The Sound of Life and Everything (22 page)

“What are epaulets?” I asked.

“The little doohickeys on their shoulders. Different ranks have different epaulets, so you can tell what their positions are just by their uniforms.” He pointed at the nearest soldier. “If this guy were a Yank, he'd be a second lieutenant.”

“I didn't realize you knew so much about ranks and uniforms.”

Chester forced a nervous chuckle. “I guess that's just what happens when your dad dies in a war.”

He probably meant it as a joke, but even so, I didn't laugh. “I'm sorry,” I mumbled. “Have I ever told you that?” I lowered my gaze. “And I think Takuma would have been sorry, too.”

Chester bumped me with his shoulder. “I should be telling you I'm sorry, not the other way around. He seemed like a swell guy.”

“He was,” I said, nodding.

Chester cleared his throat. “I guess Gracie thought so, too.”

I hadn't wanted to mention it, but since he'd brought it up, I shrugged. “She liked him,” I admitted, then sent him a sideways glance. “But I think she likes you, too.”

“You really think so?” Chester asked.

I nodded solemnly. “And I think she's been waiting for you to make a move for a long time.”

Chester's cheeks reddened. I thought he was going to pump me for more details, maybe get me to remember everything she'd ever said, but he managed to surprise me. “Well, I guess I'd better split. The boss only gave me thirty minutes. But I'm really glad I came.” He nodded toward the podium. “The things you said up there would have changed anyone's mind.”

My heart glowed like a live coal. A month ago, I would have called it pride, but now I hoped it was something more.

“Here,” I said impulsively, easing the drawing off its hook. “I want you to have this.”

“Oh, I couldn't accept that,” Chester said. “It would break up your collection.”

“I'll survive without this one. Besides, Daniel always said that art was meant to be appreciated.”

He hesitated for a moment, then took the drawing with a bow. “Thank you,” he said sincerely. “This might be the nicest gift anyone has ever given me.”

“Then that's fittin',” I said, “seein' as how Takuma was the nicest gift anyone ever gave me.”

One year came and went. It was May sixteenth
again, the one-year anniversary of Takuma's birth and death. But the pain still felt razor-sharp. I tried not to think about him as I went through the motions of another Saturday, but the not-thinking was hard. Was this how Mama felt every time Daniel's birthday rolled around?

When I got home from helping Gracie fill out her college applications—she wanted to be a teacher, of all the crazy, mixed-up notions—I went straight to the kitchen. Maybe if we baked a birthday cake, I wouldn't feel so awful. But Mama was nowhere to be seen, and the kitchen looked so spotless that I couldn't help but wonder if Auntie Mildred had been by.

The one thing out of place was Daddy's copy of the
Times,
but that was strange all by itself, since he always threw away his newspapers once he was finished with them. It was almost like he wanted us to take a closer look.

I scanned the front-page headlines, but as far as I could tell, there wasn't anything unusual. I started to chuck it in the trash, but three letters—
DNA
—made me pull the whole thing back. I shuddered at the uninvited memory, then skipped back to read the rest: “WATSON AND CRICK DISCOVER CHEMICAL STRUCTURE OF DNA.”

I had no idea who Watson and Crick were (though their names did sound familiar), but they must have been important. After drawing a deep breath, I hurried through the article as quickly as I could:

American James Watson and Briton Francis Crick have discovered the chemical structure of DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid. “We've discovered the secret of life!” Crick is reported to have shouted after he and Watson solved the riddle that's been plaguing them for years. DNA determines eye and hair color, for instance, and according to Watson and Crick, it resembles a spiral staircase. They call it a double helix.

Watson and Crick made their discovery while working in Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England. The paper describing their research was published by the scientific journal
Nature
on April twenty-fifth of this year. CONTINUED ON PAGE D4

As I flipped to page D4, I tried to figure out where I'd heard the word “Cavendish” before, but the memory wouldn't surface. At least it only took a second for me to spot the bright red circle at the bottom of the page. Daddy had clearly marked one of the paragraphs, but I started with the one before it:

Linus Pauling, distinguished chemist at the California Institute of Technology, had nothing but admiration for the Cavendish pair. Though he published his own paper in February of this year, he called their discovery “a triumph.” His paper suggested that the structure was a triple helix.

But not everyone in Southern California's scientific community is taking the news so well. Victor Franks, a former researcher, had this to say about the matter: “James and Francis's research is purely theoretical and thus a thoroughgoing waste of time. The true visionaries in this field are putting these principles to the test in real-world applications, and we'll soon have a breakthrough of our own to announce.”

When asked to comment on Franks's statement, the Institute replied, “While it's true that Victor Franks was once employed by Dr. Pauling, he no longer works in any capacity at this university and does not speak on our behalf.”

I set the
Times
back on the counter. Apparently, we weren't the only ones that Dr. Franks had lied to.

Before I could read the rest, Mama slammed the side door shut. I wanted to ask her if she'd seen it, but I didn't have a chance before someone banged on the front door.

Mama cocked an eyebrow. “Were you expectin' anyone?”

Slowly, I shook my head.

“Me neither,” Mama said, pulling her gloves off with her teeth. “But I guess we'd better answer it.”

I bounced into the entryway and opened the front door. It had been a while since I'd chatted with a salesman. But it wasn't a salesman. It was a man with a striped hat (which was tilted smartly to one side). He had a pencil in his right hand and a notepad in the other, and his vest was stained and wrinkled, as if he'd slept in it for days.

“Mrs. Higbee?” he asked Mama.

“Yes, sir,” she replied. It wasn't quite a question, but it sounded like one.

The man winked, actually winked, at me. “That must make you Ella Mae.”

I stuck out my chest. It was about time that someone knew me just by looking at my face.

“I'm sorry,” Mama said, bumping me out of the way, “but I don't think we caught your name.”

He transferred the pencil to his left hand and offered her his right. “The name's Marty, Marty Crump. I'm with the
Los Angeles Times.
”

She hesitated before shaking it. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Crump.”

Mama's unexpected courtesy put me instantly on edge, but he didn't seem to notice (or if he did, he didn't care).

“I'm very pleased to meet you, too. I've spent three weeks tracking you down.”

Mama's eyes narrowed. “What do you mean, ‘tracking us down'?”

Mr. Crump didn't reply, didn't even look up from his notepad. “As far as I understand it, you recently had contact with a Dr. Victor Franks of the California Institute of Technology.”

Mama licked her lips. “Well, I wouldn't say
recently.
”

“And he doesn't work there anymore,” I said. “Or don't you read your own newspaper?”

Mr. Crump looked up from his notepad just long enough to smirk. “You're clever, very clever. Ever considered a career in journalism?”

I crinkled my nose. “Oh, no, I don't like journals. They seem too much like homework.”

He batted that away. “I also understand that you took custody of a Mr. Takuma Sato, one of the subjects in his experiments. Would you say that's correct?”

“We didn't take custody,” I said, thinking of Sergeant Friday, at the same time Mama whispered, “I think you'd better come in.”

Her invitation caught me off guard—she didn't usually like socializing—but Mr. Crump seemed pleased as punch. He practically skipped into the house, his stained vest flopping merrily. I resisted the urge to shake my head. Maybe he could handle Mama's bark, but he'd never seen her bite.

“Sit down,” Mama said, waving him onto the couch.

Dutifully, he sat.

“Now, let's get one thing straight.” She stuck both hands on her hips. “I'm a reasonable woman, Mr. Crump, but if you're here to stir up trouble, I'll stuff that notepad down your throat.”

His Adam's apple bobbed (though at least he had the good sense to return his notepad to his pocket). “I don't think you understand, Mrs. Higbee. I just want to talk.”

“About Dr. Franks,” she said.

“And Mr. Sato,” he replied. “The records I had access to didn't paint the whole picture. For example, can you tell me exactly when and why he immigrated to the States?”

From the way Mr. Crump leaned forward, I could tell that this was why he'd come. He wasn't interested in Dr. Franks; he wanted to know about Takuma. If it had been up to me, I happily would have told him everything, but judging by the look on Mama's face, she didn't want to spill the beans.

“You've seen his passport, then?” she asked.

Mr. Crump's dark eyes lit up. “See, that's the thing,” he said, scooting to the edge of his seat. “I can't find it anywhere. Not at the Institute, not at the morgue. I was wondering if you had it . . .”

He didn't have a chance to finish before Mama shook her head.

“Well, then, I'm in a bind.” He mopped his forehead with his sleeve, partially dislodging his striped hat. “Now, I don't want you to think that I'm a lunatic or something, but it's as if your Mr. Sato materialized out of thin air when he turned up in that lab.” He sent us a sideways glance. “You wouldn't happen to know anything about that, would you?”

I gritted my teeth. It was like Mr. Crump already knew the answers to his questions and just wanted me and Mama to confirm them. But I wasn't interested in being Mr. Crump's source. Takuma wasn't a headline. He was a human being.

I sneaked a peek at Mama, and she sneaked a peek at me. Somehow, we both knew we were thinking the same thing.

Mama folded her arms across her waist. “I'm afraid we don't know what you mean.”

“Give me a break!” Mr. Crump said, chucking his hat across the room. “This is the story of the century! You don't really want those Brits to take all the credit, do you?”

“Better them than Dr. Franks,” I muttered.

Mama stooped down to retrieve his hat, then held it out to him. “I think you'd better go.”

He jammed it on his head. “You're making a big mistake, you know that?”

“That's what they all say,” I replied.

Mr. Crump started to answer, then wisely thought better of it. After sticking his pencil behind his ear, he stalked out of the house. His stained vest looked even worse from the back than from the front.

“Well,” Mama said breezily as she slammed the door shut on his heels, “I don't think we'll be seeing the likes of him again.”

“Good riddance,” I replied as I collapsed onto the couch. My gaze flickered to the wallpaper, which was what it usually did whenever I made the mistake of spending too much time in the living room. The tiny pink rosebuds, forever on the verge of blooming, always made me think of
him.

I plopped my chin into my hands. “It's his birthday, you know.”

Mama sat down next to me. “I know.”

My eyes started to water. “Did it ever stop hurtin'?” I peeped. “After Daniel passed away?”

She tucked one of my braids behind my ear. “No, it never did. But at some point in these last eight years, it did stop festerin'. Now it's a clean, smooth pain in the middle of my chest. I hardly ever feel it, only when I take a breath.”

She smiled like she'd just said something funny, but I didn't feel like laughing. “Guess I have something to look forward to.”

“I guess you do,” she said, pushing herself back to her feet. When she reached the archway, she turned back. “But can I ask you a question?”

I didn't exactly nod, but I didn't shake my head, either.

“Would you ever want it to stop hurtin'?” More quietly, she added, “Would you ever want to forget?”

Not in a hundred lifetimes. Grudgingly, I shook my head.

“I didn't think so,” Mama said. Once again, she turned to go, but she only made it a few steps before she turned around again. “What do you say we fry up a few pork links, just for old times' sake?”

“I'd like that,” I admitted. “And I think he would, too.”

Mama smiled her agreement, then disappeared around the corner, leaving me alone with the wallpaper and this sick feeling in my stomach. But it didn't feel as bad as it had a moment before. After all, pain was for remembering—and so were pork links.

This story started with one sentence: “Mama said
it was plum foolishness to keep my cousin's dog tags like that, with his blood still stuck between the ridges of his name.” It's changed a little since then, but the sentiment remains. I wondered what kind of character would say that line—and what kind of story she would tell—and
The Sound of Life and Everything
was born.

The Sound of Life and Everything
is one-hundred-percent fictitious—as far as I know, it's impossible to do what Dr. Franks did—but the events surrounding his experiments were one hundred percent real. In the early 1950s, multiple scientists around the world, including Linus Pauling, James D. Watson and Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin, were racing to discover the chemical structure of DNA. Also, the anti-Japanese sentiment that existed in the wake of World War II was an unfortunate reality for many years. I simply combined these two pieces of history to tell Ella Mae's story.

While my fictitious Dr. Franks was bringing people back to life in the spring of 1952, Dr. Watson and Dr. Crick were doing their darnedest to determine the chemical structure of DNA. Since they knew the basic building blocks, they had scale models made—the “silly children's toys” that Dr. Franks speaks of—so they could try to construct it like a giant jigsaw puzzle. The overall structure eluded them until one day in late February of 1953, when Dr. Watson noticed that if you matched adenine with thymine and guanine with cytosine, the resulting pairs had the same shape. These pairs became the rungs that ran between the twisting rails of DNA's ladder-like structure, and with this riddle solved, they were able to complete their work in a matter of days.

You'll notice that I included Linus Pauling in the list above. He is the only historical figure to make an appearance in the book. Dr. Pauling studied chemistry at the California Institute of Technology from 1922 to 1925. Upon receiving his doctorate, he served there in multiple capacities, including as director of the Gates and Crellin Laboratories of Chemistry, from 1925 to 1958. Thus, while Ingolstadt Laboratories is a fictitious institution (which I named after the university that Victor Frankenstein attended in Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein
), I set the book in California precisely because of Dr. Pauling, as his were the only laboratories in North America that were competing with the research that was happening in Europe.

Like Ingolstadt Laboratories, the city of St. Jude is also fictitious. I didn't want to saddle an actual community with the moral highs and lows represented in the book. That said, Orange County is an actual location, and in the spring of 1952, it was mostly agricultural (though by the end of that decade, it had been taken over by suburbia, not to mention Disneyland).

Last but certainly not least, I should say something about Robby. I made a point of placing him in Company E of the 28th Marines, and specifically the small patrol assigned to take the summit of Mt. Suribachi, the highest point on Iwo Jima. I based Robby's experience on Richard Wheeler's eyewitness account, but Robby's actions were his own and in no way indicative of the way American Marines treated Japanese soldiers. Also, while I had to piece together a lot of Takuma's experience, I believe it is representative of the Japanese battle plan in general and Takuma's character in particular.