‘Can’t I help?’ My voice was so squeaky, so pathetic. ‘Can’t you tell me?’
‘Just go back to bed. Please.’ She didn’t get up to touch me or guide me back or give me a hug. She just sat there, wringing her hands. Two days later she was gone.
It was all there, on the surface, waiting. But I stopped it before it could escape out of me. ‘She’s away on a trip,’ I said to Claire. ‘She’ll be back.’
A long beat passed. The wind picked up, making the snow swirl. ‘Oh,’ Claire said softly. ‘Okay.’ She waited a few more moments, then turned and started walking into the center of the great lawn. Halfway across, she stopped and looked over her shoulder, pausing, maybe giving me another opportunity to say what she knew I needed to say. I stared at a fixed point on the ground, an ember from Claire’s cigarette.
When I finally lifted my head, Claire was all the way across the lawn, heading for the snow-dusted trees. The ache inside me was cruel and precise. I stood there for a while, my toes stiffening with cold. The church bell near Grand Army Plaza bonged out the hour. There was nothing to do but walk back. I creaked through the school gate and padded down the silent halls. The classrooms were full and preoccupied. I passed by my biology classroom; the new sub, the one that had taken over for Mr Rice, was showing a filmstrip. After Mr Rice had been asked to leave, it came out that the principal had had his eye on him for a while-there had been reports that Mr Rice had acted strangely in his other classes, too. The principal assured us that none of what Mr Rice taught us that last day-the invisible tethers of DNA, the certitude of science-was true. But I didn’t want to believe that. Wherever my mother was-walking on a sun-dappled beach, riding a street car in San Francisco, scampering down a rainy street in London-the tether around her was a literal one, a rip cord. Any minute now, it would stretch taut, and she’d snap back to us.
After school that day, I went home and stared at the buildings across the water for a while, thinking. Then, I sat down at my father’s cluttered mahogany desk and wrote Mr Rice a letter. I said I was sorry he had to leave our school, that I hoped he was all right. I wrote that I wanted to know a little more about those magical, unbreakable bonds of DNA he’d spoken about. How exactly did they hold family members together? I was looking for a little more scientific evidence to support this. If he could respond with articles, books, theories, I would be greatly appreciative.
At the bottom of the page, I signed the letter, Yours in Genetics, Summer Davis. When my father came home from a rare day at the lab, he noticed the envelope with Mr Rice’s name on it but no address. I’d told him a little about Mr Rice-just his theory, not what I believed. Without asking any questions, as if my father sensed something big in me had changed, he picked up the envelope and sealed it with a stamp. He knew the woman in charge of substitute teachers at Peninsula, he said. If I wanted, we could mail the letter to her-she’d know Mr Rice’s forwarding address.
It didn’t seem possible that my father could know such a person-he wasn’t involved with the school and hardly knew anyone outside of people he associated with at the lab. But I chose to believe this, too.
I watched as my father wrote out the woman’s address on the envelope. I watched his head disappear down our apartment building’s stairs, and I ran to the window and watched his head reappear on the street below. It was comforting to conjure up this image of him later, after he’d become so very different, so very damaged. I tried to remember him as he was right then, walking to that mailbox, protective and productive and strong.
PART TWO
Cobalt, Pennsylvania,
June, 1994
twenty-one-gun salute
Prologue
That winter, I would stand in front of Two World Trade and look for you. I watched people go in and out of the revolving doors, thinking you’d be among them. When you weren’t, I went down to the underground mall and brushed through the shoe stores, the Gap, Duane Reade. I kept thinking I’d find you among the ribbed V-neck sweaters, the first-aid supplies.