“Dad, can you please tell me what you are talking about?” I ask. “I have no recollection of this place. I’m going to feel like I’ve had a lobotomy if you don’t explain.”
My dad pours another cup for both of us. “As I said, after your mother left, you started having nightmares. You were only six. I think you felt vulnerable. It got so bad that you were barely sleeping. I was barely sleeping. So a colleague of mine at Harvard recommended a sleep study on brain mapping.” He pauses. “Is this ringing any bells, Alice?”
“Um, only of a bad science fiction movie,” I say, transfixed. “Go on.”
“Not science fiction, just science.” Dad gets very touchy about the difference. “As you know, much of the brain is still a mystery. But one advance we’ve made is in the monitoring of brain activity—what sections of the brain light up when we see or feel different things. Some scientists figured out that if they monitored brain activity during dreaming, then had subjects relay the stories afterward, they could actually—at a very rudimentary level—put those stories together.”
“So basically you turned me into one of the monkeys in Madeleine’s lab.”
“I wish you would call her Mom,” my dad corrects me, and I don’t have the heart to tell him that at a certain point, Mom just didn’t feel right anymore. “But you’re not wrong.”
Monkeys are why my parents met. Apes, actually. People are always mixing up monkeys and apes, when they are in fact two different species. Madeleine was at Harvard, studying the evolution of language. All beings have ways of communicating, of expressing themselves, but not all beings use language, which has grammatical rules. Madeleine wanted to figure out how it all came to be, why some do and others don’t. She worshipped Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, the young women who ran around the African jungle in the seventies documenting gorillas.
So she spent most of her days with a cumbersome boom box playing repeated sound patterns to apes in a lab. Beep-beep-honk, toot-toot-whistle. A-A-B, A-A-B. Madeleine believed that if she changed the pattern all of a sudden from A-A-B to A-B-B (beep-honk-honk, toot-whistle-whistle) and the ape noticed, it would mean they had noticed a pattern in the first place. She was a real geek about it; she couldn’t get enough. She went to this lecture on how language is mapped in the brain, and that’s where she met my dad, who was actually giving the lecture at the ripe age of twenty-eight. They stayed behind talking for hours, and were basically never apart again.
Until they had me. And six years after that, Madeleine’s research grant in Uganda came through and she went alone, and never came back. Now she lives in Madagascar with Javier. Javier is a research student half her age from Barcelona. She says they are just friends, but I have seen pictures of Javier, who I Googled on the internet, and I say otherwise. Not that I ever tell her this, since we only communicate about six times a year.
“Anyway,” my dad is saying, “a couple of Saturdays a month at CDD and suddenly you were sleeping like a baby. You were happier. An odd group of people over there, but they were passionate about what they did for you guys.”
“You guys?” I ask. “There were others?” I am staring down at the balloons on the birthday card. I feel like my mind is full of puzzle pieces and I’m trying to put them all together without being able to use my hands.
“Sure,” my dad says. “You know how studies work, Alice.”
“Does CDD still exist?” I ask.
“Well, someone is still sending you those postcards, aren’t they?” he says, going back to his paper.
I stand up quickly, feeling awake for the first time all morning and more hopeful than I’ve felt in days. I go to hustle back upstairs and change, but jerk my foot back when it touches the first step. I could’ve sworn it just sank right in, like a couch cushion. I stare at the step for a moment. It looks normal, like, you know, a step. I take a deep breath, then gently press my toe against it, followed by a few gentle prods. Nothing. The same wooden step as ever, covered in blue carpet.
Apparently the French roast is taking a long time to kick in this morning.
5
Law & Order: Special Cookie Unit