The 100 Year Miracle (22 page)

The ten minutes were torturous. She paced back and forth in front of the stove and, when that got old, in a triangle pattern from the stove to the sink to the refrigerator, which she opened and closed twice before remembering that she was supposed to eat more food. It was a terrible time to remember. She didn’t want anything in her stomach for this experiment, and knowing she couldn’t eat only made her want to eat more. She decided to leave the fridge alone and went about opening all the cabinets and inspecting all the contents until her watch finally beeped.

Rachel donned an oven mitt, just to be safe, and used a pair of kitchen tongs to pull the tube and then the blade out of the boiling water and take them over to the sink. She ran cold water over them until the razor blade, the tube, and the contents were cool enough to work with.

Then Rachel pulled up the sleeve of her sweatshirt. She took a breath, closed her eyes, and before there was time to have another thought, she picked up the blade and dragged it across the inside of her forearm. She had to hold her arm over the sink. The blood was coming faster than she’d expected, and she worried for a moment that she’d gone too deep. Rachel grabbed the tea towel lying near the sink and held it to the wound until blood no longer ran but rather oozed out of the three-inch cut. Taking care not to drip on the counters and floor, Rachel opened the small glass tube that had been boiled and swallowed the contents.

And then she waited again.

The pain in her back was chronic, and like most chronic pain, the intensity changed from hour to hour, day to day. She needed something more standardized—more acute—to start logging accurate experiments.

After twenty minutes, she didn’t have to palpate the wound to know the boiled sample had not worked. Her heart beat faster, and she had to take a breath and tell herself it might all still be nothing. She had to test the control to know for sure. Rachel took up the second glass tube that she had brought down to the kitchen but had not dropped in the boiling water. She unsealed that one and, just like the first, swallowed the contents.

She didn’t enjoy the taste, but the solids were less rotten-fishy than the unseparated paste.

She spent the next five minutes bandaging the wound and telling herself the experiment wouldn’t work. It was a superstition of hers that she’d developed during her master’s program. If she believed something would happen, it probably wouldn’t, and she would be disappointed. So the obvious thing to do was to decide ahead of time that the thing wouldn’t work out at all, and then it would. Although you couldn’t, in your mind at the time of the experiment, make that last leap to success because that would be believing it would work, which would take you back to the first condition, which was that believing you were about to be successful ensured that you would not be.

By the time she’d finished applying the gauze and the medical tape, which wasn’t supposed to pull too much on hair and skin but did anyway, and thinking all of her superstitious thoughts, she knew it had worked. Her arm didn’t hurt at all.

She clamped a hand down over her mouth to keep from letting out the whoop that was rushing up her vocal chords. Chemicals hold up well to high heat. Proteins and peptides are destroyed by it. That meant that her active compound, whatever it was, was not a chemical. Rachel, her hand still over her mouth, leaped up and spun around 180 degrees and then did it again just to let out a little more energy. She hadn’t been this excited since she’d taken the first dose in the camp cabin.

She knew something. She knew it for sure, and it was important. It was a piece of information that she would need to synthesize the compound into something stable and reproducible.

Grinning, she went to gather up her supplies and race up to her room, remembering at the last possible moment the promise she’d made to herself. Rachel went back to the pantry and added a half-eaten package of Oreo cookies and an old-looking box of Chicken in a Biskit crackers. While she was gathering supplies, she took two sodas from the fridge, fitting one in each pocket of her sweatshirt. No one would claim these things equaled a balanced diet, but they were all high in calories. And calories were nothing but a measure of energy. The more the better, Rachel reasoned, and sprinted as quickly as her load would allow up the stairs.

High from the excitement, she didn’t even notice the door to her room was unlatched.

*   *   *

“What are you doing in here?”

Tilda had not been paying attention. It was the first time she had been in Becca’s room in—well, she didn’t really know how long it had been. She had held her breath when she’d crossed the threshold, as though that might protect her or gird her or make it easier in some way. But once she was inside, she realized it wasn’t Becca’s room at all. Becca’s room was gone. It was in some other time, and what was here instead was—this.

Tilda was absorbed by all the tanks and the lights and the tubing. My God, she’d never seen so much plastic tubing in her whole life. And there were flasks and jugs and jars full of all kinds of things she couldn’t identify, but which might have been pond scum. She had opened up one of the coolers, and smoke had billowed out. She’d slammed the lid back down and hadn’t touched anything after that. It was a lot to take in, which was why the voice scared the shit out of her.

Tilda spun around and put her hand to her heart like some sort of Southern heroine, which was embarrassing but not as embarrassing as getting caught snooping.

“I was looking for you,” Tilda said. It came out in such a rush she knew it couldn’t sound natural.

The woman, Rachel, set a cardboard box down on the bed, which was unmade and covered in papers and clothing that all looked dirty. Tilda had had to fight the urge when she’d first come in to either pick up or scold someone. Sticking out of the top of the box, Tilda noticed her stash of Oreos. They were
her
Oreos. Harry hated Oreos. He always had. It hadn’t occurred to her that Rachel would be stealing them.

“Did you touch anything?” the woman asked.

“Did I—no. I didn’t touch anything.”

“It’s important. You have to tell me if anything was moved.”

“It wasn’t.”

The two women looked at each other, and Tilda had the feeling Rachel was waiting for her to flinch.

“It wasn’t,” Tilda said again.

Rachel ran her eyes over the tanks and contraptions, trying to determine, Tilda supposed, if she was lying. Tilda thought about the cooler but refused to look in that direction and give herself away.

“You can’t come in here without permission,” the young woman said. She said it with such authority that Tilda was taken aback.

When Tilda didn’t offer a response—and perhaps the young woman wasn’t waiting for one—Rachel said, “If you were to disturb something, it could taint the results. It would be disastrous.”

Tilda was meant to feel like she’d bumped the arm of a brain surgeon mid-procedure. “I came by to see if you needed anything,” she said.

“Harry told me to help myself.”

Tilda looked down at the food. “I see that you are.”

The woman looked down, too, and shifted her weight. The comment had wrong-footed her, and Tilda moved forward. It was like a game of tennis, and the advantage was now hers.

“What work exactly are you doing for the university?” Tilda asked.

Rachel avoided eye contact. “It’s technical.”

“I spent two terms on the senate science committee,” Tilda said. “I think I can handle it.”

“I’m not at liberty to discuss it.”

“That’s unusual,” Tilda said.

The woman didn’t reply.

“Under whose authority are you not at liberty to discuss your work on this very public biological phenomena?”

Again silence. The young woman removed two cans of soda from her sweatshirt pockets and set them on the bedside table, as though she were going to go about her business whether Tilda continued to stand there and jabber or not.

“If those are cold, and I presume they are,” Tilda said, “please don’t set them on that table. They’ll leave rings.”

Still no verbal response, but the woman moved the cans to the rug next to the bed, where they would surely be kicked over.

Without a good-bye, Tilda crossed the room, passing within inches of Rachel, and stepped out into the hall. Rachel reached for the door, but before she could shut it, Tilda put her hand on the frame and said over her shoulder, “Eugene Hooper—I believe that’s his name—was in yesterday’s paper. He gave a rather extensive interview about your team’s research. I suppose no one told him it was classified.”

Tilda let her hand fall from the frame, and Rachel shut the door without comment.

*   *   *

The skin was looser above Tilda’s knees than it used to be and above her elbows and breasts. She avoided touching her neck when she sat in front of a computer. She used to rest her hand there often. It was her unconscious thinking pose, but it just reminded her of how different her skin felt now—less elastic, like panty hose about to go south. Her forearms had a bit of mottling that maybe she should discuss with a dermatologist. The veins and sinewy bits were more visible in her hands and the tops of her feet than they used to be. And that was just off the top of her head.

There were any number of reasons to feel more self-conscious about her body than she used to, and there were times she did. But pulling on her silver one-piece racing suit with its body-sucking tightness, its low leg openings and high neck, the shoulder-blade area cut out for maximum movement was not one of those times. She didn’t think about her neck or her knees in her suit. The pool was her home court. In the pool, she could beat any woman her age, most of the men, and a high percentage of the younger people, too. In the pool, she didn’t need anyone to grant her a position. She took it.

Tilda shoved her duffel bag into one of the half lockers in the ladies’ room and walked with her cap and goggles in hand to the showers. She rinsed off in warm water, wet down her hair, and pulled on her cap, tucking the ends up inside. Last, she put on her goggles, leaving the eye pieces up on her forehead, and walked in her flip-flops out of the locker room to the indoor pool.

She was later than usual. The sun was well up, and the glass enclosure around the pool was lit like a fish tank, which only reminded her of that woman. Tilda used her name in her own mind as little as possible, as though that somehow kept the scientist in her place.

Tilda windmilled her arms in one direction and then the other, did a few deep knee bends, and then hopped off the edge into the shallow end of the pool. All of the lanes were occupied, and she’d have to split one, which did not make her happy. She chose the lane with the fastest swimmer, a man who looked to be in his early forties. She wondered, but not for long, why he wasn’t in an office somewhere. Was he one of those Seattle tech millionaires who’d retired out here decades early? If he was, she thought, he’d be bored and useless within five years.

It was possible, she acknowledged, that she was in something of a mood. She would have to swim it out. She waited for the man to get to the other end of the pool. He grabbed the edge for a second-long break and nodded that he saw her. Tilda nodded back, pulled down her goggles, and pushed off from the wall.

Stroke, stroke, breathe. Stroke, stroke, breathe.

By the time she’d done two lengths of the pool, she’d passed her tech millionaire, and he’d slid over into the next lane, preferring to share with someone else.

Stroke, stroke, breathe. Stroke, stroke, breathe.

26.

When Tilda returned to Harry’s house, her hair was still wet. She was carrying a plastic bag from the corner market along with her duffel and was using her one free thumb to check her text messages.

“I like you more than I should,” Tip had written.

She stared at the screen. She should say something but hesitated to say too much. Emoticons were out of the question.

“I like you, too,” she replied, a response she immediately felt was both sophomoric and awkward. So much about dating, including the word
dating
, felt sophomoric and awkward, and she suspected other people did it better.

She shoved the phone into her pocket and adjusted her bags. This package of Oreos she would keep in her room. Kicking off her shoes at the door, she stopped in the kitchen for a glass of milk and carried it and her things deeper into the house, following the sound of a television playing sports. Harry hated sports.

Opposite the library was the family room. A large flat-screen television took up one wall, and a cluster of leather sofas and chairs were gathered around it, making only enough room for a large traveling trunk that served as a coffee table. On top was a bottle of beer and a glass of red wine, the latter closer to Harry, who shouldn’t have been drinking it—not that Tilda didn’t understand the impulse.

“Juno,” Tilda said. “I didn’t know you were coming.”

Their son was stretched out across the entire sofa with his arms crossed over his chest and Shooby, who shouldn’t have been on the furniture, lying across his knees. The game she’d heard earlier was a snippet from a highlight reel playing as part of a cable sports news show, which she knew Harry would hate even more than an actual game.

Juno took his eyes off the screen, which was large enough to create a sort of black hole, increased gravity–type effect, and pushed himself up to greet his mother, dislodging the dog, who hopped down and took a secondary position at Harry’s feet. Juno was taller than both her and Harry. He gave her a not-overly long hug, and when he did, she wondered how such a large man could have come from her body. He kissed the top of her head and wrinkled his nose.

“You smell like chlorine,” he said.

“They only have cheap shampoo at the community center. I’ll shower again in a minute.”

“Whenever I smell pool chemicals,” Juno said, “I think of you.”

Tilda supposed most mothers would like their grown children to say they smelled of flowers or maybe homemade cookies. Tilda had managed to swim out most of her earlier aggression, so she found the space in her brain to honor his truth—or whatever bull hockey she was supposed to think.