Race Across The Sky Part 22

"That's how they do it? Breeding?"

"Incest is best. Put your mouse to the test."

Healy took a hypodermic and pushed it into the mouse's neck. The mouse squealed, jerking and spasming.

"Now," Healy yawned, "he's hurting."

He deposited the blood into a small vial. Gripping the mouse's tail, he lifted the top of a Buxco box. Which wasn't really a box, Shane saw, but a clear cylinder with a tube protruding from its side. When he'd ordered it, he'd wondered what it was for. Prajuk had positioned it in a place of respect, on the back bench, where it would not be accidentally swept off the table by an errant pizza box.

"It looks like Habitrail solitary confinement," Shane suggested.

"It looks like a mouse bong," Healy added.

That was true enough. Shane peered into the bottom of the gla.s.s cylinder. The mouse had a couple of inches of room on either side. A small protruding tube at the top let air in and out. Healy measured the pressure coming from it, noting it with squinted-eyed intensity in a small black notebook.

"His lungs are definitely hyperinflated," Healy said, pointing. "Not a lot of air coming out of there."

After a few more measurements, Healy returned the mouse to its cage, where it had room, but no desire to explore. Its door closed with a light metallic clang.

"We'll know for sure when the blood comes back from the lab."

Shane looked nervously at this mouse. He felt responsible for it; he had ordered its existence. Requested that its grandmother's DNA be spliced, its embryonic genes altered, its parents inbred, leaving it with the same wheezing and desperate gasps as Lily. He had f.u.c.ked this mouse up.

Shane sat in one of the black chairs that he had put together back in December and stared at the twitching thing in its cage. Prajuk would inject it with his drug, and G.o.d willing, the faulty gene would switch on like Christmas lights and begin producing alpha-one ant.i.trypsin, the enzyme which would hold the neural elastase back from attacking the healthy lung tissue.

Or, it would cause a toxic reaction, forcing the mouse's liver to shut down, and he would die of organ failure.

Or it would do nothing, and the mouse's labored breathing would continue until the lung damage was irreversible and he developed emphysema and died one morning not far from now.

Playing with DNA, injecting a laboratory-spun protein into a baby; this mouse's arrival had made it real. Shane considered this with increasing unease. Jesus had been nailed to a cross for less presumption than this.

Although Jesus had not waited seven years and three rounds of trials to be given green lights by a government body to cure the leper. In the end, he decided, He would have the last word on all of this anyway.

Shane rubbed his forehead. He had also ordered Nicholas's existence, he reminded himself, and he realized he could still get home in time to see him before he fell asleep. And that was when he remembered the sitter.

f.u.c.k, he thought, pressing the elevator b.u.t.ton a thousand times. What time was it? He took out his phone. Nine. Walking to the car he called Janelle, who informed him coldly that she was going to bed. He could still fix this, Shane hoped. He called her favorite pasta place, ordered what she loved. Driving, he could still smell the pungent sour rodent scent on himself, which was strange; he was certain he had not touched the mouse.

It occurred to him that the mouse might be attempting to communicate something: I am part of you now. Remember me, and what I have been through. Shane blinked. He had been caught up in the narcotic thrill of seeing if he could do this, but after tonight, he understood, he could not feign naivete. Whatever happened, he would always know that he had possessed the opportunity to stop it.

Inside the house he tripped over a rubber ball.

"s.h.i.t!" he shouted with surprising vehemence.

He righted himself and looked around. The house was strangely silent. Shane set down the food and walked upstairs calling, "Janelle?"

It was ten o'clock. He pa.s.sed the bed with his sleeping wife, ran the shower, and pressed his head hard against the tile. He stayed there for a long time. For years, he had spent his days driving leisurely between doctors' practices, taking a lunchtime run, taking Janelle out at night to see her favorite DJs. Now he could not seem to imagine doing any of those things.

He experienced an intense need to hold his son; had he spent more time with the lab than with him? It was unlikely, but that he even had to consider this made him feel ill. Child psychologists, he was painfully aware, stressed the urgency of the bond created in these first six months. He imagined Nicholas confessing to a college girlfriend that he had never felt close to his dad.

He went to Nicholas's room, bursting with the scents of baby lotion, fresh crib sheets, the baby's natural smell, and inhaled the goodness of those molecules into his body. He lifted the sleeping boy and sat with him on the rocking chair, swaying gently, and met his deep brown eyes as they opened. We fight wars over where the soul goes after death, he thought, but we never discuss where it lives before birth. For surely Nicholas had not been created by him and Janelle; a.s.suming this seemed the height of arrogance. This boy arrived from someplace else and seemed to have brought with him a knowingness. If only he might connect with it. What, Shane wondered, are you trying to tell me?

He thought again of Lily. A question taunted him: which would be harder to live with? Completing this drug, delivering it to Caleb, and finding out that it had harmed her? Or shutting the lab down right now, removing this insane risk to all of them, and finding out later that she had died from lung damage?

The struggle to answer this question should have kept him awake all night. He should have turned it over and over, sweating through his sheets, pacing the living room. And yet in the peace of Nicholas's room, in the lulling softness of this perfumed air, the terrible ache behind his eyes started to seep away.

And he knew exactly what he would do.

"Afternoon there, Caley," Hank called.

Caleb broke through the bare branches and into the flat expanse of snow behind the house. Approaching the steps, he saw Hank, squat and crew-cut, Kyle, young and steaming with energy, Alice, lithe and double-jointed, on the back deck, their breath like billow clouds against the beams.

Then he saw June.

Caleb stopped, and sniffed hard. They had not exchanged a word since the day she had told him she would not leave Happy Trails; this was the closest he had been to her in weeks. He felt her presence as if she were turned all the way up, shooting toward him on jets of air.

Nervously, June stretched her arms upward, affecting a stretch. Her sweatshirt lifted, revealing the parchment skin of her belly. Caleb could not take his eyes from it.

"How is it out there?" Kyle asked him.

"Good."

"How's that feel?" Hank gestured to his backpack.

The perilous isolation in Yosemite necessitated wearing heavier packs than normal, filled with more water and clothing. Mack had begun requiring everyone in Happy Trails to train with them.

"Not so bad." With the back of his hand he wiped snow from under his eyes. "You get used to it."

Hank turned to June. "Are you going to practice with one?"

As June nodded, straw-colored hair flew into her eyes. "Sure."

"It's your first hundred-mile ultra?" Kyle asked her, squinting. "It's not the one to start with."

"If I drop, I'll work a station."

"If you can get to one."

"Leave her alone." Alice shook her head, smiling. "She'll be cool."

Kyle exhaled. "Okay, we're gone."

Caleb opened the back door and kicked off his wet shoes. Inside he found it difficult to slow his heart down. He went to the sink for some water and was on his third gla.s.s when he felt her behind him.

"Hey," June whispered.

He turned around, locked onto her enormous eyes.

"Makailah's watching Lily upstairs. Do you want . . ."

"You're running Yosemite?" Caleb asked her quietly.

She nodded.

"Why?"

"This is the Happy Trails race. We're all doing it together, right?"

"You can't risk . . ." He stopped himself. Running an ultramarathon and risk were, of course, inseparable. "Just be really careful."

She c.o.c.ked her head at a dramatic angle. "Everyone's saying you're training too hard."

"Everyone"-he smiled-"doesn't know everything."

"So, what did Shane say?"

"Shane?"

"When you told him?"

Caleb looked down at his shoes. He felt weighted down and besotted.

"Oh, Caley. You never told him we're not coming?"

"I haven't had a chance. I don't work at O'Neil's anymore."

"You need to find a phone somewhere and call him. He thinks we're coming."

She hesitated. Was there something in her eyes, he wondered? Was this a struggle for her? He looked for something that might tell him it was.

"Lily's really missing you. She wakes up saying 'cay-cay.' Do you think you can play with her while I'm out?"

"Of course."

"That would be really great."

Caleb washed his gla.s.s in the sink, set it on a rag. When he had watched her jog down the wood steps and across the snowy field to catch up with everyone, he turned and pushed through the swinging door for the main house.

"Hey," Makailah grinned when he walked into June and Lily's room.

Lily turned her head to him right away, made a high-pitched and happy sound. A drop of saliva spilled down her chin when she reached out for him.

He sat on the rug, and joined Makailah in rolling a ball back and forth.

After a time Makailah yawned. "Mind if I go to the bathroom?"

"I have her."

"Yeah? Okay," she waved to the baby. "See you soon, sweetie."

Alone with Lily he wrapped her in his arms, buried his nose into the soft skin behind her neck, and held her, swaying her gently back and forth, listening to her scratched short breaths. He wondered if he had ever missed anyone so badly in all his life.

He was watching her fall asleep when some noise from downstairs snapped him out of his thoughts. Knowing it was probably Mack, he went downstairs to check.

"Ah!" Mack was shouting, "some help from the constabulary!"

Just behind him, two wide and well-muscled men carried a pony keg each into the house. On Juan's direction they walked across the large room and placed them by the fireplace. Music switched on from the boom box. As he descended the stairs Caleb saw at least twenty people standing around, red cups of beer in hand.

"Caley!" Mack called, waving him over. "Meet Superior's finest."

Caleb was introduced to the police officers, both off duty. He wondered how Mack had befriended them.

One of them was looking at him strangely, his head c.o.c.ked. "You really run a hundred miles?"

"Not every day," Caleb smiled. He was feeling off-balance. Something of Lily remained in his arms.

At this point, Caleb would normally have excused himself. But the pain of having lost Lily and June erupted out of him now. He looked instinctively to the front door, considering plunging into the dark roads. Then someone handed him a red plastic cup; right, he thought, there was another cure for agony, and it was all around him.

He drained the cup, and helped himself to another.

Alice touched his shoulder, concerned. He shook his head, smiling to her.

Then he reached for the whiskey and shut his eyes tight as he tilted the bottle back.

4.

The offices of Zouali and Rice were filled with the kind of light only San Francisco might bestow upon lawyers.

Floor to ceiling windows looked down at the foot traffic on Geary Street. The downtown office buildings built on the hill seemed to open their arms. This was all visible from the reception area; however, the office of Brad Whitmore, who was not yet a partner, was small and bereft of sun.

Brad seemed to Shane to be around thirty years old, a bit too lean, with a sharply jutting Adam's apple. A desperate pile of thinning blond hair lay on his head. His long face bespoke a Northeastern lineage. He came recommended by friends of Janelle's.

Shane and Prajuk sat in difficult chairs, facing the lawyer's desk. Prajuk had needed to be dragged here; this was a step beyond what he had agreed to do. But Shane had persuaded him that he could answer questions, clarify, use the proper terminology, that Shane never could hope to. So Prajuk had come but he did not want his name on any doc.u.ment of any kind and seemed convinced that someone would surely force him to sign one. A line of perspiration ran down his brown temple.

Brad was looking at both of them, with an excited look on his thin lips. "So this protein you're using. Tell me exactly where it came from."

"My team and I studied, isolated, and cloned it while we were working on a new drug," Prajuk answered tersely, in his high-pitched voice.