Sara Gruen Read online

  “But they say that, don’t they? About women turning into their mothers?” She slurped the last of her margarita, and, after looking furtively to each side, let her tongue dart out to the salted rim. “God, I hope I don’t.” She swirled the straw again.

  “You won’t.”

  “I think I want one,” she said. “A baby.”

  John watched her carefully. She had barbecue smudges on both sides of her mouth. Was this a temporary confluence of Fran and tequila, or was she serious? The topic had come up periodically over the years, usually after Amanda had been to a baby shower or family gathering. So far, to John’s relief, the subject had faded away again fairly quickly. Babies appeared to be a lot of work, and he was worried that having one might change things between him and Amanda. Also, a baby would almost certainly mean a whole lot more Fran in his life, not to mention his own mother.

  “Do you think it’s a good idea if you’re about to move across the country?” he said cautiously.

  “By the time it happens, either I’ll be back in Philly or you’ll be in L.A. Besides, what if my mother is right? What if we’ve been avoiding it for all these years and it turns out we’ve waited too long?”

  “Women are having babies into their sixties these days.”

  “Yeah, freakish women.” After a pause, she added, “I don’t want to be one of them. I don’t want to be an old mother.”

  John reached across the table and took her hand.

  It was true they were both thirty-six. He certainly didn’t feel thirty-six. How and when had that happened?

  ——

  “This is Cat. Leave a message.”

  “Me again,” said John. “Call me.”

  This was the third message John had left, and while he was trying to give her the benefit of the doubt—perhaps she was in the shower, or had left her cell phone in her room while grabbing breakfast—an uneasy feeling spread through him. They were already two days behind; or at least he was. Who knew what Cat had been up to?

  Amanda had risen early, declared the hotel’s coffee undrinkable and their pastries concrete, and left on foot for a nearby grocery. She was distracted and agitated, and John felt responsible because he’d flopped and turned through most of the night.

  John called down to the front desk and asked to be connected to Cat’s room phone.

  “Hey, Cat. I think maybe your cell is dead. Call me. We need to get together and figure out our plan of attack.”

  John called the university and was informed that there would be absolutely no individual interviews. They were holding a press conference later in the morning, their first since the attacks, and would be issuing no statements until then. John found the delay odd, since reporters had been staked out for days.

  John then called the hospital, which first asked him if he was a family member, and then refused to confirm or deny Isabel Duncan’s presence. He didn’t argue, although he knew she was there: it was the only Level 1 trauma center in the vicinity, and if she wasn’t there, why ask if he was family? He then left a voice mail at her home number.

  “Hi, Isabel. This is John Thigpen. We met … uh, well, I’m sure you remember.”

  He blathered on a little longer than he should have, but he wanted to convey that he really was concerned with how she was and was not just angling for an interview. And it was true: his fractured sleep had been haunted by images of her. He was waiting for her in the hallway of the lab. She came up behind him, silently, and brushed his hand with hers. “Come with me,” she whispered, and his whole body tingled. Her lips almost touched his ear. Her breath was like lemon sherbet. Then he was following her, watching her hips and how she placed one foot exactly in front of the other, like an Indian tracker. He caught sight of flitting shadows and stopped dead. And then, in an instant, he knew exactly what was going to happen and cried a warning. He leapt for her, arms outstretched. She turned to him, face forming a question, but before she could say a word she was blown backward and up into a wall of heat so white it was as though she had fallen into the sun. She disappeared in stages: her rounded back went first, followed by face, thighs, and arms. Her long hair, blown forward around her head, went next, then her hands and feet. John woke shaking and drenched in sweat, his heart pounding. He was disoriented: it took him a few seconds to figure out he was not in his own bed. Amanda leaned over him, placing her hand on his chest.

  “Christ, baby—are you okay? Your heart is racing like a gerbil’s.”

  “I’m fine. I just had a bad dream.”

  She switched on the lamp.

  “Gah!” he said, shielding his eyes.

  She felt his forehead and studied him intensely.

  “I’m not having a heart attack. Really.”

  She turned the light off and lay back down. “What was it?”

  “What?”

  “The dream.”

  He shook his head. “Too weird to explain.”

  John lay awake, eyes open with worry. Had he shouted Isabel’s name? Probably not, since Amanda curled up behind him and stroked his shoulder until he went back to sleep. But by morning he was less sure.

  John realized he was staring at the radiator. He shook the cobwebs from his brain and dialed Cat again. This time, he didn’t bother leaving a message because if he had, it wouldn’t have been a nice one. If she didn’t respond in ten minutes, he was going to strike out on his own. If they duplicated their efforts, it would not be his fault.

  He sipped the coffee Amanda had gotten from the lobby (she was right—it was truly terrible) and booted up his computer. He typed the search string “Earth Liberation League University of Kansas lab” into his browser, hit Enter, and watched with amazement as the results loaded.

  There were thirty-two pages of Google hits. The video message had gone viral, showing up on sites as diverse as YouTube, personal blogs, and animal-activism message boards. John had seen it several times before, but it still filled him with fascinated horror.

  A man in a black balaclava sat at a metal desk in a room without windows or adornment. The walls were white-painted concrete bricks. His hands were gloved and rested on the desk’s surface. The grainy footage was overcast with olive and yellow, like a home video from the 1970s.

  He referred to a piece of paper that lay flat beneath his hands, appearing to read it all the way through. Then he addressed the camera. He started by naming the “agents of horror”: Peter Benton, Isabel Duncan, a few other people associated with the language lab, and Thomas Bradshaw, who was the president of the university. The man recited their home addresses, complete with telephone numbers and ZIP codes.

  “You are all equally despicable and equally guilty, those of you who administered the torture, and those of you who made it possible, sitting so comfortably in your offices miles away from that depraved lab, where your mad scientists performed perverted research on innocent and unconsenting primates. We will no longer allow it. You will be held accountable, as was Isabel Duncan. Your addresses are now public. Who knows what someone will decide to do? Thomas Bradshaw, this time we flooded your home, but what’s next? A firebomb, perhaps? Maybe your family will be inside, as trapped and innocent as those apes you tortured in the name of science. Or maybe something will happen to your car. You won’t know until you’re driving it, and then it will be too late. What will you say to your children then, Thomas Bradshaw? You’ll finally be as helpless as the apes you’ve imprisoned in that sick and evil lab for all these years.”

  The man consulted the paper again. When he raised his face to the camera, there were traces of a hard smile through the mouth hole in his ski mask.

  “For now, the research has stopped. We made it stop, but it’s up to you to keep it stopped. Because now you know what will happen if you don’t. We will liberate the apes again, and again, and again, and we will come after you—personally, each and every one of you—again, and again, and again. We don’t back down. We are the ELL. We are everywhere, and we don’t give up. Expect us.” />
  The picture froze. John stared at the final image for several seconds before realizing he was gaping.

  Torture? Mad scientists? Unconsenting apes? Even from John’s short visit it was clear that everyone associated with the lab went to great lengths to ensure that the bonobos had as much control over their surroundings as possible. The entire premise of the project was that the apes were communicating because they wanted to. Was it possible that these people—these terrorists—had bombed the building simply because the project contained the word “lab”? Would all of this have been avoided had it been called the Great Ape Language Project instead?

  How badly hurt was Isabel? He wondered if he closed his eyes and concentrated hard enough whether he’d get some kind of telepathic feeling. He tried. It didn’t work. And then he felt guilty.

  John drained his coffee, and grimaced when he sucked in a mouthful of grinds. He held his head sideways under the tap in the kitchenette, swishing his mouth with water. Then he set out for the university. The hell with Cat.

  7

  Isabel spent the day waiting: for orderlies to wheel her from place to place, for tests and procedures, for doctors and consultations. Most of all she waited for Peter and news of the apes.

  Were they hurt? Dehydrated? Where were they being housed? The televisions in various waiting rooms showed repeats of the other night’s footage along with a terrifying clip of the video that had been released on the Internet. The clip was very short, and always shown over the shoulder of an anchorperson. The lips behind the balaclava moved, but Isabel could not hear what they said.

  She was devastated at the thought that Celia was involved. Although wary of her own reaction to human beings, Isabel trusted the bonobos implicitly, and they adored Celia. After her first day at the lab, Bonzi had signed, CELIA LOVE! BUILD NEST. HURRY CELIA COME BONZI LOVE.

  As the day wore on, another, more primal longing crept up beside Isabel’s desperate loneliness. It was an irrational, wrenching desire, since Peter had all but said her mother wasn’t coming. Isabel had been meting out her family history in digestible bites, although, since they intended to marry, she knew she eventually had to disclose exactly what lurked in her gene pool. So far, he knew about her father’s exit and her mother’s decline into alcoholism, and also that the two events might not have happened in that order. He knew about the welfare fraud. He knew that her brother had been expelled from school by fifteen, and had also been carried off on the current of addiction; Isabel didn’t know if he was alive or dead. He knew something of Isabel’s tortured school years, and that none of her nascent friendships had survived the first bloom because when the parents of the other children saw the state of her house, no further visits were allowed. He knew generally about the schoolyard taunts because of thrift store clothes and bizarre lunches, but he didn’t know specifically about the canned corn sandwich and how it had prompted Mrs. Butson to start sending an extra lunch each day with Michele, or how that misguided act of kindness had cemented Isabel’s status as a pariah. He did not know about the day Marilyn Cho leapt around behind Isabel in the playground, mocking her silently and with cruel precision, unaware that Isabel could see every movement in the shadow on the pavement in front of her. And he certainly did not know about the “uncles,” or how her mother would race for the powder room to apply a pucker of pink lipstick and shoo the children into the basement as though each rendezvous were some kind of fun secret. He didn’t know that Isabel watched The Muppet Show and after-school specials with her brother while trying to ignore what was happening upstairs, or that after the man left, her mother would disappear into the bathroom for prolonged periods to weep.

  And yet Isabel could not help imagining that her mother was on her way right now, that she had somehow found the strength to pull herself together and was going to walk through the door at any moment. She would fold Isabel in her arms as though she were a little girl and tell her that she was sorry, so sorry. She’d gotten help and things would be different from now on, and everything was going to be okay. And Isabel would believe her, because what was the alternative? To believe that she was lying alone in a hospital bed without a single family member or friend to sit with her?

  In the afternoon, Beulah poked her head through the door, beaming. “You have a visitor,” she said.

  Tears sprang to Isabel’s eyes. She had come.

  “It’s your sister,” Beulah continued.

  Isabel’s eyes snapped open.

  Cat Douglas strode through the door. “Dr. Duncan, nice to see you again. How are …” She stopped. Her eyes widened. “Wow.” She pulled a digital camera out of her pocket, snapped a shot, and palmed it again.

  Isabel let out a cry and lurched forward, hands seeking the pad and pen she’d been using to communicate with the nurses. She accidentally knocked the pen to the tiled floor, then threw the pad overhand at Cat. Its pages flapped and separated and it dropped to the ground like a crumpled fledgling.

  Realization, and then horror, crossed Beulah’s face. She spun to Cat. “You said you were her sister,” she hissed. “How dare you? Get out of here!”

  Cat leaned forward at the waist, scanning Isabel’s face. “That’s some serious hardware. Can you even speak with all that?”

  Peter’s voice boomed from behind them. “Who the hell are you?”

  Isabel signed frantically with both hands: GET HER OUT OF HERE, GET HER OUT, GET HER OUT. Tears streamed down her face.

  Peter grabbed Cat’s upper arm and swung her toward him.

  “Get your hands off me!” Cat shrieked. “That’s assault!”

  Peter pulled her close and put his mouth against her ear. “So sue me,” he said. His eyes were glinting, his smile hard. She raised her chin and stared right back. He shoved her, hard enough that she stumbled, but because of his grip on her arm she remained upright. “Call the police,” he said to Beulah.

  “Fine. Fine, I’ll go,” said Cat. She took a moment to compose herself and lowered her gaze to look at the fingers encircling her arm. Her eyelids flickered as she registered the missing joints of his first finger.

  “Damned right you will,” said Peter. “Come on.” He yanked her toward the door.

  8

  Half a dozen news crews were waiting outside the university’s administrative offices, along with a handful of reporters. John knew several of them. One was a classmate from Columbia who had married a homely girl with old money and a summer home in the Hamptons. He had subsequently landed a job at The New York Times. Philip Underwood. He’d been present the night of the Ginette Pinegar incident, had held John’s legs toward the ceiling while someone else held the funnel to his mouth. It was all so fuzzy, and it was never going to get any clearer. After all these years, John was still so embarrassed he didn’t want to face anyone who had witnessed it. Another familiar face was an old-timer John had worked with at the New York Gazette, a man known for writing warning messages on masking tape and affixing them to his lunches in the communal refrigerator in case anyone was thinking of stealing them, as well as for peppering his speech with outdated terms such as “burying the lede” and “nut grafs.” He was gaunt yet paunchy, and gray in all respects—hair, clothes, complexion. A few years ago he’d gone through a divorce that had sucked the life, color, and possibly a decade right out of him. He was wearing a battered trench coat, his shoulders rounded against the wind.

  John came up beside him. “Hey, Cecil.”

  Cecil glanced over at John, took one last drag from a cigarette, and flicked it to the ground. It rolled away from him, the end still glowing. He rubbed his reddened hands together and blew on them. “Hey, John.”

  “Hope you have a sweater on under that,” said John.

  “Nope.” Cecil shrugged and stared straight ahead. “So, still with the Inky?”

  “Yup. Still with the Gazette?”

  “Yup.”

  The banter that followed was as ritualized as a mating dance—each of them trying to figure out what the ot
her knew without giving anything away himself.

  Eventually Cecil dug his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels. “You’ve got nothing, do you?”

  John shook his head. “Nope. You?”

  “Not a thing.”

  They nodded slowly, in commiseration. John saw no reason for Cecil to know that he’d met Isabel and the apes on the day of the explosion, and he wondered what Cecil was keeping from him.

  There was a buzz of excitement, and the building’s double glass doors were pushed open by two large men. A petite woman in business attire and towering heels made her way down the stairs to the standing microphone. The men came down and flanked her.

  She pushed her glasses up her nose and smoothed her hair. Her manicured hands shivered in the cold. “Thank you for coming,” she said, looking around.

  News crews jostled to get their overhead microphones into place, and reporters began shouting questions:

  “Was the Bradshaw family home at the time of the attack?”

  “How is Isabel Duncan?”

  “Were the apes injured?”

  “Has anyone been arrested?”

  The woman scanned the faces in front of her. Flashes from the cameras reflected off her glasses in bursts. Fuzzy black microphone cozies surrounded her face like monster caterpillars suspended from the sky. She closed her eyes for a moment and drew a breath.

  “The police are holding several persons of interest, although they are not being described as suspects at this time. We are also told that as of this morning Isabel Duncan’s condition has been upgraded to stable, and her doctors are hopeful that she will make a full recovery. The home of the university president was vandalized in connection with this incident, and although he and his family are safe, the Earth Liberation League is designated by the FBI as one of the foremost domestic terrorist groups, and therefore any and all threats are being taken extremely seriously. The apes are uninjured, but, for their own safety, have been transferred to another location.”