than anything else. In an hour, Gary and Jennifer Hogan and their daughter, Mary Ann, would arrive for the holiday weekend. Saturday and Sunday would pass on the boat and on the mahogany deck with adult conversation and lots of drinking, the grown-ups periodically rescuing the kids from boredom with a story or a game or a silly face.
“So who do you think the guy was?” Terry asked his wife, sticking his lower lip out at a blue plastic dinosaur, which Justin had lifted in front of his face.
“Who?”
Terry nodded at their son. “Him. The guy.”
“Oh, stop it.”
“Seriously.”
“They can’t tell us. It’s against the law. No use worrying about it.”
“It’s against the law for New Tech to tell us. It’s not against the law for us to find out. You know. Hire a private detective or something.”
“Stop.” She laughed.
“There’s gotta be a paper trail somewhere. Once he grows up, hell, you could throw his picture out there and somebody might recognize him. The donor was alive after cloning became legal, so he could only be dead a couple years.”
“Right.”
“There’s this, too.” Terry lifted the back of Justin’s T-shirt, exposing a birthmark near his left hip that looked a little like West Virginia, or a long-spouted teapot. Without looking, Justin absently swatted at his father’s hand and Terry let go.
Martha smiled and, tired of squinting at the sun reflecting off the lake, closed her eyes.
“He swears a lot.”
“Who?”
“Justin.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“He does. Don’t you think? For a three-year-old.”
“Well, stop swearing around him,” Martha said.
“I don’t.”
“You just did.”
“When?”
“Ten seconds ago. You said h-e-l-l.”
“That’s not swearing. I’m talking about a real potty mouth.”
“They’re just words to him. Funny sounds.”
Terry watched his son dig trenches in the sand with the tail of a tyrannosaur. “Do you ever wonder if some of the guy’s memories – the donor I’m talking about now – if some of his memories might be in Justin’s genes?”
“What? Like Jung?”
“Who’s that?”
“Carl Jung. The collective unconscious.”
Terry molded his face into a half-serious sneer, the way he often did when Martha’s total recall of her college notebooks threatened him with a tangent. “This morning, Justin got hold of this knife-”
“A knife?”
“A plastic one. It was in the bag with the bagels.”
“Oh.”
“Anyway, he was pretending to cut with it, against the tablecloth, and he looked sort of like he knew what he was doing.”
“From watching you cut the bagels, probably.”
“No, he was holding it like a scalpel. Long, smooth incisions. Like a surgeon.”
“Give me a break.”
“I know. It’s silly. I’m just saying. Suppose we found out he had been a doctor. That would be a kick, wouldn’t it?”
“I suppose he learned to swear on the golf course, then.” Martha grinned.
The joke was funny, but Terry didn’t laugh. Martha was always dismissing him, tossing aside every decent idea he proposed. He had once admired her because she was smart, but he didn’t realize that with intelligence would come condescension. He was the one who worked, the one who paid for the two homes and the two cars and the expensive vacations with his fat commissions as a futures trader, but he hadn’t been a great student, and Martha, who thought smarts were an end in themselves, never offered him the respect he deserved. Now they had a child together and the child was obviously bright and she acted like Justin got that from her side, even though she hadn’t passed a single one of her supersmart genes to him. If for no other reason, he wanted to find out where the boy came from to remind her that Justin’s brains didn’t come from her.
“So what do you think?”
“About what?”
“About having a guy check into Justin’s past.”
“He’s three, Terry. He doesn’t have a past.”
“Okay. The other guy. The other him.”
“They’re completely different people. He’ll get more of his personality from us than he will from some mystery man.”
“Dr. Moore said they were like twins, didn’t he?”
“Yeah. So?”
“You know how twins sometimes have, like, ESP? What if Justin’s still got some memory of his twin? Through ESP.”
“You got all of this because Justin said the S -word last night?”
“Not just that.”
She tossed her strawberry highlights away from her mouth and grinned at him. Her skin glistened and her teeth shined. She looked out-of-the-package new. “Go ahead. I don’t care. You’ve still got your own credit card. I’d rather have you spend it on this than a girlfriend or something.”
“Cheat on you? Never.”
With Justin between them, they shared a sandy kiss.
“Ass-word! Ass-word! Ass-word!” Justin chanted.
Their faces stretched into grins and, lips never parting, they started the kiss again from the beginning.
– 17 -
There were piles of M amp;M’s in little dishes, and lace patterns pressed for display under the glass coffee tabletop. There were yards and yards of bookshelves along the walls, but on them no books. The room was surrounded instead by ceramic animals, porcelain figures, wood frames, acrylic doodads, glass vases, scented candles, and assorted whatnots. Facing east, the room was bright, and Barwick had chosen a chair – a green one with high arms and a buttoned back, upholstered in unidentifiable fabric – that pointed her away from the window. Mrs. Lundquist sat directly in the sun’s light, causing Barwick to be curious about the older woman’s fair, preserved skin, which contrasted so drastically with her own mocha complexion.
“You were telling me about this oral history you were doing,” she said.
“Right, right,” Barwick said. “For the university.”
“Syracuse?” she asked. “SU?”
“No,” Barwick said. “University of” – she thought she might be giving something away, but then decided what the hell – “Chicago.”
“Hmmm,” she said. “I see.”
“We’re going around the country, selecting people at random, and getting them to tell us their stories. These tapes will be transcribed and filed for the benefit of – you know – future generations.”
