“Thank you,” said Martha, less intimidated now that a smile was in play, but not comfortable enough to call him “Dr. Keith,” which was how Justin referred to him.
“Advanced is good in many ways. In other ways it can be bad.”
“Bad?” Terry said. “How?”
“Maturing is supposed to be a process,” Morrow said. His voice was deep and rhythmic, like the bottom of a Parliament song. “There’s a reason God starts them small. Justin is very smart. Physically, he’s quite advanced, which has led to some troubles adjusting at school.”
“The kids make fun of him, I know,” Martha said.
“That will pass. One day, those same boys will be jealous. But he worries a lot for a seven-year-old. He wonders about things most kids his age haven’t begun to think about.”
“What sorts of things?”
“Who he is. Where he came from. Why he’s here. For most children, those answers seem quite obvious. They are part of a family. Their purpose is to please grown-ups, et cetera. It’s taken man thousands of years to identify and define the questions in Justin’s head, questions he was able to pose quite plainly to me.”
“All the acting out, then,” she said. “That’s what? Frustration?”
“Frustration, yes. Some of it might be experimentation. Justin has an extremely developed sense of self. Of individualness. He is able to recognize his own consciousness as a distinct person, separate from others, separate from his own body, even. Every day, he seeks to find out more about himself: who this person inside him is; why he is. Much of his reckless behavior would set off alarms for me in another child – fascination with fire, for instance – but with Justin I suspect he might be testing himself in ways that the world does not normally test little boys. I don’t think he’s after attention, or control. I don’t think he has malice. I think he’s an explorer. An explorer of his own mind. He’s very special.”
As he did once every session, Morrow turned his eyes briefly to a desktop barometer that had belonged to his father. When he died, Keith had joined his brothers and sister – an accountant, a banker, a teacher – at their dad’s house in Philly, and with a magnum of wine they walked from room to room, each of them in turn claiming one possession, one story at a time, rescuing the old man’s life from dismemberment at the estate sale. A worn book of poetry; a homemade tabletop baseball game; old vinyl jazz records; this barometer. Keith’s father used to reset the barometer at night so he would know in the morning if pressure was rising or falling. “Looks like rain,” he would say. “Ozone’s dropping, I can smell it.” He was uncannily accurate, the Morrow children remembered. Of course, their father watched the television news every night, got the weather that way too, and Keith had no evidence that the curious instrument on his dad’s big desk was an effective barometer of anything. Still, he often thought of psychology as being like his father’s attempts at meteorology: the children would come to his office and Keith would tell their parents if he could smell the ozone dropping.
“What can we do, then?” Martha asked.
“I think you need to expose him to people who have thought the same things he’s thinking about. There aren’t many books of philosophy written for first-graders, of course, but there are some very basic overviews of the subject, and he’s extremely intelligent. I would let him start reading fables. Stories with morals. Aesop. Then you might seek out some watered-down summaries of the classic thinkers. He won’t get all of it, or even most of it, but the important thing is to let him know that he’s not alone in asking these questions; that as he matures, there will be places he can go to seek answers. As he gets older, he’ll start to form his own opinions. The greatest danger to one who thinks too much is despair. You have to let Justin know that he won’t always feel so alone with his thoughts.”
“Are there any writers or books in particular we should start him on?”
“I don’t think it matters much at the beginning. The important thing is that it’s written in a way that he can begin to grasp it. You’ll want to read with him, of course. Maybe make a game of it. At educational stores, I’m sure you can find some children’s biographies of Plato or Socrates. The earlier thinkers.”
“Socrates. Christ, Dr. Morrow, he’s seven,” Terry Finn said. “What if he’s not interested?”
“He’ll be interested. Trust me. You’ll also want to accompany the reading with your own thoughts. Once Justin gets going, he’s going to perceive everything he reads as literal truth. You’ll want to counter that with your own sense of right and wrong. Justin is not looking for, nor does he need, a foundation in moral relativism. He needs to understand good and bad. I’m not sure he does yet.”
“What do you mean, Dr. Morrow?” Martha asked.
“Justin sees things very abstractly. When he sets a fire, for instance, he understands that the fire destroys, but he also knows that the flames themselves take the place of the thing that burns. He does not see that as bad. He has created. The creation, not the destruction, is what interests him. Allow him to explore his creative side, but make it very clear to him where the boundaries are. He needs to understand that there are consequences.”
Terry scooted forward on the leather chair. “Well, we try to explain to him…”
“This isn’t a lecture on parenting, Mr. Finn. Justin is a special child. Once you understand the way his brain works, you’ll understand that some of his needs are counterintuitive and you’ll respond accordingly. You don’t need to plan for every situation today.”
“Doctor, could this have anything to do with the circumstances of Justin’s – you know – conception?” The Finns had never discussed the particulars in this office, but they knew Justin’s origins were spelled out in the initial paperwork, as required.
Dr. Morrow made a reassuring grunting sound behind closed lips. “I don’t think so. I have to file a report based on my observations of Justin, and if they find any similar behaviors among other cloned children, then someone – probably someone at a university – will conduct a study. Investigate. To me, to you, to himself, Justin is a boy. A normal boy. If there’s anything that makes him stand out from other kids, it’s that he’s above average. That carries with it some difficulties, some pain, some angst. But he doesn’t have superpowers. He’s not a freak. I treat other cloned children, and their troubles are as different from one another as noncloned children’s. Certainly no more or less serious.”
In the car on the way home, Martha’s head hummed, and contempt for her husband’s performance in the doctor’s office felt like bees massing under the surface of her skin. He had complained about Dr. Morrow for weeks – This is a waste of money; that boy doesn’t need his head shrunk; just do what you want and leave me out of it – and then he makes it to one meeting and pretends to be the concerned father. She didn’t say anything, though. Justin was with a sitter and they’d be home soon and she’d made a determined effort not to fight in front of him anymore. Any fight she started now would carry into the house for sure.
She told Terry she would pick up some books tomorrow. There was a store just like Dr. Morrow described in the strip mall on 41, and she’d try the chain bookstores, as well as the indie one in downtown Winnetka. The counsel they’d just received was odd, she thought, but certainly the kind of thing a parent likes to hear from a psychologist – your child is smart, advanced, mature, normal. She thought psychologists didn’t like to use that word, generally, but Dr. Keith had said it anyway.
She had a plan. She felt better. Her son was going to be okay. Kids are never as good as parents think they are, nor are they usually as bad as parents fear. And as Martha expelled months of stress with a long sigh, as the car approached the yellow fire hydrant that marked the outside range of their garage door opener, Terry finally confessed to her that he was having an affair.
– 29 -
Maybe it was only the sense of being away from himself, or at least away from the part of him so tautly tethered to the Chicago suburbs in which he had been born, schooled, and married, but there were tiny villages in New England, incorporated into the sides of mountains or settled in the distant wake of advancing glaciers, that stirred a longing in Davis for country life. Brixton, Nebraska, on the other hand, did not. When he and Joan penetrated the town limits with a rented Taurus following a three-hour drive from the Lincoln Airport, he thought he could read hopelessness into every kitschy mailbox, countrified door decoration, and red-and-white Cornhusker garage door mural. Immediately, he felt empathy with every child whose adolescence in this town must be waited out like a juvenile sentence.
“Did you see that?” Joan asked.
