Sister

kindness anymore.

“He told me that in humans his IQ gene codes for two totally different things. It affects not only memory capacity but also lung function. It meant that the babies couldn’t breathe when they were born.”

I’m so sorry, Tess.

“He told me that if the babies are intubated immediately after they’re born, if they’re helped to breathe for a while, they’d be fine. They’d live.”

He had made me lie on the floor, on my left side; the damp cold of the concrete was seeping into my body. I tried to move, but my limbs were too heavy. He must have drugged me when he gave me the tea. I could only use words to stay alive.

“But you didn’t help them to breathe, did you? Xavier. Hattie’s baby.”

“It wasn’t my fault. It’s a rare lung disorder and someone would ask questions. I just needed to be left alone. Then there would be no problems. It’s other people, crowding around me, not giving me space.”

“So you lied to them about what really killed their babies?”

“I couldn’t risk people asking questions.”

“And me? Surely you’re not going to stage my suicide, the way you staged Tess’s? Frame me for my own murder like you did my sister? Because if it happens twice, the police are bound to be suspicious.”

“Staged? You make it sound so thought out. I didn’t plan it—I told you that. You can see that because of my mistakes, can’t you? My research and my trial I planned in meticulous detail, but not this. I was forced into doing this. I even paid them, for God’s sake, not stopping to think that it might look suspicious. And I never thought they might talk to each other.”

“So why did you pay them?”

“It was just kindness, that’s all. I just wanted to make sure they had a decent diet, so the developing fetuses had the optimum conditions. It was meant to be spent on food, not bloody clothes.”

I didn’t dare ask him if there were others or how many. I didn’t want to die with that knowledge. But there were some things I needed to know.

“What made you choose Tess? Because she was single? Poor?”

“And Catholic. Catholic women are far less likely to terminate when they know there’s a problem with their baby.”

“Hattie is Catholic?”

“Millions of Filipinos are Catholic. Hattie Sim put it on her form—no father’s name, mind you, but her religion.”

“Did her baby have cystic fibrosis?”

“Yes. Whenever I could, I treated the cystic fibrosis and tested my gene out too. But there weren’t enough babies who fitted all the criteria.”

“Like Xavier?”

He was silent.

“Did Tess find out about your trial? Is that why you killed her?”

He hesitated a moment. His tone was close to self-pitying; I think that he genuinely hoped I would understand.

“There was another consequence that I hadn’t foreseen. My gene got into the mother’s ovaries. It means there is the same genetic change in every egg, and if the women have more babies, the babies will have the same problem with their lungs.

“Logistically I couldn’t expect to be there for the next baby, or the next. People move away. Eventually someone would discover what was going on. That’s why Hattie had to have a hysterectomy. But Tess’s labor was too quick. She arrived at the hospital with the baby’s head already engaged. There wasn’t time to do a caesarean, let alone an emergency hysterectomy.”

You hadn’t found out anything at all.

He killed you because your body was living evidence against him.

Around us people are starting to leave the park, the grass turning from green to gray, the air cooling into evening. My bones ache with cold and I focus on the warmth of Mr. Wright’s hand, holding mine.

“I asked him what made him do it, suggested it was money. He was furious, told me his motives weren’t avaricious. Impure. He said he wouldn’t be able to sell a gene that hadn’t had a legal trial. Fame wasn’t motivating him either. He couldn’t publish his results.”

“So did he tell you the reason?”

“Yes.”

I’ll tell you what he said out here, in this gray-green park in the cool fresh air. Neither of us need to return to that building to hear him.

“He said that science has the power that religion once claimed, but it’s real and provable, not superstition and cant. He said that miracles don’t happen in fifteenth-century churches but in research labs and hospitals. He said the dead are brought back to life in intensive care units; the lame walk again after hip replacements; the blind see again because of laser surgery. He told me that in the new millennium there are new deities with real, provable