“Very well,” he says. “Then, I’ll only say that I have seen their notes and I admire their efforts. It may be more fitting for you to read what they wrote for yourself.”
I hate the idea that he has read my parents’ notes, that his eyes have invaded their thoughts and their handwriting the way his syringes and pills have invaded me. The way his promises have invaded my brother’s mind.
“My life’s work has been to find the cure,” he goes on. “I won’t bore you with the revelations and feelings I felt when I lost my first son, or the joy I felt when Linden was born. But every moment of that joy has been overshadowed by the fear of failing him. And it’s that fear that has spurred me into action, and led me to become among the most revered in my profession, both as a doctor and as a geneticist.”
That much is true. Vaughn is well established throughout the nation.
“And it’s my hard work that captured the interest of the president. About thirty years ago, when it was discovered that our children were being claimed by this mysterious ailment, the president began compiling an elite team of only the best in their fields to go about understanding and fixing the problem. Just a few short years ago, I was selected.
“But it isn’t enough to be selected. Each specialist to earn the president’s interest must prepare a case study. Dr. Glassman did a fascinating presentation on the mutations in malformed children, for instance. And as a part of his study, Dr. Hessler prepared notes on the origin of how this affliction came to be known as a virus. It isn’t exactly a virus, you understand. A virus is something that’s contracted, not something that happens as a result of one’s genetics. But when our children first started to die, we didn’t suspect genetics. We suspected another outbreak like the tainted pesticides. Of course we know better now.”
The lights in the room on the other side of the glass brighten. A door opens, and a nurse is wheeling a gurney in. My lungs constrict. My mouth goes dry. The boy lying on the gurney, as pale and still as death, is Rowan.
“I’ve been trying to come up with a case study that’s worthy of the president’s time,” Vaughn says.
Four nurses are moving my brother from the gurney to the bed, propping him against the incline.
“First I tried to imagine a way new generations could adapt to their short life spans. I dabbled with the idea of females having full-term pregnancies before natural puberty. I was making some headway there, I thought, but none of the subjects could withstand the treatments.”
This is what he did to Lydia, Rose’s domestic, and to Deirdre. Lydia didn’t survive the latest attempt, and I don’t know that I’ll ever be brave enough to face what happened to Deirdre.
And while these horrible things are being said, one of the nurses is taping Rowan’s eyelids open. This setup looks familiar. So disgustingly familiar.
“Then your brother here introduced your parents’ notes, about replicating the virus.”
I can hear the muffled commands being given through a loudspeaker. A helmet is lowered from the ceiling, and the nurse positions it over Rowan’s head, locking his chin in place. I can see the rise and fall of his chest, but otherwise he’s paralyzed, his arms useless at his sides, an IV feeding fluid into his vein.
I don’t want to see this, but I can’t look away.
“Our Jenna was an interesting candidate to test your parents’ theory,” Vaughn says. “I won’t go into the gory details; I know you were attached to her. Needless to say, she didn’t survive.”
That’s when I stop listening. I stare at my brother, and I try to listen to the voice coming through the speaker over his bed. It’s giving commands and words that mean nothing to me, but I will them to be the only thing I hear.
I know what’s about to happen even before I see the needle reaching for his eye.
My hand is touching the glass. My mouth forms the word “Count.” Count the seconds until it’s over. I think that’s what he’s doing. I think I catch his bottom lip just barely moving. There’s a second needle for the other eye, and just seeing it happen to him brings back every memory of my experience in that same position. Cecily was there to tell me her story about trying to make kites fly. There’s no one to talk to Rowan. No one at all but the nurses who monitor his IV and hoist his limp body back onto the stretcher when it’s through.
When the tape is removed from his eyelids, he blinks. I watch his fingers curl into an almost-fist, and I realize that in tandem I’ve made a fist over my heart.
Vaughn is still talking.
“Stop,” I say, breathless. “You don’t have to explain. I understand. We’re your case study.”
“Smart girl,” he says. “Come, follow me. I’ll let you see him now.”
Rather than one armed guard marking the checkpoint to Rowan’s room, there are two, and an authorization card that Vaughn swipes through a panel to unlock the door.
Rowan is being kept in a room as soulless and sterile as the rest of this place. He’s lying on a bed where a first generation nurse is monitoring the fluid that runs down a tube and into his arm. Everywhere are screens with wires that lead to his pulse points.
I’m not certain whether he’s conscious. His eyes are closed, eyelids dark like bruises.
Is this how I looked when I was the subject of Vaughn’s most invasive experiments? Rowan seems so fragile now, when less than an hour ago he was strong and his skin had color to it. I’m afraid to get any closer, afraid I’ll damage him, but then Vaughn nudges me forward and I make my way to the bedside.
“How’s our boy doing?” he asks the nurse. In answer she hands him a chart.
“Rowan?” I brush the tape residue from his brow with my thumb.
I can see his eyes moving beneath his eyelids, and then he manages to blink. He looks at me, and I’m not sure if he can register who I am; his eyes are all pupil.
Vaughn is asking him to clench his fists as best he can. Good. Move his toes. Good. Blink once, and again. Good.
I say his name, and he groans.
“He isn’t in any pain,” Vaughn says. “But he’ll be down until the morning.”
How could my brother have agreed to this? While Vaughn had me restrained and too sedated to put up a fight, my brother has been willingly enduring the same torturous regimes. How long did it take for Vaughn to manipulate him this much? How long will it take me to undo it?
Can it be undone?
When Vaughn leads me back into the hallway, I feel as though I’m the one who has been drugged. My eyes ache, and I can barely feel my legs carrying me forward.
Vaughn is talking about the heat, and his voice is so excited that it breaks into whispers at times. He loves his madness the way a bird loves the sky. And, oh, how glad he is that I’m here now. There are so many things he wants to show me; there’s a world of things beyond my greatest dreams.
He has no idea what I am capable of dreaming.
We’re in an elevator that’s made of glass, going up. On one side are the sterile levels of the sterile building, and on the other side, the sky slowly going purple going pink.
For now we must remain in this place, he says. It’s a secure building. Our business is within these walls, and then we must get back to our plane in the morning. From the door to the plane. But look, look at that view.
We’ve reached our destination, the thirteenth floor. One wall is made up entirely of windows, so much that I feel like I’m inside the building’s skeleton. I stand before the glass, and Vaughn puts his hands on my shoulders and says, “Look. What do you see?”
I see an ocean that’s spilled out of a wineglass, its body clear and sparkling and folding over itself. I see a ribbon of sand. I see clean buildings, tidy streets with streetlights that turn green, yellow, red. I see cars.
I don’t have words to answer his question.
On a distant building, on a giant screen, a woman is washing her hands and then smiling as she holds the bottle up beside her face with its label clearly shown. The woman is much older than me, much younger than Vaughn.
“The people here have been cured?” I ask, not quite believing I’ve just said the words.
I see the reflection of Vaughn’s smile in the glass, over the perfect ocean. “No, darling,” he says. “Those people down there have never even heard of the virus.”
Chapter 21
I’M SLOWLY starting to believe.
Rose was Vaughn’s first true subject. She was his favorite—until Rowan and I came along, at least. He begins the story after we sit at a table in the cafeteria that’s built into the fifteenth floor. All around us are doctors and nurses, all different ages but mostly first generation. Or is “first generation” even the term for them? What do you call someone who isn’t a first generation or a new generation? What do you call it when death comes with a number attached to it that the person living cannot see?
Vaughn doesn’t pressure me to eat what’s on my tray. He saws a knife into his steak and goes on with his story.
He first saw Rose when she was a toddler, when her parents brought her along to a lecture on antibiotic resistance. She and Linden played together, crawling under tables and tagging each other and laughing. It occurred to him then that Linden should have a playmate, but more important, one day he would need to find a wife. This was before Vaughn knew about this place, before he had been contacted by the president, when he still believed his future grandchildren might hold answers that his own son did not. He proposed an engagement between their children, but Rose’s parents declined.
“I could see even then that she was too good for her parents,” he says. “They had no idea what they had in her.”
Rose is alive for an instant in my mind. She has sharp brown eyes and a wicked smile. Her hair is alight.
And then I hear, once again, Linden’s wailing as she stopped breathing.
She would have been free. She would have stuffed herself with fresh strawberries and teased Madame’s guards and traveled the country with her father.
“They were always out there, her parents. They lived like gypsies rather than civilized professionals. And several years later, I saw Rose again when her father brought her to a conference on the Florida coast. She was growing to be every bit as beautiful as I would have expected. Looked a great deal like her mother.
“Her father pulled me aside and told me that the president had recruited him to do research for his team. He told me about this place. He wanted me to partner with him.
“And then, tragically, he was killed.”
I don’t ask about the car bombing that killed Rose’s father. I can see in Vaughn’s eyes that this tragic occurrence was less than accidental.