It took him a minute to decipher and he laughed. “Not ocean. OSHA. It stands for Occupational Safety and Health Administration.”
Alice studied him for a moment, then walked away. “Daddy says it’s just another bunch of bureaucratic bullshit.”
“He’s probably right on that one,” Andrew murmured. As he followed Alice across the room, the animals inside the cages began to stir, a sudden din of scrabbling feet and curious chirrups.
Monkeys, he realized as several of them suddenly pressed their faces against the gates, clutching at the cage bars with tiny, human-like hands.
Suzette had told him that Dr. Moore’s house in Massachusetts had been firebombed. They think it might have been a group of animal rights zealots, she’d said. PACA, I think they’re called. People Against Cruelty to Animals.
Is this why? he wondered. Whatever Moore’s working on, he’s been experimenting on animals?
The chattering from the monkeys grew louder and more insistent as Alice walked across the room and approached one of the larger crates. Before he could fully grasp what she was doing, never mind stop her, she’d reached for a key pad near the cage’s gate.
“Wait, don’t,” he said, but it was too late. She’d already tapped in the pass code to unlock it and pulled open the gate. “Alice, stop. What are you doing?”
He drew back as a chimp emerged from the cage. It was nearly as tall as Alice herself, with preternaturally long arms and a dense, silky coat of shiny black fur. Hesitating at the threshold of its crate, it studied Andrew for a moment, then allowed Alice to take it by the hand, drawing it out fully. Even though the chimpanzee seemed curious and cautious of his presence, awarding him glances now and then, Alice ignored Andrew as she led the ape toward the back of the room. Here, she punched the access code into another key pad and disappeared into what he first mistook for a closet.
“Alice, we have to go now,” he said, and because the other monkeys continued to grow more and more agitated, their voices louder and louder, he hurried after her. “We have to go now. What if your father finds out we’re here?”
“He won’t,” Alice replied. The room wasn’t a closet at all, but instead, some sort of playroom, where board games had been stacked on small shelving units alongside picture books, puzzles, assorted toys and stuffed animals. She had delivered the chimp to a small table in the center of the room then walked over to a nearby bookshelf.
The chimp shot a wary glance at Andrew as he loitered in the doorway, then began to bounce on its shorter, stouter hind legs, uttering sharp little enthusiastic barks when Alice selected Candyland from among the neatly arranged games and boxes.
“What are you doing?” Andrew asked. “Put that away, then put the chimp back. I’ll take you back to the apartment, to your room.”
“She’s not a chimp,” Alice said mildly, sitting across from the ape at the table. “She’s a Siamang, the largest variety of lesser ape species called gibbons. Her name is Lucy.” As she opened the box and began to set up the playing board, she glanced at him. “Do you want to play?”
“I want to go back to the barracks.”
She shrugged. “So go.”
Andrew watched as the game began. Not only could Lucy match the colors and numbers of required spaces for each of her plays, but she could identify, find, then move her gingerbread man to the correct character spaces—ice cream cone, candy cane, gumdrop—whenever she’d draw them. She understood what the squares designated with licorice sticks meant—losing a turn—and would slap the table and hoot, her mouth open in an elongated O of bad sportsmanship.
“She can play Chutes and Ladders, too,” Alice supplied. “And Memory. But this one’s her favorite.”
“Did you teach her?”
She shook her head. “Daddy did. It’s part of his experiment.”
Andrew tried to picture Dr. Moore doing something as light-hearted as playing a preschooler’s board game, but couldn’t. “What experiment?”
“To see how smart she is.”
Smart though she may have been, Lucy the Siamang also appeared to be blind in one eye. The lens on her left side was milky and clouded. That side of her face seemed palsied somehow, too, the corner of her mouth hanging lankly, her eyelid drooping. Spongy growths of flesh had developed in places as well, disfiguring tumors that left her head misshapen, like half-kneaded clay.
“Her brain grew too big,” Alice said, taking note of his attention. “That’s what happened to her face. Then Daddy had to cut out a piece of her skull so her brain would have enough room. You can feel the soft spot where he did it, on the back of her head, near the top.”
Curious, Andrew leaned forward, but when he reached out to touch Lucy’s head, the Siamang drew back, baring her teeth and chattering at him angrily. Remembering how he’d seen stories of chimpanzee attacks on TV, where supposedly tame animals had gnawed off the fingers or faces of their owners, Andrew shrank back in alarm.
“She doesn’t like that,” Alice said.
“You said it was okay.”
“No. I said you can feel it. I meant a physical capability, not that you should try. You’re doing that hearing-not-listening thing again.”
He scowled at her but she didn’t look up from the game board. For her part, Lucy relaxed, her lips covering her teeth again as she resumed the game. After a moment, during which the ape moved her piece one orange square, Alice said, “Suzette told me you like to count trees.”
He pondered this for a moment, then laughed. “I don’t know that I like it, but I do it, yeah. It’s part of my job. The company I work for, we get hired to count trees, catalog different species by acreage. That way, the people who own the land the trees are on can decide which ones, if any, they want to have cut down.”
“What’s it called?” she asked.
“My job? I’m a forestry consultant.”
Her attention returned to the game. “Maybe I can be one some day.”
Willing to bet this wasn’t an aspiration many kids shared, Andrew smiled. “Maybe.”
When they had finished several games of Candyland, Alice led Lucy by the hand back to her cage. Andrew walked slowly down the row of crates while the monkeys inside chattered and reached for him, anxious and eager. “What does your dad do with all of them?” he asked Alice, again thinking of PACA, the animal activists who had targeted Moore’s New England home.
“He uses them to test different kinds of medicines,” she replied, closing the gate once Lucy had clambered inside her crate. Punching the key pad, she locked it once more. “Things to make their brains grow.”
She’d mentioned this before, that this was what had happened to Lucy’s face, why she had the disfiguring growths and the cross-section of her skull had been remained. Her brain grew too big for her head.
“Why?” he asked, bewildered and somewhat disturbed.
Alice walked past him, heading for the door. Catching him by the hand, she gave him a tug not in the direction of the entrance, from which they’d originally come, but the opposite way, deeper into the lab. “Come on. I’ll show you.”
American Geneticist Wins Nobel Prize in Medicine.
Andrew studied this headline for a long, surprised moment, then the grainy black-and-white headshot of Dr. Moore that ran beneath it. The dateline for the newspaper article, which had been laminated before its inclusion in a large scrapbook of similar clippings, was three years ago.