The waitress returned again. “You guys ready?”
Hogan gave her another smile. “Believe it or not, we still haven’t decided yet.”
The waitress forced a smile sprinkled with fatigue. “Take your time.”
All of this Zach was faintly aware of. He had sensed her presence and tilted the folder so the waitress couldn’t see its contents. Then he had moved the glossy photo behind the two papers and skimmed the paragraphs. After the fourth paragraph he paused, closed his eyes. He felt his pulse quicken. He closed the folder and looked up at Hogan.
“You’ve got to be shitting me.”
thirty-five
We drive for maybe an hour or two in silence, again taking secondary roads. The night wears on and the black starts to fade as the sun gets closer and closer to clocking back in for a new day.
Mom rides with me in the back. She doesn’t have the cane she had back at the cemetery. Stroke, David had said, and I had felt awful for missing out on this important piece of family news. Only now it seems she hasn’t had a stroke.
Eventually we start winding our way up into the mountains. We pass a few homes, a few trailer parks, and keep going up and up. There’s a parking area near the top of the mountain, a kind of look out, and this is where Eli stops. He parks the Buick so it’s pointed toward the valley and shuts off the lights and the engine and just sits there for a moment, staring through the windshield. Then he takes a deep breath and turns to look at us.
“I don’t know about the rest of you, but I could use a cigarette.”
He takes my lighter and gets out of the Buick and lights himself one of the Parliaments. Ashley steps out of the passenger side and meets him around the front of the car for her own smoke. Mom smiles at me, then turns to open her door.
I reach across the backseat and touch her arm. “Did you really have a stroke?”
The smile fading from her face, she shakes her head.
“Then why the cane at the funeral? Why the limping?”
“Cover.”
“Cover for what?”
“That’s what your father and I need to explain to you.”
We get out of the car, and the morning is cool but not nearly as cold as it was back at the playground. Eli and Ashley are smoking in silence. Mom moves to the front of the car and leans against the hood. I look down into the valley, at the thousands and thousands of houses and lights scattered below like glass shards, and finally clear my throat.
“Okay, so what’s going on? Why are we here?”
Eli stares at me for a long moment, inhaling on his cigarette. Despite what Mom just told me inside the car, I expect him to blow my questions off, so I’m surprised when he motions with the cigarette down into the valley.
“Down there was where you were conceived. Where all you kids were conceived.”
“Gee, Pops, I always wondered when you and I were going to discuss the bird and the bees. Unfortunately you’re about fifteen years too late.”
Eli takes a final drag off the cigarette, drops it to the ground. “I’m gay.”
“What?”
“I’m gay. I always have been. Marta, however, is not.”
He indicates Mom when he says this, but still I shake my head and hold up a hand.
“Wait a minute. Who’s Marta?”
Mom says, “I am.”
“But that’s not your name. Your name is-”
“We had to change our names. We had to change our identities to keep ourselves and you kids safe.”
After everything that’s happened in the past twenty-four hours, for some reason this news shocks me the most. My entire foundation-everything I’ve built since I was a child-has begun to tremble and shake and might soon crumble completely.
I notice Ashley is standing off to the side, distancing herself from the rest of us. She’s watching to see what my response will be, but I don’t have one.
“My name isn’t Frank Smith,” the man who I’ve always thought of as my father says. “It’s Eli Craig. I know I’ve never been a good father. I’d tell you how sorry I am-how I wish things had been different-but something tells me you wouldn’t believe me anyway.”
“You might be right,” I say. Then, turning to Mom or Marta or whatever she’s called: “What about you?”
She smiles again, only this time it’s forced. “I always wanted children of my own. Granted, I thought it would be under different circumstances, but I’d like to think I was a good mother to you children.”
“You were,” I tell her, not so much to make her feel better but because it’s true. “At least, the few times we saw you. Why did you split all of us up?”
“To protect you,” Eli says. “It’s the same reason we constantly moved ourselves around the country. We couldn’t risk having them find you.”
“Them,” I say. “You mean the people trying to kill us?”
Eli nods. “Marta and I were doctors, once upon a time. I graduated from Harvard. Marta graduated from MIT. We both studied genetics and met when we were hired by Matheson.”
“Who’s Matheson?”
“Dr. Oswald Matheson. He was heading a privately funded study regarding autism. As you know, autism is a disorder in neural development. Nobody is one hundred percent certain what causes it, but it seems that the genetics become mutated in the womb. And what Matheson wanted to do, ultimately, was find these cells in the sperm and egg stage and eliminate them completely.”
“That’s possible?”
“Anything’s possible. It all depends on how hard you work for it. Also on how much money you have to spend.”
“So this guy Matheson, he was trying to cure autism.”
“Initially. A new investor soon entered the picture. This investor brought a huge amount of capital. We didn’t know much about it except that we were being paid even more-over six figures, with a promise of bonuses if we met our goals. There were dozens of other researchers. We were all sequestered to different areas. Marta and I were partnered up. Research subjects were brought in, women in their late teens, early twenties. They were pregnant. We saw them once a week, performed tests, then sent them on their way.”
“Who were these women?”
“Volunteers, as far as we knew. Some of them were already pregnant by the time they came to us. Others we artificially inseminated.”
“And the tests?”
“Standard tests, checking up on the mother, though we also focused on the development of the fetuses. We were keeping an eye on the genetics as closely as possible, waiting to catch any mutations.”
“So what happened?”
“The women began giving birth.”
“That’s pretty standard with pregnant women, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but these women were having more than just one baby. They were having twins, triplets, quadruplets. Some surrogates even had sextuplets. An isolated incident would not have meant much-women can have sextuplets naturally, after all-but it began happening more and more.”
“You suspected genetic manipulation,” I say, not making it a question.
Eli nods. “It certainly wasn’t natural.”
“What happened to the babies once they were born?”
“Experiments were done. Nothing harmful, mind you, but we did check to see if there was any detection of mutations in their cells. Quite honestly, sometimes mutations take years, even decades, to form, so it wasn’t an exact science. In fact, looking back on it now, it wasn’t science at all. If anything, it was the stuff of science fiction. Not that it’s not possible, but the work we were doing, it was too ambitious.”
“But these babies, what happened to them?”
“They eventually ended up going to couples. At least, that’s how it was explained to us. Mostly rich couples, those who couldn’t have children of their own or who didn’t want to go through the normal channels of adoption. Matheson had found a way to … expedite the process. These couples became benefactors that helped continue our work. Plus there were enough surrogates lined up that every week we had new births. Most of the babies weren’t in the facility more than a few weeks before they were adopted.”