She listened then, as he described the Lab in its early days in Jerome, trying to make her understand how exciting it had been to stand at the threshold of scientific discovery, to "do things that had never been done before." He told it as a narrative from the beginning, but, drifting in and out, he came back at different junctures and left great gaps, so that the story was disjointed and spliced out of sequence. She had to re-edit it back as he spoke.
He described Rincon, the mesmerizing power of that person. He told of the first great discovery in the underground chamber in Jerome — how to pull cells apart in the blastomere and keep them alive and make them grow separately. The long discussions about doing that to their own offspring, the endless debates in bed at night — what was best, what was right and what was wrong, the dictates of science. The fertilized egg had looked so small under a microscope, it was hard to believe it came from them. And so finally they had agreed to create what he called her "reserve" — he said the word three times before Tizzie understood it. Not once did he use the word "clone" — or, for that matter, the word "sister."
"We were able to not think about them. They were away on that island. We didn't visit, we didn't see them, we didn't talk about them. Only Henry — he was the only one who went there."
He talked about creating the trio of Orderlies from the embryo of a sociopath. He talked about the break with Jude's father, which came because of his attack of conscience, his opposition finally solidifying on the day Skyler was "activated" as a fertilized egg. And he talked, slowly and sadly, about the car crash that had killed Jude's father, which had not been an accident at all. Finally, he recounted his own break years later with the Lab, which had not been total — they were not stupid, they had learned from what had happened to Jude's father — and how difficult it was to stand up to Rincon. It was all out of love for Tizzie. They did not approve the use of the inoculations; it was too experimental, too risky for them to subject their only child to it.
"And I was right," he gasped, with a hubris that Tizzie thought unseemly.
He talked about the discovery of how to clone from an existing adult — almost ten years before Dolly — and how this had opened wellsprings of money, as the lure of life extension was sold to what he called "the high rollers." By that time he was out of the group, working quietly in Milwaukee, in touch only through Henry, who dropped by to keep an eye on him and make sure that he did not betray them by cooperating with law enforcement authorities.
Her father began suddenly to fade away again. She tried asking him questions.
"Do you know where they are now? Where is the Lab now?"
He frowned, his head moved — but was he saying yes or no?
She asked him about Rincon.
"Where is Rincon?"
He tried to talk, but was seized by a sudden coughing fit. His eyes widened in seeming alarm. Then the coughing subsided and he closed his eyes and he didn't reopen them. He fell back into the pillow in a deep sleep, and then later lapsed into a coma. About three hours after that, he died — more or less peacefully.
Walking down the corridor, Tizzie was too stunned to know what she was feeling. Here she had been waiting weeks — months, really — for him to die, and yet when the time came, she was feeling so many different emotions they seemed to cancel each other out, leaving her simply exhausted.
She was nearly at the elevators when she passed a large examining room with its door open. Something out of the corner of her eye made her glance in, and what she saw stopped her. A large woman was seated imperiously on an examination table, dressed in a hospital gown, and a doctor and several nurses were buzzing around her. Illumination from behind caught the woman's gray hair, as if in a spotlight; it sparkled and radiated wildly in all directions and seemed to cover her head like an aura.
Tizzie almost gasped, so powerful was the sight. The grouping was arranged like a Renaissance painting, The Adoration of the Magi or Giotto's frescoes at St. Francis in Assisi, the nurses attending with their heads lowered, almost bowing, the doctor holding his stethoscope to the woman's belly like a blessing.
Then Tizzie noticed something. The woman was elderly — perhaps in her sixties. Her physique was large and her face was strong, with elongated features and a strangely thin and sensitive mouth. But most riveting of all were her eyes, which shone like two lumps of luminous coal pressed into clay. The woman felt Tizzie's gaze, and as she stared back with those black eyes, she seemed to look deep within her.
So engrossed was Tizzie that she almost missed the most striking feature of all — the woman had a huge belly protruding upward, a rounded hill of tightly-stretched skin that she was exposing to the doctor. My God! She was pregnant. She had to be at least twenty-five years past the normal birthing age.
The doctor turned, looked at Tizzie and frowned. The name on his badge flashed at her — Gilmore — and then the door flew closed. Tizzie stood there a moment, the vision of those coal black eyes fixed in her mind. Then she shook her head, left the hospital and went immediately to the airport. She would not stay for the funeral this time. She did not want to see Uncle Henry.
She met Jude at the coffee shop near the Chelsea Hotel, crowded with the usual morning clientele — unshaven old men nursing cups of coffee, and long-haired and shaven-head rock musicians nursing hangovers. Couples of all types and sexual configurations shared tables.
Jude and Tizzie sat at the table in the corner, waiting for Skyler. She'd passed on everything her father had told her before he died. Now they were feeling stymied.
"So where do we go from here?" asked Jude.
"Hard to say. I can't think of anything. Back to the judge in New Paltz?"
"I doubt he'd be much help. Anyway, Raymond said he was ill."
"Maybe he'd talk to us. Tell us something."
"You mean a deathbed confession? Not likely."
Tizzie wondered if that was meant as an oblique reference to her father. She decided it wasn't. She had told Jude what her father had revealed: that his father's death had not been an accident, and the news had upset him greatly.
She had also described in great detail the bizarre sight of the pregnant woman with the coal black eyes and the doctor who was examining her with reverent caution.
"How about the other FBI guy? What's his name?"
"Ed something. Ed Brantley."
"You could call him."
"That's a crap shoot. Who the hell knows what side he's on?"
"Yes, but you came to trust Raymond. And Raymond trusted him."
"And Raymond's dead."
"Okay. I take your point."
She took a sip of coffee.
"Jude, we've got to do something. We can't just sit here."
Jude was about to answer, but a young man sat down at a table across from them within earshot. He was wearing a black leather coat, tight black chinos, black leather gloves with the fingers cut off and a panoply of silver rings and necklaces; his black hair stuck up in clumps, and his left ear was studded from top to bottom with safety pins and silver earrings. He jangled when he sat dawn.
He didn't look like a federal agent, Jude told himself. But you never knew. Raymond's death had gone a long way toward reigniting his paranoia.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a familiar figure through the window. It was Skyler. Seeing him just appear like that, walking down the sidewalk, Jude was able to make a split-second, halfway objective appraisal. It was like gazing in a mirror. The walk was very much like his own, a casual stride, head up. What impressed him was how much at home Skyler looked on the city streets now — how quickly he had adapted. Jude wondered, were the situation somehow reversed, if he would do as well.