"I think I almost remember your father. Not your mother. As you said, she died some years before. But now if I close my eyes, I can remember the day your father took you away — I can almost see the car going down the road. I had a sense then that something horrible had happened, something shameful. When you described it, back when we first met, it seemed familiar, as if I had dreamt it. But after talking with my parents, I suddenly remembered it clearly. It was that sense of something bad happening — remembering that brought it back.
"My parents said we were all told never to speak of your father again. So your name just disappeared. There had been this huge argument, a fight among the parents, and that was why your father took you away. I don't know all the details because even now my parents don't like to speak about it. But I gather the split came because your father objected to something — something involving the research. I think I now know what it was — but we'll get to that later.
"The group was called the Lab. And they were working on research that they were convinced would change the world — life extension. And the center of it was this scientist, Rincon. When I heard Skyler say that name, I didn't connect with it at all. I don't recall him. But I do have a recollection of someone very important. You know how children have this almost innate sense of hierarchy among adults — who is above who. I knew there was this person that everyone worshiped. He was like the sun. I think he lived in that mansion in that town we passed, the Palmer mansion. I remember the grown-ups would traipse up there to meet with him.
"He had tremendous power over them in some way, I don't know what exactly. Anyway, we kids never saw him. To this day, I couldn't tell you what he looked like. But we knew he was there. And he was supposed to be good, benevolent, and extremely smart — brilliant — because he was the head of the whole thing."
Jude was burning with questions. So far, he realized, he had not learned all that much that was entirely new, though the pieces of the puzzle were beginning to fit together a little more snugly.
He took out a cigarette and lighted up. He saw a half candle lying on the floor, put it on the small, wax-covered ledge, and lighted it, too, dousing the flashlight. The glow made the cave come alive with shadows and seem even smaller.
"Go on," he said.
"There were a bunch of other leaders, Elder Physicians was what Skyler called them, and when my parents used the same word last weekend, I felt like screaming. Baptiste — I don't know who he is. There are others who are important, like my Uncle Henry. I don't know where he fits in, but he plays an emissary role for the Lab. I think he's like the group's contact point with outsiders. Now that I look back, I imagine that he and the others like my parents and your parents — they were probably the original founders of the group or something like that."
She paused and watched a drop of wax run down the candle.
"I don't know if you remember — I didn't, until I talked to my father — but even when we were young, they began our education. I think a lot of it was scientific stuff, and we felt special — we were going to be like little pioneers. And one day — this was sometime after you left — we had to go to a regular school down in the valley. I guess the state made us. I remember a yellow school bus would come all the way up the mountain to get us and then bring us home. It was exciting. But suddenly one day we had our own school right here — in some kind of old hotel. I recall being sad because I liked going down into the valley and meeting all these other kids. I thought of them as normal, and I liked something about reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and making cutouts of the state flower — it made me feel connected to the outside world.
"All that changed when we got our own school. And now here's why I remember all this. There was one day when inspectors came — from the state, I guess — and we put on a show for them. We prepared special classes ahead of time for that day and fixed up the schoolroom. We made paper cutouts of leaves or snowflakes or something and put them on the window just like a normal school. It was to fool them. The whole thing was a charade to make them think we were getting the same education as all the other kids. But of course we weren't.
"And what I remembered was the feeling of lying — the shame of it. And my father said it was all right to do it. This weekend, when my father told me that he was dying and my mother was dying, he told me not to tell her. He said it was all right to lie. And just then, I had this memory breakthrough — everything about the school and playing here in the mines with you — it all came back to me in a single block. It was amazing."
"When you were growing up in Milwaukee, you didn't know about your parents?"
"No, not really. I felt they were different in some way. When I was young, I used to fantasize that they were scientists engaged in a supersecret project. Like the Manhattan Project, Los Alamos. That the research they were doing was invaluable and one day they would be famous for it, but in the meantime we had to keep quiet. That we couldn't talk about it, not one word, because there were benighted forces trying to stop them. It was a fantasy, but on some level it was real. I must have known about it."
"How much did you know about the breakthroughs they were making?"
Tizzie answered without hesitating, speaking now in low, urgent tones.
"Only some of it. I knew that life was important, that living long was desirable. I knew that it was important to expand my mind, to cram it with facts and research and scientific data. And I knew that taking care of my body was important. These were the values inculcated in me.
"Especially taking care of the body. Whenever anything went wrong — a cold, a cut, in the worst case, a broken arm—I was showered with attention. After all, my father was a doctor. Nothing was too much. Antibiotics were given freely."
She stopped for a second, now that she had come to the hard part.
"But if you're asking when I needed that kidney, did I know what was going on… where it would come from… the answer is no. What I told you before was true. When I was young, maybe fifteen or sixteen — funny how much of this I've repressed — I was ill. I got this urinary infection that went untreated for a while and turned serious. I was running a high fever, and it hurt so much when I urinated, I tried to hold back and that made it worse. I didn't want to tell my father, but finally he noticed. And he gave me this stuff, Gentamycin. And for a while I seemed better, but then I took a sudden turn for the worse. I recall going to a hospital in Milwaukee and being attached to a machine for dialysis. And then one day, I was operated on. It was done at a small clinic. I don't remember much about the operation at all, just that I spent days in bed and missed so much school that I had to have a tutor."
Tizzie paused for a moment, searching for the right words.
"I didn't even stop to think… to wonder where the kidney came from. I mean, why would I? I was just a kid. And the strange thing is, I don't think I've really thought about it since then. I must have questioned it at some point — I know now, obviously, that kidneys are scarce — and it struck me after the operation, much later, that I didn't have to take immunosuppression drugs and undergo that whole regimen, but I don't think I ever really came to grips with it. And then when I heard Skyler talk about Julia and about her operation, it registered somewhere. I still didn't take it in — not until my father told me. I was shocked. At least he had the decency to be embarrassed."
She stared again at the candle.
"But if I'm honest, I admit that I had a funny feeling — a feeling that I had known something about it all along on some level. The thing is, I don't know how I would have known. Because I was certainly never told. Imagine — telling a kid she's getting a body part from someone raised just for that purpose. So I didn't know about clones. I didn't know they existed. But on some level, I think I guessed that something horrible was going on."