I WOKE UP with a certain eagerness because the recordings from the snitches were waiting for me. I was curious to know what they’d captured. I don’t know why I imagined that when John and Karen were alone that they would start to argue and upbraid each other for the way they’d each behaved during dinner. But no, in their bedroom silence reigned, mitigated only by the murmur of the TV. They fell asleep almost immediately. A half hour later, they both started snoring as one. They left the TV on all night on some shopping network.
So I focused my attention on the snitch in my living room. I downloaded the audio recorded onto my phone and slipped it into an adjustable armband I used when I ran, put on my ergonomic headphones and hit Play.
While I opened windows, aired out the house and picked up cushions, books and toys scattered over the floor:
SUMMER: Come on, Olivia, it’s time to go to bed.
OLIVIA: No, some more cartoons.
SUMMER: You’ve already seen three episodes of Dora the Explorer. Your mother said two at the most.
OLIVIA: But it’s got to be an even number; otherwise, I have nightmares.
While I hung the clothes on the line in the garden (I don’t like dryers; I love the scent of clothes that have dried outside):
SUMMER: Come on, this time I’m serious. Bedtime.
OLIVIA: Just one more, please.
SUMMER: You said they have to be even. We’ve already seen four. And we’re not going to watch six . . .
OLIVIA: But six is my favorite number . . .
While I raked up the leaves—curiously, everyone hates it, but I find it relaxing—and Pony ran around leaping into the piles I made:
SUMMER: You tell me now that seven is your favorite number, and I’ll tear your little nose off.
OLIVIA: No, seven isn’t my favorite number, because it’s everybody’s favorite number. And Mommy says that the luck that’s in numbers has to be shared with other people. That’s why I chose six, and because it’s my age. But when I turn seven, it’ll still be six. When I turn eight, I might change it to eight, because then I’ll be done with all the luck six has. And now I’m going to bed.
While I expressed breast milk with an electric pump:
Ruby crying.
SUMMER: What is it, precious? Don’t cry, little baby. Come here, come over here. You want me to sing you a song? You want? Let’s sing a song together. A good one.
She taps her cell phone and plays “Wrecking Ball” by Miley Cyrus.
No, not Miley Cyrus, please. Don’t spoil my daughter’s mind: she’s still really little.
Summer sings.
Ruby stops crying.
Don’t stop crying, Ruby, bawl, don’t succumb, be strong.
SUMMER: “All you ever did was break me . . . Yeah, you wreck me . . .”
Ruby laughs.
I sighed while I looked at Pony. She was moaning.
“So what’s your problem, what are you whining about?”
She was sitting on her hindquarters. Her eyes homed in on the little glass fishbowl. Flint, Ruby’s yellow guppy with the bug eyes, had gotten tired of going round and round and not getting anywhere. He was lying flat on the surface of the water.
“Not again, Flint . . .” This was the third time it had happened. I huffed. Then I looked at Pony. “So are you crying because you’re sad or because you want some food?”
Pony looked at me, and I swear she answered: Both.
While I was on my way to Family Pet Land to look for a guppy to replace Flint III without Olivia realizing it and going through another death-trauma:
SUMMER (on the phone): I’m a little fed up, to be honest . . . I have no idea how much longer I’ve got; I don’t want to count; it freaks me out . . . Sure, but you’ve got to understand that right now, like, I can’t go back . . . My mom? No idea. I’m telling you right now. I don’t talk to her . . . Yeah, I can already see my belly . . . How the fuck do I know what I’m going to do when it gets bigger; get off my back, shit! I called you to vent, not to get a lecture . . . Sorry, it’s just that my hormones are going nuts . . . Ha, ha, ha! I’m not always such a slut! You’re the one who’s a slut!
“No, not that one, the one closer to the left,” I corrected Frank, who had the little net in his hand, trying to fish the guppy I was pointing to out of the tank. There were dozens of them.
“But they’re all the same, Alice,” he complained.
“No, they’re not all the same, they look the same, but they’re not. No, not that one either; the one next to it, right beside it.”
Exasperated, Frank passed me the net.
“Here, get it yourself.”
I took the net and went directly for Flint’s clone.
“They last shorter and shorter each time,” I complained.
“Because you pick wrong. If you let me pick . . .”
I cornered the sly guppy I wanted, and Frank put him in a plastic bag with water. Done. Rest in peace, Flint III. Long live Flint IV. Welcome to the Dupont household.
When, three days after recording Summer’s conversation, I received a call from her aunt Jennifer, I thought I’d been caught. How? It didn’t matter. With my recent paranoia I could come up with hundreds of responses a second to justify my unfounded certainties. Even when she told me she was calling because she’d finally made the decision to take painting classes, I still thought I smelled a skunk. Careful, Alice.
What most struck me about Stephen’s room was the light. There was an enormous, south-facing window overlooking the beach and the sea. The dunes seemed to have combed themselves for the occasion, and the sea appeared unusually serene. You could breathe in the peace there. I’d imagined a sicker scene, colder, like a hospital. An inert body connected to tubes, noisy machines pumping oxygen and fluid. Monitors registering vital signs. But Jennifer had taken care to camouflage it with light, life and scents. It smelled good, like a baby, like talcum powder. Burt Bacharach was playing, “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again”—very appropriate for both of us. Later Jennifer would tell me that he was Stephen’s favorite composer, that they were both from Kansas City, and that Bacharach was even born the same day as Stephen’s father in 1928. When her relationship with Stephen was already on firm ground—and they’d gotten over the fact that he was twenty years older than her—he surprised her with plane tickets to Sydney, where he brought her to the famous opera house to see a Burt Bacharach concert. When I saw Stephen, I immediately felt a healthy envy. If only I had Chris like that. Something to hold on to. But what are you saying, Alice? This is horrible, a real limbo, not what you’re going through. What would have happened if Chris had remained in a coma? Would I have done what I was doing? Or would I have been compelled to wait patiently for him to wake up, and then ask him, Hey, honey, there’s something that’s been going around and around in my mind: What the hell were you doing on Robin Island?
Stephen didn’t give the impression of being in a coma, it was as if he was taking a pleasant nap or just had his eyes closed, listening to his favorite music and meditating. His perfectly trimmed white beard and his fluffy white hair added to the overall sense of calm. I felt that there, in that room, everything was OK. I had a strong urge to weep and embrace him.
“Remember that when we met, you told me that to paint, you had to find your inspiration nearby?” Jennifer said. “For me, nothing is closer than Stephen. And don’t look for some in-depth explanation, because there isn’t one.”
I took her advice. We started off working on volume, learning to balance out dimensions. The most basic thing. In pencil.
“How long has he been like that?” I asked, once we had established some trust and the question would appear reasonable and not malignant and nosy.
“Three years.”
More or less the same amount of time Chris had been going to the island. I looked around while I toyed with a snitch between my fingers. On top of the bookshelf seemed like a good place. Jennifer must spend a good part of each day up in that room, judging by the quantity of everyday objects filling it with life: wildflowers, plants, skin care and masculine hygiene products, books on the nightstand, CDs and CD player, a laptop, a tablet, a book of Sudoku puzzles, a TV, etc. I was sure she talked to her husband a great deal. She’d tell him the news, read novels, share memories with him, preferably the good ones, so he would want to wake up, but she’d also need a sounding post, and it was clear no one else played that role, not on the island, anyway. Did she have unfinished business with Stephen, just as I did with Chris? And if so, would she get it all off her chest, express it, whether as a confession or a reproach? I would bet Jennifer felt a little guilty for her husband being in that state, just as I sometimes asked myself what I had done wrong with Chris to make him have a secret/lie/mystery that took up such a big part of his life.
“Is his condition irreversible?” I should have asked it another way so it would sound less harsh. “I mean . . . is there any possibility that . . .” I said clumsily in an effort to repair the damage.
She shook her head softly.
“Brain dead . . . which means I don’t need to talk to him and read him books at night, but I still do anyway . . .” she said with a bitter smile.
“You’ve got a knack for drawing. You sure you’ve never done it before?”
“You say that to all your students, sweet talker.”
“No, seriously.” I smiled. “You’ve got a fluid way of sketching. You hold the pencil very delicately. You don’t struggle with it, that’s very important.”
“I was bored in school, especially in econometrics.” A subject from business administration, the same thing Chris studied. “And you know who my boring teacher was? Stephen.”
“Forbidden love . . .”
“Not exactly. Until I graduated, he didn’t speak a word to me. Plus, he told me later he passed me even though I didn’t deserve it because he didn’t want me to come back and dispute my grade during office hours. He was scared he wouldn’t be able to control himself.”
“So how did he take the first step?”
“He didn’t. I did, without meaning to. At a graduation party, someone had the brilliant idea of making a chocolate cake with marijuana without telling anyone. Ten minutes later, I was knocking at the door of Stephen’s apartment on campus, high as a kite, shouting that I didn’t understand how he could ignore me that way. I went out like a light right after seeing what I was sure were dragons. He wasn’t even home. He got there twenty minutes later and found me curled up on his doormat with vomit everywhere. He didn’t want to call emergency services and get me in trouble. He made me drink a quart of milk and left me sleeping on the sofa. When I woke up, there was fresh coffee and toast. He wasn’t there. A week later, one day before leaving campus forever, I gathered my courage to overcome the terrible embarrassment I felt. I made a chocolate cake, without marijuana, naturally—I hadn’t had any since—and I took it to his house. I left it on the doormat where he’d found me. I didn’t want to see him; I just wanted to leave the cake and a thank-you note. Two weeks later, he wrote me an email that said: ‘No worries. Take care. PS: The cake was delicious.’ Take care, what a bunch of bullshit, I thought. Four days later, I answered him: ‘Whenever you want, I’ll give you the recipe. Take care.’ Half an hour and a glass of wine later, I wrote him again: ‘Or I can make you another one.’ An hour and two glasses of wine later, I wrote him again: ‘And we can eat it together . . . if you want. Take care.’ Five days later, he answered: ‘Yes, I want to. Take care.’ I loved those take cares.”
I was surprised how easy this was. I was worried, my heart pounding, trying to figure out where to put the snitch, and she was trusting me with her love story right off the bat. Maybe there was no need to spy on her. Maybe being her friend was enough.
“At which university did this precious pre-love story take place?”
“Dartmouth, the Tuck School of Business.”
“So, what happened to Stephen?”
I was carried away by the euphoria and thought it was an opportune question, until Jennifer answered, “Hey, you’re not as gossipy as Karen, are you?”
“No, I’m sorry, my apologies, I didn’t . . .”
“It’s a joke, stupid,” she said to calm me down. And then she said something that made the blood rush out of my head: “Stephen had a cerebral infarction.”
Knot in my throat. Gooseflesh. Dry mouth. Isn’t that the same as a brain aneurysm?
“We were out for a ride in the boat, and while he was raising the sail, he felt a sharp pain in his head. Soon afterward, he started vomiting and passed out. The boat was adrift because I didn’t have the least idea how to pilot it . . .”
“Damn, I’m sorry . . .” was all I managed to say. Cold hands. Queasiness. Tachycardia.
“He didn’t have any risk factors. It was hereditary. His father died of the same thing, but since he was a chain smoker, a drinker and had high blood pressure, no one thought about the hereditary aspect till it happened to Stephen.”
Didn’t the doctor tell me what happened to Chris was something congenital, or did he say hereditary? Is congenital the same thing as hereditary? At that moment, I didn’t know. Tingling. Trembling. Sweat. I couldn’t get a word out, not even to playact. Jennifer realized it.
“You’ve gone pale. These things upset you, don’t they?”
My neck forced itself to nod.
“So you’re not going to ask me the million-dollar question? The one all the island must be asking?” I looked at her, trying to convey that I didn’t know what she was talking about, even though I did have an idea.
Tell her you understand. Tell her your secret. The truth behind your lie. Cry. Be sincere, Alice. Dispel your cloud. Maybe she has the solution to everything. And if not, she’s going to understand you. No one more than her. And she’ll help you. You’ll see.
“If you don’t mind, I think I’ll take that tea you offered me earlier,” I said, getting a grip on myself somehow. I wanted to show Jennifer that I wasn’t going to judge her, that what she was doing was fine if it was what she needed.
“Green?” she asked with a smile. She was thankful for my discretion. Was she testing me?
“Yeah, please.”
I was left alone with Stephen. I didn’t plant the snitch. It seemed dirty to me. A lack of respect toward the trust she had shown me. But then I remembered Chris had told me that when he was just seven, he had passed through a phase of thinking he was adopted. It was all the fault of his cousin Kenny, who told him that he had been adopted and that meant that Chris had been adopted too. Why? Because both his mother and Betty, Chris’s mother, had a gap between their two top teeth, the ones in the middle, and Kenny’s sister, Susan, and Chris’s sister, Tricia, had teeth just like their mothers’. But the boys didn’t; neither of them had a gap between their top front teeth. Conclusion: they’d been adopted. And of course, since Kenny was two years older, Chris believed every word of it and went back home in tears. His parents then convinced him that he hadn’t been adopted. But could his cousin Kenny have been right?
That memory and the whistle of the teakettle with the boiling water broke the spell Jennifer had cast, awakening me from the hypnosis of her presence. The room suddenly seemed suspect. Stephen’s long fingers, his thin hair. What color were his eyes? What size shoe did he wear? How do you do a DNA test? Things I asked myself while climbing up onto a chair to plant the snitch on top of the bookshelf.
When I got home, more clearheaded now, I remembered the coroner had told me what Chris had was congenital. And that maybe, only maybe, had he inherited it.
I opened my computer’s Internet browser and searched Google: How to do DNA test. There were 31.5 million results in .42 seconds. I clicked on the first result that wasn’t sponsored, and it showed the proper procedure for collecting samples—outside the lab.
Later I read for a few hours, all sorts of articles about infarctions and brain aneurysms. I found that the number of patients whose aneurysms were due to hereditary causes was around 10 to 20 percent and that one of the most frequent causes of cerebral infarction was the rupture of an aneurysm. For all those reasons, I thought I should get my daughters tested right away—and that Stephen had just earned the right to be considered suspect number four.