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When I arrived at Ed Hutchinson’s home at eight a.m., he met me at the door in a ratty flannel bathrobe and wearing brown corduroy slippers. I suppose I expected him to be old, the way he sounded on the phone, but his face surprised me. Despite being ravaged by disease, his was a handsome face, with few lines, and with strong cheekbones and chin. His stature suggested he once carried more weight, that he had been muscular and dashing, in a Rock Hudson kind of way. Two bronze eyes looked me over, and I couldn’t help but sense an overt lechery in his welcoming grin. He carried himself erect and poised, about six foot two, and his hair was thick, ruddy brown. He gestured me in, coughing all the while, and told me to find a chair and wait while he dressed.
I entered his den and took in the dark mahogany furnishings, the heavy drapes and thick carpeting, the many framed certificates and awards on the walls. Those slips of paper testified to a man devoted to scientific advancements, dedication to his company, and faithful service in the military. In contrast to the abundant number of academic accolades was the glaring absence of any personal or family mementos. Only one small framed photo sat on his desk, showing a young and dashing Hutchinson with his arm around a girl, perhaps twelve, smiling for the camera. Did he have a wife? Was this a photo of his daughter?
I heard his footsteps and sat in a wide leather chair across from his desk.
“Come, you can help make some coffee while I show you something,” he said, picking up a stack of periodicals off his desk. He had put on a pair of Levis (that apparently used to fit him but now sagged below his waist) and a plain white T-shirt, but remained in his slippers.
I followed him into the kitchen as he alternately coughed and wheezed. He reached for a can of Folgers on the counter and pointed at the coffeemaker. “You do know how to make coffee, don’t you, honey?”
“Sure. How strong do you want it?” He waved at me while trying to calm another attack, giving me a go-ahead to make it however I wanted. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I didn’t drink the stuff, but I could handle a neighborly cup. Even so, I kept the brew a little on the weak side.
He looked me over before collapsing into one of the dining chairs. “You sure look like your dad, you know that? Same dark eyes and hair, same nose. Not much of your mother in you, from what I can tell.”
I guessed the husbands that had worked together at Penwell in my father’s department had all known each other. Maybe they had barbecues or company picnics. Talked about their wives and children, shared photos. I found mugs in the cupboard and filled two with coffee. I brought them to the table and sat across from Ed.
“You want some nondairy creamer? There’s some on the counter. Sugar’s over there too.”
“Black’s fine,” I said. “I appreciate you letting me come over.”
“Nice to have company. Especially someone as pretty as you.” He smiled again and let his eyes roam over my body. If he hadn’t been ill, I would have considered making excuses and backing toward the door. His gaze was just plain rude. “Who wants to sit and visit with someone at death’s door? It’s no fun, I can tell you.” He sipped his coffee, and that seemed to soothe the raspiness out of his voice. “So, you have questions about your dad. Ask, and I’ll tell you what I can.”
I decided to get to the point. I didn’t know how long he’d last before a coughing episode would make talking difficult. He seemed much less distressed than he was on the phone the day before. “You mentioned something about an experiment, in San Diego. I asked my mother and she said my dad had volunteered, and that the experiment was dangerous. Do you remember anything about it? Who else may have participated?”
“You know, I thought about that after we hung up. And I looked through my newsletters and bulletins. Nothing. I know there was a project going on down there. I can’t recall who headed it, what it involved.”
“Was that common—asking people to volunteer for assignments outside their normal jobs? Was Penwell connected with the government or the military?”
“We handled a lot of government contracts, but the employees were all hired by Penwell, a private corporation. Your dad too.”
“Well, how did that experiment in San Diego get advertised? Would they have posted a notice on a wall, or sent a memo?” If it had been top secret, how would they recruit? Take each man aside privately and lay out the details? If my mother was right and the whole thing had been covered up, surely they wouldn’t have publically posted this mission for all to see.
Ed Hutchinson sucked in air, and his throat rattled. He shook his head. “Sorry, honey, I just don’t remember.”
“Do you know anyone else who participated and came back sick? Did anyone else in the company get leukemia or die soon afterward?”
Again he shook his head, but his eyes avoided mine. There was clearly something he wasn’t telling me. I thought about my conversation with my uncle and the question of secrecy. Had Hutchinson sworn not to tell? What did it matter if he told, now that he was dying? Now that twenty-five years had passed?
“Hey, I thought you’d like to look through some of these annual reports. Some stuff about your dad in there.” A deliberate change of direction. I made a note to get back on topic once I heard him out. He flipped open one magazine-sized brochure to a page with rows of photos, arranged like a school yearbook.
“Here’s your dad. Handsome fella. Always had to push the girls away.” I looked at Ed’s strange expression. What did he mean by that remark? What girls? I turned back to the page and studied my father’s face. He was handsome, smiling for the camera. I thought it strange that I would always envision my father at thirty. Unlike my mother, whose aging face erased my memory of her younger self. When I looked through photo albums and saw pictures of her with us kids, when we were in elementary school, I barely recognized her. But my father would never grow old in my mind.
He would have been about my age in this photo. That realization gave me a start. He would be my contemporary, my classmate. And someday in the not-too-distant future, I would be old enough to be his mother. He suddenly seemed way too young to have died, and too young to have fathered three small children. I could barely picture myself with the maturity to handle that much responsibility.
Ed placed another opened magazine before me. A large black-and-white photo showed my father standing next to a young Ed Hutchinson and two other men. They posed in an airplane hangar, with a half dozen giant aircraft in the background. But next to them stood some cylindrical dark objects, about two feet wide and six feet tall. I read the caption. “Penwell scientists display the new sleek design of the SNAP 3.”
“What’s SNAP?” I asked, studying Ed’s face in the photo. There was something strangely familiar about him. Had I seen a photo of him and my father somewhere else, maybe long ago? I surely had seen him before. I pulled over the first brochure he had shown me and found his photo two rows above my father’s. Maybe it was his resemblance to Rock Hudson that clicked—the lingering movie star aura about him. Talk about a hunk. Most of the other men in the pictures looked like your typical college nerd—glasses, goofy haircuts. Like they were too wrapped up in their research to ever look in a mirror or comb their hair. But Ed Hutchinson could have been a poster boy for the all-American heartthrob.
“SNAP? That was a big project we all worked on in the late fifties. Your dad was instrumental in its development. Stands for Systems Nuclear Auxiliary Power. Generators that created electricity from radioactive decay. The first one launched into space in 1961, aboard a Navy transit spacecraft. They used the RTGs—radioisotope thermoelectric generators—on most all the spacecraft: the Apollo missions, the probes, Viking, Pioneer, Nimbus. They were especially useful for craft that traveled too far from the sun to employ solar panels. But the RTGs had other uses: powering lighthouses, remote sensing stations. Even though the thermocouples were reliable and long-lasting, the RTGs turned out to be inefficient, and after a while the SNAP program was dismantled. You can still find defunct RTGs in old lighthouses in Russia, although there are some rotting in the sea. Like the one aboard Apollo 13. It’s lying somewhere in the Tonga trench, in the Pacific Ocean. Who knows how much radiation could be leaking into the water from these things right now?”
“Wait, so these RTGs are radioactive?”
“Well, the plutonium 238 only had a half-life of about eighty-seven years. But you don’t just get exposed that easily. It doesn’t penetrate the skin like exposure to a nuclear bomb. You’d have to ingest the radiation somehow, to get it into your internal organs.” Ed looked at me and must have seen where I was going with this line of reasoning.
“Look, we didn’t build the things—we designed them, honey. Your dad worked on a chalkboard; he didn’t handle radioactive material. That was done in a different location, nowhere near our facility. Once they were built and the radioactive material housed and encased, they were perfectly safe to handle. Penwell built loads of these things, without incident. They’re still used by the Navy and Air Force, with no problem.”
The phone rang and I sipped my coffee, forcing it down, while Ed spoke to someone for a couple of minutes. I heard him say, “Okay, come on over, if you must.” He didn’t seem very happy when he hung up.
“Maybe I should go. I’ve taken up enough of your time, and you’ve been gracious to show me these photos.”
“Oh, don’t rush off. That was my daughter. Says she has to bring me something. Can’t imagine what that’d be. I hardly ever see her.”
His voice reeked of bitterness. I thumbed through more of his journals while he tried to contain his coughing. It seemed to escalate as I sat there looking at pictures of various airplanes and machinery I couldn’t identify. I tired to imagine my father working in an office, writing equations on his chalkboard, throwing ideas around with his coworkers. I looked at Ed.
“Would you mind if I borrowed this?” I held up the one magazine that featured all the Penwell employees in my father’s department.
“No, sure, honey. Take it.”
“Do you remember someone named Dave Lerner?”
Ed nodded as he tried to calm his chest. He plodded into the other room and pulled out an oxygen tank that rolled on a platform with wheels. He put the mask over his mouth and breathed steadily for a moment. When he lowered the mask, his voice was hoarse. “Sure. Dave worked at Penwell for a long time. Till he retired, I think. But he was still in LA when I relocated up here. Probably still down there.”
“Did he know my father well?”
“I guess so. They worked together on just about everything.”
The doorbell rang. I decided to broach the topic of the experiment one more time. “My mother said she ran into Dave Lerner years later,” I said, following Ed to the door. “That he told her he knew of others from their department who had been exposed to radiation and who had died. Other men who had gone to San Diego.”
Ed’s hand stopped halfway to the doorknob. He gave me a stern look. “Honey, why belabor this? Who knows what really happened? You’re never going to get answers. And all those years—it was so long ago.”
He sounded just like my mother. And just as cagey. Was I overly suspicious of everyone, or was there a reason Ed Hutchinson seemed to be hiding something? I stepped back as he opened the door.
“Well, look at you, all dolled-up,” Ed said acerbically to the tall blond-haired woman standing on the threshold. “Come on in.” He gestured to me. “Julie, this is Lisa Sitteroff. This is my one and only child—Julie.”
I smiled. “Well, my last name is now Bolton. Nice to meet you.” I shook her hand and met her friendly eyes. She looked like a model from Cosmo, dressed in a slinky top and tight jeans, her hair styled to perfection. I never looked that good any time of day, let alone nine o’clock in the morning. I guessed Julie to be about my age. “But I’m just leaving . . .”
Julie rested a hand on my arm as Ed marched toward the kitchen. “Please,” she said in a stern whisper, “stay for just a minute more.”
I caught an urgent expression in her eyes. What in the world was that about?
“All right. But I should be getting to work.”
Ed called out from the kitchen. His voice was thick with irritation. “So what did you bring me, that you had to come right over?”
Julie held her perfectly manicured hand up to me, asking me to wait. She went into the kitchen and hushed whispers followed. The tension in their relationship drifted to my ears. I kept standing by the door, fiddling with my purse, clutching the Penwell brochures. A few minutes passed, some coughing ensued, and I grew more uncomfortable, hearing the rising tone in their voices. Julie strode back to the door, her face flushed. She seemed angry and struggling to contain her feelings.
“I really should go . . .” I said.
Julie pressed something into my hand. A business card. She lowered her voice and leaned close to me. I heard Ed lapse into a coughing frenzy in the kitchen. “Lisa, I have to talk to you. It’s terribly important. Please call me at noon, at my office number. I’ll come see you.”
I studied her face, puzzled by her intensity. What could she possibly have to say to me, a complete stranger? Had she mistaken me for someone else?
She didn’t give me a chance to ask any questions. Her father walked toward us, dragging his oxygen tank. Julie pasted on a smile and turned to her father.
“Dad, Lisa needs to leave.” She opened the door for me, and the warm morning breeze drifted in. The bright sun hurt my eyes, and I reached in my purse for my sunglasses.
Julie stood between me and her father, so all I could do was give a little wave. “Thank you, Ed, for seeing me. I really appreciate it. I hope—well, I hope you feel better.” My words sounded stupid. What do you say to someone who is dying—get well soon? I nodded at Julie, who mouthed words to me as her father came up behind her. Call me. Noon. I nodded again.
“Thanks, honey,” Ed said to me. “Come visit anytime. Just make it this year, okay?”
“Sure thing.”
Julie stepped back inside. I heard the door close briskly behind me, and I felt disoriented and befuddled. I looked at the card Julie gave me. She worked at a realty office in Cupertino, and went by the last name Hutchinson. I assumed that meant she wasn’t married. There was nothing written on the back, nothing to shed any light on this odd encounter or her urgent request to speak with me. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what in the world she could possibly need to say to me. I supposed I would just have to wait three hours to find out.
As I got in my car, I looked back at the door to Ed’s house. I pictured the guard standing in front of the door to enlightenment, waiting for me to ask the only correct question that would grant me entrance. Everywhere I went, I saw doors. I heard the witch in Macbeth chant, “By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes. Open, locks, whoever knocks.” Ed Hutchinson had been guarded, hiding something. I brought to mind the small photo of him in his dashing younger days, standing next to my father beside the SNAP generator.
My hand stopped in the air as I lifted the key to the ignition. My breath caught as I shook an outrageous thought from my head. I chastised myself for my wild imagination and started the engine. I didn’t believe in coincidences, but I did trust my intuition. And in that moment my intuition told me Julie Hutchinson had something earth-shattering to tell me.