Chapter Twenty-One

Mike

Warren Scientific

“THERE...”

Mike leaned back and winced. His shoulders felt as if he’d been digging ditches for the past two days. He hadn’t. But he had been sitting on the stool for three hours as he watched the sample vials. Everything was going exactly as it should.

“This time do what you’re supposed to,” he added, glad nobody else was around to hear him talking to himself. He’d been overly optimistic when he believed it’d take a month to go through the necessary steps to get his research back to where it’d been. More than five weeks had passed since the horrendous discovery that his samples had reverted as if someone had turned the clock back four weeks.

Since he’d gone with Gabby to take Ceebee for her checkup, he’d been working longer and longer hours and seeing less and less of Gabby. He was falling right back into the same pattern he had with every relationship. Getting deeply involved, then having so much work that he couldn’t give the relationship a second thought.

That wasn’t quite true. He was having second and third and fourth and more thoughts about sleeping with Gabby. He’d be glad to do that any time anywhere... if he could steal more than ten minutes from the research. But he couldn’t ignore the look in her eyes when she saw him holding Ceebee, a look that suggested they were one big, happy family. Each time he noticed that look, he couldn’t help thinking of how her happiness would become grief.

Leaning his elbow on the counter, he propped his chin on his hand and stared at the picture of Gabby with the baby on her lap. He’d taken it when Ceebee was only a few weeks old and had hung it on the bulletin board by his desk the next day. There was an honest love in Gabby’s eyes as she gazed down at the baby.

When had he started lying to himself? Yes, he did worry about Gabby being crushed when they finally got the proof that Ceebee wasn’t her daughter, but what freaked him out even more was the whole idea of “one big, happy family.” He was married to his work, and he’d be until he got the answers he was searching for. That could be a few more weeks or a few more years, and he didn’t want to be unfair to Gabby. She deserved to get what she wanted—a family with a husband who was there for her when she needed him.

The phone rang.

He got up and groaned. His back hurt from bending over his samples. Another twenty or thirty years of this, and he wouldn’t be able to stand up.

The phone kept ringing, having no pity for his cramped muscles.

“I’m coming,” he grumbled as he went to it and picked up the receiver. “Archer here.”

“Mike,” said Sam, “I need to talk to you right away.”

“What’s up?” His smile faded away as he heard tension in his friend’s voice.

“I’ve got the results from the DNA samples you brought in. Finally.”

Mike wasn’t sure whether to be glad or worried. It was important to know the truth. His whole professional career had been aimed at discovering truths that nobody else had seen and then building more questions to take the truth to a purer level. But there had been such a nice hiatus in fretting when he and Gabby had known that nothing had to be decided.

Or had Gabby stopped worrying? He hadn’t spent enough time with her lately to know. The few words they’d traded in the hall and the few kisses that had left his mouth craving more hadn’t given them a chance for heartfelt conversations. The one night recently he’d been able to steal some time to visit, he’d fallen asleep on her sofa while she cooked dinner. She’d let him sleep the night through, and he’d been so embarrassed in the morning that he’d snuck out before she got up. Mr. Shepard had given him a knowing grin that morning on the way to work, and Mike hadn’t ruined the old man’s delusion that he and Gabby had slept together.

That’d been last week, and he hadn’t said more than a half dozen words to her since until this morning when she invited him to come over tonight for a small birthday party. He’d forgotten it was his birthday, but clearly Mr. Shepard had informed Gabby. He’d told her he’d be there—and awake—which brought one of her luscious laughs before he’d had to hurry to get to work in time for the next examination of the cells.

She was planning a celebration, and now...

“All right,” Mike said. “Tell me what the results of the DNA testing are, even though I suspect I already know.”

“You do?” Sam’s voice grew taut again. “That’s a change of tune.”

“What are you talking about? Just give me the results.”

“I’d rather we talked in my office.”

“Just tell me now. I don’t want to leave my tests at this stage. It’s close to where it was before everything went crazy.”

“I’d rather that we talked in my office,” Sam repeated.

Curious why Sam was being mysterious, he heard a beep from the timer he’d set so he didn’t miss the next time to check the samples under his microscope. “All right.” He didn’t have time to argue. “How about around three?”

“I’ve got a conference call then that’s going to go late. Come over just before you head out, and I’ll excuse myself from the call long enough to show you the results.”

“Let’s make it for around five. Gabby’s making me a birthday cake for tonight, and I don’t want to be late.”

“It’s your birthday?” His friend’s voice sounded oddly strained again.

“Happens every year around this time.” He wasn’t going to admit that he’d forgotten his own birthday until Gabby’s invitation reminded him. “Remember last year? We went over to the bar on—”

“See you around five.”

The phone clicked in his ear, startling him. Sam loved to talk, and it was usually harder to get him off the line than a teenage girl discussing the new cute boy at school.

Mike set his own phone back on the wall receptacle. He frowned. Something was upsetting Sam.

The door abruptly opened.

“Hey, Mike?” asked Lydia, the receptionist for this section of the labs. She was every cliché for her job—a buxom and blowsy blond with legs that seemed to reach halfway to Heaven. But there was one difference between Lydia and the trite depiction. She was skilled in her job and worked hard to understand the experiments going on in her section. Not all the details, but enough to be able to carry on an intelligent conversation and ask questions. “Okay for a visitor now?”

“Who?”

She lowered her voice. “Home office. They sent someone to nose around and discover why there was so much trouble a couple of months ago.”

“Wow, they reacted in a hurry, didn’t they?”

“Corporate bureaucracy.” She shrugged. “I’m trying to give everyone a heads-up.”

“Thanks. Try to keep them away for about a half hour. I don’t want my work interrupted for that long. Then you can let them in, and I’ll give them the nickel tour.”

She nodded and started to close the door.

“Thanks,” he called.

“Sure thing, Mike.” She winked as she added, “Maybe if I tell them it’s your birthday, they’ll leave you alone.”

“If so, I’m going to claim it’s my birthday every day of the year.”

The rest of the afternoon sped past, but Mike felt as if he were two separate people. One was Dr. Archer, showing the bigwigs around his lab and answering pretty much the same questions he had the last time one of them came out to snoop around. The other one was the Mike who couldn’t stop thinking of reasons why Sam hadn’t just told him the results over the phone.

How difficult could it be? The two samples weren’t a match. It wouldn’t be hard for Sam to say, but Mike couldn’t shake the image of Gabby’s sorrowful, but brave face when he told her what the test had revealed. She wouldn’t be surprised, because she knew that Ceebee couldn’t be her biological daughter. Yet there was something between the two of them that suggested they were meant to be together.

He should have put his foot down at the beginning and insisted that she turn the baby over to children’s services instead of allowing Mr. Jackett to jerk them around. It would have hurt Gabby to let the baby go, but not as much as it would now. It was too late for regrets.

MIKE OPENED THE door to Sam’s lab. As always, it looked as if a bomb had exploded. Not close enough to destroy everything, but near enough so that everything was knocked off the shelves or blown about the room. There were also piles of professional journals and papers his peers wanted him to review.

In one corner by a printer was the stack of pages that was the novel Sam had begun in medical school and was still working on. It must have bypassed a thousand pages a few years ago, but he kept adding to it. Mike had asked once if he could read it. Sam had given him a few chapters, but Mike had found it impossible to read when the characters changed names from page to page and it bounced from being a mystery to a horror to a romance to he had no idea what. After that, he contented himself with asking Sam when the book would be done, saying he didn’t want to read it until he could read the whole thing. He suspected, by the time Sam typed “the end,” he’d have to be careful not to get a hernia picking up the manuscript.

Walking through the chaos, he went to the cramped office separated from the lab by a big window and a door covered with copies of the art used to illustrate Raymond Chandler stories from the thirties and forties. Big-boobed women with Veronica Lake hair looking in trouble or just being trouble. He rapped his knuckles against the door.

Sam glanced up from where he was sitting at the u-shaped desk. It was covered with as many papers as the tables in the lab except for the area around his computer. Somehow, and Mike had no idea how, Sam always kept that space free of clutter. He wasn’t smiling when he motioned for Mike to come in.

As Mike opened the door, he heard Sam say, “This shouldn’t take more than a few minutes. Why don’t you look at the graph I emailed you along with the report? I’m sure you’ll have some questions on that. Thanks.” He pushed a button on the phone and set the receiver in place. A light blinked monotonously on the base as he swiveled in his chair to face Mike.

“You look like you could use a break,” Mike said.

“It’s been a long day.” He pointed to a chair stacked with papers and said, “If you clean that off, you can sit down.”

“What’s wrong, Sam? You really look upset.” He glanced at the phone. “Home office giving you a hassle?”

“Nothing I can’t handle.”

“Same for me. Why is it that they are nowhere to be found when we have a disaster and always show up when things are fixed?”

“Hard to say.” He gestured again toward the chair. “Why don’t you sit down?”

“What’s wrong? I thought the computer systems were working.”

“They are.” He cleared his throat, then repeated, “Sit down.”

Mike did, after removing the papers and books. He was worried that if his friend’s face got any grayer, he’d topple over.

“I finished the tests on the samples you brought in,” Sam said, punching a few keys on the computer.

Oh-oh, Mike thought. He was going to have to come up with some sort of story that sounded reasonable to explain why Gabby’s DNA didn’t match Ceebee’s. He should have had it ready, but he’d been too caught up in other things.

“I wanted to make sure,” Sam went on, his voice still taut, “I had an answer for you that you could take to the bank.” He gulped and looked away. “Back to that in a minute.”

“Back to what?”

Instead of answering him, Sam said, “These were the first tests of this type that I’ve done since the computers were back online and I had access to all our files. So I ran a global search on the DNA samples, just to make sure the system bounced back negatives as it should. It did, except for two positives. Gabby D’Angelo... and you.”

“What? That’s impossible!” He gripped the front of the desk. “Completely impossible.”

“If you thought your birth control was safe, but—”

“I’ve never slept with her.”

“Are you sure?”

Mike pushed himself to his feet. “Don’t you think I’d known if I’d slept with her? Not that I haven’t thought about it, but I hadn’t even kissed her until very recently.”

“There’s another possible explanation.” He lowered his eyes before adding, “I mentioned taking it to the bank a moment ago. A lot of us helped pay for medical school by donating.”

“To a sperm bank?” He shook his head as he paced in the small open space of the office. “I considered doing that, but didn’t. I never seemed to find the time. If I had a spare moment during med school and our internship, I slept.”

Sam tapped some more keys on the computer. He twisted the monitor around and tapped the screen. “Okay, if you didn’t do any donating for dollars, you explain it to me. You didn’t sleep with her, and she didn’t do daddy by donation.” He touched a series of lines. “So how come your DNA matches the baby’s?”

“The computer has got to be wrong.”

“This report says Gabby’s the biological mother and you’re the biological father.”

“Run it again.” He paused and leaned his hands on the papers piled on the desk. “There has to be a problem in the system.”

“I ran it three times already. Exactly the same results each time.”

“There’s something wrong.”

“Mike, I ran some tests on some samples that I already had results on, and they came back exactly the same as before. The results are correct.”

“How can they be? I know the facts of life, and I know you can’t change them.”

“Agreed. So tell me,” Sam said, slanting back in his chair. “What in hell is going on? Time to come clean, Mike.”

“I told you. I don’t know.”

Sam’s forehead furrowed as he stared across the desk. “You really don’t know, do you?”

“No.”

“So you’re not trying to avoid—”

“Sam, how could you ask that?” He banged his fist on the desk, and papers flew up around them. He ignored them, as did Sam. “We’ve been friends... how long? Ten years?”

“Closer to fifteen now.”

“Okay, so you’ve known me long enough to know that I wouldn’t skip out on my responsibilities when it came to something like this.”

Sam cursed vividly under his breath, then tapped more keys. The screen flickered, but the data didn’t change. “I don’t know what else to say. I’ve confirmed the results with every test we have, and it always comes back the same. The baby is yours and Gabby’s. I’m sorry to drop this bombshell on you on your birthday.”

“I don’t think there’s any good day to hear something like this.”

He cleared his throat before asking, “What are you going to tell Gabby?”

Gabby! What was he going to tell her? If he told her the truth, would she accuse him of lying to her? No, she had believed all of the weird stuff that had been happening. He was the one who hadn’t been able to believe it. He couldn’t believe it now. If he told her, she would assume that he believed the results were accurate. He needed further proof before he said anything. No matter what Sam said, there had to be a mistake with the results. The computers still weren’t functioning correctly. That had to be it. He’d arrange for another test, and only after he had those results would he share them with Gabby. Yet not telling her ate at him like a parasite, making him feel like a louse. Not just a louse. A guilty louse. How could he face her and not tell her the truth? How could he face her and tell her?

“Mike, what are you going to do?” Sam asked.

Mike slowly sat and stared at the computer screen with its blinking data. “I’ve got no idea.”