The next day Kate went back to work. It had been almost a month. With both her and Tina out of the lab, a lot of things had been put on hold. Kate deflected the inevitable questions as best she could. She said her mother had been sick. She’d dislocated her shoulder in a fall. But it was good to be back. It just felt a little strange.
Without Tina.
Packer had brought in a new researcher to fill Tina’s place. He was an Indian Ph.D. candidate named Sunil, who had studied cellular physics at Cambridge.
He seemed nice enough, though at first Kate knew she was probably a little cool to him. It was like saying that Tina was never coming back, and Kate didn’t want to feel that way. Packer put him on the project Tina had been working on. He wasn’t yet up to speed.
It was just a little weird, not having her around. Work had to go on, though.
Kate came back to a mountain of things to catch up on. There was tons of data to archive, an updated project-status report to complete, lots of government forms to fill out. Packer was applying to the National Science Foundation for a new grant.
Her shoulder was still too stiff to handle some of her old assignments. Kate could only imagine dropping a petri dish and sending a valuable systemic stem-cell line crashing onto the floor in a mess.
But at some point she couldn’t hold back. She put the paperwork aside.
She went into the lab and took out two dishes filled with covered slides from the specimen fridge.
Leukemic Cytoplasmic Prototype #3. Nucleic Stem-Cell Model 472B.
Tristan and Isolde.
Kate took them over to the Siemens. She placed the leukocytic cell in the viewing tray and flicked the powerful scope on. The squiggle-shaped cell with the familiar dot in the center shone brilliantly into view. Kate smiled. Hey, girl …
It was like saying hello to an old friend.
“Haven’t seen you in a while,” Kate said, adjusting the settings on the lens. Then she wrapped her magnification goggles around her head and placed the tiny catheter over the stem dish, and with the steady touch of someone who had mastered those little ball games that always came in Cracker Jack boxes, she isolated the cell into the tiny glass tube and jiggled it onto the leukocytic slide.
Kate narrowed the magnification of the Siemens. Both cells appeared.
“I see a guilty look in there,” Kate said, grinning. “You dudes haven’t been stepping out on me with anyone else while I’ve been gone, have you?”
It felt familiar and exciting to see them again. Kate perceived a minute reproduction of the whole world contained in their tiny clusters. A world of clarity and order. One thing she could always trust: the perfect symmetry of truth in a single cell.
She probed the stem. It was as if the clock had suddenly turned back and everything was just as she’d left it. Tina could be about to stick her head in to declare a Caffeine Emergency. Sharon was alive. Kate’s cell phone had never buzzed to say that her father had been arrested. It was nice to hide out here for a moment, even though she knew it was a fantasy.
Kate lifted her head. It was Sunil.
“Sorry. I was told you could show me how to download data imaging onto the digital machine?”
“Sure.” Kate smiled. He wasn’t so bad. “I was just saying hi to some old friends. I’ll meet you in the library in a second, okay.”
Sunil smiled back. “Thanks.”
As he left, Kate let her forehead rest on the bridge of the scope. Truth was, she had no idea if Tina would ever come back. If she would ever be the same. It was foolish to cling to that hope. The work just couldn’t stop.
Carefully, she transferred the cells back to their sterile dishes. She went to place them back in their home, inside the fridge.
Her cell phone vibrated. Greg, she figured, congratulating her on her first day back. Kate flicked it open, kneeling down to a lower shelf of the fridge. She crooked the phone to her ear. “Hey!”
The voice on the other end was one she hadn’t heard in months. It used to be a friendly one. Now it chilled her. The petri dish slipped out of her hand, crashing to the floor.
“Hello, pumpkin.”