Kevin Guilfoile - Cast Of Shadows

“Stop.” She laughed.

“There’s gotta be a paper trail somewhere. Once he grows up, hell, you could throw his picture out there and somebody might recognize him. The donor was alive after cloning became legal, so he could only be dead a couple years.”

“Right.”

“There’s this, too.” Terry lifted the back of Justin’s T-shirt, exposing a birthmark near his left hip that looked a little like West Virginia, or a long-spouted teapot. Without looking, Justin absently swatted at his father’s hand and Terry let go.

Martha smiled and, tired of squinting at the sun reflecting off the lake, closed her eyes.

“He swears a lot.”

“Who?”

“Justin.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“He does. Don’t you think? For a three-year-old.”

“Well, stop swearing around him,” Martha said.

“I don’t.”

“You just did.”

“When?”

“Ten seconds ago. You said h-e-l-l.”

“That’s not swearing. I’m talking about a real potty mouth.”

“They’re just words to him. Funny sounds.”

Terry watched his son dig trenches in the sand with the tail of a tyrannosaur. “Do you ever wonder if some of the guy’s memories – the donor I’m talking about now – if some of his memories might be in Justin’s genes?”

“What? Like Jung?”

“Who’s that?”

“Carl Jung. The collective unconscious.”

Terry molded his face into a half-serious sneer, the way he often did when Martha’s total recall of her college notebooks threatened him with a tangent. “This morning, Justin got hold of this knife-”

“A knife?”

“A plastic one. It was in the bag with the bagels.”

“Oh.”

“Anyway, he was pretending to cut with it, against the tablecloth, and he looked sort of like he knew what he was doing.”

“From watching you cut the bagels, probably.”

“No, he was holding it like a scalpel. Long, smooth incisions. Like a surgeon.”

“Give me a break.”

“I know. It’s silly. I’m just saying. Suppose we found out he had been a doctor. That would be a kick, wouldn’t it?”

“I suppose he learned to swear on the golf course, then.” Martha grinned.

The joke was funny, but Terry didn’t laugh. Martha was always dismissing him, tossing aside every decent idea he proposed. He had once admired her because she was smart, but he didn’t realize that with intelligence would come condescension. He was the one who worked, the one who paid for the two homes and the two cars and the expensive vacations with his fat commissions as a futures trader, but he hadn’t been a great student, and Martha, who thought smarts were an end in themselves, never offered him the respect he deserved. Now they had a child together and the child was obviously bright and she acted like Justin got that from her side, even though she hadn’t passed a single one of her supersmart genes to him. If for no other reason, he wanted to find out where the boy came from to remind her that Justin’s brains didn’t come from her.

“So what do you think?”

“About what?”

“About having a guy check into Justin’s past.”

“He’s three, Terry. He doesn’t have a past.”

“Okay. The other guy. The other him.”

“They’re completely different people. He’ll get more of his personality from us than he will from some mystery man.”

“Dr. Moore said they were like twins, didn’t he?”

“Yeah. So?”

“You know how twins sometimes have, like, ESP? What if Justin’s still got some memory of his twin? Through ESP.”

“You got all of this because Justin said the S -word last night?”

“Not just that.”

She tossed her strawberry highlights away from her mouth and grinned at him. Her skin glistened and her teeth shined. She looked out-of-the-package new. “Go ahead. I don’t care. You’ve still got your own credit card. I’d rather have you spend it on this than a girlfriend or something.”

“Cheat on you? Never.”

With Justin between them, they shared a sandy kiss.

“Ass-word! Ass-word! Ass-word!” Justin chanted.

Their faces stretched into grins and, lips never parting, they started the kiss again from the beginning.

There were piles of M amp;M’s in little dishes, and lace patterns pressed for display under the glass coffee tabletop. There were yards and yards of bookshelves along the walls, but on them no books. The room was surrounded instead by ceramic animals, porcelain figures, wood frames, acrylic doodads, glass vases, scented candles, and assorted whatnots. Facing east, the room was bright, and Barwick had chosen a chair – a green one with high arms and a buttoned back, upholstered in unidentifiable fabric – that pointed her away from the window. Mrs. Lundquist sat directly in the sun’s light, causing Barwick to be curious about the older woman’s fair, preserved skin, which contrasted so drastically with her own mocha complexion.

“You were telling me about this oral history you were doing,” she said.

“Right, right,” Barwick said. “For the university.”

“Syracuse?” she asked. “SU?”

“No,” Barwick said. “University of” – she thought she might be giving something away, but then decided what the hell – “Chicago.”

“Hmmm,” she said. “I see.”

“We’re going around the country, selecting people at random, and getting them to tell us their stories. These tapes will be transcribed and filed for the benefit of – you know – future generations.”

“Sounds like interesting work.”

“Oh, it is. It is. I get to meet a lot of nice people. Like you.” She smiled abruptly, charmingly. “You see, history has always been told through the lives of extraordinary people. Presidents and world leaders, generals, what have you. But the really good stuff, the genuine article, is in the everyday. Did you know that we don’t have a good first-person account of what it was like for an average person who lived in ancient Rome?”

“No, I certainly didn’t,” she said.

Neither did Barwick. She was making it up. “Oh, we know what the battles were like, and what went on in the Senate. And we have their myths. And plays.” Were there Roman playwrights? There were Greek ones, for sure. She should have used the Greeks as an example. “But we don’t have the everyday stuff.”

“Well, what can I do for you?”

“If it’s not too big an imposition, I’d just like to have a chat. Ask a few questions. Have a conversation. Then I’ll go, and you’ll never see me again. Although you will get a fifty-dollar check from the university.” She wondered how she would get a University of Chicago check. “Or from our grant office, anyway.” That sounded easier to fake.

“Sounds lovely,” Mrs. Lundquist said, and it occurred to Barwick that this could be a case study of why old people made such easy marks for scam artists and grifters. She wasn’t here to con the lady, though. Not really. This was legitimate business.

Barwick burned the first disc discussing life in Watertown, New York. Mrs. Lundquist liked to walk when the weather was fair, so every evening she wrote a letter to a friend or a relative and the next morning she walked it to the post office. She’d sometimes stop by Great American and pick up groceries, just a bagful, but in six days or so, she’d accumulate two weeks’ worth. On Wednesdays, a man from the store named Harvey delivered bags too heavy for her to carry.

By disc two, they were on to family.

Her husband died last year of heart disease. She had three sons, one who had moved west to Buffalo, another who’d settled south in Atlanta, and the youngest was killed in a skiing accident about nine years ago. That was the one Barwick had come to hear about. But she was patient. There wasn’t any reason to rush her.