Kevin Guilfoile - Cast Of Shadows

“What happened to Eric was a horrible thing,” Mrs. Lundquist said. “But it was an accident. Eric was a fantastic skier. Fantastic.”

“What did Eric do?”

“What did he do? When he died, he was still a student. A senior at Cornell. He was interested in social service. He was always trying to save people, involved in those campus protests, peaceful ones. He thought about the Peace Corps, or teaching in the inner city. Don and I thought he’d end up a guidance counselor. He was a very good listener. So smart.”

“Do you have any pictures of Eric?” Barwick asked. “Any of your kids, I mean. Just to put names to faces.”

Mrs. Lundquist’s face glowed like filament. “Of course.”

The Finns hadn’t asked for pictures. In fact, they’d specifically told Big Rob they didn’t want to see any photos of Eric Lundquist, and that was passed on when the assignment was handed off to Barwick. They didn’t want to know what Justin would look like as a teen, or as an adult. But Barwick wanted to see. She had never met a clone before. She wanted the thrill of looking into a photograph and seeing the grown-up face of this baby boy, photos of whom she had in the glove compartment of her rental car out front.

Mrs. Lundquist, still spry, was up the stairs and down in less than a minute. On her return, she had three faux-leather-bound three-ring albums in her hands. Barwick moved to the couch and they propped the albums open across their laps. The Lundquist boys were all handsome – tall, blond, broad-shouldered, thin-waisted, with beautiful hands and sculpted legs. She particularly noticed Eric’s softball-sized calves. Even from photos, she could see that Eric was special. Barwick tried to recall her high school days (not so long ago, she told herself), and yeah, she’d have had a crush on Eric. Her friends and she would have made him the stuff of phone gossip. They would have memorized his class schedule. They would have secretly hated his girlfriend.

“Did Eric have a girlfriend?”

Mrs. Lundquist smiled. “He was shy, but very popular with girls. Did you know he was a lifeguard at Lynde Lake? I’m sorry. Of course you didn’t. In high school, he dated the student council president. She was a lovely girl, Glynnis. I still have lunch with her mother once a week. Do you know that Glynnis is a broker on Wall Street now?”

“That’s unusual,” Barwick said.

“For a girl? It sure is. Eric saw one or two girls in college. No one serious enough to bring home. Don and I met a gal down in Ithaca once, when we picked him up. She was Indian – you know, from Asia. I can’t remember her name. It was hard to pronounce.”

“That’s okay.”

The photos preserved the boys’ lives in more or less equal amounts. For the older ones, however, there were recent pics with their current families, posed shots with the wife and kids in their living rooms and nearby parks. Eric’s gallery ended the summer before his senior year, when he was about twenty.

One of the pictures showed Eric sitting high in his white painted chair at Lynde Lake. His head was turned over his right shoulder, toward the camera, and he was making a saluting gesture with his hand. Barwick guessed he was about eighteen here. Happy. Invincible.

“Hunh,” Barwick said, accidentally out loud.

“What’s that?” Mrs. Lundquist asked.

“Oh. Well. Hmm. Did Eric ever have any surgery?”

“You mean was he hurt? No. Never before his accident. Not a day in the hospital.”

“Not even elective work?”

“You mean plastic surgery?” Mrs. Lundquist looked amused. “Gosh, no.”

“Hunh,” Barwick said again.

“Why do you ask?”

“No reason,” she said. “He was a beautiful son.”

“You’re a dear,” Mrs. Lundquist said, and after eating a single M amp;M, she started to tell Barwick about the time in sixth grade when Eric slept all night in a closet to hide from 7 a.m. clarinet lessons.

Years ago, Davis had tried to get Jackie interested in her own family history, but even talking about it bored her. “I’m much more interested in my family present, ” she said, one of thousands of unsubtle jabs she had leveled over the years at his eighty-hour office schedule.

Working from some old photographs and letters Jackie inherited from her mother, Davis constructed an incomplete chart of her clan going back five generations, and presented it to her in a frame one Mother’s Day. Jackie said she liked it and hung it in a spare bedroom where she kept her treadmill and her sewing and craft supplies. When Anna Kat assembled a seventh-grade project on her ancestors (basically cribbing years of her father’s work inside a slim decorative binder), she used her mother’s chart as a demonstration piece to explain the terms and techniques of genealogy and received an A from her teacher. Shortly after AK died, perhaps as soon as the day after, Jackie took the chart down and Davis hadn’t seen or asked about it since. He understood why looking at it was so difficult; he felt pain as well as pleasure these days when he sorted through his own family files. Those manila folders and index cards represented real lives to him, just as the files in his office, with the names of cloned boys and girls, represented children who were now loving and being loved. The difference with the files at home was that many of his relatives no longer existed outside of his little blue room. When he pulled a card on his great-great-uncle Vic and updated his date of birth or his social security number, he was certain to be the only living person who thought about long-dead Vic that day. There was sadness to that – bitter-sweetness – but such simple and melancholy tributes to the dead were also satisfying. He didn’t look forward to the day when he could think about Anna Kat and not be hurt by her memory.

“Did you ever consider it?” she asked him. It was late and they had been drinking wine and reading to themselves. Jackie had started a conversation and Davis had faked his way through it but now realized he didn’t know what they were talking about.

“Consider what?”

“Cloning her.”

“AK?”

“Of course, AK.”

Davis gave her a crazed look. “No. Absolutely not. It’s illegal, for one thing.” That was an absurd comment, a cruel thing to say, given the secret he kept from her, and he knew that, now that he had made such an excuse, she would never forgive him if she discovered the truth.

“Not seriously, I guess,” Jackie said. “It’s just, I wonder what it would be like to have her back. Even as a baby. To give her another shot at life. To give us another shot at keeping her safe.”

“It wouldn’t be her,” Davis said.

“Would that matter?”

“Yes,” Davis said.

Jackie closed her book, and her voice became softer, which it did when she was angry or sad or nervous. “You act like a cloned child isn’t real. That would surprise a lot of people if they heard you say it.”

“She’s real to the new family. To people who knew the original, she wouldn’t be real at all. To them, she’s a doppelganger. A smudged copy. A ghost with no memory. Would AK be AK without that scar across her knuckles? The one she got learning to ride a bike? If she had fillings in different teeth? If she were a swimmer instead of a setter? Afraid of heights instead of spiders? If she liked English better than math?” Jackie turned flush and Davis held out his arm, but he couldn’t reach her chair and so he suspended his hand, palm up, in the air between them. “I know what you’re thinking. That all these years later there’s still this… this absence, and the desire to fill it with something can be overwhelming. But to certain people clones can be like projections of the originals – abstract figures, actors on film, a cast of shadows. If we had another little girl walking around this house inside a shell that looked like AK, wouldn’t that only make the void blacker?”