Sara Reinke - Backwoods

On his first day at the compound, Suzette had told him she worked with Moore’s daughter.

She never mentioned anything about helping with his research, though, he thought, startled.

“Martha and I made that for him,” she said, nodding at the book.

“Martha?”

Alice nodded. “She used to be my nurse. Before Suzette.”

Her previous caregiver died trying to get out, Suzette had told him, and he realized. “I heard about what happened to your house,” he said, treading carefully, trying to be tactful. “I’m really sorry.”

Alice shrugged, her expression as smooth as plaster.

“What about your mother?” he asked. “Was she home at the time, too?”

Alice shook her head. “She was on a cruise in Limassol. It’s an island in the Mediterranean. She goes every year with her husband. She and Daddy got a divorce.”

“I’m sorry.”

She shrugged. “It was a long time ago.”

In between the press clippings were different photographs of Moore and Alice. In some, she was only a chubby cheeked baby in ruffled dresses and crisp bonnets cradled in his arms while he beamed at the camera, the quintessential proud papa—and so far removed from the red-faced, nearly crazed man who’d brandished a gun against Andrew, it seemed impossible that the two were one and the same. Although Alice responded in the earlier photos, as the chronology progressed, so, too, did her notice of the camera’s attention fade. In the last dozen or so shots, she would look past the lens in distracted, haunted fashion, her expression lax, impassive, unreadable.

“My parents are divorced, too,” Andrew said and she glanced at him.

“When?”

“Seven years ago. Shortly after my sister died.”

Alice turned her attention to him in full. “How did she die?”

“She was very sick. A disease called lupus. She was diagnosed when she was really young and it went into remission for a long time. When it came back, it was worse than ever and she couldn’t fight it off.”

“What was her name?” Alice asked.

He smiled. “Beth.”

“Was she younger than you?” she asked.

“No. She was five years older.”

Alice looked down at the book again. “You must miss her a lot.”

“I do, yeah.” Andrew smiled somewhat sadly, thinking of Beth’s grin, her voice, her laughter. Hey, Germ. What’s up?

“Where’s your mom now?”

“She’s back home in Alaska. That’s where I grew up.”

Without looking up, she said, “You don’t look like an Eskimo.”

He laughed. “More than just Eskimos live in Alaska.”

“Do you miss your mom?”

“All the time.”

“How about your dad? Do you miss him?”

That soft smile faded as the words from his father’s letter came to mind.

I’ve found someone else, someone I want to spend the rest of my life with.

“Sometimes,” he said.

It’s not what you think, Eric had told him seven years earlier, the last time Andrew had seen him. Lila and I ran into each other right after Beth died at our lawyer’s office.

Ironically, as Alice’s emotions seemed to fade in each progressive frame, so, too, did her father’s, until at last, neither one of them smiled, even when photographed together. One in particular caught Andrew’s attention. In it, Moore stood in a long, dark winter coat, holding his daughter in his arms. Alice wore a beret tipped at a jaunty angle, with a matching coat, stockings and glossy black Mary Jane shoes. They stood outside of a building crafted in the gothic architectural style, with a small suitcase, child-sized, on the sidewalk beside them.

“That was when Daddy brought me home from Gallatin,” Alice said, noticing his attention.

“Gallatin?”

She nodded. “It’s a special hospital in Massachusetts.”

“What do you mean, special?” he asked.

“Daddy says it’s a place for crazy people,” Alice said and Andrew blinked in surprise. “He says I didn’t belong there. My mother put me in it. He had to go to court to get me out. It took a long time because she had a court order that said I had to stay.”

“How long?”

Alice shrugged. “Three years.”

What the hell kind of person sticks their kid in a mental institution for three years?

“I’m not mad at her for it,” she continued. “Daddy is, but I’m not. He was gone a lot back then with his work. He didn’t always see how things were, how I was.”

It’s my understanding she’s better now than she used to be. Suzette had told Andrew this.

“What do you mean?” he asked quietly.

Without looking at him, she said, “I used to hit her. Kick her, too. I would bite her sometimes and once I pulled out a whole handful of her hair.”

He tried unsuccessfully to picture this small, slight, stoic child doing anything so violent. “Why?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know.” A quick glance at him. “But I’m better now.”

When the fluorescents in the hallway abruptly came on, the stark glow cut a thin, bright line beneath the office door. Alice gasped, sharp and alarmed. “It’s Daddy!”

“Shit.” Andrew slapped the scrapbook closed.

“Here.” Alice caught him by the sleeve, tugged at him even as he heard the faint beep-beep-beep as Moore punched in his access code at the key pad. “This way.”

Stumbling in tow, he hurried with her to a small coat closet in the far corner. They ducked together inside, closing the door just as Moore opened the one to his office and walked inside. The closet door was vented with horizontal wooden slats directly in front of Andrew’s face and when Moore snapped on the lights, yellow glow spilled through the narrow seams.

“…repeated karyotypic abnormalities that may be related to chromosomal instability, though I’ve yet to identify the specific causal mechanism,” Moore was saying. “The mitotic-spindle checkpoints that ordinarily preserve chromosomal integrity during cell divisions isn’t initiating proper apoptosis.”

Andrew shied back, keeping his hand against Alice’s shoulder. She’d gone rigid beside him, stiff as a board, tucked to his hip. Neither of them breathed as they strained to listen while Moore rustled papers, opened and shut file cabinet drawers and tooled momentarily around in his office. “It makes no sense,” he said. “Benign neoplasm development continues at an accelerated rate even after the recombinant polypeptide is discontinued.”

His voice faded into silence, trailing off in mid-thought. Through the slats in the closet door, Andrew could see him. Moore had come to a stop by his desk, looking down at it with a puzzled expression on his face.

Shit, Andrew thought. We left the scrapbook out,

“In English, please, Dr. Moore,” another man said in a dry tone, heavy footsteps marking a loud cadence on the floor as he entered the office.

That’s Major Prendick. Andrew recognized the voice right away. “Shit,” he groaned aloud, the Major’s words resounding in his mind: Failure to comply with these instructions will result in your being arrested and charged with felony trespass on government property.

Moore turned away from the scrapbook and his desk. “This new formulation isn’t any more stable than the last one. The cells still aren’t self-regulating. I can trigger the cycle of mitosis but I still can’t shut it off.”

“I thought you said you’d identified the necessary proteins,” Prendick said.

“No, I said blocking certain D-type cyclins from the biosynthetic hormones might lower the risk neoplastic cell growth,” Moore shot back. “D cyclins are proteins that turn mitosis—cell division—on and off. But there are other avenues we can still try. D cyclins work in cooperation with two specific protein kinases to activate tissue growth. Maybe if we knock out the kinases currently involved and—”