Backwoods (10 page)

“What the hell does your dad do here?” he
whispered. It was a good thing he hadn’t really expected an answer
from Alice, because she didn’t offer one.

She paused outside a pair of automatic doors,
and punched in a pass code. The doors obligingly swung inward, and
Andrew followed her hesitantly across the threshold. Inside,
beneath that sterile, sanitary smell was the distinctive odor of
musk and ammonia he associated with a zoo. One side of the room
contained with animal cages, like oversized dog carriers, white
plastic with chrome gates, stacked in neat columns and lined up in
tidy rows. On the other side stood a peculiar phalanx of tall red
chemical tanks connected to a network of pipes that branched up to
the ceiling.
CARBON DIOXIDE,
the black-on-gold labels read
on each.

“For in case there’s a fire,” Alice
explained, noticing his attention. He glanced at her, curious, and
she said, “It’s so water from a sprinkler system won’t mess up
Daddy’s equipment. See?” She pointed behind him and mounted beside
the doorway, he saw a bright blue box. “There’s oxygen, too. Little
portable tanks, a mask. They’re in all the rooms. Daddy said it’s
an ocean standard.”

It took him a minute to decipher and he
laughed. “Not
ocean.
OSHA. It stands for
Occupational
Safety and Health Administration.”

Alice studied him for a moment, then walked
away. “Daddy says it’s just another bunch of bureaucratic
bullshit.”

“He’s probably right on that one,” Andrew
murmured. As he followed Alice across the room, the animals inside
the cages began to stir, a sudden din of scrabbling feet and
curious chirrups.

Monkeys,
he realized as several of
them suddenly pressed their faces against the gates, clutching at
the cage bars with tiny, human-like hands.

Suzette had told him that Dr. Moore’s house
in Massachusetts had been firebombed.
They think it might have
been a group of animal rights zealots,
she’d said.
PACA, I
think they’re called. People Against Cruelty to Animals.

Is this why?
he wondered.
Whatever
Moore’s working on, he’s been experimenting on animals?

The chattering from the monkeys grew louder
and more insistent as Alice walked across the room and approached
one of the larger crates. Before he could fully grasp what she was
doing, never mind stop her, she’d reached for a key pad near the
cage’s gate.

“Wait, don’t,” he said, but it was too late.
She’d already tapped in the pass code to unlock it and pulled open
the gate. “Alice, stop. What are you doing?”

He drew back as a chimp emerged from the
cage. It was nearly as tall as Alice herself, with preternaturally
long arms and a dense, silky coat of shiny black fur. Hesitating at
the threshold of its crate, it studied Andrew for a moment, then
allowed Alice to take it by the hand, drawing it out fully. Even
though the chimpanzee seemed curious and cautious of his presence,
awarding him glances now and then, Alice ignored Andrew as she led
the ape toward the back of the room. Here, she punched the access
code into another key pad and disappeared into what he first
mistook for a closet.

“Alice, we have to go now,” he said, and
because the other monkeys continued to grow more and more agitated,
their voices louder and louder, he hurried after her. “We have to
go now. What if your father finds out we’re here?”

“He won’t,” Alice replied. The room wasn’t a
closet at all, but instead, some sort of playroom, where board
games had been stacked on small shelving units alongside picture
books, puzzles, assorted toys and stuffed animals. She had
delivered the chimp to a small table in the center of the room then
walked over to a nearby bookshelf.

The chimp shot a wary glance at Andrew as he
loitered in the doorway, then began to bounce on its shorter,
stouter hind legs, uttering sharp little enthusiastic barks when
Alice selected Candyland from among the neatly arranged games and
boxes.

“What are you doing?” Andrew asked. “Put that
away, then put the chimp back. I’ll take you back to the apartment,
to your room.”

“She’s not a chimp,” Alice said mildly,
sitting across from the ape at the table. “She’s a Siamang, the
largest variety of lesser ape species called
gibbons.
Her
name is Lucy.” As she opened the box and began to set up the
playing board, she glanced at him. “Do you want to play?”

“I want to go back to the barracks.”

She shrugged. “So go.”

Andrew watched as the game began. Not only
could Lucy match the colors and numbers of required spaces for each
of her plays, but she could identify, find, then move her
gingerbread man to the correct character spaces—ice cream cone,
candy cane, gumdrop—whenever she’d draw them. She understood what
the squares designated with licorice sticks meant—losing a turn—and
would slap the table and hoot, her mouth open in an elongated
O
of bad sportsmanship.

“She can play Chutes and Ladders, too,” Alice
supplied. “And Memory. But this one’s her favorite.”

“Did you teach her?”

She shook her head. “Daddy did. It’s part of
his experiment.”

Andrew tried to picture Dr. Moore doing
something as light-hearted as playing a preschooler’s board game,
but couldn’t. “What experiment?”

“To see how smart she is.”

Smart though she may have been, Lucy the
Siamang also appeared to be blind in one eye. The lens on her left
side was milky and clouded. That side of her face seemed palsied
somehow, too, the corner of her mouth hanging lankly, her eyelid
drooping. Spongy growths of flesh had developed in places as well,
disfiguring tumors that left her head misshapen, like half-kneaded
clay.

“Her brain grew too big,” Alice said, taking
note of his attention. “That’s what happened to her face. Then
Daddy had to cut out a piece of her skull so her brain would have
enough room. You can feel the soft spot where he did it, on the
back of her head, near the top.”

Curious, Andrew leaned forward, but when he
reached out to touch Lucy’s head, the Siamang drew back, baring her
teeth and chattering at him angrily. Remembering how he’d seen
stories of chimpanzee attacks on TV, where supposedly tame animals
had gnawed off the fingers or faces of their owners, Andrew shrank
back in alarm.

“She doesn’t like that,” Alice said.

“You said it was okay.”

“No. I said you can feel it. I meant a
physical capability, not that you should try. You’re doing that
hearing-not-listening thing again.”

He scowled at her but she didn’t look up from
the game board. For her part, Lucy relaxed, her lips covering her
teeth again as she resumed the game. After a moment, during which
the ape moved her piece one orange square, Alice said, “Suzette
told me you like to count trees.”

He pondered this for a moment, then laughed.
“I don’t know that I like it, but I do it, yeah. It’s part of my
job. The company I work for, we get hired to count trees, catalog
different species by acreage. That way, the people who own the land
the trees are on can decide which ones, if any, they want to have
cut down.”

“What’s it called?” she asked.

“My job? I’m a forestry consultant.”

Her attention returned to the game. “Maybe I
can be one some day.”

Willing to bet this wasn’t an aspiration many
kids shared, Andrew smiled. “Maybe.”

****

When they had finished several games of
Candyland, Alice led Lucy by the hand back to her cage. Andrew
walked slowly down the row of crates while the monkeys inside
chattered and reached for him, anxious and eager. “What does your
dad do with all of them?” he asked Alice, again thinking of PACA,
the animal activists who had targeted Moore’s New England home.

“He uses them to test different kinds of
medicines,” she replied, closing the gate once Lucy had clambered
inside her crate. Punching the key pad, she locked it once more.
“Things to make their brains grow.”

She’d mentioned this before, that this was
what had happened to Lucy’s face, why she had the disfiguring
growths and the cross-section of her skull had been remained.
Her brain grew too big for her head.

“Why?” he asked, bewildered and somewhat
disturbed.

Alice walked past him, heading for the door.
Catching him by the hand, she gave him a tug not in the direction
of the entrance, from which they’d originally come, but the
opposite way, deeper into the lab. “Come on. I’ll show you.”

****

American Geneticist Wins Nobel Prize in
Medicine.

Andrew studied this headline for a long,
surprised moment, then the grainy black-and-white headshot of Dr.
Moore that ran beneath it. The dateline for the newspaper article,
which had been laminated before its inclusion in a large scrapbook
of similar clippings, was three years ago.

Beneath the photo, the cutline read:
American physician and geneticist Edward Moore, M.D., Ph. D.,
has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for the development of
biosynthetic recombinant proteins that accelerates the natural
physiological healing process, reducing incidences of chronic,
non-healing wound development.

“Your dad won the Nobel Prize?” Andrew asked
Alice, wide-eyed, and she nodded.

She had brought him to a small and sparsely
furnished office she said belonged to her father. Inside, a
cluttered desk and wing-backed leather chair were framed by filing
cabinets and laden bookshelves. From one of these, Alice had
produced the thick, heavily bound scrapbook.

He’d flipped through it, curious at first,
then with an undisguised fascination.
Nobel Laureate Dr. Edward
Moore will speak at the spring commencement services for his alma
mater, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
read one of
the first articles he’d spied, dated almost twelve years
earlier.

To his surprise, the commencement speaker
announcement was accompanied by a small photo of Moore in a
laboratory setting. To his left in the photograph stood another
doctor, a blonde woman in a lab coat with a full, familiar mouth
Andrew recognized right away.

Edward Moore, M.D., Ph.D., and research
associate Suzette Montgomery, M.D., at work at the Genomics and
Bioinformatics Division at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New
York.

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.