The 100 Year Miracle Read online

  And then Harry had killed her.

  It had been an accident, but it was still his fault. Not metaphorically. Not in some larger, grander sense. He had done it. They had been driving to the pharmacy. Becca had asked to come with him, and he had let her. There had been mail to go out, bills. Harry had placed them on the dashboard, and they had slid off onto the floor during a turn. There was no reason they couldn’t stay there, but he had decided to reach down under his seat and pick them up. He had left one hand on the steering wheel, taken his eyes off the road. It was so banal, so ordinary, a thing he could have done a million times without consequence. But this one precise, particular time, they crossed the center line. There was an oncoming car, a van. Harry had survived. The other driver had survived. But Harry had killed his only daughter. And for a moment that evening, when he’d sat at the restaurant table and looked across the beach, it was as if he had her back, all grown up. And then she was gone, morphed back into the body of a woman he’d never seen before.

  Harry put his hand on the footed cane that sat in constant vigil now by his side and pushed up. It took some shuffling to make it to the other side of the room, which woke Shooby and brought him to his feet, ready to accompany Harry. He didn’t have far to go. The room’s only other major piece of furniture was a sofa. Across the cushions, he’d asked his housekeeper to tuck in a sheet and a quilt and bring down one of the goose feather pillows from his bed. He told her this was to save time, allow him to work through the night, nap, and be back up with a minimum of lost seconds in between. But the truth was that some days he was afraid to climb the stairs to his bed. Some days he was too weak, too off-balance, too scared to try for fear that he’d fall, and no one would find him. He would be crumpled on the floor in pain and with the crotch of his pants wet while he waited for someone to notice. It wasn’t every day that this seemed a possibility. But it was some days, and there was no way to know what day it would be.

  And it was painful. God, was it painful. Harry hurt most in the places he could control the least. At night, it felt like there was an electrical fire under his skin, and during the day, his limbs ached. It was like getting a bad shot when the needle doesn’t go in right, and the vaccine is thick and hot, and you can feel it in the muscle.

  Harry made it to the sofa, which was now his bed, and lowered himself down. Once he was settled and under the covers, Shooby lay down, too, head on paws and his eyes closed. Harry closed his eyes, too, but he wasn’t at all hopeful about it.

  * * *

  The warm water was all around her, pressing down, so that Tilda couldn’t hear anything else, couldn’t feel anything else.

  Stroke, stroke, breathe. Stroke, stroke, breathe.

  The pool was enclosed in glass. Glass walls. Glass ceiling. Outside was black. It was morning but too early for the sun, too early for anyone but Tilda and the Y lifeguard, a teenager, who sat in the chair with his eyes closed, trusting she, the only member in the pool at that hour, would take care of herself.

  Stroke, stroke, breathe.

  She liked how warm they kept the water. Eighty-four degrees that day according to the white board next to the locker room. Nearly body temperature. Like amniotic fluid. So like her own skin, she could feel no temperature at all. Not hot. Not cold. No thoughts or feelings at all. Just water.

  Stroke, stroke, breathe.

  6.

  “Rachel!”

  Hooper was on the other side of the restaurant’s parking lot waving to her. His hood was up against the early-morning drizzle, but John’s was not. The two of them were standing next to the team van. It seemed every time Rachel looked up the two of them had their heads together.

  She sighed and waited for a brown Cutlass to cross in front of her at a crawl as the old man behind the wheel inspected each empty space he passed. The wheels kicked up spray from one of the many potholes that had filled overnight, and Rachel jumped back to avoid it.

  The team—or rather the other members of the team who were not Rachel—had all voted to end their workday at a diner for breakfast. The others were sleep deprived but full of energy. The switch in their circadian rhythm was painful but not yet unbearable, and the once-in-a-lifetime-ness of the work was still seeping enough dopamine into their brains to make them excitable. They talked too fast, laughed too fast, got angry and frustrated too fast, and they were all cooped up together. It was exciting to everyone but Rachel. It made Rachel nervous.

  After the burns, her recovery, such as it was, had continued on and off for several critical years. Her schoolmates went on without her, their development bifurcating from hers at the age of six. It was not possible to return to the moment that they split—her from everyone else—and so she continued on her own path, evolving in isolation and adapting to her unique environment not unlike the platypus. A platypus that did not play well with others.

  So here she was, a fifteen-minute drive from the study site and a tantalizing five from her bed, overfull on the early bird special—two eggs, two sausages, and fried potatoes served over a plate-size pancake. She’d taken the last two white pills from her pocket stash two hours before, which was too long, and now Hooper wanted to talk to her.

  The Cutlass moved on, and Rachel crossed at a trot, anxious to get it over with.

  “Exciting, isn’t it?” Hooper said.

  “Highly altered levels of dopamine are associated with schizophrenia,” Rachel replied, shoving her hands in her pockets.

  “What?” John asked.

  “It’s pathological,” she said, even though she hadn’t been talking to him.

  John opened his mouth, but Hooper cut him off. “I think that’s Rachel’s way of telling us we’re a little amped,” he said, moving his body slightly, so he was between the two.

  Rachel was pretty sure that’s what she’d just said.

  “You wanted something?” she asked, looking at John out of the corner of her eye and tugging on the collar of her jacket to make sure it was covering the uppermost parts of her scar, something she did so frequently it was an unconscious tic.

  Ever since the ferry crossing, she’d seen John looking at her and not bothering to avert his eyes when she caught him. No one else seemed to notice this, which was unfair. Everyone noticed when she did something wrong.

  “I was just telling John that you’re one of the country’s leading experts on bioluminescence,” Hooper said.

  Two sentences in, and already Rachel’s palms itched.

  “I’ve been studying density-dependent bioluminescence in bacterial colonies,” she said, hoping it wouldn’t interest him.

  “It’s a big jump from bacteria to arthropods,” John said.

  He stood with his feet a little too far apart, Rachel noticed. Even with hands in his pockets, his elbows were wide. Everything about him took up as much space as possible, and he spoke as though he regularly deployed the Socratic method. She did not like him. Even if he were not here invading her work space, she did not think she would like him. He was generally unlikeable. Not like Hooper. More men should be like Hooper. Her feelings for him existed somewhere on the fuzzy and incommunicable border between great respect and platonic love.

  She took a small shuffle step closer to the professor and said, “No, the chemistry is the same. You’re an ecologist. That’s why it’s confusing to you.”

  Hooper jumped in. “John’s advisor at Michigan is an old mentor of mine. He told me John was making a big splash in their department and that his tribe is from this area originally.”

  Hooper looked to John for confirmation.

  “The Olloo’et people,” John answered. “They lived on this island until the 1920s when most of them were relocated. My parents still live in Tacoma.” He paused and then said, “You’re white. That’s why it’s confusing to you.”

  Rachel ignored this. She was studying his cheekbones. They were broad and flat in a way that might be mistaken for Asian along with a shorter-than-average nose that widened quite a lot at the nostrils
. Textbook Olloo’et.

  “I recognized the tattoo,” Rachel said. “Was it done in the traditional way?”

  John brought his fingers up to his jaw, and a flicker of something crossed his face. But it was too fast for Rachel to catch it.

  “Most people assume I got drunk and made a bad decision.”

  A shot of pain ran up Rachel’s back, and her hand, beyond her control, slipped into her pocket feeling for pills that weren’t there.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said, “it was done the traditional way.”

  The Olloo’et tattooed by hammering charcoal into the skin with a bone needle. The pain, it was said, was excruciating. Pain being of particular interest to her, she had several gruesome follow-up questions, but Hooper—perhaps suspecting where this was going—didn’t let her ask them.

  “When I heard he had cultural, as well as scientific, interests, how could I not bring him along?” Hooper sounded jovial, like inviting another scientist on a once-in-a-lifetime expedition was akin to pulling up an extra seat at Thanksgiving.

  “The more we can learn, the better we can protect the species,” John said.

  Rachel’s thoughts made a hard turn. “You think the Artemia lucis are threatened?”

  “I do.”

  “Do you have evidence of this?”

  “I think anything that breeds once a century has to be considered threatened. I’d like to see this whole area protected in some way. If we can gather enough evidence, maybe we can figure out how to best do that.”

  He was talking like the whole team was on his personal mission. Rachel didn’t like that. She found it was always best to assume that the only person who supported your findings was you. She looked to Hooper for backup.

  “Well,” he said instead. “I hope the two of you can get acquainted, share ideas.”

  Rachel thought this was overly hopeful, but it was Hooper, and so she nodded and turned back toward the truck, happy to dust off John’s words like dirt from her boots.

  7.

  It had been easy not to notice the hours pile up as they worked, gathering and measuring and plotting through the night. But as she drove the deserted two-lane road to the camp, Rachel’s eyelids began to develop a worrisome inclination to snap shut for longer than a blink and then reopen suddenly when her brain remembered that driving was something best done with the eyes open. When she pulled up in front of her cabin, the first thing she did, even before shutting the door of the borrowed pickup, was fifteen careful jumping jacks to keep the blood flowing.

  In the truck’s camper was a large red cooler marked “food.” On the way to the worksite it had contained the team’s allotment of sodas and deli sandwiches. For the trip back she’d stuffed it with pilfered containers full of her samples.

  Until that day, she had only seen poorly preserved specimens of the Artemia lucis in the dim university basement. They had been gathered and dumped into formaldehyde solution during the last breeding, back before there had been such a thing as a World War, before women could vote, before antibiotics and the Spanish Flu, before her great-grandparents had even been born. It was hard to believe that those very specimens, ancient and rotting, were the parents of the creatures she carried with her now. All that time and only one generation had passed. There really was no margin for error.

  Rachel lowered the tailgate and was reaching for the cooler when she heard the sound of running footsteps on oyster shell. She looked up and froze, as though hit with some sort of palsy. She didn’t want to look as though she’d been caught, but it wasn’t going well. She had read once about a bird called the Eurasian Roller that vomited a noxious, orange liquid all over itself to repel would-be predators. This did not seem, in the moment, altogether unreasonable.

  “I believe,” John said, not at all winded when he stopped less than three feet away from her, “that we got off on the wrong foot.”

  Rachel watched for signs of fatigue from the sprint but saw none, which made her uneasy. It meant that there was one more way in which they were mismatched, and she held the deficit.

  “It’s not important,” she said.

  Rachel hoped this would end the conversation. It did not.

  “I should’ve done a better job of explaining myself,” John said.

  Rachel watched him take a deep breath, holding it in his diaphragm as experienced lecturers sometimes did. She thought about closing the back of the truck and walking away, but leaving the samples alone with him was impossible. She was trapped, unable to leave until he left.

  “It would help you to know a little more about my people’s history and their relationship to the breeding.”

  “It wouldn’t,” she said, stopping him before he could begin the next in what was sure to be a long line of sentences.

  “It wouldn’t, what?”

  “It wouldn’t be helpful.”

  “How could it not be helpful?” he asked, his prepared speech derailed.

  “It’s irrelevant.” She tugged on the collar of her jacket.

  “I don’t understand,” he said.

  “When the arthropod’s primitive neural structure receives circadian inputs, oxygen combines with coelenterazine, a luciferin. Unlike other species, I believe the Artemia lucis synthesizes coelenterazine—”

  John cut her off. “What is your point?”

  “I’m explaining the mode of bioluminescence and why anthropology is irrelevant.”

  “I can provide context,” John said.

  Rachel ignored this. “You are free to study the Artemia lucis in whatever way you choose. Hooper has made that clear by bringing you on, but please do not interfere with my work.”

  The day was warming, but she tugged at her collar for the third time, pulling it up near her ears.

  John put his hands in his pockets. “You are a difficult woman to connect with, Dr. Bell.”

  Rachel knew this was probably true, but it was also true that she did not wish to connect with him. It didn’t seem he had taken this into account.

  “Is there anything else?” she asked.

  “I don’t suppose I can help you unload something.”

  “No, thank you.”

  “You’re going to leave that out here?” he asked, nodding at the cooler.

  “No, I just don’t need help,” she said.

  “Right. I remember. You’re the one who never needs help.” His tone was sharp, which was fine with Rachel if it meant things were coming to a close. “But the offering and receiving of assistance is the basis of modern society.”

  He caught her off guard.

  “It’s what normal people do.” He was still finishing the last sentence when he reached into the bed of the truck, grabbed the cooler’s handle, and gave a tug. It barely moved.

  Rachel seized his jacket and yanked his arm back. “Don’t touch that.”

  John looked at his arm and then at her. “What’s in there?”

  “Nothing. It’s empty.”

  “It feels like there’s a body in there.”

  “I said it’s empty.”

  “Do you expect me to believe that?”

  “I don’t expect anything from you at all,” she said.

  John took a step back. “Do you have some kind of disorder?”

  Rachel felt herself redden. She knew who she was and how she came off, but his words were intended to be hurtful, and they were. “No, I just don’t feel well.”

  “You should see a doctor,” John said before turning and walking away.

  * * *

  It was nine a.m. before Rachel, finally alone inside her cabin, could take a double dose of whites, emotionally relieved, as much as physically, to have them.

  She’d brought in the cooler, which took up much of whatever floor space had been left. The whole building was no more than twenty feet by thirty feet and consisted of one main room and a small bathroom, which hadn’t been updated since the 1950s and gave nothing but lukewarm
water. This hurt her more than the lack of sleep, and to add insult, the cabin’s heat barely functioned.

  Cold shower. Cold room. Few things made her scars hurt more than cold. She hoped she’d brought enough pills.

  The main room, which had floor-to-ceiling wood paneling and a linoleum floor, held two beds, but only one of them had sheets and blankets. The other mattress was bare and looked like something that might harbor lice. The windows had ill-fitting, pull-down shades, and at the end of the room were two collapsible tables. They were identical to the ones in the makeshift lab in the empty mess hall, which still bore construction paper decorations from the summer before along with a 1943 advertisement for campers. “A training in self-reliance is a Godsend in wartime.”

  With the door locked—and after another fifteen jumping jacks to clear the slush from her brain—she opened the cooler and began removing container after container of bay water peppered with the tiny Artemia lucis.

  8.

  John was pressed up against Rachel’s cabin. Hers was the farthest from the camp’s entrance, which meant this eastern side had no neighbor. The foliage was dense here even in the winter, and with his dark green coat and brown pants, it was as if the trees had absorbed him and made him one of them. He had been out there for almost an hour, having walked away from Dr. Bell and her truck toward his cabin and then, once he was out of her view, right past it and into the woods.

  He didn’t think it was possible to explain to someone else—someone who was not a member of his tribe—what the breeding meant. It had been the central event in tribal life, something anticipated, as well as feared. It transformed those who experienced it, and then inevitably, took some of their lives as payment. It was something every generation was responsible for, even those who would not themselves experience it. Those members were duty bound to prepare the next generation, who would pass on their knowledge, and so it had gone until there were so few Olloo’et left—maybe no more than fifty now—that they had become something closer to a myth than a people.