But the deflection didn’t work. Lorna was as intent as ever, infuriatingly focused on the one question I didn’t want anyone asking. The question I was sure everyone was whispering about when I was out of earshot.
“Where’s Nathan?” She was so loud, heads were turning, people were listening, and if they weren’t already wondering they would start to, and they would talk about it. Damn you, damn you, damn you, Lorna. “I haven’t been able to spot him all night, and I want to have a word with him about the research assistant he sent me last quarter. Nowhere near the caliber I’d expect, don’t know what he was thinking—” Lorna craned her neck and looked around, not one to be caught up in praising me when there was an opportunity to excoriate Nathan on the table. As she listed the defects of the research assistant, more than a few members of our audience lost interest, thank God.
“He’s not here,” I said. The seam of my dress dug into my skin, merciless. “He’s probably at home with his fiancée.”
“His what? Oh,” Lorna said, catching on and looking at me with deep, sudden concern. “I see. Tell me, do we hate him now?”
“No, no, of course not.” I let my grip tighten on the silver double helix just a little, just enough to keep my voice steady. I couldn’t tell if I was drunk or not. I wanted to be drunk. I wanted to be extremely drunk. “Very amicable.”
Lorna raised one wild-haired white eyebrow. “I’ll be taking you out for coffee later this week, and you can give me all the details. In the meantime, I’ll commence hating him just a little, in case I need material to seed hating him a lot.”
“I’d love to get coffee, yes,” I said, my cheeks numb, and before I could add something about really, though, there’s no need to hate him, things just didn’t go as we planned, a hand was on my elbow. I endured an urgent introduction, another fresh glass of champagne. By the time I turned back, Lorna was talking to someone else.
It was a mercy, in a way. The whirlwind of the evening had kept too many people from asking about Nathan. I didn’t think I could have stomached defending him, not to Lorna. Even if it was the right thing to do, professionally. It wouldn’t have been good for me to be seen bringing my personal life into my professional circles, damaging Nathan’s reputation in his academic ones. It would have been justified, but justification didn’t matter in situations like this; no, I needed to be careful.
I had seen it a hundred times in the field that we’d chosen. I knew who always bore the weight of divorce. Nathan could afford all of this, would come out unscathed regardless of how clearly the entire situation was his fault. And no matter how obviously I was the wronged party, it would haunt me for the rest of my career if I slipped at all, even once, if I ever seemed hurt or angry or sad. I needed to maintain the moral high ground, which meant that if I was asked, I needed to insist that everything was fine. I was fine. Nathan and I were fine. Amicable.
I did not want to be asked. The internal battle between doing the right thing and doing the honest thing and doing the tempting thing was an ongoing one, and I just wanted a break from it, just for one night. I wanted to hide.
And there were so many hiding places in that crowd.
Any other night, my story of the development of synthetic amniotic fluid alone could hold the right audience rapt for an hour at a stretch—but of course, this crowd didn’t want to hear about amniotic fluid, nor about the process of accelerating bone growth in nascent specimens without damaging skeletal integrity. No, this crowd knew about that work, had heard it all before. They wanted something different, something remarkable. They wanted to know about the work that had won me the Neufmann Prize.
The process of taking an adult clone and writing their personality into their neurological framework: It was mine. All mine.
Sleepless nights, research mishaps, hours and hours in the lab alone. Nobody cares about those solitary, devastating failures. They don’t want to hear about that—they’d rather hear the story of the eureka moment. And mine was good. “I was making eggs for breakfast,” I would tell them, “and I was watching the way they started cooking from the bottom up, and that’s when I figured it out: the key is to begin programming before the tissues of the hypothalamic nuclei have solidified. I ran to write down my breakthrough … and I completely forgot that the eggs were still on the stove. They burned so badly that we had to throw out the pan.”
Things I never added to the story: the fact that Nathan had been the one to throw the pan into the trash, had been the one to open the kitchen windows to let the smoke out, had come into my study red-faced and shouting. The way he stormed out of the house without listening to my breakthrough. The way he didn’t come home for days. Was I supposed to use the word “husband” or “ex-husband” for that part of the story? I could never decide, so I always told the story as though I’d been making breakfast for myself.
It was my breakthrough. It was my legacy, not ours. Nathan was already nostril-deep in academia then. It was all mine.
The Caldwell Method had never been a thing we shared.
“But aren’t you concerned about the developmental mottling of the limbic system in early stages?” This question from a man in rimless glasses and a wrinkled suit, another person I’d never met before. I fielded the question as if I didn’t chafe at the implications of such a basic objection to my methods. No, you asshole, I did not say, it never occurred to me to keep an eye on the fucking limbic system, what a breakthrough, here, take my grant money.
Poise. Patience. Be nice, Evelyn.
I answered questions, worked the crowd, took photographs. Someone asked me to sign a program, and I did, feeling ridiculous. I kept thinking that I wanted to go home, and then remembering that “home” didn’t really exist anymore. I just wanted to escape. Right up until the moment when it was time to do just that. That’s when I realized that leaving the suffocating press of the crowd would be the very worst thing in the world.
But there was no choice. The night was finally over, and home was waiting. I climbed into the back of a black car with my award in one hand and my tiny, useless clutch purse in the other. I leaned my head against the window. Behind my eyes, the champagne-hum was already turning into a headache that would be devastating come morning. The streetlights that passed were blurry, haloed by the winter air. I tried to remember why that happened—ice crystals in the atmosphere? No, that was the thing that put a ring around the moon. Maybe it was something wrong in my own eyes, something that I should have recognized as a warning sign. Should have known, I’d say later. No one else ever mentioned halos around streetlights.
It was past two o’clock in the morning by the time I walked in through the backyard of the little town house I’d rented, letting the gate slam shut behind me. I kicked my shoes off next to the sliding glass door and made an involuntary noise at the relief of standing flat-footed. The carpet was new, installed just before I signed the lease, and it was a mercy to curl my toes into something soft. I put the silver double helix down on my newly assembled flat-pack dining-room table.
I’d put the table together just that morning, half an hour with an Allen wrench and an illustrated manual. It existed for the express purpose of holding two items: my award, and an inch-thick stack of papers bristling with sticky-note flags.