A Nearly Perfect Copy (37 page)

Moira looked adorable dressed as a Trojan for the kindergarten reenactment of the
Aeneid
.

“Typical posh New York school,” Colin had scoffed, “forcing kindergartners to perform a book I wasn’t even aware of until university.” Still, he was there in the front row with the other parents digitally recording the play. Oddly, the still cameras were the larger instruments,
with lenses better suited to shooting football for
Sports Illustrated
rather than elementary school thespians in a small church basement. The video cameras, on the other hand, were so small as to be nearly invisible, nestled in the palms of hands.

Elm sat toward the back with her friend Patty, who had a daughter Moira’s age. Elm was overheated, as she so often was these days, fanning herself with the program. Patty had a second daughter, eighteen months old, who kept squirming on her lap, shrieking when Patty refused to let her down. “Be quiet,” Patty kept saying, waving a teething ring in front of her, like she was coaxing a seal to do a trick. Elm looked at them, irritated. She had forgotten that toddlers were so willful, unable to say what they wanted or to make logical decisions. Ronan had jumped off the sofa at twenty-one months and hit his head on the ottoman. When he stopped crying, Elm left him for a moment to go throw the ice pack in the sink and he was up on the sofa, leaping again.

The piano music started and the shower curtain parted to reveal a dozen five-year-olds dressed in togas. The teacher stood to the side, her back to the audience. Elm struggled to pick out Moira, but it was difficult even to tell genders apart. And then she saw a child on the end whose unruly hair must be her daughter’s. She waved, though Moira didn’t wave back. She was concentrating on following the teacher’s choreography. Hands went up, hands went down, hands went up, and the children began to sing, something high-pitched and unintelligible. Five children came forward to form a front line and they held hands, spreading out. Then Moira’s row came through from behind, ducking under the joined arms. Then the process reversed and Moira’s line went back through the hands. She bumped into someone on her way backward and got confused, spinning in circles until the teacher pointed where she should be.

Patty was laughing, bouncing her daughter on her lap.

“They’re really cute,” Elm said.

“Cleo has suddenly developed a mouth on her like a sailor,” Patty said. “I think she’s getting it from the nanny. It’s not bad words, really, just, like, a bad attitude.”

“Does it come with eye rolling? Sometimes I say something so stupid that Moira can barely deign to roll her eyes.”

“God, they’re such teenagers already.… Hey, are you expecting?”

Elm blushed. “Yes, how did you …?”

“You keep fanning yourself. The last time I was that hot I was pregnant.”

“Yeah. I’m eleven weeks.”

“Congratulations!” Patty said. She wrapped her arms around her baby to clap at the end of the first number.

“We’re not really telling anyone yet, so … I’m getting a CVS next week. I figured after that …”

So far Elm felt completely different than she had during her other pregnancies. She hadn’t even known she was pregnant until her sixth week the first time, and when she found out she’d had more energy than she could ever remember having.

Michel had explained to her in his slithering accent. “The embryo is the same, but your body’s reaction to it cannot be predicted. You are how old now, forty-three? It is not the same, having a baby at thirty-four and forty-three. Also you maybe eat now differently? Different stress? All these affect the reaction to the pregnancy. You can only expect the same result, not the same process.”

She had had to switch OBs again, and she pretended to this one that she’d just gotten new insurance and was having trouble getting her previous medical records transferred. He, of course, suspected nothing. “Seems healthy,” he said. Elm always wondered if it took practice to be able to speak to someone while your hand was inside her, but all doctors seemed to take it in stride, commenting about the weather or summer camp with their finger up her vagina or palpating her breasts. Maybe it was a course they took, and Elm giggled to think of a classroom full of young med students chatting while patients tried not to move under their fingers.

Michel had insisted on the slightly risky CVS procedure, though her own gynecologist left it up to her. “Really, it’s your choice. You know the risk statistics, though they’re lower than the national average in New York and even lower in our practice.” How like New Yorkers, Elm thought, to consider themselves in a different data category than the rest of the United States. “But you are over thirty-five, so it is indicated.” Michel, meanwhile, had said that there was evidence, “anecdotal, not scientific,” of increased genetic mutations in clones. Diseases that hadn’t occurred to Elm, like Fragile X and DiGeorge syndrome, which occur in utero after conception as cells replicate.

Patty said, “My lips are sealed. Are you going to find out the sex?”

“We’re not sure. Appointment is on Wednesday and we’re still fighting about it.”

“Who’s for and who’s against?”

“Me, both sides, actually,” Elm said. “I can’t decide for the life of me.” Colin didn’t want to find out, but he left the decision up to her. Elm was worried that if she didn’t pretend to find out the sex, she would have trouble remembering to refer to the baby as both he and she.

“My husband refused to find out if Gina was a boy or a girl,” Patty said. “I had to keep it from him for, like, four months. Whenever he pissed me off I threatened to tell.”

Elm smiled, but her anxiety mounted. All she could think about was the amount of paperwork on her desk, and when and how to tell everyone she was expecting. She tapped her foot on the floor in time to the music to hide her frustration.

They went out for ice cream afterward at the parlor that was every kid’s dream: ruffles and hats and oversized parfait glasses filled with sugar-added candied fruits and sauces. Elm had one bite and had to put down her spoon, putting her hand to her mouth in case it came back up. She was confused. With Ronan and Moira she couldn’t get enough of ice cream; for a while it was the only thing she could stomach. Colin gave her a puzzled look when he saw she’d pushed the dish away. He said nothing, though; they were out with Patty and her family as well as another friend of Moira’s and his parents and stepparents and -siblings. Elm slid her sundae over to him and he finished it.

Moira fell asleep in the taxi on the way home, and Colin carried her into her room. Elm stayed in the bathroom, willing the nausea to stop. How was it possible that she was still feeling nauseated? Colin came in and said, “Moira asked for you.”

“Tell her I’ll be in in a second.”

“Are you all right?”

“I think so,” Elm said. She sat on the edge of the tub and rested her head in her hands. After a few minutes she walked back into the kitchen. She poured herself a glass of seltzer and drank it slowly, standing at the counter. She heard Colin close the door to Moira’s room and walk into the kitchen behind her.

He took the glass from her hand and sipped. She experienced a flash
of annoyance. The familiar gesture felt like an example of his lack of consideration for her. Of course, he didn’t know what she was going through.

“Elm,” he said. “I have to tell you something.”

She froze, her heart stopping for a second, like being on an airplane as it suddenly drops. She couldn’t help but feel that this would be something catastrophic, something that they would never recover from. He would tell her a secret of the same magnitude as the one she was keeping. He was usually so silly. He had been serious only once, when he had proposed to her, and she had thought that he was going to break up with her. She admitted to herself now that even fourteen years later she wasn’t really able to read him.

“What?” she breathed.

“It’s about work,” he said. “I haven’t been completely honest with you. Or with anyone, really.”

“Did you … Have you lost your job?” Elm was surprised at the way her voice sounded: distant, unperturbed. It was like listening to a watery recording.

“Not yet.” Colin sat at the table. “Can we sit down?”

“Okay,” Elm said. She slumped into a chair and forced herself to look at him. He wore an expression of anguish, his face contorted by concern and anxiety. It was still the face she knew, nose slightly askew and a little too big for his face, the eyes close-set with nearly blond lashes. She recognized something of Ronan in his face and it would therefore never be the face of a stranger, no matter what happened between them.

“Federal regulators came by,” he said. “They’re issuing subpoenas next week.”

“So you’ll have to testify.”

“Yes …” He strung the word out. “I’m in a spot. Before he left, Al maybe wasn’t quite as forthcoming as he could have been. There were studies and he withheld some of the less positive data. It’s something pharma does all the time; it’s sort of a tacit agreement between the companies and the FDA. You’ve heard me say a million times that if we had to wait for FDA approval on everything, we still wouldn’t have a polio vaccine. I know it sounds like I’m justifying,” he said, cutting off the gurgle that was the start of a protest from Elm. “But really it’s true. If this country had fucking national health care …” He broke off.

“So they asked me, the regulators, and I told them a … softened version
of the truth. Now that I’m subpoenaed I’m going to have to come clean.” He paused. “I could be charged.”

Elm stuck her chin forward in disbelief. “Have you talked to Clint?” she asked. “What does he say to do?”

“I haven’t spoken with him yet,” Colin said. “This all happened Friday. But I have a call in to him to talk about the legal.… I wanted to talk to you first, Elm. I hope this isn’t …” He physically reached into the air to look for a word.

Elm provided nothing. “What if you stuck to your story?” she asked.

Colin shook his head. “It’ll be under oath. Besides”—he paused—“I think it will all come out, once it’s upended.”

It was just like him, Elm thought, to give the ethical reason for truth before the more practical one. This was one of the things about Colin she felt was so simultaneously endearing and infuriating, his insistence on living by principles in one of the most corrupt industries on the planet. That was what she had fallen for, his scrupulous adherence to the way he saw the world, its potential rather than its actuality.

This was the time, she knew. If she was going to tell him about the baby, this was the time right here. He was vulnerable. He had admitted a mistake; she could admit one too and they would be even. It would never again be this easy. “Colin,” she began.

“I’m so sorry, Elm. I don’t think … I didn’t think …” He grabbed her hands in his and lowered his face. She felt the warmth of his tears.

Her decision to tell him dissolved. She of all people knew what it was like to fuck up and feel guilty about it. And here was a case in which he had fucked up royally, so royally that it was possible, though not likely, Elm knew, that there would be major repercussions. If he cooperated now, nobody would bother prosecuting him. Still, Elm pictured herself enormously pregnant, taking the train to Sing Sing and waiting for visiting hours in a room with greasy handprints on the Plexiglas dividers. She freed one hand and put it on his head, ruffling his hair. She felt a wave of love, and a sense of relief remembering that he too was fallible, that mistakes and misjudgments were the hallmarks of humanity.

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s all right. We all make mistakes.” We all lie, she could have added.

That night Colin wrapped himself around her in bed and slept with his hand on her stomach. She lay still, sleepless but comfortable, watching the lights travel across the ceiling and wishing she’d had the courage
to admit her own secret. She could be sleeping now like Colin, soundly and righteously, instead of willing her breathing to be rhythmic, focusing on moving air in and out of her lungs to match her husband.

She realized that her opportunity for unburdening herself had passed. Now it was too late and she could never tell him, never tell anyone. The weight of this knowledge pressed on her and she rolled over, letting Colin’s hand slip over her hip to rest on the empty sheet between them.