Frameshift (17 page)

At last, the long-awaited day came. Pierre drove Molly to Alta Bates Hospital on Colby Street. In the Toyota’s trunk, as there had been for the last two weeks, were Molly’s suitcase and a video camcorder — an unexpected gift from Burian Klimus, who had insisted to Pierre and Molly that videotaping the birth was all the rage now.

Alta Bates had beautiful delivery rooms, more like hotel suites than hospital facilities. Pierre had to admit that one thing missing from Canada’s government-run hospitals was any touch of luxury, but here — well, he was just thankful that Molly’s faculty-association health plan was covering the expenses…

Pierre sat on a softly padded chair, beaming at his wife and newborn daughter.

A middle-aged black nurse came in to check on them. “Have the two of you decided on a name yet?” she asked.

Molly looked at Pierre, making sure he was still happy with the choice.

Pierre nodded. “Amanda,” she said. “Amanda Helene.”

“One English name and one French,” said Pierre, smiling at the nurse.

“They’re both pretty names,” said the nurse.

“ ‘Amanda’ means ‘worthy of being loved,’ ” said Molly. There was a knock at the door, and then, a moment later, the door swung open. “May I come in?”

“Burian!” said Molly.

“Dr. Klimus,” said Pierre, a bit surprised. “How good of you to come.”

“Not at all, not at all,” said the old man, making his way across the room.

“I’ll leave you alone,” said the nurse, smiling and exiting.

“The birth went well?” asked Klimus. “No complications?”

“Everything was fine,” said Molly. “Exhausting, but fine.”

“You recorded it all on videotape?”

Pierre nodded.

“And the baby is normal?”

“Just fine.”

“A boy or a girl?” Klimus asked. Pierre felt his eyebrows lifting; that was usually the first question, not the fourth.

“A girl,” said Molly.

Klimus moved closer to see for himself. “Good head of hair,” he said, touching a gnarled hand to his own billiard-ball pate, but making no other comment about the child’s paternity. “How much does she weigh?”

“Seven pounds, twelve ounces,” said Molly.

“And her length?”

“Seventeen inches.”

He nodded. “Very good.”

Molly discreetly moved Amanda to her breast, mostly hidden by her hospital robe. Then she looked up. “I want to thank you, Burian. We both do. For everything you’ve done for us. We can’t begin to say how grateful we are.”

“
Oui
,”said Pierre, all his fears having dissipated. His daughter was an angel; how could she possibly have a devil’s genes? “
Millefois merci
.”

The old man nodded and looked away. “It was nothing.”

Je ne suis pas fou
, thought Pierre, a month later.
I’m not crazy
. And yet the frameshift was gone. He’d wanted to do more studies of the DNA sequence that produced the strange neurotransmitter associated with Molly’s telepathy. He’d used a restriction enzyme to snip out the bit of chromosome thirteen that coded for its synthesis. So far, so good. Then, to provide himself with an unlimited supply of the genetic material, he set up PCR amplification of it — the polymerase chain reaction, which would keep duplicating that segment of DNA over and over again. Needing nothing more than a test tube containing the specimen, a thermocycler, and a few reagents, PCR could produce a hundred billion copies of a DNA molecule over the course of an afternoon.

And now he had billions of copies — except that, although the copies were all identical to each other, they weren’t the same as the original. The thymine base that had wormed its way into Molly’s genetic code, causing the frameshift, hadn’t been incorporated into the copies. At the key point, the snips of DNA produced through PCR all read CAT CAG GGT GTC

CAT. Just like Pierre’s own did; just like everybody’s did.

Could he have screwed up? Could he have misread the sequence of nucleotides in that original sample of Molly’s DNA he’d extracted from her blood all those months ago? He rummaged in his file drawer until he found his original autorad. No mistake: the thymine intruder
was
there.

He went through the long process of making another autorad from another piece of Molly’s actual original DNA. Yup, the thymine showed up there, too — the frameshift was present, shifting the normal CAT CAG GGT

GTC CAT into TCA TCA GGG TGT CCA.

PCR was a simple chemical procedure. It shouldn’t care if the thymine really belonged there or not. It should have just faithfully duplicated the string.

But it had not. It — or something in the DNA reproduction process — had c
orrected
the string, putting it back the way it was supposed to be.

Pierre shook his head in wonder.

“Good morning, Dr. Klimus,” said Pierre coming into the HGC office to pick up his mail.

“Tardivel,” said Klimus. “How is the baby?”

“She’s fine, sir. Just fine.”

“Still have all that hair?”

“Oh, yes.” Pierre smiled. “In fact, she’s even got a hairy back — even
I
don’t have a hairy back. But the pediatrician says that’s not unusual, and it should disappear as her hormones become better balanced.”

“Is she a bright girl?”

“She seems to be.”

“Well-adjusted?”

“Actually, for someone just a month old she’s rather quiet, which is nice, in a way. At least we’re managing to get some sleep.”

“I’d like to come by the house this weekend. See the girl.”

It was a presumptuous request, thought Pierre. But then — dammit, he w
as
the child’s biological father. Pierre felt his stomach knotting. He cursed himself for thinking anything this complex would end up not being a source of problems. Still, the man was Pierre’s boss, and Pierre’s fellowship was coming up for renewal.

“Um, sure,” said Pierre. He hoped Klimus would detect the lack of enthusiasm and decide not to pursue the matter. He took his mail from its cubbyhole.

“In fact,” said the old man, “perhaps I’ll come over for dinner Sunday night. At six? Make an evening of it.”

Pierre’s heart sank. He thought of something Einstein had once said:

Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing. “Sure,”

Pierre said again, resigning himself to it. “Sure thing.”

The old man nodded curtly, then went back to sorting through his mail.

Pierre stood still for a few moments, then, realizing he had been dismissed, took his own mail and headed on down the corridor to his lab.

Burian Klimus sat in Molly and Pierre’s living room. Amanda didn’t seem to take to him at all, but, then again, he didn’t make any effort to hold her or baby-talk to her. That bothered Pierre. The old man had w
anted
to see the girl, after all. But instead of playing with her, he just kept asking questions about her nursing and sleeping habits, all the while — to Pierre’s astonishment — scrawling notes in Cyrillic in a pocket-size spiral-bound notebook.

Finally, it was time for dinner. Pierre and Molly had both agreed that although tonight was Pierre’s turn to cook, the evening would probably go better with something more elaborate than hot dogs or Kraft dinner.

Molly prepared chicken Kiev (Klimus
was
Ukrainian, after all), potatoes au gratin, and Brussels sprouts. Pierre opened a bottle of liebfraumilch to go with it, and the three adults made their way to the table, leaving Amanda — whom Molly had breast-fed earlier — contentedly napping in her bassinet.

Pierre tried all sorts of polite topics for conversation, but Klimus rose to none of them, so he finally decided to ask the old man what he was working on.

“Well,” said Klimus, after taking another sip of wine, “you know I’m spending a lot of time at the Institute of Human Origins.” The IHO was also in Berkeley; its director was Donald Johanson, discoverer of the famous
Australopithecus afarensis
known as Lucy. “I’m hoping to make progress with Hapless Hannah’s DNA in resolving the out-of-Africa debate.”

“Great film,” said Molly lightly, really not wishing to see the conversation devolve into shoptalk. “Meryl Streep was excellent.”

Klimus raised an eyebrow. “I know Pierre knows about Hannah, Molly, but do you?”

She shook her head. He told her about his breakthrough with extracting intact DNA from the Israeli Neanderthal bones, then paused to fortify himself with another sip of wine. Pierre got up to open a second bottle.

“Well,” said Klimus, “there are two competing models for the origin of modern humans. One is called the out-of-Africa hypothesis; the other is the multiregional hypothesis. They both agree that
Homo erectus
started spreading out from Africa into Eurasia as much as one-point-eight million years ago — Java man, Peking man, Heidelberg man, those are all specimens of
erectus
.

“But the out-of-Africa hypothesis says that modern man,
Homo sapiens
— which may or may not include Neanderthals as a subgroup — evolved in east Africa, but didn’t expand out of there until a second migration from Africa just one or two hundred thousand years ago. The out-of-Africa proponents say that when this second wave caught up with various e
rectus
groups in Asia and Europe, they defeated them, leaving
Homo
s
apiens
as the only extant species of humanity.”

He paused long enough to let Pierre pour him another glass of wine.

“The multiregional hypothesis is quite different. It says all those
erectus
populations went on evolving, and they
each
gave rise independently to modern man. That would explain why
Homo sapiens
seems to appear in the fossil record pretty much simultaneously across all of Eurasia.”

“But surely,” said Molly, intrigued despite herself, “if you have isolated populations, you’d end up with different species evolving in each area — like on the Galapagos Islands.” She rose to start clearing the dishes.

Klimus handed her his dinner plate. “The multiregionalists contend that there was a lot of inbreeding among the various populations, allowing them to evolve in tandem.”

“Inbreeding from France all the way to Indonesia?” said Molly, disappearing into the kitchen for a moment. “And I thought my sister got around.”

Pierre laughed, but when Molly returned she was shaking her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “This multiregional stuff seems more like an exercise in political correctness than good science — an attempt to avoid Felix Sousa’s which-race-came-first question and say, ‘Hey, we all evolved together at once.’ ”

Klimus nodded. “Ordinarily, I should agree with you, but there are excellent sequences of skulls going all the way from
Homo erectus
through Neanderthal man and into fully modern humans in Java and China. It d
oes
look like independent evolution toward
Homo sapiens
went on at least in those locations, and possibly elsewhere, too.”

“But that’s evolutionarily absurd,” said Molly. “Surely the classical model of evolution says that, through mutation, one individual in a population spontaneously gains a survival advantage, and then his or her offspring, because of that advantage, outcompete everyone else, eventually creating a new species.”

Pierre got up to help Molly serve dessert — a chocolate mousse she had made. “I’ve always had a problem with that method,” he said. “Think about it: it means that a few generations down the road, the entire population is descended from that one lucky mutant. You end up with a very small gene pool that way, and that tends to concentrate recessive genetic disorders.” He handed a glass bowl to Klimus, then sat down. “It’s like Queen Victoria, who carried the hemophilia gene. Her offspring inbred with the royal houses of Europe, devastating them. To suppose that whole populations are reduced to a single parent every time a major mutation-driven advantage occurs would make life extraordinarily precarious. If an accident didn’t kill off the lucky mutant, his or her offspring might die off anyway through genetic diseases.” He sampled the mousse, then nodded, impressed. “Now, if evolution
could
somehow occur simultaneously across widely dispersed populations, as the multiregionalists are suggesting, well, I suppose that would avoid that problem — but I can’t think of any mechanism that would allow that kind of evolution, although—”

Amanda started crying. Pierre immediately got back on his feet and hurried over to her, picking her up, holding her against his shoulder, and bouncing her up and down gently. “There, there, honey,” he cooed. “There, there.” He smiled at Klimus, back in the dining room. “Sorry about this,” he said.

“Not at all, not at all,” said Klimus. He pulled out his notebook and jotted something down.

“Look at Mommy, sweetheart. Come on, look at Mommy. There’s a good girl. Now, Daddy’s got to prick your arm a little bit. It’ll hurt, but not too much, and it’ll only last a second. Okay, sweetheart? Here’s my finger. Give it a good squeeze. That’s right. Okay, here we go. No, no — don’t cry, honey.

Don’t cry. It’s over now. Everything’s going to be all right, baby…

Everything’s going to be just fine.”

Pierre checked a small sample of Amanda’s DNA. His daughter lacked the frameshift mutation on chromosome thirteen, and so presumably wouldn’t grow up to be a telepath. Molly seemed to have curiously mixed feelings about this, but Pierre had to admit he was relieved.

Pierre’s earlier work had shown that only one of Molly’s two chromosome thirteens had the telepathy frameshift, meaning Amanda had had only a fifty-fifty chance of inheriting it from her mother (Amanda, of course, would have received one of Molly’s thirteens and one of Klimus’s thirteens). So there was really nothing remarkable about baby Amanda not having inherited her mother’s frameshifted gene, and yet—

And yet, during simple PCR amplification of Molly’s DNA, the frameshift had been
corrected
, so—

So was this a case of Amanda actually, by the luck of the draw, receiving the non-frameshifted chromosome thirteen from her mother, or—

Or did
none
of Molly’s eggs contain the frameshifted DNA?

Had it been somehow corrected there, too, just as it had in PCR replication?

Obviously, the frameshift couldn’t be corrected every time it appeared, or it would have been fixed when Molly herself was developing as an embryo thirty-odd years ago. But still, somehow, it was being corrected now. Pierre had to know whether the correction was present in Molly’s unfertilized eggs, or whether the correction was only made after the egg was fertilized and had started dividing.

Thanks to the pre-IVF hormone treatments, Molly had brought a large number of eggs to maturity in a single cycle. Gwendolyn Bacon had extracted fifteen from her for the IVF attempt, but she had told Klimus to only attempt to fertilize half of them, meaning seven or eight of Molly’s unfertilized eggs were presumably still here in building 74.

After phoning Molly to get her permission, Pierre left his own lab and walked down to the same small surgical theater in which Molly’s eggs had been extracted over a year ago. Pierre knew one of the techs there: the guy was a San Jose Sharks fan, and the two of them often argued hockey.

Pierre had no trouble getting him to find and hand over Molly’s eggs, seven of which were indeed still in cold storage.

Of course, it was possible that a random selection of seven eggs might all have the same maternal chromosome thirteen, but the odds were against it. The chances were as slim as a family having seven children and all of them being boys: 50% x 50% x 50% x 50% x 50% x 50% x 50%, which was 0.078% — a minuscule likelihood.

And yet that apparently had happened. Not one of the eggs had the frameshift.

Unless—

Molly’s two chromosome thirteens differed from each other in other ways, of course. Pierre started testing other points on the chromosomes extracted from the eggs, and—

No. The eggs had
not
all gotten the same chromosome thirteen.

Four of them had received one of Molly’s chromosome thirteens — the one that, in Molly’s body, didn’t have the frameshift.

And three had received the other one of Molly’s thirteens — the one that, in Molly’s body,
did have
the frameshift.

And yet, incredibly, the frameshift had been corrected out of every one of the eggs…

A month later, Pierre and Molly drove to San Francisco International Airport. Pierre was about to meet his mother-in-law and sister-in-law for the first time. Amanda was going to be baptized the next day; although the Bonds weren’t Catholic, Molly’s mother had insisted on being on hand for this, at least.

“There they are!” said Molly, pointing through a sea of people, all struggling with their bags and luggage carts.

Pierre scanned the crowd. He’d seen pictures of Barbara and Jessica Bond before, but none of the faces leaped out at him. But now two women were waving at them from the back of the group, wide grins across their faces. They jostled their way through the little exit gate the crowd was funneling out of. Molly rushed over and hugged her mother and then, after a moment of sibling awkwardness, hugged her sister, too.

“Mom, Jess,” Molly said, “this is Pierre.”

There was another awkward moment; then Mrs. Bond moved in and hugged him. “It’s wonderful to meet you at long last,” she said, just the barest hint of a dig in her voice. She’d not been pleased when Molly had gotten married without even inviting her.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, too,” said Pierre.

“Hey,” said Jessica, a note of light teasing in her voice, perhaps trying to defuse the tension her mother’s remark had engendered. “You told us he was French-Canadian, but you didn’t say he had such a sexy accent.”

Molly giggled, something Pierre had never before heard her do. She and Jessica were suddenly teenagers again. “Go find your own immigrant,” she said, then turned to Pierre. “Honey, this is Jessica.”

Jessica held out her hand, the back of it facing up. “
Enchantee
,” she said.

Pierre adopted the role being requested of him. He bent low and kissed the back of her hand. “
C’est moi, qui est enchante, mademoiselle
.” She giggled. Jessica was a real knockout. Molly had mentioned that Jess had done modeling and he could see why. She was a taller, tartier version of her sister. Her makeup was expertly applied: black eyeliner, a dusting of blush, and pink lipstick. Molly was standing right beside him; Pierre felt momentarily anxious, but relaxed when he realized he was indeed musing about all this in French.

“I’m afraid our car is parked a fair distance away,” he said. The women’s bags weren’t very big. Even a few months ago, Pierre would have picked one up with each hand and simply carried them. But his condition was getting worse in small but noticeable daily increments, and he was now just as likely to drop them. Although his foot had been shaking somewhat, he’d hoped he’d been doing a credible job of making it look like toe tapping, as if he were some jittery type-A personality.

A few feet away, a big man was making a macho show of discarding the baggage cart his female companion had found and carrying a bulging Samsonite case himself. Pierre moved as fast as he could, seizing the cart and placing Jessica’s and Barbara’s bags on it. At the least, he could certainly push the cart for them. Indeed, it was probably better having it as a sort of discreet walker as they embarked on the long hike to the garage.

“How was the flight?” asked Pierre.

“It was a flight,” said Jessica. Pierre smiled, sensing a kindred spirit.

What more could one say about spending hours in a tin can?

“Where’s Amanda?” asked Barbara, her tone making clear that she was very much the new grandmother, eager to see her first grandchild.

“A neighbor is looking after her,” said Molly. “We thought all this” — she rolled her eyes, indicating the hubbub around them — “would be too much for her.”

“I would have loved to have been there for you,” said Barbara. Pierre allowed himself a slight sigh, lost on the background noise of the cavernous terminal. His mother-in-law wasn’t going to easily forgive Molly for cutting her out of so much of Molly’s life. Barbara and Jessica were only going to be here for four days, but it was clearly going to seem longer.

They passed through a pair of sliding glass doors into the late-afternoon sunshine. As soon as she was out of the terminal, Jessica fished a pack of Virginia Slims from her purse and lit one. Pierre jockeyed slightly so as not to be downwind from her. Suddenly she looked far less attractive.

Molly opened her mouth as if to reproach her sister, but in the end said nothing. Her mother clearly recognized the expression, though, and shrugged. “It’s no use,” she said. “I’ve told her a thousand times to quit.”

Jessica took a deep, defiant drag. They continued on toward the parking lot.

“Have either of you been to California before?” asked Pierre, the role of defuser now falling to him.

“Disney World when I was a kid,” said Jessica.

“Disneyland,” corrected Molly, sounding every bit the big sister. “Disney World is in Florida.”

“Well, whichever it was, I’m sure they still remember you throwing up all over the teacup ride,” snapped Jessica. She looked to Pierre with wide eyes, as if still stunned by it all. “How anyone could get motion sickness on the teacups is beyond me.”

Pierre spotted his car. “We’re over there,” he said, gesturing with his head as he steered the luggage cart.

Yes, he thought. A long stay indeed.

Pierre managed to carry the bags up the front steps. Molly looked on with compassion. They had worried about those steps when they bought the house, and watching him struggle with the bags gave her a clear foretaste of what was to come for him. The back door opened onto level ground; they knew eventually that it would end up as his principal entrance.

Once the bags were inside, Molly’s mother and sister plopped down, exhausted, in the living-room chairs.

“Nice place,” said Jessica, looking around.

Molly smiled. It
was
a nice place. Pierre’s taste in furnishings was abysmal (Molly shuddered every time she thought of that hideous green-and-orange couch he’d had), but she had a good eye for such things; she’d even taught a course on the psychology of aesthetics one year. They’d furnished the whole room in natural blond wood and green malachite accents.

“I’m going next door to get Amanda,” said Molly. “Pierre, maybe you can get Mom and Jess a drink.”

Pierre nodded and set about doing just that. Molly went through the front door and out into the twilight, enjoying being alone for a moment. It had been so much easier rebuilding her relationship with her mother and sister through letters and longdistance phone calls. But now that they were here, she had to face their thoughts again: her mother’s disapproval of the way Molly had left Minnesota, her dubiousness about her whirlwind romance and marriage to a foreigner, her thousand little criticisms of the way Molly dressed and the five extra pounds she hadn’t quite gotten rid of since the pregnancy.

And Jessica, too, with her infuriating vacuousness — not to mention her outrageous flirting with Pierre.

It had been a mistake having them come out here — of that, already, there could be no doubt. She would try to keep them out of her zone during the rest of their stay, try not to hear their thoughts, try to remember that they, as much as baby Amanda, were her flesh and blood.

She walked next door to the pink-stuccoed bungalow and rang the bell.

“Hi, Molly,” said Mrs. Bailey as the woman opened the screen door.

“Come to take your angel away?”

Molly smiled. Mrs. Bailey was a widow in her mid-sixties who seemed to have a bottomless appetite for baby-sitting Amanda. Her eyesight was poor, but she loved holding the baby and singing to her in an off-key but enthusiastic way. Molly stepped into the entryway, and Mrs. Bailey went over to Amanda, who had been napping on the couch. She picked her up and carried her over to Molly. Amanda blinked her large brown eyes at her mother and allowed herself to be passed from one woman to the other.

“Thanks so much, Mrs. Bailey,” said Molly.

“Anytime, my dear.”

Molly rocked Amanda in her arms as she carried her back to their house. She walked up the steps and let herself in the front door.

The arrival of the baby was enough to get Barbara and Jessica up off the couch. Pierre, although also wanting to see his daughter, apparently realized he’d have no luck competing against the three women for access.

He settled back in his chair, grinning.

“Oooh,” said Jessica, leaning in to look at the baby cradled in Molly’s arms. “What a little darling!”

Her mother leaned in, too. “She’s gorgeous!” She waved a finger in front of the baby’s eyes. Amanda cooed at all the attention.

Molly felt her heart pounding, felt anger rising within her. She pulled the baby away and moved across the room.

“What’s wrong?” asked her sister.

“Nothing,” said Molly, too sharply. She turned around, forced a smile.

“Nothing,” she said again, more softly. “Amanda was sleeping next door. I don’t want to overwhelm her.”

She moved toward the staircase and started up. She saw Pierre trying to catch her eye, but continued on.

Dog
, Jessica had thought.

My God
 —
what an ugly kid!
her mother had thought.

Molly made it to the top floor and into the bedroom before she began to shake with anger. She sat on the edge of the bed, rocking her beautiful daughter back and forth in her arms.

Three months passed; it was now the middle of December.

Amanda, in a crib across the room, woke up a little after 3:00 a.m. and started crying. The sound awoke both Pierre and Molly. Molly went over to the padded chair by the window, and he watched quietly as she sat in the moonlight, breast-feeding his daughter. It was hard to imagine a more beautiful sight.

His left wrist started moving back and forth.

Molly put Amanda back down, kissed her forehead, and returned to their bed. Pierre could soon hear the regular sound of his wife’s breathing as she fell back to sleep. Pierre, though, was now wide awake. He tried to steady his left wrist by holding it with his right, but soon that one began to shake, too.

He thought back to the Huntington’s support-group meeting in San Francisco. All those people moving, shaking, dancing. All those people, like him. All those poor people…

We had a guy from your lab give a talk a couple of years ago. Big old
b
ald guy. Can’t remember his name, but he won a Nobel Prize.

Burian Klimus had spoken to that group, and —

Holy shit. Holy fucking shit.