Living Proof Read online

  But even within their own party, the battle was stacked. Some conservatives felt that the DEP was sucking tax dollars away from its sister division of the state health agency: the Department of Embryo-Fetal Protection. This department, which operated out of the same building, monitored all pregnant women in order to protect unborn babies until their birth. Upon learning she was pregnant, a woman was required to register with the DEFP, where she was assigned a caseworker. The caseworker scheduled regular visits throughout the pregnancy to assess whether the woman was taking her vitamins, exercising regularly, and going to all doctor appointments. This important measure of oversight had helped to prevent countless illegal abortions, premature births, and malnourished babies. Fines for not cooperating were steep, and if the fetus was found to be harmed as a result of improper prenatal care, the mother could be charged with manslaughter.

  With so many pregnant women to monitor, and relatively few fertility clinics, some conservatives were arguing that the DEP should be drastically downsized; damaged embryos were hardly ever discovered these days, so why maintain such stringent oversight? Besides, how many scientists today even remembered how to research stem cells, so what was the point of destroying embryos? But Dopp knew that it was crucial to maintain oversight of fertility doctors, many of whom didn’t even believe an extrauterine embryo was a person. So Dopp knew it was up to him to prove that threats to EUEs still existed—thus keeping their department afloat.

  “We have two whole months,” Trent said, trying to sound positive.

  Dopp looked around the table gravely. “Only two months.”

  “I don’t get it,” Jed piped up. “Any conservatives in Albany with a brain should be fighting for us tooth and nail. It’s obvious that EUEs will always need our oversight. Why should a shutdown change anyone’s mind?”

  Dopp sighed. “Up in Albany, they don’t operate on principles. They’re pragmatists. So we need to show them that our department is still necessary. One big shutdown could mean a difference of millions of dollars in our budget next year. And—” He paused. “—lots of jobs.”

  Trent couldn’t help feeling some pity for them all; fear was the new receptionist that greeted them every morning, a reminder of the outside world’s power to obstruct their mission.

  “Back in the old days,” Banks growled, “I never would have believed it would come to this.”

  “How was it then?” Jed asked quietly.

  “It’s not over,” Dopp snapped. “Far from it.”

  With a look of nostalgia, Banks explained that the department used to do shutdowns every few months, and regularly busted scientists who had smuggled embryos into their labs.

  “But we haven’t found a stolen embryo for five years,” Banks said. “Sometimes I give tickets for missing or damaged embryos, take away medical licenses, things like that. But nothing sensational.”

  Trent remembered the last isolated shutdown two years ago—an elderly doctor had been destroying embryos for no reason other than to spite the department.

  Trent looked at his boss. “So where do we go from here?”

  “We need to catch her in action, whatever she’s doing with all those embryos,” Dopp said. “Yes, they’re all stocked at the end of the month, but where are they before that?”

  “Are you saying she could be cloning and replacing them?” Trent asked, astonished. Harvesting embryos on the sly—to cover up their mass destruction—was nearly unprecedented. It was akin to genocide, the twenty-first-century equivalent of Hitler’s ovens.

  Dopp half shrugged, lifting his eyebrows. “The technology is still out there, and we can’t tell the difference between an original embryo and a clone. But the logistics would be very complex. She’d need biochemists who remember how to do it, not to mention instruments, a private lab space, money, and bottom line: a lot of embryos. It would be a major conspiracy. I didn’t think people would have the gall to try that anymore, but who knows.”

  “You mean—running secret labs to get embryonic stem cells?” Jed asked, his voice pitching on the last words.

  Dopp blinked. “Yes.”

  “But only adult stem cells are viable,” Jed cried. “Embryonic stem cells never helped anyone even when they were legal!”

  Trent shook his head in sympathetic frustration. Adult stem cells, as he had learned from his job training, were undifferentiated cells—blanks—found in specialized tissues such as heart or muscle. These blank cells, which were used regularly in bone marrow transplants, could grow into the type of specialized cells found in the tissue of origin and possibly other types, though adult stem cells were harder to find and extract than the embryonic type, which were blank cells found in five-day-old human embryos. Those could give rise to any cell in the body, making their therapeutic potential unlimited. And they were easy to obtain—but that meant killing an unborn child. Before the embryo rights movement put a legal end to the barbarism, not one sick or paralyzed person benefited from embryonic stem cells.

  “I never understood how people could claim those cells would help anyone,” Jed said, “without any proof of it at all.”

  Trent nodded, though he wondered about his colleague’s choice of the word proof. A vision of the infamous stem cell heart popped into his mind—the first human organ that had been created purely out of embryonic stem cells more than twenty years prior, when the research was still a dangerous open highway. He wondered, had that been proof of something beyond depravity?

  Dopp’s mouth was one steely line. “Criminals can find ways to justify anything. This situation must be looked into.”

  “How?” Trent asked. “We need proof.”

  “Secrecy breeds the need for secrecy,” Dopp replied. “Trent, I’m impressed by your digging.”

  Trent smiled modestly. Finally, he thought. Window office, here I come.

  “How would you like to do some undercover fieldwork?” Dopp asked with a friendly smile.

  Trent stared. “What?”

  “This whole case was your idea, so you should follow it through. You have the people skills and the discretion from your reporter days.”

  “Wow. I wasn’t expecting…” He trailed off, amazed at this turn. “So, um, what do you have in mind?”

  “Arianna Drake seems too smart to make any errors in execution. We’ve got to come at her from the side, undercover, where she isn’t expecting it. That’s our in, God willing. I’ll help you devise a strategy to get her to talk. I think you’d be a natural for this kind of work.”

  “Thank you, I think,” Trent said, pausing. “Does that mean you think I’d be a good liar?”

  Dopp’s lips stretched up, defying the drag of his face. “Only for the sake of the truth. You’re an agent of the DEP, Trent, but really, you’re an agent of God. This is the kind of assignment that you could look back on as your life’s work.”

  “Then I’d be mostly out of the office, just coming back to report to you?” No more suit, he thought. No more walls.

  “This will be your focus. If you hit it big, I’ll move you out of that little room, closer to me.”

  Trent smiled at the irony that only a half hour before, he had been craving his old investigative beat. Not to mention that Dopp’s office was on the side of the building where glass walls were set dramatically against the edge of Central Park.

  “I’d love to do it,” Trent said, looking out at the park. From the seventeenth floor, they were practically parachuting over the treetops.

  “Good. Now, remember, as an undercover agent, you cannot tell anything to anyone, strictly anyone, under penalty of expulsion and legal action.”

  “Of course not.”

  Trent glanced at Jed, whose delayed smile betrayed a hint of envy, while Banks looked on with new respect.

  “Trent, start brainstorming strategies for how to approach her. You’ve only got one shot.”

  Trent nodded, his reporter’s mind already working angles.

  Dopp closed his eyes for a moment. When
he opened them, he stared directly into Trent’s eyes. “I have faith in you, as does God. He will guide us to the answers.”

  Trent nodded again, unsure whether he felt privileged or intimidated, or both.

  “Just remember,” Dopp went on, “however you get to the truth will be the right way. Everything happens for a reason.”

  THREE

  As a doctor, Arianna understood that symptoms do not arise without a cause and that her sudden dizzy spell was significant. Sometimes, in her darkest moments, she saw her medical knowledge as a curse; she knew too much to chalk up her fall to an imbalance of the inner ear or to that catchall diagnosis, stress. At the same time, she knew enough not to be surprised, which allowed for a quicker recovery—she had managed to lift herself off the floor and plunk down into her chair before Megan returned.

  She was much less worried about that pesky reporter. Megan had fended him off just right. As she reasoned, he would move on from her clinic after he found no story. There was no crime in having a busy practice.

  The next day, Saturday, she preoccupied herself in the kitchen, preparing dinner for two. The problem was that her guest did not know he was invited. Give him much notice, she had learned, and he would find an excuse to decline, so she waited to call until she could smell the food cooking. Years of solitude had left him friendless. She had taken on the task of injecting some happiness into the dead realm once known as his personal life; often, though less and less, he resisted her efforts.

  After she prepared the steak in the broiler, she punched a number on her speed dial. It rang several times.

  “Hullo,” said a raspy voice.

  “Hi, Sam. A little slow getting to the phone,” she teased. “Don’t tell me you have company.”

  “No one dates at my age, Arianna.”

  “Why not?”

  “They’re either widowed or dead. What can I do for you?”

  She smiled. “I made too much for dinner.”

  “I already ate.”

  “Today?”

  He sighed. “What did you make?”

  “Filet mignon.”

  “You don’t have to bribe me with food.”

  “Oh, and here I thought a steak would make all the difference.”

  He grunted. “I’m too cranky to be company.”

  “A cranky genius? I don’t believe it.”

  “All right, all right.”

  She chuckled as the phone clicked off. He seldom said good-bye. But Sam Lisio’s rancor didn’t faze her anymore; she understood why it had seeped into his persona, like a diseased cell that had multiplied. It was such an inexorable part of him now that it was hard to remember what he used to be like before, when his tone was not married to scorn and when his smile dazzled students and professors alike. Instead of being repelled by his negativity, she knew it was defensiveness: Don’t get too close, said the words behind his words.

  He was a reclusive workaholic. When she called, he had probably been poring over his notes. Although they rarely mentioned it, the grim context of their association touched every word they exchanged. As Arianna had come to understand, sarcasm kept that knowledge at a distance and reshaped it into something palatable.

  She wondered how his work was going. If he had any news, she would of course find out first, though it was torture to keep from asking. Nor did she want to leave the impression that her goal was to mine him for information; it saddened her to imagine that he might ever suspect an ulterior motivation in her warmth. That was not the case at all—their quest had united them in business, but left them friends.

  Her thoughts were interrupted by the buzzer.

  “That was fast,” she said as she opened the door.

  His lips quivered as he smiled at her, as if those muscles were stretched past their comfort zone. He was an old sixty-seven, with hollow cheeks and a gaunt frame, withered by injustice as much as by time. Strands of white hair lingered on the top of his scalp, too few to comb—not that he ever would. Despite his obvious age, though, she was sometimes surprised by the wrinkles around his green eyes and the frailness of his bones, because his mind showed no signs of senescence; its sharpness seemed only to have increased over time.

  “Here,” he said gruffly, handing over Napa Valley merlot from 2015.

  “Aged twelve years!” she marveled.

  “It’s a decent red, but I don’t like it. Too dry.”

  “Then why’d you bring it?”

  “For you. I’ll take the usual.”

  Arianna smiled and led him back to the circular glass dining table. “Rough day?”

  His expression hardened, but he said nothing as he sat down at the table.

  “What’s wrong?”

  He sighed. “Oligodendrocytes are just such a goddamn mystery.”

  She swallowed, concentrating on pouring his drink from the fifth of vodka she kept for his visits. “But it only took you guys four months to figure out how to get to the neuroprogenitor stage.…”

  “And that’s like turning a frog into a kid when what you really want is a prince.”

  “Little by little, right?”

  “There’s so much damn error in trial and error.”

  “You did it with the rats, though,” she said over her shoulder as she poured her own wine.

  “It’s trickier with human cells, obviously.”

  “Look, Sam,” she said, facing him, “you guys have already come a long way.” She stared at him, daring him to deny it. He snatched up his drink and took a swig.

  “Maybe you just need a few days’ break for perspective,” she added, as she sat down. “What do the others think?”

  He exhaled an acrid breath. “You’ll hear tomorrow. They’re both just as fed up.” He squinted at her. “How do you get off being so cavalier about it, anyway?”

  She squinted back, mocking him with a grin. “Hey, I’m not the one that has to figure out anything. My part isn’t nearly as hard.”

  “Cheers to you,” he said, lifting his glass in her direction. Arianna shook her head good-naturedly as she chewed a mouthful of salad. Sam twirled linguini around his fork and smothered it in bloody steak juices before shoving it into his mouth. Hunger and worry usurped her need for mental stimulation, and the lull in conversation went unnoticed.

  “How was work this week?” Sam asked eventually.

  “Fine,” she replied. “Except for yesterday.”

  “Because of that nosy bastard reporter?”

  She scoffed. “That guy couldn’t touch us.”

  “So you’re not going to do anything?”

  “What’s to do?” she said. “We’re just getting more popular, right?”

  He looked skeptical.

  “Come on, Sam, we’ve got the whole thing down pat.”

  “The execution of it, anyway.”

  Arianna rolled her eyes.

  “So what was wrong yesterday, then?” he demanded.

  She looked away. “One of my patients just found out she has MS. All she wants is a baby, and now she has to decide whether she wants to skip her crucial meds for nine months or give up having a child. You can’t believe how much heartbreak people go through because of this goddamn disease.”

  “I think I can,” Sam said, watching her.

  “And to think that what we’re doing … It blows me away. I just wish I could have told her there’s hope.”

  Sam nodded, saying nothing.

  They ate in silence for a few minutes, contemplating the weight of her words. Arianna felt a familiar rush that came whenever she pictured Sam at the moment of a breakthrough, as if envisioning it would somehow coax it into happening. A thrill ran through her as she bobbed her head to the beat of the music pulsing from her kitchen’s speakers.

  “Megan and I are going dancing tonight,” she volunteered.

  His eyes narrowed as he chewed his pasta.

  “What,” she said, “you don’t think I can dance?”

  “Don’t you need a man to lead?”
/>
  “Nah. Plus, do you see any men around here?”

  He made a face of mock hurt.

  “Seriously, Sam. I doubt you would take me dancing if I paid you.”

  “And why would I? It’s just two people trying not to step on each other’s toes.”

  “You’re right, it would be more fun to stay home.”

  “Just like me, right?” he said, forcefully chewing the last of his steak.

  “Sometimes I feel like I’m babysitting you,” she said lightly. “It’s like a study in tantrums.”

  She saw a smile on his lips, despite his mouthful of food. Their plates, she noticed, were empty. She stood up to clear them, but he reached for hers.

  “Thanks for cooking,” he muttered, carrying the plates to the sink.

  “Sure.” She moved beside him, putting a hand on his back as he rinsed their dishes. She could feel the blades under his skin like knife edges.

  “So…,” Sam began, not looking at her. “How is everything?”

  She withdrew her hand and crossed her arms. “Everything? Well, let’s see. My painting is going well.…” She saw him scowl. “Oh, you were talking about something else? Why didn’t you say so?” A note of annoyance floated on her teasing words. “I like dancing, but not around reality.”

  He nodded sheepishly, still scowling. “Fine. What’s your latest health status?”

  “It’s eh,” she responded matter-of-factly. “Are you trying to do a time check?”

  He nodded, reddening. She turned off the faucet and looked at him. It was not a question that required contemplation; the answer was like a billboard in her mind, inescapable on the way to other thoughts.

  “I would say at least a few months, but I’m not that kind of doctor. When I see my specialist soon, I’ll find out more exactly.”