“But it doesn’t make sense,” Gemma said. “The other woman, the nurse who committed suicide—”
“Nurse M,” Jake said.
“Right. I mean, she was threatening to talk to the media, wasn’t she? Your dad was supposed to interview her.” He nodded. “I can understand why she’d be a threat. But Richard Haven founded the institute. He wouldn’t have wanted it shut down or exposed or whatever.”
Jake rubbed his eyes. “As far as we know,” he said. “But that’s the thing. We don’t know. Richard Haven was in it from the beginning—before the military got their hands in it through Fine and Ives. Maybe he was having doubts. Maybe he wanted to back out of the whole agreement. Or maybe he just decided he wanted recognition for his life’s work. There could be a thousand reasons he became dangerous.”
Gemma absorbed this in silence. Outside the window, the sun had sunk below the rooftops, leaving only a smear of red behind, like a bloody handprint. She stood up. “Come on,” she said. “Time to wake up our sleeping beauties.”
The houses in this complex were nestled one right next to the other. From above it must have looked like a jigsaw puzzle of roofs and tiled pools and squat gardenia bushes. Gemma could smell someone grilling, and hear the blare of a television from a nearby house. It was weird to think of all those other people so close, fixing dinner or watching Netflix or worrying about their bills, totally unaware of the explosion that had punched through Gemma’s life.
She felt very alone.
The guesthouse was dark. The replicas were still sleeping. Gemma could hear the boy snoring. She eased the door to the bedroom shut, figuring that if she wanted to get the truth about Haven she would need to start by buttering them up a little, earning their trust. She rooted around in the guesthouse cabinets until she found a pot.
“What are you doing?” Jake asked.
“Haven’t you ever heard?” Gemma next began opening the cans of chili she’d bought at Walmart. “Fastest way to a person’s heart is through the stomach.”
Jake smiled. “Ah. Of course. That’s why the police use so many cupcakes in their interrogations.” His hair had a funny cowlick, and for some reason it made Gemma sad. It was so normal. She knew she’d never feel normal again, not ever.
She had always joked about feeling like an alien, but she knew now that until today she’d had no idea what that meant.
“We’re not interrogating them. We’re talking to them. It’s different.” The stove sputtered for several seconds before it lit. “Turn on a light, will you? I can’t see anything.”
The room flared into shape, blandly reassuring: seashell prints on the walls, a sign in the kitchen that said This Way to the Beach. Jake wandered over to the small antique roll-away desk, which was the only piece of furniture in the whole open-plan room that wasn’t white or beach themed. Suddenly, he sucked in a sharp breath, as if he’d just seen a snake.
“What?” she asked “What is it?”
He had picked up a manila folder, the kind Gemma associated with dental records. “It’s a medical report from Haven.” He looked up. His eyes were burning again with that dark light, the kind that seemed to absorb and not reflect. “They must have brought it with them.”
He moved to the couch with the report and powered up his computer again. Gemma came to look. The folder was disappointingly light and contained only a single, double-sided report. Still, it was something. She leaned over and read from the heading. Form 475-A. Release Authorization and Toxicity Report. Human Model 576.
“What does it mean?” she asked. The whole report might as well have been written in another language. Every other phrase was one like over-conversion or neural impairment or some string of weird chemical-looking codes like vCJD-12 or pR-56.
“Let’s ask the oracle,” Jake said. “Google,” he clarified, when she looked at him.
She sat on the arm of the couch, because when she leaned any farther she was forced to inhale him, the new soap smell and the warmth of his skin, and she got distracted. But she felt awkward sitting there, posed and clumsy, like an overinflated doll, and so she returned to the stove just to have something to do.
When the bedroom door opened, she spun around, startled. Lyra looked better than she had on the marshes. Pretty, despite the sallowness of her skin and her cheekbones like beveled edges. But there was something frightening about Lyra’s stillness, and the blandness of her facial expression, as if there was nothing inside directing her, as if she were hollow, like a puppet.
Gemma slopped some of the chili into a bowl. “Here,” she said. Her voice sounded hysterical in the silence. “Chili. From a can. Sorry, I can’t cook. You need to eat.”
Lyra didn’t thank her. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t even sit down. She just took the bowl from Gemma automatically and began to eat mechanically, holding the spoon wrong and the bowl to her lips and shoveling the chili into her open mouth. It was strange to see a girl so fragile eat like that, like she was actually a trash compactor. Weirdly, Gemma liked her better for it.
“Transmissible spongiform encephalopathies,” Jake said, and Gemma jumped. This was it: they were on the verge of understanding. Suddenly all her fear left her at once. It was like standing at the top of a really steep sledding hill and then letting go. There was nothing to do anymore but ride. “That’s a category of disease. Mad cow is a TSE.”
“Okay.” Gemma went to sit next to Jake on the couch again. It was better than standing next to Lyra, the living evidence of whatever deranged experiments they were doing at Haven. “But what does that mean?”
“I don’t know.” Jake rubbed his forehead as if he had a headache. “There are just references to it in the report.”
At the sink, Lyra released her bowl with a clatter. Gemma looked up and saw she’d gone very still. “You shouldn’t be looking at that,” she said. Gemma wondered at Lyra’s loyalty to Haven—was she trying to protect its secrets?
“Why not?” Jake turned to Lyra. “You stole it, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” Lyra said evenly. “But that’s different.”
“It’s not like they’ll miss it now. The whole place is an ash heap.”
“Jake,” Gemma said quickly. For the first time, Lyra had flinched.
He shrugged. “Sorry. But it’s true.” He didn’t sound sorry at all. He sounded angry. And Gemma knew how he felt. If even a fraction of what they suspected of Haven was true, she was glad it had burned to the ground. She bent forward over the report again, trying to make sense of the baffling medical terminology and shorthand. Among the jumble of terms she couldn’t understand, she spotted repeated references to Human Model 576, generation seventeen, cluster yellow. “Lyra, do you know what these groups mean?” Gemma kept her voice light. Lyra was still motionless by the sink, as if she was waiting for someone to tell her what to do. Maybe she was. “The patient—the replica, I mean.” She looked up, wondering whether she had used the term correctly. After a second, Lyra barely nodded. “She was in the yellow cluster?”
“The Yellows died,” Lyra said. Gemma went cold. There was something terrible in Lyra’s matter-of-factness. “There were about a hundred of them,” she went on, “all from the youngest crops.” She could have been talking about anything. Groceries. The weather. Toilet paper. “Crops are for different generations. But colors are for clusters. So I’m third crop, green cluster.” She held up her wrist, and Gemma saw the green hospital bracelet, truly saw it, for the first time. “They must have made a mistake with the Yellows. Sometimes they did that. Made mistakes. The Pinks died, too.”
“They all died?” Jake asked.
Lyra nodded. “They got sick.”
“Oh my God.” According to the report, Human Model 576 hadn’t been even two years old when she died. “It says here she was only fourteen months,” Gemma said, because somehow she needed to speak the words, to get them out of her chest where they were clawing at her. Not a specimen. A child. Small and fat-cheeked with little fists that w
anted to grab at things. Gemma loved babies, always had. Who didn’t?
“You said colors are for clusters,” Jake said slowly. “But clusters of what?”
Lyra shrugged. “There are different clusters. We all get different variants.”
“Variants of what?” Jake pressed, and Gemma almost didn’t want to know the answer.
For a second, Lyra looked almost annoyed. “Medicine,” she said, so sharply that Jake briefly glanced at her.
“Look, Jake. It’s signed by Dr. Saperstein, just like you said.” She had the urge to take pair of scissors to it, to cut it into little shreds as if doing so would hurt the real person, too. Below Dr. Saperstein’s signature—which was hard and angular and fit Gemma’s impression of Dr. Saperstein as someone made all of angles and corners, someone from whom human feeling had been carved away—a nurse, Emily J. Huang, had signed as well.
“Dr. Saperstein is in charge of the growth of new crops of replicas,” Lyra said, and Gemma tried not to wince when she used that word, crops. She was surprised when Lyra voluntarily came closer. She didn’t sit, but she hovered there. Maybe she could read. Her eyes were moving in the right way. Normally Gemma found people who read over her shoulder intensely annoying, but she was afraid of doing anything to startle Lyra away. “He signs all the death certificates.” Gemma was surprised when Lyra smiled faintly. She reached out and touched Emily Huang’s name with a finger—gently, as if it were something fragile, a ladybug or a butterfly. “Nurse Em signed, too.”
Nurse Em. Something burst across Gemma’s mind—an electric pulse of understanding. She leaned back and closed her eyes. She saw whiteness, as if she’d been staring at the sun, and silhouettes stumbling in front of it, chanting soundlessly to her. “Nurse Em,” she said out loud, testing the sound of it. Yes.
“Holy shit,” Jake said, and she knew that he, too, had understood.
Emily J. Huang.
Nurse M.
Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 10 of Lyra’s story.
ELEVEN
GEMMA FELT CLAUSTROPHOBIC EVEN ONCE she was outside. She’d felt in that small bright box of a living room as if the ceiling were going to collapse—for a second she’d almost hoped it would. Now she knelt and plunged her head into the pool, which was shockingly cold, and came up gasping, her hair running water down onto her sweatshirt. But still she sensed a terrible pressure all around her, as if an invisible hand was trying to squeeze her into a sandwich bag. But she knew that in fact the pressure came from inside, from the weight of the truth and all that Jake had found out.
Ask and ye shall receive.
They had wanted to know why and now they did. They knew why. But now more than ever her mind reeled away from the truth, careened off it pinball-style. Instead she latched onto the ancillary mysteries, the other questions still unanswered: What had really happened to Emily Huang? Why had she left Haven? Was she really killed so she couldn’t talk to Jake’s dad?
Jake had gone home with a promise to call later. She was glad. She needed a break from him, from what they had learned together. He was implicated. She would forever associate Jake with the marshes, with the replicas, with the terrible thing growing inside of them.
Through the lit windows of the guesthouse she could see Lyra and 72 sitting together on the sofa, or at least, sitting side by side. Each of them seemed bound up in individual space, totally discrete, totally other. She wondered whether they knew she could see them, or even cared. They were likely used to being looked at. She couldn’t imagine what they’d seen, and she shivered thinking about how matter-of-factly Lyra had talked about all the children in the yellow cluster dying, as if she were talking about a field being mowed or the garbage taken out for collection.
She felt trapped. She couldn’t face the replicas again. But she couldn’t face April either, who appeared every two minutes at the kitchen window, cupping her face to the glass to peer outside, obviously dying to peek at the replicas in the guesthouse but doing her best to respect their privacy, at Gemma’s request.
Gemma knew she’d been unfair—she’d asked for help and hadn’t told April anything—but the more she learned, the more impossible it was to explain. Gemma didn’t want to be forced to say the words out loud. She thought the words might scorch her vocal cords, leave permanent damage, make blisters on her tongue. She wished in that moment she’d never come down to Florida, that she’d never heard of Haven at all. She imagined Whole Foods takeout and the big couch and her father safely away on the other side of the world. Kristina happy-zonked on her nighttime pills. April Snapchatting the funny-looking dogs she spotted in Florida. Even Chloe Goddamned DeWitt and her skinny-bitch wolf-pack friends. She would give anything to go back to caring about Chloe DeWitt.
But she couldn’t. She sat down on a sagging lounge chair and began running a search for Emily J. Huang on her phone. It was a common name. She tried Emily J. Huang, nurse, and a result surfaced immediately: a four-year-old funeral announcement. The announcement was accompanied by a picture of a pretty Asian woman smiling into the camera. The service had been held at the First Episcopal Church in Palm Grove, Florida—she’d seen an exit sign for Palm Grove on the highway earlier.
Emily J. Huang recently returned from a seven-year tenure with Doctors Without Borders, where she was dispatched to remote places in the world to volunteer with underserved medical communities . . .
Emily must have made up a cover story to tell her friends and family while she was working at Haven. No wonder Nurse M’s identity had never been established. Emily had been sure to keep her personal and work lives separate.
. . . and had previously served as a staff director at a charity that placed children from high-risk backgrounds in stable environments . . .
Gemma reread the sentence a second and then a third time. Jake had mentioned that Dr. Saperstein had founded a charity responsible for placing foster kids and orphans into homes. Could it be a coincidence? She searched Emily J. Huang and the Home Foundation and sucked in a quick breath. There were hundreds of results, many of them from newspapers or crime blogs. One of the first articles, from a Miami-based paper dated only six months before the funeral announcement, showed Emily Huang leaving a police station, her hand raised to shield her face from the cameras. Gemma took a notebook from her backpack and made notes as she was reading, hoping a pattern would emerge.
The state attorney’s office has declined to file charges against the charity the Home Foundation, after an initial inquiry showed that a number of foster children may have gone missing under its supervision. Our research puts that number at anywhere from twenty-five to more than two hundred over a three-year period beginning in 2001, during explosive growth that eventually resulted in the Home Foundation’s expansion nationwide, and consolidation into one of the most powerful and well-endowed charities in the country. Several relatives of the children who allegedly came under the Home Foundation’s care have come forward to suggest that the charity be charged with abuse, neglect, and fraud. One plaintiff has even filed a suit charging the Home Foundation with abduction.
“After a careful review of the cases in question, and in consideration of the thousands of children that the Home Foundation has successfully placed and monitored in homes across the nation, we don’t think there’s a case here to pursue at this time,” said Assistant State Attorney Charles Lanski.
The Home Foundation has released only a single statement, in which it referred to the accusations as “wild, bizarre, and absolutely invented.” Initially, they did not respond to a request for further statement. But later, Megan Shipman, director of publicity for the Home Foundation, followed up in an email.
“It’s unfortunate that the accusations of a small group of very troubled individuals is calling into question the work of a twenty-year-old organization, which has placed more than two thousand children in safe and happy homes,” she wrote. “Anyone who takes the accusations in context can see that they
are no more than attempts to exploit human tragedy for financial gain.”
All three accusers who have come forward were, at the time of the incidents in question, heavy substance abusers. Sarah Mueller was only nineteen and a crack-cocaine addict when a woman she claims was from the Home Foundation offered her the sum of two thousand dollars for temporary custodial guardianship of her infant child, Diamond.
Speaking from the state-run rehabilitative halfway house where she currently lives, Mueller told the Highland News: “I didn’t think it was for good. I thought I could have her back soon as I got clean.” But when Mueller sobered up, after a long period of bouncing between the streets, jail, and rehabilitation programs, she found that the Home Foundation showed no record at all that Diamond had ever come through their system.
Mueller’s story has eerie parallels to that of Fatima “Tina” Aboud, who was barely out of her teens when a woman she describes as a Home Foundation “nurse” came knocking. Aboud claims she was offered three thousand dollars for her son, then two years old. Aboud, who suffers from schizophrenia, agreed, believing that if she didn’t, the CIA would come for her child. Ten years later, Aboud is stabilized through medication and has tried to locate her son, Benjamin, only to find the trail completely cold.
The last plaintiff to come forward is Rick Harliss, and his story is the most difficult to untangle. The Highland News has learned exclusively that Harliss, a sometime-handyman, was in jail after an altercation involving his then-employer, Geoffrey Ives, formerly of the pharmaceutical giant Fine & Ives.
Gemma’s stomach dropped through the soles of her feet. For a second the words blurred. She blinked, trying to make them come into focus again. Still her father’s name was there.
Harliss left his daughter in the care of his ex-wife, Aimee (now deceased). Aimee subsequently claimed their daughter, Brandy-Nicole, was kidnapped from the car while she was at the grocery store. But Harliss became suspicious when her account of the story changed, and when he noticed that she came into a large sum of cash at the same time Brandy-Nicole vanished.