Chapter Eighteen
The worst thing of all was that “the dinner incident” as she would later think of it, had happened on a Friday night. She would have to wait until Monday afternoon to discuss the whole matter with Jillian. When another long weekend of soccer ended, she gleefully counted down the hours until two p.m. on Monday and then jumped on the button to connect with her dear friend.
Jillian patiently listened as Suella related every detail of the story to her, including the hours they lay together in her den, holding each other, sobbing together. “That’s terrible,” Jillian said, when she’d heard everything. “But you know she didn’t mean anything by it, right?”
“Yes, I know.”
Jillian took a long sip of tea, gazing out into the space before here, deeply in thought. Suella braced herself for what might be ahead. “Natalie’s getting to the age where children try to separate from their parents, where they desperately try to make friends with other children.”
“Yes. I know. And?”
Jillian cleared her throat. “And…they desperately want to fit in, to feel just like other kids do. You remember how complicated it was, right?”
“Of course.”
From the other screen, Jillian leaned forward, making her face very large in the image. She looked as if she wanted to squeeze herself through the wires and electrons and somehow teleport herself from fifteen hundred miles away. “To Natalie, the thing that makes her different is that she’s a clone. She knows that she’s not like other kids.
That she’ll never be exactly like other kids. It might make her just a little bit frustrated.”
“I know,” Suella interrupted. “But if she just knew how much I loved her…”
“Well she does know how much you care. She was so upset that she might have hurt you…”
Interrupting again, Suella continued: “If there was just some way I could relive what happened out on that soccer field. We’d be one again.”
The remark caused Jillian to squint uncharacteristically, then widen her eyes. Suella patiently waited for her friend to share whatever thought had just occurred to her.
“Suella, do you…” Jillian started to speak, but winced, stopping herself.
“Do I what? Do I what?”
She took in a deep breath, creating quite a big buildup for whatever she was going to say. “Do you want to be Natalie?”
Suella felt her temples tinge with flashes of heat and she became light-headed, nauseous. She breathed rapidly, unable to speak for a moment. When she regained her composure, she said “Of course not. She’s her own person. She came through me, but is not of me, just like Nathan said.” Thankfully her friend changed the subject after that, and they spent the rest of the two hours discussing how Jillian’s meeting with the art curator had gone. Her artwork was slowly bringing her more acclaim, and fame, and riches. “I’m so happy for you,” Suella said.
Later that night, Suella decided that more than anything else, she wanted her consciousness to meld with Natalie’s once again. She wanted to be one with her again, to hell with the implications. Surely someone else who’d been raising a cloned child had experienced something similar to what had happened between Natalie and her.
After dinner that night, she invented an excuse of having to “knuckle down” and work hard on an important project for a client. She would need time alone, undisturbed. It enabled her to retreat to her den, shut the door behind her and start researching the subject voraciously.
For hours she read dry clinical copy about the physical makeup of dendrites and neurons in the brain as well as new-agey fluff from websites dedicated to all night radio shows that discussed remote viewing and out-of-body experiences. Trying to make sense of it all, she concluded that a release of endorphins takes the body where it does not normally go. Natalie had been running hard out on the soccer field that day, exerting herself, releasing endorphins that made her brain more susceptible, more open to her.
A quick review of some information on cloning websites confirmed that many cloned parents report being able to “step inside” their cloned sons and daughters bodies for brief flashes, and see the world through their eyes. No one seemed to know how the phenomenon worked. There was no information on how to induce it, either. Yet, Suella knew that if she was able to meld with her daughter the way she’d been able to out on that soccer field, that maybe it would deepen their relationship. Maybe it would help Natalie become just a little more like her, even if they were only able to meld together for short patches of time.
The key was the endorphins. It was not realistic to try to keep Natalie on a permanent runner’s high that would bring on the endorphins. With better living through chemistry, though, the new anti-depressants focused on raising endorphin levels, as a way of helping people feel better about themselves. Suella would have to find a way to get Natalie to take the medications, that would perhaps open her up to the glorious melding.
But how? Getting a conventional doctor to prescribe and administer them, especially since the 2010 health care overhaul, resulted in piles of red tape and headaches. It required something a little bit more creative and clandestine.
Mexico.
She could invent some type of an excuse to take a daytrip, maybe even just say she was going to their Oceanside condo and then simply trudge onward for a few miles more. The medicine could be delivered through a laser tap, which Suella could touch her with as she slept.
The center. During the exhaustive physicals for Natalie they would find traces of the medication in her system. How could she get around that? Simple. Just discontinue the medication for a full month before her appointment. Surely it would have dissipated from her system by then, wouldn’t it?
The whole scheme tested her broken Spanish. A few days later she set out in the Mazda for south of the laughingly porous border for a village conveniently tucked away in the desert. For the swarthy aides at the clinic down there and the short, round nurses she recited a rehearsed story about her elderly mother who’d dwindled far into depression over her worsening diabetes. Cruel American doctors hampered by mountains of regulations had been unable to help, so she’d decided to take matters into her own hands.
Suella drove back home carrying a shiny plastic bag filled with laser taps and tiny doses of antidepressant shaped like bullets. As she turned onto the ancient 405 for the last leg of her trip, she thought about how she would get the meds into her daughter. Natalie would have to be sound asleep, of course, so Suella would have to wait until two hours after she’d gone to bed. She’d have to distract Nathan somehow.
Most nights he surfed sporting events and laughed at young pitchers trying to come up through the Latin American leagues. He must never catch her tapping the med, called Apelbaumentine, into Natalie. No one would ever know. They’d just all comment about how much sweeter and ladylike Natalie had become.
Many medications still had bad side effects, even after all of the controversies of the last decade, when they’d pulled Viagra from the market after discovering that it caused Alzheimer’s disease and Lipitor, which exacerbated cholesterol rather than helping it. Suella scoured reams of copy about clinical studies of Apelbaumentine, translating anatomic and chemical terms with her online toolbox. The worst item she could find was proof that the medication caused more frequent urination. Big deal!
To her dismay, she also found out that one dosage of it would last for eight hours. If Suella tapped Natalie with the medication just after she’d gone to bed, then she would sleep through all of its effects. She would have to tap her at the beginning of the day instead. From that day on, she would start a tradition of giving Natalie a hug to start every morning. While she was in her mother’s embrace, it would be easy for her to tap the medication onto her arm or back.
“Good morning, my sweet Natalie,” Suella said bright and early that first morning, after opening Natalie’s
door. “I’ve got nice fresh orange juice and a hug for you this morning.” Still groggy from sleep, Natalie sat up in her bed, accepted the orange juice and her mother’s hug, and Suella tapped the laser onto the skin just below the back of her neck. “Something tells me its going to be a wonderful day.”
Suella also had to hide the laser taps and the dosages. The desk drawer, even the one in her den, would not do. Nathan sometimes looked for programs or files in there.
She kept them in an old hat box on her side of the bedroom closet instead. While she dutifully dosed her daughter every morning, she studied her for any results, no matter how subtle. Out on the soccer field and the volleyball court, she was just as tough, just as active as she’d been before. Toni no longer picked her up from school as Suella reclaimed all the transportation responsibilities to maximize the possibility for melding experiences with Natalie.
The holidays came and went. It would be easier for Suella to determine whether the meds were working. Natalie became very giddy during Thanksgiving and Christmas, which seemed to be her favorite times of the year. As of January, there were only three more months for Suella to devote to her little experiment. One night at dinner early in 2025 Nathan noticed something. He gazed curiously at Natalie. “Look at me,” he said.
As she turned to look at him he frowned, bobbing his chin up and down and squinting as he checked over her eyes and face. “I thought your eyes were getting darker. It’s just your pupils, though. They’re as big as saucers! What have you been doing, girl?”
Nathan was smiling while he talked to her, clearly joking around about something slightly unusual he’d noticed. Suella allowed herself to breathe. For the next couple of days after that, she monitored the condition of Natalie’s eyes. Though they looked slightly glassy to her, the pupils remained small, or at least average sized. She was already much more mellow and polite than she’d been before. When were things going to get to the next level? When would she and Natalie meld again?
One morning she found out. As she entered her daughter’s room, which always received the first slicing rays of sunlight, she felt slightly tipsy and light headed. She cheerfully offered her daughter a hug and tapped down, as always.
While in her daughter’s embrace, she felt as if she’d been cosmically flipped over. She found herself covered from the hip down in blankets, receiving a warm hug with a cuddling rockabye sway. “Thanks, mom,” came the whisper from her lips.
Suella felt like yelping for joy.
This helped her to feel much better about stopping Natalie’s medications at the beginning of March. For the whole beginning of that new year, 2025, she remembered a movie she’d seen as a fourteen-year-old, entitled Back to the Future, Part 2. That movie, made more than thirty-five years ago, had attempted to depict what the year 2015 would look like. People traveled in cars that flew, children played on contraptions called “hoverboards,” and people watched televisions with twelve squares. The only thing the producers got right was the part about the televisions. Yet, no one Suella knew of actually watched all twelve available screens on a television. She watched the movie whenever she wanted to give herself a good laugh.
During that week of Natalie’s 11-year appointment, she watched the movie twice. Yes, enough time had gone by for all the traces of the medication to filter out of her system, she kept telling herself. She was still uncertain how the tests would turn out, because even though the medications would have gone out of her system, test results might show lingering effects of them somehow. Without the medications, Natalie’s regular personality returned. She regained her energy. Nathan and Natalie would often play catch in the back yard, either with baseball gloves and baseballs, a football, or a Frisbee. More than once, Suella called out: “Natalie, honey, I need your help in the kitchen!” and she had her wash dishes by hand in the sink.
For awhile, Natalie dutifully scraped the plates from that day’s lunch.
She scrubbed them in the soapy water, rinsed them, and placed them in a dusty dish drainer Suella had fished out from beneath the sink. By the fifth dish or so, Natalie started to stretch her lips to one side of her mouth, a sign Suella recognized that she didn’t like something. Still, she resisted the urge to ask her if something was wrong, knowing that she might not like the answer.
Natalie saved her the trouble. “Are you punishing me?”
Suella forced a smile. “No, darling. Why in the world would you think that?”
“Since when do we wash dishes by hand? And I’m making them dirty again by putting them in that nasty plastic thing. We have a perfectly good dishwasher.”
Suella felt a flush of embarrassment. She sighed. “You’re right, honey. I plead guilty.” She raised her right hand into the air as if she was getting sworn in during a court proceeding. “I just wanted to spend a little bit of time with you. Is that so terrible?” She tenderly brushed a lock of blond hair away from her daughter’s face, to punctuate the point.
Natalie continued to wash the remaining dishes and glasses in the sink. “But you see me all the time, mom. You see me in the morning. You see me after school. You see me all weekend if I don’t have a soccer game.”
Suella forced a short, mirthless laugh. “Well then sue me for loving you. I’m your mother.” Natalie’s appointment at the center for her 11-year checkup could not arrive quickly enough.
The morning of the appointment, Suella was so nervous she wondered whether she should shoot herself with an Apelbaumentine. She had no idea of how the medication would affect her, however, and she had to drive her daughter.
Natalie sat low in the passenger seat for the ride. She had let her long hair fall forward, covering most of her face and her eyes from Suella’s view. Suella could only see Natalie’s mouth, which she had set into a straight line. “Dr. Allende has an office over near our neighborhood, you know,” she murmured, in a matter-of-fact, expressionless voice. “Why can’t I just see her there? Why do we have to go all the way out to the dirty desert?”
Suella kept her eyes on the road as she responded. “Because, dear, we’ve been over this before. There are many other doctors at the center besides Dr. Allende. They’re all very interested in how you’re doing.”
“They make me feel like a guinea pig, or a rat in a lab.”
Suella sighed. She knew it was true. During the appointments, they put Natalie in a hospital gown almost from the moment she walked in through the door. They would connect various electrodes to her, run her through various scans, and draw blood at least twice. Though all of the doctors and nurses were nice, and professional, it still must have felt cold, clinical, and disconcerting. The best she could offer was “It’ll all be over before you know it.”
“Yeah,” Natalie said. “I can’t wait until I’m eighteen.”
They still would not let Suella into any of the examination rooms with Natalie. She sat in the same lobby she’d used for the past eleven years. They’d redone the chairs so that now they were chrome-railed, with slick black leather upholstery, but the building and interior had remained the same. To help pass the time, she helped a few clients with projects. Before long she lost herself in the virtual worlds she helped run so smoothly.
When she finished, she checked her clock: Natalie’s appointment had gone on for a half-hour longer than normal. What were they finding?
A few minutes later, Dr. Allende appeared from around the corner, wearing a crisp white lab coat, the flipped ends of her hair bouncing delicately against her shoulders when she walked. Silently, she motioned for Suella to follow her, which suddenly made her feel as if she’d been thrust into a slow-motion, creepy movie. Her stomach frosted over, and her legs felt as if they’d been encased in lead stockings while she followed the doctor through the cubby-holed offices and suites.
When they reached Dr. Allende’s office, she cordially invited her to sit down. Suella sat on the edg
e of an office chair, tightly gripping her purse while the doctor shuffled a stack of paperwork in front of her.
Suella could not resist: “Is something wrong?”
Dr. Allende gave a short smile. “No, everything’s fine. We have some lab work results here that concern me a little, though.”
“Go ahead,” she said.
“Nothing to be too alarmed about. Some of her electrolyte readings are a little bit off.”
Suella nodded. She had a vague idea that “electrolytes” were: something having to do with salt and metal chemicals that needed to be in balance in the body. “So I should give her more oranges to eat or something?”
“That would take care of the potassium,” the doctor said. She leaned back in her desk chair. Calmly appraising Suella, she steepled her fingers in the air in front of her.
“Tell me, has Natalie’s diet changed?”
Suella gave the matter some honest thought. She bought only organic food.
Food savings accounts had been developed during the scare of 2009-10, and when all the dust settled, she kept her account. They used the ingredients she liked, without too many additives. “She eats well,” Suella replied. “I try to keep her away from junk, just like you all said in your guidelines.”
Dr. Allende tapped the stack of papers to indicate she was through with her little talk. “Just make sure she’s eating all her fruits and vegetables and drinking enough water. She’ll be fine.”
“Everything else was okay?”
The doctor nodded. Suella let out a long sigh of relief.