COSMOS magazine

Friday, May 2

Even in her dream, Jill knew it was too good to be true. Flutes, lutes, tambourines... sunlight distilled into pure music... She was wraith-slender. Paul strolled by her side, no, no, it was Keith, baby Alex riding on his shoulders. The aerobics instructor leaned across her, and Jill drew back from grinning white teeth like tombstones and breath that smelled of burnt toast.

"Mom? Wake up, Mom!"

Jill started, heart thudding madly, opened her eyes. "Wha—?"

Alex stood at the bedside, beaming, holding a tray.

"I made you a present, Mom. Breakfast in bed."

She smiled to herself. "A surprise! Why, thank you!" Well, wouldn't kill her to consume undercooked scrambled eggs and half-blackened toast, and as usual she was starving. "Happy birthday, sweetie. I should be bringing you breakfast in bed." Hitching herself up, she ate a bite, taking care to disguise her reluctance. "Looks delicious, Alex. Come here." She pulled him close with her free arm, hugged him fiercely. "How does it feel to be ten years old?"

"I don't think I'm any taller than yesterday," he said. Children were so solemn. But not even quite a child any more. Soon he'd be a teenager. Soon he'd be slipping away from her hugs.

"Hmm … ' Tilting her head, she looked him up and down, holding on to their old games. "Three or four inches maybe, hardly noticeable." The sweet dream was blurring, fading. "Hey, I was just dreaming about— Um. When your dad and I took you to the Renaissance Music Festival, remember?"

Alex blinked, frowned, leaned against her, tilting the crowded tray.

"Well, okay—you were only twenty-five years old at the time."

"Mom!" Her son rolled his eyes.

"Oh, guess I've got us mixed up. Well, you might have been two years old. Sound better?"

"Yeah. Before Dad—"

Ran off with his floozy, yeah. Jill washed burnt toast down with orange juice. "They held the festival in Pease Park. Your dad bought a bunch of wildflowers for me. We spread out a blanket on the ground, and you asked if you could hold the flowers."

Alex sent her a naughty, sidelong, hopeful glance. "What'd I do, eat them?"

"Better than that." She poked him playfully. "Pulled the petals off the flowers and spread them all over the blanket."

"Twenty-five petals?"

"Twenty-five thousand, it looked like."

"You were mad, right?"

"Only for the first twenty-five seconds." She hugged him again, smiled. "It was worth sacrificing my bouquet, the flower petals looked so beautiful."

The boy hugged her back.

"You're beautiful, Mom." He looked at her with uncomplicated love, features utterly smooth and guileless. It took a child's innocence to ignore the scars across her face, the added pounds. Adults who'd once sighed as she passed simply didn't notice her. To Alex, thank God, she was still simply Mom.

Oh, damn! The light was wrong for six-thirty in the morning. Overslept again. "Alex?" She shoved back the covers, jamming the last of the toast and eggs into her mouth. "Had your own breakfast, sweetie?"

"Not yet."

"Go get something, honey. We've gotta hurry."

Jill picked a skirt at random, stuffed her blouse into the waistband, fumbled with the zipper. Double damn! For the entire past two weeks she'd been skipping lunch. The scale told her she'd lost a pound and a half, but her clothes weren't getting any looser. Maybe Carol was right and you had to combine dieting with serious exercise. Easy for Carol to talk about jogging and working out at the gym, but these days Jill considered herself lucky if she found time to ride her bike ten minutes a week. Well, aside from the disagreeable prospect of buying a whole new wardrobe in yet larger sizes, her weight didn't seem to matter all that much any more.

"Alex!" she called in the direction of the kitchen as she hurried into the bathroom. "Are you eating your breakfast?"

"I don't like oatmeal." He was pouting, no longer adorable. Maybe he was disappointed that she hadn't surprised him with his birthday present. She was keeping the computer game for after dinner tonight, couldn't afford the time to distract him now by holding such a prize out of reach.

"You're scuffing your feet on the floor again, Alex."

"I'm wearing my squeakers." He belted out a loud, fake laugh.

"Well, squeak on into the kitchen and eat. You liked oatmeal yesterday."

"I'm not hungry."

"At least have a glass of milk." Jill ran a toothbrush over her teeth. No time for makeup. Oh well. She picked up the towel Alex had left flung over the side of the tub and dragged it across her face while heading to the kitchen. It smelled slightly; she flung it into the laundry basket.

"Come on, sweetie, it'd be majorly uncool for me to be late for work again. Here's a brand new box of Weet-A-Bix. Bring me your bowl." As she pulled the box of cereal from the pantry, Alex knocked over a bag of cat food, sending pellets rattling across the floor. "Shit!" she said under her breath. No time to clean it up now. "Here's your..." He had vanished. "Alex, what are you doing!" Jill tried to keep her voice calm, but she was nearing the breaking point.

"I'm bringing in Miz Kitty so she can clean up the cat food I spilled."

"We'll deal with that this afternoon. We need to get you to school. I'm serious, Alex."

"I don't feel well. I've got a headache."

"I thought you liked school this year?"

"Can't I stay home today with Miz Kitty?"

"Alex, I'm serious, I'll be out of a job if I'm late again. Birthday dinner tonight, remember? I'll pick you up early."

She'd make it up to him, she vowed. They'd have his favourite meal, and a cake, and he'd love his new game. Eek, look at the time!

---

Jill glanced at her computer clock again. Half past five. Her secretary Clothile had already left for the day. Feeling sick with guilt, Jill acknowledged that she'd broken her promise to Alex. But what choice did she have? Hired in a tight economy, she was expected to be so grateful for the job that she'd put her professional life ahead of all else, no questions or demurs. A little boy's tenth birthday dinner didn't count. Not compared with multinational business transactions affecting hundreds of people. Not when you were the lowest of the low, newest associate of the two partner office.

On good days, Jill loved working for Allen, Hoffman, and Flory. The 19th century mansion, home of the Austin offices of the national law firm, had been painstakingly restored to its original beauty and then some. She especially loved her small second floor suite with its delicately carved mouldings and French doors opening onto a balcony that stretched the length of the building, looking down into the rose garden.

This was not one of the good days.

For most of the day she'd stared at the flat-screen computer monitor, fingers tapping in a haze of concentrated competence. At five thirty she was in a final rush, organizing and summarizing case law on the issue of conversion of corporations to limited partnerships. Fighting anxiety, she tried to focus on her work. Maybe I can plead with Will Flory just to let me take my kid for a quick dinner, she thought, then come back and finish the work later. The intercom buzzed.

"Jill?" Fran. Will's secretary. "Mr. Flory wants to know when you'll have the research on the Leon case. He needs it asap."

Shit.

---

Alex looked pitiful, sitting on a swing in a deserted play yard, last kid to be picked up from after school care. Dennis, the teacher on duty, gazed pointedly at his watch. "You owe us twenty-two dollars," he said sharply. A dollar 'fine' for each minute past six-thirty. Well, couldn't blame him, he had his own dinner and evening plans to think about.

When Jill and Alex finally got home at seven-thirty they were greeted by a vile odour and a frantic cat.

"We forgot to put Miz Kitty out," Alex said, breaking a silence that had lasted since she got him from after school care. "Eeew, she has diarrhoea."

"Never mind." Jill willed herself to smile. "I'll clean it up in no time, and then we eat and watch the new Spiderman."

"I don't wanna eat. Just wanna watch the movie."

"You have to eat, Alex." Lately he seemed like two different people. He could change almost instantaneously from her own sweet lovable son to an angry and sullen stranger. My fault, she told herself with renewed guilt. I've been neglecting him terribly since I took the Allen, Hoffman position.

"Not hungry," Alex whined. "My head hurts."

"It's probably from not eating. I'm sorry I was so late, sweetie. Nothing I could do about it, honest."

He scowled. She couldn't blame him, but this mulishness was worse than a tantrum.

"Alex, c'mon, we have this delicious pizza and cake and that Netflix DVD to watch. And I've got a present for you too. Let's try to cheer up."

"Don't want your stupid present."

Exasperated, Jill told him, "I don't want you talking that way to me. If you don't straighten up, there'll be no DVD tonight."

"I don't care!" He stomped into his room, slammed the door.

Sighing, annoyed with herself and with her job's demands, Jill turned to the task of cleaning up the cat's mess. Through the door, she heard Alex sobbing in his room. She wanted desperately to go in and comfort him, but she knew he would push her away.

Friday, May 2

Two mice, one white, one brown, lay curled together like Yin and Yang. The rattle of pellets pouring into the metal feeder woke them, and they stretched and yawned. For the first two months of the experiment, Paul had kept them in separate cages. Yesterday, the protocol had paired them up, testing for effects on their social interaction. To his surprise, he found none of the usual jockeying for dominant position or fighting over food. Maybe next time, he thought, I should try putting larger groups together. More crowding, more stress. It would put pressure on the treatment.

"Hey, guys. Hey." The brown mouse was sitting up on its hind legs, holding a food pellet in both front paws. Paul reached into the cage and gently ran a finger along its back. It stared up at him with beady black eyes and took a bite of the pellet.

"If I didn't know better, little fellow, I'd think you were curious about me." Latching the door, Paul moved to the next cage, where the two occupants were grooming each other. He blinked, still hardly believing what he saw. Not mousy behaviour, not at all. As he dumped in the food pellets, both animals ran eagerly to the feeder. Instead of fighting or jostling for the food, the first mouse to reach the feeder took a pellet, then moved back to give the other one access.

He'd seen the same pattern in all ten cages.

"My goodness," he told the mice, "are we achieving the dreams of the 1960s here, or what?" He grinned as he opened his laptop to record his observations. "Peace and love for all mousekind." Well, this completely unexpected result might finally disprove the old myth about unfeeling intellects. How many times had he been assured that a person could have brains or a heart, but not both? Bizarre prejudice, especially here in Austin, Texas, which the locals boasted was the live music capital of the world and the home of advanced medical research.

He smiled to himself, watching the small animals. These modified mice were smart as a whip, yet they surely loved each other.

Paul completed his journal entry, downloaded his email, then checked Trash to make sure his spam filter hadn't thrown away something important. The filter had automatically deleted a couple of "PAUL.GIBSON DONT IGNORE THIS NOTICE' spam messages, offers of cheap V1agr.a and Human Growth Hormone, and a worm-laden attachment. The bastards were always coming up with new ways to burst in. He paused at a news flash from the Organization of Biotechnology Development, retrieved it from Trash.

Subject: Nature Forever lobbies for anti-tech law

Should read that, he told himself. But the next message was from his colleague in San Antonio, Drew Chang.

Subject: FWD: Viral Vectors in Pharmakinetics

Eagerly, Paul opened it, and instantly forgot about everything but tracking Drew's url links and reading his comments.

In their cages, the mice shared their dinner and chittered.