“Knew you were—”
“A scientist!” Elizabeth snapped. “Look, I realize this may be hard for you to fathom given your own terrible circumstances, but while we may be born into families, it doesn’t necessarily mean we belong to them.”
“But we do—”
“No. You need to understand this, Calvin. People like my father preach love but are filled with hate. Anyone who threatens their narrow beliefs cannot be tolerated. The day my mother caught my brother holding hands with another boy, that was it. After a year of hearing that he was an aberration and didn’t deserve to live, he went out to the shed with a rope.”
She said it in a too-high voice, the way one does when one is trying very hard not to cry. He reached for her and she let him take her in his arms.
“How old were you?” he asked.
“Ten,” she said. “John was seventeen.”
“Tell me more about him,” he coaxed. “What was he like?”
“Oh, you know,” she mumbled. “Kind. Protective. John was the one who read to me every night, bandaged my skinned knees, taught me how to read and write. We moved a lot and I never really got any good at making friends, but I had John. We spent most of our time at the library. It became our sanctuary—the only thing we could count on from town to town. Sort of funny now that I think about it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Because my parents were in the sanctuary business.”
He nodded.
“One thing I’ve learned, Calvin: people will always yearn for a simple solution to their complicated problems. It’s a lot easier to have faith in something you can’t see, can’t touch, can’t explain, and can’t change, rather than to have faith in something you actually can.” She sighed. “One’s self, I mean.” She tensed her stomach.
They lay silently, both wading in the misery of their pasts.
“Where are your parents now?”
“My father’s in prison. One of his signs from God ended up killing three people. As for my mother, she divorced, remarried, and moved to Brazil. No extradition laws there. Did I mention my parents never paid taxes?”
Calvin let loose a long, low whistle. When one is raised on a steady diet of sorrow, it’s hard to imagine that others might have had an even larger serving.
“So after your brother…died…it was just you and your parents—”
“No,” she interrupted. “Just me. My parents were often gone for weeks at a time, and without John I had to become self-sufficient. So I did. I taught myself to cook and do small house repairs.”
“And school?”
“I already told you— I went to the library.”
“That’s it?”
She turned toward him. “That’s it.”
They lay together like felled trees. From several blocks away, a church bell tolled.
“When I was a kid,” Calvin said quietly, “I used to tell myself every day was new. That anything could happen.”
She took his hand again. “Did it help?”
His mouth sagged as he remembered what the bishop at the boys home had revealed to him about his father. “I guess I’m just saying we shouldn’t let ourselves get stuck in the past.”
She nodded, imagining a newly orphaned boy trying to convince himself of a brighter future. That had to be a special brand of bravery, for a child to endure the worst, and despite every law in the universe and all evidence to the contrary, decide the next day might be better.
“Every day is new,” Calvin repeated as if he were still that child. But the memory of what he’d learned about his father still proved too much for him and he stopped. “Look, I’m tired. Let’s call it a day.”
“We should get some sleep,” she said, not yawning.
“We can talk about this another time,” he said, depressed.
“Maybe tomorrow,” she lied.
Chapter 6
The Hastings Cafeteria
There’s nothing more irritating than witnessing someone else’s unfair share of happiness, and to some of their colleagues at Hastings Research Institute, Elizabeth and Calvin had an unfair share. He, because he was brilliant; she, because she was beautiful. When they became a couple, their unfair shares automatically doubled, making it really unfair.
The worst part, according to these people, was that they hadn’t earned their shares—they’d simply been born that way, meaning their unfair share of happiness arose, not from hard work, but from genetic luck. And the fact that the duo decided to combine their unearned gifts into one loving and probably highly sexual relationship, which the rest of them had to witness at lunch every day, just made it that much worse.