He stops like there’s no more to the story, like the emotional trauma of inventing a life-thieving, limb-curdling, town-destroying chemical is the embarrassment of naming it like a middle schooler. If I could, I would leap across the room and shake him.
“But my father, well, his goals were different from mine. He got really excited. Belsum wasn’t a chemical company at the time. We were Belsum Industrial. We made containers and container parts—bottle tops, rubber seals, things like that. But my father got how big GL606 could be before I even finished explaining it to him. He was … proud of me. Proud of. Impressed by. Thrilled with. Do you know what it feels like to please a man you’ve been disappointing your whole life? Do you know what it feels like to succeed like that in front of your father? Especially when your father is a man like mine?”
I catch Nora’s eye. She has never not been proud of, impressed by, and thrilled with me, even when I am nothing special, even when I am nothing but. It occurs to me for the first time: there are some ways, some crucial, breathtaking, shattering ways, in which Nathan Templeton’s lot is far unluckier than mine. I mean, there’s money and mobility and living in the house on the hill, but which would you choose: parental love and support and pride, or a chemical company mired in public relations nightmares and a tenuous all-eggs-in reopening plan, the thwarting of which is currently being concocted by three tenacious teenagers?
“I can imagine that would be a very seductive feeling,” Nora allows.
“So I started testing the 606.”
“And?” Nora nods, giving him permission to continue, never mind what’s coming. I catch her eye again and remind her to breathe. I remind myself to breathe. “What did the tests show?”
“Increased liver size in rabbits. Birth defects in rats. Tumors and cancers in dogs. DNA damage. The same thing that made it appealing was also the problem with it. It was resistant to degradation, meaning it held up to the manufacturing process, but it was also bio-resistant. It stays in the body, builds up over time, does not biodegrade or break down really ever. I told my father all this, but he didn’t … It’s not that he didn’t care. It’s just that it wasn’t a deal breaker as far as he was concerned.”
“But, I mean, it wasn’t your or even his decision, right? There are procedures, regulations. Right?” She’s trying to allay his feelings of guilt and culpability, which is what she should be doing, but there’s an edge in her voice that’s desperate, panicky almost. “You had to show the government or the EPA or the—I don’t know—oversight bodies of some kind? You had to prove it’s safe.”
“You’d like to believe that, right? That’s what we count on. You believing that. You think if a chemical might be unsafe, it’s tested, and if the results are unfavorable, it’s banned or at least regulated. But it’s not true. Until last year, the EPA only had to test chemicals that had been proven to cause harm. Already. And the burden of that proof … Well, let’s just say, most chemicals never get tested at all. There are tens of thousands of synthetic chemicals in use by companies a lot less scrupulous than we are, and nearly none of them have been tested for safety, never mind environmental impact. They’re almost all entirely unregulated.”
“But.” Nora’s mind skitters away from Nathan’s crisis of conscience. “But, like, the FDA? I have a patient who was part of a clinical trial a few years ago that required more paperwork and monitoring than anything I’ve ever seen. And she was sick already.”
“GL606 isn’t a food, and it isn’t a drug. You don’t ingest it.”
“You do if it gets in your water.” Her voice is shedding the downy cloak it wears for therapy sessions.
“We didn’t know it would. We thought it might, yes, but we didn’t know it would, and we didn’t know it would be harmful if it did. Mine were barely preliminary results. Conclusive ones would take years and a team of scientists and a budget well beyond what they give postdocs. Therefore I was being unnecessarily rigorous with the testing, overly stringent, obnoxiously dogged as usual, in my father’s opinion. Meanwhile, his experts were pointing out that humans are bigger than lab animals with different biology and can handle significantly higher dosages.”
“And that’s all it takes?” Nora sounds not angry but awed. “To make everyone ignore what you don’t want them to see? To slip right through?”