But more than anything, I didn’t want to become someone’s lab rat.
* * *
—
A cold front crashed through the D.C. metro at rush hour.
A violence of black skies, wind, and rain—the final nail being hammered through the heart of autumn.
As I drove the last few blocks toward my home in the Bluemont neighborhood of Arlington, the air was aswirl with dead leaves, and I could feel the pressure change like a vise ratcheting down on my ribs.
With Beth in New York City, Ava and I ordered from our favorite Chinese place.
I built a fire.
First of the season.
And as a cold rain sluiced down the windows that overlooked the backyard, my daughter brought out our rosewood chessboard and began setting up the marble pieces. I thought I detected something in Ava’s body language—and a heaviness in her eyes.
“How was your first day back?” she asked.
“Fine. They put me on a desk in the Intelligence Division.”
“What do they do there?”
She held out both hands—a white pawn in one, a black pawn in the other. I chose her left hand.
Black.
She would go first.
“They keep tabs on all known scientists who used to work in genetics. Try to predict who among them might be willing to break the law.”
“How do you predict that?” Ava asked as she made her opening move.
Pawn to e4.
“An artificial intelligence program called MYSTIC.”
I brought out my king’s pawn to meet hers.
“Wow, Dad.”
“What?”
“You work for the man.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her what I had only recently begun to come to terms with. I didn’t just work for the man. I was the man.
We went back and forth, bringing our knights forward.
Ten minutes into the game, neither of us had lost a piece.
“Do you love your job?” Ava asked.
“It’s interesting work.”
“But do you love it?”
“Only the very lucky are fortunate enough to love—”
“That’s not an answer.”
I couldn’t help but smile. So much like her grandmother.
“Well, Mom loves her work,” Ava said.
“Yep. She’s one of the lucky ones.”
“Did you ever want to be a scientist like your mom?”
I nodded, finding her question curious—Ava had rarely asked about her grandmother. Of course she knew who she was, what she’d done. But we rarely spoke about her.
“What was she like?”
“One of the smartest people who ever lived.”
“No, what was she like? If she were in this room with us right now…”
“Serious most of the time. You always had the sense that she was thinking about something else, which she probably was. But when she wanted to engage, it was effortless. She could be wickedly funny in the right setting.”
“Was she a good mom?”
“I know she loved me. I’ll put it this way—I was not the most important thing in her life. She wanted to master the writing and editing of DNA. To heal sickness. Improve the quality of human life. The environment. The world. And it had nothing to do with money for her. She couldn’t have cared less about her fame.”
“Would I have liked her?”
“Hard to say. She would never have been Grandma Ramsay. People with those kinds of ambitions—they aren’t like the rest of us. There’s a relentlessness in them. They think they want peace. They think achievement will bring it to them. It never does.”
What I didn’t tell her was my unvarnished truth. How did I really feel about my mom? I hated her. And I loved her. And I wished I’d had a different mom, even as I wanted to be her. And I would’ve killed for her.
“You’ve never really asked personal questions about my mom before,” I said.
“Guess which global catastrophe we’re studying in modern world history?”
Fuck.
It was times like these when I was grateful we’d had the foresight to give our daughter her mother’s last name: Williams. Growing up is hard enough when you aren’t the granddaughter of the architect of the largest accidental mass killing in human history.
“Did anyone…”
“Only my teacher knows. She gave me a heads-up we’d be talking about it.”
I got an alert that our food had arrived.
I went outside and grabbed it from the front passenger seat of the empty, self-driving delivery vehicle. When I came back in, I saw that Ava’s bishop was threatening my queen’s knight. In short order, if I wasn’t careful, this would lead to me losing the game.
I set the bags of food on the coffee table as the spicy-sweet perfume of General Tso’s chicken and orange beef began to permeate the living room.
Ava looked up from the chessboard. “Did you get real meat?” she asked.
“I splurged.”
Her smile made the 300 percent upcharge worth every penny.
I returned to the game.
What Ava was doing—or trying to do—was lure me into blocking that threat with a pawn. If I fell for it, two moves later she would bring her queen to that newly vacated square, d3, and from there she was thirteen moves （assuming I didn’t block her pawn and king’s knight; seventeen moves if I did） from checkmate. But if I sacrificed my queen’s knight and used this move to advance my pawn to b5, the game’s momentum would shift. My queen and knight were already in position on her side of the board, and while I couldn’t see checkmate yet, I would definitely be taking a buzz saw through her pieces.
It was profoundly strange to be seeing this many moves ahead—I could usually manage two or three at most.
And so I advanced my pawn and, eleven moves later, checkmated Ava at f8 with my rook and queen.
She was as stunned as I was.
Oddly, this didn’t feel like any of our games in recent memory. I didn’t think she had let me win, but this was definitely not the Ava I was accustomed to playing. I wondered if the stuff with her grandmother had taken her focus off the game.
Reaching across the board to shake my hand, Ava said, “Have you been practicing?”
“No.” I smiled. “Can’t I get lucky sometimes?”
“That didn’t feel like luck.”
She got up, walked over to the bags of food.
“Hey,” I said.
She glanced back at me.
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
I chose my words carefully. “That my family’s baggage is affecting you. I wish I could tell you it gets easier.”
“Was she an evil person?”
“No. There are very few truly evil people in the world. She was just…deeply flawed.”
“I don’t know what I think about being her granddaughter. Knowing that part of her is in me. My boyfriend doesn’t even know. Feels like I’m lying to people.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, only that it broke my heart to see the pain of my mother’s actions finally manifesting in my daughter.
“These are hard things,” I said, “and if you ever feel like you want to talk to someone about it…someone who isn’t me or your mom…just say the word.”
* * *