Years ago, Davis had tried to get Jackie interested in her own family history, but even talking about it bored her. “I’m much more interested in my family present, ” she said, one of thousands of unsubtle jabs she had leveled over the years at his eighty-hour office schedule.
Working from some old photographs and letters Jackie inherited from her mother, Davis constructed an incomplete chart of her clan going back five generations, and presented it to her in a frame one Mother’s Day. Jackie said she liked it and hung it in a spare bedroom where she kept her treadmill and her sewing and craft supplies. When Anna Kat assembled a seventh-grade project on her ancestors (basically cribbing years of her father’s work inside a slim decorative binder), she used her mother’s chart as a demonstration piece to explain the terms and techniques of genealogy and received an A from her teacher. Shortly after AK died, perhaps as soon as the day after, Jackie took the chart down and Davis hadn’t seen or asked about it since. He understood why looking at it was so difficult; he felt pain as well as pleasure these days when he sorted through his own family files. Those manila folders and index cards represented real lives to him, just as the files in his office, with the names of cloned boys and girls, represented children who were now loving and being loved. The difference with the files at home was that many of his relatives no longer existed outside of his little blue room. When he pulled a card on his great-great-uncle Vic and updated his date of birth or his social security number, he was certain to be the only living person who thought about long-dead Vic that day. There was sadness to that – bitter-sweetness – but such simple and melancholy tributes to the dead were also satisfying. He didn’t look forward to the day when he could think about Anna Kat and not be hurt by her memory.
“Did you ever consider it?” she asked him. It was late and they had been drinking wine and reading to themselves. Jackie had started a conversation and Davis had faked his way through it but now realized he didn’t know what they were talking about.
“Consider what?”
“Cloning her.”
“AK?”
“Of course, AK.”
Davis gave her a crazed look. “No. Absolutely not. It’s illegal, for one thing.” That was an absurd comment, a cruel thing to say, given the secret he kept from her, and he knew that, now that he had made such an excuse, she would never forgive him if she discovered the truth.
“Not seriously, I guess,” Jackie said. “It’s just, I wonder what it would be like to have her back. Even as a baby. To give her another shot at life. To give us another shot at keeping her safe.”
“It wouldn’t be her,” Davis said.
“Would that matter?”
“Yes,” Davis said.
Jackie closed her book, and her voice became softer, which it did when she was angry or sad or nervous. “You act like a cloned child isn’t real. That would surprise a lot of people if they heard you say it.”
“She’s real to the new family. To people who knew the original, she wouldn’t be real at all. To them, she’s a doppelganger. A smudged copy. A ghost with no memory. Would AK be AK without that scar across her knuckles? The one she got learning to ride a bike? If she had fillings in different teeth? If she were a swimmer instead of a setter? Afraid of heights instead of spiders? If she liked English better than math?” Jackie turned flush and Davis held out his arm, but he couldn’t reach her chair and so he suspended his hand, palm up, in the air between them. “I know what you’re thinking. That all these years later there’s still this… this absence, and the desire to fill it with something can be overwhelming. But to certain people clones can be like projections of the originals – abstract figures, actors on film, a cast of shadows. If we had another little girl walking around this house inside a shell that looked like AK, wouldn’t that only make the void blacker?”
Jackie started to cry and Davis joined her, but he didn’t go to her and she didn’t come to him.