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Delphine steps out of Cosima’s apartment and closes the door behind her, head still reeling. She knew staying wasn’t going to get her anywhere so she walked – or did she storm? – out. She also needed air. Her lungs were, still are, threatening to explode into a full-blown panic attack. Cosima’s words, flung at her with such careful precision after she’d opened herself up, exposed her heart in one last-ditch effort, echoed in her mind, compressing her chest and making it hard to breathe.
They hardly compare, though, to the words Delphine’s currently hurling at herself.
Snitch. Cheat. Liar.
She shrugs on her coat, arms chilly against the biting wind, and starts to walk home. With every step away from Cosima her heart breaks a little more, the distance feeling permanent. Irreparable. As if she’ll never be this close to Cosima again.
All this talk of human cloning and unknown dangers and this is the first time that Delphine’s actually felt afraid.
***
She slips into her apartment later, much later. She’d meant to walk straight home but instead found herself wandering, doing circles and figures of eight around her neighborhood. Every time she caught sight of her apartment building she’d veer down another street, walking stony-faced into the darkness until finally it was too late, too dark, too cold, and she had to go home.
Her apartment is sparse. The Dyad Institute furnished it for her, of course, set her up completely like they’d promised in those early interviews who knows how long ago. They’d copied details straight out of her tiny Parisian apartment, found exact replicas of her kitchen table and bookshelves and chairs, but her Minnesota apartment feels wrong, false.
It looks like hers. But it isn’t her.
She slumps into a chair in her living room – her Parisian equivalent was a gift from her grandfather when she got into her PhD program (“For dreaming up your next brilliant idea,” he’d said) – and, finally, starts to cry.
***
It’s the dead of night when Delphine comes back to herself, tear-stained and exhausted, her mind still too agitated to sleep.
What she really needs is some comfort, after crying for so long. She’d kill for some chocolate, but she left it…
Delphine looks at her phone, which she’d tossed haphazardly on the coffee table, and does the math in her head. She hasn’t called in weeks, or is it months now? Her entire life’s wrapped up in non disclosure agreement after non disclosure agreement, and after a few stilted conversations that frustrated everyone involved, she’d given up on calling. Total silence, she’d decided, had to be better than trying to find a way around the things she’s not allowed to say. Her whole life here’s wrapped up in the Dyad Institute. There’s nothing else to talk about, even if she wanted to. She’d call when this was all over.
When, exactly, she’d be done was something she and Aldous had never discussed. At first it didn’t matter, wrapped up in the haze of excitement and new discovery, but now she’s a little terrified that the end’s not in sight. Stepping into a study over thirty years in the making is a thrilling feeling, like you’re entering into something much bigger than yourself, until you start to wonder where you’ll be in thirty years too. Still here?
How many other red flags had she missed?
Delphine closes her eyes, swallows the fear for her future she didn’t know she had, then picks up the phone and dials the numbers etched on her heart.
The call connects in moments – oceans and countries are no match for human ingenuity – and she listens to the line ring on the other hand, imagining the scene it’s greeting: her mother reading an old text in the kitchen, her father quietly tending to their garden as his mind rolls over a difficult proof.
The line clicks and Delphine feels her breath hitch. “Mama?” she says, not even waiting for a greeting.
“Delphine?” asks the voice through the line.
Delphine starts to cry again, her tears not as spent as she’d thought. Out of relief, and perhaps a homesickness she’d pushed down for too long.
“Delphine is that you? Are you all right?”
She shakes her head, no, then realizes her mother can’t see her. After all, she’s an ocean away.
“It’s… I’m fine…” The French feels strange in her mouth; the months spent living outside her native tongue have done their damage. She’s only spoken the cursory phrase since she got here and Aldous’, though he tries, isn’t perfect, lilting and foreign.
“You don’t sound fine,” says her mother, and Delphine can hear her marking her place in whatever she was reading and setting it down on the kitchen table, as she considers what, exactly, she can and can’t say to her mother.
What she won’t say.
“Just wondering how everyone is,” she settles on.
On the other end of the line, her mother sighs, but indulges her: “Things are fine here. Luc’s just finished exams, and your father, well, know how he ---“
“Mama,”Delphine breathes.
“Please,” says her mother, “Let me help. Let me listen.”
Delphine closes her eyes and takes a shaky breath.
“I hurt someone,” she concedes, finally. Quietly.
“You attacked them?” There’s a hint of surprise, there. Delphine’s never hurt anyone in her life. She wanted to be a doctor, before the world of research and immunology drew her in. Though, she supposes, she has become a doctor after all, though of a different sort. The kind who, she realizes, doesn’t have to take any sort of Hippocratic oath.
“No, not like… that.”
“You had me worried you’d turned into a prize fighter in America, Cherie.”
Delphine laughs, in spite of herself. Her mother’d always feared America, like one step on to American soil and you’d transform into a gun-toting psycho.
“Then what is it?”
“I… I… shit. Sorry.” She buries her head in her hands, gets her bearings. “I can’t explain it, really. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have called.”
“Nonsense. I’ve missed you.”
They linger a moment in companionable silence. Why hadn’t she called earlier? This silence isn’t bad, isn’t a shaky breath between “It showed” and walking out the door. It’s comfortable. It’s home.
“It has to do with what you’re doing there, then?” asks her mother tentatively.
“Yes,” breathes Delphine. Perhaps if her mother can guess the truth she’ll be spared from speaking it herself.
“He works with you?”
Well, maybe not.
But lying by omission, by a lack of clarification, is something Delphine’s well-versed in these days. She’s a little tired of it. More than a little.
“Yes, I…”
But not tired enough.
“In a manner of speaking. I can’t really say…”
“Why not?” her mother asks, “Surely they aren’t listening at every moment, waiting for you to let some insignificant detail slip?”
But it’s not insignificant; that’s the point. She hasn’t become involved with someone observing the trial – that’s a line she crossed long ago, a line she’d like to take back more and more these days. No, she’s interfered with the subject itself. Difficult fare when you’re studying microbacteria, but not when you’re sent to observe a living, breathing, laughing, smiling, person.
And what if they are listening? She cringes at the thought, glances around her apartment. Are they keeping tabs on her, too? Monitoring the monitors? The Institute set it up; they could have easily slipped in a bug or two. Even more reason to say nothing.
Delphine had always intended to keep her relationship with Cosima to herself. She’d slipped in the car with Leekie, admitted Cosima had made a pass at her, still shocked by the it. But they must have known Cosima would be interested, right? As long as Delphine wasn’t telling them anything new…
“Are they?” The question interrupts Delphine’s runaway thoughts.
“I really can’t tell you any details,” she sighs. “But could you… remind me that I’m not a bad person? Please?”
The please comes out in a shaky whisper. At every turn she’s believed she’s been doing the right thing, but what if she isn’t? Maybe you’re the real danger, Delphine.
“My love,” comes the compassionate voice on the other side of the line. “You are not a bad person. You could never be.”
Delphine’s shoulders relax at the words; true or not, driven by love and not by any knowledge of the situation or not, they’re what she needs to hear.
“You have always had such a big, open heart. This gets you into trouble sometimes, no? Following your heart without thinking through the consequences?"
“Yes,” she breathes. “Yes, maybe that’s true.”
“Well then whoever he is will know that, if he knows you at all. You could never lie about anything – whatever you’ve done, however you’ve done it, he’ll see that.”
She never could lie very well, it’s true – and clearly, her attempts to lie to Cosima were as transparent as they’d felt. But why, if Cosima could tell she was lying then, couldn’t she tell she was telling the truth now?
“Thanks mama,” she says, after a moment.
“Please,” her mother entreats, “I know you’re not well now but… you’re all right, right?”
Is she?
“I’m getting to see wonderful things,” Delphine starts, “Explore new avenues of study entirely, it’s incredible.” She pauses for a moment, then continues, “And… I met someone…”
Her mother laughs quietly on the other end of the line, and Delphine smiles, too. She has met someone. Someone so wonderful that even the science doesn’t matter as much anymore – and since when has that been true? Despite everything, despite the yelling and the recriminations, her heart still skips a beat when she thinks of Cosima. And hopefully, one day the twinge of pain she feels when it happens will fade away, and all she’ll be left with is enchante and crazy science and Cosima calling her “dude” at the most inopportune moments.
“It sounds like he’s good for you,” says her mother and Delphine comes crashing back down.
Just another lie.
Delphine takes a deep breath, holds it. “She is,” she says quietly.
And waits.
“Then you know what to do,” comes the voice on the other line, eventually, and Delphine waits for the worst. “Win her back.”
Delphine’s eyes fill with grateful tears.
“You’ll find a way, I’m sure.”
Delphine nods. There’s nothing else she can say, really. “I should go.”
“Of course,” says her mother, kindly, but with a note of sadness. “You’ll call again soon?”
“I will. I love you, Mama.”
“I love you too.”
The line clicks and a weight lifts off of Delphine. She lowers the phone and spots the files on the floor – Leekie’s files. Filled with information about Cosima, mostly.
Cosima.
She’s either gone to San Francisco or Toronto, muses Delphine, but it’d be impossible to find out which one now without letting the Institute know that Cosima's, and she’s done reporting to them. Toronto’s the most likely; Cosima will want to see the people who understand the words “I slept with my monitor and she betrayed me,” but Delphine won’t know for sure until she gets there.
She opens her laptop and navigates to find flights. One to San Fran, one to Toronto. She wonders idly for a moment why one’s so much more expensive than the other, when her phone rings. She looks at the display.
Aldous.
“Hello?” she answers, guarded.
Delphine listens for a moment.
“She is?”
Delphine selects the Canadian flight and starts to fill out the information, phone cradled in her neck.
“No, I don’t know what happened. I saw her a few hours ago and everything seemed fine.”
Maybe just one more lie, then.