23 genes

To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: This is Alyssa

Dr. Talbot-Lilley,

I got your message. If you know anything that could help me... Please.

🦎

To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: RE: This is Alyssa

I think it would behoove us to speak in private. Would you be available to visit me at my home this evening?

Regards,
Dr. Joseph I. Talbot-Lilley
Emergency Medicine

🦎

I stare at the Whitney familys' computer monitor, not scared or nervous. I am ready. When I send an affirmative response, Ian sends back an address.

"Hey, I know that road," Eli realizes. "That's the same road Ty Prestridge lives on."

"Is it?" I ask. I can't remember.

"Yeah. I know exactly where that is."

I look at the time; it's almost four thirty. We couldn't go now. Theresa will be home in an hour, and I don't know how long this meeting will take. "What time do your parents go to bed?"

"Around nine, nine thirty. Why?"

"I'll be by to pick you up around nine forty-five, then."

As I type up another e-mail to Ian, I can feel Eli contemplating my offer. So I give him a little push. "I've snuck out before for you. And twice back in."

"Yeah. I know. But I'm already grounded. I'd get grounded twice as long for this."

I imagine going to Ian's house alone, and it makes my hands clam up. "I can't do this alone," I tell him. "I need you."

So at nine forty-five, when I press on the brakes of the Camry on the road right outside of his house, he comes climbing out of his bedroom window onto the first story roof. There's no trellis for him to climb down to the ground on, but he simply jumps. He lands on his feet, but the impact of the landing brings him to his hands and knees. He gets up, rights himself, and joins me in the car.

"You ready?"

He nods. "Let's go."

The drive is barely five minutes. I pull into Ty's neighborhood and slow the car while Eli looks at house addresses. Finally, he points to one.

"32423. It's this one right here."

I follow his finger. It leads my eyes to the house directly across the street from Ty's. I park in the road, unsure if Ian's family knows we're coming. I remember his photo-less office.

"Okay." I take a deep breath. "You ready?"

I walk around to the back door and ring the bell as Ian had instructed I do in his last e-mail. A Range Rover and a Chevy Avalanche are parked beneath the carport. A green eye peers between the curtains, and then the door unlocks and the owner of the green eye is standing before us, still clad in his work clothes despite the hour — a button-down and a tie. His shoes are off, at least, and his socks don't match.

"Good evening, Alyssa." His aura is calm and welcoming.

"Hey." I nod toward Eli. "Uh, he knows."

"Oh. Well, then, good evening, Aspen. And it's nice to see you again, Elijah. How is your sister?"

Eli replies, but his voice is stiff, and I can tell he doesn't know if he should trust Ian. "She's hanging in there."

"That's good to hear. Her neck sprain should be fully healed in another week." Ian steps back and opens the door. "Come on in."

Eli goes first, and I step in past him. This house's layout looks very similar to the Prestridge's besides the surface area of the rooms and the height of the ceiling. The living room is very simply decorated, as is the portion of the kitchen that I can see from here. And just like his office, I see no family portraits. It doesn't take long for me to conclude that Ian lives alone. I idly wonder what he needs two vehicles for.

Ian ushers us to the love seat. "Sit, sit, please." We do. "Can I get you something to drink? Tea? Water?"

"Water's fine," I say. Eli nods silently beside me.

Eli whispers to me when Ian leaves the room. "There's nothing homey about this place," he says. "It looks like a hospital waiting room."

I follow the trail his eyes make. Besides the love seat, there is a rocking chair with a cushion, a TV tray sat before it, and a small-ish television mounted on the wall. There's nothing decorative to liven up the space save for a framed painting of a field of flowers (that I have to agree looks like doctor's office art) hung above the love seat on the wall behind us as if added as a last-minute spruce to an otherwise lifeless room.

"People tend to find comfort in the familiar," I tell him. I'm not ready to give up on Ian yet, although it seems that Eli has entered into this meeting with a negative viewpoint. I suppose that's helpful, though. Good cop, bad cop. Hopeful and wary. Although usually our roles are reversed.

Ian comes back with two glasses of ice water. I bring mine up to my lips, but Eli holds his in his lap. Ian slides the rocking chair around to face us. He crosses one leg over his knee and folds his hands in his lap. I get the sense that he's about to tell me that the tests ran on me came back inconclusive, not that he remembers his parallel universe that can help me through this one.

Eli speaks first. "We came here for answers." I nudge him in the side with my elbow. I bit of water escapes his glass and lands on his khakis. He ignores me.

Ian chuckles. "Yes. Yes, you did. So. Where should we begin?"

Eli looks to me for our answer. "Well," I start, "what's the farthest back of my mom or Gray that you can remember, I guess?"

"College," he answers simply. "I met them both in college. Delia and I were both biology majors. Biology with a concentration in genetics."

Biology? Genetics? "My mom was a bank teller," I tell him. "Not a scientist."

Ian nods solemnly. "Sometimes we choose our paths; sometimes our paths choose us."

I recall him admitting that he thought he may have loved her. Of course, how could I forget? "Were you dating?"

His aura becomes amused. "Not at first," he grins. "But, yes, we became a couple."

I find it kind of difficult to imagine that my mother ever loved anyone who wasn't my father. I glance to my right at the boy beside me. I wonder how many girls he will love in his lifetime.

"And when did you meet Gray?"

He pulls his brows together. "I can't say for sure that I know who you mean, but there is one man who comes to mind."

I hold my breath.

"Who?" asks Eli.

"His name was Dr. Damian Ford. He was our senior professor."

I release the carbon dioxide into the air. "What did he look like?"

"Well, back then, he was younger. He was Caucasian, thin, and he had facial hair."

My stomach sinks. This is not the description I was hoping for. But I'm willing to consider anything, at this point.

"You think he could've been the man who killed my mom?" Ian winces when I mention her death, and I remember it is still fresh news to him.

"I don't know. But I remember what he did to her — what she let him do to her."

"Hold up," Eli interjects. I am on the edge of my seat, but he is lounging — relaxed as ever. As if he is taking everything Ian is telling us with a grain of salt. "I thought you didn't remember any of this. I know you can sometimes remember things... But are these even your memories? Like, where did they come from? And how did you find them so suddenly?"

Eli's right. I had been so anxious to hear about my mother's past that I hadn't thought to question the credibility of Ian's story. When I first inquired about her, he'd had no idea who she even was. And now?

"That's a good question, and I'm glad you asked." Ian looks to me. "When I first met you, Aspen, you triggered something in me. You let something loose. It was like I was reaching for something I knew was there, but I couldn't quite grasp it. So I met with a psychiatrist at the hospital where I work. And I underwent hypnosis."

"Seriously?" comes from my right.

"Yes. I've always been able to know random facts, random details about things; I'd just assumed it was a little quirk of mine. I skim over it once or overhear it and my brain picks up on it and stores it even if I wasn't actively paying attention. But this..." He shakes his head. "This was something different. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before. How else would I have known Aspen's true name if she is called Alyssa? And then the sudden memory of Delia... And how crushed I'd felt to learn that she was murdered... My feelings for her were there, and they were real, and yet I couldn't recall ever meeting her. It was all too great of a coincidence. I wanted to know if there was more in my head that I wasn't remembering, a part of my brain I was unable to consciously access, something that had been cut out of me, so to speak. An explanation for the quirk that maybe isn't just a quirk."

"Cut out of you?" Eli questions. "Who would do that? Who could do that?" I, however, know better than anybody that there are some people on this earth that can do things, unnatural things, that don't always make sense.

Ian continues without answering. "So I underwent hypnosis, and I gave her a list of things to ask me. And when I woke up and listened back to the tapes..." His aura goes cold, and I shiver. "What I heard was horrifying."

I wrap my arms around myself and attempt to rub the chills away. "What did he do to her?"

"Nothing she didn't ask for." His aura is black, and I immediately get defensive. He must see this from my body language, because he revises his statement. "I'm sorry. What I meant was that she allowed him to tamper with her genetic code."

Eli snaps to attention. "Her what?!"

Ian uncrosses his legs and leans forward, elbows on his knees. He rubs his temples. "I'm sorry, again. I've gotten ahead of myself. Let me back up a bit."

He takes a breath. I don't.

"So we were seniors. And our professor was Dr. Ford. He favored us, your mother and I. He said he'd foreseen great careers ahead of us. We often stayed after hours and assisted him in his lab. The experiments he conducted were harmless enough — on plants, bacterium, the occasional lab rat." He looks up at us, and his eyes have darkened. "Never on humans."

"What kind of experiments?" Eli asks. I ask nothing, because all but my sense of sight and hearing have seemed to shut down.

"Well, he was a geneticist. He poked around with DNA, mostly. His idea was to somehow bottle up the way other organisms have self-evolved and translate it to the human species. He believed our minds are capable of so much more than we know, but we've believed to have peaked, thus we've stopped trying to achieve more as a species."

"So he was trying to play God?" Eli sounds thoroughly disgusted.

Ian only chuckles. "Essentially, yes."

"And the university was funding this?"

"Dr. Ford was a brilliant scientist."

Eli scoffs, and I find my voice. "What did he do to my mom?"

Ian's eyes lock on mine. "He thought he'd cracked the code," he tells me. His voice is soft, as if I'm a package labeled fragile and he's afraid if the volume increases any decibels that my skin may crack and fall off of me, shards of ceramic on the carpeted floor. "He thought he found a serum that would interact with one's DNA to allow them the ability to access other parts of their brain. But he needed a volunteer."

Mom.

"Delia felt very fondly for Dr. Ford. And he for her, as well. So I knew she would, and that he would let her. He guaranteed her safety to me, one hundred percent. But I wasn't satisfied. So I asked him to inject me, too. To blindly give one of us a placebo. That way either of us had a fifty-fifty chance. It made me feel better, I guess. And I trusted him. But you know how they say hindsight's twenty-twenty.

"So, I, of course, received the placebo. She was fine at first. Within a day or two, nothing extraordinary had taken place. No mountains moved; no seas parted. We all thought he'd failed. He took it pretty hard. I remember he canceled classes.

"But then she started getting these headaches. And nightmares. She would wake up next to me in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat. She'd sit in the bathtub for hours because she was scared to fall back asleep. And then... and then something kind of extraordinary happened.

"She started being able to control her nightmares. Kind of like lucid dreaming. She was in them, and she could direct their paths. She could dream about whatever she wanted. Create her own little movie. It was quite something, really. When she told Ford, he was ecstatic. She began going to his home, and she would practice, and he would monitor her. She told me he was teaching her how to stretch her new ability. I remember not really knowing what that meant. Until one night, she was in my dream, and I followed her, and everything she told my dream to do, it did. It was grass, and then it was rain, and then it was a fireplace inside. And she was there, and so was my sister and her husband. And they did whatever she said. Under any other circumstances, I would've thought it to be just a weird dream. But she was smiling so big when I woke up and asking if it worked. And it did."

The earth is rotating on its axis. Fast. Too fast. I can't keep up. The room moves around me. Spins. Or, wait, that's just me. I'm falling. I land in Eli's lap. I pull my knees up to my chest. I try to breathe.

"Where's her water?" I hear Eli say. "Get me her water!"

I'm lifted upright. Something cold and hard presses to my mouth. Liquid meets my lips. Water. I wrap my fingers around the glass greedily. I gulp down the entire glass while Eli rubs my back.

My mother could control dreams. Ever since Gray killed her I'd had nightmares. Nightmares of Gray. I'd been so sure that they were his doing. Torturing me. Laughing at me. But could they have been from my mother? I can still feel her aura... Who's to say that she still can't control my dreams? That would certainly explain the dreams of Ian. But what of the nightmares? Why would she give me those? The horrible, awful, terrifying nightmares? And what else, why did she never tell me what she could do? When she learned of my ability, surely it was a gene that I inherited from her, from what her professor did to her, did to me... Why didn't she tell me?

"I don't have an answer for that," Ian says. I must've spoken aloud. "But if you're alright, I should continue."

"There's more?!" Eli cries. He takes my empty glass from me and replaces it with his full one.

"I'm afraid so."

"Maybe we should wait..."

"No." I sit up, careful not to spill the life-giving liquid. Eli wraps an arm around my waist, ensuring that I remain close. "I wanna know. I need to hear it. All of it."

Ian nods and goes back to his chair. He'd been kneeling at the foot of the love seat. "She kept practicing with Ford," he begins, "and I don't know if the first serum was all he gave her, but she got really good at it. Really, really good at it. And then it was like she could, I don't know, alter one's perception of reality. Like how she could change the scenery of a dream, she could also change the scenery in your very vision, while you were awake. She could make me see things that weren't there... have entire conversations with a person who wasn't actually in front of me. It was... it was wild."

Eli's grip on me tightens, and I know he's realized what I've just realized. That it could've been my mom giving me the visions of Gray. It could've been her giving my dad the visions of Gray. Kei seeing me in the road — that, too could've been her doing. Why would my mother want Kei to crash her car? That couldn't have been her doing. It couldn't have been.

I am exhausted. I feel like I've just ran a marathon. I'm ready to go home. I've had enough. "Is that all?"

Ian purses his lips. His aura is black again. Probably guilt. He's sorry. "There's one more thing." He pauses. "Are you sure you're okay?"

I only nod, because I'm unsure if my voice will come out sounding okay.

He sighs deeply, so deep that I feel it in my own bones. "Right before graduation, she got pregnant."

Wait... Pregnant?! Before she met Dad?

He continues as if the pregnancy should be the least of my worries. "So I proposed. I loved her; it seemed like the right thing to do at the time. So we got engaged, and we were looking to buy a house. I started med school. She got a job as a grad student working in the lab. Everything was good." He closes his eyes, perhaps blocking out the memory, perhaps blocking out my reaction. And then he tells me something that, even in the present where she doesn't exist any more, chills me to my very core."But then she disappeared."

Eli questions him first. "What do you mean, disappeared?"

"She left. She took the ring and our child, and she just left. And I woke up the next morning with no memory of her." He runs his hands through his short, dark hair, his aura distressed. "The only thing I can make of it is that the baby wasn't mine — was never mine — and he came into my apartment and took her and maybe gave me some concoction of his to make me forget. I don't want to believe that she left willingly."

"Who?" Eli asks. "Who took her?"

But I know.

"The professor." I say, my voice frigid and unforgiving as I realize just how far back into my history this story really goes. How far back into my history he really goes. "Gray."

__________

Dun, dun, DUNNNNNNN.

Tell me whatcha think. And forgive me for my lateness. As soon as we got home from our road trip, we all got sick. So I've been sleeping about 90% of this week. Rock and roll.

This is the LAST of my Liliana edits. So as of now, chapter 24 will be editless... hint hint @ anyone...

Update: TWENTY-ØNE PILOTS ARE CAPTIVATING AND RIVETING AND MESMERIZING LIVE AND THEY ARE MY SONS AND I LOVE THEM BYe

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