Blowback

She called out softly to her grandmother but received no response. The candles were in a drawer on the far side of the room, but Jillian was afraid to cross the kitchen in the dark. Something inside her told her not to move. She waited and waited until another flash of lightning came, and when it did, she had the shock of her seven-year-old life. Lying on the floor was her gran. Apparently, she had tripped in the dark and in her fall had hit her head on the kitchen table. Upon seeing the pool of blood that was quickly covering the floor, Jillian screamed and ran.

She dashed into the front hall and picked up the telephone to call the police. If there is an emergency, always call the police first, her parents had told her. Jillian picked up the phone, ready to dial the number she had learned by heart, but the phone was dead.

Still in her pajamas, Jillian thought only of her gran. Grabbing her mac from the front closet, she quickly pulled it on, followed by her bright red Wellington-style boots. When she opened the front door, she was greeted by an enormous burst of wind that almost pushed her back inside. The little girl had no choice; she had to get help.

Through the storm, Jillian ran the mile and a half down their muddy road to the junction only to find that it had been washed out. She was trapped. There was no way she could cross the torrent of flood-water. There was no way she could get to the neighbors, or anyone else for that matter. There was no way she could get help. There was nothing she could do but return to the house.

When she did, she realized she would have to tend to her grand-mother. Mustering her courage, she reentered the kitchen and found a towel, intending to begin by cleaning the blood from her gran’s head wound. As she approached, though, she realized her grandmother wasn’t moving. There wasn’t even the rhythmic heave and fall of her chest as she took in air. Jillian crept closer and, placing her hand alongside her grandmother’s cold flesh, realized that she was gone.

The storm raged for two more days. Seven-year-old Jillian couldn’t bring herself to remain inside with the body of her dead grandmother lying in the kitchen, so she stayed in the barn, keeping warm beneath a pile of horse blankets. When the police finally did arrive, she wondered how they had even known she needed help.

The police came with Jillian’s aunt. When they found her in the barn, her aunt suddenly began to cry. She blamed the weather, the terrible weather. She was crying so hard that one of the policemen had to tell Jillian himself that her mother and father wouldn’t be coming home. They had died in a car accident on the way back from selling their sheep. They had fetched a good price early and were trying to beat the storm back to the farm, but they had seriously misjudged it.

One horrible storm had managed to take away the three most important people in Jillian’s life. It was no wonder that rough weather still made her feel so uncomfortable. In fact, storms had grown to become a metaphor for Jillian, representing the uncertainty and cruelty that could be disproportionately visited on one person’s life no matter how little that person had done to deserve it. It was, in part, why she had surrendered herself to a life of science. Science was a world of constants-rules and processes, which could always be counted on. The part she cared not to think about was that science was also a world that was to a significant degree cold, unfeeling, and exceedingly inhuman.

Of course there were people passionate about their pursuits, but very rarely were they passionate about other human beings. In the academic world of “publish or perish,” very few put anything above their love of science. It was indeed a cold place, incredibly enriching for the mind but not so enriching for the soul.

As a remarkably attractive woman, Jillian Alcott was a rarity in the academic world and constantly found herself treated as an object to be possessed rather than as a woman deserving of love. Throughout her education, both her fellow students and many of her professors had desired her simply for her stunning outward appearance. None of them had the courage to look beyond her all too often cold demeanor to see the person she really was. Had anyone taken the time to really study her, to study her with even half the vigor with which they pursued their vaunted scientific investigations, they might have seen a woman who had not yet been able to make it past those two horrific storm-plagued days in Cornwall when she was seven years old, a woman who, though braver than most on the outside, was still, on the inside, incredibly frightened. Life, her career, and even the prospect of learning to love someone again only to have them ripped from her, all terrified Jillian Alcott.