Frameshift

“You botched the fractionation. I’m afraid I’m going to have to redo it.”

Pierre nodded. “I’m sorry. I — I get confused sometimes.”

Shari nodded as well. Her upper lip was trembling. “I know.” She was quiet for a long, long time. Then: “Maybe it’s time, Pierre, for you—”

“No.” He said it as firmly as he could. He held his trembling hands out in front of him, as if to ward off her words. “No, don’t ask me to stop coming into the lab.” He exhaled in a long, shuddery sigh. “Maybe you’re right — maybe I can’t do the complex stuff anymore. But you have to let me help.”

“I can carry on our work,” Shari said. “I can finish our paper.” She smiled. Their paper would blow people’s socks off. “They’ll remember you,

Pierre — not just in the same breath as Crick and Watson, but as Darwin, too. He told us where we came from, and you’ve told us where we’re going.”

She paused, contemplating. Pierre’s most recent discovery — probably, it was sad to say, his final discovery — was the DNA sequence that apparently governed the lowering of the hyoid bone in the throat, a sequence that was shifted out in Hapless Hannah’s DNA, but shifted in within that of Homo sapiens sapiens. And he’d shown Shari a DNA sample with the telepathic frameshift shifted in, although she didn’t know to whom it belonged, and only half believed Pierre’s assertions about what it was for.

Pierre looked around the lab helplessly. “There must be something I can do. Wash beakers, sort files — something.”

Shari looked over at the garbage pail, where the broken glass from a flask Pierre had dropped earlier in the day was resting. “You’ve given so much time to the project,” she said. “But — well, I know you’re the one who is supposed to quote the Nobel laureates, but didn’t Woodrow Wilson say, ‘I not only use all the brains I have, but all that I can borrow.’ You can borrow mine; I’ll carry on for both of us. It’s time for you to relax. Spend some time with your wife and daughter.”

Pierre felt his eyes stinging. He’d known this day would come, but this was too soon — much too soon.

There was an awkward moment between them, and Pierre was reminded of that afternoon three and a half years earlier when he’d ended up holding Shari as she cried over the breakup of her engagement. She perhaps recognized the similarity, too, for, with a small smile, she moved closer and lightly wrapped her arms around him, not squeezing tightly, not constricting his body’s rhythmic dance.

“You will be remembered, Pierre,” she said. “You know that. You’ll be remembered forever for what you discovered here.”

Pierre nodded, trying to take comfort in the words, but soon tears were rolling down his cheeks.

“Don’t cry,” said Shari softly. “Don’t cry.”

He looked up at her and shook his head. “I know we did good work here,” he said, “but…”

She brushed his hair off his forehead. “But what?”

“Bits and pieces,” he said. “I can understand bits and pieces of it. But the big picture — the nucleotides, the enzymes, the reactions, the gene sequences…” He reached up with a trembling hand and wiped his cheek.

“I don’t remember it all, and what I do remember, I don’t understand anymore.”

Shari stroked his shoulder.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “You did the work. You made the discoveries. I can finish it up from here.”

Pierre looked up at her. “But what am I going to do now? I — I don’t know how to do anything except be a geneticist.”

Shari spoke softly. “There was another phone message for you from Barnaby Lincoln at the Chronicle. Why not give him a call?”

Chapter 43

Eighteen Months Later Pierre was busy these days. Barnaby Lincoln was right — lobbying was satisfying work. And who knew? Someday it might even bear fruit.

Meanwhile, Shari had finished up their jointly authored paper — “An intronic DNA mechanism for invoking frameshift mutations as a driving force in evolution” — and submitted it to Nature.

But today was a day off from worrying about what the journal’s referees were going to make of the paper, a day off from working the phones and dictating letters.

They couldn’t just go to the portrait studio at Sears; taking pictures of the Tardivel-Bond family was a little more complicated than that. Pierre had good moments and bad, and they had to wait more than an hour for him to have enough control to sit reasonably still. And Amanda — well, at three years of age, she was doing better dealing with other people, but it was still easier to keep her away from well-meaning but stupid adults who constantly said the wrong things, thinking that because she didn’t talk she also couldn’t hear.

Molly had helped Pierre put on his clothes, as she did every day now. At first she’d thought about having him dress up in a suit and tie, all formal and staid, but that wasn’t Pierre, and she wanted to remember him the way he really was. Instead, she helped him put on the red Montreal

Canadiens hockey jersey he was so fond of.