7

Besides limiting our freedom of movement and creating tension whenever we went out, the beach attack had the additional unfortunate effect of prompting Grandma Lily to come over more often. If such a thing was possible, she seemed even more paranoid about my safety than Mom.

“He’ll be completely home schooled, of course,” Lily said to Mom one day as she hugged me too tightly in her lap. My Clone Ranger coloring book lay on our old oak dining table, mere inches out of reach, but it may as well have been in another galaxy.

I saw my mom roll her eyes as she crushed some garlic cloves in the kitchen. Lily always had a lot of free advice to offer, and I’m sure it got on Mom’s nerves. Especially since they had significantly different ideas as to how I should be raised.

“He’ll go through virtual classes for the standard subjects,” Mom said, “and use the Hill Creek Junior Academy for group activities.”

“Group activities? But we can do group activities right here!” Lily responded.

“No we can’t, Mom. We can’t play baseball here or start a band or form a chorus. At the Junior Academy he’ll be able to play sports and get involved in the arts and socialize with other kids at lunch and do group science projects and stuff.”

“He doesn’t need all that crap!”

I think she was so livid she forgot I was on her lap. Grandma didn’t usually talk like that.

“Yes he does, and he’s going to get it,” Mom said calmly but firmly. She had a lot of patience with Lily, but I don’t know where she got it.

Lily pouted. “But we don’t know what kind of kids go there. Kids can be very cruel, you know.”

“I know,” Mom said, nodding heavily. “But there are plenty of cruel adults as well. Unfortunately, Mikey will have to learn to deal with cruelty.”

Lily put her face right in front of my nose. The smell of her heavy makeup suffocated me. “You don’t want to go to some nasty old school, do you Adam?”

It’s the question almost every kid dreams about getting asked, but most kids don’t have a Grandma Lily in their face. I didn’t really know what the school thing was all about, but I knew it could get me off her lap and in reach of my coloring book.

“I want to go to school,” I stated as firmly as had Mom.

Lily looked shocked, but Mom grinned. “Well then, it’s settled.”

To my relief, the stratagem worked. Lily dumped me from her lap. “We’ll see what father says,” she said, checking her bejeweled wristwatch while avoiding eye contact with both of us, spoken with a coldness I rarely heard from anyone but Lyle.

Mom stiffened. Like me, she was always uneasy around Lyle. It would be a long time before I knew why. Before I read about the night of her molestation. And how Lyle threatened to kill her and her father if she ever said anything.

Did that memory go through my mom’s mind as she considered her response? Did that memory go through her mind every day of her life?

“Grandfather has no say in the matter.”

“How dare you?” Lily said. “You’re just trying to take Adam away from me like you always did!”

“What do you mean?”

“You know exactly what I mean. You stole Adam from me as a child, and now you’re doing it all over again.”

“You think I stole Daddy from you?”

“You know you did, but you won’t get away with it this time, Sarah.”

Mom was silent a long time. I stopped coloring and looked at her. Saw her eyes glistening like they did when she was sad, trying not to let herself cry. It would be another fourteen years before I fully understood the tension between my mother and grandmother. My c-father’s journal made his preference clear: 

The little bit of home life I afford myself is more tolerable than I expected, as I’m able to spend most of the time doting on Sarah. She’s another type of immortality – the type that nature has been providing for hundreds of millions of years. She reminds me of my mother. There’s an actress’s vibrancy about her, and her face has the soft, rounded, girl-next-door features instead of Lily’s chiseled beauty.

In Sarah’s eyes I see my mother, and even my own self, before my parents’ deaths. She loves out of an inner light that radiates from all people who have a true passion for life and the world around them.

I don’t share that passion for the world, but I guess I’ve always been drawn to those who possess it. I often take her alone to places where I can see that passion at its greatest, to the Zoo and Wild Animal Park – places I wanted to go to as a child. And I’ll never forget the trip to Scotland to honor the tenth anniversary of the death of Dolly, the first cloned sheep. Watching Sarah’s eyes brighten with discovery as we shared the sights and novelties of Scotland and Edinburgh and Dolly. She’d get so excited by the world that she’d laugh out loud in delight.

That was something I’d still see my mom doing more than twenty years later.

Lily was never close to her daughter. She was understandably jealous of Sarah for the true affection Adam showered upon the girl. The Dolly trip was one that especially rankled Lily, as the tenth anniversary of Dolly’s death was also Valentine’s Day. Adam not only forgot to give her a gift – he only remembered to wish her a Happy Valentine’s Day that night after giving Sarah a card. Fortunately for him, it took little for Adam to re-charm his wife. He made love to her, and all was forgiven. Or so it had seemed to him.

I put my crayon down, slipped off my chair, and walked into the kitchen. Mom saw me, smiled a little, and stopped crushing the garlic to pick me up. I felt her head lean against mine.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mom,” she said, “and I’m sorry if you think I stole Daddy. But Michael is not Daddy, and no matter what you think, he is going to school, and I don’t want to hear another word about it from you or Grandfather. Is that understood?”

And apparently it was. As far as I knew, Lily never said another word about it to Mom.

Grandma Lily did, however, have a few more words to say to me. It was just a couple weeks after the school argument. Mom had gone out for something and left me alone with Lily. We were sitting next to each other at the dining table doing some preschool math games. Suddenly she grabbed both my hands in hers and leaned over for greater secrecy, despite the fact that we were alone.

“Tell me, Adam. Do you have any memories from before?”

I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about. I wondered when Mom was coming back, and prayed it would be soon.

“Before what?”

“From before you were born again. When we were together.”

I shook my head. When was mom coming back?

“You don’t remember the lilies?” she asked, shaking my hands in hers.

I paused, trying to think of something to put her mind at ease and get out of this highly uncomfortable interrogation.

“Did I give you lilies?”

Such a bright and ecstatic smile I’m not sure I’d ever seen. Lily was a young-looking granny anyway. As I would discover years later by looking at photos, she went to surgical lengths to look younger soon after my birth. But at that moment she looked like a schoolgirl. Like the young girl who had first fallen in love with my c-father. I guess I’d said what she wanted to hear. Or, more accurately, she’d heard what she wanted me to say.

“You do remember!”

I shrugged. “Maybe?”

It was, indeed, a question. I didn’t think I remembered. I was just trying to guess where she was going with the whole thing. And although I could picture in my head some things from Adam-1’s life, I was pretty sure the pictures had been formed by the photos and the stories I’d heard growing up. I knew that Adam-1’s parents had sung The Rainbow Connection to him as a lullaby. When Mom sang it for me, I’d imagine my c-father at about my age in a different bed being sung to by my great-grandparents Michael and Sarah Elwell, pictures of whom hung not far from the dining table that had belonged to them. And there was the photo Mom loved of Sarah, Michael, and Adam-1 performing a home skit from The Chronicles of Narnia, and I could imagine myself performing in it with Great-Grandma Sarah dressed in a white terrycloth robe and sunbonnet as the White Witch, Great-Grandpa Michael acting as her minion dwarf (wearing a San Francisco Giants cap for irony), and myself instead of Adam-1 as Edmund clutching our family’s own version of Turkish Delight – a package of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. So were they memories, or mere images I’d pasted together from photos I’d seen and stories I’d heard? Maybe I’ll never know for sure.

“How wonderful!” Lily continued. “Well don’t worry. Everything’s going to be the same again soon.”

“The same?” I echoed.

“Yes, the same – just like before. We’ll be together again. I’m coming, Adam!”

She’s coming where?

When was mom coming back! 

* 

Late that night the phone rang. Later than it ever rings. Mom began crying and saying things I couldn’t make out. There were footsteps, a light went on in the kitchen, and she came into my room, surprised to find me awake.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, raising myself up in bed.

“Sweetie,” she said, sitting next to me and giving me a hug, “I’m afraid your Grandma Lily has died.”

“So what’s wrong?” I thought to myself.

There was no mystery in the cause of Lily’s death. She holotaped her suicide for posterity. Or more specifically, for her clone. It was a gunshot wound to the temple as the song Delta Dawn played in endless loop.

Her suicide tape made it clear she wanted to be cloned. Great-Grandpa Lyle oversaw that himself, and a little more than nine months after her death, Lily-2 was removed from an artificial womb.

We all went down to the USCS lab to see the newborn. While Mom went to the restroom, Lyle stiffly held Lily away from his body and up close to me. I touched her nose and little fingers. I felt sure this would be an improvement over the last Lily.

Lyle introduced us.

“Lily-2, this is Adam-2.” He made her little hand go up and down as if waving. “Adam-2, this is Lily-2.”

I waved my hand playfully.

“She’s going to be your wife.”

I stopped waving.

The Clone Ranger: A sci-fi superhero created in 2035. He was cloned from his father who went missing when The Clone Ranger’s chief adversary, Mirfak, took control of the galaxy and went after all those who rebelled. The Clone Ranger now battles Mirfak’s totalitarian regime and helps ordinary citizens – a populist hero.





Hill Creek Junior Academy: A school named after 
Robert M. Hopper’s first elementary school, 
Hill Creek School in Santee, California.




















































Sexual Reproduction

Dolly



Edinburgh

Valentine’s Day





























The Rainbow Connection




The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe


Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups

Turkish Delight

San Francisco Giants

Delta Dawn


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