The Rising(56)

“Come,” he said, and led us into his office. Closing the door, even though no one else was about. “I know this is hard for you.”

He moved behind his desk, but stopped short of taking the chair set there. Your father and I took the matching chairs set before the desk, your car seat resting between us where I could stretch a hand down to gently rock you. I looked down at your sleeping form, feeling uneasy about continuing in your presence, as if not wanting you to hear what Dr. Chu had to say. Might you somehow be able to? I wondered, lapsing into a brief moment where I actually felt uncomfortable around my son.

Stop it! I scolded myself.

“When blood test results come back,” Dr. Chu continued, “the lab highlights anything anomalous in red.” Adding, “Here are Alex’s results,” as he handed stapled sheets of paper to both your father and me.

Everything, every single line item, was in red. Your readings on the left with the normal baseline reading variances on the right.

“Now,” Dr. Chu resumed, as your father mouthed the lab results silently to himself, “the first thing to keep in mind is that functionally, Alex is totally normal.”

“What does that mean?” your father asked. “‘Normal.’”

“His heartbeat is strong and sound. His lung function is perfect. All his muscle reactions and reflex coordination is textbook. In all those respects, he is a perfectly healthy baby.”

“Those respects,” I repeated.

Dr. Chu leaned over his desk, sighing deeply as he interlaced his fingers on the blotter just short of an embossed placard that read TRUST ME … I’M A DOCTOR. “In other respects,” he continued, “there are factors the tests revealed that I can make no sense out of, because they don’t make any sense. It’s why I ordered a new batch of tests, on the chance that the samples I took had been somehow corrupted the first and second times. But the results were the same, identical.”

*

The results of all those tests Dr. Chu did are here in a file. We never had any more bloodwork done. And the whole time, while you grew up, you know what your father and I worried about the most?

You getting sick.

Dr. Chu never said as much, but it was pretty clear your immune system didn’t work like ours, at least not exactly. The first time you caught a simple cold, we were afraid it might kill you. But you hardly ever got sick at all, and never seriously so. I guess the germs and viruses could never find a home inside you because your metabolism worked so different. Not better or worse—just different.

I know what you’re thinking right now, my son, because I’m thinking the same thing.

So many questions.

You ask one and a hundred others pour out, each leading to the next. What’s your life expectancy? Will there be any changes as you age? I’ve avoided talking about puberty here for obvious reasons, but your father and I were terrified when it struck you. For how could we know if growing more body hair and your voice changing would be all of it? Maybe something far more dramatic was going to happen. I never speculated beyond that—I was too scared—and then it came and went with only the normal drama.

I haven’t got much more to say, my son, but I think it’s important I cover one thing Dr. Chu told me: that you are different, different from human beings born on Earth, but you are still Homo sapiens, just like your father and I, just like everyone else. Your DNA strands are the same, just infinitely more progressed. And while there are some minor variances accounting for the issues with your blood, you are most certainly a person.

Which begs the question I know you want answers for just as I always did: Where exactly did you come from? How could you be alien and human at the same time?

I avoid thinking about Laboratory Z as much as I can. But I can only assume that you came through whatever it was they were experimenting with there, just before the explosion that caused the fire and destroyed the building. Only, you couldn’t have come alone. Someone handed you to me. Someone must have brought you through and that same person might well have been the one who triggered the explosion, so no one else could follow them through. I wonder if it was your real mother or father. No—strike that, because we’re your real mother and father.

That, though, doesn’t change the fact that you were brought here for a reason. And it also doesn’t change the reality we must face—well, you must now—that they might come back for you. The most important thing since we learned the truth in our minds has been to keep you safe, to do everything we could to blend in and make sure you did too, so no one would ever suspect. We thought of moving but thought that might be one of the things they’d look for. So we stayed. And let you play football, even though we knew there were risks.

There are risks with everything. Your father and I learned that firsthand back in China before we immigrated.

You immigrated too, Alex. That’s the way you must look at this.

I’d love to end this here, but I can’t. Because if you’re watching this, it means something bad has happened. It means the worst has happened and they came back for you. I wish I could tell you who “they” are, but I can’t. But I know they’re out there. A few times I thought I could feel them, a mother’s intuition. I don’t believe they ever totally let go or gave up. Wherever it was you came from, they haven’t forgotten you. And I know they’ll be back.