Lessons in Chemistry(12)

“Oh,” Elizabeth said. “Well. Oregon, mostly. You?”

“Iowa.”

“Really?” she asked. “I thought you were from Boston.”

“No,” he said quickly. “Any brothers? Sisters?”

“A brother,” she said. “You?”

“None.” His voice was flat.

She lay very still, taking in his tone. “Was it lonely?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said bluntly.

“I’m sorry,” she said, taking his hand under the sheets. “Your parents didn’t want another child?”

“Hard to say,” he said, his voice reedy. “It’s not really the kind of thing a kid asks a parent, is it? But probably. Certainly.”

“But then—”

“They died when I was five. My mother was eight months pregnant at the time.”

“Oh my god. I’m so sorry, Calvin,” Elizabeth said, bolting upright. “What happened?”

“Train,” he said matter-of-factly. “Hit them.”

“Calvin, I’m so sorry. I had no idea.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “It was a long time ago. I don’t really remember them.”

“But—”

“Your turn,” he said abruptly.

“No wait, wait, Calvin, who raised you?”

“My aunt. But then she died, too.”

“What? How?”

“We were in the car and she had a heart attack. The car jumped the curb and slammed into a tree.”

“God.”

“Call it a family tradition. Dying in accidents.”

“That’s not funny.”

“I wasn’t trying to be funny.”

“How old were you?” Elizabeth pressed.

“Six.”

She squeezed her eyes shut. “And then you were put in a…” Her voice trailed off.

“A Catholic boys home.”

“And…,” she prompted him, hating herself for doing so. “What was that like?”

He paused as if trying to find an honest answer to this obscenely simple question. “Rough,” he finally said, his voice so low she barely heard him.

A quarter mile away, a train whistled and Elizabeth cringed. How many nights had Calvin lain there and heard that whistle and thought about his dead parents and his almost sibling and never said a word? Unless, perhaps, he never thought about them—he’d said he could barely remember them. But then who did he remember? And what had they been like? And when he’d said, “Rough,” what did that mean exactly? She wanted to ask, but his tone—so dark and low and strange—warned her to go no further. And what about his later life? How did he ever learn to row in the middle of Iowa, much less make his way to Cambridge to row there? And college? Who’d paid for it? And his earlier education? A boys home in Iowa didn’t sound like it provided much in the way of learning. It’s one thing to be brilliant, but to be brilliant without opportunity—that was something else. If Mozart had been born to a poor family in Bombay instead of a cultured one in Salzburg, would he have composed Symphony no. 36 in C? Not a chance. How, then, had Calvin come from nothing to become one of the most highly respected scientists in the world?

“You were saying,” he said, his voice wooden, as he pulled her back down next to him. “Oregon.”

“Yes,” she said, dreading the telling of her own story.

“How often do you visit?” he asked.

“Never.”

“But why?” Calvin almost shouted, shocked that she could throw away a perfectly good family. One that was still alive anyway.

“Religious reasons.”

Calvin paused, as if he might have missed something.

“My father was a…a type of religious expert,” she explained.

“A what?”

“A sort of God salesman.”

“I’m not following—”

“Someone who preaches gloom and doom to make money. You know,” she said, her voice filling with embarrassment, “the kind who rants about how the end is near but has a solution—say a specialized baptism or a pricey amulet—that will keep Judgment Day off just a bit longer.”

“There’s a living in that?”

She turned her head toward his. “Oh yes.”

He lay silent, trying to imagine it.

“Anyway,” she said, “we had to move a lot because of it. You can’t keep telling everyone the end is near if the end never comes.”

“What about your mother?”

“She made the amulets.”

“No, I mean, was she also very religious?”

Elizabeth hesitated. “Only if you count greed as a religion. There’s lots of competition in this area, Calvin—it’s extremely lucrative. But my father was especially gifted and the new Cadillac he got every year proved it. But when it comes down to it, I think my father’s talent for spontaneous combustion really made him stand out.”

“Wait. What?”

“It’s really hard to ignore someone who shouts, ‘Give me a sign,’ and then something bursts into flame.”

“Wait. Are you saying—”