Chapter 7
Birkin agreed that, from now on, he would make it home by seven o’clock at least three days a week, and to only spend a few hours at the lab on Sunday morning. Sunday was the slowest day of the week, so staying at home was not much of a sacrifice of his productivity. Annette insisted on it, and he did not want to disappoint her any longer. It was not entirely about spending more time with Sherry, she explained. She was worried about his health, and on that point, at least, Birkin did not disagree.
But even after all this time, Annette still didn’t accept how important his work was. At one time, he thought of it as “their” work, but that time had passed. Annette became a mother first and a scientist second; maybe part of her problem was that he had not followed the trend. But he would always be a scientist first.
He could discover a cure to everything – a cure to mortality itself – if only the Progenitor could be opened. He imagined a world without nerve damage, without cancer, without old age, and the Progenitor was the key to that world. A world like that was worth anything. If he could discover the key to unlock the Progenitor’s potential, no price was too high. His time, his health, his marriage, even his life would be a small price to pay. His life was nothing compared to the biological riches the virus offered. Future generations would remember his great sacrifice.
Didn’t Annette understand that? Couldn’t she see how vital his research was? She, of all people, should know what the ramifications were. She knew what the Progenitor held, what it could give them. In the Progenitor held the cure to a dying world. Birkin was proud to dedicate his life to the quest for such a noble goal.
Annette, however, no longer felt that way. And whenever she confronted him, he could not disobey her. He was so weak without her, so helpless. Somehow, without her beside him, he stopped caring about the rest of the world. It was a cruel irony. It was her love and support that made him want to spend every waking moment working, and that was precisely what made her stop loving and supporting him. It was a vicious circle.
He came in the front door and dropped his briefcase on the floor, thoroughly exhausted after a mere twelve-hour stretch. He struggled out of his coat and hung it on the rack. Annette came from around the corner and embraced him quickly, kissing his cheek.
“I’m glad you came home,” she said, stepping back. “I’ve already made dinner. Come on.” She took his hand and led him into the kitchen.
Sherry was at the table, her homework spread out randomly in front of her. She dropped her pencil as he entered and rushed over to him.
“Hey Daddy! Mommy didn’t know if you were coming home tonight. Can you help me with my homework?”
Birkin’s smile was tired and wan. He touched Sherry on her shoulder and walked over to the table, taking a seat. “Sure thing, honey. Let Daddy eat his dinner first, okay?”
Annette set a plate of spaghetti in front of him. For some reason, he remembered the night he had proposed to her. He made spaghetti that night, since it was the only thing he knew how to make. Was Annette trying to remind him of that? He chuckled softy, picking up his fork. He ate slowly, trying to keep his mind from straying back to his work at the lab.
“We’re doing multiplication,” Sherry explained, fidgeting with her pencil in her hands. “And Mommy won’t tell me what six times seven is.”
Birkin took a forkful of noodles. It had been a long time since he did simple math like that. “That’s cause you have to figure it out yourself, honey.”
“But I don’t know the answer.”
“It’s easy to find out.” Birkin took her pencil and flipped her sheet upside down. He made six dots on the paper. “‘Six times seven’ means that you have seven groups of six. So you make seven groups of six dots each.” He made six more dots and showed her the paper. “This would be six times two. So what is six times two?”
“Twelve,” Sherry said. “I know the answer to that one.”
Birkin continued making dots on the back of her homework paper until there were seven groups of six dots each. “Now, what is six times seven?”
Sherry counted the dots carefully. “Forty-two.”
“That’s right.”
Sherry smiled and held the paper up. “That’s all I have to do? Why didn’t my teacher explain it this way?”
“Because you can’t always do it like that. You have to learn to figure it out in your head.”
Sherry wrote the answer to the question. “Thanks, Daddy.”
“No problem, honey.”
He looked up and saw Annette leaning against the wall in the entrance to the living room, smiling at him proudly. It made him feel good inside, having made her happy. He continued eating and felt better; he hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast and he wondered if part of his exhaustion had been due to simple hunger. He didn’t eat healthy meals often enough. Most of the time he simply grabbed snacks out of the vending machines.
“So four times nine means I have four dots nine times?”
“That’s right, honey.”
“Then what would nine times four be?”
“It would be nine dots four times. But they equal the same thing.”
Sherry was amazed. Young children are always amazed how their parents automatically know things that they are just being taught. Birkin, however, rarely experienced that feeling when he was a child. He never had to ask his parents for help with anything. He studied algebra on his own when he was in second grade. But then again, he had not been a normal student. It discouraged him to see that Sherry was not as brilliant as he was at her age.
“Four times nine is thirty-six,” she said, writing it down. “And nine times four is also thirty-six. That’s so weird.”
“Once you understand it, it will seem really simple.”
“If you say so, Daddy.”
He spent the next half hour helping her out, not just with math but with all her subjects. Math, Science, English, History. She had homework in every single subject, it seemed. Her homework in history consisted of reading a chapter of her textbook and answering some simple questions afterward. Although Birkin couldn’t really help her with that, he stayed at the table anyway, while Annette watched him.
When they were done, Sherry put her arms around his neck and gave him a big hug. “Thank you, Daddy. Can you help me with my homework tomorrow, too?”
“I might be busy,” he said. “But how about on Friday?”
Sherry laughed. “I don’t do my homework on Friday, Daddy. I do it on Sunday.”
“How about Sunday, then?”
“You’ll be home on Sunday?”
“All day,” he promised. “Mommy asked me to.”
“That’s because Mommy misses you too.”
“I know,” Birkin said, touching her shoulder. “And I miss you and Mommy, but what I do at work is very important. I can’t always come home when I want to.”
Sherry put all her homework papers together and put them in her pink bookbag, along with her textbooks and pencil box. She zipped it up and set it on the floor. “Okay, I’m all done. Can I watch some TV now?”
“Sure we can. Go on upstairs and change into your pajamas though. When you come back down, you can watch whatever you want.”
Sherry hurried out of the kitchen, and Birkin listened to her footsteps as she ran up the stairs. He got up from the table and went to the coffee machine to pour himself a cup. At least Annette had remembered to brew some for him. That, at least, had remained constant in his life.
He entered the living room, and Annette gave him a fast hug. “Thank you for doing that. You know, sometimes you surprise me. You almost acted like a real father in there.”
“I’m out of practice, though” he said, sitting down in a comfortable recliner in front of the television. He put his feet up on an ottoman and took a sip of his coffee.
“Maybe if you did it more often?”
B
irkin set the cup down on the end table by his chair. “Tomorrow, we’re starting a new series of tests to try to isolate VN-68. We also have some new bacterial cultures arriving from China. I won’t be here to help her with her homework tomorrow, that’s for sure. Probably not on Friday, either.”
He could feel Annette tense up from across the room. “What about Sunday?”
“I’ll be home,” he said. “I promised I would be. But if things heat up at the lab, don’t expect to see me here much next week.” He picked up the coffee and took another drink.
“You know her birthday is next Thursday, don’t you?” Annette asked, an edge to her voice.
He set the cup down abruptly. “Her birthday? So soon? What day is today?”
“The thirteenth.”
“Is it really that late already?”
Annette nodded solemnly, still standing up with her arms crossed. “You will be here for her birthday party. I want you here when I get home from picking her up at school.”
“Yes, I can do that,” Birkin said after a short pause, mentally adjusting his schedule. They would have to wait until next Friday to expose the test subjects, then. “Is there anything else coming up that I should know about?”
“Do you want me to start writing things in your daily schedule at work?”
“Actually, that might be a good idea.” Sometimes she reminded him of things and he promptly forgot about them amidst the chaos at work, so having notes would actually be a big help. Annette peered at him, unsure whether or not he was joking, but Birkin had never been good at making jokes. Satisfied that he was being serious, she nodded agreeably and reclined her chair.
“So how many kids are going to be at her birthday party? Not too many, I hope.”
“She invited twelve of her friends. Some of their parents will probably stick around as well.”
Birkin finished his cup of coffee and pursed his lips. He did not look forward to having a dozen screaming kids invade his house, but he liked even less the thought of making small talk with their parents. He supposed he could try talking to them about his job. They would probably leave him alone after that.
Sherry came running back downstairs and hopped into Birkin’s lap, dressed in her pink flower pajamas. “Daddy, did Mommy tell you that I get to go on a field trip at school tomorrow?”
“No, I don’t think she did. Where are you going for the field trip?”
“To the police station,” Sherry beamed. “Mrs. Gaffey said that we’ll get to meet some of the police officers and they’ll show us all around the station. I think it’s going to be great.”
“I hope you have fun, honey,” Birkin said with a chuckle. Maybe Sherry would run into Wesker while she was there. That would be quite the coincidence. Annette didn’t know about Wesker’s undercover job with the police, so Birkin left the thought unsaid.
Sherry picked up the remote control and turned on the television. “Is there anything you want to watch, Daddy?”
“I don’t even know what’s on,” he said. “You can pick.”
Sherry picked the cartoon channel and Birkin was subjected to an hour of manic talking dogs, cats, and mice beating each other up with frying pans and blowing each other up with red sticks of dynamite. Sherry thought it was hilarious, but Birkin did not understand how meaningless, exaggerated violence could be substituted for humor. When he was young, he never watched cartoons at all.
With the favorable genetic material Sherry had received, Birkin was surprised that she was not more intelligent or mature. Even with brilliant scientist parents, former child prodigies themselves, Sherry was just another average student, completely unspectacular. He knew from Annette that Sherry was not slow in any sense, but neither was she a young genius. And somehow, that disappointed him. He would like it so much more if Sherry was as brilliant as he had been at her age. It would be so much easier for him to bond with her.
For the whole hour he was subjected to loud cartoon nonsense, he let his mind wander back to his work at the lab. He hoped that the new experiments would prove fruitful. If they couldn’t get VN-68 to combine with the Progenitor-K, then it would mean weeks of delays and possibly even a complete dead end to that line of research. If he was going to spend more time at home, as Annette wanted, he needed to narrow his focus to more productive experiments. He couldn’t afford to waste any time at all.