Chapter Seventeen
Fall, 2024
Along with soccer, Natalie also played volleyball and basketball, causing Suella no end of grief. She’d never been that interested in sports in her youth. Why should Natalie, her cloned daughter, be so much into them? One day she tried to bring up the subject to Nathan, telling him that she was so concerned that her daughter would get hurt, or that her normal development would be affected, since she played so many sports.
“That’s a load of fuckin’ bullshit,” Nathan offered, in return. “Of course she likes sports. She’s my daughter, too, right?”
“You mean the nature versus nurture thing?” Suella said. “I just don’t understand why she likes sports so much. I never liked sports that much when I was growing up.”
“Oh. So you want Natalie to be exactly like you? Is that it?” He was standing near his trophies on the mantel, causing Suella to think that to an outsider this must look like the re-enactment of a bad movie scene. “Natalie may have come through you, but she is not you.”
“I’d just feel much better if she was interested in, you know, ‘girl’ things.”
Nathan paused to reflect on that one for a moment. “You mean like playing with dolls? Or plopped down in front of a sim screen, eating candy and blowing up like the Michelin man? Is that what you want?”
Despite herself, Suella started to laugh. “No, of course not. I would never want her to be fat. I just worry about her.”
Nathan slowly stepped toward her and took her into his arms for a quick, heartfelt hug. When he stepped back from her, he said “Nat is a great kid. We are lucky.
Other parents would give their left nut for a kid like her.”
“Excuse me?”
“Or their left tit,” Nathan blurted out. “You know what I mean.” He kissed her and continued out into the yard to trim a few hedges.
Months before, Suella had desperately wanted to discuss her out of body experience with someone. She thought about telling Dr. Allende when they traveled to the desert for Natalie’s 10-year physical. Yet, Dr. Allende was so cold, clinical and detached, she knew the woman would dismiss the events as a product of wishful thinking. There was also no one Suella knew from her days as a baseball wife who she could trust with speaking about such an unusually private subject.
Then she remembered Jillian. It had been years since she’d seen or heard from her amiably bohemian former neighbor. Was she still in the same condo? During a mid-afternoon, around the time they used to have daily tea together, Suella called her, If her luck held, Jillian would have the same telephone number. The phone line rang once, twice, three times. Her old friend then picked up the line, without any of the clunking and clattering that Suella remembered from times past.
After Suella greeted her, the two women giggled with delight about re-connecting with each other after all these years. Yes, Jillian still lived in the same condo. Yes, she still painted and played folk music, in fact her following was growing. And, yes, she still had the same land-line based telephone number, except “I can go to cam now!” she rejoiced. “I’ve joined the 2020’s.”
“That’s great!” Suella replied. “Now let me tell you about the reason I’m calling.” She went into vivid detail about the incident from the soccer field.
Nearly a year had gone by since it had happened, yet she still remembered all the details as if it had taken place yesterday. When she had finished telling her friend everything, she patiently waited for Jillian’s words. From past experience she knew that Jillian liked to consider everything, think about everything before making assessments or passing judgments. To Suella it was always worth the wait, though.
“You’ve got an extraordinary bond with Natalie,” Jillian finally said. “Much deeper than the bond a woman usually has with her daughter. Mothers can tell when their children are hurt, or ill, even when they’re hundreds of miles away. You got to experience the world through your daughter’s eyes for a brief moment. That’s a wonderful thing you can hold onto, forever.”
“Yes, yes,” Suella rejoiced. “But how can I experience it again?”
“The time has to be right. I don’t think you get to have a say in that.”
To Suella, that meant that it had to be okay with heaven and the angels before she was allowed within her daughter’s aura again. Maybe someday soon it would happen again. In the meantime, she should never try to force it. “You know what I miss, Jill? I miss our long talks together, over tea.”
Jillian laughed. “We could do it again, sort of.”
“We could?” Suella responded, thinking that the airfare could get expensive, even though both she and Nathan made lots of money.
“What did I say before? I’m on cam now. We could have tea together in the afternoon and it would almost be like we were in the same room.”
“That’d be fantastic!”
That night, Suella ventured out to find a delicately beautiful, retro tea set.
The very next day she kept her word and around two in the afternoon Jillian’s image beamed onto the projectable in Suella’s den. She felt instantly gratified at the fact that some things do not change. Jillian still wore her hair long and flowing, although more streaks of gray shimmered through it. She still favored smocks over long dresses and paint smears still dotted her hands. When she smiled, she also revealed new crow’s feet.
“It’s so great to see you,” Jillian said. “You look beautiful, as always.”
In the old days, Jillian and Suella could sit for two hours discussing themselves, ideas, life and history. Nowadays, Suella had new responsibilities and had to keep their tea talks down to an hour. “At three sharp I have to go to the school and get Nat,” she explained.
Suella and Natalie would ride home together, which would ordinarily have given them a chance to bond, but for Suella it was often frustrating. “How was your day?” she would ask Natalie, hoping for an enthusiastic response for a change.
“It was fine.”
Scratching and clawing for conversation, Suella would ask “What went on in school today?”
“Oh, the usual stuff,” was one variation that Natalie would give her.
One day Natalie called her at around noon, when Suella was heavily in the middle of a system re-track for a client. “You don’t have to come get me,” Natalie said. “A friend is giving me a ride home.”
“You mean a friend’s mother?”
“Yes,” Natalie giggled. “Something like that.”
“Could you have her call me?
“Aw, ma. It’s okay. She’s nice.”
“Yes, yes, I’m sure she is. But give me some credit, okay? That’s precious cargo she’s carrying. I wouldn’t want to entrust it to anyone.”
“Okay mom. I’ll have her call you.”
Suella hoped it didn’t show that she was secretly glad that her daughter had a new chauffeur. It meant that she could spend two hours with Jillian in the middle of the afternoon instead of just one. Natalie always arrived home at three-thirty. Though the woman never called her, Suella felt confident that it must be a good mother of one of her friends.
One afternoon, Jillian herself had to cut their tea time down to an hour. She had an appointment with an art curator that afternoon and wanted to take some extra time to freshen up and prepare herself. Suella had some clients of her own she could have been helping, with the extra time that afternoon. Instead she took the time to go outside and enjoy the fresh air while cleaning up from some palm fronds that had littered the front lawn during some recent windy days. She also edged the walkway and the bricks forming a border for her flower garden. Around three-thirty she kept herself alert for Natalie, glad that she might get a chance to meet her little girl’s chauffeur.
A few minutes later a sleek, red Tesla roadster purred up the street up and stopped in her driveway. Suella saw a familiar fluff of lush blond
hair and huge sunglasses set against a familiar face and mouth. She walked around to the driver’s side of the red roadster and the driver obliged by opening the electric window, which rolled up into the roof assembly rather than down, into the door.
The woman waved delicately to Suella, showing a flash of a glamorous manicure.
“Hi Suella. Nice to see you again.”
Suella nodded, steeling herself against the shock. “Hi, Toni. How have you been?”
“Fantastic,” Toni replied.
Inside the car, Natalie gave her driver a quick hug before gathering her backpack together and stepping out onto the driveway. A moment later, Toni’s elegant sports car had slunk away out of view. At least Natalie hugged her mother, too, now that they both stood together on the driveway. “Come on inside,” Suella said, trying to smile, leading Natalie up the walkway.
When the front door shut behind them, Suella whirled around to face Natalie. “So this is the ‘friend’ you’ve been getting rides from?”
“Yes!” Natalie replied joyously. “Aunt Toni. She’s so luke.”
There was that word again, that Suella could never get used to hearing. Today’s generation of kids took the age-old youth expression of approval—cool—and swung it around backwards to form the new word “luke.” It didn’t make the reality of what had just happened settle any better with Suella, though. “How did you get in contact with Toni?”
Natalie’s eyes widened and her mouth dropped open for a second, as if she was saying “Duh, I called her.” Instead, she politely replied “I texted her. She’s on Googlebee. Can you believe it? A famous actress like her.”
“And she offered to drop you home every day like this?”
“Yeah. She’s got a really sick job now. She gets off right before I get out of school.”
The use of the word “sick” to describe something positive in the youth world, had been going on since the middle oughts and Suella could never get used to that, either. To her, sick was, well “sick.”
At least, Suella decided, she knew who was driving her daughter home. And she approved of Toni, after all. The woman had carried Natalie. She had a good heart. But then Natalie started constantly talking about her. It started one day over dinner. “Hey, dad, you knew Aunt Toni has started driving me home from school, right?”
Nathan, who was in the middle of a texturized protein, rib-shaped entrée called a “Fib” said “Yes, I heard about that.”
“You should see the other girls vom when Aunt Toni pulls up in her red Astra.”
Nathan rolled his eyes and glanced at Suella for a moment. “Yes, I heard about that, too. Hope she doesn’t still use that lead foot of hers.”
“Her ‘lead foot?’” Natalie asked, with a confused look on her face.
Suella patted her hand. “He’s wondering if she drives too fast. That’s what they used to call it when cars had a pedal on the floor and gasoline engines. You had to press the pedal harder to get the car to go fast.”
“Oh,” Natalie replied.
“Well, does Aunt Toni drive fast?” Suella envisioned the sexy red car rocketing along the freeway.
“No. If she did, she’d bump somebody. There’s lots of cars on the driveway after school.” Natalie turned back toward her father. “Hey dad, is it true that you two knew each other since before you were my age?”
Nathan always worked up a good appetite at the gym or the golf course.
To respond to his daughter, he had to chew a large bite of salad and get it down. “Yes. It was in the 1980’s in Kansas City.”
“Wow! What was Toni like back then?”
Nathan shrugged. “Pretty much the way she is now. Blond hair. Pretty. Very bold. Acted in plays a lot. I knew her all the way through grade school, junior high, and high school.”
“Really? Did you go to dances together?”
“One or two, yes.”
Nathan had told Suella that he, Toni, and two other couples all went to the homecoming dance as a big unit. She was about to offer that as a way of clarifying things, but Natalie kept talking: “How come you didn’t marry her?”
Suella forced a laugh and then glanced incredulously at her husband, as if to say “Can you believe this kid?” Out loud, she said “Oh, honey, I’m sure your father doesn’t want to talk about that.”
“We were too busy for each other,” Nathan replied, glancing sympathetically at Suella. “I had my baseball. She had her acting and modeling.”
“But if you did marry her, I wouldn’t be a clone,” Natalie said, quietly.
Suella sprang up from her chair. “That’s it! That’s it!” she shouted, snatching dirtied plates from the tabletop, carrying them toward the sink. “I’m the bad guy because I wanted to have a child in any way that I could! I’m the uncool disciplinarian! Well sue me for wanting to have the best for my daughter! Sue me for not being able to carry a baby to term! Sue me for not being a glamorous movie star!” She flung the dishes into the sink, where they clattered and crashed and ran to her den. She slammed the door.
Barely able to see through her cascading tears, she slumped down into her easy chair and sobbed so heavily her lungs hurt. For what seemed like an hour, she was alone with her pain. Finally, when she began to calm herself down, she heard a knock. “What is it?” she asked, embarrassed at how sharp and bitter her voice sounded.
“Honey, it’s me,” Nathan said. “Can I come in?”
“Sure,” Suella said, knowing that no matter what the case, it would have been stupid to barricade herself away for the whole evening.
When he walked inside, Suella was immediately touched at how solemn and contrite he appeared. He looked like the ten-year-old boy who might have carried young Toni’s books home for her while Duran Duran played on her Walkman. “I’m so sorry you’re hurt,” he said. “Nat didn’t mean anything by what she said.” He reached forward and touched her shoulder, looking deeply into her eyes, the way he did years ago when he proposed to her. “She’s glad that she was born. And she’s glad that you’re her mom.”
Suella wanted to say “Well then how can a little girl who was cloned from one of my cells, who is the very embodiment of me, even more than an identical twin…how can she be so utterly different from me?” She knew that was a question that may never be answered. Another part of her knew that in her own way, different though it may be from she preferred, that Natalie loved her. In the end, all she could think of to say was “I made such a fool of myself back there.”
“No you didn’t,” Nathan said, tenderly stroking the hair framing her face. “You’re a normal, healthy, sensitive and beautiful woman. And you hurt. Natalie loves you. She feels awful right now. Can she come see you?”
Suella wiped away a tear and patted her husband’s hand. “Of course she can.”
Nathan left the room, immediately causing Suella to feel nervous. How would she handle it when Natalie came in? Did her daughter really resent being a clone that much? Would they ever be a normal mother and daughter, even in spirit? She checked herself quickly in a hand mirror, smoothing away smears of smudged makeup and rearranging tattered strands of her hair. There was a small knock on the door. Trying to make herself sound as pleasant as she could, she said “Yes?”
It took Natalie two tries to work the doorknob with her small hand. The door soon slowly opened to reveal her downcast face and eyes, which had been red and glistening from crying she’d done. She clasped her hands tightly in front of her stomach as she shuffled slowly into the room. Stopping in front of Suella’s easy chair, she said “Mommy I’m sorry for making you mad. I’m sorry for what I said.”
Suella had tried to steel herself to receive her daughter, but felt a hard lump growing in her throat instead. She tenderly reached out for the little girl’s hand and when she held it, whirled her toward herself and enveloped her into her arms. Natalie had floated some
how onto the chair with her and she held her tightly, rocking her back and forth.