Chapter Nineteen
Suella drove down to Mexico twice a year to get the medications. No one ever asked for any medical documentation; they just took her money, wished her well, and said “Hasta luego!” During Natalie’s second year on the medications, Suella decided she needed to get a little more creative about the ways she doled them out. Sometimes her little girl pushed her away groggily rather than accept an early morning hug. On those days and others, Suella would have to slip her a dose by tapping her as she served breakfast. Many times she would hug Natalie as she walked out through the front door, and tap her then.
Disappointingly, Suella was still waiting for the next time that their consciousnesses would meld. It never happened during the hugs they gave each other in the morning or at other times. When Natalie ran on the soccer field or jumped on the volleyball court Suella hoped something would happen, but she only got to watch her daughter excel in sports for one more year. The month of March before Natalie’s twelfth birthday, she cut off the medications again. It could have been because Natalie was getting so close to her teenage years, but she returned full-force sassy during her medication free March.
“Grapefruit and oranges!” Natalie shouted one morning. “Grapefruit and oranges! That’s all we ever have around here! Can’t we ever have eggs and bacon or other stuff that normal people have for breakfast?” Even though she complained, Natalie ate the fruit and the extra vegetables Suella sneaked into her diet. When Natalie’s twelfth birthday rolled around and they made their annual trip to the desert, Suella held her breath while she waited out in the lobby.
That year, not only did Natalie’s appointment end at the regular time, it ended without a little chat from Dr. Allende. Her only comment was “She’s growing up to be a fine, beautiful young lady. She’s nearly as tall as you, now.”
On their drive back home, Suella felt in good spirits. They passed the hot dog stand that had been so familiar to them for all these years. “What do you say we stop for chili dogs?” Suella said.
Natalie shrugged. “You can if you want. They said in school that roadkill ends up in hot dogs. I want to eat something else.”
Suella couldn’t wait until the next morning, when she could start her daughter on the medications again.
Nathan had tried to stay in the background since he’d retired from baseball years before. Journalists called their house fairly often, however, wanting to speak with him about his long pitching career or the double pickoff play that ended it. Nathan would always graciously accept those interviews or chances to speak at public events or corporations, which paid him very well for the short amount of work involved. “I can’t believe how much money they pay me to stand up there and cuss,” he told Suella.
Early in the winter of 2026, a man with a wide smile and thin hair came to the house a few times a week. “This is Justin Cintron,” Nathan said, while the man stood up and bowed to Suella, tenderly shaking her hand. “He’s going to help me write a book about my life: before, during, and after baseball.” They would sit in the living room where Justin would ask Nathan dozens of interview questions while a chip recorded Nathan’s answers. Justin usually arrived in the early evening. Natalie would show him inside and sit on one of her beanbag chairs while her father spoke about his life.
“I threw baseballs against my pitch-back every day,” he said. “Sometimes for three whole hours.”
“Didn’t you ever get bored?” Natalie asked.
“No. I’d be dreaming I was pitching in the World Series, for the Royals. The funny thing is, I feel like I played for every team but Kansas City.”
Suella had always wondered if Nathan was going to try to write a baseball book since he’d been retired and had all the extra time on his hands. From talking to women in the clubhouses and from following the literary world, Suella knew that a baseball book could be a big hit or it could be a big bust. Many books had been written during all the steroid abuse scandals that had caused hard feelings between men who’d formerly been close friends. Justin spent weeks in their living room talking to Nathan about everything, which made Suella nervous.
She spoke to him as they lie in bed awake that night. “Are you going to tell Justin about getting your tooth crushed?”
Nathan laughed. “Yeah, I told him that story last week.”
“Did you tell him why they crushed it?”
“Yes. Everybody already knows who was taking what juice and when. There have been so many books written about them since then.”
“Well then, how is your book going to be any different?”
Nathan shrugged. “Personal glimpses. Stuff like that.”
“How much are you going to tell him about Natalie?”
“You mean, am I going to tell him she’s a clone? I can’t, remember? It’s in that contract.”
“Good.” Suella felt like she could finally get some sleep. For weeks she’d been worried that Nathan’s book would somehow morph into a tell-all about what it was like to be the father of a clone.
Justin Cintron stopped coming to the house right before Natalie’s medication free month started. Nathan said he was going to spend the rest of that spring and summer writing and editing it and that it would be ready for release later in the fall.
Suella made sure to have plenty of bananas around and also kept liquid meal replacements in the refrigerator, to help with Natalie’s electrolytes. During her last trip to Mexico, the pharacist there told her that she could receive the medication in pill form. It would allow her to blend it with Natalie’s food. One time that Suella had tapped Natalie, the wand for the laser fell partially out of Suella’s hand and knocked Natalie on the arm.
Suella fumbled the wand and nearly dropped it. “What are you hitting me with a pen for?”
Horrified, Suella scrambled to make up a quick story about the laser wand. “I was going to write a check to the electric company.”
Nathan heard that and laughed. “What the hell for? We have solar. They should be writing us checks.”
“They have an option where you can donate to Save the Animals and things like that. So that’s how I pay. I send them a check.”
Nathan and Natalie both said “Oh.”
Suella skipped away down the hall to the bathroom, closed the door behind her and collapsed with relief. She vowed to find some other way to deliver the medications to Natalie.
When the pharmacist told her they came in pill form, she was overjoyed. Before she left the clinic, she peaked inside the bottle to look at them. Dismayed, she saw pills the size of nickels in there. “She can’t swallow well,” Suella said. “Is it okay to crush the pills, so that they’re more like powder?”
“Of course. We even have a mortar and pestle you can buy,” the swarthy pharmacist said. Later that night, when Nathan and Natalie were asleep, Suella took all of the pills out of all of the bottles and crushed them into a fine powder. That next morning, Natalie received her daily dose in her hot chocolate.
Natalie’s thirteenth visit to the Center came and went without incident, also. Suella learned that many popular single-serve beverages contained electrolytes, so she kept plenty of these around the house for Natalie to drink. For the second year in a row, she received a perfectly clean bill of health. The morning following the center visit, Suella eagerly put her daughter back on her medications.
Still, there was no repeat of the melding experience she’d enjoyed so tremendously. Yet, thirteen was a big birthday in the Worthy house. The celebration for Natalie went on for a whole month. Suella allowed her to have a slumber party with eight of her friends from school. Midnight arrived and the girls still giggled and played loud hip-hop music on one of their Wave cubes. Nathan lay atop the bed, exhausted but unable to sleep. Suella was reading a book. “It’s a slumber party,” he said. “Why isn’t anyone slumbering?”
Suella snickered. “Because bad
things happen to the first girl who falls asleep at a slumber party. Haven’t you ever heard that before?”
“What? Like they dip her hand in warm water or something, so she pees herself?”
“Yes. Among other things.”
Nathan groaned. “Quick. Get me some ear plugs.”
By the summer Natalie was thirteen, she’d grown another couple of inches, so that at five foot seven, she was just a couple of inches shorter than her mother. She seemed extremely thin though, despite having a good appetite and playing lots of sports. But then Natalie remembered being rail-thin until she was in her mid-twenties. It occurred to Suella that if the two of them were alone together outside of the house it might be just enough for a repeat of the consciousness melding phenomenon. They still owned the beach house in Oceanside.
“Hey Natalie,” Suella said, after dinner one night. “How about we celebrate by spending a few days at the beach?”
Nathan said “Yeah! Good idea, mom. It’d give me a chance to have all my girlfriends come around here for a change.” Suella poked him hard in the ribs, while Nathan cringed and crumpled, pretending that he’d been shot.
“Can I bring one or two of my friends?” Natalie asked.
Suella felt a twinge inside her head. “Well I was hoping it could be just us girls. We could get to know each other, bond, have girl talk, and stay up late watching chick flicks, stuff like that.”
“But you won’t go in the water,” Natalie countered. “When we go to the beach, all you do is put up the umbrella, squirt sunscreen all over yourself, and sit on a lawn chair reading a book. That’s boring! My friends go in the water.”
Suella did that because she tried to limit sun exposure as much as possible.
Not only could she avoid skin cancer that way, but she could also keep her skin young and supple, something that mattered more and more to her with each passing year. “Well, I could go in the water, too.”
Natalie compromised. That weekend they would go to Oceanside. They would stay for just a Saturday and a Sunday. It would give Suella two solid days to spend in her daughter’s company, learn about her, marvel at how she was growing and developing into a young woman, and, hopefully, meld with her. To make it even easier for them to interact with each other and bond, Suella decided that they would take the train. All either one of them would need was an overnight bag, which made it easy.
The best thing about sitting on the train was that they could choose a table on the top deck where the seats faced each other with a table in between them. The school year had just come to an end and Suella felt glad that she finally had a chance to spend time with Natalie. Sitting together watching television or being in the same house together while Natalie played on her computer and she worked in her den was not the same thing.
Suella studied her daughter’s face because she was still growing and changing and she needed to take a mental snapshot of it in time. But she gazed at Natalie for a longer amount of time than Natalie was comfortable with.
“What are you looking at?” Natalie asked.
Suella reached across the table to hold both of her daughter’s hands in hers. “I’m looking at you, honey. You’re growing up so fast I can barely keep up with you.”
“That’s what you always say. Did you ever call Grandma to see if she’s got any scrapbook pictures of you when you were my age?”
Suella glanced down at the tabletop for a moment. “No, I haven’t.”
Natalie went on. “Why do you live so far away from Grandma? She lives on the other side of the country.”
“I had to come to California to get a good job. Grandma understands.” She did not like the way the conversation was going. Natalie had started to watch the scenery go by out the window. They were rumbling past the groves of Orange County and the freeways, where for a moment they could see the buildings of Disneyland. “Isn’t this fun?”
Natalie kept looking out the window at the scenery, nodding while watching trees swish past. Back when Natalie was a baby, Suella had thought about having the talk with her when she was around thirteen years old. Now that she was thirteen, it seemed moot. When she’d received her period at only eight years of age, Suella had been forced to have the talk with her one year later. Still, she realized again and again how little she knew about her own daughter’s day-to-day life, her likes and dislikes, and her dreams. Natalie had proved long ago that she was very different from her mother, after all.
“Natalie, can I ask you a question?” Suella began.
Natalie turned her eyes from the train window and looked at her instead.
“Have you met, or gotten to know any boys yet?”
For a moment, Natalie’s eyes twinkled and she flashed a knowing grin. “Yes.”
Suella laughed along with her. “It sounds like there’s someone special.”
Natalie’s cheekbones were tinged rose in a delightful way. “Just someone I study with in the library. He’s not good at math and I am.”
That surprised Suella, since she was terrible at math in school when she was Natalie’s age. “What’s his name?”
“Matthew.”
She let the name sink in. “Now there’s a classic, old-fashioned boy’s name that you don’t hear very often. What does he look like?”
Natalie smiled when she described him. “He has red-brown hair, he’s white, and he’s shorter than I am.”
“Shorter?” Suella asked. “Ah, well. Give him another couple of years or so. He’ll have his growth spurt and he’ll be ahead of you by then.” For the next few miles, Suella joined Natalie in looking out the window.
Speaking very softly, Natalie asked “Did you like boys when you were my age?”
“Of course.”
At that moment the train took a sharp right turn to follow the contours of the Pacific Ocean shoreline. Suella loved to sit back and enjoy the vistas of the blue ocean water swelling to whitecaps, which crashed on the pebbly beach sand that swirled out for miles ahead of them. Only two more stops and they would disembark from the train and catch a cab to their beachfront house.
Suella had a local cleaning lady come in twice a week to straighten up and dust their beach house. To keep the value of it intact, they kept it off the general rental market, even though the extra money was tempting. A steady stream of renters represented people from all different classes, some of them rowdy and reckless. Suella decided long ago that she would forgo the extra money to be assured that their beach house would stay in top shape. They allowed friends to use it on occasion, but the house hadn’t been lived in consistently since Nathan played for San Diego.
The house was small, with hardwood floors since carpet was so impractical.
Still, Suella checked all the furniture and the countertops for dust. She made sure everything was still in place and that the refrigerator had been turned on. Meanwhile, Natalie ran into one of the bedrooms and quickly shed her blouse and her shorts and stepped into her floral teal two-piece bathing suit. The next thing her mother knew, she jumped out from behind the door. “Are you ready? Let’s go to the beach!”
Suella would have preferred that they relax at the house first after the train trip, but she followed her daughter’s lead and put on her retro one piece halter swimsuit, the cobalt blue one with the rhinestone accent that Nathan liked so much on her. Once she had done that, she put on her white sarong cover-up with a wide-brimmed velvet sash hat and her huge sunglasses. She found the beach umbrella and the two lawn chairs inside one of the closets.
Moments later, they’d set everything up on the sand and Suella was going to open up a book and start to relax in the lawn chair. “Last one in the water is a buffalo fart!” Natalie announced as she tossed her beach towel on the other lawn chair and streaked toward the blue water.
Suella recognized a golden opportunity when she saw one. She ran after Natalie, wincing as the cold ocean water
washed over her toes, her feet, and her calves. Natalie had cut into the water yards ahead of her and had belly-flopped down into the surf, submerging herself. Behind her, Suella felt the familiar wave of nausea overtake her. After her vision clouded over she felt an explosion of cold water wash over her. She had melded with Natalie and resurfaced in the frothy surf. Natalie had turned, and Suella, experiencing the world through her eyes, looked at herself, a few yards away, folding her arms tightly across her chest, shivering,
“Oh, my God, it’s so cold,” she said, the words booming loudly in her ear as her vision clouded over again, and her consciousness leaped back into her own body. She was the one too afraid to submerge herself into the cold surf just yet. Being able re-experience the phenomenon of being one with her daughter had already elevated her mood as she rejoiced in the peacefulness of a carefree day, the warm sun, and the invigorating ocean.
Together they frolicked in the surf, and at first Suella took care to keep her head above the water. She jumped on tiptoe as the waves swelled past them. They had ventured further out and the water reached both of their chests. A large wave crested a good deal ahead of them and Suella realized the inevitable: it was going to break on top of them. She winced, bracing herself for the onslaught of cold water as it submerged her.
Suella had stayed out of ocean water for as long as she could remember, possibly for as long as she’d been married to Nathan. It bothered her that somewhere along the shoreline that raw sewage poured into the same water they were swimming in, that the same ocean contained huge varieties of creatures who lived, breathed, and shat in it. There was also the familiar briny brackishness and slimy seaweed. Yet she was only thinking of the fun she had bouncing in the surf with her beautiful daughter that late Saturday morning. Suella had loved playing in the ocean when she was little, up till when she reached Natalie’s age. It made perfect sense that Natalie enjoyed it so much, also. They stayed in the ocean for a couple of hours.
Eventually, Suella emerged from the water, brushed out her hair, put on her sunglasses and cover-up and sat in the chair beneath the beach umbrella to read. “Aw, you’re no fun,” said Natalie, who’d also come out of the water. She laid out her towel.
For the next couple of hours she lay on the towel beside the beach umbrella while her mother read.
Suella wished there was some way she could freeze this moment in time, place it in storage and then retrieve it again so she could relive it, in the future when she needed a pick-me-up. Later in the afternoon they packed up the beach umbrella and the chair and headed back to the house. There’d been no time to head to the supermarket to get groceries for dinner. Instead, Suella ordered Chinese food delivery. When it arrived, she set the table and the both of them poured rice and saucy, spicy food out of paper containers. As they ate their dinner, Natalie eased into a more thoughtful, reflexive mood.
“Mom, why did you clone yourself?”
Suella had just bitten into a large tofu cube and had to chew it and swallow it down before responding. “Lots of reasons,” she said. “I wanted to become a mother, but I couldn’t. That was the big reason.”
“Why couldn’t you be a mother?”
“I just can’t,” she said. “Most women can have babies. Some cannot. I was one of the ones who cannot.”
“That’s too bad. I used to want to have a baby sister or brother, but now I know you couldn’t have one even if you wanted to.”
“Especially now. I’m over fifty.”
“Yeah, I know.” Natalie had put down her fork and looked downward, solemnly.
Suella touched the side of her daughter’s face. “But we’ve got each other and that’s really important, right? And we’re having so much fun.”
After their supper they both sat on the couch and watched a movie. Natalie soon fell asleep. Suella’s eyelids also became heavy. She remembered all over again just how draining playing in ocean water could be. Gently, she woke Natalie up and led her toward the bedroom where she would be sleeping. Suella would be sleeping in the master bedroom. Once she had changed into sleepwear and lowered her head down onto the soft pillow, she drifted off immediately to sleep.
Both of them had been exhausted. They slept well into the morning of the next day, Sunday. Bright summer sunshine illuminated the beach cottage, warming them as Suella brewed coffee. Natalie wore a long, frilly white nightie, which helped Suella to forget how much of a rough-and-tumble tomboy she actually was. “You look like a beautiful little angel in that nightie,” she said.
“Thank you,” Natalie murmured.
Suella realized that she’d left the Apelbaumentine pills and laser taps back home. Oh well, she thought. That weekend they would not need them.