Page 14 of Tangled Up In You
Just a number, she repeated in her thoughts. Not even linked to my name.
She swallowed down a tiny, nervous flutter in her throat. “I want to do everything while I’m here.”
Fitz replied with a disinterested hum and turned to talk to the other students at the table.
“It could be anyone’s data,” she whispered to herself while Fitz and the other students discussed their plans for spring break in over a week: an Alaskan cruise with parents, road trip to Nashville, flying to Cancún.
Quickly—but carefully—Ren carried out the instructions, then pressed one sticker with her sample ID inside her classroom notebook and the other on the vial. Before she could think better of it, she dropped her package in with the others to be mailed off that day.
The rest of the class flew past in a blur of lecturing, discussion, questions, and exercises. Too soon, Ren was packing up and heading to her international political economy course, and then to introductory Mandarin, and then holing up in the library carrel reading and completing the day’s coursework. The next day was the same, but with different courses—vocal performance, chemical engineering, and advanced expository writing—but for these classes came study groups and peers and a whole giant group of students inviting her to sit with them at a big round table in the dining hall, sharing stories of college life with her. College was already everything she’d dreamed of, and by the time Friday rolled around, Ren had all but forgotten about the commercial DNA assay.
So in the end, it was wild how fast it all felt. On Monday, she was spitting into a vial, telling herself that it was a harmless experiment and a good opportunity to learn, and on Friday she was sitting at her table for immunology as Dr. Audran said he had some preliminary results for them.
“We’ll do a deep dive after spring break,” the professor said as he walked around, passing each student a sheet with a sample of their data. “This is just a taste to whet your appetite. I want you to spend the last ten minutes of class getting familiar with how this data looks and comparing your sequences for these alleles I’ve pulled. There’s nothing intense here, nothing dire—no one is finding out today that they have a rare genetic disease.” The class laughed, eyes flickering nervously around. “But for these five sequences, see if you can identify among yourselves which have homology across most humans, and which have the most variance.” He handed Ren her sheet and kept walking. “Oh! And a number of you have relatives who’ve done this kit already. You can see how your data compares on these five genes to your relatives. Those will be at the bottom of your page.”
Relatives. The word washed over Ren, irrelevant to her perusal of her data.
But then her eyes froze at the bottom half of her sheet.
“Some of you may not have a relative in there,” Audran quickly added. “Don’t worry! You were not created in a lab!” More laughter. “Your relatives would have had to do the assay, too, at some point. But some of you will see parents or siblings there and may even be able to tell which parent you inherited these alleles from.”
Ren was vaguely aware of Fitz beside her, setting his sheet face down on the table, leaning back in his seat. But she could barely move. For as excited as she’d been to see some sequences from her very own DNA only five days ago, Ren was barely looking at that information now, because there was no way to explain the rest of what was there.
Steve Gylden would never do this test; she knew that with the certainty that she knew the sun would rise in the morning.
So who on earth was the person listed under Paternal sequences?
Out of the frying pan and into the fire, she thought, going from this class to the next, and the next, doing her best to stay in the moment and not obsessively worry about what she’d seen on that innocent piece of paper.
Before they’d left the classroom for the weekend, Audran had collected their class folders with the assay sheets tucked inside, locking them in the cabinet. It had been the only place their names were connected to their sample numbers, he’d reassured them, and besides, he didn’t trust them not to lose the sheets over the weekend. With laughter, the class had filed out, discussing weekend plans like their worlds remained perfectly intact, unchanged by whatever they’d seen on their sheets.
By contrast, Ren struggled to reconcile a father back on the homestead—who refused to use the soil pH meter Ren had built because it had an LCD display—with one who existed only as a sequence of letters in a database somewhere in New Jersey.
Still in a fog, Ren jogged down to the street at 4:45 p.m., expecting to be early, but finding Gloria and Steve already waiting for her at the curb.
Suddenly, the desire to return to normalcy was overwhelming—to greet them with joy, to reassure herself that she hadn’t just tugged at a dangerous thread. But Steve gestured that Ren go ahead and get right in the cab of the truck rather than bother with hugs, and Gloria waved off Ren’s exuberance with a “Later, later,” so Ren quietly slid onto the bench seat.
On the road, her parents were quiet, like they always were on the drive home. Gloria slept, Steve listened to old Hank Williams cassettes, and Ren was left to her hurricane of thoughts. The excitement of all her courses dissolved into the background as the single looming question ballooned, blocking out everything else: What did it all mean?
Steve had to have done the test, Ren thought. He must’ve, at some point. Maybe before we moved to the homestead? But that was impossible; the technology only came out a handful of years ago, and they’d moved there when Ren was around three. That was nearly twenty years ago—she was turning twenty-three in just over a week. It didn’t make sense. The only explanation that made sense was that her results were wrong. Audran must’ve mixed up her sheet with another student’s.
But she couldn’t check it—the sheet was locked securely in Audran’s classroom, and she’d been in such a daze that it hadn’t occurred to her to compare the sample ID there to the number on the sticker in her notebook. Now she was left considering every possibility, looking at her parents with new eyes.
Eyes. Hers were green; both of her parents had brown eyes, dark hair. Ren knew two brown-eyed people could easily have recessive green in there somewhere. The problem was, Ren didn’t know how to ask. She couldn’t remember the last time Steve or Gloria had mentioned anything about family; it was so long ago, Ren knew instinctively to not even bring it up. How mad would her parents be if, after only a handful of weeks at college, she started asking all sorts of questions about her genetic history and people the Gyldens had long since stopped speaking to?
At home, Gloria pulled dinner from the oven, and they sat down at the table the same way they always had. But suddenly, she felt like she’d been gone for a year, a stranger in her own home. For the first time in her life, Ren truly realized that her parents had stories—so many stories—that she might never know.
Was a secret father out there one of them?
No. There was no way. It didn’t matter that both of her parents were tall and muscular, while Ren was petite and lean. It didn’t matter that their hair was dark and hers was golden. It didn’t matter that, physically, she couldn’t be more different than they were. Genetics are a wonder, she told herself, poking at her dinner. I’m jumping to conclusions.
All the questions floating in her thoughts made unease twist in her chest until it was hard to breathe. Her dorm room was small, but somehow the cabin felt smaller tonight than it ever had, and so dark inside, with all the curtains pulled tight. She used to marvel at the construction of this new home, how much bigger and more modern it was than the old one had been, the cabin they tore down to make room for the barn, but Ren couldn’t help but see how rustic it was, really, and for the first time imagined how the small rooms would look through the eyes of everyone back in Spokane. She imagined Miriam with her phone and her frown, lamenting over the lack of Wi-Fi. How her composition study partners would look crowded around the small coffee table in the cloying warmth of the living room. What would her Mandarin professor think if he saw her practicing conversational Mandarin with a pig named Frank?
And, for a bewildering flash, Ren imagined Fitz at the table beside her, sitting in the empty fourth seat. In her mind, he leaned casually in his chair, one arm flung across the back as he gazed at her with that mysterious gleam in his eye. Imaginary Fitz pointed to the food on his plate. Did you shoot this bird yourself? he asked, whiskey eyes teasing and warm. He seemed outsized for the chair, outsized for this entire cabin. His feet would hang off the end of her bed—
“Ren?” Steve leaned into her line of sight. “You listening to your mother?”
She blinked hard, clearing her trance. “Yes! Sorry! Just tired.”