I don’t know what would have happened next, if Bethany’s mother hadn’t interrupted our little standoff. All smiles, she came back into the room garbed in a twin set and jeans, every inch the suburban soccer mom. For a moment, I thought she was going to offer us lemonade or something, but instead, she fixed her gaze on a spot about a foot in front of Skylar and me.
“Tyler,” she said, in one of those mom voices—halfway between exasperation and indulgence. “Stop pestering Bethany’s friends.”
It took me a moment to digest her words. I stopped breathing.
“I am so sorry, girls,” Mrs. Davis continued, a smile dancing across her face, her eyes flitting back and forth, like she was tracking someone’s movement, even though there wasn’t anyone there.
I looked at Skylar. She looked at me. The two of us looked at the spot on the floor.
“C’mon, Ty,” Mrs. Davis said. “Leave the girls alone. I’ve got an omelet with your name on it and a big glass of milk.”
She held out her hand and beckoned. After a brief pause, she flitted away, her movements purposeful and graceful. As I watched, she reached out, like she was tousling someone’s hair and then she paused.
She turned and looked back over her shoulder.
And for a split second, maybe less, it looked like she might crumble to the ground. Like she knew there wasn’t anyone in this room but the three of us. Like wherever her Tyler had gone, Bethany’s mother wished she could go there, too.
That split second of clarity was fleeting, and a moment later, the bright smile returned, but I was left with an aching sadness. I watched Mrs. Davis walk out of the room, murmuring gaily to nobody at all.
Beside me, Skylar wiped the back of her hand roughly across her face.
“You okay?” I asked her. After what we’d just seen, I wasn’t entirely certain that I was okay.
Skylar shook her head. “I’ll be fine,” she said. “It’s just—she’s so sad. She’s drowning.”
For once, Skylar didn’t elaborate, and when Bethany came back in a moment later, I struggled to hide my own emotions, to make it seem like Skylar and I hadn’t just seen into the intimate depths of her mother’s broken mind.
“Here,” Bethany said, tersely. It took me a moment to realize that she was holding out a slip of paper. No, not paper—a brochure.
I took it from her. “Chimera Biomedical,” I read, but my eyes were drawn away from the words and to the image below it: an octagon bisected by a ladder, spiraling around an invisible line.
Only this time, the ladder looked less like a ladder and more like a DNA helix.
“They specialize in gene therapy,” Bethany said stiffly. “Regeneration.”
“Regeneration?”
Bethany stared pointedly at the tips of her toes. “Reviving brain cells. Stimulating nerve growth. Growing organs.”
“Do they do stem cell research?” Skylar asked, taking the brochure from my hand and staring intently at the symbol—the one she’d drawn for me the day before.
“Look,” Bethany said. “This is what you wanted to know, isn’t it? You wanted to know what that symbol was, and I told you. You want to know who my dad is working for. Well, this is it. It has to be. It explains everything. Why he’s been working so much. Why he’d do something like this. Why Skylar drew the symbol.”
I processed Bethany’s words, but felt like I was missing something—the reason she hadn’t told me this company’s name the second she’d seen the symbol; the things she was saying about her dad.
“Your mom came back in here a second ago,” Skylar told her, gauging her reaction. “Looking for Tyler.”
This time, Bethany didn’t react to the sound of the name. She just raised one eyebrow, untouchable and cool. “So?”
I knew then, knew that Tyler wasn’t a figment of her mother’s imagination. Knew that he’d been real once, that he wasn’t anymore.
“You had a brother,” I said, thinking of all the times I’d wished for a sibling, for someone in my house other than just my dad and me. “But something happened.”
Bethany’s chin wavered, and I realized that she was biting the inside of her cheeks—anything to keep herself from showing a hint of weakness to the two of us.
Skylar sucked in a breath, that same sad smile painting her face, like if she let her lips tilt downward, she might start crying instead. “It wasn’t your fault,” she said, her voice soft, her tone even.
I thought of the things Bethany had said when she realized I was alive. You were dead, and it was my fault. I couldn’t—I can’t do this again.
“The accident today wasn’t your fault, either,” I told her.
“It’s always my fault,” Bethany said, voice steady, hands shaking. “My mom. My dad. Tyler. I was supposed to be watching him. Me. But he wanted to go to a friend’s house, and I wanted to watch something on TV, so I let him. I let him go, and he was goofing around on their diving board—it was the middle of winter. There wasn’t any water in the pool, and he should have known better. I shouldn’t have let him go.”
Bethany shrugged, like that could make the words she was about to say matter less. “He fell.”
I wondered how old she’d been at the time, how old her little brother was when he died.
“He’s not dead.” Skylar said the words suddenly, and I wasn’t sure whether she was responding to my thoughts or if she’d seen something in that exact moment that had started her lips moving. “He fell. On concrete. Hit his head, but he didn’t die.”
“Coma,” Bethany said flatly. “For the past four years. Once upon a time, the doctors thought he might wake up. There were some experimental treatments, but they didn’t work. Now they say he’s brain-dead. It doesn’t matter. Either way, he’s gone.”
I tried to imagine what must have been going through her head at that moment, how she must feel, but I couldn’t. I had my reasons for keeping people at arm’s length, and she had hers. My dad and I barely even spoke. My mother had left when I was three. But Bethany—
Her brother was brain-dead.
Her mother believed he was still running around the house.
And her father was conducting illegal experiments on unwitting teenagers—Bethany included.
Suddenly, it clicked in my head: the brochure I was holding, Bethany’s familiarity with Chimera Biomedical, her father’s willingness to break the law for them.