Passing Resemblance
A clone wrestles with her identity after loss.
When I first learned I was a “test tube baby,” I imagined rows of fat, wide glass vats with fetuses growing inside, arranged in larger clusters, inside a laboratory under dim lighting.
After dropping this revelation, Sharon, my mother, explained something about cells and mitochondria while sipping from a stainless steel mug. Maria, my nanny, stroked my damp hair and coaxed it into a low, tight braid.
Sharon leaned over the breakfast bar and drew an amorphous blob on a stray index card. “This is a cell, the basic unit of all life.”
I was six years old. It was the last year Maria would be in our employ.
What makes someone a mother? Is it to carry a child? Is it the act of birth alone that defines motherhood? Or is the act of raising and nurturing?
Sharon never needed a man, but not because she was a feminist or fiercely independent. It never crossed her mind. She didn’t need anyone else to create a child. To conjure me.
Sharon had been a promising researcher at the Powell Institute for Science, working in Romania and Ukraine and across the States, but after fifteen years of fruitless efforts and broken partnerships, her disdain for the C-level execs pushed her towards something more cynical: management. So, she quickly took to it at the laboratory, climbing up each rung of that corporate ladder, cutting the previous rung as she went.
“Why was she so ruthless?” I asked Ben, a few days before the memorial service. He paused, setting the subpar coffee I had made on that same breakfast bar. He shrugged.
I missed Maria, how she could braid my hair and sing and play along on her ukelele. Her hair was curly and she had dimples and she tanned easily. Sharon and I had the same paper white skin that blistered at the mere thought of the sun.
Maria had held me and rocked me in her lap while we watched old cartoons. She would feed me peanut butter crackers and brush my hair. Hers was so thick and long; it fell below her waist, and she wore it in a tight braid.
Was she a mermaid? I asked her at least once. She just smiled and laughed.
Eventually, she left.
“Where is Maria going?”
“Maria is starting her own family.”
A bitterness flashed through me. Then, the mist of confusion came over my eyes. “Starting her own family?”
“Maria met a nice young man and is getting married.”
“Where’s your young man?”
Sharon grinned at me, and placed her hands on my shoulders.
“It’s time to start your education.”
Not long after Maria left, Sharon brought home a bright purple all-in-one computer. It was a “gift” from the Powell Institute’s artificial intelligence division. Sharon beamed, crouching beside me in the closest approximation to a Christmas morning I would ever have, and turned it on. The computer chimed and a swooping wave tumbled and twirled across its reflective screen.
“Hello,” a voice from the device said. “My name is JODI. What’s yours?”
I stared at it, watching our twin reflections on the screen.
“Thanks,” I said to Sharon.
“Hello Minx,” replied JODI.
“There are still some issues, but the AI group is always patching it. It’s very promising. I think you’ll really enjoy having a virtual friend. ”
Over the next three years, I never corrected JODI and she continued to call me Minx.
Sharon always wanted to do what was best for me, for herself. So, I was carried by a surrogate named Rosaline. I first heard her name when eavesdropping on Sharon and Ben. I was infatuated. I traced her name in the air with a flourished cursive letter “R.” I imagined her face, though I knew it was nothing like mine, nothing like Sharon’s.
Rosaline. Rosaline. I imagined she was a princess with long auburn hair and green eyes. I imagined she was a runaway with ruddy cheeks and tattoos. She was a poet. She was an astronaut. She was a surgeon. She was a dancer. She was a creator. She was a mother.
“JODI, what does the name Rosaline mean?”
“Rosaline was a minor character in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. It is a variant of the name Rosalind, meaning soft horse.” Per usual, JODI tempered my exuberant imaginings.
JODI did not turn out to be the premier in-home educational assistant that the Institute had hoped it would be. At the age of nine Sharon introduced me to Priya and Ben, who would become my personal tutors for all subjects relating to science, technology, engineering, and math. There were no other subjects.
Priya and Ben came in a pair three times a week with their tablets, and even an occasional textbook (for fundamentals, Priya would insist). Trigonometry and calculus came from Priya, like a fountain of equations and variables. From Ben came biology and chemistry. Priya only let me move onto physics later, after I had proven my proficiency with mathematics.
Together, they collided and repulsed, like two magnets, but they taught me about logarithms and algorithms, mechanics and dynamics, mitosis and symbiosis.
By fourteen I had exceeded the requirements to graduate from a private secondary school. For this accomplishment, Priya, Ben, and I crammed into Priya’s subcompact electric car and drove to Dairy Queen.
When we returned to the condo, Sharon opened the door and smiled at me. “Now we can start your real education.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re going to start working at the Powell Institute. With me.”
“With us,” Priya added.
Sharon glanced at Priya, then Ben.
“You have ice cream in your beard,” she told him.
She disappeared into the dark entry hall of the apartment.
Sharon put me in a small office across the hall from hers. Ben remained steadfast in his attention toward me. Much to my chagrin, I never knew anything about my mother’s corporate life. She had a separate family. Ben was not simply a tutor; he had a PhD in Bioinformatics and had worked with my mother in Siberia. And I had never known.
Ben had a neatly trimmed, but greying beard. It resembled a speckled bird’s egg in texture and coloration. He was a bumbling man, sometimes, and I worked with him often. Without Priya, he relaxed. She had returned to managing one of the labs and looked like the ideal scientist in her lab coat and sensible closed-toe shoes.
Sometimes, in the summer, Ben finished his work early and watched baseball games on an old television. I never liked baseball, but I would watch with him anyway. I liked Ben, and that was good enough.
The memorial service was held in the conference hall at the Powell Institute’s office, a ten-story building that appeared to be made of a few curving, infinite panes of glass and two slivers of steel on its southern edges. Little had to be done to the austere environment. Its white walls and slate-tiled floors did well to capture the solemnity. A bouquet of white lilies rested on the podium.
When I spoke, the words caught in my throat, like I was trying to swallow gravel. The room was awash with exhaustion, silence. A few beleaguered claps of applause followed. Sharon had lit a fire for these people, but, without its burn, they were just burnt out. I didn’t know Sharon as they did.
Ben clapped the longest, and he placed his hand on my shoulder when I sat. Gave it a squeeze. Then he went to the podium. The same podium where Sharon delivered staff meetings and morale-inducing speeches. Her fingerprints must’ve been etched into the surface after all those years.
There weren’t any ashes. Nothing to see. When her yacht hit the rocky shoreline off the coast of a town one hundred miles north of the harbor, no one was sure she was even on board. But the security guard at the marina had the video. There we saw her tall, thin silhouette hop onto the deck, and then the boat slip from the dock. Sharon learned how to maneuver it out of the moorings and the marina thanks to Ben.
Ben’s eulogy was sweet and poignant. His eyes watered. He recused himself mid-sentence, glanced away. If I had been a stranger attending, I would’ve wept. But instead, I felt the burning shame of my own words. So meaningless. And untruthful. Ben stroked his hand in his speckled beard when he finished. He turned to her picture, emblazoned on the massive screen behind him.
A cold knife pressed through my heart; it was a mirror, that was me staring back at the crowd. A bit older, with fine lines and crow’s feet. A gasp escaped my mouth, my eyes and chest burned, as though my insides had turned to fire. A hand, Priya’s, stroked my hair. “Ssh, it’s okay.” I fell against her and heaved a dry sob.
My mother’s cloning experiment was a failure in its ultimate purpose: to create a replacement for her. After the service, I fled to the condominium and stayed there. Ben came, sometimes. He had been declared the executor of her estate. He took over her work, the company, and was appointed by the board as the interim CEO. Ben told me I was free.
Free.
At first the word blew through my mind with the force of a storm, shredding the broken webs and bindings. I smiled, I laughed. I tore her photo from the wall. I took all of her things and packed them into cardboard boxes. I was free.
But then, looking at the bare floors and walls, feeling the cold morning air seep through the place, I knew it was not mine. It was hers. I had desecrated Sharon’s home.
So, I took everything out of boxes; all of her clothes, her paintings, her notebooks and her gadgets, and lined them up on the tables and counters, hung them back in the closets, and set them by her bed. I fluffed her pillows, changed her sheets, and tucked the corners of the comforter under the mattress. I put everything back, because it was not mine and it was not my place.
Ben came one morning. The sky bloated with fog and heavy clouds and the windows were slick with the streams of rain. I sat at the breakfast bar where Maria had braided my hair, where Priya had taught me the Pythagorean theorem, where Sharon had glared at me icily from across the kitchen. Ben let himself in with an old key. He set a brown paper bag on the counter.
“Bagels,” he said.
Without a word, I stood and dug through a drawer in the kitchen for a knife.
“Toasted?”
Ben nodded. He opened the crinkling bag and took out two bagels, placing them on the counter. One was sesame, the other French toast. When I set my eyes on the bagels, my cheeks and lips flexed, I was alarmed. Then I realized I was smiling for the first time in weeks.
We prepared our breakfast in silence. Ben took charge of the espresso machine and produced two cups of coffee from the gleaming metal contraption. I never did understand that machine, let alone the appeal of coffee. Naturally, Sharon loved it.
Ben brought me a delicate and tiny white cup of the stuff. His beard seemed as white as the foam topping the cappuccino.
“I thought you were going to pack her things up,” Ben said.
“Didn’t seem right for me to do it.”
“You’re her daughter.”
Ben drew a hand through his hair. The lines about his eyes grew deeper, like the trenches of the ocean’s depths, under the grey light from the window. “It’s hard, sometimes, to look at you.”
“I know, but I can’t help it.”
“I told her she was being foolish, with the whole thing. Continuing all of this…” Ben laughed a little bit, but it was strained.
“Continuing what?”
The rain picked up, spattering against the windows with renewed force. I set my bagel, half eaten, back on the plate and pushed it away.
“You’re not the first,” Ben said.
I looked at him. His eyes were clear and gray, his lips pressed in a thin line. His green windbreaker wilted on his body.
“Sharon was, I don’t know… maybe number three?”
“I don’t understand. Number three?”
“She was a clone too.”
“Wait, I am the fourth? I don’t understand.”
“You understand perfectly.”
He took a messy, big bite out of his bagel. A blob of cream cheese lodged itself in his beard.
“I brought you something else,” he said. He reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out a small yellow envelope. He placed it on the granite counter.
“It’s from your mother.”
The envelope was soft and worn in my hands. Its yellow flap had been stained with dirt and fingerprints and the adhesive was entirely gone. I pressed the envelope, finding a hard lump inside. I turned it over and dumped its contents onto the counter: a sterling silver chain with a miraculous medal attached.
“Sharon was not religious,” I said.
“It’s not Sharon’s.”
“Rosaline’s?”
Ben nodded.
The name flourished in my mind like a field of wildflowers. I took the necklace in my right hand and thumbed the pendant on the end. Mary, embossed on the metal, stood with her arms open. A blaze of light behind her. I folded my hand around the necklace.
Ben stayed by my side for several moments longer. I could sense his hesitation, his discomfort. Did he want to hug me? Maybe he did. But he didn’t. He squeezed my shoulder instead.
“Rosaline was a lab assistant, for a time. One of the few people Sharon was close to.”
Rosaline wasn’t a mermaid swimming in the sea, her long shining hair flowing behind her. Rosaline wasn’t a goddess, glowing in the fiery light of the sun. She was another scientist, Sharon’s friend.
“What was she like?”
Ben leaned back, flicked his eyes to the ceiling, thinking. “Smart. Really, really clever. Charming. She convinced me to grow a beard.” He paused. “We dated for a while. Nothing serious though. Just coffee, sometimes a movie.”
He took a bite, chewing thoughtfully. I waited.
“She spent a lot of time with Sharon, working. And also, creating you.”
Her name still glistened in my mind as the pendant burned in my palm.
“You don’t have to worry about any of this. There’s plenty to help you set yourself up and start again, somewhere else. San Diego, Vancouver, Tokyo. Vienna is quite lovely too.”
Oh, how I wanted to do that before he had shown up with the bagels. Before these admissions.
How I wanted to, for all of my life, throw off Sharon’s looming presence, her stark emotionless stare. To take her plans for me, for her legacy, and shred them. To take all those photographs, those pictures of her, of me, and see them disappear in a burst of flame. I’m not you, I had cried and screamed.
“I’m not sure what I want to do.”
Ben quirked an eyebrow. He sat down across from me.
“I thought you’d be relieved. You can go, it’s okay. I will miss you, of course. But you need to stake out your own life–”
“I can start here.”
He quieted.
A breeze blew outside, rattling the windows.
“I can start here.”
Ben nodded and placed his hand on mine.
“Whatever you need, Sharon.”