The photograph on the screen was my mother. Edith Hale, young and thin, sitting up in a hospital bed in Flagstaff in nineteen ninety one, with a paper bracelet on her wrist and a nurse holding her hand. I had not seen that picture in thirty years. Dr. Venkataraman sat down heavily across from me. “Mrs. Hale, your mother was the third participant in a small study at a clinic that no longer exists,” he said. “She carried a very rare genetic variant. So do you. You are Subject fourteen, because you are the fourteenth living carrier that a company called Halvorsen Biologics has been able to find in the state of Arizona.”
He explained it slowly, and I held on to the arms of the chair. The drops in my milk were an experimental compound that had never been approved for any human being. It only worked in people with my variant, and it affected sleep and memory. Eleven hours a night. Forgotten birthdays. A car parked in the wrong lot. “It is not designed to cause permanent harm,” he said carefully, “but nobody has ever tested it in a woman of your age, and nobody asked your permission. The dose was being raised every month. Another ninety days, and I would be very worried about you.” My hands were cold as stones.
I asked the question I had been afraid to ask. “And Julian? Did he know?” Dr. Venkataraman opened another file. the name of Julian was on the clinical investigator form, with a signature, a date and a payment of four hundred thousand dollars. The company was run by a woman named Lenore Halvorsen. She had traced me through my mother old records, introduced me to a young surgeon at a fundraiser and made certain I would be asked to dance. I remembered the fundraiser. I remembered the dance. It had felt like the most romantic evening of my whole life, and it had been a hunting trip.
A faded photograph from nineteen ninety one gave one sister the weekend to bring Rosalind back to the house in Scottsdale.
I did not faint, and I did not scream. I was a librarian for thirty one years, and a librarian knows how to keep her voice low. I thanked the doctor. I asked him to keep the sample, the report and the file in his safe, with his own signature across the seal. Then I called my sister Nora, who had not spoken to me for three months, and said, “Nora, I need you.” She was in my driveway in forty minutes. We drove straight to a lawyer named Ms. Okafor, who listened to the whole story without writing a single note, and then picked up the telephone.
That evening Julian came home to find me sitting at the kitchen table with Nora on one side and Ms. Okafor on the other. The mug of milk was not on the stove. He stood in the doorway, and I watched the whole of his handsome face come apart. “Rosalind,” he whispered. “I can explain.” “I am sure you can,” I said. “You will explain it into a recorder, in front of a lawyer, from the beginning.” He sat down. He told us everything. It had begun as a job, he said, and he had hated himself for months, and he had fallen in love with me in spite of every plan.
I set my terms, the way I used to set a library fine, plainly and without heat. He would give a full sworn statement to the Arizona Medical Board and the state attorney. He would resign from the practice. He would provide the names of every person in the study, so that the other thirteen could be told. He would pay for my medical monitoring for as long as I needed it. And he would leave my condo that very night. Julian said yes to everything. At the door, he turned and said, “I did love you.” I said, “I know, and that is the saddest part of it.”
The surprise was waiting in the library on Monday, when I walked in to see my old friends. The staff, twelve women and two men, had hung a banner over the circulation desk that said Welcome Back, Rosalind. Patrons I had served for thirty one years came in one at a time with casseroles, cards and bunches of flowers. A retired judge named Mr. Abernathy, who had borrowed a mystery novel from me every week since nineteen ninety four, took my hand. “Rosalind,” he said, “if a man can be convicted of a crime in this town, we will see that he is.”
The consequences fell quickly. Halvorsen Biologics was shut down by the state within two weeks, and its investors withdrew every dollar. Lenore Halvorsen was charged with conducting an unapproved human study and with fraud. The hospital suspended Julian privileges, and the medical board opened a hearing that would last a year. Because he had cooperated, the prosecutors agreed to recommend leniency, but his career as a surgeon was over. Thirteen other families received letters and a medical team. Not one of them would ever know how close the thing had come, except that a woman had noticed a bottle in a shirt pocket.
With part of the settlement, I started a program that I called the Late Night Library Fund. It pays for evening story hours, large print books and a reader to visit nursing homes and senior apartments across Maricopa County, for the people who have outlived their eyesight and their company. We held the first evening in a care home in Mesa. Eighteen residents sat in a circle with blankets over their knees, and I read aloud from a worn copy of the old barnyard story about the spider and the pig. A woman of ninety eight listened with her eyes shut and whispered, “Thank you, dear. Nobody has read to me in years.”
One cool evening in the spring, I heated a small pot of milk on my own stove, added a spoonful of honey, and poured it into the blue mug that Nora gave me. I carried it to the couch, where Mr. Pickles was waiting, round as a loaf, and I drank every drop myself, with the television off and the window open. The cat climbed onto my lap, purring like a small engine. I looked at the empty mug, and then at the dark garden, and I smiled. It tasted of nothing but milk and honey, and it was the best thing I had ever tasted.