Darwin's Radio

EPILOGUE Tucson, Arizona

A plump little girl with short brown hair and brown skin and sweated streaks of powder on her face stood in the alley and peered between the dust-colored garages. She whistled softly to herself, interweaving two variations of a Mozart piano trio. Someone who did not look too closely might have mistaken her for one of the many Latino children who played along the streets and ran through the alleys.

Stella had never been allowed to go this far from the small house her parents rented, a few hundred steps away. The world of the alley was fresh. She sniffed the air lightly; she always did that, and she never found what she wanted to find.

But she heard the excited voices of children playing, and that was enticement enough. She walked on red concrete squares along the stucco side wall of a small garage, pushed open a swinging metal gate, and saw three children tossing a half-inflated basketball in a small backyard. The children paused their game and stared at her.

“Who are you?” asked a black-haired girl, seven or eight.

“Stella,” she answered clearly. “Who are you?”

“We’re playing here.”

“Can I play?”

“You got a dirty face.”

“It comes off, look,” and Stella wiped at the powder with her sleeve, leaving fleshy stains on the cloth. “It’s hot today, isn’t it?”

A boy about ten looked her over critically. “You got spots,” he said.

“They’re freckles,” Stella said. Her mother had told her to tell people that.

“Sure, you can play,” said a second girl, also ten. She was tall and had long skinny legs. “How old are you?”

“Three.”

“You don’t sound three.”

“I can read and whistle, too. Listen.” She whistled the two tunes together, watching their reactions with interest.

“Jesus,” the boy said.

Stella felt proud at his amazement. The tall skinny girl threw her the ball and Stella caught it deftly and smiled. “I love this,” she said, and her face flushed a lovely shade of pale beige and gold. The boy stared after her with jaw agape, then sat down to watch as the girls played together on the dry summer grass. A sweet musky scent followed Stella wherever she ran.

Kaye searched all the rooms and the closets frantically, twice, calling out her daughter’s name. She had been absorbed reading a magazine article after putting Stella down for a nap and had not heard the girl leave. Stella was smart and not likely to walk out into a road or get into any obvious danger, but the neighborhood was poor and there was still strong prejudice against children like her, and fear about the diseases that sometimes followed in the wake of SHEVA pregnancies.

The diseases were real; ancient recurrences of old retro-viruses, sometimes fatal. Christopher Dicken had discovered that in Mexico three years ago, and it had almost cost him his life. The danger passed a few months after birth, but Mark Augustine had been right. Nature was never other than two-faced about her gifts.

If a police officer saw Stella, or somebody reported her, there could be trouble.

Kaye called Mitch at the Chevrolet dealership where he worked, a few miles from their house, and he told her he’d come right home.

The children had never seen anything quite like this odd little girl. Just being around her made them feel friendly and good, and they did not know why, nor did they care. The girls chatted about clothes and singers, and Stella imitated some of the singers, especially Salay Sammi, her favorite. She was an excellent mimic.

The boy stood to one side, frowning in concentration.

The younger girl went next door to invite other friends over, and they in turn invited others, and soon the backyard was filled with boys and girls. They played house, and the boys played police, and Stella provided sound effects and something else, a smile, a presence, that soothed and energized them at once. Some had to go home and Stella said she was glad to meet them and smelled behind their ears, which made them laugh and draw back in embarrassment, but none of them felt angry.

They were all fascinated by the gold and brown dapples on her face.

Stella seemed completely at ease, happy, but she had never been among so many children before. When two nine-year-old girls, identical twins, asked her different questions at once, Stella answered them both, at once. They could almost understand what she said, and they broke out laughing, asking the funny plump little girl where she had learned to do that.

The older boy’s frown changed to determination. He knew what he had to do.

Kaye and Mitch called her name along the street. They did not dare ask the police for help; Arizona had finally gone along with the Emergency Action and was sending its new children for special study and education in Iowa.

Kaye was beside herself. “It was just a minute, just—” “We’ll find her,” Mitch said, but his face gave him away.

He looked incongruous in his dark blue suit, walking on the dusty street between the small old houses. A hot dry wind soaked up their sweat. “I hate this,” he said for the millionth time. It had become a familiar mantra, part of the bitterness inside him. Stella made him feel complete; Kaye could still give him some of the old life. But when he was alone, the strain filled him to the brim, and in his head he would say over and over how much he hated this.

Kaye held his arm and told him again how sorry she was.

“Not your fault,” he said, but he was still very angry.

The thin girl showed Stella how to dance. Stella knew a lot of ballet music; Prokofiev was her favorite composer, and the difficult scores came out in complexes of piping and whistling and clucking. One little blond boy, younger than Stella, stayed as close as he could to her, brown eyes big with interest.

“What do we want to play now?” the tall girl asked when she grew tired of trying to stand enpointe.

“I’ll get Monopoly,” said an eight-year-old boy with the more familiar kind of freckles.

“Or maybe we can play Othemo?” Stella asked.

They had been searching for an hour. Kaye stopped for a moment on a broken patch of sidewalk and listened. The alley that ran behind their homes opened onto this side street, and she thought she heard children playing. Lots of children.

She and Mitch walked quickly between the garages and board fences, trying to catch Stella’s voice, or one of her many sounds.

Mitch heard their daughter first. He pushed open the metal swinging gate and they entered.

The small yard was packed with children like birds around a feeder. Kaye noticed immediately that Stella was not the center of attention; she was simply there, off to one side, playing a game of Othemo, with decks of cards that made sounds when pressed. If the sounds matched or made a tune, the players got to discard. The players who emptied their hands first won. This was one of Stella’s favorites.

Mitch stood behind Kaye. Their daughter did not see them at first. She was chattering happily with the twins and another boy.

“I’ll get her,” Mitch said.

“Wait,” Kaye said. Stella appeared so happy. Kaye was willing to risk a few minutes for this.

Then Stella looked up, pushed to her feet, and let the musical cards fall from her hands. She circled her head in the air and sniffed.

Mitch saw another child, a boy, enter the yard from a gate in the front. He was about Stella’s age. Kaye saw him, too, and recognized him immediately. They heard a woman’s frantic calls in Spanish and Kaye knew what they were, what they meant.

“We have to leave,” Mitch said.

“No,” Kaye said, and held him back with her arm. “Just for a moment. Please. Watch!”

Stella and the boy approached each other. The other children one by one fell silent. Stella circled the young boy, face blank for a long moment. The boy made small sighs, his chest heaving as if he had been running. He rubbed at his face with quick dabs of spit on his sleeve. Then he bent over and sniffed behind Stella’s ear. Stella sniffed behind his ear and they held hands.

“I’m Stella Nova,” Stella said. “Where are you from?”

The small boy just smiled, and his face twitched in ways Stella had not seen before. She found her own face responding. She felt the rush of blood to her skin and she laughed out loud, a delighted, high-pitched shriek. The boy smelled of so much — of his family and the way his home smelled and of the food his mother cooked, and his cats, and Stella watched his face and understood a little of what he was saying. He was so rich, this little boy. Their dapples colored madly, almost at random. She watched the boy’s pupils fleck with color, rubbed her fingers on his hands, feeling the skin, the shivers of response.

The boy spoke in broken English and Spanish simultaneously. His mouth moved in a way that Stella was familiar with, shaping the sounds passing along both sides of his ridged tongue. Stella knew a fair amount of Spanish and tried to answer. The boy jumped up and down with excitement; he understood her! Talking to people was usually so frustrating for Stella, but this was even worse, because suddenly she knew what talking might really be.

Then she looked to one side and saw Kaye and Mitch.

Simultaneously, Kaye saw the woman in the kitchen window, using her phone. The woman did not look at all happy.

“Let’s go,” Mitch said, and Kaye did not disagree.

“Where are we going now?” Stella asked from her safety seat in the back of the Chevy Lumina as Mitch drove south.

“Mexico, maybe,” Kaye said.

“I want to see more like the boy,” Stella said, pouting fiercely.

Kaye closed her eyes and saw the boy’s terrified mother, grabbing him away from Stella, shooting a dirty look at Kaye; loving and hating her own child. No hope for bringing the two together again. And the woman in the window, too afraid to even come outside and talk with her.

“You will,” Kaye said dreamily. “You were very beautiful with the boy.”

“I know,” Stella said. “He was one of me.”

Kaye leaned over the back of the seat and looked at her daughter. Her eyes were dry, she had thought about this for so long, but Mitch rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand.

“Why did we have to leave?” Stella asked.

“It’s cruel to keep her away from them,” Kaye told Mitch.

“What are we going to do, ship her off to Iowa? I love my daughter and I want to be her father and have her in this family. A normal family.”

“I know,” Kaye said distantly. “I know.”

“Are there many like the boy, Kaye?” Stella asked.

“About a hundred thousand,” Kaye said. “We’ve told you that.”

“I would love to talk with them all” Stella said.

“She probably could, too,” Kaye said with a smile at Mitch.

“The boy told me about his cat,” Stella said. “He has two kittens. And the kids liked me, Kaye, Momma, they really liked me.”

“I know,” Kaye said. “You were beautiful with them, too.” Kaye was so proud and yet her heart ached for her daughter.

“Let’s go to Iowa, Mitch,” Stella suggested.

“Not today, Sweet Rabbit,” Mitch said.

The highway ran straight south through the desert.

“No sirens,” Mitch observed flatly.

“Did we make it again, Mitch?” Stella asked.