At Dusk

Puppets

They sat in a small living room, with wooden furnishings and bluish-grey cushions. Isabel was now in front of her, holding her hands. Steam was rising from a teacup filled with a golden liquid on a short table in front of them.

"I'm not like Laura..."

"You're not like them either, chipmunk," her mother's voice now sounded strangely serene. 

"Why do you say that?" 

Isabel told her to drink the tea before she started talking. 

"When I met James he wasn't looking for love. He had a peculiar magnetism that drew people to him, women especially, like a sultan with his little private harem. Ever since I met him, women walked in and out of his life..." 

"Isabel, where are you going with this?" 

"When I met James he wasn't looking for love. I wasn't looking for anything specific really, I only knew what I didn't want. I didn't want the sense of normality, the lukewarm relationship my friends had settled for. I was 24 and I wanted adventure in my life. That was what James had to offer."

"He was older, he knew things. We used to drive together for hours... just aimlessly, talking about the world. He invited me to move in with him after the first few months. I resisted at first, but he insisted and I gave in. That's when I met Linda. Needeless to say, we never got along. But maybe she did love him, right? I mean... now that I come to think of it. It has to be a kind of love to put up with all that shit..."

She took a sip of her cup before resuming.

"They already lived together and had two boys. I was the newcomer. Later I learned that they weren't even Linda's children. They were born from James' previous liaisons..." 

 "You said father wasn't looking for love. What was he looking for?"

Isabel didn't answer until Angela gently squeezed her hand.

"A healthy womb."

She stared at her mother for the longest time in silence, weighting the words that had just been spoken.  

Answering an unspoken question in her eyes, her mother continued her story. "Your father worked as a consultant for a pharmaceutical company when I met him. He used to talk about the possibilities of new developments in the field of genetics. Parallel sequencing, epigenetic inheritance... whatever that means. He said he could edit the chemical reactions responsible for turning specific genes on and off."

"One day, he proposed that I help him with his project. I laughed at him and said it was pathetic that he was trying to play God. I suggested that he asked Linda. She would certainly agree with whatever scheme he had planned. He said that wasn't possible for Linda, but if I accepted and we succeeded, in the future Linda's infertility issues could be easily fixed. My final answer was no. Three weeks after, l I found out I was pregnant."

"I didn't panic, nor did I think too much of it. Life went on, and when I had you two, I was a happy mother. So was James, who declared the family complete. The relationship with Linda deteriorated. I didn't want us all to live in the same house. The house was huge, of course, and we led almost entirely separate lives. But still..." 

Isabel stopped for a while, as if pondering her past actions. "I wanted to leave, but he always found a way to keep us close by, to reason with me. I always listened."

"I remember Laura and I used to find vacant rooms to play hide and seek when we were little. Sometimes we would hear you two arguing behind the walls."

 "Yeah, that happened a lot. It never led anywhere. He would always win."

"By the time Nora came along and Amadeus was born seven years had passed. She was even younger than I was when I met him. Linda hated Nora almost as viciously as she hated me."