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summer afternoon when he'd tossed her up in the air and then
caught her in his strong, clean-smelling hands.
    Gregory Hubbard and Lily Eggleston
were childhood sweethearts who'd lived next door to one another since
birth. They'd gotten "married" in the third grade, swearing allegiance
over plastic Cracker Jack rings. Many years later, Gregory was drafted
and did a tour of duty in Vietnam. When he came home from that contentious
war, all he wanted was to settle down with Lily Eggleston, for real this
time. A successful real estate agent with a bright future ahead of
him, Gregory was killed in a car crash two months before Lily gave birth
to their second daughter.
    Their father had passed on more
than just these faded images in a photo album-he'd passed on the internal
programming that would determine everything from the girls' eye color
to their susceptibility to heart disease. DNA was a four-letter language.
A single strand of DNA was made up of endless combinations of just four
letters-A, T, G, C. These letters made up words, and these words made up
sentences. The sentences were called genes. The DNA alphabet produced
various genes the way the English alphabet produced words. Each human
being had a unique genetic "book"-a life story written in the
genes. It was the study of these books that had absorbed percent of Daisy's
waking moments for the past fifteen years.
    "So how's your job going?"
Lily asked as she closed the album on the past.
    "Fine."
    "Tell me about the rats."
    Daisy stared out the window at the
falling snow and tried to single out one individual whirling snowflake
to the exclusion of all others. "Mice, you mean," she said.
"I work with mice, Mom. Not rats."
    "How are your mice, darling?"
    "Thriving."
    "Good. That's good. How many
Louis are you up to now?"
    "Fourteen."
    Lily turned to her. "What happens
when you hit nineteen?'
     
    "Nothing will happen. We'll keep
on going."
    "But there were only eighteen
King Louis."
    "I know, Ma."
    "So there'll be a Louis
XIX?"
    "I named the mice after my
brother, not the French king."
    "Oh."
    "I'm going to cure Stier-Zellar's in his honor."
    Lily nodded, her eyes glazing
over. "I think Anna's in real trouble this time," she said.
"Did I ever tell you she thought there was electrical wiring in her
chest once?"
    Daisy felt a spike of alarm.
"Recently?"
    "No. When she was thirteen.
Right after she came back from the hospital that time."
    She relaxed a little, then became
irritated.
    "Anna skulked around the house
with her hands over her heart and grew more and more secretive, but I
kept after her. 'What's wrong? What is it?' Finally, she told me there was
electrical wiring in her chest that connected her to heaven. Sort of like
a telephone. She said it pulled questions out of her heart."
    Daisy hadn't heard that one before.
"What kind of questions?"
    "The deep, painful
kind." Lily glanced at her. "What do you remember? About Anna
getting sick, I mean."
    Daisy remembered chaos and heartbreak,
her sister's hateful words and those interminable crying jags; she recalled
the hospital visits and faceless doctors and the ongoing battles to get
Anna to keep taking her meds. "I remember being trapped in the kitchen
once," she said, "while Anna did these crazy martial arts exercises.
She almost kicked you in the head. I was so angry." With this memory,
something broke like the skin of a blister. How could her sister put their
mother through this time and again?
    "Poor Daisy. You're like your
father, same worry wrinkle between the eyes." Lily reached for Daisy's
forehead and tried to rub it out.
    They both fell silent for a moment.
    "So," Lily said,
"what should we do now?"
    Dr. Susan Averill was so soft-spoken
Daisy had to strain to hear her. "How is Anna?" the doctor said.
    Daisy clutched the receiver.
"Excuse me?"
    "Is everything okay?"
Dr. Averill operated out of an office in Beverly Hills, and although
they had never met, Daisy couldn't help picturing a petite, well-groomed
woman