Human Sister

along the vineyard drive. She turns, listens, peers out along a row of moonlit trees, and answers back, “Who are you?”
    Nothing. I am nothing but memory. The weight of memory. The mud-suck of memory.

    “Begin where we began,” Michael urged. Well, as anyone reading this can see—will anyone read this?—I disobeyed. Something unusual for me, disobeying. I suppose I could arbitrarily designate a beginning and say that, like most humans, I began mid-ecstasy; and like a few, when my mother discovered me, burrowed tail and all into her uterine wall, clinging to life, it was another who spoke up and saved me.
    “Mary,” Grandpa said, hoping that in time his daughter-in-law’s body would betray her, make her maternal despite her wishes, “what would be wrong with giving the little tyke a chance to be born? Then give it three months to see how things go. Three months isn’t that long. If after three months you still feel the same way, then give the baby to Helena and me to raise. We would like a granddaughter to care for and love in our old age.”
    After making the decision to endure a pregnancy (the gift of a bigger home in Berkeley was part of the deal), Mom immediately stopped smoking, refrained from even an occasional social drink, rigorously followed the exercise, diet, and nutritional supplement program prescribed by Grandpa, and, after I was born, breast-fed and cared for me ideally. But on my ninety-second day, as I was settling into my new home—Grandpa and Grandma’s world of science and flowers and love—Mom resumed smoking, popped the cork on a bottle of champagne, and danced with Dad on Stinson Beach to celebrate the resumption of her life.
    That, at least, is the story I gleaned from hearing Grandpa and Grandma speak about how I came to be—and how, to my parents, I rated a distant second to my older, non-biologic brothers.
    But I wonder—now, after discovering so many secrets and lies—whether I really came to be in that manner. Perhaps, even before the dilated-pupil conception, Grandpa had intended me to be a part of his next and most daring project. Perhaps he even went so far as to surreptitiously foil Mom and Dad’s birth-control methods, methods nearly certain not to fail. Then again, perhaps Mom and Dad were in on it all along.

    During my first years with Grandpa and Grandma, I wasn’t permitted to venture out alone beyond the walls enclosing the high-security home they had built into the side of a vineyard hill. There were bad people out there, I was told, fanatics who hated Grandpa for the work on robotics and emergent intelligences that he and his company, Magnasea, had done for the military—people who would, if we weren’t careful, kidnap and hurt me.
    Not only did these threats darken my imagination of humanity in the outer world, they also darkened my perception of nature beyond the walls, such as of the old valley oak tree that stood alone atop a hill just east of our yard. My first memory of this tree comes from an overcast, misty winter morning when I was riding on Grandpa’s shoulders. He stopped directly in front of the ivy-covered wall, and I pushed myself up with my palms against the top of his head to peek out at the world beyond—and there it was, this ancient tree, silhouetted against a gray sky. Tattered rags of pallid green beard lichen drooped from its many-jointed, crooked arms, which rose pleadingly in all directions. Perched on a bleak, leafless arm a lone crow cawed, without answer, before spreading its lustrous wings and becoming a lampblack kite, fluttering, gliding, crying to the leaden sky.
    Nor did all dangers lurk out there with the fanatics, the craggy oak tree, and the crow. I was fair-skinned, with white hair, and Grandpa insisted I stay out of the sun. Thus, the sun-curfew of my early years: no playing outside from 0800 to 1800, May through August; from 0900 to 1700, March, April, September, and October; and from 0900 to 1500, November through February. I learned to love the sun low in the often multicolored sky, the soft slanting light, the shadows grazing leisurely across the lawn. During those early mornings and late afternoons, I hugged trees and rubbed leaves and petals between my fingers to memorize their smells. I watched hummingbirds, bees, and butterflies flit from blossom to blossom and giggled and shivered as bugs crawled up and over my hands and arms. But all the while, because of Grandpa’s warnings, I avoided the dangerous