“Poor little bear,” he said. “Tell her I love her.”

Larry, who was hiking outside Portland with his two children, knew even less about his sister’s adolescent history than Stuart, but his description of their mother was similar.

“She was angry all the time after Sonia was born. Up to then she’d been normal some of the time. I mean, she sometimes had the interactions with Stu and me that I see my wife doing with our kids: Did you hurt yourself when you fell? What happened at school today? After Sonia was born, Mom checked out for good. She seemed to want us all to look after her, and she didn’t pay much attention to the baby. I remember her screaming at Dad all through the pregnancy: What about her life? She wasn’t dealing with any more kids. He could stay home from the lab a few nights a week to help out. I was eight, Stuart was six—you can imagine what that was like.”

I grunted agreement. I’d met Shirley and Nate. I could picture it.

“Made me nervous as hell about having any kids of my own, put it off until I was almost fifty. Poor little polar bear, though. Tell her I love her.”

“Polar bear?” I echoed. “Your brother called her ‘little bear.’”

“It was our nickname,” Larry said. “She had a white bear winter suit when she was three or four, and she loved wearing it. When we got home from school, she’d meet us at the door growling and beg for a raw seal. We’d cut up an apple and pretend it was a seal and let her hunt for it. Maybe it was the only time we were all happy together.”

Like his brother, Larry asked me to tell him as soon as I knew Sonia’s condition. Like his brother, Larry knew nothing about Matt Chastain or the experiment, but he did remember Shirley screaming at Kiel about the European woman.

“Bratislava, not Barcelona,” he said. “Dad went to some conference in Czechoslovakia about his bug, not sure when. He was always jetting around the world—summer institutes in Aspen, meetings with the army at Fort Detrick, conferences in Europe. He was a big noise in his field, and he loved being the center of attention.

“Anyway, a couple of years after he went to that particular jamboree, this woman showed up. I was counting the hours until I could leave for college, and I was spending as little time at home as possible, so I don’t remember too much about it, just my mother’s histrionics—drunk, sobbing, yelling, throwing things—and Dad screaming back at her.”

He was silent, revisiting a place he hadn’t liked to begin with.