The words struck Jeremiah in a way he didn’t expect. Although the man didn’t know her, he spoke about her in words that rang true. Jeremiah’s mind went back to all the times his mother had tried to show him the world through her eyes, a world worth exploring, worth knowing, worth figuring out. When, he wondered, had he lost that? How had he come to be so timid and awkward in his life? As he listened to the priest, he began to look for his own quiet impact on the world. It bothered him, more than a little, that he couldn’t see it clearly. Where was the impression he’d leave? When the time came, would some priest he didn’t know stand in front of a half-empty church and talk about the cloning? The money he left behind? His big house? How he did what was expected of him, met all of his obligations? What if the best thing anyone could say of him, after everything was said and done, was that he toed the line?

The clone didn’t get up to speak at all, and Jeremiah knew it was because he just didn’t know what to say. But Jeremiah would have said something, given the chance. He would have talked about the things she sacrificed, the things she loved, the way she tried to make him a better person. He would have said he was glad she’d been his mother. He might have even taken a moment to say he was sorry he hadn’t been a better son.

For the next two hours, he and Brent watched uncomfortably as the clone attempted small talk with a smattering of distant relations he barely recognized and a few residents of the assisted living home who had come to pay their respects. Nurse Nichelle had come. She shook her head in that way she had and offered the clone a hug and whispered words of comfort that Jeremiah couldn’t hear over the monitor. For once, Jeremiah didn’t envy his clone. He looked somehow small, deflated—even on an six-foot wall. He almost wished he could help him. Finally, the clone thanked the priest for his eulogy and, sitting in that laboratory apartment, Jeremiah silently thanked him, as well, and tucked away his words for later.

A few minutes after it was over, Brent retrieved his laptop from the closet and posed to Jeremiah his usual three questions about what he’d just seen. Jeremiah’s answers, every one of them, were uttered with robotic precision and a complete detachment: “No.”

“No.”

“No.”

Chapter 22

Jeremiah had trouble sleeping again that night. For a couple of hours, he tossed and turned in bed but finally gave in sometime after midnight. He found himself in the kitchen rooting around in the fridge for something to eat. He didn’t find a thing that appealed to him. He wasn’t even really hungry. He stood in front of the open door letting his mind wander back to what the priest had said about his mother. There was something quietly satisfying about the way he’d described her, the way he focused on the many small ways her life had been important, the way he made it feel as though that had been enough. And it struck him now that, for her, it always had been enough. Growing up, Jeremiah had often felt sorry for her and had pushed away nagging feelings of guilt that she’d had to spend the best years of her life raising him on her own. He used to wonder what she might have done with her life if she’d ever had the chance. It hadn’t really occurred to him that she’d been perfectly content, that she’d considered it a valuable, good and worthwhile thing simply to know who she was and to be herself.