The main door hisses open and shut again, and footsteps echo through the empty lab. The mice squeak at the intrusion into their space.

“Enzo?”

But it isn’t Lorenzo. The intruder is Morgan, and behind him a young man dressed in orderly’s scrubs wheels Mrs. Ray into the room.

She looks much older than the last time I saw her.

Steven, now on a fool’s mission to find his girl, was still struggling with multiplication tables when Delilah Ray came to the house with her plans for my garden. America’s first black president had taken the keys, and Mrs. Ray was in high form, all talk of politics and hope and how “it was about time, darlin’, this country got on the right track.” She always called me “darlin’” in that sweet Southern way of hers.

Until she had the stroke.

It happened not long before the hopeful president handed over his keys to a new man, the one Mrs. Ray would never refer to as a darlin’ or hopeful or charismatic, or anything else on the positive end of her rich vocabulary’s spectrum.

When I called that day to ask about a problem with one of my rosebushes, her son answered and gave me the news. I can still hear the hope in his voice, feel the breathless, wordless optimism hanging between us like a storm cloud as I outlined my research.

“What if it doesn’t work?” Del said. “What if my mother still speaks in riddles and nonwords?”

“Then we’ll try again,” I said. “And we’ll keep trying.”

That was when he mentioned money. I told him not even to think about it; there would be no fee.

I turn to my first human subject now, an old woman in a wheelchair gazing around the white emptiness of the lab. “How are you, Mrs. Ray?” I say, knowing she won’t interpret this as anything but a string of unfamiliar words.

Delilah Ray, the botanist who designed my garden and talked politics and pie recipes, looks up at me through a veil of confusion and noncomprehension. “Fine twinkles, today. Cookie for your thoughts and when the Red Sox gossiping and galloping, I don’t know. There’s going to be hypertension!” Her speech is fluid and unencumbered and meaningless.

I hope to change this.

Looking back, I can never recall whether I expected success or failure, but in my dreams I’ve always imagined the old woman’s first words that would hold real meaning since her stroke. As I fill the syringe with fluid from the single vial, I realize my hands are shaking.

“Here. Let me.” It’s Lorenzo. I was so lost in my memories, I didn’t hear him come into the lab.