Part I

 The Book of Sarah

I used to almost wish I hadn’t any ancestors, they were so much trouble to me.
  – Mark Twain 

1 

I was born too early.

That was how it began.

I received my clone-father’s journal on my eighteenth birthday. He handwrote his memoir late in life in the hope that his next birth – my birth – would correct the mistake of his initial one. I read it for the first time while sitting next to his grave, the setting of my recurrent nightmares since I was very young.

Adam-1 was born at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center on the sunny morning of June 12, 1974 to Michael and Sarah Elwell. Born too early. And his childhood stolen from him too early.

He was only seven years old when his father opened the door to his mother’s hospital room. Adam walked in alone, forcing his legs forward. His chin was trembling before he reached his mother’s bed. He felt like he should say something but didn’t know what, as if he’d forgotten how to talk to his mother. As if the person he loved most in the world was a stranger.

She looked like a stranger. Her bald head. Her emaciated body. Sarah made a weak smile, and then lightly petted his head. Neither said a word. There was only her shallow breathing and the sound of nurses passing outside the door.

The silence wasn’t broken until his mother began reciting familiar lines from their favorite book, The Hobbit, as Bilbo Baggins joins the quest, leaving his hobbit hole and setting off on his adventure.

Adam hid his eyes against her shoulder. He wanted to be near her, but he didn’t want to see her like this.

“I know, sweetie. I know,” she whispered. She kissed his head.

“Please don’t die,” he begged.

Sarah sighed. “I think I have to go, honey. I have to go on this adventure. But we’ll meet again in Aslan’s Country, okay?”

Adam didn’t answer. That was just another story they’d read. Made-up stories like the kind his father wrote. Places like Aslan’s Country and the Heaven mentioned in their ancient family Bible could be equally imaginary.

He held her tighter. She kissed him again.

“I love you, sweetie.”

“I love you too, Mommy,” he cried, but choked at the end.

She made a similar sound, as if mocking him. He felt her shudder and then relax. He pulled away, looking into her blue-gray eyes. They stared blankly through him, her chapped lips only slightly parted.

He prodded her timidly on the shoulder to wake her. The movement made her jaw drop down, her mouth falling silently open.

Adam jumped and must have screamed something. His father opened the door and a nurse rushed in behind him. Michael clutched him to his body and gently held his dead wife’s hand.

“We’ll get that,” the nurse said to Michael, glancing at the floor.

Adam looked down and saw that he stood in a puddle of his own urine.

His Aunt Mary pulled him out into the hallway and wiped his shoes. Michael came out of the room several minutes later, his face pale, eyes red and puffy. He embraced his son for a long time. Then he straightened up and slowly, silently led them out of the hospital. 

*** 

Fifty years after his mother’s death, Adam himself was dying on a hospital bed.

“Where’s Sarah?” he asked, words he’d repeated for a half hour as the poison paralyzing his extremities moved slowly towards his heart.

“She’s on her way,” Lily answered again, more wearily by then. But Adam died minutes before his mother’s namesake, his daughter Sarah, rushed into the room.

His last journal entry, written the night before his death, appears to be an attempt to reassure himself: “It’s with great fear I end my life, but the hope outweighs it. With this cup I’ll escape the Gardeners, and have another mother named Sarah. My hemlock is not the cup of death. It is the cup of new life. The life I should have had.”

Yet I often wonder what was going through his mind as oblivion approached. Did he second-guess himself, wondering whether his dream of living forever had just slipped through his fingers of his own volition, fearing that he would never exist again?

Regardless, less than an hour after he arrived at the hospital, the man who had once sworn to himself that he’d never die was dead by his own hand.

Sarah reached the hospital shortly afterwards, Lyle Gardener a bit later. While Lyle talked with the doctors in Adam’s room, Sarah tried to comfort her mother in a private office. She told Lily how fortunate it was that Adam saved her by knocking the glass of poisoned wine from her hand, but Lily was despondent.

“I wish I’d drunk it too,” she mumbled, a shoulder strap of her evening gown dangling around her elbow.

Sarah grabbed her arm. “Mom! How could you say that?”

“I can’t imagine life without him. There’s nothing for me now.”

Sarah was quiet for a while. The last statement stung. She thought of her father’s clone with whom she’d soon be implanted, and wondered whether mentioning it would help her mother. On the other hand, she’d long since determined that her father’s clone would not be made to feel like he was the original Adam, but instead be raised to believe he was his own individual free to live any life he chose. It wouldn’t be right to tell her mother that Adam would soon be alive again.

“Adam would have wanted you to enjoy your life after him,” Sarah said as she righted her mom’s strap. “That’s why he knocked your glass away. If you don’t go on, then Dad’s saving you was in vain.”

Lily shook her head, then leaned slowly into her daughter’s arms and cried quietly on Sarah’s shoulder.

“Besides,” Sarah continued as she found a more comfortable position in which to embrace her mother, “I’m going to need your help raising my son.”

Lily stopped her sobbing. After a minute she raised her head from Sarah’s shoulder and looked her daughter in the eye, a glimmer of a smile on the widow’s lips.

“You’re right. We have to be strong for Adam’s rebirth. That’s what he wanted.”

Sarah smiled at her mother’s brightening, but worried over the choice of words. Adam’s rebirth.

Within a couple weeks of Adam’s death, a fetus was growing within the womb of his 33-year-old daughter. In that way my daughter would become my mother and, just like the old vaudeville song, I would become “my own grandpaw.”

Dust in the Wind – Kansas

Mark Twain

The Hobbit

Aslan’s Country

Film: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

Hemlock

I'm My Own Grandpaw