“But my father, well, his goals were different from mine. He got really excited. Belsum wasn’t a chemical company at the time. We were Belsum Industrial. We made containers and container parts—bottle tops, rubber seals, things like that. But my father got how big GL606 could be before I even finished explaining it to him. He was … proud of me. Proud of. Impressed by. Thrilled with. Do you know what it feels like to please a man you’ve been disappointing your whole life? Do you know what it feels like to succeed like that in front of your father? Especially when your father is a man like mine?”
I catch Nora’s eye. She has never not been proud of, impressed by, and thrilled with me, even when I am nothing special, even when I am nothing but. It occurs to me for the first time: there are some ways, some crucial, breathtaking, shattering ways, in which Nathan Templeton’s lot is far unluckier than mine. I mean, there’s money and mobility and living in the house on the hill, but which would you choose: parental love and support and pride, or a chemical company mired in public relations nightmares and a tenuous all-eggs-in reopening plan, the thwarting of which is currently being concocted by three tenacious teenagers?
“I can imagine that would be a very seductive feeling,” Nora allows.
“So I started testing the 606.”
“And?” Nora nods, giving him permission to continue, never mind what’s coming. I catch her eye again and remind her to breathe. I remind myself to breathe. “What did the tests show?”
“Increased liver size in rabbits. Birth defects in rats. Tumors and cancers in dogs. DNA damage. The same thing that made it appealing was also the problem with it. It was resistant to degradation, meaning it held up to the manufacturing process, but it was also bio-resistant. It stays in the body, builds up over time, does not biodegrade or break down really ever. I told my father all this, but he didn’t … It’s not that he didn’t care. It’s just that it wasn’t a deal breaker as far as he was concerned.”
“But, I mean, it wasn’t your or even his decision, right? There are procedures, regulations. Right?” She’s trying to allay his feelings of guilt and culpability, which is what she should be doing, but there’s an edge in her voice that’s desperate, panicky almost. “You had to show the government or the EPA or the—I don’t know—oversight bodies of some kind? You had to prove it’s safe.”
“You’d like to believe that, right? That’s what we count on. You believing that. You think if a chemical might be unsafe, it’s tested, and if the results are unfavorable, it’s banned or at least regulated. But it’s not true. Until last year, the EPA only had to test chemicals that had been proven to cause harm. Already. And the burden of that proof … Well, let’s just say, most chemicals never get tested at all. There are tens of thousands of synthetic chemicals in use by companies a lot less scrupulous than we are, and nearly none of them have been tested for safety, never mind environmental impact. They’re almost all entirely unregulated.”
“But.” Nora’s mind skitters away from Nathan’s crisis of conscience. “But, like, the FDA? I have a patient who was part of a clinical trial a few years ago that required more paperwork and monitoring than anything I’ve ever seen. And she was sick already.”
“GL606 isn’t a food, and it isn’t a drug. You don’t ingest it.”
“You do if it gets in your water.” Her voice is shedding the downy cloak it wears for therapy sessions.
“We didn’t know it would. We thought it might, yes, but we didn’t know it would, and we didn’t know it would be harmful if it did. Mine were barely preliminary results. Conclusive ones would take years and a team of scientists and a budget well beyond what they give postdocs. Therefore I was being unnecessarily rigorous with the testing, overly stringent, obnoxiously dogged as usual, in my father’s opinion. Meanwhile, his experts were pointing out that humans are bigger than lab animals with different biology and can handle significantly higher dosages.”
“And that’s all it takes?” Nora sounds not angry but awed. “To make everyone ignore what you don’t want them to see? To slip right through?”
“That, and Dad knew a guy. Bunch of guys. He always does. Strings were pulled. Officials looked the other way. Forms got signed. I fought him. I did. But not that much. Not enough. And then I thought, well, if it’s happening anyway, better to be on the inside. Maybe from there, I could do some good. Maybe inside, I could help. So I came aboard.”
“And how’d that go?” Her tone is less psycho-rhetorical than deep-fried sarcasm.
“That’s the sick part.” That is? “I’m better at running this company than he is. He’s always on about how I don’t have that cutthroat instinct. I’m not willing to do what it takes to get things done, make the hard calls, put it all on the line, first to the finish at all costs. That’s true. But people don’t like him. They don’t trust him. Everyone likes me.” He sounds ashamed, sorry about it. “People like me and believe me. They go above and beyond for me. They want to help me out. They trust me. I don’t know who was more surprised, me or Dad, but it turns out, I’m good at this.” He looks up, and his eyes meet hers again and hold, steady, unfaltering. “And then I couldn’t leave because now, well, now I’m all that’s standing between you and him.”
“I’m not sure—” she begins, but he reads her mind.
“It could be so much worse.”
“It’s pretty bad already.”
“I’m invested in you,” Nathan says. “All of you. I feel responsible for you. What happened wasn’t my fault exactly, but there would have been no 606 without me. I owe you. I have to make it up to you.”
She blinks. “You can’t.”
But he shakes his head, won’t hear her. “It’ll be different this time, Nora. We fixed it. The 606. We had this incredible team of researchers and scientists. We had the budget and the manpower this time. And the years. The test results are astonishing. It’s better now. It’ll be different this time. I swear.”
“So you’re here for a do-over.”
“Not a do-over. A do-better. All the good things we promised before. None of the bad ones. My dad thinks I’m stalling. Dragging my feet. ‘Pussyfooting around like the pussy I am.’” He nods an apology in my direction and makes quotation marks with his fingers to show me such language is beneath him and it’s only his father who would use it. But it’s not his language that offends me. “I keep telling him it’s easier said than done to get work started in this town. But honestly? It’s true. I want to slow down and do this right this time.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure I want to do it right?”
“Sure it’s fixed.”
The faintest of doubts flickers over his face like a hair got caught in his eyelashes for a moment. “Sure as you ever get in this business. Or any business. Sure enough.”
“Sure enough for whom?” Nora asks.
But he answers a different question. In fairness, it’s the pertinent one. “He’s my father, Nora.”