Emma gave David his space.
He took the folder of his early medical records from her office and burrowed into the couch upstairs. Occasionally he would flip a page, but mostly he stared at nothing.
Snowflake, his blind white cat, patiently let him rest the papers on her. Having been trained to retrieve various useful items - including Emma, in case of emergency - Snowflake qualified as a service animal, though she'd never been formally certified as one. David had insisted on adopting her two years ago, and it had worked out better than Emma had expected.
She made herself busy around the apartment, and after a few hours had gone by, she sat next to her son.
He didn't say anything.
"What are you thinking?" she asked.
"What's missing?" He pushed the folder at her, with a deeply troubled expression. "Mom, it doesn't make sense."
Emma traced her own handwriting with her eyes. She'd had good penmanship fifteen years ago, and she thought she still did now. Despite David's constant hectoring about her aversion to computers, she still did all her charting by hand.
"There's something else you haven't seen," she said.
"Mom!"
"David -" She put a hand on his knee. "I haven't even had those notebooks in years. They're in Ron's files somewhere."
"How deep does it go?" he whispered, his voice not quite catching the words before they escaped.
"This is as far down as I know about," Emma said. "If you want to go further than that, your answers are somewhere else."
He nodded, and she had no doubt he was planning to use his "search engine" skills - whatever exactly those were - to hunt down everything there was to know about TCRI. If he hadn't done it already.
"You know about the intake process," she began, referring to the way she examined animals that were abandoned or surrendered to her clinic, assessing their health and making sure they had names. "That's what I did for you, when you showed up looking like a very sick turtle."
He nodded; he knew that from the notes in her lap.
"At first, that's what we thought you were," Emma went on. "Why would we think anything else? But that's when you started to talk."
David didn't talk now, remaining silent and reserving his judgment.
"Back then, people were just starting to take the idea of animal intelligence seriously. They were teaching sign language to gorillas and raising chimpanzees like human children. Ron and I agreed that we would try something like that with you. The notebooks you haven't seen document what happened next."
David's eyes darkened, but he still didn't say anything.
"You started meeting all the milestones for human infants," Emma recalled. "You spontaneously used language. You understood social cues. You learned to read. And potty training was not nearly as awful as I had anticipated."
Normally David would have interjected at this point from sheer embarrassment, but still he kept his mouth shut.
"We had thought you were the result of some kind of an experiment," Emma said. "Who would have guessed that was the closest we ever came to the truth? But at some point, it was just not remotely plausible that you were a turtle that had somehow been engineered to stand upright and speak fluent English. We needed another theory.
"You know the result," she went on. "We labeled your shell FOP, and your reptile heart a congenital defect, and your cold-bloodedness a thermoregulatory disorder. We had an explanation for everything. All together, they sounded ridiculous. But mostly we thought about them one at a time, because we were so busy trying to deal with each of them and keep you alive. And then as you grew up, we just thought about you as you, and we sort of forgot how many labels it took to hold you together."
She wanted to touch his hand, but she refrained. "And now, with everything that's happened… we're remembering what a mess we built up to try to explain you, and we're finding out that the right explanation is the one that's both simple and impossible."
She stopped there, letting him process.
"I can't believe it," David said finally.
"I know," Emma said.
"No," David said, "I mean I can't believe it. I can't accept that I'm really a turtle, because that would mean…" He trailed off, and Emma knew her son understood just enough about where that line of thinking led to know that going any further down it would change everything. "But I have to believe it, because if I don't, then Ron's theory about a cure is completely wrong."
Emma saw immediately that this was an extremely faulty way to evaluate a proposed treatment plan, and she opened her mouth to say so.
"But then -" David said, and he pushed Snowflake off his lap and stumbled to his feet. "I have to go."
"David -"
"Mom, I know what I'm doing." He was heading for his room, the cat following at his heels. "I - I just have to prove a theory."
She worried, but she let him go.
"So how can I contact you guys?" David had asked, a few weeks ago over donburi. "What are your ICQ handles?"
"My friend," Mikey said, slinging an arm around David's shoulders, and holding up his other hand to frame an imaginary view. "Whenever you have need of us… just shine the Bat Signal."
"No, I'm serious," said David.
"You think I'm not?" Mikey feigned hurt. Pushing up from the table, he tore a sheet of notepaper from the magnetic pad on the refrigerator, and grabbed a marker from the cup on the counter. In a minute, he had drawn an impressively symmetrical Bat Signal. "There you go," he said, passing the drawing to David. "Just hang it down the sewer grate out front, and we'll know to come over right away."
She made him come out of his room for dinner. He knew perfectly well that while theory-proving was encouraged in this household, avoiding blood sugar crashes always took priority.
As soon as he came into the kitchen, David grabbed the Bat Signal from the refrigerator, where it was pinned with one of the veterinary clinic's branded magnets, and put it on the table.
"Call the guys," he said.
Normally Emma insisted on requests being phrased with a little more courtesy, but on a day like this, she supposed she could ignore a little rudeness.