Crystal (Orphans 2)

6 My Tutor

Bernie answered the door himself. The house was dark and quiet.

"Maid's night off," he muttered, and stepped back.

"Where are your parents?" I asked as I entered. After having lived all my life in orphanages and now living with Thelma, who kept the television on the way some people kept on lights, it seemed strange to enter a home that was so silent.

"Out," he said. "At a meeting or a dinner or something. They left numbers in the kitchen, but I didn't look at them. Come on," he said, leading the way down the hall to his room.

He had the microscope out and the new slides beside it. Next to that was a plastic replica of the human heart.

"These cells come from heart muscle," he said, and glanced into the microscope. He had yet to look at me directly.

I stepped up beside him and waited, and then he moved to the side.

"Go on, take a look," he said.

I sat and looked through the eyepiece. I had to adjust the focus to fit my vision, but it soon came in clear, and I was amazed at the detail I could see.

"This came with it," he explained, and read from a sheet of printed material.

"'We studied cardiac explants and autopsy hearts of patients with chronic congestive heart failure caused by either a dilated cardiomyopathy or ischemic heart disease and compared them with normal hearts. In control hearts, endothelial cells rarely were positive for PAL-E. In hearts of patients with ischemic cardiomyopathies, there was distinct staining with this marker.

"'Conclusions: A phenotypic shift in endothelial antigen expression of the coronary microvasculature occurs in both ischemic hearts and hearts with dilated cardiomyopathies, as revealed by PAL-E, compared with control hearts. The change may relate to compensatory mechanisms in long-standing chronic heart failure.' "

He put the paper down as if he assumed I understood any or all of it. I shook my head. "Where did you get all this?"

"A friend of my father's works at a

cardiovascular research lab in Minnesota. He sent it. My father tells everyone I'm some sort of scientific genius, and they send me things." He gazed at the sheet. "This is heavy research."

"Let me see it," I said, and he handed me the paper. I reread most of what he had read aloud. "No way could I understand it." I shook my head. "This might as well be in a foreign language. I mean, I know what some of the words mean, but putting it all together. . I guess they've found a way to diagnose a heart problenn"

"Right," he said. He looked relieved that I didn't know much more than he did.

I gazed at the cell under the microscope again.

"It is interesting to know that this was once part of a human being," I said.

"I didn't show you half of it before. I've got cells from all sorts of human organs," he said with more excitement in his voice. He went to his special small file cabinet and opened a drawer. Gazing in, he read from the labels. "Liver, kidney, lungs, ovaries, the prostate, even some brain cells."

It was almost as if I had gone shopping at a department store for human cells and he was the salesman. I couldn't help but smile.

"What's so funny?" he asked sharply.

"Nothing," I said, not wanting to make him feel bad. "It's just unusual to see someone have all that in his room."

He slammed the drawer closed. "I thought you would be interested and even excited about it," he said.

"I am! Really, Bernie, I am," I cried.

He looked at me sideways, his eyes narrow with suspicion.

"I mean it. I'm sorry," I said.

He hesitated and then opened the drawer again. "You want to see anything else?" he asked.

"I'd like to see a brain cell."