The Two Percent

The DNA report had come in the mail folded into three parts, and Soren's grandmother had read the first page, said something about cousins in Norway, and gone back to her soup.

Maya was reading the last page.

"Soren. You're one point eight percent Neanderthal."

"That's a typo."

"It's not a typo. It's a whole row. Look. Neanderthal ancestry, one point eight percent." She turned the paper so he could see.

Soren read it twice. "Neanderthals went extinct."

"Apparently not all the way."

He got his notebook. He wrote the number down, then crossed it out, then wrote it again, because crossing it out felt like calling the paper a liar.

"Okay," he said. "Extinct means there are none left. So how do I have any."

Maya pulled her own report out of her bag. She'd brought it because they'd ordered them together, two kits, two envelopes of spit, mailed off in September. She flipped to the back.

"One point three," she said. "For me."

"You're less Neanderthal than me."

"Don't sound so proud." But she was grinning. "We both have some. That's the part that's weird. Not that you have it. That I have it too, and we're not related."

Soren stopped. "Say that again."

"We're not related. But we both have Neanderthal in us. Different families. Different countries our families came from. And both of us have some."

"So it's not a Soren thing."

"It's not a Soren thing. It's an everybody thing." She looked at the report like it had moved. "Or an almost everybody thing."

His grandmother set down two bowls of soup without looking at the papers. "You two and your gloomy faces. Eat."

They ate. Maya ate fast, the way she did when her head was somewhere else.

"Here's what doesn't fit," she said, spoon halfway up. "Extinct usually means gone. Done. The last one dies and that's the end. But this isn't the end. The end is sitting in your bowl right now eating soup."

"How, though." Soren wanted the mechanism. He always wanted the mechanism. "Extinct is extinct. There's no Neanderthal walking around to give me anything."

Maya put the spoon down. "What if they didn't give it to you. What if they left it in you. Like. A long time ago."

"How long."

"Tens of thousands of years. More." She was building it out loud now. "There were Neanderthals. And there were people like us. At the same time. In the same places."

"And they met."

"They had to have met. Because the only way I get a piece of a Neanderthal in me is if somewhere back there, way back, one of my people had a kid with one of theirs."

Soren felt the back of his neck go cold in a good way. "And then that kid had a kid."

"And that kid had a kid."

"For forty thousand years."

"For however long. Nobody stopping. Every single one of them old enough to have a kid before the next one came." Maya spread both reports side by side on the table, his and hers. "An unbroken line. From a Neanderthal. To you. With no gaps. Not one."

Soren looked at the two percent on his page and tried to feel forty thousand years of people standing behind it, each one passing a sliver of something forward, none of them knowing they were carrying anybody, all of them just living.

"That's not extinct," he said slowly. "That's hiding."

"It's not even hiding. It's working." Maya leaned in. "That two percent isn't a fossil. It's not a bone in a museum. It's instructions. It's doing something in you right now. Today."

"Doing what."

"I don't know. That's the part nobody fully knows yet." And she said it the way other people said the best news of their life. "Scientists are still figuring out what those genes actually do. Some of them might be about skin. Some about how you fight off sickness. Some they haven't worked out at all. There are pieces of an extinct kind of human switched on inside living people and we don't all the way know what they're for."

Soren wrote that down. He underlined it.

"So the Neanderthals didn't completely die," he said. "Part of them got adopted."

"Into us. Into millions of us. You'd have to add up little bits from millions of people to put a whole Neanderthal back together." Maya stopped, struck by it. "You could, almost. There are pieces scattered through everybody. Different pieces in different people. If you collected them all."

"That's the part that gets me." Soren's voice dropped. "It's not all in one person. It's smashed up and spread out."

"Like a window that broke and everyone took a different piece home without knowing."

His grandmother passed behind them again. "What window."

"Nothing, Mormor." But Soren turned in his chair. "Mormor. The cousins in Norway. How far back do you know them."

"My grandmother's grandmother. After that it goes dark. Nobody wrote it down."

"It doesn't go dark," Maya said quietly, mostly to Soren. "It just stops being written. It keeps going. It's still going. It's the part that didn't need anybody to write it down to keep it."

Soren looked at his grandmother, who came from people who came from people, back and back, past Norway, past names, past writing, to somebody who once stood next to somebody who was not quite the same kind of human, and decided, in whatever way people decided things back then, that they were close enough.

"Mormor," he said. "Did you know you're a little bit Neanderthal."

She laughed, surprised, the laugh of a person who had not been told this before. "Says who."

"Says the spit you mailed in the same envelope as ours." He turned her page toward her and pointed.

She bent over the report. The rain hit the window in long gray streaks. She read the row twice, the way Soren had, and then she set down her dishtowel and pulled out a chair and sat with them, looking at the number, her finger resting on it like she could feel it there under the paper, still warm, still running, forty thousand years late and not stopped yet.