“Would it be the same people who took that researcher, the one everyone says had gambling debts?”
“His name was Arturo. Is Arturo,” he says. “He would have been an easy target. No family. His father rejected him for being gay. Such idiocy. He snuck across the border to America, nearly dying on the journey. He showed up with nothing but the clothes on his back and a deck of playing cards he always carried. I mean always. He was a heck of a poker player and he rarely lost. I never believed that story about gambling debts.”
“You think he was kidnapped?”
“Of course,” Dmitry says, as though this is obvious.
I thought of how, at various times, I’ve imagined myself to be living under difficult circumstances. How my mother has always had to work so hard and for so little. But it’s been far worse for Dmitry. And for Arturo.
“And this is why you live in the laboratory?”
He nods. “My work helps American soldiers. That makes me a traitor in Russia.”
“And they definitely know you’re here?” I say, pointing to the ground.
I hear him laugh a single, bitter “ha.”
“They know everything,” he says.
14
THE LABORATORY LESSONS give me new confidence. I come into Mellin feeling as though I am, at last, up to the job.
Unfortunately, Will doesn’t agree. He wants me sterilizing bassinets, scrubbing everyone’s glassware, and sweeping up the floors. Nothing more.
“You’re very good at it,” he says brightly.
Lauren and I have long talks about Will. She thinks he’s secretly in love with me. I think he’s openly at war with me.
“Wouldn’t it be cool if it turns out he always had a crush on you?” she says.
“No.”
“Not now, but like in the future. And one day you tell your kids about how when you guys first met he hated you and—”
“Don’t be gross,” I say.
I try not to think about Will. Anyway, right now he’s the least of my tormentors. The high school prom is nearing and there’ve been all these promposals. One day, a boy arrived outside class with a huge, painted sign that read, Nobody but you, Kira!
I hadn’t wanted to go to the prom with him, but it felt mean to say no especially because of that painted sign. So I’d agreed.
Within a few seconds, I realized my mistake. At first, it was just the look on his face. Then he started laughing. Then his friends appeared. They’d been watching the whole thing. And they started laughing, too. I moved away from them, backing up, but they crept nearer. Finally, I turned and raced down the hall, walking as quickly as possible through the crowds while they charged alongside me like a pack of dogs. It wasn’t until I turned the corner and into a classroom that they stopped. I spent the entire period worrying they’d be waiting for me outside when class finished.
I blame myself. The kid is very popular and has a girlfriend who is likely to be prom queen. If I were halfway aware of what goes on in my school I’d have known as much. But now, every few days, I get another of these “invitations,” fake promposals that arrive without warning. School has become nearly intolerable.
By comparison, Will is just an annoyance.
I take a dirty bassinet to the sink. Dirty isn’t the right word. It’s like someone murdered their pet in it. If I don’t look too closely I’m okay. I’ve worked plenty of hours in the cafeteria where my mother once worked, so standing at an industrial sink with a lot of hot water steaming around me is almost second nature. If Will thinks he can scare me off with blood and gore, he’s wrong. He can ignore me and he can give me gruesome tasks. But he can’t run me out of here.
I’m scrubbing away at the sink with my stack of bassinets when April shows up, a pair of rats on her shoulder. “Would you be really annoyed if I asked you to help me with something when you’re finished?” she says. The rats tip their noses to sniff the steamy air. “It would be a big favor,” she adds.
I nod, then put out my finger to stroke one of the rats. “How come these ones are so smooth?”
“Because they’re female. The does have sleeker, shorter coats. This is Daisy and Not Daisy.”
“Not Daisy?” I laugh. “That’s the rat’s name?”
April rolls her eyes. “I’ve run out of names for them over the years. Come by animal tech when you can, okay?”
There’s a running tension between April and anyone at Mellin who dares to ask for the rats for experiments. She’s an expert on testing models that don’t use animals and will give long lectures on the alternatives: in vitro, in silico, cell cultures, computer models. As far as she’s concerned, animals are the last thing anyone should use for testing. But it still happens.
I arrive to find April bent over a shallow cage filled with a dozen rats, all with the same peculiar bald patches across their middles. Judging from the sites of the patches, I imagine some kidney experiments have taken place.
“This is my hospital cage,” she says. “They sleep in that corner where the soft bedding is, but it has to be changed daily or else they risk infection. You can leave the rest of the bedding, but just do that part—”
“You want me to clean the rat cages?” I say.
April stops herself at once, and looks up at me. “Oh, sorry!” she says, her hand flying to her mouth. “I haven’t even asked you!”
She suddenly stands at attention, heels together, hands clasped in front of her, looking at me with great urgency. “I’m going on a training course, and then taking a few days’ vacation. Can you please, please look after the rats for me? I’ll show you how to do everything. It’s the ones that have been recently operated on that I worry about most. They look like they are going to be fine, but there’s always the possibility the wounds may abscess or they’ll pull out the stitches. See?”
She picks up one of the rats and holds it out to show me what she’s talking about. The two sides of the incisions, undoubtedly once neatly knotted together, are gaping slightly where the stiches were gnawed away.
“I don’t suppose you can stick a cone on their heads like dogs?”
“Ha! Don’t think I haven’t tried!” she says, squinting at the rat’s incision. “The surgical glue should keep that together, but we still have to watch it.”
Despite the stitches, the young rats are racing around, looking for food among the bedding, as though they’ve already forgotten the trauma of surgery.
“Rats must have amazing pain thresholds,” I say, though I spy a bottle of painkillers nearby.
“I have a feeling they’re going to do a whole new bunch early next week, which means you’ll have fresh casualties,” says April. “But don’t worry. I’ll make sure the hospital cages are all set up for you.”
It seems April and I are now Team Rat. I follow her around as she shows me the little creatures, so eager to come out and play. They crawl across the bars of their cages, splayed out like starfish. She shows me how to dose the water bottles with antibiotics, which food packets go into what hospital cages, and gives me a list of people to call if I see any sign of a wound opening or a rat getting sick. “If they seem a little depressed,” she says in a conspiratorial tone, “just slip them cake.”
“I love how you give them nice homes,” I say. The cages are full of colorful ladders and bridges and fleecy hammocks the rats can sleep in.
“They’re sweethearts. You remember Cornelius, don’t you?” she says. She puts her arm into the cage and Cornelius uses it like a bridge to climb out. “You met him the first day you were here. He’s my favorite. Don’t tell the others.”
Cornelius is one of the bigger rats, his ivory fur laced with streaks of blue. His size and whiskers and long, naked tail may frighten some people, but not me. And it’s clear that he adores April. He curls around her hand and begins licking her fingers. “When I get back, I’m taking him and his brothers home. He’s getting older now and deserves his retirement,” she says. She gives him a kiss on the top of his head.
“He’s adorable,” I say truthfully. “Do you take a lot of the rats home?”
She puts a finger to her lips. “Shh, it’s secret. Munn wouldn’t approve. People don’t think these animals have value outside being available as tools for experiments. You’re the only person I trust to look after them with care,” she says.
I promise that I will and she gives me the paper with all the phone numbers on it, underlining her cell number three times.
“Night or day,” she says. “And feel free to, you know—” She hesitates now. In the world of science, it is best not to fall too hard for the lab animals, but clearly April already has. “Feel free to play with them, okay?”
15
I TOLD DMITRY not to tell the others, but he unleashes his newest “crazy” idea right in the middle of an otherwise ordinary lunch. Everyone pounces on him.
“You want to bring back dead people?” Chandni says, stabbing at her salad. “You mean like in those awful newspaper headlines, ‘Pregnant Dead Woman Kept Alive,’ when anyone with an education knows it’s the unborn baby that is being kept alive and that she was brain-dead weeks ago?”
“Yes!” pipes up Dmitry. “I want to bring back that poor lady!” he says, as though he knows her.
“What rubbish,” says Will. He pushes his fork around his plate. The lunch today is vegan, and it infuriates him that he is being asked to eat something he describes as “New Age.” “We’re scientists. We shouldn’t even be having a conversation like this.”
“But we should be!” insists Dmitry. “I believe it is possible to repair neurons. That does not mean we ought to be doing so in all cases—if a person has a painful, terminal condition before their brain begins to die, they will still have it when recovered—”
Will interrupts him. “You’ve made a classic mistake. Did you hear yourself? You said, ‘before their brain begins to die.’ I’m telling you the brain is already dead. You won’t ‘recover’ anyone. But if you want to try to raise the dead, then be my guest.”
I’m waiting for Dmitry to argue that the brain doesn’t die all at once. After all, he was the one who taught me this.
Instead he says, “I will need to borrow Kira for this investigation.”
I am stunned by this announcement. “What?” I say.
“You want Kira?” Will says.
“She is my first choice.”
“Fine, have her,” Will says, as though trading a horse. “Did Munn agree to this work?”
Dmitry hesitates. “Not exactly.”
“I thought not,” Will says. “I take it you’re not exactly close to proof of concept?” he adds sarcastically.
“More the theoretical side of things,” Dmitry admits.
“The theoretical side,” Will snorts. “You’re paid to analyze chemical weapons for the Department of Defense, if I’m not mistaken. Aren’t you boy wonder of antidotes and countermeasures? This ‘crazy idea’ as you call it is an unauthorized lark!”
Dmitry sits very still, his lips in a thin, tense line. A lot of money and responsibility rests on his shoulders. And it’s true this new thing is, indeed, a distraction.
I say, “If you ask me what I think—”
“Not asking,” says Will.
I continue anyway. I may not always stand up for myself, but I can sometimes stand up for people I care about. “Raising the dead, as you put it, is a great antidote to chemical agents, possibly the best antidote,” I say.
Will turns to me. “So that acetylcholine can flood the parasympathetic nervous system all over again and the victim can die the same excruciating death a few extra times?” he says, then realizes what he’s said and stops himself.
Everybody freezes. Death from a nerve agent really is excruciating. The victim dies in convulsions. It’s terrifying and it’s painful. Dmitry looks as though he’s struggling with that now. His father, his sister. He pushes his hand through his hair. “There would be some challenges,” he says flatly.
The table is silent.
“There would be some difficulty with timing,” he admits.
“And that’s not all, mate,” Will says, his voice kinder now. He knows he’s crossed a line. “It’s a nice idea but maybe a stretch too far.”
But it’s not a stretch too far. At least, I no longer think so. In my “free” time, I’ve been studying the concept, and I think it’s possible. I wait for Dmitry in his lab and tell him that if he meant it about me helping, I would love to do so.
“You don’t mind appearing to be mad?” Dmitry says.
My face is still marked with burns around my ear and my hair looks like it’s been melted on one side, so I’m not particularly worried, no.
We begin, seated at one of the waxed tables in Mellin’s dining room, surrounded by the smell of old books. I bring Dmitry everything I can dig up about agents that send blood flow back to areas of the brain where it has been starved of oxygen, about neurogenesis and DNA damage response. I discover experiments in which drugs are injected into the spinal cord and electrical currents are used to stimulate the brain with some success. Paper after paper. Dozens, hundreds.
I bring home printouts every night, reading in the armchair in my mother’s room while she dozes. Or sitting around with her, half watching TV.
“Do they pay you for this?” she asks.
Beside me, hunched over a cardboard box, Lauren laughs. “They don’t need to,” she says. “She’s obsessed.”
Lauren is one to talk. That box houses a nest of baby birds. The birds’ parents were killed and the babies went to the rehab center where Lauren volunteers. Now she has to feed the chicks every thirty minutes from dawn to dusk. Needless to say, the nest is not supposed to be out of the center, but I’m not telling.
I want to do a good job for Dmitry. I read, analyze, summarize, draw elaborate pictures of various processes in the body. But I’m tired. I fall asleep at dusk just like the baby birds. One evening Rik finds me in the dining room fast asleep with my cheek on the table and gently shakes me awake.
“Hey,” he says. “Are you okay?”
Normally, there is a little bit of electricity any time he’s within ten feet of me, but I’m so tired I barely register it’s him. “Sorry,” I say, and fall back to sleep.
I don’t wake again until it’s so late that only Dmitry is left on site. I slump into his laboratory and drop into a chair.
“You want a bed in the dorm?” he says. “It’s surprisingly comfortable.”
I tell him no. School in the morning.
One afternoon my mother finds me parked outside the house, dozing with my head on the steering wheel. She says, “Kira, that’s enough! You could have fallen asleep driving. You need a day off.”
“Okay,” I agree. It seems a waste, but Saturday I sleep until noon, then spend the rest of the day with my mother. We sort laundry into neat stacks, squeeze lemons into a big glass pitcher for lemonade, bake homemade bread so the house fills with a lovely yeasty smell. We do all the gardening chores, and it feels good to be outside, the sun on my back. I look up and see my mother with her iced lemonade, watching me thoughtfully.
“You have such a young, strong body,” she says.
“The house,” I say, pointing at a section of the low gray roof with new asphalt tiles. “You had it repaired.”
“You wanted it to cave in on our heads?”
“I want—” Oh, what’s the point? “Fine,” I huff.
Lauren stays over for supper. We eat burritos at the picnic table, searching for hummingbirds among the flowers. We watch a movie together, all three of us, until my mother dozes off. I get out my papers again.
“I think you’re a workaholic,” Lauren says.
“More like desperate,” I say earnestly.
“Are you going to graduate?”
“I hope so.”
“Meet me at the café on your way in to work tomorrow,” she says. “I have a surprise for you.”
It’s the café near work. Lots
of people from Mellin use it, including Rik. It’s not wise for me to develop a crush—Rik is a hundred levels out of my league—and I’ve been kind of avoiding him for this reason. But I don’t see him here, thank God, and the coffee smells good, so I get in line, hoping that Lauren will join me shortly. I’m peering up at the menu deciding between a latte and a cold brew when I hear someone call my name. I look up and there’s a guy wearing a pair of shorts, a T-shirt, and matching socks in my high school’s colors. He’s walking toward me with his arms open, as though he intends to hug me.
“Kira,” he says, his voice full of mock longing, “why do you forsake me?” He reaches the decorative iron railing that separates those standing in line from those in the seating area. There he pauses, tilting his head to one side, and fixing his pale eyes upon me. “Why won’t you go to the prom with me?” he says, his voice steeped in sarcasm.
I know him. Mike. One of my prom tormentors. There are more and more of these phony invitations as prom nears. I don’t know if they do it to other girls. I hope not, because it’s really mean, but I also hate the thought that I’m the only one.
“Stop it!” I whisper.
“Just say yes,” he urges. It would be easy for a bystander to imagine that he really means it. “I love you!”
“Please go away!” I say in a low voice.
Over his shoulder he calls, “She wants me to go away!” He clutches the bottom of his T-shirt and brings its hem to his face as though wiping away tears. I turn my back to him, staring up at the menu on the wall above the espresso machines, hoping that if I ignore him long enough he’ll give up. But then I hear laughter from somewhere deeper within the coffeehouse. I turn to see another guy from my school, dressed in the same sports uniform.
“She’s going with me!” he tells Mike. “Are you trying to steal her?” He shoots me a nasty grin, then says, “You said yes, don’t you remember?”
Unfortunately, I remember all too well, him with his sign, Nobody but you, Kira! The bold way he asked if I’d go to the prom with him. My stupid reply.
Dragonfly Girl Page 14