“I don’t see why not. But that’s not my area. You want to talk nanomeds? Ask Marta.”
“You mean it? Plant Lady can do this?”
“She could, but I don’t see her abandoning her work.” The two sat in an amiable stalemate. “And by the way, it shows respect when you use her name. Marta. Not Plant Lady.”
Eva fidgeted but did not speak. They’d discussed respect and social graces often, especially since the fiasco at Harvard. Eva’s impulsiveness had cost Marta’s trust and friendship. Jim counseled Eva that to temper sudden actions, to use proper names, to be courteous, even to observe ordinary table manners, were better ways to recruit help from others.
Finally, Jim broke the silence. “You need her, don’t you.”
Eva said, “Is that supposed to be a question?”
“You’ll have to come up with something in public health,” he said.
“Easy. I have a plan.”
“Your last big idea was to build fat-loving nanomolecules for tummy tucks and replicator cells for breast augmentation.”
“Boob jobs pay.”
“Yeah, but you’re not going to get Marta interested unless you go deeper into the thoracic cavity. She wants public health, not private wealth. You want her help? Meet her halfway.”
“But you know what my problem is,” said Eva.
“Sure. Chronic disease is expensive. And the countries that need help the most don’t have the treasury to pay for it. So, you’re back to where you started.”
“Not this time.” Eva’s coffee was untouched and cold. She looked down and said, “If Plant Lady gives me the meds and the controls, I’ll give her public health.”
Jim stared without speaking.
“Sorry. If Marta can come up with the controls, then I’ll give the good Dr. Cruz her public health.”
“Do you mean it?”
“Yes,” Eva said. “But you need to convince her. I can’t just drop back into her life. And I need your help, too. You have a practical side that’ll be valuable to NMech.”
“Thanks, but I’m pretty happy with my stinky residents.”
“Just hear me out,” said Eva. “You and Marta will like what I have. Then you decide if my proposal is as important as your mangy dogs. Besides, you owe me.”
“I haven’t forgotten,” Jim said. His eyes dropped to the floor again.
She had asked for something from him once before, something very personal, reminding him of his debt to her. “It’s not mine to share,” was all he said.
Then Mama and the others at the Table howled at Eva.
01
___________________________________________
SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN
SOFIA, BULGARIA
APRIL. 2022
One week before her departure from Sofia to attend a special high school in Los Angeles, 13-year-old Eva Rozen had awoken to the sounds of Mama and Papa fighting. She had been accustomed to shouted curses, taunts, and screams, even the crisp crack of hands on flesh. Those sounds had not bothered her. To be roused from sleep, however, was to lose its comforting amnesia. That did bother her, and a reckoning had been long overdue.
She slipped past Gergana’s empty bedroom, gaze fixed ahead, and crept down the spine of the railroad flat to the fracas in the kitchen. Separate rooms and separate lives were connected by a dark hallway as grim as Eva’s thoughts.
Eva stepped in unnoticed. Mama’s screams alternated with Papa’s. Eva looked around. She heard a thought, as if from a separate intelligence within her. Use what’s at hand. She found a wine bottle. It was an easy task. They littered the kitchen. She hefted one to test its weight, and gripped the neck, entered the field of combat and swung two-handed.
Eva was smaller than an average child on the cusp of adolescence and her aim was low. But she wielded the bottle with the predatory ferocity of a weasel and the roundhouse blow drove into Papa’s left knee with a satisfying crunch. He bellowed as the kneecap shattered. Eva regarded her mother, swung and caught Mama just below her hip. The impact was cushioned by the soft tissue of Mama’s thigh, once seductive territory that had first captured, then repelled, Papa. Mama cradled her leg, and sobbed. Eva regarded her parents, sprawled on the floor.
“That’s for Gergana.” Her voice was impassive.
She returned to her small bedroom where memories came, unbidden: Mama’s indifference, Papa’s drunken visits, and Gergana. Most of all, Gergana. Eva imagined what Gergana might have said to her tonight, tried to feel Gergana’s cool hand on her forehead. She would have told Eva that she was very brave.
She wanted to sob but choked back her tears. At that, she heard a low murmur of approval. Startled, she sat up and looked about. The whispers would not have been from Papa or even Mama. They were still in the kitchen. Papa was moaning in pain and begging Mama to call an ambulance.
Eva heard the murmurring again. It was distant, yet...interior. For a moment, Eva imagined the voices coming from within her pillow. She sat up and then walked to the door. The sound grew and followed her. She heard notes of pride, of encouragement, of approval. The words were indistinct yet the meaning was clear: she had done well.
Then a second message emerged from the swelling clamor, increasing in volume, building in pitch and resonance, blotting out any other thought, a boulder rolling slowly at first, then crushing every obstacle in its path. “Strike first!” she heard from within the din. “Strike hard!”
Eva listened. She could pick out individual calls and caws. She strained to identify one voice. It would have been a quiet one. But Gergana’s crooning was lost in the uproar.
From Eva’s first hours of life, uneasy forces shaped her. Her birth was a brief cause for celebration, as Gergana’s had been some years earlier. Mama and Papa displayed Eva like a gauche traveler waiving a first-class airline ticket. But soon, parenting enervated rather than enlivened them and Mama and Papa’s interest decayed. Eva was demoted from an object of inestimable worth to that of a curious gewgaw. Then they nurtured Eva as they might a caged falcon, tossing scraps of attention as they might have cast bits of offal to the raptor. The bird survives but is stunted, fettered by self-doubt, never to soar, always ready for a sharp-beaked defense of its circumscribed territory.
The roles of mother and of father fell to Gergana whose de facto parenting was as tender as Mama and Papa’s was feckless. When Eva looked for comfort, her eyes lit on Gergana’s smile. Eva’s ears heard her sister’s soft lullabies and her hands played with toys that Gergana somehow provided. When Mama ignored Eva’s cries, Gergana cleaned and changed her infant sister. When Papa stumbled home, Gergana stood at juvenile Eva’s doorway.
Eva nursed on Gergana’s attention and Eva’s loyalty was as fierce as a samurai’s. Gergana adorned their bleak lives with bedtime stories, fanciful embellishments to bring hope.
“Little One,” she’d say, “I’ve got a story for you.” She portrayed the family as heroic figures in a romantic adventure. Gergana transformed Papa into a sea captain whose perilous journeys accounted for frequent absences. Mama was a member of the exiled royal family of Simeon II. “Little One,” Gergana told Eva, “one day you’ll be on that throne.”
Gergana’s stories and dreams were grand, but Eva saw life with open eyes. She fought to reconcile Mama’s weak chin and perpetual air of distraction with the royal station of Gergana’s tales. Eva saw Papa return, not from the high seas with sun-bleached hair and the tang of brine, but from a nearby tavern, red-faced, stinking of tobacco and stale beer. Sometimes the stench lingered, and Eva showered before returning to sleep.
“I don’t want a story tonight,” Eva announced one evening. Gergana had seen to Eva’s bath, changed her into nightclothes and shut Eva’s bedroom door so that Mama’s weepy ramblings and Papa’s snores were dampened.
“No story, Little One? How about a song?”
“No.”
“How come? You like bedtime stories.”
“They’re not true. You made the
m all up.” Eva’s voice was flat, almost uninterested.
“They’re supposed to be made up. Something nice to think about before you go to sleep.”
“Mama’s not a princess. Some days she doesn’t even get out of bed. Papa is no sea captain. Sailors have sunburns. Papa’s skin is all white.”
“Well, stories are for pretending. I don’t have to make up stories. I could read books with fairytales,” Gergana offered.
“No. I don’t want stories anymore. That’s for little kids,” said nine-year-old Eva.
“Well, don’t you play pretend games with your friends?”
“I don’t play with the other kids. And I don’t like pretend games.”
“What about your friends? Don’t they like to play house or have tea parties?”
“I don’t know,” Eva said. “Anyway, you’re my only friend. And I’m not Little One anymore. I’m a woman.”
Gergana chuckled. “You’re a woman now? How very grown up. When did you become a woman?”
“A while ago,” said Eva, in a matter-of-fact voice.
“Oh, a while ago, eh?” Gergana teased. “And how did you decide that you’re now a woman?”
“Papa told me.”
Gergana began a vigil outside Eva’s door when Papa staggered home. She was Eva’s guard. Sometimes she was Eva’s alternate. She had no choice. She would protect Eva, no matter what.
What replaces fantasy and imagination for the child exiled from the acres of make-believe? Where does the mind travel when fairyland becomes forbidden territory? Eva found sanctuary in science with its logic and its immutable laws. Banished from enchantment, Eva found chemistry. She could create new worlds, real ones. Leave illusion to children who could pretend in safety. Science offered Eva the means to travel from her perilous world to an orderly one.
Sisters grow and sisters change. Gergana ripened into eye-catching adolescent beauty. She bore the hallmarks of classic loveliness—symmetrical features, full lips, high cheekbones and captivating green eyes—and her interests centered on boys. Gergana’s breasts were full, and she turned and stretched to display them. Her toned legs drew admiring eyes up to wide hips. The owners of those eyes sought to accompany Gergana. Eva no longer had an unrivaled claim to her sister’s attention.
Eva considered herself in a mirror. Her hair was unkempt, her features mismatched. She had no experience with style. Her single experiment with makeup led to calamitous results.
“How come you’re so pretty and I’m so ugly?” Eva asked one evening as she walked into her sister’s room following Gergana’s return from a social outing.
“Would you knock before you come into my room?” The tone was abrupt.
“Why are you ignoring me? Those boys don’t care about you as much as I do.”
“Well, I like boys and it gets me out of the house.”
“I wish you would play more with me,” said Eva.
“Little One, we’re not little kids anymore. You’re my sister and I love you. But I have friends. You will, too.”
“I doubt it. I’m not pretty like you are.”
Eva clung to her sister but she was as awkward as a skittering foal and her efforts to hold onto Gergana fed the distance between them. The distance grew as Gergana’s experiments with boys became experiences with men, her delight in schnapps and then liquor broadened to include marijuana and then cocaine.
Late one night Gergana stumbled home. Her key fought with the lock until the tumblers clicked into place and she staggered in. Her hair was matted, her clothing rumpled. Her words were slurred and coated with the sweet aroma of a flight of vodka. Eva helped Gergana into her bedroom, helped her get undressed. All the while, Gergana was singing popular songs or talking about her boyfriends, comparing one to another.
“Why do you do this?” Eva asked.
Gergana was lying on her bed. She reached for a stuffed animal, a plush pink rabbit with a blue waistcoat. Thin flexible wiring inside the toy’s ears held a shape, and Gergana alternated between bending the ears down, flopped over one moment and then alert and erect the next. She brought the bunny up to her face and cooed to it as she stroked its length.
“Why do you do this?” Eva repeated.
“Do what?”
“Get drunk. Get stoned. Give yourself to the boys. That. Why do you do it?”
“Flopsy,” Gergana whispered to her rabbit, “Little One is jealous.” Gergana’s words trailed off in an alcoholic haze.
“The boys don’t care about you. I do. You should spend your time with me.”
Gergana snored.
Gergana’s widening social interests claimed her. Now, when Papa’s clumsy steps shook the stairs leading to the Rozens’ third-floor apartment, the post outside Eva’s door was abandoned. Eva felt helpless. Her father was a big man, and she was small.
An unexpected warning from a surprising source gave Eva a solution to her growing dilemma. It was an ordinary spring day. Eva was dressed in her usual navy blue gabardine cargo pants. These were hemmed to fit her four-foot frame, cinched with a functional black leather belt that matched heavy black boots. A dark green work shirt gave her the appearance of a dwarfish custodian, and Eva’s trademark black cloak made her look like a walking toadstool.
Mama’s shapeless form greeted Eva that day. She was staring through eyes that were partitioned from the rest of her face by dark circles of fatigue. Despair carved hollows into her face. She shuffled along, wrapped in a frayed bathrobe despite the hour.
Mama started to speak, and then stopped. Eva had removed cleaning supplies from a storage area under a rust-stained sink. She held a bottle of bleach in her right hand and one of ammonia in her left.
“What?” Eva asked.
Mama stood just beyond Eva’s reach. “You might not want to mix bleach with ammonia,” Mama suggested.
“Why not?”
“It makes a gas if you mix them.”
“What gas?”
Three simple questions from this adolescent girl carried the force of a State Security interrogation.
“Um, bleach has chlorine in it.” She pointed to a label on the bottle. “See, ‘chlorine bleach’. If you mix it with ammonia, it makes chlorine gas which can hurt you. What are you trying to clean?”
Eva showed Mama the offending spot. Mama examined the stain on the heavy fabric’s sleeve. She reached for laundry soap and peroxide.
“Blood?”
Eva nodded. She offered no explanation nor did Mama ask for one. Mama dabbed the spot with peroxide, waited, and then scrubbed with laundry soap. She handed the cleaned shirt back to Eva and retreated down the dark hallway.
The label’s warning puzzled Eva. It told her what was hazardous but not why. She went back to her room to find an answer on her bookshelf. Every volume was a text. Each bore the bookplate of Sofia’s public library or of its university. Eva enjoyed the feel of paper and the heft of books and she handled them with the reverence of a rabbi cradling the Torah. Textbooks were her playmates and chemistry was her best friend.
Eva found her answer. Bleach breaks down in ammonia to release chlorine gas, a powerful greenish-yellow poison. During a world war in an earlier century, the gas earned the title of civilization’s first weapon of mass destruction. Eva pondered these facts and determined that she must experiment and learn. It would be easy to find a subject for her investigation. Wild dogs roamed the streets of Sofia. Victims were widespread: the deer enclosure at the city’s zoo suffered an attack and only the largest-antlered bucks survived; a British tourist in Nedyalsko, mauled almost beyond recognition; a child visiting her grandmother, dead. Eva had been set upon as well. She’d had the presence of mind to snap open an umbrella into the dog’s face. Startled, the dog ran.
But dogs were fast and unpredictable. She needed a subject that she could anticipate and even control. She pondered this challenge for several days then found an answer, right at home. Why not Papa? Given his drunken gait up the stairs and off-key singing, she’
d have enough time to prepare.
She found a squeeze bottle, one that would cap tightly and fit into an inner pocket in her cloak. Next, the formula. Equal parts ammonia and bleach would create a gas that would happily rip apart the delicate lining of a human’s respiratory system.
Eva thought, I’m on the right track, but not with chlorine gas. It’ll get me, too. There was another option, a favorite tool of the police and military—pepper spray. The recipe was simple. The active ingredients, the ones that burn—capsaicin and dihydrocapsaicin—came straight from hot peppers. The hottest of the many peppers available at Sofia’s markets was Guntar chilies, imported from India’s Spice Coast. This variety possessed commanding levels of the hot capsaicin molecules. The pepper’s oily juice was soluble in oil, mineral oil for example. It would stick to its target and she could use it at close quarters. Or better still, baby oil—the scent reminded her of Gergana.
Eva’s pepper spray ended Papa’s nocturnal visits. The blisters around his eyes and mouth lasted for three days. His hunched-over walk lasted longer. After two encounters he was conditioned to avoid her door.
But he was like a puppy, and had occasional lapses. Eva learned to stay alert. Soon she had the reflexes of a combat soldier and could come out of sleep in an instant, ready to protect herself. Once Papa moved more deliberately. He caught Eva by surprise and she suffered the effects of the pepper spray along with Papa. Soon, her arsenal included a knife.
Papa was thwarted. He turned his attention to Gergana who found safety by increasing her the distance from Papa. That meant more time away from home at a time when Eva needed a big sister all the more.
How could Eva find a way to bring Gergana back to her, to regain the warmth of their earlier years? She decided to appeal to her sister’s vanity. I’ll find a pretty present. Something for her to wear. She’ll look in the mirror and think of me.
Little Deadly Things Page 2