Little Deadly Things (29 page)

She also lacked a model by which to put my behavior into perspective. A part of her was eternally juvenile, stunted, unable to follow me into adolescence. At another time in her life, she would have accommodated a new dimension in our friendship. But she was possessed of a single focus which brooked no competition for her attention.

She was not the only one of us with tunnel vision. My parents and I were blind to the demands she placed on herself, and the consequences of those demands.

It was a small thing, our spat. How many great events turn on a small detail? That day, I was fueled with bravado that went beyond the scope of our usually playful competition. Someone who understood that teen moods ‘blow in, blow up, and blow out’, to quote Winston Churchill, would have taken a deep breath, counted to ten, and ignored my bratty manners.

I wish Eva had ignored me. I truly wish my mother had.

There’s a saying that if a butterfly alters its path, then the course of history is changed. The Butterfly Effect, some call it. That’s a bit too philosophical for me, but my run-in with Eva about butterflies did indeed change history.

Just before I stormed out of Eva’s work area, my mother and I had pondered how a butterfly emerges from a cocoon. Her objective that day was to place science within the context of mystery, to find the sublime in nature. Butterflies lack teeth, my mother said, so they couldn’t chew their way out of a cocoon. If they were to secrete a caustic substance to dissolve the cocoon, would that not burn their delicate wings? My assignment was to look for the answer in the world of science but to preserve the sense of wonder. Awe and humility are essential research tools, my mother said. Science might have an explanation, but attunement with nature’s mysteries hones the researcher’s scientific intuition. Seek awe, my mother said, and you’ll find science.

I did the opposite. I turned clever. I tried to stump Eva rather than sharing my excitement.

The timing of my display of pride was bad, very bad. Eva was racing to complete NMech’s bid. Her usual short supply of patience was long since exhausted. When I nagged and teased her, she snapped. What she said to me wasn’t important, but how I reacted had a lifelong impact on Eva and my family and ultimately, the world: I burst into tears.

My outburst would have blown over as quickly as a summer squall but as I hurried from Eva’s lab, embarrassed by my artless attempt to play the bully and stunned by the strength of my reaction, I ran into my mother—literally. We nearly tumbled to the floor. Then chagrin escalated to humiliation. The last person on earth I wanted to see was my mother. She held me and kissed me and wiped my tears with her thumbs, as she had when I was a child. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a small group of lab techs watching us.

Now my mortification was complete. I screamed at her. Eva heard me and came out of her lab with a look of confusion and concern. I ran out from the work area, out of the building onto Boylston Street, through the Public Gardens and the Commons, running until the tempest passed. The outburst was short-lived but the damage was permanent.

In my meditation, I return to that day to comfort my mother, Eva, and the child Dana. I return not as an older version of myself, not a wiser manifestation of the child, but as something ageless. I wrap my arms around the three figures to hold them intact. Fractures race along fault lines deep within the foundation of each one’s character. My strength flows from the present. It is tangible and luminous, like fire from the Sacred Heart of Jesus. My love for these ones fuses and anneals the flaws. The fire gathers into plumes and becomes an archangel’s wings, softly drawing gall and malignancy from Eva, and she knows peace. The alar radiance has a quilled sharpness, too, and it lances my mother’s greatest fear, that I would inherit her pain. Hot infection spills out of her in pustulant colors and she sighs deeply in relief. Then the child—always blameless—turns transparent and the angers and debts of these two women pass through, unretained.

This fine meditation brings me a moment’s relief. But the mighty seraph who returns to that moment to give succor is utterly impotent. My mother had previously sworn an oath.
If she crosses a line that involves Dana, we will not have Eva in
any
of our lives.

When I ran from Eva’s lab into my startled mother’s arms, misunderstanding animated her vow. In that moment, her oath, sworn years earlier, was fulfilled.

I never learned what transpired between my mother and Eva after I stormed out but when I returned, a changeling had replaced Eva. The substitute was cool, polite, and distant to me. She would sport no teeth, exude no caustic dissolvant. What emerged from her cocoon was not a monarch or a swallowtail, but something dark, blood red, and fearsome.

___________________________________________

WHOM THE GODS WOULD DESTROY

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS
2043

E
va worked with the consuming passion of a New World missionary. The technical challenge was simple to describe—keep ZVI immersed in an inert gas like helium until it was injected into the polluted river. Expose ZVI to pollutants and you get remediation. Expose it to oxygen and you get rust.

The business challenge was to prove that NMech could provide adequate supplies of ZVI to keep the operation running smoothly. All of the other bidders relied on off-site ZVI manufacture. Transporting the pure iron to the remediation plant increased their costs and risks. NMech’s solution was elegant and unexpected. In theory, it looked simple: combine known elements in a new way. In practice, it looked impossible. How could NMech produce a working model in time?

Eva feared missing the deadline.
At this rate, I won’t make it,
she thought.
I have to speed the process.
She reviewed her notes and considered her progress, and the tasks that remained. The science wasn’t an issue. The solution she was developing was based on nanotechnological developments dating back to the early 2000s. She needed neither new technology nor methods in engineering. The scale of the project was the issue. She needed more time.

Eva ran her simulations, as she had a dozen times. She changed variables at each step, and then ran the simulations again. And again. The results were maddening and consistent: she would not meet the deadline.

If I could work all twenty-four hours of the day, I could do it. If Marta or even Dana understood the chemistry we could make it. If I had an extra couple months, I could do it. If Jim could write the proposal, even just be here for moral support.
She couldn’t add hours to the days, or days to the month, and she was working as hard as she could. If only she could think faster and move faster.

Then an idea struck. Eva subvocalized and called up a series of neurobiology texts. It looked feasible.
This is Marta’s area,
she thought,
but I’ll be damned if I’ll let her in on this. She’d have some objection or another. But if I can make this work, I can do it. In fact, this may be even bigger than remediation.

Eva read more.
There. I
can
do it. I can achieve things that humans only dream of. Then we’ll see about Marta Holier-than-Thou. Jim will have to see me for what I am.
She checked the texts one last time and headed to an NMech pharmaceutical laboratory.

A quarter century earlier, Eva’s older sister, Gergana, and the antiquarian, Coombs, and an English teacher named Erickson had all urged Eva not to ignore stories and literature. Understand yourself, they had argued, and you will better understand your science. But Eva ignored all three warnings, like Peter’s three denials before the cock crowed.

The lessons of literature were lost on Eva. The tale of Bellerophon or Icarus might have served to warn her before she began her own flight to Mount Olympus or to the sun.

It worked. Damn, this feels good! Going to do this yet. Look out world, here I come. This project is mine and
nothing
is going to stop me.

And the chorus from the Table of Clamorous Voices was sweet and, for once, harmonious. It sang on and on and on and Eva sang with it.

___________________________________________

IN DREAMS

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS
AUTUMN, 2043

J
im Ecco was jittery. He might as well have chewed a crop of coffee beans. The smart bed could not lull him to sleep. Nor could it dampen his movement enough to protect Marta’s fragile slumber.

“Querido, what is it? What’s troubling you?” she asked in a strained voice.

“Bad dream.”

“Come here,” she said, and reached out for her husband.

“I can’t lie still. I’m sorry I woke you.”

“Querido, come here. Let me hold you and you can tell me about your dream.”

Jim sighed. The dream was confusing, upsetting and finally, ludicrous—not one he cared to recount. He closed his eyes and breathed in through his nose, and then exhaled through pursed lips. He repeated the exercise three times. Tonight, the rhythmic cycle of inbreath and outbreath brought no peace.

“Marta, I’m scared.” He laid his head in the crook of her left arm. She wrapped herself around him and reached her right hand up and stroked his hair.

“Tell me your dream.” She stroked his forehead until she felt him relax a little.

“We were at home. I saw white ash falling from the sky, like something had burned. I didn’t know where it was coming from. I went outside to look and the ash burned me where it touched me. I tried to warn you to stay indoors, but you couldn’t hear me. I wanted to shout but I couldn’t make a sound. You came out to see what was wrong. Then you were burned, too.”