In this new role, Rose discovered her passion, and though she still thought fondly of her exploring days with Randolph, lately, her dreams were of an entirely different sort of adventure — climbing the political ladder, perhaps one day becoming mayor.
One of the things Rose liked best about this new Nicolet were the cultural activities at the Lab. She and Lily were frequent patrons, taking advantage of the opportunity to enjoy visiting musicians, theatre troupes, and lecturers. Lily had displayed an early and intense curiosity about all things scientific, and her favorite events at the Lab were the lectures by visiting scholars on popular issues of science.
On their first visit, Rose drove past the gate and along the winding drive toward the towering building that had sprung up during her time away. The Research Tower it was called, and she marveled at the way it loomed over this land she remembered as orderly rows of corn and soybeans. They parked in the Research Tower lot and made their way, Lily’s hand in hers, toward the outdoor amphitheater that had been constructed where the Heggestadt farmhouse once stood.
As they took their seats, Lily diligently studying the program open on her lap, Rose counted more empty seats than full. A shame, she thought, not to take advantage of the chance to see a first-rate production right here in Nicolet. Still, she couldn’t imagine the Heggestadts, or her own parents for that matter, in attendance. Most of the audience, she thought, looking around, were new citizens of Nicolet.
After the performance, Rose decided to take the opportunity to explore the vast grounds of the Lab campus. As they drove along the roads that cut through the prairie grasses, she pointed out to Lily the farmhouses now relocated, the barns, the new buildings that had been constructed around them. Rose had never been to one of the Lab’s open houses for displaced families, but she had heard about them from those who had: how strange it was to find their former homes, farmhouses that had once stood so far from one another on such wide expanses of land, now arranged in a neat cul-de-sac, side by side like the houses in a subdivision. And how strange, too, to find their childhood bedrooms turned into offices or temporary housing for visiting scientists.
When she’d returned to Nicolet, it had, in many ways, felt to Rose like she’d moved to an entirely new town. Now, as she drove past the cemetery full of familiar last names, past landmarks she remembered, and through the Lab’s expansive campus, she felt like she was showing Lily the ghost of a part of Nicolet that had once existed.
CHAPTER 6. Elementary Particles
The urge to travel and explore probably originated in my childhood. Certainly it was an unusual childhood.
MEENA AND LILY MET IN THE THIRD GRADE. THEY’D SPENT THE year racing to see who could finish their weekly math test first. Every Wednesday morning at 9:35 it was a draw as Lily arrived at the right side of the teacher’s desk and Meena at the left. And every Wednesday at 9:36 they exchanged polite smiles and began the long, disappointing walks back to their own desks. But they’d bonded over the sly looks they exchanged as they waited for the rest of the class to shuffle forward at the bell with their half-completed tests.
Meena had noticed that Lily always brought the best things for show and tell — a shrunken head from Bali, a dried and stuffed piranha from the Amazon, which she passed around the classroom proudly, the fish’s desiccated body mounted on a small wooden pedestal.
One day, finding no other available seats on the bus ride home, they’d been forced to sit together and had begrudgingly begun a conversation. Soon they were spending every Saturday afternoon together in the Nicolet Public Library, a large brick building that overlooked the town’s scenic river walkway.
Lily preferred the quiet study room, spending her weekends working ahead in their textbook, Steps toward Science, shushing adults who whispered or folded their newspapers too loudly. Meena liked to browse the shelves, returning with armloads of obscure books from the reference section that caught her eye: Noteworthy Weather Events: 1680–1981, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, coffee table art books, mystery novels, and field guides, which she pored over beside Lily.
In the mornings, NPR on the radio on the kitchen counter, Lily and her mother ate breakfast in silence, ears alert for any mention of the countries where Randolph had set off on his latest expedition. Sitting across the table from each other, they passed the crossword back and forth as they ate. Rose had taught Lily tricks like filling in the — Ss on plural clues, the — EDs on the past-tense clues, and how she might discover further clues within the clues themselves.
For Meena, mornings were a parade of novelty breakfast foods that had caught Sarala’s eye in the supermarket — Pop Tarts, frozen waffles, frozen pancakes, frozen pancakes wrapped around a frozen sausage, sausage biscuits, biscuits and gravy in a microwaveable bowl, packets of oatmeal with colorful bits of dehydrated fruit that came to life under a stream of hot water from the teakettle.
After dinner, their small family of three spent the evenings in the kitchen, Sarala cleaning up, Abhijat beside Meena at the table helping her as she worked through her homework.
Meena’s schoolwork, Sarala had noticed, was one of the few things that could tear Abhijat away from his study in the evenings. As she loaded the dishwasher, she watched with pride the patient way he explained the things Meena struggled with, the way he listened carefully to each of her questions, even as, she knew, he was already beginning to craft his response. These were the moments in which Sarala loved Abhijat best, in which she best knew that he loved both her and Meena.
Rose encouraged Lily’s intellect, enrolling her in summer enrichment courses in art, music, science, and math. By ten, Lily had a layperson’s grasp of Heidegger, an unflagging interest in Freudian psychoanalysis, and had begun compiling a list of her own criticisms of Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis.
On weekends, Lily divided her time between the public library and the YMCA, where she could be found among the aging patrons, swishing along on the rowing machine.
On her bedroom mirror, Lily kept a photograph of her father, blue turban wound round his head, skin darkened and worn by the sun, beard closely cropped, indicating the beginning rather than the end of an expedition (which was itself distinguished by the presence of a long, tangled, and unkempt beard her mother insisted he trim immediately down to a refined Van Dyke). The photo had been taken in the Sahara, where he had joined a salt caravan and, in native dress, led his camel by a rope through the desert. Lily loved to hear again and again the story of the light-handed pickpocket Randolph had met there, who had offered to help Randolph negotiate a suitable bride price for the lady of his choice. “Oh, I’ve already got a lovely bride, thank you,” he had replied, pulling out the photo of Rose and Lily he kept on him always, brandishing it with pride.
Randolph came home during the holidays — Christmas, Lily’s birthday, and Rose’s — but these were short trips, temporary. The house was a house of women — Lily and her mother, their nights spent together, Rose reading to Lily from the letters Randolph sent from his expeditions — North Africa, the Greek Isles, New Guinea.
Rose kept one room on the first floor of the house, just off the foyer, as a study for Randolph, a dark-paneled room with a sidebar on which sat a bottle of whiskey and a polished silver seltzer dispenser. Here, she kept his leather-bound expedition journals arranged chronologically on the bookshelves along the wall. Above the bookshelves hung framed photographs of Randolph and Rose on safari, of their trusted porter on a trip to Nepal, and an impressive collection of rare maps. An imposing mahogany desk, which Rose kept polished to a high gloss, sat in the center of the room, and facing the desk, two leather wing chairs. The whole setup suggested an office that, in addition to being regularly occupied (which it was not), also hosted regular visitors (which it did not), who might occupy the wing chairs, admire the photos, and flip through the expedition journals. In fact, with the exception of Lily, who liked to curl up in one of the deep leather armchairs, a framed photo of a pygmy nuthatch hanging over her head as she applied herself conscientiously to her schoolwork, the room was almost always empty.