I feel like an exhibit, a commodity, and I am itching to flee, back to Paris, my lab, back to the science. I am doing what I must to get my radium—smiling, waving, speaking when I can. But it is harrowing and painful. I despise every minute of it. It is not what I want, never what I wanted.
Lou is in a facility in Chicago, trying to regain sensation in her legs, and we schedule a visit with her into all the busyness. It is a shock to see her in her wheelchair, crippled and despondent, staring out her window at the steely Chicago sky.
“Your color is so good,” Ève lies, kissing her cousin on the head. Irène nods eagerly in agreement.
Lou turns to look at me, and I go in close to her face so I can see her, really see her. Her eyes are round and large and vacant. I hold on to her shoulders in an awkward hug. “It is too hard to live this way, ciotka,” she says softly to me.
Her voice sounds flat, and it is hard to remember that girl who took me up in the Carpathians, once. But she is in here somewhere, I know she is. “You are a strong woman,” I tell her. “Like me. Like your mother. We have all endured so much. You will get through this.”
She pulls away from me, frowns, and turns her gaze back out the window.
She worries me, and I hate to leave her like this. But she cannot walk; I cannot bring her with us westward. And Missy has us scheduled for two weeks more.
THE FOLLOWING YEAR, BACK IN FRANCE, EVERYTHING IS looking brighter.
I have my new gram of radium, new work underway. I’ve had surgery for my cataracts in both eyes, after the doctor Missy set me up with in America diagnosed that as my problem. And I can see again now, with the help of my magnifying lens.
When the urgent telegram arrives from Bronia, I pull it from Ève’s hands this time, wanting to read it myself.
Lou is dead.
I read the words, and they sink inside my body, a weight.
“What is it, Maman?” Ève asks, alarmed. “Is it Lou?”
I am surprised by Ève’s perceptiveness, but perhaps I shouldn’t be. She had been cheerful in Chicago, but she had been there. She had seen Lou’s vacant stare and terrible crippled legs. “She took her own life,” I say, reading through the rest of the telegram, breathless.
Ève puts her hand to her mouth, and her eyes well up with tears, and she runs out of the room. I don’t realize my own hands are shaking until Irène pulls the telegram from them, places it down on the table, and sits down on the floor with me, putting her arms around my shoulders.
This can’t be right. This can’t be true. My chest aches for my sister-mother, both her children gone too soon. Why must death hover around my family? I try to breathe and my lungs burn, as if I’ve run and run for days. So many people gone; so much loss surrounds us.
What if I had done things differently in my life—could I have stopped this all from happening? Perhaps I could’ve talked to Lou that summer in the Carpathians, tried to convince her to give up hiking for science. Or I could have gotten a doctor to heal Jakub if I’d convinced Bronia to stay in Paris just one summer longer. And Pierre. What if I had stopped him from going out that one afternoon into the rain? In all these years, I have changed the entire course of science; why have I not been able to save my family?
“It is all my fault,” I say. “Everything is my fault.”
Irène clings to me. “Maman, how could this be your fault? What could you have possibly done?”
“I could’ve stopped them; I could’ve done things differently.”
“Maman,” Irène whispers and strokes back my hair, like I am the child and she is the mother. “Lou was in terrible shape when we saw her in Chicago. There was nothing to be done.”
I hold on tightly to Irène, breathing in the scent of her: flowers and sunshine and the lab. “You will never leave me,” I say. “My darling girl, promise me that.”
“I promise,” Irène says.
Marya
L’Arcouëst, 1922
I spent the summer of 1922 at Hela and Jacques’s house in L’Arcouëst, and even Bronia agreed to come for a few weeks so all of us sisters and our children could be together again. Our husbands mostly stayed behind to work, except for a few weekends here and there. But the three of us and all our children were together for the first time in so many years. It was glorious.
I’d spent the past year writing up Professor Mazur’s research and my results into a paper. I no longer had use of the lab at Jagiellonian, as the dean had hired a new chemistry professor for Professor Mazur’s job, an older man who had no interest in continuing with me on my mercury research, in spite of all the arguments Kaz tried to make to him on my behalf. Still, I had months of results, a paper to prove it now. I brought my paper with me to L’Arcouëst for Hela to look through, and I hoped that she would agree that applying her electromagnetic theory to mercury was highly exciting. That she might even want to endorse my findings about using mercury to ignite an electrical switch, and that she might help me get it published in a scientific journal.
“Marya,” she said, after she was finished reading my words. Her cheeks were pink, her voice effusive. “This is brilliant. Your research could be revolutionary. If ever there were another Great War, imagine how this device could help with precision in bombs, and… aircraft.”
I smiled, but Hela was getting ahead of herself. I’d gotten mercury to ignite in an electrically charged tube, and theorized the rest, that this could work as a detonation device, or in a switch. That seemed far off still from controlling bombs, and another war? God forbid. I said all that to Hela, and she laughed.
“Well, every large idea is a small idea, first.” She paused for a moment, as if to think, and I remembered a Latin phrase I’d learned once at my Flying University in Loksow: omnium rerum principia parva sunt. The beginnings of all things are small. “Why don’t you come to Brussels with me in October, Marya, and we can present this paper at the Solvay Conference, together? Perhaps someone there would want to undertake more of this research with us.”
“Solvay?” I remembered how Professor Mazur had attended, how she had met Hela there once, just before Hela had won her Nobel Prize. I was almost entirely self-taught. I could not imagine I would fit in with scientists like Hela who had advanced degrees from top schools. “I don’t know,” I said.
“I will pay for your ticket,” Hela said. “You have no reason not to go.”
“Oh, you two.” Bronia rolled her eyes. “Can we stop talking about science for five minutes and go enjoy this beautiful view, hmmm?”
“You should talk, Bron,” Hela retorted. “You are always working.”
“I have taken this entire month off,” Bronia retorted back, sounding uncertain, like she could barely believe her own words. “Lou and I both have.”
“I’ll stop talking about science, if Marya will agree to come to Brussels with me,” Hela said. Both her eyes and Bronia’s fell squarely on my face, staring at me, waiting for me.
“Yes,” I finally said, feeling both excited and terrified. “I’ll go to Brussels with you.”
THEN I SAT OUT ON THE BEACH IN BETWEEN MY SISTER-MOTHER and my sister-twin, and all of us, with our wrinkled faces and graying buns now, we forgot about science for a little while. We watched our grown children swimming, racing each other in the water, laughing and teasing one another, cousins and comrades. Lou was the fastest one, with Jakub coming in second. (Of course Bronia’s children were the best and fastest, just like their mother.) Marie beat Klara—my beautiful, musically inclined child always came in last, the least athletic of all her cousins.