Eva looked up and gasped involuntarily. She was looking at a woman who could have doubled for Gergana. The wide smile, the innocent eyes, the full hips, the perfect facial features. Eva blanched.
“Eva,” Marta began, “I’d like you to meet Dr. Colleen Lowell.”
Colleen stepped forward to accept Marta’s introduction. “I’m very honored to meet you, Dr. Rozen. You’re one of my heroes, an inspiration to women scientists, and—”
Colleen stopped and stared at Eva. “Dr. Rozen, are you all right?”
Jim and Marta turned to their colleague. She grimaced, as if in pain, and sat down heavily. She rested her elbows on the cherry wood conference table and held her head in her hands. She looked up again at Colleen.
“No,” muttered Eva, struggling to regain her poise.
“What’s wrong?” said Jim.
Eva looked at the bewildered trio on the other side of the table. She repeated, now in a firm voice, “No.” Then Eva rose and stalked towards the boardroom’s door.
“Eva?” Marta asked, concerned and confused.
Eva said nothing. She paused for a moment, and then turned back and scrutinized Lowell.
“No,” Eva said, for a third time.
“What the—?” Marta said. She turned to Colleen Lowell and spilled out an apology. “I’m sorry, Colleen, but our partner, uh, Dr. Rozen, she can be eccentric every now and then.”
“What’s going on, Marta?’ Lowell asked, an edge to her voice. “You said that NMech would take on my work.”
Before Marta could answer, Eva turned to the young woman. “Settle down, Ms. Lowell,” said Eva, in her customary flat voice. She had regained her composure.
“That’s Dr. Lowell, if you don’t mind,” Colleen huffed. “Materials engineering at Harvard. I believe that’s your alma mater.”
Eva stared at her, unblinking, and then said, “Marta, your idea is a good one. I do not want her up here in the executive suite. I do not want to come in contact with her.” Then, turning back to Lowell, Eva said, “Nothing personal.”
“Not personal? You tell me you don’t want to see me and that’s not personal? Well, it’s personal to me. I don’t care if you’re the smartest woman in the world. You dress like you’re going to a cattle auction—as the livestock. I deal with people in the fashion world who would eat you alive, you ugly runt! Marta, thanks for the invitation. Good luck with Raggedy Ann.”
The words, ugly runt, triggered a flood of memories for Eva. Others had hurled the same words. Mama did. Papa did, especially when he believed she did not hear. Schoolmates did. And Bare Chest did.
Each taunt cried out for recompense and Eva kept a ledger. Recording each offense was an automatic mental process, if not a conscious one. Each offense was tabulated with meticulous precision.
Eva remembered some of the offenses. There was the child—could she have been six? Seven?—who uttered those words. That child soon watched a shiny thing, half-hidden in Eva’s left hand, turn into a pair of scissors. Then she saw a hank of her pretty red hair fall to the playground tarmac…the boy, who returned from soccer practice shower to find every piece of his clothing glued together…the schoolmate who found her hair conditioner replaced by a depilatory.
The foulest and most memorable entry in her ledger was that of Bare Chest—Akexsander Yorkov—accomplice to Gergana’s murder. Eva remembered him clearly, and the price he’d paid.
Colleen’s angry retort may not have triggered a conscious memory of each violation. But it evoked an emotional response from a lifetime catalog of insults. This triggered a series of biological events. Eva’s endocrine system prepared her for fight or flight, flooding her with adrenaline and noradrenaline. Her heart raced and digestion slowed. Glucose pumped into her bloodstream and her pupils dilated.
Years of free-flowing rage found a target, not two feet away.
Eva smiled.
She touched Colleen on the forearm and spoke quietly, even soothingly. “Be careful, dear. You meet the same people coming down as you did when you were going up.” Eva held her hand on Colleen’s arm for a moment longer than necessary to make her point, and a series of software commands flowed from Eva’s sleeve into Colleen’s. She did not need to touch Colleen for the rogue software to jack into Colleen’s sleeve but the unexpected contact distracted the fashionista from Eva’s real purpose
Lowell jerked her arm away and stormed out of the boardroom.
“Well, that worked out nicely,” said Marta. “Thanks, Eva. Real professional. That was a very dear friend you just insulted. And one heck of an income stream you just threw out.”
“Disregard it. We have enough on our plate right now,” Eva snapped. “And nobody calls me that name to my face.”
Marta wanted to say, Which name? Ugly? Or runt? but she held her tongue.
Eva left the boardroom fighting to control her emotions. Something tugged hard at her memory, but it was frustratingly out of reach. Eva’s breathing became shallow, rapid breaths that drew in little air. She felt her pulse throb in her neck.
Eva was processing images, memories from her preverbal infancy. Lowell’s sculpted features matched Eva’s stored images of her sister and her onetime caregiver, Gergana, both alive and dead in Eva’s unconscious mind, where past, present, and future were indistinguishable.
Ego structures strained under the reanimated weight of memory and loss. Long-repressed images pushed insistently against the barriers that separated a violent past from a controlled present, like protestors overrunning a police barricade.
The din from the Table of Clamorous Voices had been dormant. Now it was an unquiet phenomenon.
14
HOME SCHOOLING
FROM THE MEMORIES
OF DANA ECCO
I was almost nine when my parents bought a home in Pill Hill, an upscale Boston suburb, named for its proximity to a cluster of hospitals. My father cycled to work, weather permitting, or rode with my mother in a P-car, a semi-private driverless automobile. Our house backed up against a ribbon of parkland called the Emerald Necklace. That was my western frontier, my Sherwood Forest, my mystical kingdom. If I wanted to meet Robin Hood’s Merry Men, cowboys, or elves, I had merely to walk out the door and into my backyard imagination.
My mother showed me plants in the parkland that were edible or medicinal. Today, when I walk through the parkland along the Muddy River, I can still spot trillium, wild asparagus, leeks, and Solomon’s seal.
My childhood was as ordinary as anyone raised by one of the greatest scientists of her age and tutored by another. I liked to listen to music, to play games—things adolescents have done for centuries—although sports never caught my fancy. I tried to play soccer a few times, and lacrosse just once. Evidently, an easy-going personality doesn’t match up well against big-boned bloodlust.
My playmates were more inclined to fantasy than to football. We found our castles, battlefields, and alien landscapes along the Muddy River. The fens and woodlands were forests and jungles inhabited by wild creatures. What courage, what daring we displayed.
I made friends with children of other scientists at NMech, explorers all. We hunted for treasure and found it, right there at NMech—ancient sensors, induction coils, spectrometers, rheostats, and voltmeters. I doubt that another school, private or corporate, boasted a scanning tunneling microscope, capable of nanoscale resolution, right alongside a considerable pile of building blocks, board games and baseballs.