A Constellation of Vital Phenomena - By Anthony Marra Page 0,17
father was as smart as the dictionary sitting on his desk. Every word she knew came from him. They couldn’t take what he had taught her, and this made the big, important words he’d had her memorize, recite, and define feel for the first time big and important. “He told me about minimalists and arborists and marine biologists and scientists and social scientists and economists and communists and obstructionists and terrorists and jihadists. I told him about sea anemonists.”
“It sounds like you know a lot of big words.”
“It’s important to know big words,” the girl said, repeating her father’s maxim. “No one can take what’s inside your head once it’s there.”
“You sound like a solipsist.”
“I don’t want to learn new words from you.”
Sonja dunked the dishes in a tub of tepid water. Behind her the girl was quiet. “So your father is an arborist,” she said as she scrubbed their spoons with a gray sponge. It was neither a question nor a statement, but a bridge in the silence. The girl didn’t respond.
Back in the geriatrics office she gave the girl a blond-haired Barbie doll from the lost and found. It had belonged to the daughter of a devout Warsaw Catholic who believed the makers of department-store toys were conspiring to turn his ten-year-old girl into a heathen, and so he had boxed up all but her Nativity figurines and, filled with the spirit of Christian charity, sent them to a heathen country where they could do no harm to the souls of children already beyond salvation. The doll, dressed in ballroom gown and tiara, appeared surprisingly chipper given her emaciated waistline. The girl inspected the doll, distrustful of this vision of humanity.
“Why is she smiling?” the girl asked.
“She probably found that tiara on the ground and plans to sell it for a plane ticket to London.”
“Or maybe she killed a Russian.”
Sonja laughed. “Sure, maybe. She could be a shahidka.”
“Yes, she’s a Black Widow,” the girl said, pleased with the interpretation. “She snuck into a Moscow theater and took everyone hostage. That’s why she’s wearing a dress and jewelry.”
“But where are her hostages? I don’t see any. Why else might she be smiling?”
The girl concentrated on the doll’s unnaturally white teeth. “Maybe she’s starving and just ate a pastry.”
“What about a cookie?” Sonja asked, as the idea came to her.
“She’d probably smile if she ate a cookie.”
“Would you?”
The shadow of the girl’s head still bobbed on the wall when Sonja found a chocolate-flavored energy bar in the upper left desk drawer, a new addition to the humanitarian aid drops, designed for marathon runners. The girl chewed the thick rubber and grimaced. “What is this?”
“It’s a cookie.”
She shook her head with wide-eyed betrayal. “This is not a cookie.”
“It’s like a cookie. Cookie-flavored.”
“How can something be flavored like a cookie and not be a cookie?”
“Scientists and doctors can make one type of food taste like another.”
“Can you do that?”
If only she could. “I’m not that type of doctor.”
The girl took another bite, then crinkled the foil around the remnant and slipped it under her pillow.
“It’s not that bad,” Sonja said, annoyed by the girl’s finicky palate.
“I’m saving it.”
“For what?”
“Just in case.”
The girl lurched against the blankets, but still fell asleep first. Sonja tightened her eyelids and pressed into the pillow but couldn’t push herself into oblivion. She only knew how to sleep alone. Since she had returned from London eight years earlier, her casual affairs had never been serious enough to warrant an overnight bag. She sighed. When Deshi woke her that morning, she could have never imagined the day would end like this, with her trying to fall asleep beside this bizarre little thing. Even so, she was glad for Akhmed’s help. She needed another set of hands, no matter how fumbling and uncertain they might be. Not that she’d admit it to him. She had to harden him, to teach him that saving a life and nurturing a life are different processes, and that to succeed in the former one must dispense with the pathos of the latter.
The pull of sheets transmitted the girl’s shape, her indentation in the mattress, that slight heat burning off her skin. Sonja didn’t want her here, couldn’t imagine what the girl had seen, or knew, or was blind to or ignorant of that had put her in the Feds’ crosshairs. Somewhere a colonel tossed in bed, wanting to find Havaa as much as Sonja wanted her gone, and she would happily trade the girl