Dragonfly Girl

by Marti Leimbach

  Then he realizes it’s my hair.

  He tugs me by the arm, pushes my head into a sink, and holds the faucet over my painful ear as I cry out in agony, gripping the edge of the countertop, trying to keep my balance.

  I hear footsteps and voices and Will saying, “No reason to gawk!”

  Finally, he straightens me up. I’m dripping wet and my face feels like it’s on fire.

  “Now can you see why you need a proper education?” he says, holding me by the shoulders.

  He just doesn’t get it. I can’t go off to college and get a “proper” education like he can. I don’t have the money, and even if I did, I couldn’t leave my mother.

  But what’s the point in explaining? “Let go of me,” I say through gritted teeth.

  As soon as I can, I stumble to the bathroom, lock the door, and soak the side of my head in water. It hurts like hell, but at least with the water running nobody can hear me crying. Eventually, I turn off the tap and sit on the closed lid of a toilet seat, dripping onto my clothes. I don’t move for a long while. How can I have been so stupid? I really am as much of a liability as Will describes.

  I can’t decide what’s worse: being fired or quitting. I guess quitting would look better on my résumé. I don’t want to, but I need to resign before they fire me. I stay in the bathroom, enduring the pain, which is nothing compared to the pain of leaving Mellin.

  At last, I emerge into the hallway, squeezing my stinking, burnt hair between paper towels. There’s April, standing in the corridor, waiting for me.

  “Are you okay?” she says. Her own veil of dark hair cuts across her forehead in a perfect line, then down to her shoulders as straight as a pencil. Her clothes are so cool: a stripy skirt, a jean jacket. Meanwhile, I look like a fire has been put out on my face. Because it has. The flesh has a powdery yellow coating on it and is puffy around my ear.

  “I’m fine,” I lie. “It’s nothing.”

  “Oh good. For a minute there I thought you’d cooked yourself. Listen, you know when I told you that Munn wants you to make mistakes? I meant make mistakes while asking great questions, not burning your ear by trying to listen for gas coming out of your Bunsen.”

  She laughs now. I try to laugh along with her but find it difficult.

  At my station, I collect my bag, my car keys, my sweatshirt. I want to go home. Go home and hide. I feel as though my accident proves that Will was right all along. I don’t belong in a laboratory. I don’t have any useful skills except standing at a sink, scrubbing. Who am I to play at being a scientist? I’m not a scientist.

  Will strides over and says, “Good to see you’re all right. Regulations stipulate I log an accident report.”

  I say nothing. He knows that I’ve provided another reason for my dismissal. He’s practically gloating.

  “I hope you’re proud of yourself,” I say.

  “I hope that’s the last of your injuries,” he fires back. Then, more softly, he says, “It’s not like I wanted you to hurt yourself. Really, Kira. I’m sorry this happened.”

  I walk past him, searching for the exit on the lower floor, which is the fastest way to the parking lot. I’m on my way out the door, a hand cupped over my ear, fighting back tears, when I see Dmitry. He’s holding a latex glove filled with water and ice cubes, tied at the wrist like a water balloon.

  “Come with me,” he says gently.

  He brings me to something like a school dormitory, or what I imagine a school dormitory to be. Sets of bunk beds, chests of drawers above which hang small mirrors. I realize all at once that this is where Dmitry sleeps. He must never even leave the lab. I can tell which is his bed, too, because it’s made up with a Snoopy quilt with his favorite T-shirt scrunched at one end. On the floor beside the bed, stacked several feet high, are his books.

  He sits me down, assessing the damage. He doesn’t touch my ear but he uses a penlight to get a good look. “It’s not as bad as I thought,” he says finally. “But you should see a doctor.”

  “It costs hundreds of dollars just to walk into an emergency room,” I say. “Thousands at some hospitals.”

  He places the glove filled with chilled water over my ear again. It’s a clever thing to have come up with. The glove shapes itself over my jaw and provides huge relief. “It’s important not to burst the blisters,” he says gently.

  “I have blisters?”

  He moves the burned hair carefully out of the way. “A bit worse than blisters. You will need some pain relief. Also, to rest. I’ll get pillows.”

  He drags pillows from every bed in the place, including his own, and stacks them so that I can stretch out on a mattress while keeping my head up and the ice pack in place.

  “I’m so stupid!” I say. I feel tears gathering at my eyes and pray that Dmitry doesn’t notice.

  “You make mistakes because you are exhausted and because that zhopa won’t teach you anything,” he says.

  “He wants me to leave. I guess he’ll get his way.”

  “No,” he says. “I will talk to Munn. Munn will listen to me.”

  “That’s very kind of you, but whatever you say, Munn will still feel obliged to let me go.”

  “Kira,” he says, drawing my name out as though I am being stubborn. “You don’t know what it’s like to have an ordinary mind, one that doesn’t process research papers like a computer.”

  “Will says I have a bloated working memory,” I say.

  “What he ought to say is that you can do things he can’t. The programmers in the upstairs lab can’t. Frankly, none of us can.”

  “He hates me.”

  Dmitry looks at me carefully. “Why does that matter?” he says.

  I don’t know why it matters. It just does.

  “Anyway,” he says, “Will better get over it, because in the next few years you are going to leave him in the dust.”

  “I can’t even set up a Bunsen burner.”

  He pats my shoulder. “Those things are easy. I am going to teach you.”

  “Why should you be stuck with me?”

  “We will start tomorrow when you are feeling better.”

  “Tomorrow is Saturday.”

  “Saturday is good. Saturday is perfect.”

  I look at the bed at the end of the long room. Dmitry’s bed. “You live here,” I say, a statement, not a question.

  He nods. “Where else would I go?”

  “What if I burn the place down?” I ask.

  He points up to the ceiling and smiles. “Sprinkler system,” he says.

  My mother already doesn’t like Mellin, says it cuts too much into my schoolwork. Now this.

  “Do they not have health and safety over in that lab of yours?” she hollers. “And now you’re working all weekend?”

  “I’m learning, not working,” I say.

  “Don’t you already go to school?”

  Part of my mother’s frustration is that she doesn’t understand what goes on in my life. When I’m not at school, I’m at Mellin. It’s hard to get everything done, not just homework but laundry and shopping. She sees me hustling and still we’re always short of cash. Biba came around the other day. He said my mother borrowed money from him for groceries.

  You mean lottery tickets, I’d said to him. Because I’d already bought all the groceries. Stop giving her money.

  I don’t give her anything, he said. He flashed an ugly smile. I lend it.

  “I’ll make dinner,” I tell my mother now. “Don’t let Biba anywhere near you. We’ll have a picnic in front of the television and watch a movie. Lauren might even come over. She always cheers you up.”

  She tells me Lauren isn’t going to like my blistering skin and crispy hair. “She already thinks you should moisturize.”

  “I know,” I say. I hold up a tub of medicine that Dmitry gave me. “I am moisturizing.”

  Saturday morning, Dmitry is waiting for me by the espresso maker in a T-shirt that says Do not approach space debris, a giant mug of tea besid
e him.

  “Does it hurt very much?” he says, pointing to his own ear.

  The pain woke me up. And my hair still smells. Not that Dmitry will be able to tell. He must have been evaporating toluene again, because the whole laboratory stinks of it.

  “Do I need a mask?” I say.

  He shakes his head. “Safe levels,” he says, meaning the toluene. “This morning we will concentrate on lab skills. All very easy. Then, we will look at a glove box, a rotary evaporator, and how to handle Schlenk lines. We will also find out what happens if you heat a closed system—spoiler alert: it acts like a bomb. So expect our session to end with an explosion. Sound okay?”

  “A real bomb?” I ask.

  He raises his eyebrows, grinning. He has the most expressive face, and I can see he’s excited about teaching me, though I can’t imagine why. “We’ll be busy,” he says in a singsong tone.

  Some may call him Dr. Gloom, but nobody can doubt Dmitry’s work. Nor his importance at Mellin. Even though he’s the youngest scientist here (apart from me, who can’t call herself a scientist), people line up to ask him questions. But I have him mostly to myself today. He shows me a piece of brain tissue, explaining that the brain makes an effort, however feeble, to repair itself even when clinically dead.

  “The tissue wants to tell us all about the dying process,” he says enthusiastically. “We should listen.”

  I describe to him the game Carlos played with the audience at SFOF, figuring out the time of death of all those scientists. “He uses genetic activity in brains to tell the time of death in people. He’s worked with the police and everything.”

  Dmitry nods with recognition. “Munn brought Carlos here to meet me when he was just starting out on this mission.”

  “Carlos was here?”

  “Of course! From Texas! We had dinner together. He loves barbecued meat. He was fascinated to learn that we are the same in Russia with our shashlik. Munn offered him a position, but he has moved to Europe. Apparently, he’s met a Finnish woman—”

  A Finnish woman?

  “You must mean Helmi!” I say. “I was there when they met!” I’m so excited. I tell Dmitry all about the Science for Our Future awards, about how Helmi and Carlos presented their papers the same day and how they had seemed to like each other very much, though I had no idea an entire romance had followed.

  “Ah,” says Dmitry wistfully. “It is good to find love.”

  We work all day. As promised, we end up in blast shields and goggles, watching the first law of thermodynamics in action by replicating, in miniature, several common laboratory mistakes that cause explosions. Afterward, I suggest we get a sandwich, but Dmitry suddenly looks uncomfortable.

  “Perhaps you can bring one back?” he says.

  I get out my car keys. “I’ll be right back.”

  When I arrive back from the deli I find Dmitry in the dining room. He’s set out plates and a flask of water with two glasses. Also on the table is an impressive wooden chessboard.

  I put down the paper bag of sandwiches and potato chips and look at the pieces, arranged across brown and white squares. “Did this belong to you in Russia?”

  “Oh, no,” he says. “At home in Moscow, we had an old Soviet tournament set. Much less ornate.”

  I pick up a knight. The weight of the piece in my hand is substantial, as though the knight is a wooden artifact, not a simple game piece.

  “Do you play?” says Dmitry. “If not, I will teach you!”

  I shake my head. “You should play with people who understand the game.”

  He works his right eyebrow into an S formation, then says, “If I want to challenge myself, I can play on the computer. Do you know the pieces and how they move?”

  “I think so.”

  “Then we skip lesson one!” he says, sounding delighted.

  In all the years I’ve studied and learned and tried to understand, I’ve never come across anyone like Dmitry, a natural teacher who wants to share everything. He eats his sandwich and teaches me a few openings, all very casual. After a while, I ask, “Do you never leave the lab? I mean, at all?”

  He stops chewing and looks at me.

  “Sorry,” I say. “None of my business.”

  He holds up a finger. “I leave only on special occasions. The people who killed my father did not want him to grace the United States with his skills and knowledge. They may feel the same about me.”

  “That’s why they killed him? Because he was working for the United States?”

  “You shouldn’t look so surprised.” He takes a long sip of water.

  We play a few more moves, and then Dmitry says, “My father was a scientist, but he also taught himself Turkish, Polish, and English. That made him very interesting to the KGB, who wanted him to work for them. He said no. He thought that settled the matter. Years later, after the Soviet Union broke up, the KGB was dismantled. The organization that replaced it approached him afresh. He refused again and managed to evade them for years. But intelligence agencies are clever. And they approached him a third time when they discovered there was something my father wanted very much. That would persuade him.”

  “What did he want?” I ask. But what I’m thinking is how the red-haired man had approached me at a conference.

  He puts down his sandwich, then wipes his fingers on the balled napkin on the table. “He wanted me to go to MIT,” he says. “And he agreed to the work as long as I was permitted to attend. But this time it wasn’t Russian intelligence that wanted him. It was the CIA.”

  I stop chewing. “Your father worked for the CIA?” I say.

  “The Department of Defense, but it took the CIA to get him out of Russia. By then, he wanted out. I was fifteen. Don’t ask me why MIT; he had his heart set on it. The deal was done at a science conference in St. Petersburg. He was on a plane within a few hours.”

  “With you?”

  “No. I was looking after my sister at our apartment in Moscow. Some men came to our door in the middle of the night and told me to wake my sister and get into a car. I wouldn’t do it. They said that I had to and that our lives were in danger. But my father had left me in charge of my sister, and I was not going to get into a strange car because a couple of men in suits told me that I should. They got angry and shouted. When that did no good, they rang my father and gave the phone to me. He told me to do what they said. He said, Please, Dima, this is not so much to ask you? To get into a car, no?

  “My father told me I must bring all his papers, so I got a suitcase and stuffed it full. I took my books and some clothes for my sister. I didn’t have another suitcase, only plastic bags. We were driven out of Moscow. We had to get to a landing strip in the middle of a forest. The landing strip was one of those—I don’t know what you call them—areas that are cleared in case of fire.”

  “A firebreak?”

  “Yes, a firebreak. We had to walk through the forest to get there. In Russia, we have bears. Alina was terrified. The men told her to shut up; there were no bears in this part of the country. But one of them went to the trunk of the car and got out an ax just in case. My sister started to cry. She didn’t want to walk through the forest in darkness and she was scared of the ax. I held her hand. I could not tell if she was shaking from fear or from cold. The men told me to make her stop crying. I whispered a story to her as we walked, the wooden suitcase banging against my leg. At that moment, I cursed my father.”

  Again, another silence. Then Dmitry says, “We began life in America. My father worked for the US government. I went to MIT. My sister forgot about Russia. She was watching The Simpsons and playing computer games. She spoke English fluently and sounded like an American, not like me with a terrible accent.”

  “I like your accent.”

  “Okay, maybe it is good then.”

  I wait a beat, then say, “I’m so sorry about what happened.”

  He sighs. “It was graduation day,” he begins. “We had breakfast together on campus, as peopl
e do. I bought my father a pair of binoculars so he could see the ceremony clearly from the audience. He thought they were a wonderful gift. It was very warm with the cherry blossoms and flowers everywhere. Then they were killed.”

  I don’t know how to respond to this. So simple and so final: Then they were killed.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. With hesitation, I add, “How come you got away?”

  “That depends on who you ask. My theory is that they made a mistake. My father asked another graduate, a Polish boy, to join us for breakfast so he could practice his Polish. He was always doing that, pulling people in to talk with him so he could practice his languages. Meanwhile, I was standing in line to collect my graduation gown. The line was long. The next thing I knew I was walking across the green and there was an ambulance and the . . . you know . . .” He stumbles for the word.

  “Paramedics?” I say.

  “Yes, paramedics. My family was roped off and someone in a protective suit was yelling to the public to clear the area. For some reason, I had my father’s new binoculars in my hand. I put them to my eyes and I could tell immediately what had happened. All the typical responses—spasms, convulsions. I knew they’d been poisoned. I could see them all dying right there on the grass. The Polish boy—the one that they had mistaken for me—was on the ground beneath the table. I cannot tell you how much I wished I hadn’t bought those binoculars.”

  “Oh, Dmitry,” I say.

  “Now I am Dr. Gloom. Everybody talks about me. They say my father was a spy or my father was bratva. You know, a criminal. People make things up.”

  “But why your sister?” I say. It’s too appalling to think about.

  “Killing a family is a good deterrent for others still in Russia who might wish to do the same as my father. But Munn believes they never meant to kill me. He doesn’t believe it was the Russian government who assassinated my family.”

  “Who does he think, then?”

  Dmitry shrugs. “A private enterprise. A rival, perhaps. Science has become very big business,” he says.