by Sam Maggs
This box was almost entirely packed with dishes carefully wrapped in newspaper; Nadia wondered what they’d do with the extras she didn’t need when she was living full-time in the lab. They were so lovely—they deserved to go to a nice home. Maybe Taina’s abuelita? The box next to it was a puzzle of centrifuges and test tubes and glass vials fitted between Styrofoam packing sheets. Nadia scooped up the pile of wrapping paper from under the chair she’d been sitting on at dinner, complete with Janet’s gift, and dropped it into the box. It all had to go to the lab, anyways.
It was an accumulation of things that both felt like Nadia’s…and didn’t. The house had been her father’s for decades; it had been Nadia’s for only a year. She loved that its contents helped her feel closer to the father she never knew, but it was like the space was holding her back.
Really, outside of “genius” and “Ant-Man” and “bipolar” and “sometimes kind of a jerk, actually,” Nadia didn’t know much at all about her father. And for the most part, she was okay with that. She was her own person and she had become who she was largely without Hank’s influence, no matter what the Red Room insisted about genetics. And a person’s things can only tell you so much.
Take Taina. Nadia knew that her room was full of screwdrivers and that the walls were painted a blue that matched the sky on a cold, clear day and that there were stacks of magazines tucked into her bedside table where she thought no one would notice them.
Or Ying’s room at the lab, mostly devoid of personal effects except for her massive and ever-growing collection of Korean skincare products, which Ying swore was like doing chemistry on your own face.
Nadia knew her father’s things well, if that counted. She knew he liked music—though she’d never listened to any of his collection because his cassette player was long gone. She knew he liked particle physics and that his VHS two-set of Titanic needed rewinding, so he must have watched it at least once. But things can only tell you so much about a person—and they just weren’t Nadia’s. Really, the house just felt like another instance of Nadia’s past refusing to let her move forward.
So she was going to force it to let her move forward.
Sometimes, with experiments, Nadia thought as she poked through the kitchen, you just need to push a little harder to understand why you aren’t getting the result you were expecting. You need to look at things from a different angle.
Nadia figured she just needed to push all this debris of her past out of the way so that she could see the proper way forward—shift the cassettes into a box and see the floor for the first time, literally and figuratively. And her family had already done so much to help her. She was on the right track, and she’d be finished in no time. She just had to get it done. Finish what they’d started. “Muck in,” as Jarvis would say.
Nadia nodded her head in time to the beat coming out of the speakers around her as she moved smoothly from room to room. Her bare feet tapped out a rhythm on the floor when she stood still for too long. She shuffled from box to box, from room to room, adding a little bit to her mental list every time she found something new to pack away. She took the stairs to the second floor two at a time, to the beat, her bangs flying back out of her eyes.
At the top, she paused. Upstairs, Nadia noted, things were looking particularly dire. No one had touched anything up here in years. For her part, Nadia usually slept on the floor or on the couch nearest whatever work she was doing at the moment. Healthy? Probably not. But moving to the lab would solve that problem, too; there, she had a bed right next to her work. How much space did one person really need, anyway?
Boom. It was like Nadia had the answer to everything!
Except for this second story full of…stuff. Her father’s old bedroom, the door to which she always left shut. The bathroom with the shower that didn’t work as well as the one in the basement. The second bedroom that had been converted into a sort of lab-equipment storage unit, mostly emptied of the best stuff when Nadia had first moved in, excited to see it all. And the spare bedroom, inexplicably packed with porcelain dolls that Nadia knew everyone else despised (they were going to come alive in the night and commit horrible atrocities, obviously) but that Nadia found sort of charming, even if their dead eyes were deeply unsettling. She was drawn to them in the way that only someone who’d been raised in an assassin training program against her will could be: She was never allowed dolls in the Krasnaya Komnata, and figured that these more than made up for her deficit as a kid. She would leave the dolls for last, she decided. They were what she felt most personally connected to in the house, even if the collection hadn’t been hers.
Instead, Nadia turned to look at the door to her father’s room. She’d opened it only once, when she first moved in, and shut it again just as quickly. She was basically squatting in her dead father’s house; conceptually, she knew that. His things were everywhere. But there was something so…creepy and invasive about entering his bedroom in particular.
She knew her father through his things, but she also knew there was another side to him. A side she had, too, though Hank’s had been unmanaged and manifested itself in ways Nadia hated to think about.
Hank, deep in a bipolar episode, lashing out at Janet. Berating her.
Hitting her.
Nadia balled her hands into fists at her sides. If she was being completely honest, she didn’t want to open the door to her father’s bedroom because she was afraid she might find that side of him, hidden away in the moldy curtains and in the gap between the pillows and behind the dresser. She was afraid she would breathe in the dust and find that it smelled familiar. She was afraid that she might find parts of that side of him and find that they matched hers, that she might look into his space as though it were a mirror and be unshakably horrified to see herself.
She took a deep breath. She wasn’t her father. She knew what was going on in her brain and was dealing with it; she wasn’t responsible for his actions. She was responsible only for herself. She had a job to do, and she’d never let fear stop her before.
Luckily the music had followed Nadia up the stairs; it kept her energy up even when she started to feel overwhelmed.
“Okay, Nadia,” she said to herself, her voice almost getting lost in the pulsing beat. “Time to get to work.”
Nadia shut the door behind her, leaving the music in the hallway. Everything in here felt like it had been frozen in time. Holding the door handle, Nadia rose up onto the balls of her feet a few times, taking everything in.
It was stranger in here than Nadia had ever imagined. Not that she had spent that much time imagining it, really. But it was hard to form an opinion about what somebody’s most personal space might look like without really knowing them well. If Nadia had guessed about what would be in her father’s room, given what she knew about him, she probably would have said…
…prototype helmets? Ant farms? Maybe whiskey?
Don’t old white men love whiskey?
Instead, what she found was something entirely…normal. A bedframe made of a dark wood with a deep-red duvet on top. A dresser in the same dark wood against the nearest wall, a mirror balanced on top. Two nightstands and two lamps. Everything was covered in a thick layer of dust, but nothing sinister lurked in the dark. Just dated décor that would have been right at home in the Red Room. Nadia closed her eyes for a moment and breathed in the stale air. It smelled different from the rest of the house—musty, sure, but something harder to place. Perhaps something more individually Hank that clung to the edges of his most personal space, even after it’d long since dissipated from the rest of the house. She imagined she could still see her father, ignoring his bed entirely to keep working on an important project.
Nadia smiled. It was something she knew they had in common, no matter the cause.
She opened her eyes to an empty room.
And then she got to work, like she always did.
Nadia danced back down the stairs and then right back up again, this time hauling a stack of
flat-packed boxes. She found herself wondering, as per usual, if there was a more scientifically expedient way to pack up a house. Perhaps some sort of robotic aid…? She dragged the flattened boxes into the bedroom and they landed on the floor with a thud, kicking up dust in their wake.
“Eugh!” Nadia coughed, waving the dust from her face. Perhaps I should have come in here sooner, at least to clean? Nadia shook her head. Who had spare time to dust when there was G.I.R.L.?
Nadia used a heavy-duty packing-tape dispenser to fold the top box into shape. The door open, now, music filtered in from the hall. Nadia got up to move toward the dresser, moving to the beat—and caught her foot on the unfamiliar bedpost.
“Whoa!” Nadia went flying forward, right into the dresser. The mirror tottered precariously, and Nadia used her Super Hero senses to catch it just in time (okay, she was just lucky. She was not Silk, here). But as she balanced herself with one hand and the mirror with the other, Nadia spotted something.
The first thing in the room that made any sense to her.
It looked like a teeny tiny hole in the wall.
“Privet,” Nadia said to the hole. “Kem ty mozhesh’ byt’?”
Hello, there. And who might you be?
Nadia picked the mirror up and gingerly set it down on the bed, disturbing the otherwise smooth covers, sending up a cloud of dust in the process. She moved her face closer to the wall. It was a different color where the mirror had been, the rest of the wall paint faded from sunshine and time. Her face perilously close to the thick layer of dust bunnies on the dresser top, Nadia saw that she was right—it was a hole.
Not even a hole—a tunnel. A tunnel for someone very, very small.
She didn’t even waste a moment. The boxes forgotten on the floor behind her, the music now only background noise, Nadia traded her clothes for her suit, her wings springing from her back with the touch of a button. And with the press of the button, she was feeling that feeling, her favorite feeling in the world, as her feet lifted off the ground and Hank’s room fell away. She was unburdened, if only for a moment, before gravity caught up with her.
Nadia landed on the dresser, the dust bunnies now as tall as she was. She tried not to look too closely.
NADIA’S NEAT SCIENCE FACTS!!!
Dust is actually made up of many different things, none of which you would probably like to see up close. It is essentially a collection of particulates, including pollen, soil, clothing fibers, insect waste, and, of course, human hair and skin. Your own cast-offs, close up! It is as disgusting as it sounds, and I have a pretty high threshold for disgusting things. And don’t forget about the dust mites! Have you ever seen a female dust mite lay eggs? I would recommend never doing that, if you can at all avoid it. 0/5 stars.
As quickly as she could, Nadia jetted forward across the slippery surface of the dusty dresser. The tunnel was short, even by her current standards. Nadia ran, sliding forward on her butt to make it through the gap in the wall.
I hope this is an intentional hole in the wall. Nadia swallowed. Or I’m going to be meeting a very surprised spider in her home in a matter of moments.
Breaking and entering was still breaking and entering, even if human laws didn’t strictly apply to arachnid dwellings.
Nadia slid out the other side of the tunnel…and she was not disappointed.
It was something.
Everything Nadia had half expected to find in her father’s old room, she found here. She flipped on the light attached to her suit, and—in this makeshift, in-wall Ant-Cave—Nadia found herself looking at what must have been her father’s secret laboratory.
Nadia swallowed. This…was awesome. Who doesn’t hope their dead father’s ancestral home might have a secret room? In most of the old books* Nadia had read in the Krasnaya Komnata, usually these rooms were located behind a rotating fireplace or a hinged bookshelf.
But she would take a tiny hole-in-the-wall laboratory just the same.
Ancient Ant-Man prototype suits lined one wall, their associated helmets on the floor in front of them. Ant farms lined another wall, floor to ceiling. Nadia was shocked to see an entire glass storage unit filled with vials of what could only be Pym Particles. Lab stations snaked their way across the floor, each worktop covered in some half-finished project. Nadia could relate. A third wall was just bookshelves. There was a lot. This was a lot.
You couldn’t know a person through their things, not entirely. It was an impossibility. Things would never tell you how someone sounded when they laughed or even what they would find funny enough to laugh at. They were impressions; shadows. You could interpret them in whatever way suited your idea of a person best.
How was Nadia supposed to interpret all this? Where would she even begin? She traced her finger along one of the lab tables, leaving a clean trail behind. The benches were cluttered, but she could see a pattern through the mess. She recognized a bit of herself in her father’s haphazard methods. Did that make her and her father similar? Was it coincidence?
Ying called it Nadia’s “organized chaos.” Nadia didn’t think much about it; she simply didn’t have the time to be tidier. But here she was, in the middle of Hank’s own “organized chaos,” and she wanted it to mean something about Hank. She could make it mean whatever she wanted, she supposed. The truth was somewhere underneath all the dust, but Nadia couldn’t reach it by cleaning.
She did laugh at an ancient box of Lucky Charms, though. Nadia thought they were disgusting brand-new (who wanted to eat that much sugar first thing in the morning?! Americans were wild). Hank, on the other hand, obviously loved them. So he was probably a child at heart. Or a sugar addict. Either way, she was going to need to throw those away. And clean. And do a hundred other things…
Following the light of her headlamp, Nadia wandered over to look at the books. Sometimes, when she was overwhelmed, it helped Nadia to focus in on just one, simple thing—like music, or counting a collection. Nadia began to read the titles off the spines of the books in front of her.
“‘Particle Physics and You,’” she read, trailing her finger down the books’ spines. “‘Feynman’s Lost Lecture,’ ‘The Strange Theory of Light and Matter’…‘Chicken Soup for the Soul’? He liked to cook!” Nadia marveled at this new insight into Hank. She kept trailing down the titles of books, knowing that these would have been her father’s favorites, the ones he referenced again and again. Mostly physics titles.
Of course. Mostly boring fonts and terrible design choices betraying the fascinating worlds they contained.
Except… Nadia’s finger stopped on a book smaller and thinner than the rest. Its spine had nothing on it. It was blank.
She pulled it from the shelf. It was soft brown leather. Nadia twisted it so she could see the front cover. In gold embossed letters was a single word: JOURNAL.
Nadia’s eyes went wide. She was surprised. Knowing what she did about him through Janet, Nadia really didn’t think Hank would be the introspective type—but then, she never really knew him. If he’d been in touch with his own feelings in any way, he might not have been so…Well. You know.
Nadia went to flip open the cover, but stopped herself. This was personal; private on a level that invading a secret laboratory just wasn’t. She hadn’t even been comfortable entering his bedroom until an hour ago. Was it okay for her to open this?
She shook her head. There had been no ghosts in the bedroom; no answers even in the secret lab, really. Hank Pym had been dead a long time. He wasn’t going to complain. Ultimately, there was more to gain by reading it than by leaving it untouched.
Nadia adjusted the light on her headlamp and cracked open the front cover. The first page had a simple bookplate stuck to it. THIS JOURNAL BELONGS TO…There was a name inscribed below in clear, loopy handwriting. Despite its legibility, Nadia had to read the autograph three times before she was sure she had read it right.
Maria Trovaya.
Not Nadia’s father.
Nadia’s mother.
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* Nadia wasn’t exactly well-versed in pop culture, but a fellow bug-themed phenomenon had gotten her attention early on in the cultural crash course she was embarking on with the other G.I.R.L.s.
* Trinkets, usually useless but often sentimental. Much as Nadia loved efficiency and disliked things that were useless, sentimentality was a new sensation that she felt taking root in her heart more with every saved ticket stub and treasured artifact that served as a reminder of the many good days she’d had since escaping the Red Room.
* Mostly Nancy Drew.
When Nadia felt sad or alone or confused or in particular need of some serious experimentation time, she needed to know that she could be alone. Really and truly alone. Not in the house, where Dedushka could stop by unannounced at any moment alone. Not in the lab, where Shay was probably listening to Beyoncé (Shay had made sure Nadia was fully up-to-date on her Beyoncé). Not even in her therapist’s office, which was probably the healthiest kind of alone that Nadia could be right now.
But she couldn’t think about therapy or the coping mechanisms that she relied on in the world at large (literally); Nadia just wanted to take this journal, and she wanted to be alone.
There was only one place she could really go for that. And it was even smaller than Hank Pym’s secret laboratory.
Clutching her mother’s journal—her mother’s journal—in one hand, hardly even feeling it against her chest, Nadia fumbled with the front zipper on her Wasp suit. She lowered the zip just enough so that she could reach beneath it and feel around for…
There. A chain. Nadia tugged, pulling the necklace through the gap in her zipper. With an extra tug, the charm on the end of the chain popped free: a small pink crystal, glowing with an extra-dimensional light from within. She never went anywhere without it, lately.
