See a football game (which football? Nadia wondered)
Watch all of the Star Wars
Watch the stars
Teach them chess
Plant a vegetable garden
Play in the rain
Make a family
And so it went, item after item, a brilliant and completely random combination of Hungarian traditions, a European’s perception of American traditions, completely normal mother/potential-future-daughter events, and things only a geneticist and entomologist* would think to include. Nadia loved it. More than Nadia loved most things.
Hastily, Nadia wiped away a tear that had fallen onto the page. She sniffed and blinked hard, trying to get herself under control. She was feeling a lot of different things at once and it was hard to think clearly through the whirlwind in her brain. She was thrilled. And she was excited. This was the most she’d ever had of her mother. Nadia had mostly only ever heard about what happened to her, not about who she was. And here she was: Maria, on the page. Nadia suddenly knew that they both loved Frankenstein. It was impossible. It was a miracle.
And yet Nadia was still desperately, uncompromisingly sad. Sad that her mother never got to do any of the things on this list. Sad that Nadia never got to do them with her. Sad that she had this list, even though she was also in love with this list. But it was the only thing she had, and it still wasn’t enough to really know her mother. Not to have her here, in person, to listen to ABBA with and to laugh and to play in the rain with and to smell and to know what she would have thought of Hank’s Lucky Charms. For a scientist like Nadia, it felt…confusing. It felt inapplicable, like trying to know a ghost. Like there was no physical experiment she could do to really know her mother. It was all so good and so terrible and…
For perhaps the first time, Nadia felt the bone-deep hollowness of really knowing, understanding what she’d lost when she lost her mother. These words—her mother’s words—made Maria feel more real than she’d ever felt before. And in the same breath, even more gone.
Nadia knew that even before she’d taken her first breath, she was loved. Wholly. Unconditionally.
Nadia took a shaky breath, focusing every bit of her energy on not collapsing under the weight of all of this. It was happiness and profound sadness and love and loss and joy and pain. It was feeling like her family was still a part of her, and feeling immeasurably lonely, smaller than anyone else in the universe and completely alone in the one place in the world where she was almost untouchable—unfindable, for better or worse.
With a snap, Nadia closed the journal. There was an experiment she could do to get to know her mother. At least a lit
tle. Standing up with a renewed sense of purpose, Nadia knew she had a new list to add to her own already never-ending to-do list. The Red Room had robbed her of so much—of a childhood, of her parents, of any chance of being a Cool American Teen until now. But this list—this was Nadia’s way forward. This would be a new way for Nadia to reclaim what she’d lost and to build her own future. This was everything she had been missing from the house, and it had been waiting for her inside of it all along.
Nadia snatched up her helmet and leapt from the edge of the bell tower. She let herself fall for a second—and another, and another—before her biosynthetic wings picked her up again.
* Literally? “World Shaking!” (One of Nadia’s favorite Sailor Uranus attacks.) Less literally? “Holy She-Hulk.”
† An Eastern European crepe.
‡…Er, literally? “Pig slaughter.” Colloquially? Also that, but it’s a tradition. Not unlike Thanksgiving! Well. Actually, kind of not at all like Thanksgiving, except it usually takes place in late fall and involves preparing food.
* The study of bugs! Fitting, right?
“You’ll never guess what I found—” Nadia burst through the doors at G.I.R.L. before stopping dead in her tracks. All the lights were off. The place was deserted. “Oy.” Nadia smacked her forehead and checked the back of her left wrist. The numbers were still there, but now they flashed 10:37 PM.
Nadia felt like it had been an eternity since she’d found Maria’s journal. She’d run to the Crystal Lab, and sat with the journal nearly all night before returning to Pym Labs. In the Microverse, the whole thing had taken hours. In the real world, it had taken around twenty minutes. Nadia hated losing track of real time like that—especially since it messed with her medication times. She would have to remember to take them five hours earlier than usual.
Thank goodness for phone alarms. Life savers.
“Right,” Nadia said to herself, walking toward her room. “Everyone is asleep. Like they should be.” She would have to wait until tomorrow to share her news about the journal and the list—though she had no doubt all her friends would be just as excited as she was. How could they not be?
“Not everyone,” came a voice from deep within the lab. Nadia spun—and saw a small light in the back corner of the lab she’d missed when she blasted through the front doors. In fairness, she had been distracted. You know, by contact with her dead mother from beyond the grave.
That was not a normal, everyday thing, not even for Nadia. And Nadia saw some pretty weird stuff on a pretty regular basis. She had a quartz laboratory she’d crafted with science because of Sailor Moon. So, you know, “normal” wasn’t exactly in Nadia’s wheelhouse.
Nadia walked toward the back of the lab, curious. “Who was that?”
“Who else would be awake at this ungodly hour?” A familiar creak accompanied the words—Tai’s crutches.
Sure enough, Nadia found the light was coming from the window that looked into Taina’s room in the lab. “Taina,” Nadia said scoldingly, walking into her friend’s room. “It is almost eleven! You should be asleep.”
Taina gave Nadia a pointed look.