Vinegar Girl Read online

  But all her father said was “Anything could go wrong. Any number of things. Oh, I had a feeling I shouldn’t leave it in Pyoder’s hands! I realize the fellow’s phenomenally able, but still, he isn’t me, after all.”

  Then he continued toward the rear of the church.

  Bunny was typing a text now. Tap-tap-tap, as rapid as the telegraph keys in old movies, using both her thumbs and hardly needing to look at the screen.

  Eventually, Uncle Theron reappeared. “So…” he called from the doorway. He walked toward the pew where Bunny and Kate were sitting, and Dr. Battista reversed course to join them.

  “So, does Pyoder have to come from very far away?” Uncle Theron asked.

  “Just my lab,” Dr. Battista told him.

  “Is he subject to a foreign standard of time?”

  He was looking at Kate as he asked this. She said, “A foreign…? Well, maybe. I’m not sure.”

  Then she realized from his expression that she ought to be sure, if they had been dating for long. She would have to remember that for their interview with Immigration. “Oh, he’s hopeless!” she would say merrily. “I tell him we’re due at our friends’ house at six and he doesn’t even start dressing till seven.”

  If they ever actually got so far as an interview.

  “Perhaps a phone call to find out if he needs directions,” Uncle Theron said.

  It was silly of her, she knew, but Kate didn’t want to make a phone call. She was reminded of those obsessive discussions that girls had in seventh grade—how they wouldn’t like to be seen “chasing a boy.” Even if this was the boy (so to speak) who was marrying her, it felt wrong. Let him show up as late as he liked! See if she cared.

  Lamely, she said, “He’s probably on the road. I wouldn’t want to distract him.”

  “Just send him a text,” Bunny told her.

  “Well, um…”

  Bunny clucked and returned her phone to her purse and then held a hand toward Kate, palm up. Kate stared at it a moment before she understood. Then, as slowly as possible, she dug her own phone from her tote and passed it over.

  Tap-tap-tap, Bunny went, without even seeming to think about it. Kate sent a sidelong glance toward what she was writing. “Where r u,” she read, beneath the last message Pyotr had sent Kate, which dated from a couple of days ago and said simply, “Okay bye.”

  This seemed significant now.

  No answer. None of those little dots, even, that meant he was working on an answer. They all looked helplessly at Uncle Theron. “Perhaps a phone call?” he suggested again.

  Kate steeled herself and took her phone back from Bunny. At the same instant, it made a soft swooping sound, which startled her so that she fumbled and dropped it, but only in her lap, luckily. Bunny gave another cluck and picked it up. “ ‘A terrible event,’ ” she read out.

  Their father said, “What!” He leaned past Uncle Theron and grabbed the phone out of Bunny’s hand and stared at it. Then he started typing. Just with one index finger, it was true, but still, Kate was impressed. They all watched him. Finally he said, “Now what do I do?”

  “What do you mean, what do you do?” Bunny asked him.

  “How do I send it?”

  Bunny tsked and took the phone from him and punched the screen. Peering over her shoulder, Kate read their father’s message: “What what what.”

  There was a wait. Dr. Battista was breathing oddly.

  Then another swooping sound. “ ‘Mice are gone,’ ” Bunny read out.

  Dr. Battista made a strangled, gasping noise. He buckled in the middle and crumpled onto the pew in front of them.

  To Kate, the word “mice” made no sense, for a moment. Mice? What did mice have to do with anything? She was waiting for news of her wedding. Uncle Theron seemed equally uncomprehending. He said, “Mice!” with a look of distaste.

  “The mice in Father’s lab,” Bunny explained to him.

  “His lab’s got mice?”

  “It has mice.”

  “Yes…” Uncle Theron said, clearly not seeing the distinction.

  “Guinea-pig mice,” Bunny elaborated.

  Now he looked thoroughly confused.

  “I can’t take it in,” Dr. Battista was saying faintly. “I can’t seem to absorb this.”

  Another swooping sound came from the phone. Bunny held it up and read out, “ ‘The animal-rights activists stole them the project is in ruins all is lost there is no hope.’ ”

  Dr. Battista groaned.

  “Ah, yes, that kind of mice,” Uncle Theron said, his forehead clearing.

  “Does he mean the PETA people?” Bunny asked everyone. “Is there some rule that grown-ups aren’t allowed to abbreviate, or what? ‘PETA,’ you idiot! Just say ‘PETA,’ for God’s sake! ‘Animal-rights activists,’ ha! The guy is so…plodding! And notice how all at once he puts a ‘the’ every place he possibly can, even though he almost never says ‘the’ when he’s talking.”

  “All those years and years of work,” Dr. Battista said. He was doubled over now with his head buried in his hands, so that it was hard to make his words out. “Those years and years and years, all down the drain.”

  “Oh, dear, now surely it can’t be that bad,” Uncle Theron said. “I’m sure this is repairable.”

  “We’ll just buy you some new mice!” Bunny chimed in. She handed the phone back to Kate.

  Kate was beginning to grasp the situation finally. She told Bunny, “Even you ought to know that only those mice will do. They’re at the end of a long line of generations of mice; they were specially bred.”

  “So?”

  “How did these people get into the lab?” Dr. Battista wailed. “How did they know the combination? Oh, God, I’ll have to start over from scratch, and I’m too old to start from scratch. It would take me another twenty years at the very least. I’ll lose all my funding and I’ll have to close the lab and drive a taxi for a living.”

  “Heaven forbid!” Uncle Theron said in real horror, and Bunny said, “You’re going to make me drop out of school and get a job, aren’t you. You’re going to make me go to work serving raw bloody sirloins in some steakhouse.”

  Kate wondered why they were both contemplating careers they were so unsuited for. She said, “Stop it, you two. We don’t know for sure yet whether—”

  “Oh, what do you care?” her father demanded, raising his head sharply. “You’re just glad, I bet, because now you don’t have to get married.”

  Kate said, “I don’t?”

  Her uncle said, “Why would she have to get married?”

  “And you!” Dr. Battista told Bunny. “So what if you drop out of school? No great loss! You’ve never shown the least bit of aptitude.”

  “Poppy!”

  Kate was staring at the hymnal rack in front of her. She was trying to get her bearings. She seemed to be experiencing a kind of letdown.

  “So that’s it,” her father said bleakly. “Excuse me, Theron, will you? I need to get down to my lab.” He stood up by inches, like a much older man, and stepped into the aisle. “Why should I even go on living anymore?” he asked Kate.

  “I haven’t the faintest idea,” she snapped.

  She would be reclaiming her old room, it appeared. Her life would pick up where it had left off. On Monday when she went in to work she would explain that things just hadn’t panned out. She would tell Adam Barnes that she wasn’t married after all.

  This didn’t cheer her up in the least. Adam had nothing to do with her, really. He would always make her feel too big and too gruff and too shocking; she would forever be trying to watch her words when she was with him. He was not the kind of person who liked her true self, for better or worse.

  This last phrase sent a little echo of sadness through her. It took her a moment to recollect why.

  She rose and followed Bunny into the aisle. It felt as if she had lead in her stomach. All the color seemed to have been washed out of the room, and she saw how bland it was
—a dead place.

  She and Bunny stood waiting while their father shook their uncle’s hand—or more like clung to his hand, with both of his own, as if hanging on for dear life. “Thank you anyhow, Theron,” he said in a funereal voice. “I apologize for taking up your—”

  “Khello?”

  Pyotr was standing in the corridor doorway, with Miss Brood smiling anxiously behind his left shoulder. He wore an outfit so shabby that he looked like a homeless person: a stained white T-shirt torn at the neck and translucent with age, very short baggy plaid shorts that Kate worried might be his underwear, and red rubber flip-flops. “You!” he said too loudly. It was Bunny he was addressing. He charged into the chapel, and Miss Brood melted away again. “Do not think for one minute that you will not be arrested,” he told Bunny.

  She said, “Huh?”

  He arrived directly in front of her and set his face too close to hers. “You…vegetable eater!” he told her. “You bleedy-heart!”

  Bunny took a step backward and dabbed at her cheek with the heel of one hand. He must have been spitting as he talked. “What is with you?” she asked him.

  “You went to lab in dead of night; I know you did. I do not know where you took mice but I know it was you who did this thing.”

  “Me!” Bunny said. “You think it was me who did it! You honestly believe I would mess up my own father’s project! You’re nuts. Tell him, Kate.”

  Dr. Battista managed to slip in between them at this point. He said, “Pyoder, I need to know. How bad is it?”

  Pyotr turned away from Bunny to clap a hand heavily on Dr. Battista’s shoulder. “Is bad,” he told him. “This is the truth. Is bad as it can get.”

  “They’re all gone? Every one?”

  “Every one. Both racks empty.”

  “But how—?”

  Pyotr was walking him toward the front of the chapel now, his hand still resting on Dr. Battista’s shoulder. “I wake up early,” he said. “I think I will go to lab early so I am in time for wedding. I get to door; is locked the same as always. I punch combination. I go inside. I go to mouse room.”

  They slowed to a stop a few feet from the altar. Uncle Theron and Kate and Bunny stayed where they were, watching. Then Pyotr turned to look back at Kate. “Where are you?” he asked her.

  “Me?”

  “Come on! We get married.”

  “Oh, well,” Dr. Battista said, “I don’t know if that’s really…I think I’d just like to get on down to the lab now, Pyoder, even if there’s nothing to—”

  But Kate said, “Wait till we say our vows, Father. You can check the lab afterward.”

  “Kate Battista!” Bunny said. “You are surely not going ahead with this!”

  “Well…”

  “Did you hear how he just talked to me?”

  “Well, he’s upset,” Kate told her.

  “I am not goddamned upset!” Pyotr bellowed.

  “You see what I mean,” Kate told Bunny.

  “Come here now!” Pyotr shouted.

  Uncle Theron said, “Goodness, he is upset,” and he chuckled, shaking his head. He walked up the aisle to the altar, where he turned and held both arms out from his sides like an annunciating angel. “Kate, dear?” he asked. “Coming?”

  Bunny gave a hiss of disbelief, and Kate turned and handed her tote to her. “Okay, fine,” Bunny told her. “Be like that. The two of you deserve each other.”

  But she accepted the tote, and she trailed after Kate up the aisle.

  At the altar, Kate took her place next to Pyotr. “I at first did not understand it,” Pyotr was telling Dr. Battista. “Was obvious what had happened, but still I did not understand. I am just staring. Two empty racks and no cages. Painted letters on wall next to racks, painted directly on wall: ANIMALS ARE NOT LAB EQUIPMENT. This is when I think to call police.”

  “The police: oh, well, what can the police do?” Dr. Battista said. “It’s too late now for all that.”

  “The police take a very, very long time and when they finally come they are not intelligent. They say to me, ‘Can you describe these mice, sir?’ ‘Describe!’ I say. ‘What to describe? They are ordinary Mus musculus; enough is said.’ ”

  “Ah,” Dr. Battista said. “Quite right.” Then he said, “I don’t see why I had to get dressed up if you didn’t.”

  “She is marrying me, not my clothes,” Pyotr said.

  Uncle Theron cleared his throat. He said, “Dearly beloved…”

  The two men turned to face him.

  “We are gathered here in the presence…”

  “There must be some way they can track them down, though,” Dr. Battista murmured to Pyotr. “Hire a rat terrier or something. Don’t they keep dogs for such purposes?”

  “Dogs!” Pyotr said, turning slightly. “Dogs would eat them! You want this?”

  “Or ferrets, perhaps.”

  “Do you, Katherine,” Uncle Theron was saying, in an unusually firm voice, “take this man, Pyoder…”

  Kate could sense Pyotr’s tension from the extreme rigidity of his body, and her father was jittering with agitation on the other side of him, and she could feel the waves of Bunny’s disapproval behind her. Only Kate herself was calm. She stood very straight and kept her eyes on her uncle.

  By the time they got to “You may kiss the bride,” her father was already turning to leave the altar. “Okay, we go now,” Pyotr said, even while he was ducking forward to give Kate a peck on the cheek. “The policemen want—” he told Dr. Battista, and then Kate stepped squarely in front of him and took his face between both of her hands and kissed him very gently on the lips. His face was cool but his lips were warm and slightly chapped. He blinked and stepped back. “—policemen want to talk to you too,” he said faintly to Dr. Battista.

  “Congratulations to both of you,” Uncle Theron said.

  In order to get into Pyotr’s car, Kate had to enter from the driver’s side and struggle past the stick shift to the passenger’s side. This was because the passenger-side door seemed to have been caved in by something, and it no longer opened. She didn’t ask what had happened. It was pretty clear that Pyotr had been driving even more distractedly than usual.

  She put her tote on the floor among an assortment of discarded flyers, and then she fumbled beneath her for whatever the lump was that she was sitting on. It turned out to be Pyotr’s cell phone. Once he was settled behind the wheel, she held it toward him and asked, “Were you texting while driving?” He didn’t respond; just grabbed it away from her and stuffed it into the right front pocket of his shorts. Then he twisted the key in the ignition, and the engine roared to life with a grinding sound.

  Before he could back out of his parking space, though, Dr. Battista rapped his knuckles on Pyotr’s side window. Pyotr cranked the window down and barked, “What!”

  “I’m dropping Bunny off at home and then I’m going straight to the lab,” Dr. Battista told him. “I’ll talk to the police after I check things out. See you two at the reception, I guess.”

  Pyotr merely nodded and shifted violently into reverse.

  Barreling down the Jones Falls Expressway, he seemed to feel the need to relive every last second of the tragedy. “I stand there; I think, ‘What am I seeing?’ I think, ‘I will just blink my eyes and then everything will be normal.’ So I blink, but racks are still empty. No cages. Writing on wall looks shouting, looks loud. But room is very, very still; has no motion. You know that mice are always moving. They rustle and they squeak; they hurry to the front when they hear anybody coming; they find humans…promising. Now, nothing. Stillness. Four, five cedar chips on bare floor.”

  His window was still open and the wind was whipping her hair into snarls, but Kate decided not to mention it.

  “I am so not wanting to believe it that I turn and walk into other room. As if mice just maybe took themselves elsewhere. I say, ‘Khello?’ I don’t know why I say, ‘Khello?’ Is not as if they could answer.”

  “You want
to veer left at this fork,” Kate said, because they were traveling so fast that it seemed he might not be planning to do that. At the last second he swerved violently, throwing her against her door, and shortly afterward he took a speedy right onto North Charles Street without checking for traffic. (He certainly felt no hesitation about merging.) “I never trusted that Bunny, right from start,” he told Kate. “So baby-acting. Is like what they say in my country about—”

  “Bunny didn’t do this,” Kate told him. “She doesn’t have the nerve.”

  “Of course she did it. I told police she did it.”

  “You what?”

  “Detective wrote her name down in notebook.”

  “Oh, Pyotr!”

  “She knows combination of lock, and she is vegetable eater,” Pyotr said.

  “Lots of people are vegetarians, but that doesn’t make them burglars,” Kate said. She braced her feet against the floor; they were approaching an amber light. “Besides, she’s not really a vegetarian; she just says she is.”

  Pyotr sped up even faster and sailed through the light. “She is a vegetarian,” he said. “She made you take the meat from the mush-dish.”

  “Yes, but then she keeps stealing my beef jerky.”

  “She is stealing your beef jerky?”

  “I have to change my hiding place every couple of days because she’s always swiping it. She’s no more vegetarian than I am! It’s just one of those phases, one of those teenage fads. You have to tell the police she didn’t do it, Pyotr. Tell them you made a mistake.”

  “Anyway,” Pyotr said gloomily, “what is the difference who did it? Mice are vanished. All that care we took for them; now they are scampering the streets of Baltimore.”

  “You really think animal lovers would turn a bunch of cage-reared mice loose in city traffic? They do have some common sense. Those mice are stashed away someplace safe and protected, with all their antibodies or whatever perfectly intact.”

  “Please do not contradict me,” Pyotr said.

  Kate rolled her eyes at the ceiling, and neither one of them spoke again.