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That wasn’t easy. It took hard work, and Nadia knew it.
She just…well. She just had to get on with it.
Nadia unlocked her phone and started up her playlist again. Her phone was connected to the Bluetooth in her house, so a wireless speaker in every room picked up the signal. The synth and the drums drowned out the white noise in Nadia’s brain, helping her focus.
And she had some bops on this playlist! Shay and Bobbi had put their heads together and made it for her, keeping in mind her somewhat specific tastes. Nadia only liked music she could dance to. Dancing while getting through her to-do list was sometimes the only thing that kept her on track. She might not have been a ballerina anymore, but she would always be a dancer. Same as Ying.
There are certain things that never leave you, thought Nadia, and this is one of them.
Dancing her way from the front door back into the dining room, Nadia was struck again by how much work Janet, Bobbi, and Jarvis had done for her. She peeked into a couple of the boxes, their flaps still open, ready to be filled with any last-minute tchotchkes* (or, more likely, batteries or wires or PlayStation controllers, since Shay had been trying to convince her to learn how to play the Spider-Man video game) left around the house.
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?
