As the skate cut the eighth crack in the lake, Evelyn smelled bitter almonds.
In Lake State, Pennsylvania, in 1997, a nine-year-old girl hooks her ballet shoes with her frozen red toes. My father's new dancing shoes had a pearl-colored satin, like frost in the moonlight from a cooling tower in a chemical plant. She practiced the 32 laps of Act 3 of "Swan Lake" against the ice, exhaling a white mist filled with lily of the valley perfume her mother sprayed in the morning.
The tenth circle rotated to an Angle facing the chemical plant, and the vent suddenly emitted black smoke. By the time Evelyn counted the seventh column of smoke, sparrows from the wire fence fell en masse at her feet, and the orange-yellow bird's beak spilled pale blue foam -- just like the stray cat who died in the ballet class last week.
"Dad's work permit!"
Blackened plastic cards floated out of the vents, with corrosion-resistant lab tape still attached to the edges. Evelyn stood on tiptoe to reach, and the ribbon broke. Metal tweezers sticking out of the iron mesh held the work card, and a husky voice came from behind the gas mask: "Want this? I'll trade it for your tutu."
She recognized them as the forceps of Daniel, the chief engineer's son, who had scars on the knuckles of his right hand burned by concentrated sulfuric acid. Last week in chemistry class he stole her scalpel, said he was going to peel swan feathers for taxidermy.
The explosion came two seconds after the fire.
Evelyn was thrown into the frozen lake by the wave, and scarlet glowed under the shattered ice on her right shoulder. The burning chemical plant had torn the sky into Burgundy wounds, and black raindrops of melted asphalt were on her eyelashes. The ballet shoes, broken in two, were floating in the boiling water, their ribbons corroded by some pale green liquid.
"Mother! She rushed to the burning employee dormitory building, leaving bloody barefoot prints in the melting snow. A second-story window burst open, and the mother fell in her lavender nightdress, clutching a candle for her daughter's birthday -- the last light Evelyn saw from the fire.
Fire truck sirens were blared at the same time as the sound of broken bones. Evelyn rummaged through gas masks looking for her parents, with bits of concrete with brain matter under her fingernails. One moment she grabbed her father's watch, the glass of the dial embedded in the palm of her hand, only to find that at the other end of the watch chain was attached to a half-charred forearm.
Evelyn stared at rainbow-colored smoke wafting from the vent as a man in a silver suit sprayed spray on her eyeball. The gas paints twisted irises in the snow, just like the doodles in Daniel's chemistry notebook. Before she was carried away on a stretcher, a piece of metal bearing the Rothschild crest was removed from her right shoulder with a surgical clamp.
The smell of hospital disinfectant mixed with rotting meat. As Evelyn counted the drip of the IV, she heard a hushed argument in the hallway. "... Cyanide leak... At least 20 bodies to dispose of... The girl's corneal transplant..."
At three o 'clock in the night, the shadows under the bed began to creep. Daniel climbs in wearing night-vision goggles, his protective suit reeking of rust from the pipes beneath the chemical plant. He pressed his cold, mechanical prosthesis against her crusted right shoulder. "Want to know how your parents really died?" The breathing mask filters out a message like a venomous snake, "They're calling your name on the intercom while they're melting into pink jelly in the air ducts."
The blood from Evelyn's bitten lip dripped onto the bed sheet, forming a small iris pattern. Daniel stuffed a Zippo lighter into a crack in her cast. The flame emblem had the Latin word for Purification engraved on it: "When you learn to burn your own throat with this, I'll tell you how many funny pictures I took in the control room during the explosion."
When the mirror in the rehabilitation room reflected the centipede scars on her back, Evelyn dreamed of dancing at the bottom of Swan Lake. The agent the physiotherapist injected into her spine had a mother-of-pearl sheen, the same ingredient that stained Daniel's protective suit that night. After one of her electroshock treatments, she found a tranquilizer with the Rothschild biotech logo on the bottom floor of the medical equipment cabinet.
The fire engulfed the orphanage on Christmas Eve. Evelyn jumped from the third floor wrapped in a burning curtain, and in the air saw Daniel standing on the opposite street corner, recording her fall with an infrared camera. The moment she hit the ground, the scalpel hidden in her stocking plunged into her ankle - the first time she had actively used the pain to stay awake.
In the police evidence room, Evelyn's stolen father's work ID shows invisible numbers under ultraviolet light. It took her three months to decipher the access code to the three basement floors of the chemical plant, and the access to the number was deleted two hours before the murder.
On the night of her 17th birthday, Evelyn dug a sealed box under what had once been a frozen lake. Inside my mother's burnt dancing shoes was a note written in mascara that read "Don't trust a man with a blue tie," while a cyanide capsule with Daniel's fingerprints was taped to the bottom of the iron box containing my father's belongings.
Now, as she stood at the top of the gallery lighting a menthol cigarette, watching the neon of Manhattan turn into a bloody iris in the torrential rain, the metal under the scar on her right shoulder resonated with the lighter in Daniel's pocket. Footsteps from the fire escape beat to Chopin's "Funeral March," and Lucas' holster clasp glistened phosphorescent in the dark.