might be punishment, but it’s one I deserve. If I wallow too much in my own misery, I’ll put this kid—and the others working with me, for me—at risk, and that’s unacceptable. “Let’s hope the next few months are uneventful,” I say, regaining some of the composure and authority I lost in Venezuela.
Fake it till you make it. One of Dad’s favorite sayings. Time to put it into practice.
Chapter Two
August
Mikayla
The freak summer rainstorm sounds like hundreds of tiny pebbles hitting the roof of my car as I pull out of the garage at Baltimore/Washington International Airport. Next to me in the passenger seat, my mother sighs.
“You look so tired, Mikayla. How late did you work last night?”
Thank goodness I’m driving so I don’t have to look her in the eyes. “I left around 2:00 a.m.” My mother clucks her tongue, and though she only wants the best for me, she doesn’t understand why I do this. “Mom, the World Horticultural Society needed supporting documentation for the fellowship application, and I had to get it right.”
“At the expense of your health?” my father asks from the back seat. “If you had gone to medical school—“
“That was your dream. Not mine.” I meet his gaze in the rear view mirror briefly, then return my focus to the road and merge onto the freeway. “I love what I do, Dad. My work… There’s an orchid that only grows in Guatemala and one specific region of Mexico high up in the mountains. It produces a rare phytotoxin in its roots and flowers, but one of my colleagues at Johns Hopkins thinks he can use it to help create a treatment for Parkinson’s.” I pause, hoping they’ll understand the importance, but despite losing my grandmother to that horrible disease, my mother’s still giving me the side eye. “The orchid’s in danger of extinction. Most of its habitat has already been lost to coffee farming, and it’s so rare, poachers make a fortune selling it. Without proof it has more value than being one flower amid a host of others, it’ll be gone in under a decade.”
“We did not leave Syria and seek asylum in America so our daughter could risk her life studying a flower,” my father says.
Anger flares up, bright and hot. This is his favorite argument, but it’s also one I can refute easily. “No. You left Syria so your daughter could decide for herself what she wanted to do with her life. I want to study this orchid. Preserve its existence.”
“And how does working all hours of the day and night help this?” The judgement in my mother’s voice grates on my nerves, but despite her nagging, she’s always come around in the end and has been my biggest fan—as long as I could justify my actions. She convinced Dad to stop pressuring me to go to medical school, supported me when I told them I was moving from Mountain View, California to Edgewater, Maryland to take a job at the Smithsonian, and I know I can sway her now too.
“If I get this grant, I’ll be able to take a team of graduate students with me down to Mexico and study the orchid in its natural habitat. With the information we’ll get there, we might be able to find a way to preserve its existence. Reliably grow it in the lab or cross-breed it with a hardier variety. And we’ll bring back enough samples for Johns Hopkins to work towards a clinical trial.”
My words spill out over one another in my excitement, and I know I’m rambling in ways my parents didn’t fly across the country to hear. They just wanted to spend a long weekend with me. But I can’t help myself. “If we visit the grow sites, we can take air, water, and soil samples, install equipment that monitors all those variables year-round, and maybe even convince the Mexican government to do more to stop poachers from stealing the flowers and selling them illegally.”
“You want to study poisonous plants? In the mountains of Mexico?” my father asks. “Mikayla, that does not sound safe.”
“It is. I promise. The poison is only active when the flowers and roots are dried, and we always wear protective equipment when we handle the samples. And it’s not a poisonous plant. It’s a plant that could potentially help millions of people. That just happens to be dangerous when dried.”
“You would be hiking? Up in the mountains? Alone?” My mother rests her hand on my shoulder.