“There’s no way I’m letting Baba Smallpox get to you.”

“But she isn’t gonna get me.”

“Not if I’ve got anything to do with it.”

I cracked an egg into the bowl of Funfetti mix. While I stirred, I imagined clubbing Desislava with my wooden spoon until she bled, smearing thick layers of Funfetti batter onto her wounds as revenge. It was Desislava who had told Mom about Baba Smallpox. She’d brought it up after I came home from school while the three of us watched a car crash on the corner through a screen of falling rain. Desislava is our neighbor. She’s Mom’s age but dresses like some of the girls in my grade, with leggings under her shorts and fur-lined boots. Her accent makes every word that drops from her chapped lips sound sarcastic.

The cops took forever to come that day, so Desislava had plenty of time to scare Mom, like she always does when the two of them sit on our porch, killing mosquitoes and talking about crime statistics.

“She comes and gives the children the disease. To get rid of her you must leave bread and honey or some sweets for her at night.” She laughed, cracked lips cleaving, and turned to me. “Madeline, you will have to watch out for Baba Smallpox.”

“What’s a baba?” I asked. I smashed the toe of my sandal into a puddle and felt warm dirty water.

Desislava patted my shoulder and said, “Grandmother,” then waved goodbye. I guess she gave up on waiting for the cops. She ambled off without putting on her hood, the drizzle frizzing her red perm.

I walked into the kitchen that night and saw Mom laying out Oreos on a paper plate. There were probably about ten.

“You’re eating all those Oreos?” I said.

“They’re for that smallpox bitch.”

These days we went out less and spoke to fewer people, and there was nobody but me to snap her out of it. I’d ignore her, so that she’d be forced to at least explain herself. I pretended to think she was joking. I went in for a cookie. She snatched back so hard that one slid off the plate, smacked  and broke on the tile.

“That smallpox bitch is not real. And she doesn’t live in New Orleans.” This didn’t matter to Mom. At her craziest she used to talk slow and clear, like a professor or a judge.

“If I was her and I went around infecting kids, stealing them from their parents, you’re the first one I’d take. Look at you. You’re so beautiful, like a tree. Every mother I know wishes you were their daughter. I’d want to steal you too.” She ate fragments of floor-cookie in tiny bites while looking up at my face. “And you’d love to let the smallpox bitch take you, too. You probably want to just give up and leave. But I won’t let that happen.” 

That night, she left the plate of Oreos on the floor outside my door while I slept.

The foods she left for Baba got sweeter, softer. Sometimes her ideas fizzled after a day, but I could see that Baba was becoming more real to her, solidifying in her mind. After the Oreos she brought home Winn-Dixie cookies, the kind with perfect pink discs of icing. Then expensive hot chocolate with real whipped cream and marshmallows, then the Funfetti cake. This meant no real dinners or breakfasts anymore. Sometimes we’d make grilled cheese, but mostly I snuck bites of whatever Mom had bought for Baba. At school, I’d trade my cafeteria desserts for an extra slice of pizza or a taco. I’d wrap them up in napkins to take home, and wolf them down in the bathroom after school. Sometimes I had to dodge Mom and Desislava, sitting together on the porch almost every day now, so that I could go in and eat  But after a few weeks Mom figured Baba Smallpox could steal me more easily at school. So she started calling school, telling them I had to take care of my dying grandmother. My real grandmother swims at the Tennis Club and lives near City Park. We don’t speak to her because of how she acted when Aunt Denise died, like nothing had happened, like she didn’t even have an oldest daughter. It was a few years ago that we stopped speaking to her completely, not even Christmas and birthdays. After that, I think, Mom got worse. But school didn’t know all that. Most days I saw nobody but Mom and Desislava.

Mom spent one Saturday making coconut cake. It came out too dense, she wailed, and screamed that I’d distracted her. I’d walked too loud on purpose, so she’d fuck up the cake and Baba Smallpox would come and find me and kill me. She’d be left alone, with no daughter, no sister, less than nothing of a mother. While she explained this I waited, tracing my big toe through flour she’d spilled until she quieted. The two of us ate the cake on the kitchen floor while the crickets sang. I didn’t think it was too dense. 

That night Mom left nothing for Baba but a mug of strawberry milk. She showed me where it was beside my bedroom door before I went to bed, because a few nights ago I’d stepped in a bowl of vanilla pudding, scaly with sprinkles, on my way to the bathroom. The night of the strawberry milk, we hugged goodnight in the hall. Back then I was so used to Mom’s voice that my room’s silence hurt. She was wrong, at least at the start, about me wanting to leave her. Her noise was a railing I clung to with both hands.

That night the quiet didn’t last. I heard a knock seconds after I’d laid down. Thinking it might be Baba Smallpox herself, I stood. I figured we’d need to have a talk. But it was only Mom. She took off the silver bracelet that Aunt Denise left her. She almost never takes it off.

“You know who this belonged to?” she asked.

“No,” I said, even though I did.

“It belonged to Aunt Denise,” she told me. I knew what she was going to say next. “She loved you so much that she came to the hospital when I gave birth, even though she couldn’t walk anymore. They wheeled her in. Her arms were weaker than yours. I had to help her hold you so she wouldn’t drop you. What a person. Like you, Maddie. I want you to remember her.” Then she clasped the bracelet on me. It pinched because she has dainty wrists, and Aunt Denise’s must have been the same. Mine, wider than theirs, had grown even fatter because of our new sugar-only, anti-Baba diet. I didn’t tell Mom I was sick of hearing about her dead sister.

“Thanks,” I said. She gripped my wrist, pressing metal deeper into my skin.

“Maddie.” She said, “You’ve got to be like Aunt Denise. She stuck around as long as she could. She was stubborn her whole life, even when she was a baby. You’ve got to be stubborn like her. Don’t go. Don’t let anyone take you.” The bracelet left dents in my skin but I didn’t take it off, even after Mom went to sleep. Lying there I wondered, for the first time, whether it would be so terrible to be taken by Baba.

After the chocolate cake, Mom stopped cooking from scratch. Still, we spent tons of time driving all around the city, filling the trunk with sugar. On special occasions, Baba got to celebrate. My birthday meant two Happy Birthday Maddie cakes, one for me and one for Baba. On Christmas we left her the gingerbread house I’d made. All Mardi Gras week we barely stepped outside except to buy a lineup of king cakes: cream cheese-filled one night, raspberry the next, even passion fruit from a fancy cafe. On Valentine’s Day Baba got a gold box of truffles from the mall.

Sometimes when she came to the porch Desislava would bring  a tupperware of apple banitsa she’d baked, the pastries pale like sick snails.

“These I used to eat when I was your age, every day,” she told me. “But I was very fat, so do not eat them every day.”

How, Mom quizzed her, does Baba Smallpox travel? And does she prefer treats sweetened with sugar, or is honey better? What about that Stevia stuff? At the sight of Desislava I’d feel a raging hope, thinking she might get Mom to chill. It wasn’t likely, but Mom didn’t talk much to anybody else. But usually Desislava just talked about her schooldays in Vidin, spilled wine on the steps, and worked Mom into a frenzy. When their voices got loud, and they talked over each other, I could whisper Baba’s name and ask her to come pick me up without being heard.

I was only allowed one sliver of banitsa. Since Desislava had been the one to mention Baba Smallpox, Mom assumed her pastries worked best and should be treated reverently. If I snuck a chunk of banitsa, she’d threaten to chop my ponytail off. Ugliness was her threat of last resort: bald head, shaved eyebrows, even a burn to the face. I think she believed that Baba Smallpox wouldn’t come after an ugly girl, but couldn’t bring herself to make me into one, beyond a few halfhearted snips to the hair.

It wasn’t all bad. In Mom’s good-crazy times, she and I would get up earlier than usual in the mornings and peek our heads out. Baba’s food still sat on the floor, untouched. Sitting in the hall, we would eat. I got my sweet tooth from Mom. She got hers from my grandmother. But since we don’t talk to my grandmother unless there’s an emergency, I started to feel like we’d inherited our sweet tooths from Baba Smallpox. It was like she was my real grandmother. Just like my real grandmother, we avoided her. On the way to Hong Kong Market for special cookies, or Pandora’s for a snowball, which would melt to purple syrup when we left it out for Baba, we’d turn on the radio. “FUCK OFF BABA SMALLPOX!” Mom would sing over the real lyrics. When I joined, she’d tell me to hush with the gutter mouth, but she still laughed.

Then when she got bad-crazy, I’d regret it. Mom, I’d remember, was not like me: she let nothing new into her life anymore. She didn’t watch episodes of TV she hadn’t already seen, didn’t like to turn on the light or open the curtains while she was working. When something interesting or strange fought its way to her, it would stick in her mind until it frightened her, and since Desislava’s story about Baba Smallpox had been strange and interesting, it could never really be a joke to Mom. When she got bad, I refused to eat Baba’s food, even if it meant I ate nothing all day. Putting those foods into my body felt like devouring Mom’s badness and letting it rot me from inside. When she scooped a whole jar of Nutella onto a china plate using her bony hand instead of a spoon, she had to lick it clean and had brown teeth for hours. I hated her so much I wanted her to die while I sat and watched. My body choked with sick, writhing fury. Everything I touched I’d throw or crush. When Mom slept in a folding chair on the front porch to make sure I didn’t sneak out, I wanted Baba Smallpox to come and take me so I would never have to talk about Aunt Denise or my grandma and how I looked like an elegant tree. At these moments my brain felt cracked in half. I knew Baba Smallpox would help me escape if I let her. During the Pledge of Allegiance, on the days I was allowed to go to school, I prayed to Baba Smallpox to take me away.

Mom was right—it was easier for her to find me at school. I ran into her in the bathroom during study hall. The first time I smelled her, warm and smoky, I knew it was her before I’d even left the stall. Over the loudspeaker, a boy was called into the principal’s office. In the silence after I could hear her tapping her nails on the edge of the sink. I flushed, left the stall and took my first look at Baba. Her red hair shone under the bathroom lights. She was smoking a cigarette.

It felt like the days that my grandmother used to pick me up from school, back when we still spoke sometimes. In other words, it felt as though this was the plan. 

“You can’t have those here,” I told her. It was exciting, seeing that Mom’s efforts to keep Baba away were finally crumbling. But I did not want to die, and wanted to show that I wasn’t going down without a fight. I felt it was an awful injustice that I would be forced to either live in the dark with Mom or die of smallpox.  

“Listen to me, Madeline.” She said, her accent low and sarcastic like Desislava’s. “I know you have been asking for me. These sweets your mother is buying sound very nice but unfortunately I have not been able to find your house without an address of any kind.” She stubbed out her cigarette in the sink and lit another. I felt stupid for not mentioning my address during my silent prayers to her. “In any case, it was easy enough to find you at your school,” she concluded.

“That’s what my mom thought, actually,” I said, then wished I could take it back. It felt impolite to bring Mom up to Baba, as if Baba might get jealous or, worse, say something truly awful about her. But she only said,

“Yes, the building is large and a very polite boy held the door open for me.”

Baba did not return me to study hall. Instead she walked me through the empty hallways, past the front office. She pushed open the school door. As soon as the humidity hit my skin an explosive headache took hold of me, like my brain really was wrenching in two. I had to sit down on the school steps and tried to ask Baba to call my mother. My body itched, and I wondered if I was dying of smallpox, but I couldn’t figure out how to ask. When I’d almost figured it out, I stopped being awake.

And when I woke up, I knew before I even opened my eyes that I was far from New Orleans. It was the quiet that told me. I wasn’t used to hearing quiet like that, in the house or at school. My head held the residue of pain. I was sitting in a soft chair. On a table before me was a doily, with a mug of hot black coffee waiting on it.

At home I drank coffee with milk and sugar.

I was thinking that I wanted either Baba or my mother when I heard Baba’s voice from the next room. “Madeline, you are finally up, ” she said, as if I was adorably lazy. She was winding a pink scarf around her neck. “I am very sorry to have to leave so soon, Madeline. I did not think you would take so long getting up, to tell the truth, when I made these plans.” She walked over to me and patted me on my back, a little awkwardly. “I am leaving to visit with Polina, my friend, her husband is ill. But drink your coffee, yes? And there is food for you in the refrigerator. I am very sorry to leave so fast,” she said, and left. 

“Does my Mom know where I am?” I asked, but a second too late, just as the door slammed shut. I stood, discovering that my legs worked.

This place was smallish. This kitchen. A living room with a couch and TV. A bedroom in the back, it looked like. Off the kitchen was a concrete balcony. When I stepped out a wet wind slapped my body. I was on a high floor in a huge building at what looked like the start of a winter night. All around were more balconies like mine, rising from concrete buildings like mine. Laundry was hanging to dry on some of them.

Back inside I ate the salad of tomatoes and cucumbers Baba had left in the fridge, and while I ate I studied the needlepoints on her walls. They showed scenes of horses and trees, all bowed in early-evening shadow. Then I read one of her books, in an alphabet where half the letters were familiar and the other half were odd. By the time she opened the door with a yellow grocery bag hanging on her arm, I thought I could understand a few words.

“Baba,” I asked when she set the bag down next to the kitchen sink, “Did you give me smallpox and kill me?” I went to help her put away the groceries.

“I do not know,” she said, holding a cigarette in one hand and a cauliflower in the other. “I tried, but I have not taken anybody in a long time. The whole thing—very exhausting. In the old days, you could not be so nice. Sometimes in those days you had to give the smallpox, so they will be afraid of you and give you some bread to eat. But now I go to Billa and get bread anytime I want. My granddaughters Dilyara and Bisserka come from Chicago every summer, they say, ‘Baba, you want American candies? American sweets? Anything you want!’ So these days it is not necessary to give anyone smallpox. Life is easy even though things are very, very bad here in Bulgaria these days.” She took a drag from her cigarette, which smelled like tea.

“So why did you try to come and get me?”

“You asked me, no? Also, you are very beautiful, you look like a tree. Anybody would be lucky to kill you.” She waved vaguely at me. “But you, you have the vaccine anyway. I heard that some of the American children are no longer getting vaccines. That is good, that you have yours. I have told my son Todor that if Bisserka and Dilyara do not get their vaccines, I will take them back to Bulgaria myself, bring them to the doctor— anyway.” She sighed and stuffedx the empty grocery bag into a cabinet. “I am unsure what happened here. But if you were dead, possibly you would not be in my flat today.”

So I wasn’t dead, and I was happy. I had escaped Mom and yet had not done so entirely on purpose, which meant I didn’t have to feel guilty about it. Baba didn’t make me go to school— she said the schools in town were corrupt and useless— but she didn’t keep me locked up either. Sometimes, when she was cooking or visiting friends, I’d wait for the eighth graders on a corner outside the high school. I couldn’t understand anything they said, but when their bell rang for the break between classes, they’d hand me coins to load into the vending machine. I’d eat candy, pet the stray cats, and listen to the eighth graders shouting and laughing. Sometimes one of the more outgoing ones would hug me around the neck and kiss my head, like I was her little sister.

When break ended and my friends trudged inside, I’d search for Baba. I usually found her in one of the cafes in town with Polina or another friend. She’d eat salad and use silver tongs to drop ice into a glass of rakia. The rakia smelled like rubbing alcohol and Baba did not let me try it, though she’d order me a salad. She made me wash my hands after petting the stray dogs and cats. Each day before I left the apartment she stuffed me into a tiny coat her granddaughter Dilyara had left behind, and at night Baba would stretch a sheet over the couch’s pattern of red flowers so I could sleep on it.

After a while, the quiet started to scare me. The town was little and gray. I never heard a siren there. After nightfall you couldn’t even hear traffic. At dusk there’d be the furious roosting of birds, and the eighth graders would yell during their break. But that noise wasn’t like Mom’s noise. It didn’t have that same buzzing electric threat. At night on Baba’s couch, I wondered what she’d eaten that day and whether she was sitting on the porch just then. I had no idea what time it could be in New Orleans. I tried to count the days I’d been at Baba’s, but I knew only that it was still winter. Bluish ice crusted half the town. I’d never seen snow before and wasn’t pleased to find out how wet it was, not at all soft and dusty like in Christmas movies. Baba bought me a pair of boots from the shoe store near her flat. But either they weren’t good boots, or I was terrible at walking on the ice. I slid and slipped and crashed.

One morning, skidding through town on my way to find my favorite stray cat, I saw vendors selling red-and-white yarn bracelets. Some looked homemade. Most did not. The vendors crammed each patch of bare concrete in the town center.

“What’s that?” I asked Baba that afternoon, pointing to one of the bracelet stands as we passed. My English had worn thin. Mom would have liked how I’d become babylike, pointing and falling. All the weight I’d gained at home sloughed off and left me smaller than before, even though Baba tried to stuff me with cabbage and cheese and cured sausages. Under my skin, bones flared. I slipped easily into Dilyara’s coat now.

“They are martenichki,” Baba answered me. “On the first of March we celebrate the spring. We exchange the martenichki. Teachers and students, friends, they are all giving them to each other.” As I skidded across a square of ice on my way to ogle the martenichki, Baba picked me up and carried me on her hip. The gesture was not one of affection. She was only tired of waiting for me while I slipped all over town. Still, I rested my head on her shoulder, inhaling the tea smell of her cigarettes, and wrapped my legs around her waist. The stiff ends of her hair scratched my ear.

“You see,” she told me, “We wear the martenichki that we are given. And then, each time we see a tree that has begun to blossom, we remove the bracelet, and tie it to the tree’s branches. This is the tradition.” I nodded, thinking I’d buy one for myself later. I let Baba carry me back to the flat. There, I slipped into a long sleep.

I slept so much these days. Sitting next to Baba at her favorite cafe, I’d curl up and nap on the booth. I’d stare sleepless all night on Baba’s couch, my eyelids sinking only when the sun started lighting the concrete buildings outside. Hours later I’d wake and find Baba long gone and I’d stumble out, rubbing my fists across my eyes. Then I’d find my eighth-grade friends, who pet and poked me in watery afternoon light while they screamed at one another. One day when I found them, their wrists were piled with bracelets. One of my friends, a girl who drew her eyebrows thick and dark, shook a martenitsa from its crinkly plastic wrapping and tied it around my wrist. Then she kissed my hand with a big “MWAH.”

I didn’t find Baba in one of her cafes afterward, so I went back to the flat. She was sitting on my couch watching a singing competition on TV.

“Come watch this man, he is wearing high heels! Look at him dancing.” She patted the couch next to her. I sat right on my favorite big red flower. When I got here, my butt had covered the whole thing. Now the flower spread below me like a stain. Baba gasped and snatched my hand up to look at my martenitsa.

“Madeline! This reminds me—” she stood and trotted back to one of the rooms I’d never entered, at the end of the dark hall. I watched the man dance. Mom would have liked him. I had the vaguest recollection of Mardi Gras parades, mom hooting and clapping at dancers while my head bowed with the weight of beads. Baba’s footsteps flopped back into the room, and she waved something at me: Aunt Denise’s silver bracelet. I did not remember taking it off.

“I took this bracelet when you arrived, because it was too small for you and hurting you—and I have just remembered. You are so little now, it will fit.” And she sat beside me and clasped it over my wrist. When I looked down my hand looked like Mom’s, back when she used to wear this same bracelet. Sickly, like you could break my bones by holding my hand.

For a second, after Baba clasped the bracelet onto me, I thought something would happen. A bang, a headache, and I’d find myself back in the school bathroom where Baba had left me, in time for Mom to pick me up when the bell rang. I’d be her baby again, just like she wanted, like Aunt Denise used to be when they were little girls: small and breakable, barely able to speak. She’d carry me around wrapped in blankets and feed me with a tiny spoon.

But I stayed put. No bang, no bathroom, no Mom. Tears crept from me though I tried to think: I am relieved.

“This bracelet, it is very nice. And I am glad you have a martenitsa. That means you are all settled in!” Baba said. The man in high heels gave way to a yogurt commercial, and Baba bustled to the kitchen. I heard her shoving dishes around. Soon she’d ask me to help her layer the sheets of dough for banitsa, and I would, my bracelet dangling over the skin-thin sheets.

A few nights later, I finally slept well. I ate breakfast with Baba and left home early. On a street near the outdoor market, I spotted a tree, which had spat out a few white blooms. The first of the spring. Already, a few people had tied red-and-white martenichki to the branches. I slipped mine over my hand and tied it to a low bough. The bigger challenge was removing the silver bracelet. I had to jiggle the clasp around using my sweaty free hand. I finally got it off and tied it to the branch, next to my Martenitsa. And that’s all there was to do. I left to get a snack from the vending machine.

The next day when I passed that same tree, my two bracelets had disappeared under an explosion of leaves. After that, my memories of home decomposed, as if home had been a song someone used to sing to me when I was too small to speak. This year I tied a martenitsa to the tree and, after I’d turned to go, remembered I’d meant to stay and look for something in the branches. I scanned for a glint of silver in the weak spring sun, but all I saw was red and white yarn tossing in the breeze.