by Megan Abbott
“No,” I say firmly. “Look, it’s only been a few days. It—”
“I was just telling his parents. The police pinged Alex’s phone,” she says. “It’s either turned off or the battery ran out. This is the last known location.”
“The lab?”
“Or nearby.”
“Cell towers,” I say, as dismissively as I can, trying not to ponder what they can find out next. Texts between Alex and me? I’ve been thinking a lot about it and I have to tell Dr. Severin. Alex, you CANNOT do this. “That’s junk science. It doesn’t mean anything.” I pause. “I don’t have to tell you that.”
But she will not be stopped.
“There’s something else,” she says, blocking me as I try to pass, leaning against the hard casement corner into the next wing. “Thursday night, I was supposed to see Alex, but he never called me back. And when I talked to him Friday, he said he forgot, but now the detectives keep asking about it.”
Thursday night.
“You know cops,” I say, averting my eyes, fighting off a vaulting panic.
“We had plans, a lecture I wanted to go to. I drove by his apartment a few times.” She looks at me, jaw tight. “I don’t think he ever came home.”
Zipperz Thursday-night specials. Long Island Iced Teas, two for one.
She looks at me, head tilted. “Did you see him Thursday night? Were you all working late or something?”
I move to the door. “No. Sorry. I left early.”
She doesn’t say anything, her mouth opening then closing.
“I’m sure it’s nothing,” I add.
“Why are you so sure?” she asks after a moment. The chilliness chillier.
I glance at the clock on the wall. Two fifty-seven, thank God.
“Eleanor, I’m sorry. I have to go,” I say, not quite pushing past her. “It’s later than I thought.”
NOW
GRANT AWARD CEREMONY says the hastily written sign, Sharpie on posterboard, an easel in the auditorium lobby.
I’m looking for Diane.
Glass-walled and teeming with people, the space reminds me of a greenhouse I once visited on a class trip in first grade. It was exotic, like a jungle in a book, but there was something wrong and I kept telling my teacher that there was a smell of dead things.
That’s how greenhouses smell, he said. That’s how nature smells.
But it turned out the place was filled with spring-loaded rat traps and we found a dead cat in one of them and most of the girls and two of the boys screamed. I knew I’d smelled the dead thing, even if no one believed me.
Through the crush, I see Dr. Severin. You couldn’t miss her. She’d made a quick wardrobe change for the occasion. The woman in red—red stockings, to be precise. And a black leather shift with long, vented sleeves like tent flaps. Booties with gold at the toe. Soft and hard. I can’t take my eyes off her. Who could?
The auditorium is swollen with university bigwigs in pinstripes, with white coats from the medical school, with grayish lab rats like me. Everyone so eager to be pulled from their routine at three o’clock on a Tuesday.
All of it feels faintly ludicrous. Let’s toast female hormonal madness! Let’s raise a glass for menses! Isn’t womanhood a dark and mysterious thing? Will we ever penetrate its surface, fathom its depths, dissect its enigmas, lay bare its witchy power?
I’m stuck behind Maxim, who’s nearly a foot taller than me and, texting furiously, barely notices me. Juwon and Zell don’t appear at all.
Scanning the crowd, I spot Diane standing over by the door, under the exit sign. Her usual poise gone, she leans against the curtained doorway, neck thrown back, arms hanging stiffly like an unposed mannequin’s.
Before I can move toward her, the ceremony begins.
Dean Baker presents Dr. Severin with a novelty bottle of champagne that is nearly half her height. Six liters, he announces, “a size known as the Methuselah.” It is bigger even than the novelty check behind her. The grant funds themselves, confetti-shredded by administrative fees and overhead, wouldn’t appear for months.
But the champagne bottle, wrapped in an enormous ribbon, looks oddly right in Dr. Severin’s slender hands. The way she holds it, like a club.
“I’m not going to give a speech,” she says, that sweep of her hair like smoke emanating from that leather dress, the red slash of her stockings. Chosen, I have to believe, for this occasion. Blood and the woman. And the woman waiting for the blood to come. “Instead, I just want to say a word about Shakespeare.”
I feel my lips part. I see Diane’s head turn. It swivels side to side. She finds me. I can feel her looking at me.
“My favorite character has always been Lady Macbeth,” Dr. Severin is saying. “And my favorite moment is when she’s trying to get her nerve up to kill the king. She calls upon the darker spirits and demands, Unsex me here.
“Make my blood thicken, she says.
“Make it come to a halt. Stop my blood. Stop me from feeling anything womanly, or human.”
I look down at my hands, which are pale. Blinking twice, for a second I see Diane’s hands there—gray-red, like a piece of meat left on the counter.
“Unsex me,” Dr. Severin repeats. “It’s a plea I’ve heard countless times. From Tania, who hid under her desk at work so no one could see her crying. From Ayoka, who dug a razor into her arms every month and became afraid to pick up her children. From Iris, who had a total hysterectomy at age twenty-four because the week before her period she couldn’t stop vomiting. From so many others.”
Looking up, I see Diane’s eyes on me again, direct and unblinking.
“Make my blood stop. Stop that unbearable push of feelings, feelings gone out of control. For these women, womanhood feels like a wretched curse, and they seek relief, would kill for it, some of them. And no one will help them. Not even the darker spirits.
“But the fault for these feelings, this monthly horror show, does not lie with uteruses, their sex. It does not even lie with their estrogen and progesterone. Not with their bodies at all, much less their minds. The problem lies with science. Which has failed them. We have. We’ve failed these women.
“But no more. We are only beginning, but we are, in fact, beginning.”
The clapping gathers loudly, thunderously, as Dr. Severin steps back, that face stage-lighted and luminous. In seconds, the crowd surges forward, moving toward the doorway, toward the lobby and the discount champagne.
When I look up at the microphone again, Dr. Severin is reaching out for someone, pulling someone close to her to share the applause. She is even smiling.
I see the blondness first, the back of her long neck. Diane swept up by Dr. Severin’s silken arm, its winged sleeve long and shining. Diane steps inside it. She nearly disappears.
What might Diane have told Dr. Severin? I think again. About me, about Alex. And what might it take for her to cut me loose?
In the lobby, plastic flutes are stacked into high pyramids and someone has pulled out all the decorations from the science-achievements dinner last month: the double-helix-shaped table runners, the test-tube flower holders, floating candles in beakers. Where are the ovary gravy boats? Alex had joked to me. Oh, Alex…
It’s too much. All of it. The crush of the bald-pated well-wishers, the red-faced scientists and Adam’s-appled students encircling Dr. Severin.
As everyone pushes forward, I push harder. I don’t care; no one knows me, no one even sees me, ever. These men never do. And I need to reach Diane, at the center of everything. At Dr. Severin’s side.
I push through the lab coats, the shiny blazers and yellowing collars, all the white-haired white men with gray or flushed faces, and reach for Diane, whispering her name in her ear.
“I need to talk to you,” I say, pulling her near the windows, out of the scrum.
“Kit,” she says, her voice even lower than mine, “did you see him too?”
“See who?” I say. “Diane, you told the detective things. Th
e questions she was asking—”
Diane’s eyes widen. “No,” she insists, our bodies pushed closer together with each wave of men behind us, “Kit, I would never do that.”
“How else would they know about Thursday night?” I say, trying to be discreet.
Behind Diane, a few feet away, a loud bearded man is talking animatedly to Dr. Severin, touching her shoulder over and over again with hairy hands. Sweat shimmers on her brow from the hot lights.
“I didn’t say anything,” Diane says, again, shaking her head over and over. “But I’ve been looking for you. To tell you about what happened.”
“You’re lying,” I say, and her hand is on my arm, pulling me against one of the cold, fogged-windowed walls. “You’re lying again.”
Her fingers slip around my wrist. “Kit, I saw him. Over in the vivarium.”
She is so close now. I can smell her, a whiff of something unclean.
“Serge?” I say, yanking my wrist free.
“No. No. I saw him.”
In that instant I know who she means and there’s a stiff feeling across my chest, my heart.
“That’s impossible,” I say.
Her eyelid twitches, and then again. And the smell from her, earthy and sharp.
“He was walking and holding his throat.”
“Diane, stop,” I say, turning away, pressing my hand against the cold glass. “We were there. We know.”
But she can’t hear me, her fingers to her own neck. “He was moving so slowly, but I’m sure it was him. I called out to him.”
“You were imagining—”
“He didn’t have a mustache anymore,” she whispered. “But I’d know his walk anywhere.”
“Diane.” His mustache. It’s just like in my apartment, that telltale slip: The poison wasn’t meant for him. It just happened and then it was too late. “Are you okay?”
She looks at me. “Of course I am. But we need to be careful, Kit.”
“What do you mean? Diane, I think you—”
“I’m not sure we can trust Serge. I don’t think he likes me. I know he doesn’t. I—” Her face tightens. “She wants us.”
“He doesn’t like…” I turn, following her gaze, and see Dr. Severin summoning Diane from her circle of admirers. She doesn’t seem to see me. Only Diane.
“Don’t go,” I say, my voice reedy and insistent. “We need to talk. You’re not okay, Diane. And what do you mean about Serge?” But Diane is already moving toward Dr. Severin, slipping between all the old men to her mentor’s side.
“Lena, dear!” The plummy tones of Dean Baker, his face Rudolph-red and shiny amid the flashing cameras, the energy. “I have so many people you need to meet.” He gets an eyeful of Diane, matching him for height. “Why not bring your lovely protégée?”
Through the white coats, the dark-flanneled arms, Diane looks at me, and then the crush of men temporarily overwhelms us, an enormous silver tureen of wan shrimp set down center table, an impossible wheel of cheese, and the pop-pop of the Methuselah, all heads turning to watch.
“What about Kit?” Diane is saying, the dean’s shiny arm around her, her voice small and far away now. “Kit?”
The smile on Dr. Severin’s face is fixed, a mask. Her eyes move right past me.
NOW
Everyone is leaving or gone.
I wonder if it’s wise to stay in the lab with the detectives still here, with Eleanor still lurking, closer and closer to a mad Ophelia, her drooping sweater sleeves like water-weighted hems.
But it seems too dangerous to leave. With Diane and what is going on in her head. And Dr. Severin is still here.
When I return to our floor, the first thing I see is the bright yellow security tape crisscrossed across the door to G-21. In the dark hallway, it nearly glows.
I start walking faster and faster.
All I can think of in that moment is the floor by Alex’s lab bench. Maxim’s eyes drawn there. What did he see? A fleck of browned blood? A bit of tissue? The tail of a washed-away spatter? A shirt thread or strand of hair? Was it mine or his or even hers?
Or any of the hundreds of samples—blood, semen, urine, tissue cultures, cells of humans and animals—that pass through the lab every day?
And then all I can think of is that I must leave. Now.
But as I reach the elevator, I hear someone call my name.
I turn and see it’s Detective Harper with her partner, a rooster-breasted young man who missed a spot shaving, both of them with coats on.
“What’s going on in G-21?” I ask. My voice sounds woozy to my own ears.
“We’ll see,” she says. “Maybe nothing.”
“Or maybe something,” her partner says, and I can’t tell if he’s speaking to her or to me.
“We were looking for you,” she says, her police radio crackling.
“You were?” I say, and the elevator doors shuttle open. My heart suspended in my chest.
“We have more questions,” her partner says.
“Oh.” Nodding, nodding.
“Just a few,” Harper says. “We were hoping you might come by the station later.”
“The station? I…why there?”
We all watch as the elevator doors close again. I look at myself in the mirror, a white blur.
“It’s easier,” she says. “Alex Shaffer’s parents are arriving tonight and meeting us there so we can take some DNA samples.”
I push the elevator button again.
The male detective looks at me, shifting his weight from one leg to the other.
“Okay,” I say. “Anything I can do to help.”
The elevator doors open and I walk inside.
“Great,” Detective Harper says. “We’ll see you soon, then.”
“Right,” I say, and both of them watch me as the doors tremble closed.
It’s a trap, I think. They’ll ask to look at my phone; they’ll ask for DNA samples.
In the parking lot, walking briskly and close to the curb, I try to avoid seeing anyone.
And maybe, I think, my mind racing, they found something on the cameras too.
I spot Juwon and Zell ahead of me, walking to their cars.
I slow down, hang back. Catch my breath.
“They didn’t ask me much,” Juwon is saying, his voice lifting in the evening air. “It was quick.”
“Fleming was in there a long time,” Zell says. “But Owens was in there longer than anyone.”
“See you tomorrow,” Juwon says, stopping at his car, “unless I get a job offer tonight.”
Zell waves and keeps walking toward the bike rack.
My head down, I try to veer the other way so he doesn’t see me. But as he walks under the golden cone of one of the parking-lot lights, I find myself stopping.
Zell, his back to me, is tugging off his messenger bag.
That’s when I see it, like a warning flag, a hazard sign. That YEAH, SCIENCE T-shirt, so neon it glows in the growing dark. Burn-your-retinas green against the pink of his thick arms.
With his lab coat off, I finally see the back of the T-shirt, the word BITCH! emblazoned there.
Where did I—
A week ago—less—my Long Island Iced Tea nearly knocked from my hand. The careless shove of a passerby in a BITCH! T-shirt. Zell, in the crowd that night at Zipperz. Elbowing me, spilling my drink. Watching Alex and me.
How I’d turned, thinking I’d recognized him. Wait, I’d thought, I know—
Zell at Zipperz, like a bad joke.
“Zell,” I call out. “Zell, you son of a bitch.”
When he sees me looking at him now, he smiles, mean as dirt.
“What did you tell them? The detectives. About me and Alex.”
My hand on that rubbery arm of his, his elbow crooking, Zell looks surprised, but only for a second.
“Only the truth,” he says, squinting at me. “Except I didn’t tell them how you can’t hold your booze. Or keep your hands off—”
“Shut up,” I say, releasing his arm, pushing back. “You saw us at a bar—so what? We had a few drinks. What’s it to you?”
He touches the spot on his arm my hand had clasped. A coolness drops across his face. He turns to his bike, making me wait.
“You and Alex, always laughing together, thick as thieves,” he says, popping his U-lock, shoving the key into his pocket. “You know what he said to me once? That he could tell he was gonna get into trouble with you. How you just screamed trouble to him.”
His face scrunches; he seems suddenly fragile and nasty at the same time. A little boy with a lit firecracker in his hand.
“Alex never said that,” I say. “I don’t believe you.”
“Look, I told the detectives the truth. You two were at the bar. You were all over each other, making out on the patio.”
I won’t let him see a wince.
“If you have nothing to hide,” he says, pulling his bike from the rack, “you don’t have anything to worry about. Do you?”
He’s not smiling at all. He has never looked so serious.
“By the way, enjoy the new gig,” he says. “Win that Nobel for the ladies.”
I don’t remember the walk back to my apartment other than the hard wind, my hands clutched to the edges of my jacket.
I can’t put any of the pieces together.
At home, I sit on the plastic chair and scroll through my phone, pointlessly deleting old texts from Alex, from Diane. I don’t read any of them. I just delete them all.
It’s not until I tug my jacket off that I realize I never even took off my lab coat. Diane’s rabbit’s foot slides from my pocket to the floor.
I look at it. Lots of luck you gave me, I think.
Once, my dad’s second wife, Debra, gave my mom a Mother’s Day gift: a sackful of crystals and coins and other pocket pieces and a few things that we couldn’t figure out—dried-up things that might have been old feathers or bug wings. Debra called it a jack bag and said she’d made it personally to bless her. Two days later, my mom started bleeding even though she’d had a partial hysterectomy years ago. It went on for days and she hated going to the doctor. Finally, she took the bag, drove out to the salt marsh, and tossed it in, which she said was the only way to make sure it stopped. Later, I’d wonder if it ever did.
