by Megan Abbott
I pick up the rabbit’s foot and toss it across the room, watch it skitter across the pile of papers, articles, case studies on the floor.
There’s a sharp hum in the back of my head, the downy hair back there, tingling.
Rabbit’s foot. Rabbit’s foot. Then I remember.
Moments later, I’ve heaped all my PMDD files on the coffee table, the pages fluttering. I know it’s in here. I read it only days ago.
Journal Articles, Pharma, Case Studies. My fingers flipping through the folders.
And there it is. The folder labeled, in my inconstant handwriting, Severin Studies 2005-2009.
Case Studies (Unpublished)
I’d even circled the paragraph:
At age twelve, Nina’s mother, who Nina believes also suffered from undiagnosed PMDD, gave her a rabbit’s-foot key chain. Nina notes that when “the feelings came, I’d stroke it and stroke it, hoping they would go away.”
I sit down on the carpet, my elbows on the coffee table, and begin reading:
Case Study
(see also: Exclusion Criteria: Rejected Subjects)
Nina, a twenty-year-old college student at a large university, enrolled in the first round of the PMDD and GABAA receptors study. During intake, she described feelings of extreme moodiness, anxiety and despair that frequently overwhelm her. In recent years, she states, her symptoms have become a source of great distress. While Nina cannot point to connections between her “dark moods” and her menstrual cycle, she has read about PMDD and feels certain “it explains what has gone wrong in my life.”
And farther down:
Nina reports that her mother suffers from heavy periods and, through Nina’s childhood, marked the number of tampons she used on index cards. When asked for more information about her mother, Nina refuses to give any.
“I have disordered thoughts,” she informed the interviewer more than once. When told she didn’t seem disordered but in fact seemed calm, Nina noted she had learned not to show her feelings because of childhood experiences.
When asked to articulate those experiences, Nina declined to go into detail. Her survey responses show that she did not live with the same parent in the same home for more than a few months after she was seven years old. When asked about these responses, Nina again declined to elaborate.
And then:
Nina reports feelings of aggression that she struggles to control. When asked if these feelings had affected her personal relationships, she stated that she had never had any. “I don’t want to burden anyone with my problems,” she says. “And I have never had feelings like that.” Nina reports no sexual experiences.
Finally:
Outcome/Recommendations: After three months of the symptom calendar and weekly consultations, it was determined that Nina did not meet the diagnostic criteria for PMDD. Her symptoms (emotional lability, irritability and anger) are not confined to her luteal cycle and persist during and after her period as well. While excluded from this study, she was strongly encouraged to undergo further gynecological testing as well as psychiatric treatment for anxiety, feelings of aggression, psychosocial difficulties, possible sexual dysfunction and development issues.
The date on the case study is nine years ago, when I was an undergrad at State.
Diane was one of Dr. Severin’s test subjects. And neither one has said a word about it. Just as neither one noted that Diane had been one of Dr. Severin’s summer interns a few years later.
Dr. Severin and Diane. Mentor and student. Researcher and rejected subject. Doctor and rejected patient.
I don’t know what any of it means. A clue to a mystery I didn’t know I was in.
But I do know this: It’s time to open that cellar door myself and climb in.
In the end, my mom always said, there’s only you.
Remember this, Dr. Severin said, you will have to fight your entire life.
NOW
Why didn’t you tell me about Nina?, I type, my fingers shaking.
What?
About Nina. The case study. You were one of Dr. Severin’s test subjects. You told her you had PMDD.
Kit. No. You’ve got it wrong.
What is going on with you two? What are you doing to me—
We shouldn’t be texting.
Meet me at the lab now.
She doesn’t reply.
Within twenty minutes I’m back at the lab, hunting for her.
The hallways empty and echoing, I look in the lounge, the prep room, the ladies’ room, Dr. Severin’s darkened office. I don’t dare break the tape to G-21.
The only place left to go is the vivarium. The animal unit and its honeycomb of rooms, cage wash, prep, necropsy, freezer.
I don’t see Serge. It’s after six and the last junior lab tech is leaving. He waves to me through the glass, swinging his backpack.
When he is gone, I step inside, slide on a paper coat, a pair of shoe covers, as if Serge is there, nodding and smiling his approval.
Walking through the space, I can feel my phone buzzing in my pocket.
Where are you?
The only movement is the constant scurrying and scampering from the cages. I stop at the feed room, which I haven’t set foot in since Serge scooped clumps of Panda Garden mice from the floor.
Vivarium, I text back. We need to talk.
Standing at the feed-room door, I hear something, a movement. A shuffle. The shush-shush of shoe covers on concrete.
I step inside.
Everything is whirring. The ventilation system, but also a trio of standing fans that someone—Serge, or the maintenance staff—put in there days before, to get rid of the mouse carcass smell.
At the center is Eleanor, her back to me. The heat screaming up the pipes and the trapped, fetid air blowing everywhere, yet she’s wearing a thick wool coat.
Paper flapping, window blinds shirring, everything is moving, her straw-colored hair pirouetting around her like a ballerina’s tulle.
All I can think of, seeing her, is the undergraduate who died a few years back, her long locks catching in the lab’s metal lathe, spinning her around tighter and tighter, her neck pressed against the machine until she could no longer breathe. (Rapunzel, Rapunzel, Zell snarked. That’s why the ladies shouldn’t be in the labs.)
“Eleanor,” I say, walking toward her. “Eleanor, are you okay?”
Back still facing me, she doesn’t move, her shoulders hunching higher in some odd, animal way. Like the wiggle of a garter snake.
“You shouldn’t be in here,” I say. “We had an infestation. The smell…”
Finally, she turns. All that prettiness is gone, knotted tight in the center of her face. Her fingers tug at her coat’s winking buttonholes.
“I was leaving—Alex’s parents land in an hour. But I got turned around. Then I saw someone,” she says. “Or thought I did.”
“Probably the junior tech,” I say. “I can show you out.”
She looks at me, blinking twice, three times, like she can’t focus. “They’re bringing the dogs in,” she says. “The state police. There’s only one reason they bring dogs in.”
Suddenly, I feel painfully sorry for her. Because she’s right and because it’s only going to get worse.
“Let’s get you out of here.”
I move toward her, trying to direct her to the door.
“They asked me something,” she says, not budging. “The detectives. They asked if I thought Alex might be involved with someone.” She’s still looking at me, wiping her face on the rough wool of her coat. It’s a statement that’s also a question.
“I don’t think he was that kind of guy, Eleanor,” I say, my voice a magnificent deceit, so magnificent it frightens me. “Alex, he—”
“He was always drawn to people who were weak. Maybe that’s what happened here.”
“What?” The fan whirring past us again, Eleanor’s hair whipping wildly like some comic fright wig.
“Even unstable. Maybe he thought he co
uld help her.”
For a strange, fleeting second, I find myself wondering if this is true.
“Her?” I say. My phone starts buzzing in my pocket.
Her bright eyes are fixed on me, big and spiraling. “And this person,” she says. “This unstable person. I think she may have done something to him.”
“No, Eleanor, I’m sure that’s not—”
“So was it you?” she asks, so suddenly, so plainly I think I’ve misheard.
“What?”
She’s staring at me intently now and I’m afraid to move my eyes, to look at anything but her.
“I heard them talking. Those guys, your coworkers. Saying you were Alex’s lab wife.”
“That’s a joke. That doesn’t mean anything.”
“That you were at a bar with him on Thursday night.”
I don’t say anything. The fan lashes past once more, thunderous now.
“I just need to know,” she says, her voice low and desperate. “Please. Was it you?”
“No,” I say, so easily I surprise myself.
She doesn’t say anything, her face gleaming with sweat, her coat gaping open, its silky purple interior glaring at me.
“It wasn’t me,” I say. “And I don’t think anyone’s done anything to him. I really don’t.”
I say it as firmly as I can, as firmly as a doctor might, as Dr. Severin might, firm and resolute.
“I don’t know,” she starts, her fingers to her temples. She backs away, one step, two. And in that moment, I see the large fan behind her oscillate, its blade catching one wheaty hank of her hair.
I grab her so hard that she cries out as I pull her toward me. It’s after she stumbles forward—knocking the cord loose, the fan shuddering to silence—that I hear the sound. The groaning above us, the fan no longer drowning it out. It seems to be coming from the ceiling, the dimpled panel from the infestation, its edges shorn, a hole in its center leading to some dark interior. I think of the mice plummeting from there just a few days ago. Serge’s dutiful care of their remains even though they weren’t his mice, or even lab mice at all.
I look up and that’s when I see it, my heart halting.
“You need to go,” I say.
Because I don’t want her to see what I see, which is the thing hanging from the narrow space between the sagging panel and the wall. The pale blue flap of Alex’s linen shirt.
“There you are,” a voice says. It’s Diane, pale as a cadaver in the doorway. “Your taxi is here, Eleanor. To take you to Alex’s parents.”
We don’t say a word to each other until Eleanor’s steps have faded on the concrete, until we hear the elevator chime and carry her away.
“Diane,” I say, and my eyes lift again to the ceiling.
Her eyes lift too.
III.
Present, I flee you: absent, I find you again:
Your image follows me in the forest’s night
…I search for myself: and yet find no one there.
—Jean Racine, Phèdre
NOW
“I told you I saw him,” she whispers, her fingers to her mouth like a child. She even seems smaller, seems to be shrinking.
“Diane, you didn’t see him.”
“I did,” she says. “But his mustache was gone.”
I take a breath. “Did you know he was up there?”
She shakes her head, a gray film on her face under the light.
“Why would I ever believe you?” I say. “You’ve lied about everything.”
“No, Kit,” she says, the ceiling groaning again above us. “You’ve got it wrong.”
“Could Dr. Severin know?” I ask, my head aching.
“About my dad?” she says, her eyes dark, stepping forward now.
“What?” I say, impatient. “About Alex. Could she know?”
But Diane doesn’t seem to be listening to me. “No one else can ever know. You’re the only one. The only one who knows what I am.”
What I am. What are you, Diane?
My hand shoots out before I can stop it. The slap is almost a punch, a hard clapping sound, so hard she stumbles backward. My palm print on her cheek, a scorch.
“I never wanted it,” I say. “I never asked for it.”
The groan is more than a groan this time.
We both look up at the ceiling panel. Swollen like the belly of a whale.
It seems to take forever, the panel peeling loose like a zipper unzipping.
“Kit.” Diane’s hands are on me, hard, the only time they ever felt hot to the touch.
Pushing, both of us leaping against one wall, her arm around my waist. The scatter of particle dust, the ceiling panel splintering, like the hull of a ship torn loose by an iceberg. The sudden hard thud against me, knocking my feet out from under me, seeing Alex’s blue shirt billowing, hearing the awful thump. Everything falling.
My right hand aches. I’m holding something tight between my fingers.
I’m lying on the floor of the feed room. My face is wet, and my legs, and there’s a coldness all through me. I can’t see from one eye; something’s caught between my lashes.
I blink it loose, look down at my hand, see what is pressed between my fingers: the blue linen of Alex’s shirt. Next to me, the soft limbs of Alex himself. His shirt lifting like a cloud each time the fans pass.
Then what looks like a half-sunken carnival balloon, green and twisted.
Shifting myself, turning, I know it’s no balloon but Alex’s arm curled around itself, the rigor long past. Bloated and blistered and meaty. And something delicate, the poke of a leg, the body folded in on itself. The pants fabric straining, stiff with brown blood, and popping from it a calf, the delicate, almost feminine turn of an ankle.
Alex. Poor Alex.
In that moment, I know if I see his face, I will die.
But there’s no face to see, his body wrapped tight around itself like a Christmas present. The soft black of his soft hair, hair I stroked with my nail-bitten fingers a few nights ago.
You saved her, a voice is saying, deep, male.
No, she saved me, says Diane.
Diane’s face looms above me, that halo of hair lit by a bank of fluorescent tubes hanging by a pair of shredding cords behind her.
The only friend I ever had, Diane is saying.
“There she is.” That male voice again, thick, throaty, familiar. “It would take more than a few pieces of wet fiberboard to knock that brain loose in its skull.”
Serge’s face hovers above me, his cheeks even more distended, an earthy smell coming from his dark mouth.
I try to move, but my neck bends like a plastic straw, and for a second I see stars. I’m on a sofa, itchy and low-slung, in Serge’s pocket-size office, just off the vivarium. The walls are white and bare, a laptop humming on his desk beside a tidy stack of file folders.
“How did I get here?” I say. “You carried me.”
“It was not so impressive as it sounds. I give my choreography a C minus.”
All the lights are off except one plastic gooseneck lamp. Classical music murmurs from a tiny glowing speaker. Through the door, I see the tech kitchenette, barely big enough for a dorm fridge, a narrow sink, a burnt-orange percolator warming itself.
“I should take you to the hospital,” he says, sitting on the sofa arm, “but that is not possible.”
I feel the back of my head, soft and spongy. The smell.
“So you did it?” I say to Serge. “You found the body. You put it up there.”
Serge nods slowly, the snaky trails of a hanging plant dancing behind him as the radiator hisses. “It was not meant to be a long-term solution,” he says. “I pride myself on always finishing my work. The cleaning, the sterilization, swiping his access card so it appeared he left. But this job I could not complete. Some tasks are too objectionable.”
Serge’s words don’t make sense and I wonder if it’s his swollen mouth, the medication from the teeth extraction.
�
�Disposing of the body as if it were lab waste was more than I could tolerate. I had a crisis of conscience. Surely you understand that. You of all people should understand.”
“I don’t understand anything,” I whisper, trying to sit up. “Why would that be your job?”
“That is my point,” he says, helping me upright on the sofa. “I have sealed off the room. To give us some time to consider things. It’s ten p.m. No one will be here until six.”
“And…Diane?”
His face darkens. He leans back against the wall, one knee up on the sofa arm. I sit up taller, holding the back of my head, which feels like it might peel off.
“She is here as well. She has cleaned herself in the ladies’ room.”
On cue, Diane appears in the doorway, her hands clasped in front of her, a brush of blood on her brow.
“The front of her head, the back of yours,” Serge says to me.
“Together, we’ve got one whole brain,” I murmur.
Serge points Diane toward the only other seat, a metal folding chair with bright red foot caps like painted nails. “Excuse my manners,” he says. “I do not have many guests.”
“Do I smell jasmine?” Diane asks, taking a seat. There’s a look in her eyes I can’t name.
There is something between them. Something fresh and nasty.
“Good nose,” he says. Then smiles. “Look at me. As I say, I don’t have many guests. I’ve been having tea. Would you like some?”
We sit for a moment in silence as Serge moves around in the kitchenette, his hands like long-necked birds. I can’t figure out what’s going on, but something’s happened between them.
