Lab Girl

by Hope Jahren

  I didn’t get to finish my sentence, because instead of gradually slowing down, Teri had popped on the brake and, finding the road icy indeed, slammed down even harder until the brakes locked up. When we started to slide she compensated wildly with the steering wheel, and the van began waltzing in big, swinging fishtails as it flew forward. Teri was screaming at this point, having fully lost control of the vehicle, and I realized with horror that there was no way this was not going to end in some kind of crash.

  The last upright thing that I saw was the speed limit sign snapping like a Popsicle stick as the van managed to hit the one single vertical object within a ten-mile radius of where we were. We spun around and around, and when we finally slowed we were facing backward into the oncoming traffic. My terror that another car would hit us was overtaken by a sickening awareness that the van was more than leaning to one side—it had begun to tip over. I tried to brace myself against the dashboard as I felt us slowly roll sideways into the ditch, accompanied by the sickening crunching sound of metal, the clattering of plastic, Teri’s high-pitched shrieks, and what sounded like the fire of musket balls that heralded the first volley of the Civil War.

  I was amazed at how slowly everything seemed to be happening, like a roller coaster going over the tallest peak of the ride. My head hit the cool glass of the window and then bumped and rested against the thin felt covering of the van’s ceiling. All at once we were profoundly at rest. I opened my eyes and stood up awkwardly, the ceiling now serving as the floor. The other three passengers hung upside down like parachuters, effectively suspended by their seat belts.

  I commenced running back and forth on the ceiling of the van, trying to check on everyone. Miraculously, we were all uninjured, save for my bloody nose, which gushed with vigor when I started to laugh hysterically. Bill was the first to unfasten his seat belt and fall ungracefully to the ceiling, and I noted that he didn’t seem much fazed by the whole thing. Noah was in the far back, morosely wiping his grungy hipster hairdo with both hands. Teri simply hung there, looking dejected.

  I started to worry that the van might blow up, since this is what always happens in the movies after a crash, but I wasn’t sure what to do about it. Suddenly the back doors of the van flew open and a man’s voice announced, “I’m a veterinarian. Is everyone okay?”

  Apparently the car behind us had watched us go into the ditch, and the driver had pulled over to help.

  I could hardly contain my relief; I was ready to throw my arms around the guy and kiss him. “Hey, yeah, we’re fine!” I beamed.

  “Weather’s getting worse. Let’s get you all into town.” I looked past our new friend and saw a second set of Good Samaritans ease toward us, hazard lights flashing.

  “Okay,” I agreed happily. “Let’s do it!”

  The men helped us out and I was the last to leave, more because I had to dig my boots out of the van’s spectacularly dispersed contents than because I was the captain of our capsized ship. We jumped into their trucks in pairs and drove off toward who knew where.

  We didn’t know the drivers and we didn’t know where we were; we didn’t have any vehicle, any money, or any real plan—and I felt awesome. I was so glad to be alive that I thought my heart would burst through my chest. I was so grateful that nobody was hurt that I wanted to sing out at the top of my lungs. Whatever came next, no matter what it was, it was going to be a gift that I could never hope to deserve. I looked back as we drove away and saw Olivia’s flags fluttering across the ditch and onto the road; the yellow cross of Jamaica on its field of black and green caught my eye, and I smiled as I watched it scamper off into the distance.

  Twenty minutes later we were dumped off at a filling station on Spruce Street in West Rawlins. I thanked our rescuers profusely and the more I talked, the more I could sense that they just wanted to get out of there. Teri looked positively suicidal, sulking darkly on the outskirts of the group. One of the men took Noah aside and said, “Hey, don’t worry about it. You’ve had quite a scare.” It was only then that I realized how filthy we all were. When the van had overturned, so had everything in it, including the deli. It was particularly unfortunate that one of us had failed to adequately secure the top of our two-liter bottle after use, and by the look and smell of things, I surmised that Noah had been soaked in someone’s urine during the crash. I supposed that the man comforting him had assumed that the poor kid had somehow lost continence onto his own head, and I briefly contemplated setting the record straight.

  Bill interrupted my thoughts. “Well, whaddya know?” he said brightly. “We’ve got Triple-A!” Prior to abandoning our vehicle, he had removed the gas card from the glove box and started reading its fine print. Upon hearing this news, I turned to Bill and grinned in delight. “I’ll go phone and get them to yank us out of the ditch,” he said, and walked off toward the pay phone.

  “Tell them we’re at the Super 8,” I yelled up to him as I noticed the motel up the block. When Bill came back from the phone we picked up our backpacks and started walking to the motel. Once inside, we found that the lobby stank so badly that by comparison we had nothing to worry about.

  I greeted the woman behind the counter. “Hi there. We’re gonna stay here if you let us.”

  “Single room is thirty-five; double room is forty-five,” she told me without looking up or removing the cigarette from her mouth.

  I looked at Teri, who was clearly still in shock. “How about three rooms,” I said. “Singles for them, and he and I can share,” I added, indicating me and Bill. “Hundred and fifteen dollars total, right?”

  “And tax,” the woman added.

  “And tax. You bet,” I said with a smile, and timidly provided my credit card. To my surprise, she accepted it and slammed it through the manual system of pressed receipts.

  “All right, this just gets better and better,” I said, and then added, “Now, who wants dinner?”

  Teri was sullen. “I just want to go to bed,” she said, and I couldn’t tell whether she was angry at me or at herself. I wanted to ask her if she was okay, but then I thought that maybe that wasn’t the right thing to do, so I stood there and did nothing, which I also knew wasn’t the right thing to do. Noah had disappeared as soon as his room key was in his hand, so Bill and I left the motel and walked down Elm Street looking for a restaurant. We found a greasy steakhouse, ordered two rib eyes and two Cokes, and ate with gusto, only then realizing how hungry we were.

  The walk back to the motel was a lot like every other walk we’d ever taken together, and yet something had changed. We were like two mobsters who had killed the wrong guy; something about the whole near-fatal debacle had bound us together forever. We got back to the motel and let ourselves into our room. There was a king-size bed, with a grotesquely patterned burgundy quilted bedspread on it, covering sheets that definitely hadn’t been changed. The dark-paneled walls and heavy polyester curtains reeked of smoke and sweet-smelling disinfectant. The carpet was stained and sticky enough that we kept our boots on.

  It was late at night, and while my body was beyond exhausted, my mind was still on and glowing. Some bruises had started to make themselves known, and I had seen some blood in my urine when I went to the bathroom at the restaurant, but it hadn’t upset me. On that night I felt like nothing in the world would ever happen again that would be worth getting upset about.

  Bill and I lay side by side on the bed, staring up at the water-stained ceiling, dimly lit by the room’s single desk lamp. The faucet in the bathroom dripped, marking a gentle, steady beat. After about twenty minutes or so, Bill said, “Well, it’s finally happened. One of the students tried to kill us.”

  The ridiculousness of it all, put that way, made me giggle. My giggle turned into a laugh. I kept laughing, until I was laughing harder and harder from deeper and deeper inside. I laughed until my stomach cramped up and I couldn’t breathe properly. I laughed until I couldn’t control myself and I wet my pants just a little. I laughed until it hurt so much to lau
gh that I was begging not to laugh while I was laughing. I laughed until it sounded like I was crying. And Bill laughed too. We laughed out our joy and thanksgiving that we had somehow cheated Death and cheated him big-time. Our great good luck was a gift from Heaven and had revealed a world that was too sweet to leave. We would have another undeserved day and we would have it together. When our laughing finally tapered off, it was because our bodies were exhausted. I rested until I began to giggle again. Then I started to laugh, and Bill laughed too. We did it all over again. We lay side by side, fully clothed, and laughed and laughed with our boots on.

  Bill got up and went into the bathroom, but came out directly, saying, “Guess what, the toilet’s clogged. I knew we should have grabbed the bottles as we bailed.”

  “Just piss on the carpet,” I suggested. “I think that’s what people have been doing.”

  He reacted with disgust. “Don’t be an animal. The bathtub drains just fine.” I got up and took his suggestion, and then we both lay back down, side by side, and continued to stare at the ceiling.

  “You know, I feel bad about Teri,” I confessed. “She probably hates me.”

  “Oh, c’mon, she should be ecstatic that she’s alive,” Bill said adamantly.

  “She should be glad we’re all alive,” I added with emphasis, but I was troubled. “I’m sure she blames me for this mess. And ultimately, I guess it is my fault; I’m the one who signed her up for the conference in San Francisco.”

  “You made her travel across the country for free? In order to meet the people that she’ll be trying to get a job from after she graduates? Yeah, you’re a bitch all right. We should have stayed in Atlanta, where I can do all her lab work for her,” said Bill, voicing a hard-edged resentment that I hadn’t heard before. “She’s an adult,” he continued. “Shit, she’s like thirty-five or something; that’s a hell of a lot more grown-up than we are.”

  “Well, that’s not saying much,” I countered. “But it’s not like anybody gave a crap if I ever went to a conference back when I was a student.” I retreated into my own resentments.

  “Listen, you’re never going to be friends with the students, so just get that through your head right now,” Bill sighed. “You and I are going to work our asses off, teach them shit over and over, risk our fucking lives for them, and they are going to unfailingly disappoint us. That’s the job. That’s what we both get paid for.”

  “You’re right.” I played into his cynicism, but only halfheartedly. “We don’t really believe that, do we?”

  “No, we don’t,” Bill admitted. “But tonight we do.”

  I lay with my eyes closed and counted the drips, soft and regular, as they fell from the bathroom faucet, until Bill finally said, “But you do know that you can never be friends with the people that you work with.”

  I opened my eyes because his words had unexpectedly stung me. I ventured, “What about us? I mean, we’re friends, aren’t we?”

  “Nope,” he answered, and then continued, “You and I are just two sorry sonsabitches stranded in the middle of nowhere trying to save twenty-five bucks on a hotel room. So shut up and go to sleep.” And so we did, on opposite sides of the big bed, with our clothes and boots on. I decided that this must be what family feels like, and I thanked God for the day we’d had, and also for tomorrow while I was at it.

  The next morning we woke up late, and by the time we emerged from our room, it was a clear, sunshiny day. Teri had been waiting for me in the lobby, fuming. It didn’t look as if she’d slept at all that night.

  We walked across the street to the Big Rig Truck Stop and shared a single order of bacon and eggs, which provided more than enough food for four people. After Bill ordered his eighth cup of coffee, Teri looked at me and said, “I want you to take me to the Salt Lake City airport, so I can fly back home.” I nodded and got ready to tell her that I understood and that it would be no problem.

  Before I could open my mouth, Bill exploded. “What?” He threw his silverware down and grabbed the table as if the very Earth were shaking. “You roll the van and now your plan is just to bail out of here and leave us to deal with it?” he asked. “That is cold. That shit is just fucking cold.” He shook his head, appalled. Teri got up hastily and left, probably to go and cry in the restroom. I considered following her and telling her that everything would be all right and that everybody makes mistakes and that the whole trip had been a stupid idea and that we’d all just go home. But my intuition as a scientist told me that it would be a mistake for us to give up that easily.

  I sat at the table and thought as the dust was settling. Like everything else in the lab, the accident was ultimately my responsibility and the buck stopped with me. Last night I’d known that once morning came, I’d have to crawl out of bed and deal with the whole mess, none of which I had even remotely started to sort out. I had no idea where the van was, or my suitcase for that matter. I didn’t even really know how close or how far we might be from Salt Lake City. I knew that it was now less than twenty-four hours until my presentation at the conference, and that we still had to cross three entire states to get there. But mostly I was just glad to be sufficiently alive to get to try to solve these problems. I didn’t foresee anything that might kill me that day, and not getting killed was my new bar for what constituted a good day. There was nothing for it but to eat some bacon and then improvise.

  Although I agreed that pushing forward was the right thing to do, Bill’s reaction had surprised me. I slowly realized that he might have considered—yet never acted upon—the idea of abandoning me, and it dawned on me for the first time that he actually had the option of bailing out of his life in Georgia. Bill had taken this latest bizarre and scary episode in his usual stride and saw no way out but to put his head down and burrow out of the huge catastrophe that he’d had no part in creating. In fact, none of this had even seemed to bother him. The thing that did bother him was that someone else might consider abandoning us—the very idea enraged him in a way that all the frustrating situations we had ever encountered could not.

  I finished the thought that I had started before I fell asleep: This is my life and Bill is my family. The students will come and go, they’ll be what they are, some hopeful and some hopeless, but we won’t get attached. This is about me and Bill and what we can do together. All the rest of it is nothing more than background noise. I released myself from the lofty, boastful, greedy expectations of academia. I wasn’t going to change the world or educate a new generation or glorify an institution. It was about being in the lab and keeping it all together, body and soul. When I crawled out of that van alive, I checked my pockets and found only one currency that mattered: loyalty. I got up, paid at the register, and then held the door open for everyone as we left. “C’mon, gang, this’ll get better,” I told them. “It has to.”

  As we all walked back to the motel, I saw what looked like our van in the parking lot, but I decided that it couldn’t be because it was in perfect condition. As we got closer we found that it did look perfect, if you looked at only the passenger’s side. The other side was caved in like a crumpled beer can, and the driver’s side mirror was nowhere to be seen, having snapped off along with one of the windshield wipers. However, none of the windows were broken, and all of the doors on the passenger’s side opened and closed normally. Bill opened the van, looked inside, and commented on its “understated luxury.” The deli had flown open during the crash, and the interior reeked of piss, spoiled lunchmeat, and rancid cheese. Filth was stuck to the windows on one side because the whole mess had settled and frozen while the van had lain in the ditch all the previous night.

  Bill announced that our suitcases were all there and plopped himself down in the driver’s seat to try the engine. He turned the key and the engine immediately roared to life and purred while it idled. I saw Bill’s face break into a huge smile. “We’re in business!” he shouted. I held my nose and hopped up into shotgun position while Teri and Noah crawled into the two backs
eats.

  We returned to the highway and drove west toward Rock Springs, Wyoming, with Noah acting as the driver’s side-view mirror, silently signaling when the road was open. It occurred to me that he hadn’t spoken a word during the whole trip. I put my seat belt on and checked it several times to make sure that the mechanism had caught.

  We pulled onto the highway and I calculated how many hours we were from San Francisco: sixteen, maybe seventeen at the most—we’d just make it. I didn’t count on the blizzard that was raging in the Sierras, but that wouldn’t become an issue until later. For the moment, everything looked good. Bill suddenly exclaimed, “Oh shit! We forgot to pull over and look for the side mirror.” Then he added, “Oh well, we can do it on the way back.”

  I was stunned; I had been so focused upon just getting to San Francisco, I hadn’t even thought about the fact that we were going to have to drive this broken thing all the way back across the country. I started to say something about it. As if reading my mind, Bill pointed at me and said, “Nope, I don’t want to hear it. You just sit there and think about your presentation.” Then he added, “After all we’ve been through, it had better be good.”

  Compared with the trip there, the five-day conference seemed uneventful, and as soon as it ended we drove back to Atlanta, this time via first I-10 and then I-20, which included Arizona, New Mexico, and two hundred miles of Texas sans map. Each day, Bill observed that the country was beautiful, and I agreed. By the time we got to Phoenix, Teri was fully herself again, and bygones were bygones.

  I returned the van late in the evening after we arrived in Atlanta, shoved the keys in the rental pool’s after-hours box, and walked away. Within a month every administrator at the university was absolutely furious with me. I insisted that it had been me behind the wheel, and reassured them again and again of my complete lack of remorse, arguing that I was far too grateful to be alive to find fault with whatever miracle had granted us safety. They didn’t get it, and I finally stopped expecting them to. There was one person who did get it, who got all of it, and I had finally fully realized how damn lucky I was to have him along.