by Megan Abbott
She looks at me.
“He didn’t look inside the bag,” I say, my voice speeding up. “And it was sealed.”
“How often do they pick up those biohazard bins?”
“I don’t know,” I say, staring down at our legs, our feet, both of us smelling like my soap. That’s when I feel a hot rush up my cheeks, under my eyes. But I don’t let it happen. I won’t let her see it.
“Kit,” she says, very gently, “we need to stick together now.”
“I need some air.”
“I won’t let anything happen to you.”
I step out onto the balcony and stay there, alone.
The sun starts to drag down and the sky goes vermilion, smoke drifting from wildfires somewhere. Calcium, I think. The flame test just two nights before. His hand holding the wire in the Bunsen’s flare. Everything beginning, or seeming to.
But it had begun before, hadn’t it? He would push and probe and prod and pry. He would find my weakest spot. He would take what he wanted for himself.
It’s easier to think about this than about anything else.
When I step back inside, I don’t see her.
For a few frantic seconds, I think she’s gone and wonder what it means. But then the bathroom door opens and she appears, newly pale, her eyes red.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes.” She walks toward her backpack, sitting on my lone dining-room chair, the plastic one with the crack.
“You were in there awhile.”
“I felt a little sick,” she says. “I’m okay now.” As she reaches for her backpack, her shirt lifts, exposing a small bit of flesh. I nearly flinch at the xylophone of bones on her spine.
“The sun’s down,” I say, hoping she’ll leave so at last I can breathe.
She nods distractedly. “You’ve been through a lot,” she says. “Just remember, it was an accident, like you said. And anyone can have one bad second. The poison wasn’t meant for him. It just happened and then it was too late.”
“Poison—what?”
Diane looks confused a moment, then shakes her head. “I mean the accident. It wasn’t your fault. That’s all I mean.”
I look at her, the quivering in her hands. She seemed so cool, so self-possessed in G-21 and with Serge. But now I wonder if any of that was real. Was it possible she’d been going through all these motions while her brain was somersaulting back in time? The thought is terrifying.
“You can go home,” I say quickly. “I’ll get rid of the shoes and lab coat. It makes more sense.”
“But no one here knows me. Doesn’t it make more sense—”
“I’ll do it,” I say, even as I wonder if my rust-shingled car will stall in the evening chill, if I ever replaced the headlight. “It’s my responsibility.”
She nods, sliding her backpack on. Reaches for her keys, which have fallen to the carpet.
“I’ll leave, then,” she says, looking out the window. “It’s dark enough.”
The lab coat is dripping with excruciating slowness on the shower bar, the shoes from the tub. Lifting them to my face, I think I can still see the blood, smell it even, which is impossible.
I know I need to get them out of here.
I put them in a garbage bag, and then I put that in another garbage bag.
I grab my jacket. My fingers move strangely on the buttons, as though they’re no longer used to routine tasks, only blood and mayhem.
In the building parking lot, I scrape massage-parlor flyers off the windshield of my slowly dying Pontiac hatchback. The only thing I’d ever won, back when I was nineteen. The local used-car dealership held a contest. Whoever kept a hand on it the longest won. Ten-minute breaks every three hours. It took me fifty-six hours, and I got lucky when my main competition, a truck driver with legs thick as propane tanks, fell asleep on his feet. All this for a clunker with sixty thousand miles on it already, my cousin Scott said, shaking his head.
These days, I use it only to drive to the big box store once a month for bales of paper towels, coffee tins like barrels. I hope it will start and it does and before I know it my foot is shaking over the gas and the car erupts to shuddery life.
Driving, my SoWest Lab Supplies baseball cap pulled low, I begin to make my way out of town. No one sees me; no one ever does.
But my brain zigzags to dire places. It’s as if Diane’s brain, so wary, so watchful, after more than a decade in hiding, so wired for vigilance and self-protection, has infected my own.
Why had she been so eager to dispose of the shoes? Why did I listen to her?
In the end, there’s only you, my mom always said, sitting me down at the kitchen table to explain about payday loans and title loans and my dad’s bounced checks. And your mom, of course.
NOW
There are storm drains all over town. And the next town and the next. But somehow I can’t stop driving.
I’m at least a hundred miles away when I pull off the interstate and meander a few miles until I find a highway drain that looks deep enough to devour anything. I don’t even stop the car, just open my door. The bag slips from my hand into the abyss.
And then I keep driving.
The AM radio broadcasting from another era (Dottie West and Juice Newton and I want a lover with a slow hand) and the road black and empty, I drive with my right foot trembling the whole time, it seems. By the third hour on the interstate, the foot is nearly numb and then I know just where I’m going, the sky flattening on the land, the grimy wastewater-treatment plant all lit up in the distance like a great rust-furred wagon wheel on the Lanister marshland.
The chemical smell when I roll down the windows is exactly as I remember, so strong, like pressing my face into my old Pocahontas comforter or my mom’s pilled Hickory Hill Animal Rescue sweatshirt. Ammonia and marsh sulfur and pet hair and Lava soap and everything that stifled and smothered me and that now seems as magical and as extinct as a lost land in a fairy tale or the first few years of childhood when everything is fixed by a banana split with Spanish peanuts or a trip to the dusty old petting farm with your mom and dad.
Just before the city limits, I stop.
I pull the car to the shoulder and sit on the hood for a half hour and try to remember things, try to push aside everything else, try to hurl off the hushing breaths of Diane on my face, in my ear, her voice such an insinuation (We need to stick together now).
But why would I ever believe her? Can you ever believe a killer?
You’re a killer too now, Kit.
My head wasn’t right, I imagine telling someone, the police. I couldn’t think at all. I should have called 911 right away. My head wasn’t right. I just did what she said. But I never hurt anyone.
Inside, somewhere, I feel it. That flickering sense of guilt when someone you’re at odds with, who’s an obstacle to you, who’s trapping you, or so it seems, is suddenly gone. Dead.
Except then I start thinking about Alex. Alex as he was, that charming man, that flirty boy, his throat open before me. Did I do enough to stop the flood of blood? To save that wily little heart?
Alex, his hands to his throat, his scraping voice, You killed me, you killed me, you killed me.
Oh, Alex, I think. Poor Alex.
It’s nearly three a.m., only truckers on the road and the sky and horizon making one black sheet. The gas ticker shaking, I stop once, filling my tank and improvising a scattershot path through a very bright Flying J, Cinnabon steaming, pajama pants for sale by the register, the frozen-drink machine overflowing cherry slush into a far corner, red streaking the floor tiles and wall.
I buy beer.
It seems better than crying. I’ve been crying for hours, my face hot as a firecracker. Thinking of Alex twitching on that floor.
Still twenty miles from home, I take the back route, the lonely night roads, the strip of strip malls. I don’t remember how it happens, spotting a police station’s green lantern, my brain inexplicably filling with my father’s voice, making jokes abou
t cops and doughnut runs.
What would my old man think of me, wherever he is.
That’s when I turn into the precinct parking lot. I don’t know what I mean to do but I sit there, watching, for a long time.
For a half hour, maybe more, a near-empty bag of ranch-dusted pretzels and a froth-lined forty of High Life next to me, I sit and think and wonder, my mouth aching, feeling the ghostly throb from that old tongue piercing long healed.
You do these things, my mom had said, and they can’t ever be undone. The hole closes up, but the body remembers.
That’s when I spot two officers walking toward the station house.
I step out of my car and call to them, my voice hoarse. “Hey! I need to talk to someone,” I say. “I need to tell someone, okay?”
The words aren’t coming fast enough. They’re too big.
They look over at me. I catch sight of myself in the glass door’s reflection. Sunken baseball hat, tank-top strap drooping, flip-flops. No bra. The smell of beer all over me.
I open my mouth again, but nothing at all comes out this time.
“Cabstand’s over there,” one of them says. “No way that chick should be driving.”
“Go home, honey,” the other adds, laughing as he pushes the door open. “Go back to your double-wide.”
In that second, I can’t explain, all my moral conviction slips to the pavement.
I stand there a moment, watching. Only flipping them off once they’re safely inside the building, my father’s daughter to the end.
The sleep that comes when I get home at last is epic, opiate, endless. Snow White in her glass coffin. Twelve hours or more.
At some point, I feel a grinding inside me, crawling from its deepest caverns, and I know what’s happened, the screw-clamp feeling in my spine. I slip into the bathroom, look in the mirror, and take two breaths. When I shove down my jeans, I see the telltale splotch of brown blood.
Back in the bedroom, I stand in the doorway and see what looks like a lump under my coverlet. A stray pillow, something.
A lump that looks like a person, curled up. A man curled, or a woman.
The nausea leaps up my throat as I step closer. Lifting the coverlet and seeing it there. The searing red of yesterday’s biohazard bag, slick and wet in my hands. Its insides leaking out.
Then comes the thump like the pneumatic punch of the lab injector, my skull striking my headboard. My body bolting upright, the orange of the sinking sun at my window.
And I’m awake, the bed shorn of coverlet, of top sheet, of everything.
Pushing myself from the nightmare, I pull my panties down; there is no blood.
There is no bag.
There’s only me.
I stumble from my bed into the kitchen, my feet spongy on the carpet. Trying to calm myself, the hammering in my chest. But all I can think of is the bag.
The bag. Filled with dirty Kimwipes, mop heads, shoe covers seamed with blood.
So careful in so many ways, we were so careless about that. Diane sauntering out of the lab with it spilling out of her backpack top, with it practically perched on her shoulder like a parrot.
Diane’s question comes humming back to me. The only moment she hesitated, unsure.
Are you worried about the Russian?
Serge.
I’m drinking coffee, three cups of instant, eyeing the clock and wondering where Sunday went. It’s already dusk.
No one has called. Not even Diane.
And I can’t help myself. I grab my keys.
NOW
The lab always looks like it’s glowing at this hour. The pale concrete illuminated by ground lights. Those slit windows like shut eyes, black and lifeless. A puzzle box snapped shut.
I don’t see Zell’s dirt bike or Juwon’s sturdy Nissan. Dr. Severin’s grove-green Citroën is nowhere to be found. Alex’s car isn’t there either, and I can’t remember if I saw it earlier. I barely recall what it looks like, only that it was the Quietest Car in All the World. Sometimes he bikes, but the rack is empty. Sometimes he walks. You never know with Alex. Never knew.
It doesn’t matter anyway, I remind myself. He’s not going anywhere.
Heat rises fast under my eyes, and I try to stop it. There’s no time for it, no time to give myself over to any feeling at all.
Are you worried about the Russian?
Now I am, Diane. I can’t stop thinking about how unlike Serge it was to dump what he thought were animal carcasses in the bin when the policy was freezing and then special pickup or incineration. Might he have gone back for the bag?
This is Serge, after all, who cares deeply about the rules, about the order of the lab, at least his portion of it. The way he walks through the vivarium, headphones on, tending to his flock, like a bygone aristocrat strolling through his private gardens. Even when he must take the green-tagged mice to the carbon dioxide machine, he is so gentle and always gives them the iso first, sliding the needle into each one’s still-beating heart, no bigger than a kidney bean. Especially then.
You alone understand the heart—that’s what Serge told me once, watching me scruff one of the mice and insert a needle into its tiny, bean-size ticker. The others are made of darker material.
But maybe that tenderness he reserves only for lab mice, his lab mice. Not dark, slippery rodents from the Chinese restaurant across the street, which can be tossed in the bin like he’d tossed the others through the incinerator door.
Or maybe, when he took the bag, he was too entranced with Diane to care. There was that way he was looking at her. So intently, those long-lashed eyes blinking slowly.
But I’m not sure. I’m not sure at all. Thinking of the bag sitting in that bin—do you see?
What if Serge went back for it? What if he looked inside?
Are you worried about the Russian?
She poured the poison in my ear and now I am inflamed.
Cameras are everywhere. They always are when your job is to flatten animals on tables, punch toxins deep inside. There have been protests, occasional vandalism.
There’s one in the lobby. Several in the parking lot.
And there’s a camera on the loading dock by the heavy iron door, which is where I’m heading. The tidy row of biohazard bins, those red stumps, their sides stamped with spiky symbols. Sharps, human fluids, liquid waste, mixed chemicals.
If I stay close enough to the right wall, the camera won’t find me.
Walking quickly, my arm scraping against the concrete, I arrive at the first bin, SOLID WASTE, the one that counts. I put my foot on its pedal; its lid pops open, the smell of bleach and plastic. Something else, sweet and strong. It seems to me the creak of the lid rings as loud as cathedral bells on an Easter morning.
Inside, it’s empty, gaping red, its molded plastic like bony tonsils.
No soiled and tugged gloves and bench paper, no clotted slides and caking petri dishes, the sealed bags of dark matter tossed daily from labs everywhere. And no large red biohazard bag, puffy with our sins. It’s not there.
They’re all empty, every one, lids snapping one after the other.
It’s not there, the bag.
They picked it up, I tell myself, walking away fast. It’s in the campus incinerator, burning to soot.
“Hey there!”
The high voice snaps like a rubber band. I stop midstride at the foot of the parking lot. A slender figure flits around one of the concrete pillars and heads toward me.
“I’m sorry!” A pitch of mild panic. “Can I ask you a question?”
For a second, I think it’s Maxim’s pale, neck-tattooed girlfriend hunting for her workaholic lover again. But this is a younger woman, a tall blonde in a cloud-colored sweater that drifts past her wrists—the kind of sweater you want to touch because it will feel like the ears of a bunny rabbit—and a moss-green scarf and ballet flats, a heavy diamond stud jabbed through each ear.
She approaches tentatively, then more swiftly.
“Oh,
thank God,” she says. “You’re not Ted Bundy.”
I blink twice. “Pardon?”
“Sorry,” she says. “Isn’t Ted Bundy the one who prowled campuses, killing coeds?”
“Don’t they all kill coeds?”
She smiles, a nervous smile, the smile of someone who’s unused to being nervous. “Do you work in there? The lab?”
“Sorry,” I say. “Students can’t get in here on the weekends without an access card.”
“Oh, I’m not a student,” she says. “My fiancé works here.”
I look at her. She’s gripping her phone in her hand, her fingers red and tight.
“We had plans, and, well…” She can’t stop smiling, color soaring up her face. “I feel silly. I’m not that kind of fiancée.”
“What kind?”
“The kind who shows up at his job,” she says, showing more of her fine orthodontal work. “It’s just that he isn’t answering his phone. We were supposed to meet hours ago.”
The evening wind is whipping around the building now, our heads ducking beneath its shade fins. Up close, I see she’s maybe twenty-two with that kind of milky skin where any bit of pressure, any touch shows, blooming pink. I’m imagining art-gallery assistant, business-school student, fashion marketing.
“Who’s your fiancé?” My mouth is dry; my eyes too. My ankles tickle as if still speckled with blood.
She smiles again, a dimple emerging. “Alex Shaffer. He works in the Severin Lab. Maybe you know him?”
I pause, and, for a pulled-loose second, the wind cocooning us, I think I can hear both our hearts beating, hers like a little sparrow caught in a chimney, mine like an earthworm’s, wrapped around its own throat.
“Alex, sure.”
Her long sweater sleeve slides back as she reaches for her phone. That’s when I see the ring, its diamond fat and insistent.