Give Me Your Hand

by Megan Abbott

  “Well,” she says, the scarf still unwinding, Isadora Duncan–like, until it wafts to the table, its lips pursing at me. “I imagine it was a long weekend for all of you.”

  No one says anything; a few weak smiles.

  “Where’s Shaffer?” she asks, surveying us.

  Shrugs, silence. I look intensely at my hands folded before me.

  “Should I text him?” Maxim, ever helpful, asks, rat-a-tatting his pen again.

  “Doesn’t matter,” she says. Her head swiveling like an exquisite lizard’s, she faces Diane, then me. “The PMDD team. It’s going to be Fleming.” She looks at Diane, who lowers her eyes to the pen in her hand. “And Owens.” Her eyes rest on me, dark and crackling. “You two up for it?”

  Diane nods, eyes darting to me and back down again. “Yes.”

  I don’t say anything or even blink, but Severin seems not to notice. It wasn’t really a question, after all.

  The men’s gazes are heavy on us. Heavy and pointed, three dull sabers to our chests. They would be high-fiving if it were them. Crowing and banging tabletops. We don’t move or even smile.

  “Gentlemen,” she says, “Dr. Irwin is very glad to have you join his hypogonadism team. He’s just received pharma funding for the oral-testosterone piece.” She pauses. Is there a whisper of a smile there? “Heady stuff.”

  Juwon nods without looking up from his laptop. Zell nods too, twisting an old brown Band-Aid on his thumb.

  “Glad to help wherever needed,” Maxim says, tossing his pen onto the table, the closest he’s ever come to showing disappointment.

  My fingers press hard into the heel of my hand.

  “Dr. Severin,” Diane says, turning to me, “we won’t let you down.”

  Severin swishes a pair of forms across the table at us.

  “I would be surprised if you did.”

  After, Juwon snaps his laptop shut and leaves without a word. Maxim is watching me but says nothing, fingers now tapping on his phone.

  “Well, hell,” Zell says. “I guess Shaffer missed his shot.” Walking past me, he palms the top of my head, his hand hot. “Lucky you, Owens.”

  Diane is watching.

  Whatever’s in her eyes, he sees it and drops his hand to his side.

  “Hey, congratulations is all I meant,” he says, backing away from us both. “It’s gonna be gangbusters. PMDD. Its day has come.

  “Blood will tell, right?”

  “What happened?” I whisper to Diane, my face nearly on hers at the far end of the hallway. “Maxim was in there.”

  “We shouldn’t be talking here,” she says, low and cool, unblinking. She nods to the door and we duck into the stairwell.

  “He was dead,” I say. “He was deader than dead.”

  I felt his heart under my hands.

  “He’s still dead,” Diane says. “He was bleeding from his jugular for five minutes, ten minutes. It took us maybe twenty minutes to clean all the blood up. He’s not Rasputin.”

  “Well, he didn’t get up and walk away.”

  She pauses. “Do you think someone else came to the lab?”

  “No,” I say. “I mean, I don’t know.”

  “We have to wait, then,” she says, her eyes on me like we’re two of a kind, partners, collaborators. “This is how it works.”

  She places a hand on my shoulder.

  “Don’t,” I whisper, pulling away, instinctively covering my shoulder. Suddenly, I don’t want to be near her or her saint’s haircut and her whittled-down body and her silky, insinuating voice. I open the stairwell door and step back into the hallway. “Don’t touch me. Never touch me.”

  The look on her face is stunned and sad.

  “I should never have listened to you,” I say. “I should’ve called 911.”

  She pauses before saying, “Then why didn’t you?”

  “You know why. The chloroform. I passed out.”

  But there’s a hot flush on me then. A feeling of being stripped clean before the world for an instant. Because it couldn’t be only the chloroform, could it? What took me so long to act when it was happening? And after, emerging from my stupor, why didn’t I insist? Call myself, despite Diane’s protests?

  “I…I don’t know,” I blurt, not meaning to say it aloud. “I don’t know why.”

  “That’s how it was for me too.”

  “For you?” I say. “Diane, we’re not the same. I didn’t push the glass into Alex’s throat. I didn’t kill him.”

  Slowly, she nods. “But somehow,” she says, “it still feels the same.”

  I look at her and have that same feeling I had in my apartment when she started talking about poison. When that razor-sharpness that is Diane’s brain, that precision, dulled into something formless, strange.

  “There you are,” someone says, somewhere. Turning, I see Dr. Severin watching us, head tilted.

  “Look at you two,” she says. “A study in dark and light.”

  Diane’s face—it’s like a sheet has fallen across it.

  “Meet me downstairs at noon,” she says. “I’m taking my new team to lunch.”

  I have to blink twice; the whiteness of the lab’s clean stainless everything nearly blinds me.

  I’m in G-21 for the first time since Saturday. Since I scurried away like a lab rat, trails of blood instead of a tail. Since I watched Alex die.

  And there is nothing to see.

  Maxim is cleaning glassware at the sink. Juwon sits at his lab bench, laptop open again. I think I spot his CV on the screen.

  Walking briskly to my station, I let my eyes drop to the floor. The spot where, forty-eight hours ago, Alex lay split open—a deer ready for dressing, limbs still twitching but dead as earth—now gleams bare. It is as clean as a car showroom, as my mom’s slop-mopped kitchen floor.

  As if reading my mind, Maxim looks over at Alex’s bench.

  “Did anyone call Shaffer?” he asks.

  Zell and Juwon both look at me. It reminds me of when Zell came upon Alex and me in the lounge a few weeks ago. We were laughing, our heads bent over our ramen. Later, Zell teased me about it. You and your lab husband, canoodling over your noodles.

  “I can call him,” I say, taking my phone from my pocket. And then I begin a ridiculous charade: pushing his number, holding the phone to my face, which still feels hot and throbbing, waiting for the outgoing message.

  “It’s just voice mail,” I say. This ridiculous dumb show.

  I listen: Hey, you’ve reached Alex, which is me…I guess that’s it, right? Slightly stuttery and that quality he had, so it always sounded like he was smiling when he talked.

  I hear it and I hear him, and I can feel a tug of something dragging me to a place I don’t want to go. Juwon is looking up from his computer, and Maxim is watching me, head cocked. Zell, headphones on, purses his lips. The phone is wet in my hand.

  “Hi, Alex,” I say into the phone, my own voice tinny. Like a recording of my own voice. “It’s Kit. We’re just wondering where you are. You know.”

  There’s a long second where I can’t seem to unstick myself. To push the button, to end the call. I can almost hear, like the old answering machines, a great and horrible tape whir.

  “So call us, okay?”

  As I move the phone from my face, my jaw aches.

  The door opens and Diane steps into the room with another woman.

  I let my arm drop and look at the two of them. The two elegant blondes. Diane, with her eyes blue and glittering, and Eleanor, Alex’s fiancée, her pink face like a corsage, crushed.

  I almost don’t recognize her. Gone is the deft, levelheaded young woman I met last night. Instead, she’s crying, weeping openly, the sleeves of her sweater—pale green today—wilting over her long fingers. Weeping long tears like a drowning Ophelia, the glassy stream, her muddy descent.

  Diane has one hand floating a few inches above the girl’s shoulders, but she doesn’t touch her. Diane never touches anybody but me.

  �
��I can’t find him anywhere,” Eleanor says. “It’s just—he’s gone.”

  We all surround her, but at a distance.

  “You,” Eleanor says, her face lifting, eyes like great gray puddles, “you’re the one I saw on Saturday.”

  Everyone turns to look at me.

  “Yeah,” I say, “on my way to the library.”

  “Kit and Alex are pals,” Zell offers, a whiff of provocation in his eyes. Even more provocation than usual. “Joined at the hip.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?” I say, too abruptly. He looks at me, twirling his fingers around the soft cushions of his headphones.

  “He was here in the morning, at least,” Diane says, calm but forceful, nearly stepping in front of me. “Working.”

  “That’s right,” I say. “He was still here when we left.”

  Zell’s eyebrows lift and Juwon folds his arms. “We?”

  “Kit gave me a tour of the town,” Diane says.

  “The Walmart or the Sav-a-Lot?” Zell asks.

  Eleanor looks back and forth at all of us, her chin trembling slightly in a way that moves me. How does a sweet girl like this—a New England blonde, fisherman’s sweaters and golden Labs, the kind with adoring parents and grandparents and nice jobs in nice offices where all anyone wanted from her was her winning smile, fine manners, and untroubled efficiency—end up in our wolves’ den?

  Our nest of vipers, as Alex called it.

  Zell smiles at her, twirling his headphones across his knuckles like a card trick.

  “I’ll take you to the administrative offices,” Maxim says. “They can help. If he was here over the weekend, they’ll be able to confirm it.”

  “Did you know?” Diane asks me under her breath, standing close to me over the sink, our glassware clanking.

  “Know what?” I say briskly.

  “About the girlfriend.”

  “The fiancée, you mean.” I turn the water on harder. “No.”

  Diane nods carefully and says nothing. But I feel some kind of judgment passing across me like a dark tide. Diane, who seemed never to have had a sexual urge in her life. Once, I used to think of her as a Barbie, and now I wonder if, like a Barbie, there is a smooth spot between her legs instead of a vulva.

  She doesn’t say any more and I don’t say any more. I’m remembering something.

  Years ago, back in high school, I’d told Diane about the first time I ever made out with a grown man, not a boy. Stevie Shoes. I’d been dog-sitting his bloodhounds so I knew he had a girlfriend. Her clothes were all over the house, gold-ringed sandals on the patio, filmy aqua panties hanging in the laundry room where the dog food was kept. One night we got to talking and he told me all about his failures as a husband, a dad. How his little boy drew a picture of his family that made him look like the ice king from his favorite cartoon. That was before I ended up making out with him, doing things with him in his car. I can still remember the smell of the detergent on his jeans, how the scar groove on his forehead pressed against my thigh.

  It just sounded so awful, Diane had said. It made her never want to do anything like that, ever.

  Ilene, Dr. Severin’s lab administrator, pages through my grant paperwork with grim precision.

  Behind her, Dr. Severin’s office looks dark through the marbled glass, but that’s not always a sign. Sometimes she meets with graduate students without turning on the light. We think she does it as some kind of test. Do they dare to suggest the setting sun has shrouded the room in eerie darkness? Dare to reach over and snap on the desk lamp or rise and turn on the sizzling overheads?

  No one has yet.

  “Are we supposed to meet her here?” I ask, my voice low. “For lunch?”

  Ilene does not reply, merely continues to count, collate, and double-check. Ilene is humorless in a way we all find very humorous. Her hair swept into a perfect chignon—a Hitchcock-blonde chignon, only brunette—her nails always meticulous half-moons, she is as severe as her boss, and, in place of Dr. Severin’s skunk streak, there’s a distinctive beauty mark on her cheekbone, like Serena on Bewitched.

  For a second, I think I see a shadow behind the glass, a dark thing.

  “Is someone in there?” I ask. “With her?” I wonder if it’s Eleanor, the fiancée.

  Still sorting through papers on her desk, Ilene looks up at me from under the thick velvet rim of her perfectly shaped hair.

  “You didn’t sign this one,” she says, pushing a paper at me.

  While I sign it, I see something flickering on her computer screen. An open document with a dateline and a headline: Severin Lab Awarded Major NIH Grant for “Potentially Groundbreaking” New Study Aimed at Severe PMS.

  I’m trying not to stare.

  Dr. Severin will collaborate on the two-year, renewable study with Dr. Harkness (neuropsychiatry) as well as her own team members, including…

  And if I squint, I can see my own bullet point, my own name. Boldface, all caps.

  KIT OWENS

  And Diane’s, of course.

  “Is that a press release?” I ask, not even caring how foolish I sound to Ilene, who finds nearly anything any of us ask about foolish and, quite frankly, not your affair.

  “It is a press release,” she says, sliding my papers into her file folder and capping her pen. “You’re done.”

  My name. Mine.

  With the same brisk movements of her boss, Ilene rises and strides into the copier room, but I linger. On the desk, I see the new file folder: FLEMING, DIANE.

  So I open it. Look inside.

  There’s a personnel form, several long co-authored articles, sparkling letters of recommendation, a research proposal; my fingers dance quickly through all of it. The curriculum vitae, though, is the star.

  I try not to think of my modest twelve-page CV, toner low, content limited, its staple crooked.

  Even printed double-sided on copier paper, Diane’s feels substantial. Turning the pages, I wonder at it, its heft and ballast.

  The steady drone of Ilene’s copier behind me, I can’t help but look more closely. Just a quick scan—overseas conferences, Phi Beta everything, more laurels than I can count.

  But then, flipping the pages, I stop. Because I see the name Severin.

  It appears in one item of a half a dozen under the heading “Internships.”

  SEVERIN SUMMER PROGRAM, JUNE–AUGUST.

  The date is eight, nearly nine years ago, back when Dr. Severin had her old, smaller lab. Back when Diane and I were both finishing our bachelor’s degrees.

  I have to read it twice and even then, the letters blurring, I doubt myself.

  But it’s there.

  The hum of the copier ceases and Ilene appears, swooping around me, snapping the papers from my hand, and giving me the same look Serge used to give Alex when he meandered around the vivarium asking questions loudly and jostling the cages.

  “I was just curious,” I tell her. “Sorry.”

  Ilene does not reply, or even look up.

  Diane and Dr. Severin, they have a history, those two.

  But Diane hasn’t told me. And Dr. Severin never said.

  Didn’t I somehow know anyway? Didn’t I feel the closeness there, hovering?

  In the end, my mom always said, there’s only you.

  Walking through the parking lot, I see them. Black head, blond head. Both in their trench coats, swaying in the breeze as they stand by Dr. Severin’s car.

  “Hey,” I call out.

  Both heads turn.

  “There she is,” says Dr. Severin.

  A cigarette in her dark mouth, she opens her car door. Invites me in.

  NOW

  The perversity of woman is so great as to be incredible even to its victims.

  I remember that quote from college. The great philosopher Caro. Deep in the stacks of the State U. library, I found it in a dust-gilded book from the nineteenth century, its leather slipping from its cover like old skin. Sexual Aberrations in the C
riminal Female.

  It was filled with revelations. For instance, the most intelligent female criminals favor poison. And the blame for women’s crimes must sit squarely on the shoulders of their mothers. Want of maternal affection, he called it.

  But what I remember most is the story of an epileptic tattooed prostitute who murdered her lover, then embroidered his epaulets on her own shirt, declared herself “chieftainess of the brigands,” and terrorized her small Italian town.

  Women have always been far less violent than men, the author conceded. The facts speak for themselves.

  But why, then, he asked, are women so much more ferocious in their violence?

  It has always seemed to me that the answer lies in the question.

  Here we are, snug in a corner booth. It’s a restaurant like in old paintings, crimson-flocked wallpaper, heavy drapery with dustless fringe. Round, red booths like tight cherries and pristine white tablecloths with napkins so heavy they feel like a psalm book across your lap. And no sound from outside or anywhere. That must be the thing when you have money, I think. You never have to hear anything you don’t want to, ever.

  Across the table, Diane is asking smart-girl questions in her low voice. About the first round of study participants, about which of the neuros will be participating and did she see the article on brain-derived neurotrophic factor and stress paradigms in the latest Biological Psychiatry?

  “Look at you. Straight out of the gate,” Dr. Severin says, smiling and not answering any of the questions. “We won’t waste your time like Freudlinger did. Is he still hot on the ASR?”

  “We used it on his cocaine study,” Diane replies. “But only with animals.”

  “Giving foot shocks to rats,” Severin says, raising one long hand for the waiter. “Sounds like Freudlinger.”

  I sit there, mindlessly flipping the pages of the thick, bound menu, crêpes Suzette and chicken à la champagne and iced cracked crab. The hushed room, the passing waiters in their black waistcoats and glossy black shoes. I keep thinking about Diane’s internship with Dr. Severin, what it means. Maybe nothing. Maybe not.