by Megan Abbott
I could feel all her breaths, hoarse and high. I could feel her breaths vibrating through me and not even be sure if they were hers or mine.
My mom always says, you don’t have a self until you have a secret.
That girl, that girl. Hurt already a thousand times by fifteen.
“There is something especially hard about mad people who know they are mad,” Dr. Severin says, tapping out her cigarette. “If Diane weren’t so brilliant, maybe she wouldn’t know how mad she is. But she does. And I think that must be a terrible feeling.”
I take another cigarette. “Sorry,” I say, trying to still my shaking hand. “I’m not going to feel sorry for her.”
“Well, Kit,” she says, leaning back in her chair, those legs displayed, one shoe slipping off, “that’s a shame. But, like I said, you’re still so young.”
I drop my head and take a breath, not wanting her to see me.
When I lift my head again, her eyes have gone glassy.
They’re nearly ready for us.
I have no idea what to expect. Obstruction of justice, at best, and what about the lab? The scandal?
We stand and Dr. Severin smooths her hair, then mine.
“You might think about what draws the three of us together,” she says, gathering herself now. “We’ve all tasted the apple, haven’t we? We ate it whole.”
As I walk by, I see her seated on one of the rolling chairs in the animal-prep room, the officer with the mustache standing beside her.
“Are they taking me now?” she is saying, looking up at him. “I explained what I did. I explained about Serge and about Alex and about Dad.”
I wonder if she can see me.
“We need to wait here a minute,” the officer is saying. “Then we’re taking you to the station.”
Her head lifts, golden under the lights, that Saint Joan face, composed and sure.
“I killed them,” she says, eyes skittering toward me. “I killed all of them.”
Detective Harper and her partner, the rooster-breasted one, are waiting for me.
“You don’t have to be afraid of her any longer,” he says. “We got it all in writing.”
“Afraid?”
“She told us how she threatened you.”
I don’t say anything, trying to imagine what she might have said. Alex and I were fighting. He knew my secret. The glass broke. Kit came in after. She wanted to call 911—I pressured Kit and threatened her into concealing everything.
Oh, Diane, I think. I never asked you to do that. I never would.
Detective Harper tells me he’d be very surprised if the DA bothered with me at all. “You were dealing with a multiple murderer, after all,” she says.
“Right.”
“Some days,” her partner says, handing me some forms, “fortune smiles on you.”
“I’ve always been a lucky girl,” I say.
“Or smart enough to make her own luck,” says Detective Harper, looking at me.
I see her from a distance.
The two policemen from before are escorting her back through the vivarium to the door. Her back is hunched, head ducked, and she looks so very small.
I start moving toward her.
“Diane,” I say, unable to stop myself. “Diane, you didn’t have to.”
I can hear Dr. Severin behind me, asking the mustachioed officer if we can approach.
“Diane,” I say, but she doesn’t see me, or won’t look at me.
Her arms drop to her sides stiffly as the three of them pass a long lab bench, stainless steel so bright it hurts my eyes, all the gleaming containers of pipettes, scalpels, specimen scissors and knives, capillary tubes, glass septums.
“Diane,” I say again. “I’m sorry.”
And all I mean is I’m sorry you’re like this. I’m sorry your parents didn’t love you enough and I’m sorry no one ever taught you how to be. I’m sorry for all the feelings you had that you never learned how to stop and most of all I’m sorry your brain couldn’t work out how to live in this world.
But she won’t look at me, and there’s that strange, stilted way she’s walking now, one arm hanging in front of her like a broken limb, her sleeve covering her hand.
“Officer,” Detective Harper is calling out, “can you escort Dr. Fleming to the squad car?”
Diane raises her head and looks at me, at Dr. Severin, both of us still. The feeling inside of something—
“Kit,” she says. “Kit. I fixed it.”
Diane’s long arm lifts, her hand like a white spider. I see the flash of a specimen knife slipping from her sleeve into her palm.
“Don’t, don’t!” I shout to anyone at all.
The officer moves quickly, his arms flying up, but Diane is faster than anyone when she wants to be. Because she’s already so far ahead before you even begin.
“Diane, no!” Dr. Severin cries out.
Her eyes on me, her face trembling, she throws her head back, that long neck bare and gleaming—
The carotid, you die much faster, she’d said. So fast.
—and with one endless sweep she drags the blade forward and across, ear to neck, everything going red.
Her legs falling beneath her, that great burst of blood, bright red, redder than anything I’ve ever seen.
My mouth opening, I’m running forward, a sprinter always, and never fast enough.
Ten Years Later
“It’s the lab you dream of,” the young woman says, leaning forward slightly in her chair.
She is so nervous, neck straining, her CV in her lap, her scholarly publications neatly bound. She wants the position. She wants so badly to be on the team.
“It took three years to renovate,” I say, “but we made it, thanks to some very generous women’s foundations and a little Big Pharma. They’re always circling, hoping for a proprietary treatment.”
“The biotech center, the mass spectrometry facility—I saw the pictures in Time magazine. I mean, you should see the lab I’m coming from at State.”
I smile, wanting to pat her on the head. “Well, it turns out there was a lot more money for ‘female problems’ than anyone thought,” I say. But she’s too young to think about these things: funding, budgets, the long, slow march of scientific progress. She’s just finishing graduate school and has the dewy, wide-eyed look of a fairy-tale virgin.
“There’s something about the light here,” she says, looking up at the skylights and out into the glass-walled corridors, offices, and laboratories. “It’s inspiring.”
“All the better to see you with, my dear,” I say, tapping my pen. Counting, in my head, all the security cameras on us now. The first steps taken, years ago, after everything. After Diane.
“I never believed any of it,” the young woman says, lowering her voice. “All that stuff about the lab’s toxic environment.”
“The Laboratory of Death,” the newspapers called it, way back when. “The Microscope and the Angel of Death.” “Madwoman in the Lab: How Far Would She Go to Keep Her Secret?”
“Good for you,” I say. Even smarter than her GPA indicates, this one.
“You’ve worked with Dr. Severin for longer than anyone, right?” she asks.
But my mind is now with Diane. Those photos of her in the paper all those years ago, her lab coat like an angel’s wings. I try not to think about her, about all of that, but sometimes it comes back—meeting a transfer student from Lanister, spotting the new lab tech with the pale gamine haircut.
“Yes,” I say, finally. “For her, and now with her. She’s very loyal.” I see the look in the young woman’s eyes and remember it well: When will I get to meet her? What is she really like? “She travels a lot, but she counts on me here.”
Dr. Severin and I, bound forever.
Crimping the edges of her CV, the young woman peers through the glass into the central atrium, the scattering of bodies down below. Like the dark, swarmy backs of mice in a maze.
“And what makes you so i
nterested in our work?” I ask, pulling the CV from her hand.
“Well,” she says, her face frozen now, panic dancing across her eyes. Then, a smile emerging, a grin, really. “It’s still the dark continent, right?”
I smile and nod. “It is.”
After the interview, there is the requisite tour of the shiny new stem-cell unit, the endless security march into the animal unit, the vivarium with its new modular wall system promising “state-of-the-art airflow control for unprecedented employee safety.”
“You’ll hear from us,” I say as I walk her out, her extra CVs curled between her sweaty fingers.
When I return to my office, I see a stack of mail on my desk.
The apple-green envelope stands out, not interoffice, not government mail, not slick research-publication Mylar. It’s greeting-card size and sealed with a foil wafer. The return address is Sarasota, Florida. When I open it, I smell perfume, strong and cloying. There’s a jolly card with beach umbrellas and, inside, a folded piece of paper on sunny stationery. I open it and begin reading.
Dear Kit:
Do you remember me? If so, I hope it is with fondness. You were very kind to my troubled daughter. May she rest in peace.
You can’t imagine my surprise when I sat in my doctor’s waiting room, opened up a copy of Time magazine, and saw the profile of your lab and your important work on behalf of women.
I shouldn’t say “surprise,” really. I know I only met you once, Kit, but I feel like I know you. Diane spoke of you so often, with such admiration. After reading the article, I began to think about why things went so right for you and so wrong for Diane. But the truth is, there is no one to blame but Diane for the mess she made of her life. You worked so hard, harder than anyone. And now I hear about all this research you’re doing that is definitely going to change women’s lives. Is it wrong to say I’m proud of you?
No one ever imagines what it must feel like to have a murderess for a daughter. Every time I tell someone about Diane’s crimes, they sympathize, assure me it’s not my fault. Even though I know they are right, it pains me. Sometimes I do blame myself. But it is my nature to take on the pain of my children.
You see, Diane always was a demanding, needy child. Her father and I were so young when we had her. We still had so much growing up to do. And he was never a warm person—he never knew how to show me love, I can tell you that. So of course Diane wanted to be with me—all the time, really. But a woman has needs beyond her child, doesn’t she? When I found love again with my husband, Steve, Diane was unable to cope. She even conjured some tale of his seduction at the hands of a teenage girl. It is sad to think about now. Perhaps I should have seen it as a cry for help. But, as everyone tells me, there was nothing I could do. Who could understand her sickness?
I’m only glad I didn’t believe her deceit (I see it now as a symptom of her illness). And, in the end, it brought Steve and myself closer together.
I can’t say, when she moved in with her father, I ever suspected the dark path it would lead her down. It may seem hard to believe now, but a month after his passing, Diane came to me and confessed. I did not believe her. Diane always had strange ideas, even as a small child. Sometimes I wonder if she fell out of the crib as a child or if she suffered some damage all those times she wandered off as a little girl.
Diane, I said, this is just another one of your stories. But she was insistent, hysterical. I told her if anything had really happened, the doctors would know. Still, she would not give up and kept demanding I take her straight to the police station. She begged me to make her go. She wanted to drag me down with her, you see? Just as she did to you. Thankfully, we are both stronger than that.
In the end, I told her she was just going to have to live with what she’d done. Next time you want something, I said, make sure you really want it.
My point is, Kit, we did more than anyone could to help Diane. She always said you were the smartest person she ever met. And now, look at all you’ve achieved. Devoted your career to seeking a balm for the maladies of being a woman.
On behalf of women everywhere, I thank you.
Growing in love and wisdom,
“Mrs. Fleming”
P.S. I enclose a picture of my “new” family from a few summers ago. Got it right this time!
I peer into the envelope and shake loose the photograph inside. A family of four standing on a dock, Diane’s mom at the center, tall and blond as ever, her tan skin thickened with time, what my mom used to call banana-boat skin. She has one arm around each of her girls, both long-legged beyond their years, their mouths full of orthodontia. And the husband with the boatman’s cap, the big grin, his arm reaching down to rub the drooping liverish belly of a very large bloodhound.
There is something in him that’s familiar.
They stand in front of a cabin cruiser, sky blue. Along its side, in flamboyant silver script: THE DREAM CATCHER.
No single guy has a dream catcher in his car.
Who said that? I think, smiling. Then I can nearly picture it, four teenagers huddled on our double beds at the Wheels Inn. Sarina and the other one—was it Shauna?—and Diane. My sordid tale of Stevie Shoes, the sportswear salesman with bloodhounds I used to dog-sit for. Stevie and his fast hands and the dream catcher hanging from his rearview mirror. Purple feathers tickling my chin. Stevie Shoes, who must’ve been fifteen years older than me, sliding his fingers down my jeans, telling me all his girlfriend problems.
Stevie Shoes.
…my husband, Steve…The feeling comes slowly, and I hold the photo closer, squinting.
And closer, grabbing the arm on my lamp and tilting it.
What, I think, is Diane’s mom doing with Stevie Shoes?
Because that’s who the man in the picture is. Older, a little huskier, but he is Stevie, and he is also apparently Steve, Mrs. Fleming’s husband.
The pieces jumble in my head for assembling, before fitting into place: How I told Diane about Stevie that night at camp. How the next time I saw Diane, more than a year later, she’d been ousted from her mom’s life. How Diane admitted she’d found something out about her mother’s boyfriend and told her. Things that showed the kind of man he was.
Mom, your boyfriend is cheating on you with his fifteen-year-old dog-sitter in the front seat of his car.
Mom, it’s true. I know it happened. It’s absolutely true.
Mom, you believe me, right?
Mom.
The truth can’t be poison, she’d told her mother.
But it was, for Diane. Exiled, banished, expelled from a questionable Eden to the pullout sofa in her father’s bachelor apartment. And everything that came after.
I look at the photo again, for a long time. Diane and me, joined together from the start, long before I even knew it.
A professor once described the brain to me as a great silent vault. A dark theater with nothing playing on the screen. Just electrical charges bouncing corner to corner, like lightbulbs flashing off and on.
Science doesn’t yet have any idea how everyone’s private, personal experience of the world springs from that empty vault. We don’t know yet why we sleep or why we dream. What and how we remember.
The world is a fiction the brain constructs. The smell of a fresh peach, the punch of a firefly in the night sky. The lilting hush-hush of a first lullaby. The brain fashions it all and we don’t know how, or why.
So how could I know about myself, what I am, what Diane is or was before?
What Diane and I are together that we might never have been alone.
THEN
Graduation Day
This is a golden moment. That’s what my mom kept saying.
The big Lanister sky made sure I felt it. Was it possible I’d never noticed it before, Barbicide blue and stretching on forever? And how the shaggy buildings of old downtown were winking at me? Even the sensual push of rust-pocked cars in and out of the strip malls struck me that day. All the colors and window-glassed ago
ny of so many sad souls dying, dying, dying to get home or to get back to something like they felt before, long ago, that feeling they had the night of their graduation, drunk and tickle-nosed on Cold Duck and everything smelling of new dresses and blazers and the smack of social performance, a masquerade, and all the adults getting caught up in it, bemoaning their lost innocence when they still had youth but didn’t know what to do with it.
I was eager to let mine go, but I also felt feelings I couldn’t quite grab hold of. Like maybe the ending of things was the best part, the only time you saw the beauty in anything at all. And you had to honor those moments.
Maybe my dad taught me that, his sudden sorrow at being called on all his bad behavior, crying on our front lawn, begging to be reformed, redeemed at last. It was only at the end that he realized everything had mattered after all.
“You may not care, but I care,” my mom announced as we drove up to the Hair Cuttery.
“I have to wear the flat hat anyway,” I said, trying once more, but it was no use. I was getting my hair done, and my nails too.
“You’ll thank me later,” she said.
I wanted to tell her it didn’t matter, nothing here did. I’d already reserved the $19.99 U-Haul, stockpiling liquor boxes from the Safeway, swiping the good cartons from the Golden Fry. I couldn’t move to State until August first and it’d be six weeks of cleaning cages and bagging ferals before then, but in my head, I was already gone.
“I skipped my graduation,” she said, pulling into the lot. “Instead, I got drunk on Southern Comfort with your dad and spent the day fishing croakers and silversides off the dock down at Point Cooper. Jet-Puffed marshmallows as bait. Your dad fell and hit his head on a post. I had to hitch us a ride with two meatheads to the urgent care, his head bleeding on my lap all over my Pepto-pink graduation dress. In the ER, they kept calling me Jackie O.”