Everyone is leaving or gone.
I wonder if it’s wise to stay in the lab with the detectives still here, with Eleanor still lurking, closer and closer to a mad Ophelia, her drooping sweater sleeves like water-weighted hems.
But it seems too dangerous to leave. With Diane and what is going on in her head. And Dr. Severin is still here.
When I return to our floor, the first thing I see is the bright yellow security tape crisscrossed across the door to G-21. In the dark hallway, it nearly glows.
I start walking faster and faster.
All I can think of in that moment is the floor by Alex’s lab bench. Maxim’s eyes drawn there. What did he see? A fleck of browned blood? A bit of tissue? The tail of a washed-away spatter? A shirt thread or strand of hair? Was it mine or his or even hers?
Or any of the hundreds of samples—blood, semen, urine, tissue cultures, cells of humans and animals—that pass through the lab every day?
And then all I can think of is that I must leave. Now.
But as I reach the elevator, I hear someone call my name.
I turn and see it’s Detective Harper with her partner, a rooster-breasted young man who missed a spot shaving, both of them with coats on.
“What’s going on in G-21?” I ask. My voice sounds woozy to my own ears.
“We’ll see,” she says. “Maybe nothing.”
“Or maybe something,” her partner says, and I can’t tell if he’s speaking to her or to me.
“We were looking for you,” she says, her police radio crackling.
“You were?” I say, and the elevator doors shuttle open. My heart suspended in my chest.
“We have more questions,” her partner says.
“Oh.” Nodding, nodding.
“Just a few,” Harper says. “We were hoping you might come by the station later.”
“The station? I…why there?”
We all watch as the elevator doors close again. I look at myself in the mirror, a white blur.
“It’s easier,” she says. “Alex Shaffer’s parents are arriving tonight and meeting us there so we can take some DNA samples.”
I push the elevator button again.
The male detective looks at me, shifting his weight from one leg to the other.
“Okay,” I say. “Anything I can do to help.”
The elevator doors open and I walk inside.
“Great,” Detective Harper says. “We’ll see you soon, then.”
“Right,” I say, and both of them watch me as the doors tremble closed.
It’s a trap, I think. They’ll ask to look at my phone; they’ll ask for DNA samples.
In the parking lot, walking briskly and close to the curb, I try to avoid seeing anyone.
And maybe, I think, my mind racing, they found something on the cameras too.
I spot Juwon and Zell ahead of me, walking to their cars.
I slow down, hang back. Catch my breath.
“They didn’t ask me much,” Juwon is saying, his voice lifting in the evening air. “It was quick.”
“Fleming was in there a long time,” Zell says. “But Owens was in there longer than anyone.”
“See you tomorrow,” Juwon says, stopping at his car, “unless I get a job offer tonight.”
Zell waves and keeps walking toward the bike rack.
My head down, I try to veer the other way so he doesn’t see me. But as he walks under the golden cone of one of the parking-lot lights, I find myself stopping.
Zell, his back to me, is tugging off his messenger bag.
That’s when I see it, like a warning flag, a hazard sign. That YEAH, SCIENCE T-shirt, so neon it glows in the growing dark. Burn-your-retinas green against the pink of his thick arms.
With his lab coat off, I finally see the back of the T-shirt, the word BITCH! emblazoned there.
Where did I—
A week ago—less—my Long Island Iced Tea nearly knocked from my hand. The careless shove of a passerby in a BITCH! T-shirt. Zell, in the crowd that night at Zipperz. Elbowing me, spilling my drink. Watching Alex and me.
How I’d turned, thinking I’d recognized him. Wait, I’d thought, I know—
Zell at Zipperz, like a bad joke.
“Zell,” I call out. “Zell, you son of a bitch.”
When he sees me looking at him now, he smiles, mean as dirt.
“What did you tell them? The detectives. About me and Alex.”
My hand on that rubbery arm of his, his elbow crooking, Zell looks surprised, but only for a second.
“Only the truth,” he says, squinting at me. “Except I didn’t tell them how you can’t hold your booze. Or keep your hands off—”
“Shut up,” I say, releasing his arm, pushing back. “You saw us at a bar—so what? We had a few drinks. What’s it to you?”
He touches the spot on his arm my hand had clasped. A coolness drops across his face. He turns to his bike, making me wait.
“You and Alex, always laughing together, thick as thieves,” he says, popping his U-lock, shoving the key into his pocket. “You know what he said to me once? That he could tell he was gonna get into trouble with you. How you just screamed trouble to him.”
His face scrunches; he seems suddenly fragile and nasty at the same time. A little boy with a lit firecracker in his hand.
“Alex never said that,” I say. “I don’t believe you.”
“Look, I told the detectives the truth. You two were at the bar. You were all over each other, making out on the patio.”
I won’t let him see a wince.
“If you have nothing to hide,” he says, pulling his bike from the rack, “you don’t have anything to worry about. Do you?”
He’s not smiling at all. He has never looked so serious.
“By the way, enjoy the new gig,” he says. “Win that Nobel for the ladies.”
I don’t remember the walk back to my apartment other than the hard wind, my hands clutched to the edges of my jacket.
I can’t put any of the pieces together.
At home, I sit on the plastic chair and scroll through my phone, pointlessly deleting old texts from Alex, from Diane. I don’t read any of them. I just delete them all.
It’s not until I tug my jacket off that I realize I never even took off my lab coat. Diane’s rabbit’s foot slides from my pocket to the floor.
I look at it. Lots of luck you gave me, I think.
Once, my dad’s second wife, Debra, gave my mom a Mother’s Day gift: a sackful of crystals and coins and other pocket pieces and a few things that we couldn’t figure out—dried-up things that might have been old feathers or bug wings. Debra called it a jack bag and said she’d made it personally to bless her. Two days later, my mom started bleeding even though she’d had a partial hysterectomy years ago. It went on for days and she hated going to the doctor. Finally, she took the bag, drove out to the salt marsh, and tossed it in, which she said was the only way to make sure it stopped. Later, I’d wonder if it ever did.
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.