Give Me Your Hand

  Five minutes later, I’m walking across the stretch of strip malls, making my way to campus, the brisk bright Saturday morning hours before anything’s moving other than blowing trash, parking-lot tumbleweed.

  As I walk, I try to remember precisely what I said to Alex, the words I used.

  But mostly what comes are whispers, the green light of the bedroom, ATOMIC LIQUOR winking from the top of the neon-sign stack at my window.

  You were crying in your sleep, he’d said from the far side of the bed, shaking me awake.

  I guess I was. I guess I didn’t know it would be like that. I didn’t know it would feel so much.

  But you can undo this, I tell myself. You can fix this.

  The campus is empty and hungover, the gray ghost of Friday-night beer and mayhem still hovering. It’s not until I reach the building’s front doors that I see an actual person, a shadow behind me somewhere, gone before I can turn, before I can swipe my key card and step inside.

  In the elevator, the access card’s edges cutting into my cupped hand, I think about what I’ll say to Alex. But the truth is, you can rarely undo things. This is what you realize after one of your parents dies.

  I look down at the access card: SEVERIN LAB, my name, my institutional photo, snapped by the HR woman my very first day. I couldn’t believe I’d finally made it. The Severin Lab, at last. Working with—well, for, but maybe eventually with—the woman herself. So the moment the HR woman clicked her digital camera, my face broke into an impossible grin.

  Looking at it now, that smile so big and unrestrained I don’t even recognize it, feels important. Eyes on the prize, Ms. Castro always used to say.

  The lab itself is quiet, just the beep of an autoclave echoing through the halls. Weekend mornings, the place always feels haunted. Serge might be there, but he seldom leaves the animal unit unless he has to. Or Juwon by late morning, same with Maxim, who brings his own Chemex on weekends (You have to saturate the grounds. I like to let it bloom precisely thirty-seven seconds, no more, no less) and settles in for four or five hours of work before his girlfriend, Sophie, starts texting, and texting. Once, when she didn’t hear back from him fast enough, she showed up. After a half hour of trying to find an entrance she could get into without a key card, she finally appeared, a crunchy leaf in her hair from the bushes by the back exit, the one often propped ajar by grad students without weekend-access privileges. She seemed surprised to find Maxim there, just where he’d said he would be, even disappointed in some furtive way.

  You’re always here, she cried out, tugging a twig from her shoe, what was I supposed to think?

  But Maxim had said something about Sophie dragging him to a wedding this weekend. And Juwon—well, one kid with a sore throat and he might not show.

  First, I look in the lounge, but it’s empty. Maybe everybody’s superstitious about the decision. Or maybe they’re sending out CVs to avoid being stuck on Irwin’s hypogonadism study. There was something so sad about the tired, hairless men shuffling in, waiting for their testosterone injections.

  The closed-circuit TV screen shows the building entrance, and my eye catches the flutter of a person moving past. I wonder if it’s Diane. Something in the movement, both graceful and stealthy. In the way of bogeymen in your childhood nightmares, I imagine she knows I’m here, knows I told Alex.

  I shake the thoughts loose, rising.

  The moment after I walk into G-21, stopping at the turn in its L shape, I spot Alex, standing under the fume hood, his headphones large and buglike.

  He still looks handsome, the elegant crook of those long fingers. The delicate swivel in his sneakers as he moves from hood to bench.

  This is the first Saturday I’ve ever seen him here. (This weekend? A college buddy made me go out on his boat, he’d say with rolling eyes. Or I had to fly home for my sister’s gallery opening or Went to Vail for my cousin’s wedding.)

  “Hey,” I blurt. “Figured you might put some work in today?”

  The slow turn is his tell. He knew I’d been watching. Heard the click of the door unlocking before I walked inside. Thinks he holds all the cards.

  He does, maybe.

  THEN

  “Diane,” I said. “Diane. Why did you tell me? Why did you…”

  I felt something in my stomach, reached out for the trash can, like I might throw up.

  But I didn’t. I covered my mouth, turning and looking at her.

  Sitting with her spine so straight, her hands folded in her lap, just watching me.

  “Haven’t you ever done something in the blink of an eye and then realized it was wrong? That it was all wrong?”

  “No. Not like that. No.”

  “And you can’t believe it later. You can’t believe you were that person.”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head harder. “Never.”

  “I guess,” she said quietly. “I guess I was wrong.”

  NOW

  It turns so quickly. A flash, a spark, and everything changes, forever.

  “I’m sorry about before,” I say, walking toward him. “Yesterday.”

  “Hey,” Alex says, looking up, a generic smile. “Okay. Sure.”

  He’s setting up another flash column, plugging cotton wool to fill the stopcock. All you’re really doing is using gas to push a solvent down a tube, but it’s a delicate thing. Every time I watch Alex, I wince a little. Too much air, clamps too tight, a chip or scratch in the glass tube. Working too fast, too roughly.

  “I said a lot of things the other night. Some things about Diane, but that’s drunk talk. Like that time Zell downed those Old Crow shots at Flanigan’s and told us how he used to wrestle girls in junior high.”

  Fixing the foot-high glass tube to the clamp, Alex smiles again, smiles easily, maybe even a little smugly. “That’s not exactly the same thing, though, is it?”

  “It is,” I say, my voice lifting high in a way I hate. “Petty high-school stuff. I knew Diane when we were seniors. She was always the smartest, always beating me. It just all came back.”

  “We’re not talking about stolen lab notes or some dry-ice prank,” he says, adding the solvent now, the bright, pungent smell of the chloroform filling the air.

  “She was the best at everything. I could never beat her.” I keep going, feeling a dampness at my forehead. “She was perfect, and I wanted her brain. I wanted her drive. She never stopped. I never knew anyone like that before.”

  But Alex merely nods as he pours the silica slurry into the tube with one tilt of the arm, doesn’t even bother to stir.

  “Alex, stop what you’re doing a second, okay?” I say.

  But he keeps going, tapping the sides of the tube. “Who did she kill, Kit?”

  “What?” I say, my voice shaking.

  “Who did Diane Fleming kill?” he says, looking up at me at last. “You said, That girl, she looks so innocent, but don’t believe it. She is a killer. She killed in cold blood.”

  As he says the words, I can feel them like the hard old knots in the back of my neck. I know I said those words to him because I’ve said them before. To myself, to someone else once. The biggest words you can ever say and still be real and not be a person in a play, Ophelia among the buttercups and nettles, the long orchids and browning daisies.

  “What else?” I say, my voice like those clamps, scraping glass. “What else did I say?”

  “You said you had nightmares for months, every night, that she came running after you in the woods like a crazy killer in a mask.”

  “No.”

  “You said that you stopped sleeping after, that you’d have to sneak out into your mom’s car at night and blast opera or death metal to get her out of your head.”

  As he says it, I start remembering, those words like marbles in my liquored mouth.

  “You said you nearly lost your mind,” he adds. “But in the end you saved yourself.”

  I don’t know what to say because there is nothing to say.

  It was all
true, but it wasn’t everything. It never could be. There were so many parts that were hard to articulate, that required me to heave my heart into my mouth. And there were other parts I’m sure I left out for reasons of my own. The sneaking knowledge: Had I told him everything, he might have seen some of the ugliness in me. Not half as dark as Diane, but still full of blood.

  “And then you said, But now she’s back, Alex. And look what she’s capable of.”

  “I don’t really know if she did anything,” I say, and in some technical way this is true. “It’s all secondhand, thirdhand. It’s all ancient, Alex. I need you to forget it.”

  He looks at me, tapping the glass tube with his finger, that callused finger. The gas surging.

  “None of us should be working with someone like that, Kit.”

  I don’t pause on this. I can’t. In my pocket, I clutch at my access card.

  “I don’t know why I told you,” I say, “but—”

  “I think you do know.”

  “What does that mean?” Maybe it’s that brief huff of chloroform, sickly and strong, from the tube. He should be under the fume hood, I think, distracting myself so I don’t have to ponder what Alex is saying. What is he saying?

  “It means,” he says, “you were right to tell me. And don’t you think, deep down, you probably wanted me to take care of it?”

  “Take care of it?” I repeat, which is all I seem able to do, my eyes fixed now on this easy, knowing look on his face. It’s enraging, recalling a dozen, a hundred, a thousand times in my life a man telling me to relax, be a team player, stop worrying so much, take it easy and roll with the punches. We’re all on the same team.

  “You wanted me to do what you couldn’t do.”

  “No,” I say. “No. No. I was drunk. You with your one more round for the lady. Plying me with drinks.” His eyes widen. “I’ll say anything when I’m that drunk. I’ll do anything when I’m that drunk. That doesn’t make it real.”

  The slurry separating like a lava lamp, he steps forward. The usual looseness in his face, the comfort and ease, is gone for the first time since I’ve known him.

  “Are you suggesting I was trying to get you drunk?” he says. “Because who hopped on whose lap out on that patio? You with the sneaky hands and the dirty talk—”

  “Stop,” I say. “Shut your goddamned Dartmouth mouth.” I don’t know where the Dartmouth came from, or any of it, my face hot, hotter.

  “Or,” he says, louder now, “are you suggesting I got you drunk not to get in your pants but to get in your head?”

  I don’t know what I’m suggesting, but there’s victory in throwing him off his game, in watching his eyes darting, his sneakers squeaking on the floor.

  “Because,” he says, fiddling impatiently with the tube, turning to adjust the adaptor, adding more pressure to make it all go faster, “I don’t need to load anyone up with cheap drinks for a lab spot. My work speaks for itself.”

  “So does mine,” I say. “So does mine.”

  It’s just a beat, a slow blink, but something lies in there, I can feel it. Something he’s thinking but not quite saying, until he does.

  “Being a hard worker, a good little worker bee, is great,” he says. “But it gets you only so far.”

  The raw, ugly, mottled things you fear about yourself in your most private moments—what happens when someone says them aloud to you? The feeling like your skin slipped from your body, showing everything, red and veined.

  “You don’t even know what I can do,” I say, and in the background somewhere I’m hearing something, some distant whistling sound. My eyes snag on the glass tube, the pressure cranked too high. The gas driving the solvent too hard.

  “That’s not what I meant, Kit,” he says, shaking his head, his face softening.

  “How would you even know? How smart I am. What I can do—”

  “Kit, listen.” Like every Kit, listen I’ve heard my whole life at schools, in financial aid offices, at job interviews and HR offices, Kit, listen, community college is a good thing. Kit, listen, be grateful for what you have, don’t be greedy. “It’s under control. I got this.”

  “Wait, wait,” I say, my head throbbing, that chloroform lifting from the tube, my own bad thoughts. “What do you mean?”

  He looks at me, and there’s something in his eyes, the way his mouth opens as if to say something but then stops.

  “Did you already do something?” I say. “Did you already talk to Dr. Severin?”

  “No. It’s not—” he starts, but then his head jerks, and he backs away from the lab bench, squinting down the other side of the L-shaped room. “Is someone here?” he asks me.

  “Alex,” I say. “Alex, please.”

  It must be something in my voice because finally Alex stops and looks at me, a long look.

  But that’s when the whistling sound gets louder. Like that time long ago, my mom put my favorite Snoopy mug in the microwave. The whistling sound and then—

  I look over at the glass tube behind him.

  “You’ve got too much pressure on it,” I say, stepping forward. “Can’t you hear that?”

  It is both a second and an eternity, but I can see how it’s going to happen. That same glass tube from the other day, its star-shaped crack now like a web spreading, the pressure inside too high.

  Watch it, I try to say, thrusting my arm forward, pointing to the tube. Except I can’t hear the words come out, and Alex is still talking. The crack in the glass, Alex. I told you—

  “In the end you’ll thank me,” he is saying. And I can see it happening, but I can’t move to stop it. I can’t even get my mouth to say it.

  Alex, behind you—

  I can’t seem to make any words come.

  His mouth is still moving, voice pushing forth (Kit, listen—), as it happens, as the pop! comes, smaller than a firecracker, like the bang-snaps my cousin Scott used to twist into teardrops and throw on the driveway.

  The same second, or the one after—a singing sound in between, something flying, glass flying.

  Nothing can stop it now.

  Pop! and in the same second, or the one after, his throat bright red, the glass shining there. A sheet of red dropping from his neck like a curtain descending.

  “Alex.” My voice crumples, my hand flapping in front of me like a frightened bird.

  His face, his chin, as if a scarlet veil hung there, his hands grabbing for his throat, the fountain.

  “You killed me,” he says, which doesn’t make any sense. I haven’t moved. I’m not even moving. But that awful glub-glub sound.

  The blood jet is real, obscene.

  He reels back, head bobbing, one hand clutching his throat. Turning around once, grasping for the lab bench, he reaches out just as his long, narrow body slides to the floor.

  There he goes, slipping to the floor and falling back in a long, red forever.

  I’m on my knees, leaning over him, clasping my hands over the fountain. Pushing down. The beat of his heart beneath my forearm as I press hard against the gushing thing, his open neck, a femme fatale’s wet sneer, a cleft lurid and obscene.

  Inside, his slashed vein is finger-thick, a bright shoelace resting between my fingers. Taking a breath, I press hard against it. I won’t let go.

  Lips bluing. Those lips.

  My face wet, dripping with something hot.

  The cloying chloroform everywhere now.

  I watch his eyes, dark and blissful, and I can see it happen. It happens right there.

  One hand pressing against his splayed throat, the other landing hard on his chest.

  On his heart now. On his heart.

  My feet clapping on the sidewalk. They leave black marks, the chloroform melting the rubber on my sneakers.

  I’m walking my dogs in the blush-red chemical haze of Lanister, leash-tugging Grimm and Fudge, both gone for years now, gone before my mom, who’s running up behind me, wind in her hair, those creasy eyes and sad smile.

 
She’s shouting something to me, her voice caught in the wind.

  What, Mom, what?

  She’s shouting and waving and the dogs are pulling at their leashes, straining my arms, and my mom is screaming, her hands around her neck now like the people on the Heimlich poster, but her voice makes no sound.

  And before I can do anything, the dogs are bolting, my arms feel like they’ll be torn from me, the leashes slipping from my grasp.

  Hey, hey.

  Grimm stops and turns his head, looks at me, eyes gone white. Then bolts again.

  They aren’t dogs at all anymore but two black things small and far away.

  My wrists hurt, oh God, they hurt.

  Looking up, the fluorescents screaming above, I see Saint Joan from the old movie, her shorn hair, her blazing cheek. Has anyone ever been so beautiful?

  And she’s dragging me, my legs heavy and stiff, through a rain puddle.

  “You have to get up, Kit,” she says. “The chloroform is making you sick.”

  Diane is leaning over me, her hands gripping my forearms. And it’s not a rain puddle I’m in, and there’s something holding me in place, a heavy thing in my lap.

  I look down and see Alex, his head slipping off my legs as Diane pulls me, my sneakers skidding, leaving black marks.

  There’s glass everywhere, and more blood than ever in all the world, pooling in my jeans, my shoes.

  And Alex, his throat torn to red ribbons like poor old Grimm after a coyote got him and his eyes seal gray and empty and staring at me.

  Everything comes back, scissoring through the sweet brume of the chloroform.

  “Did you hear the glass break?” I say. “Is that why you came?”

  “No,” she says. “I heard someone crying. I heard you crying.”

  II.

  We lived in a preoccupation as complete as that of a dream.