But behind those whispers, she was sure she heard another voice warning her: Go back. Get out!
The truth was, Vi hated the basement. Everything about it frightened her: the darkness; the noises the animals made; the way the smells of formaldehyde, rubbing alcohol, and bleach all mingled and got caught in her nose and the back of her throat, making her feel like she couldn’t breathe.
She wanted to get this over as fast as possible. Take a quick look and get out. She drew a deep breath to try to relax herself as she looked around.
A row of shelves on the left was lined with medical books and jars of different things floating in cloudy formaldehyde: animal brains, a fetal pig, the heart of a deer. The tiny pig frightened her the most: its perfect little white body, tiny snout and hooves, all curled up like it was sleeping, still waiting to be born. Every time she saw it, she half expected it to open its eyes, kick out at the glass, swim up to the surface of the jar gasping for air.
Along the right wall of the basement, shelves held the wire cages full of mice and rats used for experiments—all albino, their eyes glowing red like tiny demons. The mice ran round and round on squeaky metal wheels, going nowhere.
Beside the cages, leaning against the wall, was the wooden maze Gran used with the mice and rats, testing how different medications and treatments affected the rodents’ ability to navigate.
At the far end of the basement, a lamp and a microscope sat on a long worktable.
In the middle of the room stood the stainless steel dissection table. Gran was fascinated by the brain: not just the thoughts and emotions it engendered, but the actual physical gray matter. She spent a lot of time studying animal brains, taking thin slices of them and turning them into slides so she could look at them up close. Like maybe sickness and insanity touched each cell, like the key to fixing it might be hidden there.
Vi stood frozen, listening to the mice and rats: Go back, go back, they seemed to chatter. We’ll tell on you. Tell her you were here.
She had never disobeyed Gran. Not once. Not ever.
Doing this felt all wrong and made her head and whole body feel all tangled up. But at the same time, it gave her this strange rush. She was Gran’s good girl, but here she was doing something truly bad. Something against all the rules.
But Gran wasn’t going to catch her. They’d worked out a plan.
Eric and Iris were upstairs, standing guard.
Iris was perched at the top of the stairs, ready to signal. If Gran was coming, she would flash the lights: off, on; off, on. Eric was by the front door, watching. If he saw Gran coming across the yard from the Inn, he’d give Iris the signal, then run and stall Gran before she got to the house, giving Vi time to put things right in the basement and get upstairs.
“Stall her how?” Vi had asked.
“I don’t know.” He’d shrugged. “Maybe I’ll tell her I saw Big White Rat? Caught him even, but he got away.”
Vi had nodded. It was a good plan.
She walked deeper into the basement, looking around, unsure what she was even looking for, but feeling there was a clue waiting for her. She also had the strange sense that she wasn’t alone down there—that someone was watching her. She searched the dark shadows, knowing it was foolish, knowing she was alone, yet the feeling lingered.
The mice and rats rustled in their cages, seemed to call out, This way, this way if you dare. She turned and went over to the rodents, all white, all lined up in wire cages with numbers written on the front.
“Can’t you give them actual names?” Eric complained whenever he came down and saw the numbers on the cages.
“Do you think they really mind?” Gran asked with an indulgent smile.
“I would if I were them. Being called Number 212 instead of Eric.”
She laughed aloud, tousled his hair. “Thank goodness you’re a boy and not a lab mouse, then.”
Some of the mice and rats were active. Some sleeping, listless. One was so still, Vi was sure it must be dead, although she was afraid to look too closely. All of them had red eyes that seemed to glow, sharp yellow-orange teeth. In truth, Vi was a little scared of the animals. The way they smelled of antiseptic. Some had shaved patches, and tiny sutures. She held her breath as she passed.
Beyond the cages, Vi paused at the exam table, clean stainless steel. She knew so many of the unfortunate rodents would end up here, victims of Gran’s scalpel. Some would end up with their skulls sliced with a tiny saw, their brains cut into thin slivers and pasted onto glass slides. Gran believed in what she called a holistic approach to psychiatry. Brain and body were connected, she always said. If something happened to your hand, it affected your entire body, including your brain.
“We carry all our traumas, all our body memories with us,” she explained. One of the things she was trying to learn was how to help people let go of those memories, start over.
Vi turned on the bright surgical light above the table to help illuminate the room. She looked down and saw her own reflection in the steel’s mirrorlike surface, wavery and strange as if it weren’t her at all, but someone else pretending to be her. Behind it, a shadow seemed to move. She jumped back, spun around.
Nothing. No one.
Squeak, squeak went the interminable metal wheels.
* * *
VI WALKED OVER to the workbench area, sat down on the stool, flipped on the crook-necked work lamp. Gran’s microscope was there, with a slide tucked in. She turned on the microscope’s light and looked down, using the knob to focus. Blood, cells, the cross section of a tiny mouse brain. She switched the magnification, pulling back. It looked like a flower.
All living things were related to each other in some long-ago way. Vi knew that. The parasite. The worm. The great white shark with rows and rows of teeth. Vi herself. They were all connected. Vi’s skin prickled a little when she thought about it.
She loved it when Gran told her about evolution, how every animal on earth came from one long-ago ancestor. One creature, slick and gasping, that had wormed its way out of the ocean.
We are stardust, like the Joni Mitchell song.
I am, I said, like Neil Diamond sang.
Gran said people were not done evolving yet; that it was an ongoing process. “Think of it, Violet,” she’d said to her once. “Human beings are a work in progress. And what if we as scientists, as doctors, can find ways to help that progress along?”
A gold pack of Benson & Hedges sat next to an ashtray full of cigarette butts. Vi ran her fingers over the pack. To the left of the cigarettes was a white metal cabinet that held all the medications Gran used in her experiments. It also held the chloroform and the killing jar Gran used when it was time to put an animal out of its misery. Part of being a doctor, she’d explained, was not letting any creature suffer.
Last month, she’d brought Vi down to the basement and taught her how to use the killing jar. An unfortunate mouse had undergone a treatment that hadn’t worked. It was no longer able to eat or drink and was just curled up in the corner of its cage, twitching.
Vi knew she shouldn’t feel bad, but she did. She felt bad for every single animal that didn’t make it. But Gran said the rodents had served a greater purpose, given their lives so that she could learn things that would help her heal her human patients.
Following Gran’s instructions, Vi had unscrewed the lid of the chloroform and squeezed the eyedropper the way she had been shown.