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.
Gran explained that, like ether, chloroform was used as an early anesthetic for surgery—they’d probably used it at the Inn, back when it was a Civil War hospital, for amputations on the soldiers. They’d soaked a rag with the sweet-smelling liquid and held it over the patient’s face. But Vi had been taught that too much for too long would paralyze the lungs.