Poison

by Galt Niederhoffer

  “He tried to kill me, Dad. You are having the wrong reaction. Your anger should be directed at him, not your own daughter. This is when the father says he’s gonna guard our door with a shotgun.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Marty says. “This man saved you from a miserable life. Without him, you would be a lonely, aging widow.”

  “I think you mean financially independent single mother.”

  “You know what I mean,” he scoffs.

  Cass shakes her head, crushed by her father’s reaction. “My husband tried to kill me.” Repetition is her only source of power, defiance.

  “Well, I do not believe you.”

  “That’s very disappointing,” says Cass. She trails off. “It’s shocking.”

  And then, a final insult. “I don’t care if he tried to kill you,” says her father. “Just don’t say it.”

  That people are abandoned at the moment they most need protection is unfortunately all too common. As improbable as it seems, it appears to be the default setting of human nature. Still, when it happens, it is baffling to the person seeking assistance. Cass struggles now to understand her father’s reaction. It is the opposite of her most basic instinct as a parent—to love, protect, and nurture. But now, as she listens to her father—her own father—and digests his reaction, she considers a possible explanation for his callous treatment, for what can only be described as his own delusion. Perhaps it is so painful for him to imagine the harm of his own daughter that he simply refuses. Instead, he prefers to think—can only think—she did something to cause this, which in turn allows him to blame her “active imagination,” spare him the pain of imagining harm—and worse, his role in allowing such a thing to happen. She hangs up, gutted, convinced of one thing only: that she understands human nature less than she did an hour prior.

  * * *

  Cass is lying in the guest room of Nora’s Cumberland mansion. Everything in this house is beige. It is like a giant hotel room. Three other people share this bed. Daughter. Son. Baby. In. Out. In. Out. Alice, Pete, and Sam look like a trio of kittens, their limbs and hands entwined in one spectacular knitted being. Cass draws her children close and pulls up the blankets. She feels hollowed, halved, carved out like a cantaloupe before chopping. She has lost her love and faith in love. She has lost her home and her faith in home. She has narrowly escaped death and detainment. That her three children lie in her grasp is why faith remains at all.

  She tries now to steel herself, to draw on previous means of meditation, to make a list in her head of consolations and desolations. She listens to the sound of her breath, tries to find the virtues in her situation. It is not easy, but here goes nothing. One: she has survived an attempt on her life, brought her children to safety. Two: she has lost—and left—a man who subjected her to intolerable cruelty. That she misses him is only proof of the depth of his degradation. Three: she has averted a misunderstanding that nearly resulted in forced incarceration. Four: her children are in her arms, and they are breathing.

  Surrounded by all that matters in the world and somewhat sedated, she pulls out her phone, that trusty lifeline—and goes back to work, continuing an investigation that has risen from petty and prurient affairs to attempted murder. She begins where every detective starts, amateur or licensed: that infinite source of information, clues, facts, and misunderstandings, the World Wide Web, specifically, Google, Mayo Clinic, WebMD, Poison Control, and the website for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She types the only thing she knows: poisons, undetectable, and heavy metal for good measure.

  A knock on the door. She looks up to find Nora standing in the doorway, holding a cup of tea and a stack of white towels. Dear God. Thank you for small mercies.

  She rises to sit without stirring the kids. “What would I do without you?”

  “Please don’t thank me,” Nora says. “I’m just glad I got your text in time. That could have been hairy.”

  “I got yours just in time. I was starting to lose it.”

  “Anyone would in that situation.”

  Cass adds a new item to her list of consolations. Five: she has dear friends, and they are dear to her. It is true, she is finding, that hard times reveal who your friends are. It is not true, she has learned, that blood is thicker than water. If the last twenty-four hours are any indication, family has nothing on the kindness of strangers.

  “What happened in there?” Nora places the tea on a table and sits on the edge of the bed.

  “It was scary,” says Cass. “I was locked in that room. I didn’t know if they were going to let me out of there.”

  “But you passed the test.” Nora smiles.

  “Apparently,” Cass says.

  “That’s my girl,” Nora says. “Making friends and taking names in psych wards across the country.”

  “I should have seen it coming,” Cass says.

  “How could you?” says Nora.

  “He’s been teeing this up.”

  “How could you know?”

  “How could I not?” says Cass. “He did exactly what he said. The threat was a statement of his plan. He just kept his promise.”

  “Look, honey, Cass.” Nora takes the particular tone women take when they’re about to get angry, the sudden increase in volume, the rising pulse, the tenderness that precedes indignation. “It’s natural now to doubt everything. Everything around you. But you’ve just been through hell, my dear. Nothing feels safe to you right now, but that doesn’t mean you should heed all your instincts.”

  Cass straightens. “It doesn’t mean I should dismiss them either.”

  A moment passes between the friends as they digest a difference of opinion. “It was a mistake to go,” says Nora. “I had a feeling this might happen.”

  “You had a feeling this could happen?” says Cass.

  “Not when I told you to go,” she says. “But now, after spending time in that place. I learned a lot from the nurses and doctors in that waiting room.”

  “What did you learn?” Cass says.

  “Just about trends of presentation.”

  “What do you mean?” Cass asks.

  “Turns out there are two kinds of people who show up in emergency rooms with fears of being poisoned. Victims of domestic violence and paranoid schizophrenics.”

  Cass leans forward on the bed, to prevent a rise in volume. “What are you saying, Nora?”

  “Just that you need to be careful now. You need to watch what you say and to whom. There’s a world outside this room ready to judge this, ready to judge you. An avalanche that will smother you if you don’t get out ahead of it. You saw that tonight.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Who knows what would have happened if you hadn’t reached me, if I hadn’t been able to come.”

  “This sounds like more like a reprimand than a warning.”

  “I’m just making sure you know what this is, Cass. This isn’t like reporting a pickpocket or a burglary. You know what happens to girls who report assaults, even when they do have bruises. These women get taken down,” she says. “They get victimized by the press, by the cops, by the lawyers, the courtrooms. It doesn’t matter if it’s a rape, abuse, assault, or drugging. ‘She’s crazy,’ they say. ‘She made it up.’ ‘She wants attention, money.’ ‘She’s a slut who wore too short a skirt.’ ‘Why was she there so late at night?’ ‘She drank too much.’ ‘She asked for it.’ ‘She wanted it.’ ‘She deserved it.’ I’m surprised they don’t say more often that she did it herself, shoved a wine bottle up her crotch and injected the semen. Women get brutalized, Cass. For reporting brutal crimes against them. They’re DOA before they can even make their statements. And that’s not even thinking about what happens to their children.”

  “And what do you suggest I do to avoid this brutalization?”

  “Hell if I know,” Nora says. “It just seems to me that reporting a crime can make things worse, that the systems there to protect us actually fail us more often. Only you can
decide what to do. I guess you just have to ask yourself what you gain by speaking out. Ask yourself if it’s worth it.”

  “I am trying to protect myself, find safety for me and my children. I am not ‘speaking out.’ This is not a political statement.”

  “You know that’s not what I mean,” says Nora. “I’m just telling you the box is open now. You have to be very careful.”

  Cass begins to feel it again, the heavy sensation of dread descending over her being, followed by a new weight, an array of questions, possible outcomes, catastrophes, permutations. And she asks herself: This feeling that has taken up residence in her heart—is it paranoia or intuition?

  “Right, of course,” Cass says. In. She takes air into her lungs. She needs to dull her emotions. She needs her friends and their belief in her. She needs their love like she needs water. It is going to be a cold winter, and she needs to preserve her resources. “Thanks again for everything.”

  “Anytime,” says Nora. “Anything.” And then, just before closing the door, “Clean clothes are in the drawers if you need them.”

  But the light tone they try for now underscores a bleak reality. Cass turns off the lamp, but she is already submerged in darkness.

  * * *

  The symptoms begin later that night with a new vengeance. She immediately wishes she had stayed in the hospital, not only because they would believe her now—now there would be no confusion—not only because she needs proof and proof is now abundant but because the symptoms are so extreme as to bring her to her knees and render her helpless, to cause her to beg for mercy, to beg God to make himself known and forgive her for calling on him only when she needs protection. The nausea has its own unnerving cycle—first, an overwhelming urge to gag, a gag that is both a source of pain and a harbinger of vomit, followed by a violent eruption of the esophagus. Peristalsis is a fitting word, conjuring the halting, wormlike contractions of this serpentine organ. The only respite from the experience is to make yourself tiny, to face the coldness of the floor and try to remember a different sensation.

  But the most disturbing symptom of all is not a physical ailment. It is an affliction of the head, a feeling in the brain that can only be described as a swelling. A mental illness of sorts. But unlike mental illness, it is caused by something outside the mind, as though by an infection, an intrusion from the outside that causes an internal inflammation, a burning up of the cerebellum. Imagine the most you’ve ever had to drink, the feeling where the room begins to spin, that awkward parting with the knowable world when the walls and the floors lose the distinction between their two separate axes. Now double the greatest dosage of alcohol you have ever ingested, and try to complete executive functions. Smile, speak, open your mouth. Find your keys, bag, wallet. These are the simple instructions Cass gives herself when she is awakened later by pain that spreads from her throat to her gut, from her gut to her brain to her toenails.

  It must be three or four o’clock when she wakes with a shudder. Her chest feels cold, as though her lungs were dampened and then frozen. The muscles in her face are stiff, encrusted. She is unsure if this sensation is the result of fear and sadness, the poison coursing through her blood—or some indistinguishable mixture, like sugar and water, that has blended together into a new substance. She reaches over her sleeping children to collect her phone. The baby and Alice are to her right, still tangled like a skein of yarn—arms, feet, round tummies—and Pete is cuddled up on her left, clutching her forearm. A new surprise greets her on her phone, an email in the unmistakably officious tone of a lawyer. Ryan has retained a divorce lawyer and petitioned for custody of Sam. Before this information has traveled from her eyes to brain cells—the malice, the betrayal, the mental leap required to fathom nights without her baby, a baby who still fed from her breast not two months prior, the cost, the calls, the meetings, the heartache, the decisions required—Alice and Pete begin to stir, and Cass must rise to action and switch into a functional state and her morning version.

  She must move this new reality from one part of her brain to another, and so she begins the tasks required to get her children dressed and brushed and ready before eight fifteen this morning. She scans the room for clothes that will support this transformation—pants, sweater, clean socks—and removes them from the drawers, grateful for Nora’s suggestion. She moves on to the bathroom to begin the bathing process. She turns the faucet and submerges her face, hands, and fingers. The water starts the day again, resetting her senses. Would that it were so easy to turn time on and off like this, to start yesterday again such that it would not end in this bizarre new reality.

  So little time has passed, and yet so much is different. What could she have done differently, she allows herself to wonder, to prevent them from ending up here, in this house, in this world that is almost familiar and yet strange and inhospitable? Right now, it takes all her energy to remain standing at the sink, hands submerged under the faucet, so powerful is the force of nausea swirling from her gut to her throat, so hazy are the thoughts in her head as to feel that they—the thoughts themselves—have been drenched and blurred like newsprint by water.

  It will be a triumph if she can dress all three kids and get them out the door for school without forgetting the name of that school, and the directions to it, without crumpling to the floor and landing in a pool of her own vomit. Luckily, thanks to the grace of God and her children’s resilience in a crisis, all four of them stand in Nora’s front hall, looking vaguely presentable twenty minutes later.

  An hour later, the kids are dropped off, safely delivered, content for the next six hours. Cass is in the car, headed home. Sam is beginning to doze in his car seat. With the baby sated and the big kids safely at school, Cass calls the only doctor she knows and asks for a morning appointment. She is beginning to feel a measure of hope as she pulls out of the school driveway. Her children are safe. The baby is calm. It is not raining. The dark green firs that line the road will survive this winter as they have every other before it. Flowers will bloom in the spring no matter how harsh the winter—tulips, magnolias, cherry blossoms. The bay is still on her right, absorbing the winter sunshine, and the ocean is just farther east beyond it. She has survived an attack on her life. She is strong and resilient. What she needs more than anything now is proof. Blood work, urine tests, numbers on a page. She needs unassailable evidence, objective fact, empirical data. Surely, this doctor will provide this.

  * * *

  At the Connor home, a young woman sits on the front step, hair brushed, eyes shiny. She looks neat and prim. She wears leggings and a checked oxford shirt, a gray cardigan sweater rolled up at the sleeves, lace-up Victorian-era boots that tie above the ankles. A tattoo peeks out from her sleeve, a subtle incongruous question: Nice or naughty?

  But today, she is almost exclusively nice, even dowdy, hair pulled back into a bun like a surgeon prepped for focus. It is twenty minutes past eight right now, and she is patiently waiting. Marley has reported to work. She is here to watch the baby. She has brought a canvas bag filled with crayons and colored pencils, books with cheerful bindings. She is ready to put the last nanny to shame. She is a veritable Mary Poppins, if Mary Poppins were a mint julep.

  Cass fights the gnawing sense that something has been forgotten. It will be hours before she remembers the girl sitting on her front step, a small mercy, like dollars found in a coat pocket, that will get her through the next few weeks, these endless hours. Help has arrived in the form of Marley Lyons, an ally committed to Cass alone, every day, rain or shine, for ten to twelve hours.

  TWELVE

  Cass is sitting in her gynecologist’s office. This doctor’s office is pink, not blue. Pink as a baby’s bottom, pink as a bouquet of spring flowers. This is the only doctor Cass knows in the city of Portland. Were she still in Brooklyn, she would have had a list of options, a second and third alternate on speed dial, specialists for ears, noses, and throats at all the various hospitals. But she is still a virtual newcomer to this
city and has not yet amassed the go-to Rolodex collected over years as a grown-up, and the confidence that comes with having such a list, however false, that you are safe from injury or accident. Conversely, Cass feels right now particularly prone to disaster, balancing the baby on her lap while talking to the doctor and trying to prevent Sam from grabbing the prescription pad off the doctor’s desk or using the doctor’s jar of pens as the foundation of a tower.

  “Well, that’s creepy,” the doctor says. This is her response to Cass’s now-familiar synopsis, what she has begun to think of as the short version. This doctor has a bedside manner that is decidedly not treacly. She speaks with the businesslike tone of a lawyer, and Cass likes her for this.

  “It was,” says Cass. “It is.” She lets out an unexpected burp and, with it, embarrassed laughter. Is it possible her body is expelling the toxic substance, that she is now the lucky beneficiary of the body’s miraculous self-correction, that her body has begun the inelegant but efficient purge of its gastrointestinal system?

  “The miraculous human body,” says the doctor.

  Cass looks up quickly. Did she say that out loud? Did the doctor hear what she was thinking? She pushes the thought from her head and continues through her list of questions. “They told me I should get these tests with a private doctor, so I’m wondering if you can run them. He said to start with household chemicals, heavy metals, and basic narcotics. He said to do blood work and urine.”

  The doctor nods and sits in silence for several seconds. Cass begins to wonder if she has not heard her. She wonders if she has said something wrong, something inadvertently offensive.