Poison

by Galt Niederhoffer

  He responds with a smiley face, cementing Cass’s annoyance. Emoticons should be outlawed, she feels, particularly for men over forty.

  In her groggy state, she tries to assemble a log of each attack she remembers.

  1. coffee

  2. lobster roll

  3. champagne

  4. neck

  5. dress

  6. paper

  7. cake

  8. neck

  She rereads it and scoffs, imagining a cop’s response. Is there a better word for this? Assaults? Batteries? Drugging? Dosing? Assault with a chemical weapon? She thinks back to what the cop said. “I don’t even think we have a code for this one.”

  Another email from Aaron arrives. The subject heading pisses her off even before she reads the content. “Subject: Re: Confirmation bias.”

  The email includes a link to an article on the concept. She clicks it, as requested. “When you have a hammer, everything is a nail,” begins the writer. The subtitle of the article is “You’re Not as Smart as You Think You Are.” It goes on to present various examples of bogus or circuitous logic, in which a person who is overly motivated by a theory, goal, or expectation arrives at false conclusions, finds problems that do not exist, or misdiagnoses benign concerns with false positives—or worse, malignant findings. To wit: people seeking advice from psychics, wives looking for proof of cheating husbands, or doctors running tests on an otherwise healthy patient.

  She scans the article quickly with growing resentment. She replies in a text. “Why the sudden change of heart? Please stop trying to dissuade me.”

  He writes back quickly. “I’m just trying to point out alternative explanations.”

  “Please don’t,” she writes. “I know what’s he’s done. I just need to prove it.”

  “Then what?” he writes.

  “Then I go back to the cops. And I stay there until they listen.”

  “I don’t think you should do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “The cops will do one of two things: laugh at you or arrest you.”

  A pause and then an email arrives with another inscrutable heading: “Re: Dr. Lugner.” Followed by an impassioned plea to consider the referral for a shrink in downtown Portland who specializes in “negative fixations” and, Aaron says as a final plug, “at the very least, might be someone who can help you work out why you are entrenched in such an unhealthy relationship.”

  Enraged, Cass signs off without ending the conversation. The doctor’s name is familiar, but she is too put off by his sudden flip-flop—and his insulting suggestion—for any further consideration.

  One last Google search before she allows herself a reprieve from the night’s investigation.

  “Space behind the ears,” she types. “Temples. Neck. Absorption through skin.”

  And after a flurry of photos of various Jewish, Buddhist, and Roman temples, she finds something more relevant. Confirmation bias is a bitch. So is poison.

  “Jugular vein,” she reads. Followed by the definition. “One of the largest blood vessels in the neck that transports blood from the head to the heart. This vein runs from behind the ears down the neck and up to the temples. It is often used for injection or topical application of medications because it drains directly into the heart, allowing for the most expedient delivery of medication to the major organs.” And then, the chilling addendum: “External jugular cannulation is the injection or topical application of fluids, medications, nutrition, or chemotherapy into a patient. It is an integral part of modern medicine, practiced in every health-care setting for rapid dissemination.”

  She closes her computer, sufficiently riled by this information.

  Desperate for respite from the day, the nausea, the confusion, Cass walks to the bathroom and turns on the shower. She stands under the faucet, grateful for a familiar sensation, grateful for the simple connection between action and reaction. Hot water runs down her back. She wraps herself in a towel, embracing the comfort of the soft cloth against her shoulders. She sits on the bed, then lies on her back at a right angle to her husband and falls asleep next to Ryan, still in her towel, clutching her pillow as though it is a life preserver.

  * * *

  Nausea wakes Cass in the morning, nausea so intense it propels her from bed with its own momentum. She stumbles to the bathroom, knocking over a stack of clothes, tripping over the suitcase, leaving a trail of neon shirts and bathing suits that look like spilled jelly beans. She collapses on the bathroom floor just in time to vomit bile into the toilet. After, she crouches on the tile floor, hands to the ground, struggling to still the moving plane of all that is horizontal. The tiles are cold and hurt her knees. The floor is damp in patches. The puddles lead to a trail of footprints that extend from the shower to the door.

  “Why is the floor wet?” she calls out. Her thinking is as viscous now as her stomach. She is making simple assumptions. She assumes that Ryan still lies in the bed, and that he—or someone—will answer.

  “I don’t know.” His voice is hoarse. “Probably from the shower.”

  “But you just woke up,” she says.

  “Yeah,” he says. Then, for clarity, “I woke up when you woke me.”

  “Then how would it be wet?” she says. “Everything else in here is dry. It’s been hours since I ran the shower.” She touches the clothes hanging on the hook, her bathing suit—and the children’s. “The clothes are dry. The footprints are wet.” And then again, “Someone was in here. In the last few hours.”

  “Who do you think it was?” he says. “Who is the culprit, Miss Marple?”

  “You tell me,” Cass says. She is on her hands and knees, her face inches from the floor as she inspects the wet shapes tracking from the shower.

  A long pause during which Ryan digests or feigns frustration. “What are you saying, Cass?”

  “I’m not saying anything,” she says. “I’m asking.”

  Another pause, this one the pause of a man struggling to still his anger. “Are you suggesting someone broke in? That someone broke into our cabana?”

  “I’m not suggesting anything,” she says. “I’m telling you there are footprints that go from the shower to the door and asking you how they got here.” With effort, she rises from the ground and crawls out of the bathroom.

  Ryan is standing in the doorway when she crosses the threshold. “Don’t do this, Cass,” he says. “Don’t ruin this vacation. This is how you wake me up? With your paranoid delusions?”

  But Cass will not be bullied. She is done with intimidation. She struggles to rise from the floor, hobbles out of the bathroom, then opens the front door of the cabana, takes several steps across the grass, then drops to her knees to feel the grass, as though the dew, the dampness can prove who was in her bathroom.

  Ryan stands at the door as Cass crawls across the grass. He is shaking his head with revulsion.

  “You’re crawling,” he says. “Like one of those women.”

  She does not look up. “Watch out what you wish for.”

  “Get off the ground.”

  She does not move.

  “Cass, look at yourself right now. Get off the ground, Cass.”

  “Someone was in our room,” she says. “Someone was in there recently. I’m calling the front desk, Ryan. We have to tell them.”

  “Cass, do not call them. What are you going to say? You found your own footsteps, Cass, after taking a shower!”

  “Stop trying to make me doubt myself,” she says. “And basic facts of nature. Water evaporates, Ryan, after several hours.”

  “Do not bother them, Cass. You’re going to feel really stupid when you realize these are your footprints.”

  “You’re telling me this water has been here for over eight hours?”

  Furious, she walks back inside, marches to the bathroom. She grabs her bathing suit from the hook where hers and the kids’ are hanging. She wants to leave quickly, and her bikini top is closer than the bra that is still in her
luggage. She puts it on, clasping the back, and then finds a dry blue sarong, a simple patterned fabric, and ties it at her hip to look like any of the other presentable, elegant mothers. She stops at the door, mouth poised to speak but freezes at the sight of the waking children. She and Ryan will have to wait to continue this conversation.

  Alice and Pete sit on the floor, a pile of white shells between them. They are sorting and trading yesterday’s haul, as they do with Halloween candy. Shells clatter on the tiles like coins in a pocket. The children’s cheeks are flushed from the sun, their eyes bright with anticipation. Cass surveys her kids, oblivious in their laughter. She looks at the man that was once her love, her partner, the man that has become her tormentor. She thinks of what she told her daughter when she asked for her guidance. When you don’t know what to do, get very quiet. Get quiet, don’t stay quiet. Then scream bloody murder. The time has come to call for help. The time has come to end this madness.

  Moving faster now, she leaves the cabana and heads to the lobby, but before she has taken ten steps across the warm sand of early morning, the feeling is upon her. Light so bright and silvery it looks as though the sun has gotten closer. Nausea pulls her down again with the convulsive release of all that was inside her. The force of it brings her to her knees, so that she is kneeling in the sand like a shipwrecked sailor.

  She racks her mind now for the cause, the latest ingestion, the action and reaction. Was it something she ate, something she touched, something she breathed, something that is on her? And then, recoiling in horror, she realizes she has once again turned his weapon on herself, a voluntary dagger pointed at her breastbone. She gestures clumsily at her chest and fumbles at her clothing. Something that is on her. She is in broad daylight now, amid the morning strollers. She cannot rip her clothes off in the middle of the beach or else appear—and confirm his claims that she is—completely demented.

  Frantic, she stumbles to the surf, desperate for any cover. She crouches into an approaching wave, untying her bikini top and dragging off the bottom. She wears only a sarong now with nothing underneath it. She gathers water from the waves and tries to cleanse her chest of the remaining toxin—whatever has not already been absorbed into her system, and already circles her veins, speeding from the jugular vein to her prefrontal cortex.

  Holding the bathing suit by a string, she waits for another wave and rinses it in the water, beating it against the sand in the chop in the hopes that this will purge it of the toxins it has been soaked in. But this, too, seems a futile act, a pointless protest in the face of something that has grown massive—a force that is everywhere at once, inside and surrounding her. She hurls her bathing suit into the ocean—first the top and then the bottom, as though in offering to the sea, in acceptance of its power, and an act of defiance. The orange shreds of her suit flow out on the next wave. She watches them rise and fall once more before they are enveloped.

  When she turns around, Ryan is standing behind her. “Look at yourself, Cass. You’re practically naked.”

  She clutches her sarong to her chest, tries to run now in the sand, but her steps are slow and labored.

  “Cass, stop.”

  She doesn’t. She keeps moving.

  “Cass, stop!” Ryan is faster. He reaches her in four large strides and grabs her by the shoulders. He spins her toward him and stares at her as though he can still hypnotize her into submission.

  “We’re leaving,” she says. “I’m ending the vacation early.”

  “By all means. Take Alice and Pete. Sam is staying.”

  She looks up now. They are eye to eye, and his gaze is relentless.

  “Sam’s coming with me,” says Cass.

  “Not unless you want me to report you.”

  “To whom?”

  “It’s illegal to take a child out of the country without the approval of both parents.”

  “We came here together,” she says. “I am his mother.”

  “You’re in no state to travel,” he says. “I’ll have to inform customs.”

  She matches his intensity without flinching. “You can’t stop me.”

  “No, I can’t,” he says. “But you can’t travel without a passport.”

  Cass turns and trudges across the beach, fighting the sand to reach the cabana. Inside, she empties the bags in a frenzy, first the one with wallets and passports, followed by the luggage with her own clothes and the children’s. Clothes unfurl across the floor in a pile of socks, books, and swimsuits. She drops to the floor on her hands and knees, rummaging like a beggar. Ryan has bested her once again. Pete’s and Alice’s passports are still in her bag, secured, as before, with a rubber band. Sam’s is conspicuously absent.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The Connors sit together at breakfast on the terrace, cheeks flushed and spirits soothed. Two days into their vacation, their faces already evidence the salve of changed perspective. The kids eat eggs and toast and fruit, the colors of which are vivid enough to name Crayola colors—yellow mango, pink grapefruit, green papaya, brown toast, and red berries. To anyone looking at this family, they appear picture-perfect, a far cry from the horror Cass is living, which is, of course, she realizes now, exactly what Ryan has intended.

  Ryan hands Cass a drink, a frothy white thing in a curvy glass, garnished with a cherry. He stares at her in a goading way, daring her to defy him. If she refuses, she acknowledges she knows his method, and, therefore, poses a threat to his freedom. Should she call his bluff and sip it as a show of trust or a pretense of ignorance? Or meet him with the tacit acknowledgment and refuse it? Surviving a crime can be more dangerous than being its victim.

  But now a new problem. Sam, too, is tempted by the milky drink and the shiny fruit adornment.

  “Want drink,” he says, reaching for the glass. He plucks the maraschino cherry.

  Ryan and Cass react in the same instant, swatting Sam’s hand away from the drink and snatching the garnish. Sam bursts into tears, surprised by the reaction and the denial.

  Cass stares at Ryan. Ryan stares back, defiant. The inference is not lost on either one. The drink was meant for Cass.

  “Too sweet for Sam,” Ryan says and quickly changes the subject. “Who wants to build a sand castle?”

  The kids raise their hands at once. Diversion is a fail-proof tool. Enthusiasm—and bribery—are equally contagious.

  He leads the children from the terrace to the beach after breakfast, each one gleefully taking their place in the usual procession, except now they are carrying pails and shovels, ready to make good on the promise of their heated conversation. A flutter of fear occurs to Cass as she imagines some unconsidered hazard—an accident of nature, a tidal wave or strong current, but her heart is buoyed by pride and relief as Alice and Pete build and play with furious determination. For the rest of the day, the Connors prostrate themselves to the trifecta of sunshine, sand, and water. Cass is strengthened by her children’s joy. Her heart begins to pump more fully as she watches them dance across the beach, chasing each other across the surf like a school of dolphins.

  A short trip to the hotel room to restock towels and sunscreen affords the opportunity to send an email to her mother. She is reluctant to do so, but it seems imperative. She knows, of course, that her mother is a fragile alliance. And now she understands the risks of speaking too soon to anyone. Reporting this crime has well-known repercussions. But so does silence.

  Subject heading: SOS.

  “Mom,” she writes, “I need your help. The kids and I are in danger. We’re on vacation in Bermuda. I need you to fly here as soon as you can and take Pete and Alice back to New York. I need you to keep them safe with you until I can fix a very bad situation.”

  She puts down her phone and opens her computer. Now a different message draws her attention: a new email from an unknown address in Arizona. It opens with a single click and an elaborate Excel spreadsheet. On the left column is a list of substances. On the right, a series of numbers. First, the trace amount in which
these substances might be found naturally in the environment, followed by the amount in which they have been found in the sample substance. She understands the numbers before she remembers the referent. It is the lab report from the toxicology test ordered by her lawyer. The lobster roll has tested positive for seven heavy metals on the periodic table—arsenic, lithium, beryllium, magnesium, cadmium, nickel, and mercury—all of them in toxic levels. But none is higher than the first—they are listed in alphabetical order. Arsenic: 350 mcg/L. A bouquet of metals. A compound. An alloy. C. Alloy.

  She types all seven metals into her search. It yields the following definition:

  Group 12 Elements. Transitional metals in the D-block of the periodic table. Likely to form bonds with other metals and often used in alloys. Low boiling points make them favored in the formation of metal compounds. Transformation to gas at lower points than most metals.

  She quickly switches off the phone and hurries to her children. She needs to find someone, anyone to help them.

  * * *

  Certainty can be more confusing than any amount of wondering. Wondering leaves you with options, alternate explanations, and room for the lies we tell ourselves in order to live without fear and trepidation. Cass no longer has the luxury of not knowing. Time is no longer on her side. Time has joined forces with her husband. She joins her family on the beach, where Ryan is reclining on a lounge chair. Sam sits building mounds of sand in the shade of an umbrella. The older kids are farther down the beach with a gaggle of other children, their red, orange, and yellow bathing suits scattered like a handful of jelly beans.

  “I’m going in,” Ryan says.

  He rises from his chair and starts toward the ocean, picking up speed as he passes Alice and Pete and taunting them to join him. Cass watches Ryan walk, surveys his sunburned shoulders. She scans the beach like a hungry bird and prepares to gather her children. Pete and Alice have moved slightly. They are combing the beach for shells at low tide along with the seagulls. Without delay, she rises and hoists Sam to her hip, taking him from his castle.

  “No!” he wails. He tries to squirm from her grasp.