Fed Up

by JESSICA; SUSAN CONANT CONANT-PARK

  “Yes,” I said. “Thank God.”

  I’d somehow expected help to pour in through the back door, but when the doorbell rang, Josh went through the dining room, opened the front door, and took charge of directing the newcomers upstairs to where Francie lay on the bathroom floor. I felt certain that she was dead, but medical personnel and the police could hardly be expected to take my word for her condition, and there still remained a chance, I told myself, that I was wrong. The possibility made me feel guilty: what if I’d abandoned Francie when my presence might have comforted her?

  While I could still hear the sounds of feet pounding up the stairs, Marlee reappeared from the bathroom. Her color was worse than it had been before. She had a greenish tinge, and her damp hair clung to her cheeks. “I heard the ambulance,” she said. “Chloe, get someone to help me, would you? I’m sick. I’m so sick.”

  You and everyone else, I wanted to say. What I actually said was, “I’m not too well myself, and neither are—” I broke off. What if Marlee was becoming as horribly ill as Francie had been? “I’ll see if I can get someone,” I promised. With that, I made my way to the front hall, where the outside door stood open. Through it, I could see more official vehicles than I expected: two police cruisers and two big ambulances. As I stood there wondering how to summon help for Marlee—holler loudly? actually venture upstairs?—a handsome young EMT came bounding down, and at the same time, Josh appeared through the wide doorway to the living room.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” I said to the EMT, “but there’s someone in the kitchen who wants help. She’s sick, too. And so are—”

  “I’m going to check everyone out,” he assured me, “and then we’re probably going to take all of you to the emergency room.”

  “I’m fine,” Josh claimed.

  “No, he’s not,” I insisted. “He threw up all over the place.”

  “Yeah, I did throw up. I feel okay now, though. I’m fine.”

  “Josh, you don’t know that!” I insisted. “But the one who’s feeling really bad is Marlee. And Digger is sick, too.”

  “Give me a minute,” the EMT said.

  “We’ll be in the kitchen,” I told him. “It’s in there, through the dining room.”

  The EMT hurried out through the front door. As Josh and I were on our way to the kitchen, we paused in the dining room to exchange a few words.

  “Francie?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “They had to do their thing, but . . .”

  “I thought so,” I said. “Oh, Josh, I was with her when she died. Maybe that’s why I feel sick. Maybe I don’t have the same thing as everyone else. I can’t even tell.”

  “Hey, we’ve got to get these guys to take a look at you. Like he said, get you to the hospital.”

  “Marlee’s the one I’m worried about. She looks terrible. Not as bad as Francie was, but I’m scared that she’s—”

  Josh held a finger to his lips. “Let the EMTs worry about her.”

  “I have to see how she is,” I insisted.

  When we entered the kitchen, I was relieved to find Marlee no worse than she’d been before. She was sitting at the table with Robin and Digger.

  “Marlee, one of the EMTs will be here in a minute,” I said.

  Robin spoke up. “I’m really queasy, too. I don’t feel right.” She was slumped in her seat and was idly fingering her drooping ponytail. “I can’t believe this. Is Francie really . . . ?”

  Josh nodded. “Yes. Chloe was with her when she stopped breathing.”

  “Oh, my God, Chloe! Are you all right? Come sit down here.” Robin pulled out another chair from the table.

  “I’m okay.” I still felt weird, but I was too embarrassed to admit that I couldn’t tell whether I was sick or terrified.

  Just as Josh opened his mouth to start arguing with me, the handsome EMT entered the kitchen in the company of a uniformed police officer, a large, muscular man with a neatly trimmed mustache. Before either of the men had a chance to say a word, Josh put a hand on my shoulder. “Chloe, you’re not okay.” Addressing the EMT, he said, “You need to take a look at her.”

  I caught the EMT’s eye and gestured to Marlee. “I’ll be okay, but Marlee’s the one who really needs help.”

  The police officer’s radio crackled loudly. He stepped to the far end of the kitchen and began muttering incomprehensible words. Interrupting the EMT, who was speaking softly to Marlee, he called out, “Where’d you get the food?”

  “Natural High,” I answered. “The Natural High right near here.”

  In an effort to be helpful, Josh began to give a detailed description of all the food we’d bought and all the dishes he’d prepared with such enthusiasm. I could hardly listen without crying for him. In the background, I heard heavy footsteps and the sound of the front door opening and closing. For a moment, everyone was quiet, as if we’d tacitly agreed to observe a moment of silence as Francie’s body was carried away. My head was spinning, and everything seemed to be simultaneously happening in slow motion and at warp speed. I couldn’t think clearly.

  I don’t know whether the EMT responded to me, to someone else, or to the whole situation, but I clearly remember that he said, “Okay, let’s get you all to the emergency room.” I also remember that he let Nelson have it: “And turn off that camera!”

  Until then, I’d all but forgotten Nelson’s existence. Wishful thinking?

  “Man, look at it this way,” Nelson said. “I’m just doing my job. Pursuing my art, okay? I’m a filmmaker, and I’m not going to miss this. That’s what a documentary is about, right? Reality. Whatever happens. No matter what, you get it on film.” The glee in Nelson’s voice made me feel queasier than ever.

  The cop was more effective than the EMT had been in getting Nelson to quit filming. Instead of giving Nelson an order, he did nothing but look at him, raise a hand, point his finger, and utter one word: “You!”

  Nelson turned tail and vanished through the dining room.

  The next thing that happened was that I stood up and . . . and . . . Well, what I definitely did not do was faint. For one thing, as a person who had completed a whole year of social work school and was thus a mental-health professional in training, I couldn’t possibly have passed out from anxiety. For another thing, although I’d been feeling sick to my stomach, I hadn’t lost any bodily fluids and thus couldn’t have keeled over from dehydration. And for yet another thing, I wasn’t the swooning type. So, let’s just say that one moment I was rising from a chair in the kitchen, and the next moment, the next one I can remember, anyway, I was in an ambulance on the way to the hospital. But not, not, not because I had fainted.

  SIX

  OKAY, so I fainted. The first voice I heard when I came to was Marlee’s. “I can’t see right,” she complained. “Everything is kind of blurry.”

  The second voice belonged to the handsome EMT. “You with us again, Chloe? You’re going to be fine. We’re on our way to the hospital, but all that happened to you was that you fainted.”

  It was then that I became aware of the siren and of the sensation of being in a moving vehicle. To my credit, I didn’t ask where I was. In fact, although the interior of the big emergency medical service vehicle looked like my idea of the inside of a space capsule, I knew that I was in an ambulance. “Not me!” I said. “I never faint.”

  Besides his good looks, the EMT had a sense of humor. He laughed. “Not the type for smelling salts, huh?”

  When I tried to sit up, he gently told me to keep my head down for a while, but I succeeded in looking around and saw Marlee on the opposite side of the ambulance. She was rubbing her eyes, and her face looked wet from tears. “What’s wrong with me?” she asked in a feeble voice. “With us?”

  Although she wasn’t addressing me, I answered her. “Something in the house? Like a gas leak?”

  To my surprise, it was Josh who replied. His voice came from somewhere toward the front of the ambulance. “It’s got to be the food
. I don’t know how, but it has to.” He started reciting a list of everything he’d bought today: “Lamb, halibut, olives, arugula, potatoes . . .”

  The comforting rumble of Josh’s voice must have soothed me. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, I showed two signs of health: practicality and hunger. “I don’t have my insurance card!” I said in alarm. “It’s in my purse, locked in my car.” I had the sense to say nothing about my empty stomach. With one person dead and others ill, this was no time to ask for a snack. Even so, the thought did cross my mind that the hospital probably had a cafeteria or at least a vending machine.

  As it turned out, Josh had found my keys and retrieved my purse from my car. Although he grumbled in a sweet way about women and their purses, I was glad to have my belongings with me, especially once we were at the emergency room, which was mercifully uncrowded. By the time we arrived, even my matinee-idol EMT conceded that my case had low priority, as did the nurses responsible for deciding which of us had to be seen immediately and which of us could wait. Although I still felt shaken, I had no physical symptoms at all. Consequently, I ended up in the waiting room with Josh, Digger, Robin, and that damned Nelson, who’d followed the ambulances to the hospital, which was a small one that I’d never heard of before. Marlee, who’d felt increasingly worse, had been hustled into the exam area as soon as we’d arrived. Nelson, camera in hand, was lurking near the entrance. The rest of us were sitting together. Josh and Digger were, as usual, talking about food, but not in the way that chefs typically do.

  “Dude, it can’t be the food. You know that,” Digger tried to assure Josh. “All the stuff you cooked would take time to produce symptoms like this. Food poisoning wouldn’t come on that fast and kill somebody. You know as well as I do that it takes, like, six hours at least before you’d get sick. If this was E. coli or something, none of us would be feeling anything right now.”

  I saw a flash of relief cross Josh’s face. “You’re right. You’re right. I’m just so freaked out, and I can’t help feeling like this is my fault somehow. I mean, I fed Francie, and then she died! I don’t know everything about food poisoning, but I think there are a few kinds that can produce symptoms in a hour or two. I wish I had my ServSafe books with me,” Josh said.

  “It’s a program,” I informed Robin. “ServSafe trains kitchen workers in safe food laws, safe practices.”

  She spoiled my sense of being in the know by saying condescendingly, “I already know what ServSafe is, thank you very much.”

  “Josh,” I said, “Marlee was saying that she had blurred vision. I’ve never heard of that being a symptom of food poisoning. That’s neurological, isn’t it? Blurred vision?” An unwelcome thought occurred to me. What if the problem was not food poisoning, but poisoning? Just poisoning. My stomach clenched in knots. I hoped the doctor who must now be examining Marlee would figure out what she had and would inform the rest of us. “Robin,” I asked, “how are you feeling?”

  “Been better, but at least I’m not heaving up Josh’s food. And you?”

  “I’m okay. I’m just shaken up, I think.”

  I glanced at the desk, only to spot Nelson leaning against it. A second later, a nurse noticed him, too, and in an undertone ordered him to turn off his camera. I couldn’t hear her words, but her irate expression suggested that she was threatening fearsome consequences.

  I saw Robin smile. “I should hire her.” She rubbed her stomach. “So, Chloe, talk to me about something. Anything. Distract me from my screwed-up stomach.”

  “Well, I’m going to be performing a wedding ceremony in a few weeks.”

  Robin perked up. “You are? Who are you marrying? I mean, who are you helping get married? That’s so cool. How can you do that?”

  Although I was a little reluctant to give Robin credit for a good idea, it did take my mind off the present nightmare to think about my best friend Adrianna’s wedding to Owen. “All I did was go online, print out an application from the state, and fill out a form. It’s called a one-day marriage designation. The application had to be approved by the governor, except that I don’t think he has to do it personally. And then I got my Certificate of Solemnization. So now I can marry Adrianna and Owen!” That didn’t sound right. Unless I wanted people to think that I was about to commit bigamy, I’d need to work on my solemnization-wording skills. “Well, you know what I mean.”

  “That is really neat! I didn’t know you could even do that,” Robin said. “They don’t go to church or anything? They didn’t want someone more official to preside over their ceremony?”

  “No, neither of them is particularly religious, and they’re having a smallish wedding. Fifty people or so. And Ade thought it would be more personal if someone close to both of them did the ceremony. They’re writing the whole service themselves, vows and all. Of course, I’ll do my own piece, too, but it’s nice that they can control what they want in and out of the whole thing.”

  “Chloe?” Josh touched my arm. “They’re ready to see you and Robin now. Digger is getting checked out already.” Josh’s phone rang. “Sorry. I have to take this.” When he picked up his call, I could make out a woman’s voice on the other end. “I can’t talk now,” he said. “I’ll call you back.” He clicked his cell shut. “You ready?”

  “Who was that?”

  Josh waved a hand. “No one. Just work stuff. Oh, there’s the nurse who wants to see you.” Josh pointed to a fiftyish woman with a folder in her hand.

  The nurse led me into a large room filled with medical equipment and lined with little curtained exam areas. When we reached the area assigned to me and she closed the curtains, I did my best to peek through the cracks to see whether I could see Marlee or Digger and find out how they were doing. Unfortunately, the hospital was all too effective in ensuring patient privacy—I couldn’t see anyone at all—but at least I didn’t hear any panicked calls for crash carts or loudspeaker announcements of emergency codes, so I assumed that Marlee and Digger were doing okay.

  The nurse took my blood pressure and pulse, and shoved a thermometer in my mouth.“So, young lady, tell me what’s going on with you.” I didn’t like the accusatory tone in her voice. And how was I supposed to answer her with my mouth closed?

  I made unintelligible sounds with my lips closed until she pulled the thermometer out. “I don’t think anything’s going on with me. But”—I started to whisper—“I was with the woman, Francie, when she died. I found her on the bathroom floor, and I, uh, I watched her take her . . . well, her last breath.”

  The nurse squinted her eyes at me. “Her last breath?”

  “Yes. I think I’m just unnerved.” At normal volume, I said, “I’m upset by the experience. Anyone would be! It was not a peaceful death. She looked like she was in a lot of pain.” I looked up at the nurse. “She is dead, right? I mean . . . we heard that Francie was dead.” As if the statement were somehow unclear, I said, “We heard that she’d died, but . . .”

  The sour nurse stared at me before speaking. “Yes, the woman is dead.” She sat down on a stool with wheels and scooted next to me. “Tell me about this party you were at.”

  “It wasn’t a party. Although it did have a celebratory feel at one point, I guess.” I briefly explained the concept of the show and told her about the food that Josh had made. “The food was really good, though. Well, except for the lamb, which tasted fine at first. But then later it tasted really bitter and strange. And that dreadful arugula pesto. Ugh.”

  “So the lamb changed taste as the night went on?” She eyed me suspiciously

  “I guess you could put it like that.”

  “And what else did you people put into your bodies? You know, we can’t help you unless we know exactly what’s in your system, what it was that you took.”

  “What I took was gnocchi and a bit of the lamb, some vegetables.”

  “What substances?” She didn’t bother hiding her exasperation.

  “I did not take any drugs! I don’t do drugs! I
barely even drink anymore now that my best friend is pregnant. I’m supporting her by abstaining from alcohol during her pregnancy. And all the food was from Natural High.”

  “Natural High, my ass,” the wretched nurse mumbled.

  “The market called Natural High.”

  I eventually convinced the nurse that no one had snorted, injected, inhaled, or otherwise taken or used anything except food, and I was allowed to leave.

  Josh was in the waiting room. “Everything okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Either I didn’t eat enough of whatever is making us sick, or it’s just my nerves that were making me queasy. I’m fine. You look better, too.”

  “I am. I feel back to normal now. Well, as normal as I get,” he teased. He pulled me close for a tight hug. “I guess they’re keeping Marlee and Digger. I don’t know why exactly. It’s not clear if they are admitting them or not. They wanted to hook me up to an IV to rehydrate me, but I told them that was ridiculous. I’ll drink some water.”

  I sighed. “Are you sure? There’s no reason to be stubborn about this.”

  “Look, the last thing I feel like doing is lying down with a needle stuck in my arm all night. I just want to get out of here. I swear to you that I’m totally better.”

  I didn’t get another chance to try to coerce Josh back into the exam room, because Robin’s voice began echoing through the room.

  “I am not, I repeat, not a drug addict!” Robin stormed over to us. “Can you believe this crap? Some idiot back there kept insisting that I must have taken too many prescription pills. Like I was mixing uppers with downers instead of producing a TV show!” She breathed out heavily. “Sorry. I’m just strung out.” She turned around and yelled, “And not strung out in a drug-related way!”

  “So,” I said slowly, “I guess we’re ready to go?”

  “Yes. Where’s Nelson? Nelson!” Robin barked.

  “At your service.” Nelson’s tone was so cheerful and his expression so smug that the shine radiating from his damp face and scalp made him appear to be glowing with happiness.