by Sung J. Woo
But some of it did. Christopher had sex with Penny, and something was done with the condoms he used. The reason behind…whatever she’d done…was because Grace wanted to help her mother (though new blood – what the hell did that mean?), and also to save Christopher’s parents from…leaving? But then her mother found out and had Penny moved yet again? That wasn’t clear. What was clear was that I’d need to delve deeper into Cleo Park’s business, which wouldn’t be easy since she lived in her own sequestered bubble. But there were ways into everyone’s lives, even that of the rich and the powerful, because no one lived in a vacuum.
Dolores stopped in. “How’re you feeling?”
“Good,” I said. “Ready to be discharged.”
She cocked her head and walked over to me. “Really?” She took my temperature and shined a bright light into my eyes. “Yeah, you’ve recovered nicely, despite getting off the IV early. We can use your bed, so you can go ahead and check out.”
I thanked her. It was almost ten o’clock.
“She takes a licking and keeps on ticking,” I said.
“Back to work?” Craig asked.
“Back to work.”
“Glad I’m a lawyer. Better hours.”
64
Back at Krishna, things were returning to normal. Some disgruntled guests were packing up their cars and leaving, but the main lobby was cleaned up and looking like its usual soothing white and beige self and the people returning from the hospital were like me, tired but feeling a whole lot better.
As soon as Craig and I got in the elevator, Cynthia Bard, the PR lady, jumped in.
“Third floor, right?” she asked, bubbly as always.
I nodded.
“On behalf of Krishna, I’d like to personally apologize for this evening’s extra-curricular activities,” she said. “We’ve already conducted an internal investigation into the matter and I’ll have you know that we’re now working closely with Hawthorne police.”
“Really?” Craig said.
“In all the years I’ve been here, we’ve never had something like this happen. Our bodies are our temples—no one believes this more strongly than our Dining and Nutrition Department. You can imagine how utterly destroyed they are. They’re just sick about it.”
The elevator dinged and the door opened.
“But not really sick, like the people who actually got sick, like myself,” I said.
“Sorry,” Cynthia said. “Poor choice of words. From what we can gather, it was just one batch of the chicken that was affected, so a minor portion of the guests. But still, even one sick guest is one too many.”
We all got out onto the third floor lobby.
“Thank you for being here,” I said to Craig. “You saved the day.”
“It was the least I could do.”
I kissed him, and he kissed me back. Nothing too grand, just really nice. It gave me hope, and I think it gave him hope, too.
“I’ll call you in the morning, like eight?” Craig said.
“Perfect.”
As soon as he was out of earshot, Cynthia said, “It’s always lovely to come here as a couple. Next time, I suggest you guys stay in Javani, our newest addition. I didn’t get a chance to show you those lovely rooms.”
“Look,” I said. “You don’t have to worry about me writing about what happened here tonight.”
Cynthia broke open a smile that actually felt genuine. “I can’t tell you how relieved I am.”
I guess I could’ve made her feel even more relieved by telling her that I would be writing no story whatsoever, since I was a complete fraud.
Back in my room, I fell face-first onto my bed. I was beat, but I had to return Josie’s call. On the ride back from the hospital, my phone had notified me of a missed call from hours ago.
She picked up on the first ring.
“She’s run out of methimazole,” she said. “Her drug for Graves’.”
“How do you know?”
“I have an alert set up with the pharmacy when her refills need to be re-upped. Her final set of pills are still at Llewellyn’s health center, waiting to be picked up for a week.”
“I’m afraid I still don’t have great news,” I said, and gave her the rundown including the latest gastronomical incident. I left out most of what Grace told me about Penny and Christopher, since I still needed to investigate what she’d said.
“You had a long day,” she said.
“I’m getting close, though. I can feel it.”
“Without her methimazole, she can drop ten pounds in a week, and she’s already so thin as she is…” There was a long pause. “I’ve been thinking about how little I actually know her, you know? I just thought…I thought it would be different between me and her. I thought I would be the kind of mother my daughter could confide in.”
“Just you and Penny against the world,” I said, which I immediately regretted, because now she was crying. But maybe it was good for her to get it out.
“This is all so fucked up,” Josie said.
“It’s a mess, I agree. But all messes start somewhere. Don’t forget that.”
“I won’t. Please find her, Siobhan. Please.”
“I don’t have your daughter yet, Josie, but I will. I promise you.”
I hung up, but my night wasn’t over yet, I had a doctor to track down. I rang the hospital and asked for Dr. Novakovic. By now, I hoped the influx of the Krishna sick would’ve abated.
“You should be in bed, Ms. O’Brien,” Novakovic said.
“That’s actually exactly where I am, doctor. In bed, lying down, calling you.”
“Jack-o’-lantern mushroom. I’m looking at it right now, it’s distinctive because of a tiny flap of orange on the bottom. Omphalotus illudens. Can easily be found near the base of hardwood trees around these parts. We get a few cases a year, mostly from overzealous mushroomers.”
“Krishna isn’t the kind of place that’d serve wild mushrooms. More likely they’d source them from a local farm,” I said.
“Yes, this is definitely not that. These mushrooms were freeze-dried.”
“How do you know that?”
“The lab report. Most of the mushrooms were pulverized to a powder, but not all. When you freeze vegetables, you can see a particular type of cellular destruction that’s consistent with the damage of freezing. Some vegetables are fine, like broccoli, but spinach becomes mush when it melts. Mushrooms keep their shape, but under 100 times magnification, you can see everything.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Sleep,” she said. “Doctor’s orders.”
I turned off the overhead light and stared at the almost full moon through my window. There was a hazy ring around it, fog or a thin layer of clouds. I thought of Penny’s pills; I thought of orange mushrooms. I closed my eyes.
65
Early morning light beamed down on the barefoot people lying on spongy rectangular mats. From where I was standing, just inside the wide double doors of the sanctuary, I could see how this spacious room used to be a chapel. On the opposite wall sat a giant bronze Buddha, his right hand raised as if to swear to tell the truth and nothing but the truth.
“Excuse me,” a quiet voice spoke behind me. I was standing in front of the tall wooden cabinet that contained stacks of purple yoga blocks, so I moved out of the way.
Christine Collins, the professor who’d come to Krishna with Cleo Park and Wheeler, picked up a pair of foam bricks. It took her a few seconds to recognize me, as it was six-thirty in the morning. From what I’d read, the morning yoga session was the most popular one at Krishna, but after last night’s mass food poisoning, attendance was sparse, the room not even at half capacity.
“How are you feeling this morning?” I asked her.
She averted my gaze and grabbed a mat and a cushion and made her way to the far left. Of course I followed her.
I’m sure if I were into yoga and detox and a
ll that healthy stuff, I’d possess a more discerning view, but as it stands, yoga people are like country musicians to me: they all look and sound alike. So the instructor who walked up to the stage and started speaking to the people in the room was like everybody else at Krishna: wiry, content, and calm. Dressed in a tight red t-shirt and silky white capri-length pants, he turned down the background music of faint chimes and birds chirping with a remote and spoke into the tiny ear-clipped microphone.
“A glorious morning to you all. My soul is your soul; the sun is the love that binds us together. Welcome to the start of another beautiful day here in Hawthorne, in the heart of our Sanctuary. This is First Light Gentle Yoga. My name is Hiran and I’ll be your guide.”
He sounded like a golf commentator, quiet and precise. He asked us to put our right hand over our hearts, then feel the beat as we breathed.
“Straighten your legs and feel the floor beneath you. Connect to the earth below and bless its strength, the tendrils of its loving stability.”
Tendrils of its loving stability?
The lady next to me touched her nose to her kneecap. If my arms were twice as long, I might have been able to grab my toes, but that was all right. I wasn’t here to become Rubber Woman. My shoulder was still achy from last night’s run-in with the bodyguard.
“Raise your right hand, lean to your left, breathe in. Now breathe out as you return to center.”
Breathing, as it turned out, was a big part of yoga. And so were women in tight little pants that showed off their well-toned booties. When we all assumed the Downward Dog pose, hands and feet on the floor, butt raised high in the air, everywhere I peeked, female buns of steel encased in black and gray tights mooned me with poise and vigor, and I felt guilty for scarfing that Big Mac on the drive down yesterday.
After spending half an hour waking various sleepy muscles, I was surprised at just how alert and energized I felt. Now New Age harp music filled the room, and the instructor employed a metronome: lying down, we were to breathe in through the nose and into the belly for six beats, hold for two, breath out through the mouth for four beats, hold for two. A dozen repetitions later, I was in rhythm, except my synchronicity was being disturbed by what sounded like sobbing. It was Collins. Tears streaked down her cheeks. Crying softly, she looked like a little girl lost.
The harps faded to silence, and the instructor put his hands together and doled out a flurry of namastes. He suggested we do the same to our immediate neighbors, so I blessed and was blessed by a silver-haired gentleman to my left and a pregnant young woman to my right. People rose from their cocoon of meditation, rolling their necks and stretching out their arms. I crawled over to Collins, who had her face covered by her hands.
“I don’t know what Wheeler is doing to you, but you know you always have a choice.”
Collins, through her reddened eyes, stared at me. “You don’t know anything.”
“You’ve gone from lecturer to assistant professor in six months. You’ve worked on a PowerPoint presentation you’ll be giving this morning, Aging Is a Disease, and There Is a Cure: The Path to Perpetual Youth. You’re also a trained chemist, someone who spent many years honing her academic craft, but now you’re about to spout a whole bunch of ridiculous hokum, and your boss Vera Wheeler has you by your short hairs. You’re trapped. How am I doing so far?”
Collins’ small round face drained of color.
“In case you didn’t know, I’m here to find Penny Sykes. Her mother has asked me to find her because she disappeared earlier this month. I don’t know how Penny figures into all of this, but I have a feeling you might. Do you?”
“Yes,” she said, so quietly that I almost didn’t hear it.
“She suffers from hyperthyroidism. Without her medicine, she can get sick quite quickly.” I placed a hand on her shoulder. “Can you tell me where she is?”
“No, she can’t.”
Wheeler said from behind me.
66
She was in an all-white business suit, jacket and blouse and knee-length skirt, white hose and white stilettos. Virginal and sexy, all in one.
“That’s very gauche of you, Vera, wearing shoes in here. Didn’t you see the sign outside?”
Collins quickly wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her shirt and scrambled up off the floor to stand behind her boss.
Wheeler crouched down and spoke into my ear.
“So,” she said, “how’s your little brother Sven?”
I wanted to grab her face by her ears and yank her to the floor. Perhaps seeing my flash of menace, Wheeler stood up quickly and backed off.
I shouldn’t have been surprised that she knew something about me. Maybe she had hired a detective of her own. I thought of my brother, who was actually not so little—six-foot-two Sven could handle himself, but he also had a wife and a toddler, my beautiful nephew with his sparse brown curls and impossibly tiny fingernails.
Threats, Ed once told me, come from a place of fear.
I rolled up my yoga mat nice and slow to buy myself time.
Spin it to your advantage.
I gathered the foam blocks, stacked them together. The best way to couch this threat was to see it as a desperate personal attack to get me off her back. I felt my wits returning to me.
While I was taking my mental break, Wheeler had done the same. With her arms akimbo, she stood her ground. In fact, she walked right up to me again.
“Cleo doesn’t know about the little stunt you pulled on her daughter last night at the hospital. If she knew? If I told her?”
I smiled.
“What the hell is so funny?” Wheeler asked.
“If you wanted Cleo to know, you would’ve told her already. Now get the fuck out of my way.”
I placed the mat and the blocks back in their cubbyholes and walked out of there, feeling Wheeler’s seething eyes behind me.
Waiting for me at the bank of shoes was Craig, holding out my sneakers. I was grateful to see a friendly face.
“You okay?” Craig said.
As we made our way upstairs to the dining hall, I related my encounter with Collins to Craig.
“Shit. That’s pretty low, to threaten your family.”
“I’ll text Sven later, it’s like five in the morning there.”
“So you think Collins knows where Penny is.”
“Even if she doesn’t, I think she can lead me there. The problem is, now that I’ve interrogated her, my chances of doing so again are slimmer.”
“Kind of like what happened with Grace.”
The dining hall wasn’t as busy as it was last night, but there were still a good number of people. The big difference: not a single diner was on the meat aisle. A heaping of fatty, glistening bacon sat on the serving dish, untouched.
“If somebody wanted to make a point about vegetarianism, I suppose the point has been made,” Craig said.
Dharma’s words came back to me: Because this is home, Siobhan. I will not abandon my home. Not without a fight. And that time is coming. Sounded like posturing at the time, but now? I wasn’t so sure.
“Feeling brave?” Craig asked, pointing at the bacon.
“Not really,” I said, and we did like everybody else, opting for the vegetarian aisle.
Once we got in line, we stopped talking as per the dining hall rules of silent breakfasts. When I sat down with my dish of tofu frittata, cup of fresh fruit, and mug of Himalayan Hibiscus tea in front of Craig, it felt good to say nothing at all. All around me, I heard the clinking of utensils and dishes, an almost musical quality to these ordinary sounds that were magnified due to the complete lack of human conversation. The man sitting cattycorner to me chewed slowly with his eyes closed and his hands clasped together.
There was an innocence here at Krishna, though I’d think the Hawthorne Police might deem it closer to negligence. Cynthia Bard had said last night that they were working with the cops to get to the bottom of the food poisonin
g, and I’d imagine they took one look at the lax security around food preparation and thought these people were living in a fantasy world.
By the time we made our official exit from the dining hall, it was ten before ten.
“I can stay a few more days, you know,” Craig said.
He’d already checked out, his luggage lined up outside the dining hall like all the others, everyone respecting each other’s property, no one worried about theft at this Shangri-La.
“Don’t you have to be in Albany for the state supreme court in like five hours?”
“Sounds pretty important, doesn’t it? It’s not, though, just a patent ruling.”
I pulled his rolling suitcase off the wall and handed it to him. We made our way to the bank of elevators.
“You have your work,” I said, “and I have mine.”
We rode the elevator down with four others with suitcases in tow. At the lobby, Craig held my hands in his hands.
“I’m sorry about what happened at my place.”
“No worries,” I said.
“After work today, I’m seeing a therapist about my…I don’t even know what to call it. A kind of hoarding. Inability to move on.”
“You’re not doing that for me?”
“No. For me.”
“Good answer,” I said, and hugged him hard.
Craig turned back before he exited through the open doors to shoot me a final glance. Framed in front of the distant Adirondack Mountains, he was commercial-ready. He waved, and I waved back. Now that he was gone, I sort of wished he hadn’t left.
I turned and walked towards the Sunrise Room.
67
If I had come a minute later, I would’ve been shut out—the place was teeming with people, almost entirely women, and mostly women of a certain age and look. It wasn’t necessarily that they looked bad…but rather eerily similar, in the uniform way women who’ve had work done look, a rebuilt, reconstituted mask with their sinewy arms and platinum blonde locks. The only available seats were in the very back row, so I took one next to an extremely made-over woman.