CHAPTER TWELVE
(Charlotte)
I was going to die on a toilet.
“Charlotte?”
“Don’t come in!” I shouted, cursing whoever had designed this fucking bathroom. With the toilet separated from the shower in its own little room, the only water to turn on for noise cover was the handwashing sink, and the damn thing had a gently trickling stream.
Not even Niagara Falls couldn’t provide the privacy I needed.
When I’d woken at two in the morning to run to the bathroom and spew my guts out, my first thought had been, oh fuck me, I’m pregnant.
And while I had clung, desperate and sweating, to the toilet bowl, I’d thought that could be the worst possible scenario.
But now, I was sitting on the toilet with a wastebasket between my knees, wishing what I had was something as minor as a life-altering uterine event.
“I’ll use the other one!” he called back, with an unmistakable urgency that I wished we didn’t share.
All I could think was, what the hell did my parents bring home on the plane?
At some point, I pulled myself together enough to leave the toilet and go to the shower. It seemed like a much better place. I turned the taps on hot and laid directly on the floor. The cold tile on my hot face and the hot water on my chilled and shaking body made me feel a little more coherent.
Then, I thought, oh god. The mussels.
“Charlotte?” Matt’s ragged voice called through the echoing bathroom.
“Why didn’t you make beef?” I groaned.
“I don’t know. I wish I did.” There was a brief pause, then a retching noise, and the door to the toilet slammed closed.
I pushed myself up on my limp arms. “Are Mom and Dad okay?”
It took him a long time to answer. “I don’t know. Honestly? I don’t think I could get down there to check. I’m pretty weak.”
It took all of the strength in my body to get to my knees and turn off the shower. Matt called, frantically, “No, go ahead and leave it on!”
Understood. I pulled myself to my feet and staggered out, almost slipping in the water that dripped from the t-shirt I hadn’t even bothered to take off. I grabbed a towel and wrapped it around my body, dropped another on the floor and warned him, “Don’t fall when you come out.”
By the time I got to the hallway, the automatic lights in the stairway atrium were already on, and Dad was in the elevator on his way up. When the doors open and he saw me there, shaking like a nearly-drowned rat, he blinked and said, “Oh.”
“Oh?” Why was his skin so fucking pink and healthy? I’d seen my reflection on my way out. My lips were white, my skin tinged green. I looked like a freaking sewer zombie and he...
He was fine.
“Your mother is sick. I’m pretty concerned. She’s throwing up a lot. It’s coming out both—”
“I get it!” I snapped. Somehow, hearing about someone else’s vomit was enough to trigger my own gag reflex again. My dad sidestepped as I doubled over and forcibly ejected what I assumed would be our housekeeper’s reason for resignation all over the floor.
“Oh man, sport. I... I think there was something wrong with those mussels.” Dad rubbed my back while my nearly empty stomach seized and cramped.
Wiping my mouth with the back of my hand, I gasped, “Why aren’t you sick?”
“I picked the mussels out. I don’t trust bivalves. Even when they’re cooked by a real chef in a restaurant. You never know—”
Another dire emergency sent me tearing off down the hall to the half-bath.
“Is Matt sick, too?” Dad asked through the door when he caught up.
“Yes.” I gritted my teeth and braced a hand against the wall, hoping I could catch myself if the stomach cramps made me pass out or something.
“Okay. Look, this seems serious. I’m going to call an ambulance.”
“Are you kidding?” Then again, maybe the hospital would sedate me, and I wouldn’t have to consciously experience shitting myself to death.
“Food poisoning is nothing to play around with.” He was using his dad tone, so I knew there was no point in arguing. “Stay here. I’m going to go check on Matt.”
“Probably don’t do that,” I begged. “You don’t know him like that!”
“Yeah, well,” Dad said helplessly. “The point of this visit was to get to know each other better. And I think tonight, we’re going to accomplish that.”
* * * *
The low, steady beeping of our heart monitors and the clicks from our IV pumps were almost relaxing, once I got used to the rhythm. I looked across the curtained ER cubicle Matt and I shared. He stared straight ahead, one hand buried in the dark, sweat curled hair atop his head.
I’d seen guys less grim in photos of historical disasters.
“Boyfriends have made worse first impressions,” I said softly. Even in the half-darkness, I could make out the slightest twitch of a smile, but he didn’t turn his head toward me.
“This is a fucking nightmare.” His throat sounded as dry as mine was, but we were strictly NPO—nothing per oral—as the attending physician had ordered, and the little lemon swab things they’d given us to get the puke taste out of our mouths did not cut it.
“Look on the bright side,” I tried to joke. “We don’t have to be shy about the bathroom anymore.”
He grimaced, but he did laugh. Then, for what seemed like the ninth time that night, he swore, “I did everything right.”
Now that the anti-nausea drugs had kicked in, it felt safer to discuss the dinner. “I’m sure you did. And nobody blames you. Like my dad said, he doesn’t trust bivalves. He picked them out.”
“I know they can be tricky. That’s why I used a recipe.” He sighed, utterly defeated.
“Well, maybe the recipe was wrong?” I suggested. “What did it say?”
“Oh, yes, please, let’s talk about shellfish in detail.
It’s the perfect subject at the moment,” he grumbled.
“I heated up the skillet, threw my olive oil in, sauteed the garlic, then added in the white wine, tomatoes, all the different seasonings, and I let the mussels simmer in that for seven minutes. Then I went through, opened up the ones that were still closed—”
I sat up, then regretted it. The brutal dehydration of the past few hours had turned my brain into a hard little bean ricocheting off the inside of my skull. I pinched the bridge of my nose and waited for the fireworks of pain to pass. “Wait. What do you mean, you opened them up?”
“There were a few that got stuck,” he said helplessly. “The recipe said to let them simmer for five to seven minutes. I didn’t want them to overcook.”
“Oh. Oh no, babe.” Laughing, even grim chuckles, made my overworked abdomen scream. I could hear the pain in my ears like the rope of a tire swing creaking.
“What?” When I didn’t immediately answer, he demanded again, “What?”
“If they don’t open, they’re bad ones. You’re supposed to throw them out. Did the recipe not say that?”
“It... might have,” he admitted quietly. “When I got to that part, you’d already gotten back from the airport and everything else was done. I kind of rushed through the rest and maybe I skimmed over that section.”
Part of me wanted to smack him. Another part of me, one that must have missed out on the last four hours of living hell, remembered that he wouldn’t have any reason to know that, or to even suspect that missing a crucial step might poison us.
The extent of his culinary prowess was that basic stuff I’d taught him, and the borderline prison commissary fare he’d survived off of in the dorms almost twenty years ago.
“Maybe mussels were a little ambitious,” I said gently. “But hey. I do appreciate the effort.”
“Yeah?” It wasn’t often that Matt sounded so uncertain.
I paused before I answered so as not to raise my voice over a page going out on the overhead intercom. When it was over, I said, “You could have had the chef make a big, elaborate feast. You could have tried to dazzle my parents with a big display of wealth and luxury, but you didn’t.”
“Not to sound like a complete asshole here, but it’s not like my apartment screams humble and frugal,” he pointed out. “I wanted to do something normal. Not for them, but for you.”
“For me?” I asked, turning on my side.
He did the same, to face me across the gap between our carts. “I know you’re not comfortable yet with the places we go out to eat or having people serving our food and cleaning up after us. And having your parents visit was already stressing you out.”
“Stressing both of us out,” I corrected him.
“Okay, you got me. It was stressing me out, too. But all the quote-unquote ‘normal’ stuff is important to you. I pay attention to that because I don’t want to steamroll over you and squish you into my life.
” He exhaled through his nose, a frustrated, sad sound.
“I want us to build our life. I thought that doing this might make you feel like I’m willing to fit into your life, too. ”
The squeezing ache in my chest might have been a cracked rib from all the projectile vomiting, but at the moment, I diagnosed it as too much love for my heart to take. My words failed me. That could have also been a symptom of the food poisoning.
“You can tell me it was stupid of me,” he went on with a self-deprecating chuckle. “And that I should have gone with something easier.”
“Hamburgers, maybe,” I suggested with a smile.
“I bet those are harder to make than they look. If they were easy, why would fast food places send them out pre-shaped and frozen?” His IV pump alarmed, and he rolled onto his back again, reaching out for it to hit a button.
“Are you supposed to do that?” I asked doubtfully.
“I’m a pro at these things,” he assured me.
Oh. Right. He’d already spent a huge chunk of this year in the hospital.
“You know what sucks the most about this? I mean, aside from shitting myself in the ER in front of my future in-laws?” Matt asked, scrubbing his hand over his face. “Your brother is never, ever going to let this go. He will mention this in my eulogy.”
There was that crushing love pain again. “Your future in-laws?”
He looked sharply over at me, eyes wide. “Shit.”