Chapter Six
Waiting for lab results while pretending to be on a work retreat turned out to be a full-time job with two departments.
In one department, I actually worked. It surprised me how much.
The suite’s dining table became a studio, color scripts spread end to end, and Pip and Luma kept me company through the long, quiet mornings.
My hands worked better than they had in months.
I tried not to know why and knew anyway: nothing was going into me except hotel food and the clean decoy vitamins.
My body, given the first honest chance in a year, had started to mend. Even that felt like evidence.
In the other department, I performed. Every evening I called home, and every evening, the three of them tended the sick wife by phone.
“You sound tired,” Karl said on one of those calls. “Are you sleeping?”
“Nine hours a night. It’s the work that’s tiring, but it’s the good kind.”
“And eating? Actual meals, not room-service pastry?”
“The restaurant knows my order by now.”
“Supplements?”
“Yes, Karl. The whole pouch routine. Dara labeled everything, a trained bird could follow it.”
“Don’t joke. You always get worse when you slack off.” There it was again, his line, or her line – their line. “Bill wants you in when you’re back. He mentioned it twice today, which for Bill is practically shouting.”
“Twice?”
A small pause, just long enough to notice. “He called about your file,” Karl said. “Follow-up scheduling. Anyway. We miss you. The house is too quiet.”
Dara texted through the days, a warm, steady drip.
Photos of the dog next door that she knew I loved.
– Morning blend or did you skip, be honest. – A voice memo of her singing the jingle from a commercial we’d been obsessed with in seventh grade, because it had come on while she made lunch, and she’d thought of me.
I answered all of it in kind, and it cost me something every time.
I wrote the cost down in the symptom diary under a category Dr. Parks hadn’t asked for.
Once she called instead of texting, and I made the mistake of answering on the second ring with a pencil still in my hand.
“You sound chipper,” Dara said.
“I sound caffeinated. The color scripts are finally behaving.”
“Hm.” One syllable, and I heard the antenna go up in it. “You’re keeping up with everything, right? The pouch? Because you have this pattern, Mills. You feel a little better, and you decide you’re cured and you drop the routine. And then I get you back worse.”
“Two scoops of lawn a day, I promise.”
“One scoop.”
“One scoop,” I said. “See? The routine’s so exciting I dream about it.”
She laughed, and we talked about the neighbor’s dog. After she hung up, I sat very still with the pencil in my hand and understood that I’d just been checked on, and that I’d passed. A person who improved on poison was a problem for the people dosing it.
On the fourth day, the unknown number texted: Dr. Parks, 4pm, by phone. She’ll call the hotel landline. Be somewhere you can take notes.
I was at the table with my notebook open twenty minutes early. When the phone rang, I picked it up before the first ring finished.
“Mrs. Barber. Is now a good time?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll do this the way I’d want it done for me.
Findings first, plain language, and then what they do and don’t mean.
” Paper shuffled on her end. “Your general panels show real problems. You’re anemic.
Your liver numbers are elevated. Several values are the kind I’d expect in someone considerably older or considerably sicker than your file says you are.
None of that is dramatic on its own, but none of it matches the word normal, and I want that on the record between us, because you’ve been carrying that word around for a year. ”
My pen moved. Anemic. Liver. Not normal. My hand stayed steady, and I noticed it staying steady, and some cold part of me stood off to the side and wrote it all down.
“Now, the toxicology screen.” Dr. Parks’s voice didn’t change, which was how I knew to hold on to something.
“Your results show abnormal markers consistent with toxic exposure. Elevated values where there should be none worth mentioning. I’ve asked the laboratory to run confirmatory testing on the same samples, a more specific method that quantifies exactly what we’re looking at, and I’ve ordered additional collection from you this week, because exposure over time shows up in more places than blood. ”
“What places?”
“Urine over twenty-four hours. And hair, which keeps a calendar of what your body has been through, month by month, along its length.” She paused. “Mrs. Barber, are you writing or do you need a moment?”
“I’m writing.” I looked at what I’d written. Toxic exposure. Hair kept a calendar. “Say the middle part again. The part after the screen.”
“Your results show abnormal markers consistent with toxic exposure.”
“Consistent with,” I repeated. “Not stress. Not burnout. Not a sensitive system, or a nervous stomach, or a creative temperament, or any of the other diagnoses I’ve been prescribed by people who are not doctors and one person who is.”
“None of those produce these numbers, no.”
“So, it’s real. It’s in my blood. It’s been in my blood while everyone…” and that was the exact place the professional part of me ran out, mid-sentence, between one word and the next.
I’d been so good. That was the thought that broke me, of all the available thoughts.
I’d been so good for so long. I’d taken every pill they gave me, and drunk every cup and thanked them.
I’d apologized to Karl for being tired, I’d told Bill I was probably imagining the burning in my feet, I’d let Dara hold my hair while I threw up whatever she’d fed me.
I’d said sorry into the toilet for ruining dinner.
I had participated. They’d built the machine, but I’d turned the crank with my own hands, every day, smiling, grateful, sorry for the trouble.
“Mrs. Barber.”
“I fed it to myself.” My voice came out wrong, high and even. “You understand that? Whatever the confirmatory test finds, I’m the one who put it in my mouth. Every day. I said thank you.”
“Stop.” Dr. Parks said it flat and fast. “Listen to me, because this is a medical opinion too. What you’re describing is not gullibility.
You trusted your husband, your oldest friend, and a licensed physician.
That’s not a character flaw, Mrs. Barber.
That’s the entire design of the crime. Systems like the one around you are built specifically to defeat a reasonable person’s judgment, and yours was defeated by three people working at it full time, one of whom took an oath. The verdict on that belongs to them.”
I heard her. Hearing it and holding it were different jobs, and I could only do one that afternoon.
We finished the call with logistics, collection kits, the next appointment, her direct line, now that secrecy mattered less than speed.
I wrote it all down in handwriting that stayed strange and even, and then I hung up and sat in the sudden quiet.
The falling apart I’d been holding off since the studio finally came.
I called Nick. I got as far as, “The results,” and stopped. He said, “Twenty minutes,” and hung up.
He made it in fifteen. He came up the garden path, took one look at me waiting for him on the steps of my suite, and sat down next to me, close but not touching. He said nothing at all, and I broke in the general direction of his shoulder. He let me.
I cried like I had a year of backlog tears, which I did.
I cried about my trembling hands, and my falling hair, and the burning in my feet.
I cried about seventh grade, about the jingle, about Dara’s rings clicking on the amber jar.
Somewhere in the middle of it, Nick’s arm came around me, careful, and I turned into it.
He held on while the worst of it went through, one hand steady between my shoulders, no words, no there-there, no rush.
“I keep thinking about my body,” I said, when I could talk. “It fought this whole time. It kept sending signals. My hands, my stomach, my hair… It kept telling the truth over and over, and every single person around me taught me to call it a liar. Including me. I’m the one who apologized for it.”
“Then it’s owed an apology,” Nick said. “It’ll get one. Starting with dinner, because I’d bet you haven’t eaten since the call.”
“You can’t fix this with fish.”
“I can’t fix it with anything, that’s the point of me.” He said it plainly, no bitterness in it. “Beatrice fixes. Parks fixes. I’m the guy who shows up and makes sure you eat. It’s a small job. I’m extremely good at it.”
I laughed, which I wouldn’t have bet on an hour earlier.
We went in off the steps, and he ordered half the menu to the suite while I washed my face.
We ate at the corner of the evidence-free end of the table, and he told me a long, ridiculous story about a director who’d once demanded final cut on a cereal commercial. He let me be a person for an hour.
Beatrice called at eight. Nick stood to give me the room, but I waved him back into his chair and put her on speaker, because I was done being alone in rooms with hard information.
“Parks briefed me,” Beatrice said. “First, how are you? Then we work.”
“Bad, but not useless,” I said.
“Better than most. Here’s where we stand.
” A page turned. “The medical file, Mrs. Barber. Real doctor, real lab, documented findings, abnormal toxicology, confirmatory testing in motion. When those confirmations land, we’ll know exactly what’s in you, and the hair testing may even tell us how long it’s been going in. That’s half the bridge.”
“Half.”
“Half. Think like their lawyer for a second, because I promise you someone eventually will. Toxic exposure, they’ll say.
Terrible. Environmental. Something in the house, the water, a contaminated supplement from a sloppy factory, some tragedy of modern retail.
Poor Mrs. Barber, and how dare anyone point at her devoted family.
” Her voice stayed dry and level. “A poison in your body tells us a crime happened to you. It doesn’t yet tell a jury who committed it.
For that, we connect what’s in your blood to something they bought, prepared, packaged, or gave you.
Which, thanks to the work you did, is sitting sealed in your room safe with dates and initials on the tape. ”
I looked in the direction of the safe, where I knew the little linen pouch with my initials on it that Dara had pressed into the suitcase herself was waiting.
“So that’s next,” I said.
“That’s next,” Beatrice said. “The lab is expecting the samples. Tomorrow, we move the pouch properly, with a courier and a paper trail, and then, Mrs. Barber, they test the tea.” Her chair creaked.
For the first time since I’d met her, I heard something like appetite in her voice.
“They put it in your blood. Now we prove what they gave you”