CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
AT THE JOHN F. KENNEDY HOSPITAL front desk, Elliott was frantic. “Will he be alright?”
Elliott snapped at his wristbands in the waiting chair, he twisted his silver rings on his fingers; the nurses assured him the surgeons were doing the best they could to save Finch.
He shoved his hands in his tuxedo pockets.
Finch had been brought to the town hospital in Deer Ridge.
The Marlborough Mountains cleanly separated the campus and Deer Ridge as though it were a mastodonic barrier that breathed the rural, mundane, backcountry real world into the secluded affluent students when they arrived in town.
The finely robed thespians loured at the threadbare overalls of the farmhands with homemade gauze duct taped over their injured, tractor-crushed fingers.
The opera singers scowled in disdain at the steel workers that tracked grime beneath their filth-ridden boots on the ground beside them.
The lyrists and lutists openly despised the mill men that stared at them.
The Classical dancers feared the wildcrafting women who pastorally gathered mayapples, ginseng, and persimmons in their hand-woven wicker baskets and patiently bundled their homeopathic basil, cloves, feverfew, and whole grains on their lap while they waited.
The harpists gasped at the leaking, communal water fountains where anyone dying of sickness could cough behind them and contaminate their diamond earrings.
There were soda pop stains and granola crumbs over the busy telephone lines manned by garrulous women still in their waitress aprons, helping out after their second shift.
The town was overrun with neighborly volunteers.
Teenagers were expected to babysit the elementary kids after school.
Grandmothers sewed the holes of the donation bin clothes.
There were lawyers dressed in sweatpants and faded t-shirts that offered free legal advice for insurance.
Deer Ridge women smoked indoors, the stench spread through the gold-spun linings of the apoptygma of the Baneburian’s well-sewn peplos.
There was dust over the outdated, chunky computers, like no one ever bothered to use it.
The theater students could hardly parse the guttural, breathy, New England accents that volleyed bluntly off the Deer Ridgers with clipped consonants and overly rounded vowels.
However, the production crew fit right in, idly leaning on the counter and chatting with everyone who asked why they stopped in.
The Baneburians were surrounded by the uninitiated. They were outnumbered by the unfledged.
The crude town of Deer Ridge had little culture, no taste for artistry, no knowledge of the arcane, yet they were happy.
They cheerfully held their neighbors’ babies.
Kind strangers offered to fix cars in the overflowing parking lot.
Some even paid the meter fees without asking so that no one would get towed.
The ill and healthy alike were fed from the wildcraft baskets.
Above all, they welcomed the odd, little, eccentric pagan students with a smile and a tilt of curiosity.
What are you doing all the way out here?
What even happens in those small pagan towns?
In the end, the Deer Ridgers were too polite to ask. Even though it was their town, the rural people sensed their presence was unwanted.
Elliott counted his breaths, before he returned to the desk. “Please. Have you heard anything yet?”
“It’s helpful that he was brought over within sixty minutes of displaying symptoms, but the blood results will need to determine what caused the reaction. Please have a seat.”
Elliott cried out, “How can I help him?”
She gave his hand a touch of comfort. “Sir, I promise you will be the first to know his condition. I won’t head home until I let you know the update for him. Please try to stay calm and have a seat.”
“Thank you. Sorry to bother you.”
“You’re not a bother.”
Wounded patients were urgently wheeled through the automatic sliding doors on gurneys by new waves of paramedics; there was a blur of police men through Elliott’s briny tears that arrived to transcribe reports from victims with toothpicks wedged between their molars; there was a cacophony of coughing and groaning patients slumped over in the worn-out, discolored seats.
To Elliott’s dismay, it was overcrowded.
Sirens wailed in the Accident & Emergency Department as the A&E doctors arrived for the night shift in their patterned scrubs, entering the miasma of airborne illness and antiseptic. One of the doctors sanitized their hands, then responded to their pager the very next second.
The senior students who purchased the wine told the police that they’d taken the chalices from the provost’s office.
They forgot to wash or rinse the chalices as they assumed the pristine dinnerware was clean.
They didn’t want to be late for the banquet.
The provost always offered his provisions and his luxuriant glassware, his preserved stoneware, and his gilded artifacts to the theater department.
There must’ve been residue of the provost’s elderly medication that contraindicated Finch’s medication. It was an accident.
After what felt like a century, Elliott heard the entrance doors barge open.
“Where is he?” James rushed over, still in his formal tie from the seven-course dinner with Kitty. He’d left as soon as Elliott informed him that Finch was hospitalized. “Elliott, where did they take him?”
The nurse answered that Finch was in the intensive care unit, and there could be no disruptions or interference. The surgeons were doing their best on the operating table. “He’s in the best of hands. If you are immediate family member, you may–”
Finch’s family members. How could Elliott have forgotten to call Finch’s parents?
“I’m so sorry–”
James squeezed Elliott’s shoulder. “It’s not your fault. You were shocked by the entire episode. I’ll call them. Sit down.”
James headed over to the line of public telephones on the walls, ringing the Hudskins immediately. He informed them to come to the JFK Hospital in Deer Ridge as soon as possible, an incident occurred. It was an emergency.
Elliott raised his head out of his hands as he heard James call him over to him.
James handed Elliott the phone to tell the parents what happened.
Meanwhile, James traversed back to the desk to provide Finch’s extensive medical history.
He knew Finch’s medications, surgical records, and charts by memory and he could provide a detailed account of Finch’s chronic illness condition.
“Hello?” Elliott asked.
“What happened?” Finch’s father was on the other line. “Is this Elliott?”
“Yes. We were eating–” Elliott started and stopped his words, petrified by the memory.
“He ate a strawberry and he started to choke. He’d been coughing beforehand.
No, not like this. This was different, Mr. Hudskin.
He had blood everywhere. No, not only his mouth.
No, I didn’t know about the ulcers, but I know he has spittles of blood sometimes.
It was…God, his eyes.” Elliott pressed his head against the metal of the phone booth, squeezing his eyes shut to block the graphic images out.
“His eyes were crying blood. I can’t explain it. ”
“Alright. Thank you for informing us. We’ll be there.”
Elliott could hear the tightness of Finch’s father’s throat. His low timber voice wavered as though he were on the verge of tears at the news. Everyone thought Finch would be dead by twenty-two, but it was an entirely different matter for it to happen that night.
“Elliott!” James called him over again. James was speaking to the second nurse who needed more information. “What was on the dinner menu at the refectory, Elliott? They need to know.”
Elliott couldn’t breathe. His blood froze beneath his skin as he stood on his unsteady feet.
“Elliott, you need to remember. What was the dinner menu you had?” James explained to the medical professionals that Finch sometimes ate at the refectory with Elliott, if the infirmary released him. Finch must’ve signed himself out for the night.
Elliott’s tongue coiled in his mouth. He felt the rise of vomit.
James sat him down, then he rushed past him to telephone the Winterthur Hall front desk himself.
Elliott heard him hurriedly ask the receptionist to transfer his call to the Raedwine Refectory at once.
He relayed that he needed to inform the town medical center of the dinner menu that night.
Down to the fruit. Elliott felt his chest pound in horror as James argued heatedly with the head chef.
“There had to have been strawberries served tonight. All that I am fucking asking you is what kind of strawberries–Albion strawberries, Camarosa strawberries, everbearing strawberries–what were they?”
James pressed the phone against his panting chest.
“Elliott, did Finch bring his own strawberries? Did he bring his dinner there or did he eat there, the refectory is claiming there were no strawberries served. They’re fucking incompetent.
His allergic reaction had to come from somewhere.
” Tears gathered in Elliott’s eyes, and now wasn’t the time for it, but James was patient.
He squeezed his arm. “Finch has medical episodes all the time. I know it must’ve been traumatizing to see him like that.
But if Finch had an allergic reaction to the strawberries, then we need to know where they–”
“It was the banquet.”
The phone fell out of James’s hand. “What banquet, Elliott?” He grasped Elliott’s shoulders through his blood-stained shirt. He searched his eyes as if in prayer to find a different answer there. “Don’t tell me you went to the theater banquet.”
Elliott watched the rage spread over James’s features. As James towered above him, he remembered then that James was six feet and four inches in height with a powerful stature. Even though James was an inch taller, in that moment, it felt like a meter.
His golden eyes were stakes of fury.
“Don’t tell me you brought him to her banquet, Elliott. Answer me.” His patience had eclipsed. His vocal chords tautened in his hellish command. “Answer me!”
The typist paused, her hands frozen at his sudden anger. The chatting paramedics on their break quietened down to glance over at the scene. The rural nurses awaited Elliott’s answer with their mouths parted in confusion.
“Elliott, I swear to God. You better answer me right now. You better not have lied to me.”
Finch’s life was more important than anything, and the truth tumbled out of Elliott with a thread of guilt.
“I thought he’d enjoy the banquet festivities. He’s in the infirmary all the time. The provost’s chalice likely had medication for senior citizens on the rim, and it possibly contraindicated his own medication.”
He mentioned the strawberries were the last thing Finch remarked before the coughing episode began.
James listened to him silently as Elliott explained that he attended the banquet because he had to express his gratitude to the professor for helping return his life to him.
James didn’t speak a word as he heard Elliott relate that he brought Finch as a last-minute decision and they had nearly finished the feast before the incident occurred.
Finch was fine. He was lucid. Then everything went awry.
It was the provost’s chalice.
James lifted his head only after Elliott finished his explanation.
“If my best friend dies here because of her, I will murder her.”