Journaled to Death

by Heather Redmond

  ‘That’s terrible,’ he said softly. ‘I love your cookies.’

  ‘I know,’ she choked out, then started to sob as she tried to tell him the story. ‘Sorry.’ She wiped her eyes.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said after she slowed down. ‘Most foodborne illnesses don’t cause a reaction after just thirty minutes. They’ll probably find out that the nurses all ate something tainted yesterday evening.’

  She lifted her gaze. ‘Really?’

  He smiled at her. ‘Really. Now why don’t you go enjoy your unexpected afternoon off? I’m sure you have some calligraphy orders to fill.’

  ‘Sticker orders,’ she said. ‘I probably have those.’

  An unexpected dimple appeared in his right cheek as his smile deepened. ‘There you go. Always with a plan. I have to get to surgery.’

  She liked that view of herself. Always with a plan. ‘Of course, Doctor Burrell. Have a good surgery.’

  ‘It’s Tristan,’ he told her.

  She blinked. ‘Really?’

  He shrugged. ‘Romantic mother. And I never liked Stan, but that’s what most people call me.’

  ‘Tristan,’ Mandy said, trying it out, though she had a little hitch in her voice as she held in a giggle. ‘Much better.’

  He winked at her then strode away.

  She watched him move down the sky bridge, and decided he had just as good a body as Dr O’Hottie, and a much better personality. Maybe Tristan Burrell would be the next hospital heartthrob. But what would his nickname be?

  SEVENTEEN

  Mandy felt cheerier on the drive home thanks to her conversation with Dr Burrell, but as she scooped up the day’s mail, she felt her tear ducts spiking with hot moisture again.

  Loud clomping noises from Vellum’s favorite heavy boots made her straighten, clutching their unpaid bills to her chest.

  ‘What are you doing home so early? Do you have a fever?’ Vellum stepped up to her and put her palm on Mandy’s forehead. Her skin felt warm against Mandy’s February outdoor chill. ‘You’re freezing.’

  ‘That’s from outside,’ Mandy said. ‘I’m not sick.’

  ‘Then what’s wrong?’

  ‘I went into work an hour early,’ Mandy temporized.

  ‘But you’re home two hours early,’ Vellum pointed out.

  Mandy sighed. ‘I’m temporarily laid off while the bar is disinfected.’

  Vellum went rigid. ‘Why?’

  Mandy put her hand on her daughter’s arm. She could feel the tension as her muscles quivered. ‘Don’t worry, sweetheart. Some nurses reported becoming ill half an hour after visiting the coffee bar.’

  ‘That’s terrible!’ Vellum exclaimed.

  ‘I talked to Doctor Burrell on the way out and it didn’t make sense to him. He said foodborne illness usually takes longer to affect people. It will probably turn out to be something else.’

  ‘What if soap got into the coffee or something?’

  ‘It was the cookies, supposedly.’

  Vellum worried at her lip. ‘Let’s sit down, Mom.’

  ‘OK, but I’m fine.’ She winced as she followed her daughter to the sofa. While she might be sort of coping, something was happening with Vellum, and the mere thought of her baby being troubled made her own muscles tense in both sympathy and fear. ‘What’s going on with you?’

  Vellum sat, then leaned against the sofa back and crossed her legs underneath her. ‘I want to move in with Dad for a while.’

  Mandy felt a sudden sense of weightlessness, as if the sofa had vanished beneath her and she floated on air. She put her hand to her throat, fighting to make her voice sound normal. ‘Why?’

  Her daughter shrugged. ‘Because.’

  ‘I’m sure I’ll be back to work in a couple of days. Well, maybe Monday, since tomorrow is Friday. Nothing odd happened with the cookies. I’d served tons of them and I’d used the same mix for two days. I’m sure Doctor Burrell is right.’

  Vellum poked Mandy’s arm. ‘You’re babbling, Mom.’

  ‘Sorry,’ she said automatically, her mind churning. Those tears pricked her eyes again.

  Vellum sighed, but the tension didn’t leave her body. ‘Mom, you can’t afford me between the layoff and Ryan dying. You say we’re taking the business seriously, but you aren’t. We should have been doing sticker orders last night.’

  ‘All weekend,’ Mandy promised.

  ‘We need to do them now,’ Vellum said. ‘I don’t want to put more pressure on you. Dad has plenty of money. His family is rich. They can support me without blinking an eye.’

  ‘You think I don’t know that? It’s his fault,’ Mandy said, fighting for control. ‘But even so, we were doing fine.’

  ‘I know, Mom. Until Ryan died. How much money did he owe you?’

  ‘Just for February. He was good about paying me.’

  ‘You’re on the ragged edge. You couldn’t even pay my allowance. I’ll come over to work on our videos. I believe in the business. I’ll keep doing my share.’

  ‘I have custody of you,’ Mandy said.

  ‘He has weekends. And I’m old enough to decide.’

  ‘We have to go to court.’

  ‘Why spend the money on lawyers?’ Vellum asked. ‘Just let me go, Mom. It’s for the best. I promise you’ll see me at least a couple of days a week.’

  ‘As my business partner,’ Mandy said glumly, ‘not as my daughter.’

  ‘I’m fifteen,’ Vellum pointed out.

  Mandy knew this speech, her daughter asserting how grown up she was. She cut Vellum off. ‘I know you’re a sophomore in high school. You have more than two years of dependence to go. You don’t need to give me the “I’m practically an adult” speech. Trust me, you aren’t. You can go stay with Cory.’ Rattled, she added, ‘He has ignored so many days that he was supposed to take you that I’m sure we could go three weeks before it is made up.’

  Vellum went still as a car shut off its engine in front of her house.

  ‘You called him before talking to me?’ Mandy asked, fighting to keep the accusation from her voice. ‘You were going to leave before I came home from work. You didn’t know I’d been laid off.’

  ‘I heard a voicemail from your boss, Mom. She must have called the house instead of your cell phone by accident when the hospital administrator showed up.’

  ‘You knew all along?’

  ‘Sorry,’ Vellum said.

  They both listened as steps, once so familiar, came up the concrete stairs outside. ‘Did you pack?’

  ‘Yes. I’ll come over Saturday and help you with orders, OK?’

  ‘If you can get a ride,’ Mandy said.

  ‘You’ll come get me, right?’

  Mandy forced down her anger. This was her daughter, and who knew how she’d been manipulated by the Moffats. While Cory didn’t want the responsibility of his daughter underfoot, her ex-mother-in-law would be thrilled. She might have offered to loosen the purse strings or something. For instance, Cory was driving a three-year-old BMW and Mandy knew that would irritate him. He liked his cars to be two years old or less. And because of his careless ways, his cars didn’t look new for long. ‘Of course. Anytime, day or night. Really, since I’m obviously not working tomorrow.’

  ‘Saturday,’ Vellum said with an air of beleaguered patience. ‘I’ll call you Saturday morning for a ride.’

  ‘Got it. We can even stop at the bakery on the way home and get treats before we start work.’

  ‘Don’t spend any money right now,’ Vellum said, then smiled. ‘Maybe Dad will give me some spending money and I can treat you.’ She winked, not realizing she was driving a dagger into her mother’s heart, and bounced up from the sofa to open the door.

  Mandy, unwilling to see what expression would be on her ex-husband’s face – triumph, despair, or something else – went the long way around to the basement door, unbolted it, and fled downstairs to check on the laundry situation.

  It continually amazed her how an otherwise intellige
nt teenager couldn’t recognize the irony of asking the father who wouldn’t pay his child support for spending money. The sad truth was that Cory would likely give Vellum what she asked for. Maybe she should craft a plan to get a child-support-worthy amount of spending money from him each month through Vellum.

  She stuck last week’s sheets into the washer and turned it on, then quickly toured the basement, making sure nothing had been disturbed. When she hummed under her breath, trying to fill the air, she swore she could hear an echo. So strange to have no furnishings in the rooms. It had not been like this since the day they moved in.

  She wandered upstairs as the silence and cold got to her. In the art studio, she set up her camera and flipped her planner to her collection of journal spread ideas. She compared it to her list of videos to film and decided to work on a pen test page. Some journals had a page in the back, but that didn’t mean they were formatted with brand, color name, color number, wash of color and calligraphy sample.

  She also checked when she had last done a giveaway, and decided to set up a new journal for one of her subscribers to win. The pen test spread could go in that. She grabbed a new planner that a manufacturer had sent her that week and flipped on the camera, wanting to talk about the unfamiliar brand and why a pen test page would be important to make sure that pens didn’t bleed through its particular paper.

  After that, with the camera still on, she stopped speaking and picked up a ruler so she could set up the page with boxes. ‘Better make this a double spread,’ she said. ‘I never use just one brand of pens. I like to have a set of pens I use for each month. My lettering pen, a pen for lines, and two or three colored pens to suit my theme.’

  Her voice sounded thick, and when a drop fell on the page she realized it was a tear. She blotted the page with a tissue. ‘It’s been a rough day, guys,’ she said. ‘And I don’t want to waste this spread.’

  Realizing how idiotic she sounded, she shut off the camera and leaned back on her chair before she ruined the page. As it was, she’d buckled it with her tear and couldn’t possibly send the journal to a contest winner now.

  She grabbed her own journal. When she pulled off the elastic, it opened to her mood-tracker page. For February, she’d set up twenty-eight cactuses on shelves, and had chosen five different shades of green to color in based on her mood. On the sixteenth cactus of the month, she used a dark forest green. The moods she’d listed were ‘Best Day Ever’, ‘Getting Stuff Done’, ‘Functional’, ‘Falling Behind’ and ‘Sad Face’.

  She considered her spread. Way too much dark forest green. It had been a Sad Face month. Thinking back to the origins of the mood spread, how different journalers had tied them to sleep spreads, productivity spreads, recovery spreads, exercise spreads and the like, she realized a lot of her fellow journalers worried about mood disorders. Many had problems with depression and documented their lives in order to help themselves. ‘A well-organized, proactive, group of depressives,’ she muttered. Had she found her sisterhood without meaning to?

  It didn’t matter if she had. When in doubt, she made a quote page, something she needed to remember. She found a blank page after her most recent weekly spread and then searched on the internet until she found something that spoke to her. When she found the perfect quote, she penciled it in, alternating lines with faux calligraphy and block lettering. Then, she went over it all in black pen.

  She sat back and looked at the wise words of Charles Dickens. ‘The most important thing in life is to stop saying “I wish” and start saying “I will”.’

  She smiled. ‘Thanks, Mister Dickens.’ Of course, she had to do extra, so she chose orange and yellow Tombow dual brush pens and drew sunrays around the quote. Finally, she scanned the page into her computer just in case she wanted to make a sticker out of it at some point.

  For now, she needed to listen to these words and get to work. Resolutely, she flipped to her list of sticker ideas and decided to do pastel sets of number strips in various colorways for spring. She could also do matching weekly headers, too. They would sell. Not the most exciting product, but the basics were important.

  She spent the rest of the day on that, then, as the sky darkened, she put on her camera makeup and filmed an intro for her pen test video. She added teasers for her new pastel stickers and edited the video until her eyes blurred long after the moon had risen.

  Now, she could sleep. Who needed fresh air to wear yourself out when you could stare at a screen half the night? Bedtime didn’t matter during a layoff.

  The next morning, Mandy rolled over when something disturbed her. ‘C’mon, Zac, I’m sleeping,’ she muttered, then her eyes shot open when she registered the sound of her own voice. Had she really spoken out loud to Zac Efron? ‘I’m losing it.’

  Her phone rang. Again. That had been what woke her up. She glanced at the time as she accepted the call. Ten-thirty in the morning. Exactly how late had she stayed up? She didn’t usually sleep in like this.

  ‘Hello?’ she quavered.

  ‘Good news,’ Fannah said.

  Mandy blinked. ‘Aren’t you laid off like us?’

  ‘I was called in an hour ago and just left a meeting.’

  Mandy heard excitement in her supervisor’s voice. ‘A good meeting?’

  ‘Yes. You’ve been exonerated, along with the coffee bar.’

  ‘We didn’t get anyone sick?’

  ‘No.’ Fannah’s voice had gone all high-pitched, then calmed. ‘When I went to Mister Cho’s office, he said all three nurses were put on the spot when they arrived for their shifts today. I’d certainly have been suspicious if they were all perfectly well again so soon after vomiting.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘They were taken into a conference room and told they were being sent to mandatory drug testing.’

  ‘Like a pee test?’

  ‘Exactly. Employees are subject to them at will. Right then and there, one of them fessed up. The weak link, I suppose.’

  ‘They took some kind of drug that got them sick?’

  ‘You bet.’ Mandy heard Fannah smack her lips. ‘When faced with drug tests, all three nurses admitted they took Adderall.’

  ‘Wow. Just like Doctor O’Halloran.’

  ‘Mister Cho was smart enough to ask them where they got it, and it wasn’t from you or me.’

  ‘Who from, then?’

  ‘He didn’t say, but we’re cleared to work. I’m in the prep room now and it’s been thoroughly wiped down. Everything perishable was thrown out but I’ll have all of our non-dairy and dairy milks replenished by noon and we’ll have smoothie ingredients on Monday. Can you be here at noon? Then we can reopen.’

  ‘What about Kit?’

  ‘I can’t reach her.’

  Mandy wondered if she’d picked up an extra shift at her new job. ‘I guess if we don’t open until noon it’s no trouble for us both to work until six.’

  ‘That’s my plan. Can you stay?’

  ‘Yes,’ Mandy said. ‘That’s fine. I’ll be there at noon.’ She disconnected from the call and wiped sleep from her eyes. Her neck ached from her long night of video work. In her layoff frenzy, she’d done what was normally two days of work in one half day and reached the upload process before her eyes had blurred. The video was only eight minutes, half her usual length. She hoped she hadn’t brought down the quality of her vlogging.

  Mandy was blinking hard, trying to stay alert, when Dr Burrell appeared at her counter later that day. She stared at him. ‘Did you appear out of nowhere? I didn’t see you coming.’

  He chuckled. ‘Late night? I saw you loaded a video in the wee hours.’

  She goggled at him. ‘How do you know that?’

  He mimicked hitting buttons on his phone. ‘Like and subscribe, right? Remember to hit the bell so you’ll get notifications?’

  She put her hands to her face and then smoothed curls back behind her ears. ‘You really have watched at least one of my videos.’

  ‘You bet
,’ he said lightly. ‘What are you doing back here? Yesterday you were cruising for a breakdown due to your layoff.’

  ‘Exonerated.’

  His blue eyes brightened. Maybe they’d just caught the light, but that Chris Pine resemblance intensified. ‘Excellent. I knew your cookies couldn’t be poison.’

  ‘Very funny, Doctor.’ She made a face at him. ‘The Adderall problem is getting worse. First Doctor O’Halloran, and now all three of those nurses.’

  ‘Ah, so that’s what was going on.’ He winced.

  She nodded. ‘When faced with a drug test, they admitted it.’

  ‘I hope you ban them from the coffee shop for life. Assuming they still have jobs here.’

  ‘I hope not. Abusing drugs, lying about it, and threatening the coffee bar and the livelihoods of the employees?’

  ‘Your co-worker was assaulted not too long ago, right?’ Dr Burrell asked. He stretched out his hand and she gave him a paper coffee cup, then followed him around the inside ring of the counter while he moved to the urns.

  ‘Monday night. It’s been a horrible week.’

  He loaded his cup with dark roast. ‘I wonder if that’s related somehow. A couple of years ago, a nurse who worked with me in the NICU unit was assaulted at the bottom level of the parking garage.’

  ‘What does that have to do with what happened?’

  He opened a shelf-stable creamer and splashed it on top of his coffee, barely changing the dark color, then snapped a lid on. She handed him a cup guard.

  ‘She had a personal alarm and was able to turn it on. Security reached her quickly and the assailant was still in the garage. They found Adderall when they searched him.’

  ‘He was her dealer?’

  ‘No, at least I don’t think so. She had her third child about six months later and quit to stay home with her family after that.’

  She shuddered. ‘Pregnant and assaulted.’

  He winced. ‘She told me that’s why her husband had given her the personal alarm. Because of her job she was out late at night.’

  ‘I’m glad she could afford to stay home after that.’ She walked back to the cash register and rang him up. ‘We should have real milk and cookies again on Monday. The weekend team isn’t going to have much to work with.’