Poison

by Galt Niederhoffer

  “Judge, I am asking for custody of my child, and an order of protection from my husband. On November 1, he made a death threat, and then he acted on this threat. He pushed me into traffic. He informed me he had been poisoning me and that he intended to make it look like a suicide. Since that time, I have experienced severe and painful symptoms, including nausea, vomiting, mental confusion, vaginal and rectal bleeding. I don’t feel safe in my home. I fear for the safety of my children. I am asking for a protective order for the safety of myself and my children.”

  It takes several minutes to recover from the rush of speaking in the courtroom. Her heart speeds. Her hands are numb. Nausea is momentarily eclipsed by adrenaline. The rest of her time in the room is a blur except for the memory of Matthew saying, “Good job,” the knowledge that she needs to stand and exit, and the relief that comes from learning she has finally been believed, that she has broken through the recent days’ dismissal, and that she has succeeded in her goal, gaining a measure of protection for her and her children.

  They stand outside the courtroom now in a room that resembles a marble mausoleum.

  “Most people freeze up,” Matthew says. “You ever done this before?”

  “I’ve had to pitch before,” she says, exhaling.

  Matthew explains the outcome in more detail now. The judge has granted, ex parte, a temporary order of protection. Ex parte means in the absence of the defendant. This order must now be served to Ryan. Then he, with his lawyer, will have the chance to defend himself against the allegation. The judge has not ruled on custody. This will happen with both parties present. They will all return to the court in a week. Ryan, Cass, and their lawyers. Until then, things will proceed as they were with Ryan getting Sam the following night, as scheduled.

  “It’s a start,” says Matthew. “The restraining order will deter him.”

  “Let’s hope,” says Cass. “But we need to wait to serve it. I want Sam back with me first.”

  “That makes sense,” says Matthew. “Call me as soon as you have him.”

  Cass walks to the car, grateful for the silence. Everything feels different. Everything is altered. It is mid-November, and the sun is out in Portland.

  * * *

  Back at home, Matthew arrives with three people—two witnesses and a notary. One is a short, overweight man with a balding head and greasy scalp. From his prominent brow and thick lower lip, he could easily be Matthew’s brother. The other appears to be the receptionist from the immigration agency that shares his office. But Cass is too grateful for help to quibble with the details. She is grateful for someone to steady her hand while she removes the lobster roll from the freezer, to witness this bizarre procedure as she places the food in the special tube designated for “animal tissue,” for someone to sign his name on the line that says “witness,” for the notary to make this event official, to prove that it happened as it did without any evidence corruption, by putting his rubber stamp on this document. It is a far cry from the cheerful family meals assembled on this counter, and she shudders as she considers her husband’s latest ingredient.

  She is grateful that someone is here to use phrases like chain of custody and contamination, to explain the technicalities involved in this process when she is too sick and sad and confused to remember much more than the names of her three children. Matthew intends to “establish a link” with Ryan’s fingerprints on the container. To obtain proof of purchase of the lobster roll and the toxins he placed in it. To prove the delivery of the weapon with medical labs taken from Cass’s system. To prove a crime not unlike rape, a crime with no witnesses, the only proof that it did occur, the victim’s bruises, trauma, terror, and, if she’s lucky, her attacker’s semen. A rapist warps an act of love into an act of violence. Except here the semen is poison. No DNA to speak of. Ten minutes later, the food has been safely transferred to the appropriate container, the container placed in a sealed envelope, the envelope ferried to overnight mail for delivery first thing in the morning, and these three strangers have left her alone in a house that was once her haven and is now her very own crime scene.

  SIXTEEN

  It is morning, and Cass works to restore a sense of normal. Because of the issues with child care, she calls in sick and cancels her afternoon class with a perfunctory dashed-off email. She shudders to think of the complaints of her students, who treat the last-minute absence of a teacher as a cause both for celebration and a passive-aggressive note to the dean of students. “We didn’t pay this tuition to have our teacher cancel at the last minute.” Alice and Pete are safe at school. Sam is fed and contented. Now Cass stands underneath a wooden plank bridge while Sam roars with laughter, running back and forth, shrieking with delight as he instructs his mother to “be the monster.” Several trips later, another little boy about the same age climbs up the ladder and asks for an encore. She recognizes him vaguely from his mop of curls and unusually wide-set eyes but does not remember who he is until she turns to see his father.

  “Be the monster!” Sam says.

  Cass obliges.

  “Be the monster, Mommy!”

  Cass performs another growl, to the delight of both children.

  “Impressive,” says Aaron.

  “Thanks,” she says. “I’ve spent years honing my monster impression.”

  “You’ve got three, right?”

  “Yes,” she says.

  “Don’t know how you do it.”

  Cass smiles. “I’m very lucky.”

  “You smoke?” he says.

  “What?” she says. Does he mean what she thinks? “Oh, no. Not since college.”

  “You and Ryan never lit up a joint? Bottle of wine on a Friday night. After the kids finally conk out?”

  “Nah,” she says. “That stuff never agreed with me. I don’t need any more reasons to be suspicious.”

  He waits for her to elaborate. She immediately regrets making this joke with this near stranger.

  “If you ever change your mind,” he says, “I could hook you up.”

  “Thanks,” she says. “I’ll do that.” Her eyes are on Sam as he gains momentum on the plank bridge.

  “Don’t go thinking I’m some drug dealer. I just know people who can facilitate should you ever need it.”

  She pauses. Facilitate. Why is it that druggies always use such overwrought vocabularies? “Not for me. Besides, I’m thinking of doing a cleanse. Got enough junk in my system.”

  “What kind of junk?” he says.

  “Oh, you know.” She regrets the disclosure. But everything is so dark right now, there is something reflexive and cathartic about gallows humor. “You know how it is with an old house,” she says, retreating. “There’s always something in the paint or the pipes or the water.”

  “Fuck, we can’t do anything anymore. Can’t breathe in the house because of the lead paint. Can’t eat seafood because of the mercury. Forget about the great king crab. Filled with arsenic … sick bastard.”

  “I didn’t know that,” she says. She is eager to end this conversation, but something holds her in her place. Loneliness or morbid curiosity.

  “I’m something of an expert,” he says, “in the science of foreign substances.”

  “Oh yeah?” she says. “Why’s that?”

  “Wow, that sounded macabre.”

  “It did,” she says, “but now I’m curious. What kind of expert?”

  “I was that kid, experimenting with baking soda to make explosions in the kitchen. Then I was the science geek in high school, working the Bunsen burner. Majored in chem in college. After that, I spent my twenties finding myself in the American Southwest, where I learned about the science of the drug trade—meth, ecstasy, acid—and I gained the dubious distinction of being one of five people present at Timothy Leary’s deathbed.”

  “Leary as in LSD, the professor?”

  “The one and only. Turn on. Tune in. Drop out. Think for yourself and question authority. Father of the movement.”

 
“How did you have occasion to meet?” Cass says. She feels her journalist’s instinct kicking in.

  “Truth be told, I used to sell a bit. Paid my way through college. You know. My wayward twenties. The search for purpose. I read his books, wrote him a letter, went to visit him in the desert, ended up sticking around a few weeks. That turned into a few years. I think of that time as my master’s in chemistry. You can learn a lot about science—chemistry and the brain—from real-life experiments.” He smiles. “I mean from the manufacture and combination of various substances.”

  “Wow,” she says. It is all she can say. She is repelled and intrigued in equal part. But something keeps her standing there—loneliness, voyeurism, perverse interest.

  “They’re using it now for everything. Alcoholism, trauma, depression. Terminally ill patients. Did you know recovering addicts on acid trials have a lower rate of relapse than the ones who go through rehab? You should hear what it does for trauma patients. Thirty years of therapy in six to eight hours.”

  Cass nods. No other response comes to mind.

  “But of course, you know what they say…”

  “What do they say?”

  “Sola dosis facit venenum. It’s the dose that makes the poison.”

  “Right,” says Cass. “I thought it was ‘everything in moderation.’”

  “Santos is the laboratory where it all started. Two self-taught druggies-turned-chemists making LSD in a New Mexico basement. Now Monsanto is the largest pharmaceutical company in the free world. Chemo drugs and pesticides. Both made from the same darn stuff. Pretty awesome when you think about it. The same thing that saves the lives of the terminally ill kills every little fucker that lands on our precious agriculture. And then we use those crops to feed our children. Ironic, huh? Nuclear warfare on a microscopic level. And to think this little underground lab became the biggest of Big Pharma.”

  “Fascinating,” says Cass. “I had no idea you were so knowledgeable.”

  “I’m just the weird dad at the playground.”

  “Just the weird dad.” She smiles. “Weird but interesting.”

  A burst of laughter from the bridge where the kids are playing. Cass beams at her son, arrested by his elation.

  “They play well together,” says Aaron.

  “Yes, let’s do this again,” she says. She is not sure about this, but she wants to go now. And the truth is this is the first time in weeks she has spent ten minutes in sunshine, distracted from abject darkness.

  “If you ever change your mind, you know where to find me.” He nods at his house across the street. “You seem so stressed. Everyone feels better after a little vacation.”

  Cass collects Sam from the plank bridge, re-zips his puffy blue parka, hoists him to her arms, and quickly leaves the playground. Given the strange nature of life of late, this conversation seems relatively less bizarre than it might have weeks prior. Stranger still: as she walks home, she is actually considering Aaron’s offer.

  * * *

  It is afternoon, and Cass tries to uphold a semblance of normal. At the Macon Dance Center school, she and the kids pass the time in a state of diversion, Pete calmly reading a book while Sam locates a similarly athletic toddler and enlists him to climb onto various chairs and tables. Every several minutes, the flailing and adorable legs of tweens fly across the classroom window in flashes of black and pink spandex as Alice and her classmates perfect the routine for their upcoming winter recital.

  As Cass sits in the crowded lobby, Ryan’s phone lights up, revealing a bizarre text exchange between Ryan and Marley.

  “I am very sorry to say I had to resign from my position,” writes Marley.

  “That’s unfortunate,” Ryan writes. “Are you available to discuss this?”

  And then, a few minutes later, from Marley: “I’m at a doctor’s appointment now. I’ll call you when it’s over.”

  “Please do,” he writes. “Please call at your earliest convenience.”

  Cass stares at the phone with budding awareness. There is something off to the exchange, something rehearsed, scripted. Too wordy, grammatically proper. A pretense of formal. Texts tend to be more cursory, shortened by urgent, clumsy fingers.

  Cass considers again the various theories of their involvement: either Ryan is pursuing Marley now or a greater intimacy and longer history exists between them. If the latter, this message is nothing less than a criminal’s alibi, a rig designed to obscure a more complicated structure. Still, Cass checks the impulse to draw too many connections. But she cannot discount the possibility that Ryan and Marley were lovers, that he placed her in their home as a plant, a marriage of motive and accomplice, a chilling hybrid of Dr. Jekyll and Mrs. Doubtfire. This would be truly sinister, a whole other level of deranged and psychopathic.

  The night still holds a series of decisions for Cass. She has not yet authorized Matthew to serve the restraining order, and so as far as Ryan knows, he will receive the baby later tonight at their scheduled transfer. She faces a throng of opposing emotions on this subject: rage compels her to hurt him back, to deprive him of the thing he wants most, their most precious shared possession, and common sense tells her he is not in his right mind, that he is not competent now to be around children. And yet her pure and weakened heart wants no revenge, no malice, and, like some old broken toy, yearns to make him happy.

  Now Cass scripts her own message, one designed not to convey but elicit information.

  “Some bizarre behavior from Marley yesterday. Turns out she was a total fraud. Fake name, fake references, fake everything. It was pretty scary.”

  Several minutes pass, minutes during which he is either distracted or deciding on the most appropriate reaction.

  “You ran off another nanny,” he writes. No mention of Marley’s message to him, no mention of any prior knowledge.

  “The girl was a psycho,” she writes. “We’re lucky nothing happened.”

  “The nose always knows,” he writes back. “Lucky you’re such a good detective.”

  Cass fights a new impulse to double over in anguish, but finds a new diversion; anguish activates anger.

  “Don’t come to the house tonight,” she writes. “I’m not willing to give you the baby. Our lawyers can talk on Monday and figure out a long-term solution.” Her fingers hover over the phone, about to press Send on this nuclear message. But something stops her—fear, self-doubt, compassion. She erases the message to start from scratch.

  Ryan writes before she revises. “Meet me at home,” he writes. “I’ll come to the house to get him.”

  Cass is ready now to tell him not to bother, to greet him instead with a note on the door: your new restraining order. But the cycle of their relationship is a wave with a fearsome undertow. She is a swimmer, wading back to shore, and he is the wave that carries her under.

  * * *

  By the time they reach the house, the kids are agitated and grumpy. Hunger and day’s-end fatigue converge to make them edgy and prone to sudden movement. They have reached the crucial zone before dinnertime during which a parent has mere minutes to nourish her children or else witness a rapid decrease of blood sugar, spirits, and inhibition. The urgency of the endeavor is heightened by the kids’ divergent goals. Pete wants to play LEGOs and eat at home. Alice wants to go out to dinner. Cass wants to get the big kids inside before Ryan’s arrival and delay the transfer of the baby as long as possible. Conflicting goals converge as they emerge from the car into the driveway.

  Ryan arrives in the midst of all this chaos. The car rolls to a stop, and the door opens. He gets out quickly. She watches his face for signs of which Ryan he will be. Loving stepdad? Company man? Estranged husband?

  Seeing him produces a swell of emotions, so conflicting as to be combustive, soothing her just as it causes a surge that feels like a geological explosion.

  “Can we talk for a minute?” Cass says. She cringes as she says this, words uttered by women for thousands of years, words that have caused genera
tions of men to go spontaneously deaf to reason.

  The kids freeze near the door. Ryan waves an awkward greeting. Pete waves back. Alice doesn’t.

  “Put the kids inside,” he says. “We can talk for a minute.”

  He grabs the baby from Cass before she can stop him. Sam reaches out for his mother on reflex, but Ryan is quick to respond, distracting him with a steady stream of babble and promises. Startled, she turns and opens the door, eager to shield the older kids from the tension. Pete pauses for a moment, his chubby hand on the doorknob. He turns back to look at his mother and Ryan, confused by his feelings; one impulse tells him he hates this man, that he mistreated his mother. The other misses him terribly. Not two weeks ago, this man was a fact of his life, a playmate, a friend, and, for all intents and purposes, a father. The contradiction of these emotions—hatred and love, fear and desire, loathing and yearning—is too much for a seven-year-old, and, reasonably enough, it makes Pete angry at his mother.

  He stares at Cass and Ryan for another moment and then slams the door and runs inside to pick a fight with his sister.

  Cass looks at Ryan, as though waiting for an answer to a question, as though she can tell from his eyes whether he is still susceptible to reason. But reason is quickly leveled by the weight of emotion. “Do you realize how sick I’ve been?” she says.

  “I know you’re sick,” says Ryan.

  “No, not sick in the head. Puking my guts out. Bleeding out of my asshole. What did you do to me, Ryan?”

  “Stress is a powerful force,” he says. “It can cause serious symptoms.”

  “Spare me,” she says. “I’ve heard it before. Do you have any idea what this has been like for the children?”

  “You could have avoided this,” he says. “But you wouldn’t listen.”

  “You ended our family,” says Cass. “Now we need a peaceful resolution.”

  “I’m open to peace,” Ryan says. “I sent you a fair proposal. We have a child together. We both want to be with him. Neither one of us can get everything we want. This will be a negotiation.”