Poison

by Galt Niederhoffer

  “What is that?” says Nora.

  “Keep walking,” says Cass. She walks faster.

  “What is that?”

  Cass walks, straightens. “Metal detector.”

  The alarm blaring as they leave may as well be a call to arms, for it will take the force of a revolution to reverse the damage. But Cass will find this strength. Cass will wage this war. Killers forget that when they fail, they train their insurrection.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Cass opens her front door and stands outside in silence. She waits for a moment, surveying her lawn, marveling at the loss, the devastation. Pete’s bike still rests on the porch. Alice’s books are still scattered across the dining room table—The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, a cookbook. The cat taps anxiously on the inside of the door. She’s hungry and sick of waiting. Cass marvels at the simple fact: life can change in an instant. All the world she knows is gone. All that was hers has been taken. The mind cannot forget, once learned, the fragile nature of these things—a child on a swing, a family meal, the stupid sparkle of the bay, those most precious and perfect things gone to dread and anguish.

  This is what injustice feels like. Living through days with no refuge, every refuge is a reminder, every memory a horror. Acknowledging the deception of every joy, every normal situation. A bed that promised restoration is now a torture chamber. A meal that offered sustenance became a vessel for poison. Waking up shuddering in the night, in the morning, waking up to daydreams more gruesome than the nightmares. Walking through the once-known world aware of one’s exception, smiling when you mean to scream, laughing when you’re weeping, complicit in the grand delusion that good prevails over evil. Upholding, with this falsehood and the comforts that come with it, those things that we rely upon, things we count on to protect us—family, friends, doctors, lawyers, churches, temples, sunshine. Knowing these things care nothing for us. They only make assessments. Can you afford to act? Will you condone the violence?

  These things know no discernment. No compassion. No order, reason. Just random luck in a world that neither loves nor disdains you. You are but a passenger. You is but a concept. They are just the other you, making their own calculations. Can they abide the violence? Will it jeopardize their pleasant day, their wallet? Split-second choices that result in life or death, collusion or defiance, based on simple questions: What is the upside? What is the downside? What is the perk of silence? And then the dreaded inference. Good and evil. What are they? They, too, are false distinctions, made-up concepts. And finally the most sobering fact: they and you are no different. Good and evil spout from the same source, reside in every person. They and you are equally capable of benevolence and violence. Benevolence and violence—these, too, are bogus constructs. There is only how you act in that moment.

  This is life at its limit, a sauce cooked down to reduction. How the number one behaves as it approaches zero. Nothing looks the same once you’ve witnessed this transformation. You can spend the rest of your life hell-bent on forgetting. You can push it from your mind, but this awareness pervades every minute. You try, and though you succeed for a time, you are forever different. This pain, the lessons that come with it, this is a new hell of its own, awareness coupled with the knowledge that someone has fought to erase you as a person.

  Proving the crime and vindicating herself is no longer a matter of survival. It is the difference between this abject hell and reclaiming her children. She finds herself repeating the chronology like a mantra: her husband committed a crime but used his defense to destroy her. A wife reported her husband’s crime, but the wife, not the husband, was punished. The process, the steps, the days ahead are difficult to fathom. All she can do is listen to Matthew’s advice, find comfort in Nora’s hope, strength in her outrage, and show up in court again in a month with more evidence, witnesses, and eventually, a trial. She must count on due process. For now, she must complete the excruciating task of living through these hours.

  The bleeding has stopped, and the nausea has receded to a dull constant. Her hair no longer falls out in chunks in the bath and shower. Her hands no longer twitch like invertebrate creatures. Now she holds them, clenched, as though to defend against an intruder. The world is forever changed, not only in its nature. The world has been shattered at its foundation. Total demolition. Cass is a mother stripped of her children. Cass’s children were taken from their mother. And this grief, this unceasing hideous grief is a pain that defies description. It is a constant state of horror. It feels like facing death, except there is no ever after. There is only the knowledge that her children are alive, the prayer that they will be safe until they are reunited, and the understanding that her belief in her beliefs, her choices, and her actions prevented something more dire. Her children are alive. And her quest to reclaim them will consume every moment, thought, hour.

  Everything is different. Everything is altered. And yet, standing at her front door, things look very similar, so much like the life she used to inhabit. The house is still the same dusty blue. The clouds still loiter on the horizon. The grass is still the same dewy green as the eyes of her husband. The mail is piled up on the doormat, a stack of exhibits of time’s unflinching accrual. She leans down and flips through the damp envelopes. Bills from doctors, notes from school, random solicitations. A life that used to belong to her. A world she used to belong to. She crouches to gather the envelopes. A series of return addresses draw her attention.

  Maine Medical Labs. Sitters.com. The North Bermuda Clinic. She tears them open and scours the results. The heavy metals panels run over the last two months, by Nora’s doctor and her own, as well as the North Bermuda Clinic. Urine and hair samples. They show a flux from low to high, from high to excessive levels. It’s true that Ryan committed a crime with no fingerprints, a crime with no scrapes and bruises, but he did not plan for the evidence of his crime to be harbored by her body. Nor that Cass would live to tell it.

  November 5: urine 19 mcg/L

  November 15: urine 41 mcg/L

  December 5: 144 mcg/L

  December 31: 568 mcg/L

  And one for Pete, December 31: 40 mcg/L

  No need for a smoking gun. Cass swallowed the bullet.

  Another goodie in the mail to add to Cass’s exhibits. A letter from the babysitter agency with its own admission.

  A sitter you have employed has failed the identity authentication. She has been removed from the website. Please discontinue contact with this person. A member is removed from the site for one of three reasons: she is underage, she has failed a background check, or she has provided a fraudulent name and biographical information.

  And last, a letter with an official address. She scans it in disbelief.

  Maine Department of Health is the return address at the left-hand corner. A rapid tear and the letter is out. She sits down on her front step to read its contents.

  Dear Mrs. Connor,

  Due to the mandated reporting of medical labs in the state of Maine, your labs have been reported to the Department of Health. You have been placed on the Heavy Metals Registry due to your elevated levels. Those on the registry have exceeded safe and normal levels, usually due to unknown environmental toxicity or occupational hazards. Please call the number on this letter for more information. You may be entitled to free medical care for the remediation of heavy metals. Please find the enclosed info sheet to better understand how your job may be affecting your health.

  She sits and stares at the letter for several silent minutes. Time is callous, she decides. Finding this here days after the court hearing. No matter. It wouldn’t have helped her. They would simply find a way to say the findings were inconclusive or, worse, claim she is responsible. Maybe it is a blessing she didn’t find it sooner. She reads the handy fact sheet about heavy metal poisoning, educates herself about her options. The pros and cons of chelation. The irony is toxic.

  Something in the letter jogs a part of her brain that has been blocked. Chelation
: the cleaning of heavy metals from the blood. Detoxification. Using metal ions to bond with metal ions, like using dirt to clean dirt, like to clean like, poison to cure intoxication. Quickly now, she fumbles for her key, wrestles her front door open. She drops her bag and sprints up the stairs, past her room and the children’s, until she is on the top floor of the house, the areas she likes the best, where she has spent countless hours, nursing the baby, folding laundry.

  She stands in front of the washer and dryer, panting, breathless, and crouching, reaches behind the machine to remove the phone she hid behind it. Seventy-four messages since she last checked. Ryan’s phone is still working. She pours detergent into the slot, starts up a load from the hamper, taking immense comfort in the sound of the washer. Something delicious simmers on the stove. The dishwasher murmurs. The laundry circles. A perfect machine until a circuit breaks and the machine ceases to function. She sits down on the floor, her back resting against the massive metal machine. She studies the messages on his phone, re-reads all the emails. But she only reads the first few before intuition starts buzzing.

  “Mr. Connor, your dry cleaning will be ready for pickup at 4:00 P.M. at the Cherry Street location.”

  “Mr. Connor, your dry cleaning will be ready for pickup at 4:00 P.M. at the Cherry Street location.”

  “Mr. Connor, your dry cleaning will be ready for pickup at 4:00 P.M. at the Cherry Street location.”

  But she always dropped off his dry cleaning. And the sitter pitched in with the laundry.

  She scrolls further back to the correspondence with C. Alloy.

  “It’s working,” he writes.

  “We did it,” he says.

  “She’s over.”

  Followed by a stream of lewd love notes and hearty congratulations.

  Now Cass thinks of two people, her second- and third-favorite liar.

  “Delicate for denim.”

  God knows what they put in this washer. And what they exchanged at these drop-offs.

  Cass scrolls to the contacts on the phone. Locates the number for C. Alloy. A reverse search on the Ohio address lands at a 304 number. A quick search reveals that 304 is the area code for West Virginia. Another search confirms her suspicions. The number is registered to Mary-Lynn Logan.

  Once again, Cass finds herself re-filling the gaps of recent history. Ryan and Marley were having affair long before Marley’s application. When Ryan went missing during her class. The clumps of hair in the beach house. The panties in the laundry room. So many texts and emails. All of the texts to this number, their little joke: C Alloy, an amalgam of heavy metals.

  Right here under her own roof, Ryan brought his inspiration and accomplice. Not a nanny. But a plant. A home into a crime scene. A haven into a coffin.

  Liars tell parts of the truth. Liars leave breadcrumbs. Liars twist and flaunt the facts. Liars need to broadcast.

  A girl, poisoned as a child by her own environment. The cancer treated with an even more powerful toxin. Arsenic trioxide. Spared from death but back with a grudge. For the stolen years. The lost childhood. She wanted damages, payback. In Marley, Ryan found a willing partner and a shared incentive. Not wanting to lose his child or his home but dogged by the need to split them in a divorce, Ryan asked his doting lover a simple question:

  “How can I kill my wife?”

  She knew just the thing. Guaranteed to kill without the risk of detection.

  Ryan fell for her tale of woe, her desperate rebellion. She fell for Ryan. Right here under Cass’s roof, a Trojan horse was delivered: a can-do nanny with a penchant for “all things strings,” and a killer craving for Cass’s husband.

  With certainty comes the satisfaction of confirmed intuition, followed by the knowledge that it’s time to avenge her children. And while some part of Cass feels sorry for this disturbed woman, her own life is too hard-earned to forfeit to a trailer-park grifter. She cannot help docking one last lesson as she puts on her shoes and jacket: Always trust your gut. Ignoring your instincts is the surest route to self-destruction. Doubt, not belief, Cass decides, is the most dangerous delusion.

  * * *

  It is morning when Cass arrives at the university. Only a week has passed since she returned to Portland. Four days since her world was destroyed. But here nothing has changed. Office hours start at ten, and her first class is at noon. The students are back from the winter break, and they move through the halls with extra volume. A knock on the door and a rustle of denim as her first student hurries in.

  “Oh, good, you’re here,” says Anna. It is bittersweet to see her students now. So young and already invested in redressing injustice.

  “There an issue with the assignment?” says Cass.

  “I’m really struggling.” Anna sits down on the chair next to the desk and extracts her laptop from her backpack.

  “What’s got you stuck?” Cass says.

  “It’s hard to be objective when you feel so strongly about a piece.”

  “Here, let’s take a look at the lede. What is the subject of the article?”

  “Lenient sentencing in rape cases based on a ruling that the rape was ‘solicited.’”

  Anna hands Cass her paper. She scans the first page and then looks back to Anna.

  “This is strong,” Cass says. “What can you do with the verbs to give it more rhetorical power? Journalists hate a gerund.”

  Anna takes the paper, begins to make revisions.

  Cass glances at her student. Recognizes her strength. Her ambition. “I’m actually working on a project. I could use some help.”

  Anna straightens. “Can you tell me more?”

  “It’s an in-depth investigative piece. Requires some strenuous reporting.”

  “Investigative?” Anna whispers.

  Cass looks back at Anna’s paper. Considers the ethics of what she is asking.

  “Is it a political piece?”

  “It’s somewhat political,” Cass says.

  “Sex crime?” Anna whispers.

  “In a sense,” says Cass. “And drugs. Sale of a controlled substance.”

  “Trafficking?” Anna gasps, mouth agape. “A sex-and-drug cartel?”

  “Not exactly,” says Cass. “More of a domestic situation. With a bit of overlap in environmental science.”

  “You mean like Flint?” Anna’s voice rises an octave.

  “Some things in common with Flint. Stonewalling. Cover-up. Heavy metals. Think Flint but with criminal intent.”

  “Whoa,” says Anna. “Sounds juicy.”

  And then, because Cass cannot resist a good pitch, “An outraged victim, wrongfully accused, dismissed, disgraced, ripped from her children. A woman, charged and criminalized, tried without due process. No suspension of judgment. No burden of proof. An innocent, a victim sentenced for reporting a crime. All of this filtered through a feminist lens. But most of all, it’s the story of every woman’s fight for survival, a mother on a quest for her children.”

  “I’m in,” says Anna.

  “Really?” says Cass. This was easier than she’d expected. Or she is better at this than she realized.

  “Sounds like a huge story,” says Anna.

  “It is,” says Cass.

  “The victim, dismissed and decried. The broken legal system. The baked-in misogyny that make a community complicit. It’s like a bad light bulb joke. How many victims do you need to accuse a man of rape before one is believed? Before one man is convicted?”

  “You get it,” says Cass.

  “I’m quoting your article,” says Anna.

  “Oh,” Cass says. “Right.”

  “So when can I start?”

  Cass takes a sharp breath. “You free now?”

  Anna shrugs. “Yes.”

  Cass studies the girl, assesses her capacity for trust. “I need to make sure that you can maintain confidentiality.”

  “Of course,” Anna says. “Your lecture on reporter’s privilege was one of my favorites.”

  “We’re
going to take some liberties with our source.”

  “Really?” says Anna. She leans toward the desk.

  “Our source is also our subject.”

  Anna nods slowly.

  “I want you to witness a transaction and make your own purchase.”

  “Okay,” says Anna. “I can do that.”

  “If it goes well, you can write about it. The story is yours. Single byline.”

  Anna nods. Her eyes are wide.

  “Are you sure you’re up for this?” Cass says.

  “Absolutely,” says Anna.

  Cass scrutinizes the young woman’s face. Her earnest eyes, her childlike blond curls, the wisps of hair grazing her cheek. Her ambition, her intensity. “What are you wearing under that jacket?”

  She unzips a jacket to reveal a tight-fitting T-shirt.

  “That’ll work,” says Cass. She gathers the papers on her desk.

  “Whoa,” says Anna. “Girilla journalism. Every arrow in our quiver. All the tools in our arsenal to slay the dragon!” She is nearly punching the air.

  “No,” says Cass. “You’ll need that pocket for the recorder.”

  “Oh!” says Anna. She straightens her face, nods somberly. She takes her paper from Cass and stuffs it into her bag.

  “Any other suggestions for my attire?”

  “Nope,” says Cass.

  “Glasses? No glasses?”

  “You’re perfect as you are.”

  * * *

  It is ten o’clock, and four women sit in a borrowed car. Cass, Nora, Anna, and Jean are half a block from the address on Ryan’s “dry cleaning pickup,” the Cherry Street location. They are close to downtown Portland, where the coiffed lawns and crime intersect, where the trees meet the city. Nora has brought a thermos of coffee. They have been sitting for over an hour. The air is cold and damp outside, and the heat in the car is blasting.

  A man in a hoodie strides up the block, wearing headphones that look like earmuffs. His gait is immediately recognizable, hunched shoulders and long rhythmic strides, like he’s moving to a beat. Cass has to restrain herself not to shout curses across the street. Her “concerned neighbor” is a common criminal.