Crazy 4U

by Cach, Lisa

  “Ow! Stop it! Never mind my nose; go tend the jib!”

  Angelica hurried forward as bidden, then returned to the cockpit to find Tom leaning out over the water, his blood chumming the sea. “I’m so sorry!”

  “My fault,” he said tightly, obviously in great pain.

  “You’d think I could get port and starboard straight!”

  Tom reached out a hand and patted her thigh. “It’s okay.”

  “But your nose! Did you re-break it?”

  “Probably.”

  “Oh god!” She felt horrible.

  “Angelica.”

  “Yes?” she said eagerly, desperate to help.

  “Could you get me some ice from the galley?”

  “Okay! Anything else? Bandages? Painkillers? What can I do?”

  “Just one thing, my dear.”

  “What?”

  “You’re going to have to sail us home. I’m not sure I’ll be conscious.”

  Chapter Five

  You let your guard down for a minute, stopped being careful and started enjoying yourself and getting cocky, and this is what happened. Disaster! Injury! Terror on the high seas, and on the road in Mr. Toad, and where did it all end? In the emergency room, that’s where.

  Angelica shook her head and bit back tears. She was in the waiting area of the emergency room. They’d taken Tom in ten minutes earlier, despite his protestations that the bleeding was much less now, really. They both looked like they’d been vacationing in a slaughterhouse, and the blood was especially conspicuous on Angelica’s white dress. Her skirt was a red Rorschach test, her bodice a field of Flanders poppies.

  Tom had stayed conscious during the sail home, but she had been the hands that did as his mind commanded. Her body was shaking from nerves and exhaustion by the time they tied up at his brother’s slip. She’d thought her trials were over until Tom pointed out that she’d better be the one to drive to the ER. He got Mr. Toad started, but then it had been her tired muscles against the toad’s drum brakes and manual steering. She was grateful she knew how to handle a stick shift, although even so the toad had thrown her a few curves, not least of which was his habit of jerking either left or right when she touched the brakes. She suspected the little green truck had been difficult on purpose; it had remembered her unkind words earlier in the day and taken revenge.

  Tom had called his brother en route, asking him to check on the boat as Tom wasn’t confident he’d left it sufficiently secured.

  “Skittles! I need more Skittles!” a woman in the waiting area moaned.

  “Shh, you ate them all,” her husband said.

  Angelica sneaked a peek at the couple, who were sitting about fifteen feet away. The man was balding and chubby but well-groomed. His wife was badly sunburnt, and strangely swollen in her upper lip, chin, and breasts. The flesh in those areas looked inflamed and angry, and there was an open sore above one breast, visible above the low neckline of her shirt.

  “Skiiiiii-ttles,” the woman moaned, her face curiously immobile despite the distress in her voice. “Skiiiii-ttles.” She lumbered from her chair towards a vending machine in the corner. “Skittles?”

  Her husband chased after her, digging in his pockets for change. “How about Reese’s Pieces, dear? Would those do?”

  “Reeeee-se’s…”

  Angelica was distracted from the couple by an attractive woman in her early thirties who had stopped in front of her. “Angelica?” the woman asked.

  Angelica nodded in surprise.

  The woman, a dark blonde with freckles and green eyes, smiled. “I’m Lucy, Tom’s sister-in-law.”

  “Oh! Hi! They took Tom back about fifteen minutes ago.”

  Lucy’s gaze traveled over Angelica’s dress. “Wow. You’re never going to get that out.”

  Angelica closed her mouth, working past her surprise. Lucy was worried about her dress?

  Her date’s sister-in-law sat down beside Angelica and took her hand, patting it. “I’ve known Tom for ten years. I know it’ll take more than a smashed nose to do him any lasting harm. I’m more interested in how you’re doing. Are you okay, honey?”

  Angelica looked into Lucy’s concerned green eyes and felt herself crumbling. “No.”

  “Aww, honey, come here,” Lucy said, and put her arms around her in that way that only mothers could do.

  Angelica dissolved into tears, crying quietly into Lucy’s shoulder. It was her stress finding an outlet, purging her system of the fright and struggle of the last several hours.

  “I know a date with Tom is hard on any woman,” said a man’s voice, “but this goes too far.”

  Angelica dried her eyes and sat back.

  “This is my husband Mike, Tom’s brother,” Lucy explained. “Mike, this is Angelica.”

  Mike was a dark-haired, paler version of his brother, with the same bright blue eyes. “Pleased to meet you, you poor devil.” He shook her soggy hand.

  “I’m sorry I smashed your brother’s face with the boom.”

  “He probably deserved it.”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “I’m sure someone somewhere thinks he did. At any rate, if anyone was going to smash his new nose, I’m sure he’s delighted it was you. Did you have a good time with him out on the boat? Before the boom thing, of course.”

  Lucy surreptitiously kicked his foot.

  What? Mike’s expression seemed to say.

  “I was having a wonderful time. I’d never been out in a sailboat before.”

  “You didn’t get seasick?” Lucy asked.

  “Not at all. And Tom served a wonderful lunch, a Greek picnic.”

  Lucy blinked in surprise and looked up at Mike.

  “He served you real food?” Mike said, clearly astonished.

  “Of course he did,” Lucy answered.

  “Dr. Velazquez!” the chubby man halfway across the room suddenly called out. “Oh thank god.”

  Angelica, Mike, and Lucy all turned to look as Dr. Velazquez strode into the waiting area, dressed in casual clothes that probably cost more than Angelica made in a month. His hair was perfectly in place, his movements smooth and assured. He held up one finger to the chubby man, silently asking him to wait a moment, and strode past the intake desk into the ER proper.

  “Bit of a slick customer,” Mike murmured.

  “Stop it,” Lucy chided. “He did an excellent job on Tom’s nose.”

  Mike grunted.

  The swollen woman started groaning, drawing all eyes. Angelica stared in horror as the sore on the woman’s breast opened up and something white started to emerge. Her heart caught in her throat, but it was the woman’s chubby husband who started to scream, the sound girlish and piercing in the confines of the waiting area. The white thing swelled, pushing through the widening opening in the woman’s breast as she lay moaning in the chair, her bag of Reese’s Pieces falling from her hand.

  “Dr. Velazquez! Dr. Velazquez!” the chubby man screamed. “Somebody help her!”

  The woman’s breast suddenly seemed to contract, squeezing tight, and the white thing flew out the top, arcing through the air towards the three of them. They all shrieked and covered their heads with their arms as the thing bulleted toward them, then landed with a wet noise on the tile floor. Splat.

  Angelica lowered her arms and stared. Mike inched toward it then cautiously poked the blood-streaked, white, jellyfish-like mass with the toe of his shoe.

  “You know what that is,” Lucy said in a hushed voice.

  Angelica nodded, both revolted and fascinated. “It’s that woman’s breast implant.”

  Nurses and orderlies rushed over and took the woman and her implant away. Someone mopped up the spot on the floor, and swept up the Reese’s Pieces. The chubby man had returned to his seat, only now his face was in his hands, his shoulders hunched.

  Angelica got up and approached him. “Excuse me, sir?”

  He looked up at her, and then blinked at the state of her clothes. “Yes?�
��

  “I just wanted to ask, if you don’t mind, did Dr. Velazquez perform your wife’s surgeries?”

  He shook his head. “No, some quack in the Valley did them. We were hoping that Dr. Velazquez could fix whatever went wrong. We had an appointment to see him next week.”

  “Oh. Thank you.” She scuttled back to Mike and Lucy, feeling reassured.

  “That’s a relief,” Lucy whispered, echoing Angelica’s own thoughts.

  A few minutes later Tom emerged from the ER, wads of gauze bandages fastened under his nose and a new brace attached to the bridge. Angelica rushed over to him. “What’d Dr. Velazquez say? Is your nose going to be okay?”

  “I’ll be fine,” he assured her, his voice newly nasal from the bandages. “Good as new in no time; maybe even better than new.” He grinned, but it didn’t look reassuring under the new bruising that was developing in his face.

  “Tom, I—”

  He laid his finger on her lips. “Stop. I’m okay. And I had a wonderful day with you.”

  “You did?”

  “Can’t beat this for a first date story, can you?”

  She chuckled. “I suppose not.”

  Mike and Lucy joined them. “She’s a good one, Tom,” Mike said. “I can see why you’re sorry you don’t have more than ten days left.”

  “Ten days left for what?” Angelica asked, as Lucy again kicked Mike. Angelica looked up at Tom. “Ten days for what?” she repeated.

  “Ten days left to win your heart.”

  “Why ten days?”

  “Tom, you didn’t tell her?” Lucy asked, censure in her voice.

  “Tell me what?” Angelica pleaded.

  Tom grimaced. “In ten days I fly back to Micronesia, in the western Pacific. That’s where I live, full-time.”

  “Full-time? What do you mean? I thought you did dive tours somewhere around here, or Mexico.”

  He shook his head.

  “No? But you must fly back and forth to L.A., right?”

  “Only once every two or three years. It’s too far, and too expensive.”

  She digested that, stunned. “So in ten days you’re out of here. I’ll never see you again.”

  “Not unless you come with me.”

  She shook her head, her heart understanding before her brain could. Fresh tears sprang to her eyes. “We did that, all day, and you didn’t tell me you were leaving? You asked me to marry you, and you didn’t tell me you’d be gone from my life in a week and a half?” She kept shaking her head as she backed away. “You should have told me!”

  “I was afraid you wouldn’t go out with me if I did.”

  “I wouldn’t have!”

  “See?”

  “But it was my decision to make, not yours! How could I ever love a man who treated me like that?” Sobbing, she turned on her heel and fled.

  Chapter Six

  “Good evening!” a skinny fake blonde said on the TV screen. “And welcome to Spotlight on Show Biz. I’m Bethany Williams, in tonight for Carrie Sharp, who is out sick.”

  Angelica slouched on the opposite end of the sofa from Karen, both of them working through their second bowl of cookie dough ice cream. It was Friday night, and neither had gone to work for two days. Angelica had a severe sunburn on her face and chest that refused to fade, and that was making her feel tired and ill. Or maybe it was thoughts of the intimacy she’d shared with Tom, and the feelings for him that she had started to develop, that made her feel ill.

  He’d called her every day since, trying to persuade her to see him again. She hadn’t yet relented, but she felt herself weakening. She’d liked how he’d made her laugh with his stories, and the way he made her body feel. She’d liked the way he’d challenged her to learn to sail the boat despite her fears of incompetence. Even with the disastrous, bloody ending to the day, she’d felt more alive with him on that day than she could remember feeling for years. And she’d liked his brother and sister-in-law, too.

  Against all that, though, was the feeling that he’d lied to her by omission, that he hadn’t allowed her to make her own choice about getting involved with someone who would be leaving the country in a few days. As Maya Angelou said, “The first time someone shows you who they are, believe them.” But was Tom a man who habitually hid the truth, or was he, as he kept claiming on the phone, a man who had fallen in love for the first time in his life, and was acting like an idiotic adolescent as a result? And was one answer really any better than the other? She didn’t want an insecure lover, one whose weakness made him try to control her. Nor did she want a lover who lived halfway around the world.

  She could of course move to Micronesia with him; but how could she take such a massive risk without having a better idea of his character? He’d fooled her once already. She couldn’t give up her life here when it was possible he could fool her again.And yet, their day on the sailboat had been so wonderful….

  The show credits and intro ended, and Bethany Williams was diving into the meat of the broadcast. “We begin tonight with shocking footage of Kelsey Magnuson, who has been hospitalized. We warn you, the amateur video you are about to see is disturbing. It was captured by a fan on his iPhone late Thursday night.”

  On screen, an image came up of the interior of a candy store, shot from outside the front plate glass window. Candy bins had been pulled from the shelves, their contents scattered on the floor. Kelsey Magnuson lay amidst the carnage on the floor, strands of something yellow, green and red hanging from her mouth. For a horrified moment Angelica thought they were snakes, but then the videographer zoomed in and she saw that the strands were actually gummy worms. Kelsey moaned as she chewed, stuffing fresh handfuls into her mouth every few seconds.

  The videographer panned down Kelsey’s front to her breasts, a great inflated mound beneath her T-shirt. The shirt itself had wet, bloody-looking stains, and it looked like something was moving under the fabric. A moment later, an implant shot out from under the hem of the T-shirt. The videographer shrieked and started to curse, his hand shaking as he focused on the white blob resting amidst a mosaic of gobstoppers.

  Angelica dropped her spoon into her dish with a clank. “Oh my god!”

  Karen, too, stopped eating. “That’s what you said happened at the emergency room!”

  “Shh!” Angelica said, as the TV host came back on the screen.

  “Medical authorities are launching an investigation into what has been causing a rash of implant rejections across the city. Contaminated silicone is the primary suspect, although authorities have not yet pinpointed the source of the contamination, nor what substance is causing it. If you have implants, you should call your doctor if you have any of the following symptoms: swollen flesh around the implant; open sores; fatigue; poor coordination; and possibly sunburn or an unusual craving for sweets or other simple carbohydrates.”

  Angelica and Karen looked at each other, and at the bowls of ice cream in their hands.

  “Yeah, but what’s an ‘unusual’ amount?” Karen asked.

  “I know people who go weeks eating nothing but soda and candy bars,” Angelica agreed, even as her mind cast back over the past two weeks and her increasing attraction to sugary foods. And her sunburn. And the fatigue that had kept her home from work. “Thank God neither of us have implants.” Her own words did little to reassure her.

  On screen, Bethany Williams was saying, “To help explain these distressing developments we have the well-known plastic surgeon, Dr. Emilio Velazquez.”

  “Cool!” Karen said, resuming consumption of her ice cream. “I didn’t know he was going to be on. Of course, he is a bit of a media whore.”

  Angelica had called Dr. Velazquez on Monday to ask about her face, and he’d assured her that the spreading paralysis was a temporary, common, and harmless side effect. If it didn’t resolve in a couple weeks she should come back, which he would like anyway as he wanted to talk about working on her nose and breasts.

  The show cut to an interview with Dr. V
elazquez in his office. The reporter reviewed the points they’d already heard with him, and then asked for an explanation of how this could have happened.

  “The body treats an implant as a foreign object,” Velazquez explained. “Even when it is an inert substance like silicone. The body forms a capsule of scar tissue around the invader; this is the body’s way of containing the danger. In some cases, this capsule contracts, causing pain and deformation. These cases are difficult to repair, as any replacement of the implant is likely to cause the same thing to happen again.

  “In the case of Kelsey Magnuson and others who have been affected, I suspect that a foreign protein contaminated the surface of the implants sometime between their production and their implantation. The body has overreacted to the implants, stimulated by the foreign protein or other substance. A bacterium, perhaps. The result is what we’ve been seeing: not just capsular contraction, but a massive rejection of the implant by the body.”

  “Is it possible that something besides the implants is causing the problem?” the reporter asked. “Some medication that these people are taking, perhaps?”

  “My suspicions are that it may be a toxin in the environment. Pollution and global warming could be to blame. Perhaps the Environmental Protection Agency should look into it.”

  The reporter blinked in surprise, then recovered and smiled. “Related to that, you are well known as a champion of conservation, especially in your home country of Costa Rica.”

  “Yes, my foundation has saved thousands of acres of jungle from the threat of logging and development. The rain forests of our planet are the pharmacopoeias of Nature, and we have only begun to discover the cures they hold for mankind. To save the jungle is to save ourselves.”

  “Well said, doctor. Changing topic, you are also known as a pioneer in the field of plastic surgery. You’ve developed several techniques that have been adopted by your colleagues, and there are rumors that you have a new formula under development that will rival Botox.”