by Jay Forman
“What is she doing?” I asked the man sitting on my other side.
“Beats me. At least it’s not the table cloth this time.”
“What happened with the table cloth?”
“It was polyester, machine washable, less labour intensive for the laundry crew. They tried it out at lunch one day and Mem C went ballistic. She made us all stand up and clear the table while she went to find a linen one. According to her, the only civilized way to eat is when your cutlery, plates and stemware are resting on pressed and starched linen. So we stood around, holding our bowls of hot potato soup, until Mem C was happy with the table setting. By the time we sat down our soup had turned to vichyssoise.”
“Yeah,” the woman on the other side of the man joined in. “And remember the time they mixed up the salad forks and the fish forks? I thought she was going to poke Cheryl’s eyes out.”
“Or what about when...,”
Mem C burst through the swinging door to the kitchen, carrying a tray of sugar bowls. They looked very much like the bowls she’d just removed. It wasn’t until she plunked one down on the table in front of me that I saw that the sugar in the bowls was cubed and a tiny little set of silver tongs was sticking out of each bowl.
“Now that’s how sugar should be served,” she said happily after sitting back down. She pinched a cube with the tongs and dropped it into her teacup. “How many, dear? If I’m remembering right you had a sweet tooth, so two lumps or three?”
Given the strength of the tea, I went for three lumps. But the tea had cooled down so much that my first sip was a bit crunchy.
“Manners and etiquette are so important, don’t you agree?”
I just nodded and took a big gulp of my tea. It kept my mouth busy and helped stop me from telling her that it all tasted like sugar to me, whether it came cubed or loose.
“Do you know, one day they put a cheap polyester tablecloth down! It was dreadful. And you can be sure I sorted that out quickly.”
I didn’t pay attention to her version of the tablecloth fiasco. The man and woman on other side of me were laughing so much that I couldn’t really hear much of what she was saying, anyway.
I looked down at the dining hall and was surprised to see Jack walking toward me from the far end of the hall. The strangest feeling raced through my body and I felt my face flush. It wasn’t guilt, it was ... it was...I don’t know what. I felt light-headed, dizzy, confused. And my tongue felt funny, like it was too big for my mouth. I tried to swallow, but couldn’t. I felt hot all over. I felt itchy. I couldn’t breathe. My stomach cramped so badly that I wanted to curl up into a little ball. I could feel my heart racing as panic set in. I knew what was happening.
Jack was moving faster, running toward me, a lumpy uneven run. He’d tossed his crutches somewhere. I wanted him to move even faster.
“Whatever’s wrong, dear?” Mem C asked me as I fell out of my chair.
“What’s wrong?” Jack. He was beside me. He was picking me up.
“Ep...” I tried to say, but didn’t recognize the sound that came out of my mouth.
“Call 911!” Jack sounded like a wild boar. “She’s having an allergic reaction! Where’s your EpiPen, Lee?”
I couldn’t speak so I just pointed up. My room in the dorm was so far away.
“You!” He shouted at whoever we were running past. My face was swelling up and I couldn’t keep my eyes open. “RUN to the infirmary, get an EpiPen and meet me out front.” I heard feet scuffling and running away. “It’s going to be okay, Lee,” Jack said more gently.
I could feel his breath hitting my face. It made me even itchier. I wanted him to scratch. Instead he just kept running. Upstairs. Dad used to carry me upstairs to bed. But he didn’t run.
“Stay with me,” Jack pleaded.
I felt water hitting my cheeks. Rain? We were outside?
“Where’s the fucking EpiPen?” Jack screamed.
Someone shouted “The infirmary’s closed for lunch.”
Dad carried me up to bed after dinner, not lunch. Then he tucked me in. And sang to me. He hadn’t sounded anything like the wailing siren I could hear. Mum’s voice grated like that siren. Dad’s deep voice was smooth and comforting. I wanted to hear it again. It always made me feel so safe.
And nothing hurt anymore.
Chapter Fifteen
Beep-beep-beep...
Darth Vader breathing.
“I don’t want her staying there anymore.” Was that Will’s voice?
“She won’t be.” Jack’s voice for sure. “I won’t let her.”
I opened one eye, just a bit.
Beside me a green line skimmed across a monitor screen, spiking up with every beep – every beat of my heart.
There was an oxygen mask over my nose and mouth.
I was in a hospital bed. Jack and Will were talking on the other side of the curtain that had been drawn across the opening to my cubicle in the emergency room.
Slowly, more slowly than my heart rate, I started to remember what had happened. But I couldn’t quite grasp my last memory. It was of Dad sitting on the edge of my bed, playing his guitar and singing Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s “Watching Over You”. That definitely hadn’t happened. Not in over twenty-five years, anyway.
Someone yanked the curtain open and it startled both of my eyes wide open.
The familiar face of Ayça, one of my favourite doctors, smiled warmly at me as she walked over to the monitor. “You gave us quite a scare, Lee.”
“Oh thank Christ,” Jack exhaled when he looked at me from the hallway.
I tried to smile at both of them but all I accomplished was pushing the oxygen mask up into my eye sockets. “Can I take this off?” I asked, hoping they would be able to understand me through the thick plastic.
“I’ll get it,” Ayça leaned over the raised bed rails and gently lifted the mask off my face and slipped the elastic band out from under the back of my head.
“Hi.” My throat didn’t feel great, but my tongue had shrunk back to normal operational size.
“You scared the crap out of me,” Jack came limping into the cubicle.
I blinked a couple of times. Had my vision been affected? Jack was holding the world’s largest stuffed Hawksbill sea turtle under one arm. It was almost as large as the real one I’d floated around with off the coast of San Salvador.
“How is she, Dr. Bayramoğlu?”
“She’ll be fine.” She turned around from the monitor she’d been watching and spoke to me. “Your blood pressure’s back up, the swelling’s almost all gone and your heart rate is back under control. You might feel a bit stoned for the next couple of hours. We pumped you full of antihistamines, but the buzz should wear off overnight.” She looked up at Jack. “As for you, Dr. Ross wants to have a look at you and you’ll probably need a new walking cast. You’re not supposed to run in them, you know.”
“You’re keeping her overnight, right?” Will came into the cubicle and I was glad to have a nice big reserved area just for me. The three of them were overfilling the cramped space.
“Definitely,” Ayça answered Will firmly.
“Definitely not!” The patient, aka me, said even more firmly.
“Lee!” Jack and Will said in unison.
“You heard Ayça, I’m fine.” Another advantage of being a frequent flier in the emergency department, I knew most of the doctors by their first names. It made the whole hospital experience a little less clinical, but I still didn’t like being in one. “I’m going home.”
“I don’t advise it,” Ayça started to disagree with me/agree with Jack and Will.
“Since when has that stopped me from leaving this place?”
She laughed. “Since never. But I don’t want you being alone all night; your body’s had one heck of a shock. Can Emma come over and stay with you?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “Probably.” Maybe I could even talk her into baking up a batch of her amazing chocolate chip cookies as a get wel
l gift? My stomach didn’t feel great, but I knew it would be able to deal with a couple of those cookies.
“I’ll stay with her,” Jack killed my cookie fantasy. “You can stay at my place, Mrs. Dawson can make you some soup.”
“Uh, no.” The thought of Mrs. Dawson’s cooking didn’t help settle my stomach at all. “I want to sleep in my own bed in my own house.”
Ayça held her hands up in mock surrender. “I’m not going to fight you on this one. I know I’ll lose. Just promise me you won’t be alone, okay?”
“Promise.”
She then ordered Jack to Dr. Ross’ office in the orthopaedic department.
Jack, and his stuffed sea turtle, obeyed her marching orders. Maybe I was more stoned than I thought? Was I imagining the stuffed animal?
“You’re not going back to Berkshire, Lee.” Will had me all to himself and his uniform and height made him an imposing presence over my bed. “It’s not safe.”
“It was an allergic reaction, Will. There must have been a peanut product in something I ate.”
“Berkshire’s been peanut-free for over twelve years. They had a student almost die from anaphylactic shock and have been very, very careful with every food product they’ve brought in since then.”
The line on the heart rate monitor started to spike up more frequently. Had someone tried to kill me? “But I ate the same thing as everyone else. Did anyone else have a reaction? I couldn’t be the only one there with a peanut allergy.”
“No one else had a reaction and you’re right, you weren’t the only one there with a peanut allergy. Two of the kids and one teacher have the same allergy and they’re fine. Someone could have slipped a peanut into whatever you ate. What did you have?” He pulled a small notebook and pen out of his pocket.
“A chicken Caesar salad, but there was nothing crunchy in it except for the lettuce. Some of their homemade potato chips ... maybe they fried them in peanut oil?”
Will shook his head. “No peanut oil in the school. What else?”
“Fruit salad, a glass of water and about three sips out of a cup of tea. That’s it.”
He flipped the notebook closed. “Two uniforms are at Berkshire right now, taking samples of everything you ate.”
“I still think it was just an accident.” At least I hoped it was.
“There have been too many accidents at the place for my liking.”
“If they were accidents.” My brain was re-firing on all cylinders. “Are you going to tell me the truth about Ethan now?”
Will looked at me and puffed out his moustache. “Like you told me the truth about what you’ve found? That notebook of Kayla’s for example?”
“I was planning on telling you.”
“But you didn’t. Jack did just now. He filled me in on everything. You waited and look what happened. You’re officially out of this investigation as of right now. Got it?”
“Yes, Sir!” I raised my right hand to salute him only to discover that there was an IV needle in my arm. Gross! “But I have to go back to get my things out of the dorm.”
“I’m heading over to the school now. I can pick your stuff up for you before I leave.”
“It’s in the girls’ dorm area, you’re not allowed up there.”
“I think they’ll make an exception in this case.” He was already starting to leave.
“It’s my stuff, personal stuff,” I was lying but he had his back to me so I didn’t have to worry about him seeing my guilty face. “Honest, I’ll just go upstairs, pack up and leave. And I’ll take Jack with me; he can wait for me at the bottom of the stairs.”
“God, you’re stubborn. Fine.” He turned when he got the curtain. “I’m glad you’re okay, Lee.”
“Me, too.” I was better than okay, I was fired up. I wanted to get to Jack as quickly as possible. Hopefully, he hadn’t told Will about my theory about the blackmail money being inside Jocelyn’s panda bear. If it was there I wanted to be the person to find it. But first I had to find a nurse. The IV needle had to go! I pushed the call button on the wall beside my bed and had already figured out how to lower the bed rails and was standing up by the time a nurse came into the cubicle.
Once my arm was no longer attached to hospital equipment, I went in search of Jack. I tried walking quickly, but my legs felt a bit like Jello so I had to slow down.
He was moving slower, too. His navy blue walking cast had been replaced with a bright red one and he was using crutches again. But he was having difficulty holding onto the crutch and the stuffed sea turtle as he made his way down the hallway toward me. We met up in front of the gift shop near the emergency department and I spotted some smaller relatives of his sea turtle in the gift shop window.
“Let me take him,” I said as I reached out to grab one of the sea turtle’s front flippers.
“I’m not sure if it’s a he or a she. I looked but that area was rather nonspecific. I guess it’s not an anatomically correct replica. Either way, it’s for you. I thought you’d like it better than the emergency inflatable brain.”
He, or she, was big and squishy and very huggable, so I hugged him as we headed for the exit doors on the other side of the emergency waiting room. “He needs a name.”
“He’s already got one – Imbri.”
I looked at the tags that were attached to his tail. “It says Melissa and Doug here.”
“Yes, but as we’ve discussed, I can’t tell if it’s a Melissa or a Doug, so I decided to go with Imbri.”
“Why?” I’d heard a lot of unusual names, but never that one.
“Because that’s what he is – an eretmochelys imbricate.” The corner of Jack’s mouth curved up in a self-satisfied smirk.
I wanted to give him an even bigger hug than the one I was giving Imbri. “You remembered the scientific name.”
“I’m like an elephas maximus, I remember everything.”
I sometimes forgot just how special Jack was. “How’s your leg?”
“Sore, but no damage done. I’ll be glad to put it up once we get back to your place, though.”
“How are we going to get there? My car’s at Berkshire.”
“No, it’s not. It’s here.”
The automatic doors slid open and, just as Jack had said, my car was there. Right there. It was parked (more like abandoned) right over the criss-cross yellow lines on the pavement that marked the no parking spot. “You drove it over? Did you follow the ambulance?”
“Correction, the ambulance followed me. They were taking too long to get to the school so I took matters into my own hands.”
I gave Imbri another squeeze. “How did you know where the key was?”
“I saw you drop it into your backpack so I got Grace to get the key and your EpiPen and toss them down to me from the tower window.”
“You’re amazing.”
“You’re just figuring that out now?”
*
I hugged Imbri all the way home, which meant Imbri was hugged a lot. Jack drove much more slowly than I would have.
The afternoon rain had washed away almost all the remaining patches of snow in the forest, but not the hard packed snow that had been ploughed to the side of the highways and roads. The long drifts weren’t white anymore, though. They’d turned city dirty from all the mud that had been splashed up against them by cars passing by. I heard a faint rumble of thunder in the distance as I got out of the car once Jack had parked it near my back door. Looking up, I saw a solid line of powerful dark clouds moving in from the west, like a thick black curtain slowly being pulled across the sky.
“We’re supposed to get a storm tonight. I hope it breaks the humidity.” Jack said as he unlocked my kitchen door. “It’s coming in from Georgian Bay so it’s picked up a lot of power crossing over Lake Huron. It could be a doozey. They issued a couple of tornado watches over by Manitoulin and the northern Bruce.”
I loved the big boomers. They always put on a spectacular light show. Staying tucked in at home would b
e the perfect place to watch it. “I don’t have any food. We’ll have to go out again if you want dinner.”
“I’ve already got that covered.” He held the door for me.
I almost dropped Imbri when I saw what was on the kitchen table – a plate piled high with Auntie Em’s chocolate chip cookies (they smelled so good!), four foil containers from Jack’s diner, and my backpack. “How did you...?”
“Emma offered when I called to tell her about what was happening to you, I called the diner when you made it clear that you weren’t going to spend the night in the hospital, and Young Pete picked up the order right after he swung by Berkshire to get your backpack. I know you can’t live without it. We’re having poached salmon with that Greek Quinoa salad you like so much, minus the olives.”
He remembered that I hated olives. He really did remember everything.
I stood up on my tippy-toes to give him a great big kiss on his cheek but he turned his head at just the right time and my lips landed on his. Even with his scruffy upper lip, his lips felt incredibly smooth, but I jerked away from the shock of sensations that instantly ran through me. I blamed them on my still upset stomach and slightly erratic heartbeat and quickly dropped back down onto flat feet. “Thank you.”
“No, thank you!” He looked very pleased with himself again. “Come on, let’s go into the living room. I need to get this leg up.”
I grabbed two cookies before joining him on the couch. (My stomach was never too upset for Auntie Em’s cookies, especially when they were fresh. The ones on the plate were so fresh that the chocolate chips were still gooey.)
Despite our physical closeness, it quickly became apparent that we were still miles apart on many issues.
Jack didn’t want me going back to the school to look inside Jocelyn’s panda bear. He even went so far as to remind me that he’d promised Will that he wouldn’t “let” me go back. Nobody “let” me do anything! No one would ever have that kind of control over me, of that I’d make damn sure. At least he hadn’t told Will about my animal-stuffed-with-cash theory. He’d forgotten about it. (So he really didn’t remember everything after all.) He wasn’t even convinced that the panda had been Kayla’s, so I made him call Erica on speakerphone. (I had that kind of control over him.)
