“You called the police?”
Doctor Nelson nodded. “They’re with the security team right now. I’ve told them you’re here. If you’re up to it, they’d like to speak to you as well.”
“I can do that.”
Doctor Nelson shifted on her feet, flipping through pages on her clipboard. “Faye, I don’t know if you want to talk about this now, but I prepared it for your visit.” She unclipped some papers and handed them to me. “Your mother’s lab reports have come back. I’ve made you copies. It’s definitely chronic poisoning fromAristolochia clematitis– a plant commonly known as birthwort.”
I sat up, taking the papers from her in shaking hands. “What?”
“It was commonly used by the Ancient Egyptians and in the Classical World to ease pain during childbirth. There was this pervasive belief that if a plant looked like a certain part of the anatomy, it would help with ailments of that area. The flowers are shaped like a uterus, hence… birthwort. By the Victorian era, it was a known poison, but the plants were still sometimes cultivated in manor gardens for their beauty. It’s not a common plant now, and your doctors didn’t spot it in previous tox screens because no one thought to look. I never would have thought of it either, if you hadn’t told me about your mother’s herbal teas. That gave me the idea to investigate poisonous ingredients in natural medicine. Birthwort is still used in some herbal medicines despite FDA warnings, and this might have been how your mother ended up ingesting such a large amount.”
I sank back against the bed, struggling to process this new information. After all these months of hospital visits and my mother begging doctors to take her pain seriously, even as her kidneys shut down, wefinallyhad a name for what was killing her.
Naming the enemy was one thing, but could it be fought?
Doctor Nelson anticipated my questions. “The good news is, now that we understand what happened, we believe we can help her.”
My heart pattered against my chest. “You can?”
She smiled. “It’s involved a lot of digging through old Victorian poison books and some lab experiments, but we think we can halt the poison’s progress on her body. Once this treatment is administered, as long as she doesn’t ingest any more and we monitor her kidneys for complications, she should be able to live a normal life. We’d like your permission to proceed with treatment.”
“What does that mean, exactly?”
“First, we’ll administer a small amount of antidote and monitor changes. If that goes well – and we expect it to, as her body would have processed much of the poison in her system by now – we can attempt to wake your mother from her coma.”
Those words… those magic words I’d been wanting to hear for weeks rushed at me. My head spun, and I gasped for breath. This was too much. It was amazing. It was the hope I hadn’t dared to feel in so long.
“If she’s…” I swallowed the lump rising in my throat. “Best case scenario, what will happen when she wakes up?”
“She’ll still have organ damage, and she’ll likely need dialysis for the rest of her life. But many people live full and happy lives with greater damage than she’s taken. The wildcard is her brain. There’s just no way of knowing what damage has been done by the prolonged coma.”
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.
“If you’re okay with it, we’ll start the initial tests immediately. If they go well, we can discuss the next steps. I don’t want to leave her under any longer than necessary now that I know we can help her. How does that sound?”
I nodded again. “Th—thank you.”
The police came shortly after, and I answered their questions and stumbled out of the hospital in a daze. Dorien slouched on the hood of his car, sipping from a cardboard coffee cup.
“The hospital cafeteria food was shit, so I went out for the real deal.” He shoved a coffee cup and paper bag filled with doughnuts into my hands. “I remembered you liked these.”
I stared down into the bag, hesitating before peeping inside, half expecting some enormous spider to crawl out and go for my face. Instead, a heavenly smell greeted me. Four doughnuts heaped with Oreo cookie crumbs. They looked and smelled just like…
A memory assailed me. I was eight years old. That day at school Rebecca Marshell and her posse of mean girls stole my clothes from the gym changing rooms and pinned them to the noticeboard under a sign that read WHALE NETS. I went straight from school to practice in tears. Dorien ran away as soon as he saw me, and I thought my life couldn’t get any worse. But he came back ten minutes later with a bulging bag of peanut-butter Oreo doughnuts from a little shop around the corner called Nothing But the Dough. We hid in a storage room and ate them all, and in minutes he had me laughing. I forgot about those stupid girls. Ever since then, peanut butter Oreo doughnuts had been our go-to whenever something bad happened, whenever we needed cheering up. Until Dorien became the bad thing in my life, and I hadn’t touched them since.
Nothing But the Dough was all the way in the East Village, if it even still existed.Dorien can’t have—
“Go on. Try one.”
I pulled a doughnut out of the bag, scattering Oreo crumbs down the side of the car. I bit into it. Chocolate dough and peanut-butter frosting exploded in my mouth. A rush of emotion slammed into me – all the horror of seeing my mother with that word scrawled across her forehead crashed into the memory of the doughnuts and what they meant. For what felt like the first time since my mother’s nightmare began, I wasn’t entirely alone.Dorien’s here.
My chest tightened. Fuck, I didn’t want to have to do this alone anymore.
I stared up at him with wide eyes. “How did you—”
Dorien flashed me his signature smirk, the one that promised mischief. “I’m rich as fuck, remember? It cost a fortune to get a delivery person to drive them out here on a motorcycle, and I wasn’t even sure they’d arrive in time. But it was worth it to see your face.”
I wiped frosting off my chin. “To see me covered in peanut butter?”
