His Love Was My Poison novel · Chapter 2 of 48
Chapter 2: White Lines
Lenora asks Royce about his hands in front of the table, refuses his plea to come back, and watches the troops' favorite singer take the stage while a boy with Royce's jaw waves from the front row.
The water rose in my glass, and I watched his hand instead of the water.
The white bands sat about a third of the way up each nail.
Nails grow slowly.
Those lines had been laid down months ago.
"Royce," I said. "Let me see your hands."
He set the pitcher down and pulled his hands into his lap.
"Still bossy," he said, and the colonel across the table laughed.
On my other side, a big man in a flannel shirt leaned in and stole a roll off my bread plate.
"Is this the part where I pretend I'm not listening?" Micah asked.
"You were never going to manage that."
"I'm a very good pretender. I pretend to understand our cash flow every single day."
Micah Callicott was my business partner.
He had spent two tours as an Army medic, then gone back to school and become an engineer.
He built the guts of our machine and I built the chemistry.
Together we'd made something we just called the kit.
It was the size of a hardback book.
Drop in a water sample, wait ten minutes, and it told you how much arsenic, lead or mercury you were about to drink.
The Army wanted something for soldiers in the field.
If they chose ours, our company in Pittsburgh lived.
If they didn't, thirty-one people would be looking for jobs by spring.
That was why I was sitting in a tent in the desert next to the man I had run from.
When I left Fort Myer, I took a bus to Pittsburgh because it was the first one leaving.
I rented a room over a laundromat.
A doctor there finally tested my hair.
Arsenic, she said. An old exposure, already on its way out.
She asked where I'd lived.
I said Alaska, on a post with an old well, and she nodded like that made sense.
Within a year my hair grew back thick.
My feet woke up.
Two fingertips on my left hand never did.
I went back to school at thirty and learned everything there was to know about poison in water, because I never wanted anyone else to get sick and never know why.
Across the table, one of the wives was telling a story about me shoveling snow off their roof in Alaska.
Everybody laughed in the right places.
Royce didn't laugh.
He kept his hands under the table the whole meal.
"How long have your feet been numb?" I asked him.
The table went quiet.
He looked at me for a long moment.
"Who told you that?"
"Nobody. How long?"
"It's the desert. I'm forty-five. Everybody's feet hurt."
"Do you get headaches? Is your hair thinning at the crown?"
The colonel's wife put her fork down.
"Nora's a doctor now?" she asked, delighted.
"Toxicologist," Micah said. "She's the scariest person in any restaurant. Never let her near your tap water."
Royce stood up.
"Walk with me," he said to me. "Please."
I went, because I wanted a better look at those nails.
Outside, the desert was enormous and black, and the stars were thick enough to read by.
Behind the tent, soldiers were setting up a stage with lights and speakers.
Royce stopped beside a Humvee and turned around.
"I looked for you," he said. "For two years I looked. Your mother hung up on me ten times."
"She told me it was twelve."
"I never married her, Nora."
"Lenora."
He flinched.
"I never married her," he said again. "I kept your picture by the bed. I kept everything. I invited your company here because I wanted to see you with my own eyes. Come back. Please. Let me fix it."
Over his shoulder, I saw the old friends drifting out of the tent with their drinks.
They had followed us to watch the reunion.
The colonel's wife had her hand pressed to her chest.
I didn't lower my voice.
"You put her name on your mother's grave," I said. "As your wife. With your son. And you told me you were in a briefing."
The colonel's wife's hand dropped.
"That was for Kit," Royce said. "You don't understand what it was like."
"I understood the photo. You looked very happy."
"Nora."
"Show me your hands, Royce."
He didn't move.
So I took his right wrist and turned it over under the floodlight.
Every nail had the same white line, straight across.
I pressed the pad of his index finger.
"Can you feel that?"
He hesitated a second too long.
"Of course I can."
He couldn't.
I let him go.
"See a doctor," I said. "A real one, off post, tomorrow."
"Is that all you have to say to me after seven years?"
"Yes."
I walked back toward the tent.
Micah was leaning in the doorway with two plates of cake, pretending not to have watched.
"I got you the corner piece," he said. "Do you want to talk about it, or do you want the corner piece?"
"Corner piece."
"Smart woman."
Then the stage lights blazed on behind us, and the whole crowd turned.
A voice boomed out of the speakers.
"Ladies and gentlemen, soldiers of Fort Irwin, please welcome the voice of the troops, Nora Varley!"
The soldiers went wild.
In the front row, right below the stage, a boy of about ten in a too-big blazer twisted around in his seat.
He had Royce's square jaw.
He found Royce in the crowd and waved at him with his whole arm.
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