“Enough,” Michael snapped; he’d already made it to the kitchen, and the telephone on the counter.
The ambulance came within fifteen minutes, the slowest quarter of an hour that I’d ever passed. But in this time, I learned from Margaret that about thirty minutes had passed since my father had telephoned them, asking if they’d heard from me and then admitting he had a headache he was worried about. Now, I calculated, it would be around forty minutes to Queen’s Medical Center, even in an ambulance speeding along the shoulder. And that could be too long, from what I’d read in all my stroke books.
Honolulu was too distant, but there was another option. I remembered Michael mentioning an emergency clinic in the other direction, up the coast.
“Can they treat stroke at the Waianae Comprehensive Health Care Center? And how far is it?” I asked the lead paramedic as they shifted my father from the couch to a gurney.
“Sure they can treat it. And it’s ten miles away, a third of the distance to Queen’s.”
“Well, that’s where my father’s going, then.” I said.
I rode along in the ambulance, an experience in itself with all the paraphernalia on the walls of the small van-tubes, canisters, pumps and paddles-all the things that could continue life. My father had an oxygen mask over his face and a paramedic at his side monitoring blood pressure and heartbeat.
The ambulance made a sharp right and began climbing a curving road up to the clinic. The land around the clinic was scrubby and rocky, and its small parking lot was filled with a mix of late-model cars and shabby older vehicles, some of them with surfboards strapped on top.
As the paramedics started unloading my father on his stretcher, Michael pulled up in the Sebring. He handed me my father’s wallet. “I found this. It’s got his insurance card in it.”
“Thanks.” I hugged him for a long moment, thinking how odd it was that responsibility, and sexiness, seemed to be part of Michael in equal measures.
Michael kept his arm around me as I filled out my father’s paperwork in the waiting room, and a few minutes after I’d handed it back to the nurse at the desk, the attending physician, Dr. Yamashiro, emerged to get me. I waved to Michael and went off, shoulders squared and preparing for the worst.
“You are his daughter, right?”
I nodded, preparing for the worst. “It’s not another stroke. His brain looks good. Heart, too. But did your father have…psychiatric problems?”
“No, he didn’t. Why do you ask that?”
“He’s overdosed on lithium. We asked him for his list of regular medications and he didn’t mention it, but sometimes, people are ashamed-”
“He was poisoned. I know for sure, because the same thing happened to me.”
“What do you mean?” The doctor looked at me with concern.
“Someone tampered with my food, sticking in a mixture of lithium and Motrin. I had more than my dad, because it sent me into a kind of psychosis. I had to undergo hemodialysis at Queen’s.”
“You mean…you didn’t accidentally take these medicines together?” the doctor pushed.
Sometimes people were really slow. “No. I was poisoned. Call the people at Queen’s, compare what happened to me to what’s going on with him.”
“Yes, you can release your medical records to us, if you’d like.” The doctor was already signaling to the nurse. “Did you ever find the substance containing the drugs?”
“No. But if you let me talk to my father, maybe I will finally be able to find it.”
MY FATHER HAD two IV lines running in his arm, but was sitting up on the gurney when I was allowed back behind the curtains. I embraced him, and told him what a scare he’d given everyone. He told me that the doctors had already spoken to him about the charcoal, and he was prepared to undergo two days of what I’d been through.
“The good thing is you never went as nuts as I did-and you can help me figure out what you ate that did this.”
“I have an idea, but I’m afraid to tell you.” My father’s voice was weak. “The last time I went to Safeway, to buy new food to replace that which was taken for examination, I bought a few Japanese-brand instant noodle bowls. Today, I couldn’t resist the temptation.”
“It couldn’t be the noodles. What did you drink today?”
“I made one cup of green tea with a new tea bag, and drank water the rest of the day. Bottled water, the Fiji brand.”
“You had nothing extra? You didn’t add anything to the noodle bowl?”
“I chopped green onions and stirred them in to make it a little healthier.” He shook his head. “You know, I feel bad about preparing the noodles, because I felt quite fine until about an hour after eating. Now I understand that kind of processed food isn’t nearly as good as homemade.”
My father’s propensity to tinker made me think he might not have stopped at green onions. I asked, ‘Was there anything else you added to the noodle soup?”
“Well, I would have liked to add Sriracha sauce, but we don’t have the bottle anymore, so I used a pinch of wasabi.” He made a pinching gesture with his finger.
“Wasabi? Did you order sushi for dinner last night?” By the time Michael and I had arrived home, the kitchen had all been cleaned up; I had no idea what they’d eaten.
“No, I grilled an ahi tuna and ears of corn. Tom steamed brown rice, too.”
“But where did the wasabi come from?”
“The fridge-a small container.” At my shocked expression, he said, “I believe it must be something that Hiroshi and Tom brought back from the pool concession stand. They serve sushi there, you know. I found it in a corner of the refrigerator’s door.”
“What did the wasabi look like?” I asked.
“Quite pale; it’s the fresh wasabi without an artificial color. It came in a small, covered plastic cup.”
“That sounds like the condiment Calvin brought along with the restaurant sushi, earlier in the week.” My thoughts were racing faster than the words could come out. “I must have taken the wasabi container out of the sushi box, when I was fixing my own plate, and put it down somewhere else in the fridge, where it was missed by the police inspectors.”
“I can’t believe it.” My father sounded as dazed as I felt.
“Why would Calvin do it?” I asked, then moved on to something more important. “Dad, what did you do with the wasabi container after you were finished seasoning the soup?”
“I returned it to the refrigerator, but this time on the top shelf.”
I recalled Calvin’s most recent, annoying visit. Uninvited, he’d opened our fridge to get himself a drink. Perhaps that had been his intent; to check that the wasabi was gone-or had he intended to add more poison to it?
“Dad, if it’s OK with you, I’m going home for a while. I have to find that wasabi.” I stood up.
“Just wait. I’m thinking, Rei-chan,” my father said. “Don’t jump to conclusions about Calvin’s behavior. There’s a chance he’s suffering an illness.”
“What do you mean?”
“To behave like this makes me think of one disease in particular: Munchausen’s-by-proxy.”
“I don’t think so. He’s super-fit; he didn’t look like he had any kind of disease, let alone a German-sounding one.”
“Munchausen’s is a psychiatric disorder, named for a German doctor who studied a woman who intentionally made herself very ill, repeatedly, because she craved the attention of a physician. In Munchausen’s-by-proxy, some people-often the parents of helpless children-intentionally sicken or disable someone.”
“Weird,” I said. “Very weird.” But I could see my father’s point, because ever since we’d arrived at Kainani, Calvin had been overly interested in our family. Perhaps he thought that if one of us became quite ill, he could become indispensable.
“I can understand that a few people out of every ten thousand or so might have this problem, but a psychiatrist with a great job in Oahu?” I couldn’t hide my skepticism.