Page 22 of Potion Sickness

The kitchen is off the gym’s east side, a long galley of steel counters and industrial fixtures. The lights are on. Dana is at the sink with her sleeves pushed up, and the drying rack beside her is full of goblets, pewter and brass, upside down, rinsed and gleaming. She’s working on the next one with a brush, a sink full of soapy water holding the rest.

“Oh, no,” I say.

Dana looks over her shoulder. “Morning. There’s coffee, and I made it, so it’s actually drinkable this time.” She reads my face, and the brush stops. “What?”

“How many have you washed?”

“Most of them.” She looks at the rack. “The corn syrup sets up like varnish if you leave it, and half these belong to people who want them back, and I—” She stops. “Why does it matter how many I’ve washed?”

“Annabel needs the goblets. She thinks the sickness came from something Damien ate or drank, and a potion leaves residue on whatever carried it.”

Dana turns off the tap.

“I’ve been here since six,” she says. “I couldn’t sleep, and there was a kitchen full of dirty dishes with my name on it. It seemed like something I could actually fix.” She sets the brush down on the drainboard, aligning it parallel to the sink edge. “Did I just wash the evidence?”

“Not necessarily. Annabel says washing fades it, but doesn’t erase it. She can still read a washed cup. It’s just fainter.”

“Fainter.” She looks down the rack. “So I made her job harder, but not impossible?”

“Basically.”

“Story of my week.” She dries her hands on a dish towel. “Okay. What does she need, exactly?”

This is something I’ve come to like about Dana. You hand her a catastrophe and she asks for the specs.

“All of them. However you can pack them. And anything else from the banquet table. Pitchers, the ladle, the cooler⁠—”

“The cooler’s in the storage room. The ladle’s in the sink.” She’s already moving, pulling a stack of cardboard boxes from beside the recycling. “I hadn’t gotten to the ones left in the sink, the tray on the back counter, and” —she points with her chin— “the tall one. Pru’s. I saved it for last because the corn syrup got inside all the grooves in the stem and I was dreading it.”

We pack the goblets in newspaper like we’re moving house. Englebert supervises from the counter, which is to say he sits with his tail wrapped over his feet, periodically announcing that we’re wrapping something incorrectly. At some point, I notice the forest of slim glass bottles in the recycling bin the newspaper came from.

“Skye’s,” Dana says, following my eyes. “Came by first thing this morning to collect his things from the dressing room. All his juices, the little bottles. His ‘vitamins’, she called them. Swept the whole shelf into her bag.” She fits a lid onto a box. “She was crying the entire time. Poor kid. I gave her the good tissues from the office and she apologized to me for using them.”

“Where’s Vivian?” I ask.

Dana’s hands keep wrapping, the same speed as before.

“In the back,” she says. “She’s been here since before I have. Walked down here this morning. Your cat has a nine o’clock. She’s expecting him. Take the hallway past the fuse box.”

“How are things?” I ask. “With Vivian, I mean.”

“Don’t,” she says. “You’re a nice person and a good journalist, but I’m not talking about my marriage next to a sink full of somebody else’s crime scene. Go do your meeting. I’ll finish the packing.”

* * *

Vivian is in the storage-room-turned-dressing-room, sitting on a folding chair in front of the costume rack. Macbeth’s cape hangs on the end of the rack.

“Mari,” she nods. “And the maestro. I assume you’ve come to tell me what you believe is to be done. I hope so, because I have no idea.”

“We’ve come to confer,” Englebert says. He ascends a costume trunk in two moves and arranges himself at her eye level. “How is our Macbeth? Have you heard?”

“Sleeping. His mother says his color’s good. His color is always good. He pays people for that.” She rubs her eyes. “Ms. Carter fed me banana bread at midnight and asked me if the show could be pushed to October, and I didn’t have the heart to tell her the Community Center is booked all month for the Harvest Festival, so as far as she knows October is under consideration.”

“October,” Englebert says, “is not under consideration.”

“No. It isn’t.” Vivian looks down. “Here’s where I am. I have a sold-out house, a waiting list, a lead who can’t be woken up, and no understudy for him, because I spent the understudy budget of my attention on Lady Macbeth, since Pru hasn’t acted in the last decade and Damien had done Broadway and assured me he didn’t need one. I planned for the wrong emergency.” She sighs. “Tiffany covers Pru. Nobody covers Damien. If he wakes up in time, we have a show. If he doesn’t, I’m deciding which is worse: canceling the whole thing, or putting a Macbeth on stage who’s holding the script.”

“There is a third possibility,” Englebert says.