Fed Up by Jessica Conant-Park, Susan Conant Page A

have keeled over from dehydration. And for yet another thing, I wasn’t the swooning type. So, let’s just say that one moment I was rising from a chair in the kitchen, and the next moment, the next one I can remember, anyway, I was in an ambulance on the way to the hospital. But not, not, not because I had fainted.

SIX

    OKAY, so I fainted. The first voice I heard when I came to was Marlee’s. “I can’t see right,” she complained. “Everything is kind of blurry.”
    The second voice belonged to the handsome EMT. “You with us again, Chloe? You’re going to be fine. We’re on our way to the hospital, but all that happened to you was that you fainted.”
    It was then that I became aware of the siren and of the sensation of being in a moving vehicle. To my credit, I didn’t ask where I was. In fact, although the interior of the big emergency medical service vehicle looked like my idea of the inside of a space capsule, I knew that I was in an ambulance. “Not me!” I said. “I never faint.”
    Besides his good looks, the EMT had a sense of humor. He laughed. “Not the type for smelling salts, huh?”
    When I tried to sit up, he gently told me to keep my head down for a while, but I succeeded in looking around and saw Marlee on the opposite side of the ambulance. She was rubbing her eyes, and her face looked wet from tears. “What’s wrong with me?” she asked in a feeble voice. “With us?”
    Although she wasn’t addressing me, I answered her. “Something in the house? Like a gas leak?”
    To my surprise, it was Josh who replied. His voice came from somewhere toward the front of the ambulance. “It’s got to be the food. I don’t know how, but it has to.” He started reciting a list of everything he’d bought today: “Lamb, halibut, olives, arugula, potatoes . . .”
    The comforting rumble of Josh’s voice must have soothed me. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, I showed two signs of health: practicality and hunger. “I don’t have my insurance card!” I said in alarm. “It’s in my purse, locked in my car.” I had the sense to say nothing about my empty stomach. With one person dead and others ill, this was no time to ask for a snack. Even so, the thought did cross my mind that the hospital probably had a cafeteria or at least a vending machine.
    As it turned out, Josh had found my keys and retrieved my purse from my car. Although he grumbled in a sweet way about women and their purses, I was glad to have my belongings with me, especially once we were at the emergency room, which was mercifully uncrowded. By the time we arrived, even my matinee-idol EMT conceded that my case had low priority, as did the nurses responsible for deciding which of us had to be seen immediately and which of us could wait. Although I still felt shaken, I had no physical symptoms at all. Consequently, I ended up in the waiting room with Josh, Digger, Robin, and that damned Nelson, who’d followed the ambulances to the hospital, which was a small one that I’d never heard of before. Marlee, who’d felt increasingly worse, had been hustled into the exam area as soon as we’d arrived. Nelson, camera in hand, was lurking near the entrance. The rest of us were sitting together. Josh and Digger were, as usual, talking about food, but not in the way that chefs typically do.
    “Dude, it can’t be the food. You know that,” Digger tried to assure Josh. “All the stuff you cooked would take time to produce symptoms like this. Food poisoning wouldn’t come on that fast and kill somebody. You know as well as I do that it takes, like, six hours at least before you’d get sick. If this was E. coli or something, none of us would be feeling anything right now.”
    I saw a flash of relief cross Josh’s face. “You’re right. You’re right. I’m just so freaked out, and I can’t help feeling like this is my fault somehow. I mean, I fed Francie, and then she died! I don’t know everything about food