“He’s alive,” she breathed in relief, taking the knowledge from the doctor’s mind before he had even opened his mouth to speak.
The doctor’s face was stern and tired. His mustache twitched in agitation as he surveyed the room. “You’re the mother of this boy?” he asked, grimly.
“I am,” Betty said. “His name is George Jones, Junior, and he’s five years old. How is he? Do you know what happened?”
“He’s very unwell,” the doctor said, reproachfully, moving closer to George Senior instead, who was attempting to extricate himself from Nancy’s arms to get to his feet. “Something you could have circumvented if you’d kept a closer eye on your children, Mrs. Jones. From what I can gather, they found a jar of an illegal opiate in the streets or some such place, and the boy ingested some of it. He had a severe reaction and would have died, had his sister not managed to bring him here in time.”
“Oh, my poor baby!” Betty wiped her eyes, penitently. Her tears fell true with regret and shame. Although she had already known the truth of the situation from Nancy’s memories, the words spoken aloud cut through her like a blade. It’s all my fault.
“And now?” George asked, quietly. The police officer had moved alongside, his pencil scribbling furiously. Sam found himself a chair and the nurse hovered for a moment, then, deciding they were taken care of, left again, through the corridor.
“I gave him an injection of Nalorphine,” the doctor replied, lifting his chin. “It’s an experimental drug, an opioid antagonist we’re developing here at the hospital. It counteracts the effects of heroin on the respiratory system, gets our patients breathing again, like your boy here. Not strictly standard practice yet, but it was that or nothing. Oxygen had no effect on him and all his symptoms pointed to one thing. Heroin overdose. Accidental, I assumed. Since the beginning of the war, we’ve had an exponential increase in the number of deaths by overdose, it’s becoming an epidemic, here in New York City more than most places. I imagine something is driving this problem, criminals selling it on the black-market and taking advantage of desperate addicts, I’d say, but that’s not my area of expertise.” He looked pointedly at the young officer, who cleared his throat and jotted something down in his book. “In any case, the problem is getting worse. We’ve been working on this antidote in our labs and can only try to save people from their own stupidity.” He looked over his shoulder at the closed recovery room door. When he spoke again, his voice was less abrasive. “Of course, in this case, as he’s just a small child, it’s clearly accidental. At least that’s what the girl implied.”
“Is that so, Miss?” the officer interjected, turning to Nancy, who held George’s hand.
Nancy looked over at her mother, her eyes burning. The truth, that the heroin had been found in her own home, would have tipped an avalanche of enquiries, leading down the complicated involvement of child welfare agencies. Despite it, Betty didn’t prompt Nancy to give anything but the truth. In her efforts to protect them from the evils of a world where Donny and his murderous empire reigned supreme, it was she, their own mother, who had delivered the most danger into their young lives. Whatever punishment lay ahead, Betty was willing to take it. As if she knew this, and perhaps she had heard it inside her own mind with the burgeoning gift of her mother’s line, Nancy turned and spoke evenly to the officer, never dropping her gaze.
“We were playing in the park and found that bottle under the hedge,” Nancy said. “Georgie thought it was sugar. He fell over and stopped breathing. It all happened so fast I didn’t know what to do, so I brought him here. I’m sorry, Officer Hall, I was too frightened to tell you before.”
Betty’s eyes widened at her daughter’s smooth lie. Despite herself, a flicker of pride flared in her chest. Nancy was indeed, true to her gifts and the curse she would carry with them. No doubt the child’s head was swimming with questions and confusions. Her reality had already changed so much.
The officer snapped his notebook shut with chagrin.
“Well, that’s all I need for now, then,” he said, “now that your parents are here, and the boy is recovering. There will be an investigation of course, and I’ll need a copy of the boy’s medical report.”
“Well,” the doctor growled, “you can tell your superiors that if we don’t get this black-market heroin problem sorted out, there will be more deaths on the streets than they’ll be able to handle. Addicts leaving drugs in parks for children to stumble across! This was a close call, but mark my words officer, there’ll be more children at risk unless you find who’s at the center of this epidemic and bring them to justice!”
Betty bit her lip. For the first time since she’d left Donny in the orphanage basement, she thought of him. He was alive, unfortunately so. But his empire had indeed fallen, at her own hand. His men were dead, his warehouse of stolen drugs and weapons now under the jurisdiction of the New York City Police Department, and his reputation irreparably broken. He was incriminated in the biggest scandal to hit the city in decades, and no amount of buying favors would get him off the hook this time. Besides, she had bankrupted him into the ground. She took a deep breath, desperately glad for Jacob’s help in covering her trail. From here, it would be a matter of law and strategy to keep Donny behind bars. Violence was no longer needed. She caught Sam’s eye, as he listened from his chair.
“I’m sure the NYPD will be able to assist you on that front, doctor,” Betty said, as the young policeman scowled. “From what I’ve seen here, we have the finest officers we could ask for.” She offered a grateful smile to the young man that had sat in frustrating silence with Nancy awaiting their arrival. “Nancy and I will bring a batch of freshly-baked cookies to your station on Monday, officer, to thank you for your trouble.”
The policeman shifted uncomfortably. Apparently, Betty’s usual charm didn’t work so well when she was covered in blood and bruises.
“That won’t be necessary, ma’am, I’m just doing my job,” he said. He tucked his notebook into his pocket, tipped his hat, and left the room.
“What in the devil’s name happened to you two, anyway?” the doctor asked, his brow furrowing at Betty and George’s bloodied and disheveled appearance.
“An automobile accident,” she explained. “We were in such a hurry to get to the children when we heard. Spun right over into the gutter. Hit a maple tree.” The doctor raised an eyebrow but said nothing. Betty had lost all her knives to the bodies in the basement. She had no bag or personal effects on her, and nothing to indicate she had been involved in anything more sinister that evening than an accident on her way to the hospital, or that she had been anywhere but her own home before so. She was just a mother, albeit, a negligent one, who had allowed her children to play too long in the park after dark, where they had stumbled across the poison that brought them into dire straits. Such accidents, in the days of children’s unrestrained freedom to play in the neighborhood streets until dinner time as they waited for mother’s call, weren’t unheard of.
Shaking his head, the doctor sighed. “You can go in, only you two for now. He’s asleep and mustn’t be disturbed. The nurse will be in to monitor him every fifteen minutes.” The doctor left through the corridor.
Hours later, after Nancy had been delivered to Mrs. Porter for safekeeping and an astonished but determined Gladys Eubanks had been called in to the hospital to pick up her new charge, clucking over Sam like a mother hen as she shuffled him home, Betty and George sat quietly on either side of Georgie, holding his hands as he slept. He had awoken briefly, then returned to a deep sleep, still suffering the effects of the antidote.
Betty sang to him softly, smoothing the hair back from her little boy’s forehead with her free hand.
“Little Jitterbug, sweet dreams,
You’re in safe hands now, sweet pea,
You’re just a tiny tot, but soon you’ll grow a lot,
and the world will see you shine like a moon-beam –”
“Ten years, we’ve been married,�
� George said quietly, “and I feel like I don’t know you at all.”
Betty looked up. Her eyes were glistening with tears.
“You know my heart, George, you’ve always known my heart, from the very first moment you met me.”
“Have I?” He looked away. “I thought I did.”
The air in the room crackled uncomfortably between them. The walls suddenly seemed much closer, the beeping of machines louder.
“You loved me from that first day, and I you,” Betty said. “Even though I wasn’t perfect. You knew I had a past. That there had been other – people – in my life before. And unhappiness. You knew I could never be entirely yours because of those memories. You didn’t want to know. You were happy not knowing.”
George looked up at her, his eyes shining with tears. “But I trusted you.”
Betty nodded. “Yes, you did. And I took it for granted. I’m so sorry, George. It breaks me to know how much I’ve hurt you. I never meant to.”
“I just don’t understand how you got caught up in all of this. That orphanage, what I saw there – and I don’t remember what happened before this blasted pain in my head and it riles me –” he gingerly touched the swollen lump on his forehead, which was now wrapped with gauze, “– but I’m not sure I even want to remember. It’s beyond me, Betty. That’s not the life for us.”
“I don’t want that life, I swear.” Betty got to her feet and walked around the bed, falling to her knees beside him. “I never did. I only ever wanted a happy life, a safe life, for all of us.”
Safe,” George scoffed quietly. “Yes, well, that’s me, alright. The safest ticket around.” He stared, humiliated, past Georgie’s sleeping face to the black wall beyond. “I’m not the man you want me to be, Jitterbug.”
“But you are! You always were. But – I’ll never be the perfect wife you want me to be, George. As desperately as I try, I’m beginning to wonder if there’s any such thing.”
For a moment there was silence. The second hand of a clock ticked by on the wall, the metronome broken only by the soft breathing of the child that lay in the bed beside them and the noise of the machines that monitored him. George rose, and stood dejectedly by the closed door.
“I don’t remember how we got to that place, or what you did to get out of there, but I do remember something.” He turned to look at Betty accusingly. “He kissed you. Sergeant Jacob Lawrence. He was never just an innocent childhood friend, was he? Or a good Samaritan that returned your lost bag that day.”
Betty’s ashamed silence spoke volumes.
“It’s him, isn’t it?” George said. “The one who - the one you ran away from?” George studied her face, searchingly. “The one who gave you Nancy.” He closed his eyes, and Betty didn’t need to read his mind to know what memory George had found. She had been honest with him about her daughter, from the very first day he’d come blustering into the drug-store to escape his flu, and fallen head-over-heels in love with her.
“I have an illegitimate child,” Betty had warned him from behind the gleaming counter of perfumes and cosmetics, at barely eighteen years old herself. Although she’d be disappointed to lose the affection of the handsome young man who brought his optimism and adorable good humor to her counter, Betty held her heart at bay for the inevitable rejection she was accustomed to. This was not the first man to woo her since she’d run away to start her new life, only to then be appalled at her lack of moral character when they found out. To be a young woman, with no respectable family, with a bastard child of “father unknown”, was tantamount to social suicide.
It was a stigma, and burden, that Betty willingly carried. By the time George had met her, Suzie, now Betty, had already spent two years working her fingers to the bone to protect her dearest treasure. The baby daughter she had escaped her old life for, to save from it.
“She’s an absolute little doll, mind you,” Betty had said kindly, “but to love me is to love her as well, Mr. Jones. And I don’t care what any man thinks of me for it.” She’d lifted her chin proudly and packaged up his medicine in a brown paper bag. George had stood there, clearly taken back, then left the store, only to stand in the snow and stare in at her through the sleet-covered windows until his nose had turned quite blue and he was shaking with cold. To the astonishment of the other counter girls, he had finally come back in, bedraggled and sneezing and fallen directly to his knee with a look on his face of earnest determination.
“Then I have no choice,” George had replied, sniffling into his handkerchief. “I’ll simply have to love you both equally. Because you’re the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen, and gosh darn-it, I’m not sure I’ll ever forgive myself if I can’t tell you so, every day for the rest of my life!”
And love them he had.
He’d been the father to Nancy that Betty had always dreamed she might one day have, and when George Junior was born four years later, her husband’s pride had seemed to have given him wings. If not for Betty’s past, and the ghosts that plagued her every waking moment, life would have been idyllic.
But those ghosts had never left her. And Betty’s own memories held demons that no amount of perfume or bath-salts could drown.
Particularly the memory of that fateful night when she had finally taken her freedom, only sixteen years old as she stood over her father as he lay dead on the kitchen floor.
A knife hard in his chest.
Blood on her hands.
Revenge burning in her heart.
The smell of gasoline trailed through the house.
The cold comfort of the silver box held tight in her arm as she lit a match.
The blazing inferno of her childhood home behind her.
The warmth of her own small hand supporting her pregnant belly as she walked away.
Her eyes like steel as Susie looked ahead, to a new life. A safe life. A perfect life.
With ghosts still fading from her mind, Betty wiped away a tear. The clock kept ticking. Georgie’s soft breath seemed to keep the beat of her heart in check.
“I wasn’t running from Jacob, George” she said. “I was running from my past. Jake was the only part of my life that was good and kind. He was the only love I had. But there was simply no way he could be part of my future. That wasn’t his fault. Even at sixteen I knew that.”
“Does he know about her?” George asked.
“No. He never knew.”
For a while they sat in silence. Breathing. Watching. Each lost in their own thoughts.
“You’d be better off with him, Betty,” George said finally, finding her through some unfathomable fog. “I think he knows you. The real you.”
Betty walked over and took George’s face in her hands.
“Then you’ll just have to get to know me too, George. The real me.”
George looked at his wife, a spark of hope flickering behind his tired eyes.
“I made my choice a long time ago,” Betty said. “We’re yours now, George. We’re a family.”
“I won’t bother asking how you know where I live,” Jacob grinned, as he opened his front door to find Betty on the stoop. His arm was in a sling.
“A wise decision,” she smiled, following him inside, glancing surreptitiously at the quiet street before doing so. Even in the modern times of 1943, it wasn’t considered entirely appropriate for a lady to enter a bachelor’s house alone. Still, it couldn’t be helped. There were important things to discuss.
Jacob’s apartment was small and neat, with minimal furniture and comforts.
“You need a woman’s touch here, Jake,” Betty smiled. “I’m not sure this vase has seen a spot of polish in its life.”
“You know me, all work, no play,” Jacob said. A touch of regret marred his voice. He shifted some papers and gestured to a couch for Betty to sit, then offered her some tea.
“No, thank you, I can’t stay long,” she replied, as he sat down opposite. Betty offered a kind smile. “How is she?”
“Adina?”
Jacob sighed, leaning back with his good arm against the armrest, his hand supporting his chin.
“Managing,” he said. “They’re considering a plea bargain. She’ll give them everything she’s got on Donny and she won’t do time for her part.”
“Good.” For a moment, Betty considered. “He’ll try to stop her, you know,” she said, darkly. “He still has connections, inside and out. As a key witness, she’s not safe.”
“I’ll protect her.”
“As will I.”
There was a moment of comfortable silence as Betty picked some lint from the cotton cushion beside her.
“And you?” she finally asked. “Can you forgive what she did?”
“I don’t know. I can forgive her indiscretion with Brandway, although I can’t for the life of me understand what she saw in him. But, as for the affair itself, well, who am I to hold that against her? It was before my time and we all have our skeletons in the closet.” He offered a tight smile, “Don’t we?”
“Some of us more than others, I think.”
Jacob nodded, sadly. “But still, she was a fool to let Donny blackmail her. Photographs or not, surely her reputation, or her father’s, was not worth the sacrifice and torment she went through.”
“A young woman’s reputation is everything, Jake.”
“I would never have let it go so far.”
“You’re a man. You would never have been judged to begin with.”
Another moment of silence.
“I should have known,” Betty said, ruefully. “If only I’d read her thoughts at the ball. It was so clear that something was wrong.”
“I told you not to.”
“I should have anyway. You know, my mother always said it was unladylike to impose on another person’s thoughts. I try not to unless I can’t help it. Sometimes though…”
Avon Calling! Season One Page 36