Mended-Hearts

by Gordon, M. E.

  I didn’t want to move from the dark and cozy hole I’d made in the covers, but as I became more aware of things, I noticed I wasn’t huddled under a cover. It was dark in the room, really dark. I turned over and nearly lost my shit. It was six o’clock at night and the lights that lit New York City and kept it hustling through the darkness were streaming in through the window.

  I got out of bed, grabbed a change of clothes and a towel, and headed for the bathroom. I’d told Nick that I was going to call him in the afternoon. We were supposed to meet this friend that owed him one at the hospital today. I’d left my bag with my phone in it at the door. I had to call him and tell him I’d overslept and that I hadn’t dropped off the face of the earth.

  I ran out of the room with my new clothes and towel in my hand. I’d turned the corner to go into the living area and grab my bag, when I saw a silhouette sitting on the couch, looking at a computer screen. The rustle of my feet got its attention, and Nick turned from the computer screen to see me standing just outside the hallway with drool on my face and hair going in every which direction.

  He smiled over at me. “Good morning or I guess it’s good night now.”

  “How long have you been here?” I asked, adjusting the clothes and towel in my hands.

  “When you never called this afternoon, I decided to come over and make sure that you were okay. Natasha’s gone off the deep end and is posting all sorts of shit about you that isn’t true, but I still had to make sure just in case.”

  I made my way to the couch and plopped down next to him. He immediately leaned away from me and made a face. The oh-my-god-you-stink-like-three-week-old-gar-bage face.

  “Oh, it’s not that bad,” I said.

  He covered his nose and mouth with his hand but I could still see the smile in his eyes. “It’s pretty bad.”

  He cringed. I hit his shoulder before leaving him on the couch to take a quick shower.

  Steam filled the bathroom and, as I stood under the scalding water, I replayed last night over in my head. I’d kissed Nick. No, not Nick, it was Simon I’d kissed. It was tender like him, soft and comforting just like I remembered Simon to be.

  I was in the middle of shampooing my hair when there was a rap on the bathroom door. “What?” I yelled as water spilled over my face, sending soap right into my eyes. “Fuck that stings.” I wiped at my eyes and shoved my face into the scalding water.

  “Are you all right?”

  I opened my stinging red eyes when I heard Nick from the other side of the glass shower door. I covered my body with my arms and moved back from the glass. Only the beads of water on the glass and my sorry excuse to cloak myself kept Nick from seeing my naked ass.

  “What are you doing in here?” I said from the corner of the shower.

  “Our way into the hospital just called. We got the go ahead but we have to get there and get out in an hour,” he said with what looked like a smirk on his face as he tried not to look at me, but I knew he was.

  “Okay, let me finish up real quick and we can go.”

  “All right,” he said, not moving.

  “Nick?”

  He looked up from the floor and through the water beaded glass. “Yeah?”

  “Get the hell out of the bathroom,” I screeched.

  He laughed at me. Then put his face up to the glass, like he was a little boy peeking into the girl’s locker room.

  “Are you serious, right now?” I yelled.

  “What? It’s not like I haven’t seen it before. Have you been doing squats?” he asked.

  His devious smile spread across his face as he wiggled his eyebrows at me.

  I threw the wash cloth I had in my hand right at his face. He backed away when it hit the glass and slid down. Bad idea, Beth. As it skidded down, it collected the water beads in its path, making an almost perfectly clean shower glass. I quickly ran my hand through my soapy hair and slopped it over the glass, making a new soapy barrier between me and my peeping tom.

  During the ride over to the hospital, I couldn’t look Nick in the eye. He had this cocky grin plastered on his face, and I still felt naked, even though I was sitting next to him, covered head to toe in clothes. I didn’t have time to dry my hair so I did a quick braid and shoved one of Charles’s hats on.

  “Will you stop it?” I finally said.

  “Stop what? I’m not doing anything,” he said, all innocent, from beside me in the cab.

  I gave him a questioning look back. He knew what he was doing, and he needed to stop. He was gloating about seeing my bare ass in the shower.

  “Stop looking at me like that,” I clarified.

  “Like what?”

  “Like you’ve seen me naked,” I stated.

  “Well, I have--”

  I covered his mouth before he could finish. “Don’t, just don’t. Try to keep the right head in charge tonight. Can you do that for me?” I asked.

  I felt him smile behind my hand. He nodded in agreement so I let my hand fall from his mouth.

  “Let’s go over this one more time just so we’re clear, and our cover doesn’t get blown, I’m Jack and you’re Jill, and we’re looking for our long lost brother. Got it?” he asked as we pulled up the back entrance of the hospital.

  “Jack and Jill, brother, sister, and we’re looking for our long lost brother. Got it!” I repeated. “You’re sure about the name, Jill? Isn’t that just a little weird, ya know Jack and Jill nursery rhyme and all?”

  “It was the first thing that came to my mind, and, besides, we can’t change your cover now. I’ve already talked to her and she thinks you’re name is Jill.” Nick smiled. “So, nursery rhyme wins.”

  There was a young woman standing by one of the side doors. Her foot was stuck in between the doorjamb, holding it open. We made our way to her, and it was obvious she was a knock out, even in her scrubs and pulled back hair.

  “Thanks for doing this, Regan,” Nick said, reaching out to give her a hug.

  I watched as she lingered on him. Her eyes closed and her hand gripped him tighter than necessary for a casual hello.

  “It’s the least I can do,” she said, pulling back and staring up into his eyes. She glanced around him and saw me standing there with a poor excuse for a disguise on. Along with the hat I swiped I also put on a fake pair of glasses. Nick might not have been noticed out in public, but I sure as hell would have been. A disguise was a must if we were going to get past her. Nick had informed me that she was a budding actress and itching at the chance to get famous. That was how she got into the mess of owing Nick in the first place.

  “Jill, right?” she asked, addressing me.

  I jumped at my imposter name and quickly got into character. “Yes. Jill, Jack’s sister. Our mother has a wicked sense of humor,” I said, trying my best to put on a fake smile, and held my hand out to shake hers.

  “Wow, you look really familiar. Do I know you, or maybe--have been in the hospital before?” she asked, gauging me skeptically.

  This is it, our cover’s been blown. Of course, she’s seen my face around the hospital, I was on every freaking magazine cover known to man.

  “Nope, I don’t think so,” I said, trying to change my voice and make it deeper than normal.

  “Regan, how long do we have?” Nick asked, saving my ass again.

  “The file room is all yours for the next hour. The woman who works in there is going on break, and I found out she’s running to some restaurant to grab food and bring it back for a few people so you have at least a solid hour, if not more, but I’d stick to an hour. If she gets back sooner, I’ll come by and get you.”

  We both nodded and followed her down the winding halls of the hospital.

  When she opened the door to the room, I expected to see file cabinets lining the walls and stretching as far as the eye could see. Thankfully this hospital had gone digital. The nice woman who was on break getting dinner for her co-workers was in charge of putting all files, new and old, into the computer syste
m.

  Regan gave us a quick lesson on how to search and what to look for before she left us there in the vacant room. There were no windows, no way to tell if it was daytime or nighttime. It was kind of depressing. It was no wonder the woman who worked in here jumped at the opportunity to get dinner for her co-workers. It was like being in a dungeon.

  When the door closed behind Regan, we both looked at one another, nervous and anxious that maybe we’d done all this, and we weren’t going to be able to find anything. We sat down at the computer at the same time. Nick put his fingers on the keys then turned to me.

  “What should we put in?” he asked.

  “Well, as far as I know, he’s been Spencer all along. What if we put in Spencer and the year he was born because we know that, and look at birth records?”

  Nick nodded in agreement.

  In the year Spencer was born, there were also twenty eight other Spencer’s born in New York. Public record had Spencer being born in July, according to Wikipedia and numerous gossip sites. But when we narrowed it down to July, there was one Spencer born and he was African American, definitely not the Spencer we were looking for. Another cover up from the mysterious, Spencer Salvatore.

  “We need to change gears,” Nick said after going through ten of the Spencer baby files. “We’re never going to find anything this way, and we don’t have enough time to whittle it down. How old did Camilla say he was in that picture?”

  “Eight. She said it said age eight on the back.”

  “So that would have been...” Nick did the math really quick and put in the correct year and then Spencer’s name and hit search. Again a ton of Spencer’s popped up, not only from the year that he put in but from years past, all with the same birth date but different last names, four to be exact. They kept repeating with every visit Brown, Black, Smith, and the last one Phillips.

  “Try that one,” I screeched in excitement.

  I had a feeling we were getting close. The first one he clicked on was Brown. A one year old Spencer who had posterior rib fractures. The next Spencer had a cut and fifteen stitches on his eyebrow. There weren’t pictures, obviously, but I quickly remembered the scar over Spencer’s eye. The next one was a broken nose, again I thought of the slight shift to the left down Spencer’s nose. A five-year-old Spencer Smith was sent to the ER to get a busted lip stitched up. Immediately, I saw the small white scar on Spencer’s lip behind my closed eyes. The last was Spencer Phillips who had a buckle fracture on his arms, both of them.

  It was too much of a coincidence that all these Spencer’s had the same birthday but different last names. Something wasn’t adding up.

  “This is him,” I said out loud.

  Chapter 31

  Nickolas

  “Are you sure? How do you know--wait a minute, look at this.” I opened up three of the files at once and each one was from a different, smaller hospital. “They’re all from different hospitals too.”

  “Why would--”

  The door to our dungeon flew open before she could finish her thought. Thankfully, it was just Regan checking in on us.

  “Did you find him?” she asked, walking over and standing next to me. She placed a hand on my shoulder and peered into the computer screen from beside me.

  “We think we did, but all the last names are different, plus why would they have taken this child to--three--wait, four different hospitals around New York?” I asked, sitting back from the computer so she could get a better look.

  Regan did a quick once over of the few files that I had opened. She pulled back from the computer and her face fell, her smile faded, and her eyes got serious.

  “What? What do you see?” Elizabeth asked from the other side of me.

  “It looks like--I mean usually when we see things like this, on top of these types of injuries, it leads to a certain stigma.” She shoved her hands into the front pockets of her scrubs and started fiddling with whatever was in them.

  “What does that mean? Were they trying to get around the system or something? Were they illegal immigrants maybe?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Kind of--It’s hard to say,” Regan answered.

  “Kind of? What does it mean, Regan?” I asked, glancing up at her.

  “You see this here.” She took the mouse from me, scrolled to one of the files, and brought up an X-ray scan. She pointed to the bones in the arm. “This is what we call a buckle fracture and it can be a sign of child abuse. The aggressor holds on so tightly to the child that the bones buckle and fracture.”

  “Are you saying someone hurt Spencer Sa--our brother, to the point of breaking his bones?” I said, catching my slip up.

  “That’s what it looks like. As far as going to all the different hospitals and clinics, that’s just another layer to it. Moms will take their children to different hospitals and use fake names so it doesn’t look like abuse. What this Mom didn’t know was that all these hospitals are now under one branch, one big hospital bought all these smaller ones so now we have all their files.”

  “So why wasn’t anything done? If they knew about this--I mean, it’s all here. Why wasn’t it sent over to social services or somewhere like that?” Elizabeth asked.

  She stood aggressively from the desk and went to go toe to toe with Regan. I pushed back from the desk myself and got between then. With my back to Regan, I steadied Elizabeth with a hand on her shoulder and mouthed. Calm down.

  “I don’t know,” Regan screeched from behind me. “What year did this all happen?”

  I felt her move behind me and glance down at the computer screen. I kept a calming hand on Elizabeth, afraid she’d let her temper get the better of her.

  “Here’s your answer. The hospitals were only joined together ten years ago. These files are from almost twenty plus years ago. A lot of nurses and doctors looked the other way back then.”

  “They turned their backs on a small child, clearly getting physically and, most likely, mentally abused,” Elizabeth yelled.

  My calming hand on her shoulder was pushed away. Thankfully, she stalked off in the opposite direction of Regan and myself.

  “Listen, I’m sorry, but there’s really nothing that can be done now,” Regan said.

  “Nothing that can be done? This is why he’s the way he is! If someone would have spoken up for him--Oh, my God, this explains everything--why he wants to leave me--why he thinks he’s going to hurt me--He’s afraid of turning into his abuser. Ni--I mean, Jack, we figured it out,” Elizabeth said with wide eyes as she spun back around to us.

  “We’re still talking about your long-lost brother right?” Regan asked.

  She was getting too curious. Not only had I slipped a bit, now Elizabeth had, and her ranting about why Spencer left her was only making things worse.

  Elizabeth stopped moving and reached in her pocket. Her phone was ringing, and I could have kissed whoever it was on the other end for getting her to shut her big babbling mouth.

  We were a few choice words from getting caught, and I didn’t need that right now.

  “It’s Camilla,” she said before answering. “Hey, is everything okay?”

  She turned from Regan and me again while talking to her. I tried my hardest but I couldn’t make out what was being said. Regan was in my other ear, talking about getting drinks after her shift and that she missed me. I smiled politely at her and nodded in agreement, just to keep the charade up a little bit longer.

  “I know it’s been over two years but I--I still think about you. What about you?” Regan asked, taking me off guard.

  “Umm--yeah,” I mumbled.

  “So you do too. I knew it was different was with you. I know we were only together for two months, but I just had this feeling, ya know?” Regan reached up and touched my face tenderly with her small delicate hand.

  I stopped trying to listen to Elizabeth and actually looked down at Regan. She was a pretty girl, blonde and green eyed, a pinched nose, and high cheek bones. She was a lot shorter than me. The
top of her head only came up to my neck. I felt her grab onto my shirt, pulling me closer toward her.

  I licked my lips, nervous about her getting so close to me. I wanted more with someone, but I didn’t think for a second that it would be her. There was too much history, too many lies, and that was not how I wanted to start a relationship, not anymore. I wanted a fresh start with someone who only knew me as Nick and nobody else.

  “Don’t let me interrupt,” Elizabeth said from behind me.

  Regan’s hands left me in a rush as I spun from her to Elizabeth. She had a wicked smile on her face, and I could tell she loved every minute of this.

  “Do you two need a minute?” she asked through a chuckle.

  “No. What did Camilla want?” I asked, changing the subject.

  “He’s home.”

  “Home?” I asked. “Like Vegas home?”

  “No, New York home. She said he was upset. Jack, I have to go to him. I have to tell him I know everything. He’s at his place.”

  “You’re just going to go over there?”

  “I have to,” she said with a smile a mile wide. She ran over to me and wrapped her arms around my neck. “Thank you,” she whispered in my ear before pulling back and leaving a kiss on my cheek. “Pray my key still works,” she shouted behind her as she dashed out of the room, leaving me there with Regan.

  “Jack...” Regan said in a serious tone.

  I turned back to her, expecting her to leap into my arms after her little speech, but she was sitting back at the desk and scrolling through the files some more.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “That’s not your sister, is it?” she said, glancing over at me from the computer screen.

  “Of course, it is. Why would you think otherwise?” I said, trying to save my ass.

  “Because that’s Elizabeth Monroe. I knew I recognized her, and this little boy you’re looking at is Spencer Salvatore, isn’t it?”

  “Regan, listen--”

  “Jack, what’s going on?” she asked sternly.