Page 72 of Hale Yes
“They moved the baby to a hospital in New York. Since I lived there, I went to check on things, expecting to see Zoey.”
“She wasn’t there?” I ask.
Anger takes shape on Nicolette’s pretty face, narrowing her eyes and hollowing her cheeks. “No, the baby was born addicted to meth, so they took him away from Zoey. My aunt was there though, wailing that she had no idea how this happened.”
I roll my eyes. “Of course she didn’t. She’d only been enabling her daughter for years.”
The server drops off our sandwich, which she’d separated onto two crystal yellow plates. Nicolette’s eyes widen at the thick triangles. “Wow, that is big.”
“That’s what she said,” I blurt out before I can stop myself, and my dinner companion snickers while I whack my forehead with my palm. “Sorry, I’ve been around Phoenix for too long.”
“It’s okay.” She smiles before taking a healthy bite, and I do the same. “Anyway, my aunt seemed more worried about Zoey than the baby, so she left to go back to New Jersey.”
“The baby was a boy?”
She nods. “Noah. I explained the situation to the nurses, and since no one knew who the father was and the baby was kind of an orphan at that point, she let me come up there after work and hold him. She got me signed up with the cuddling program to make me all official and cover her ass.”
We’re both silent, me in my thoughts and Nicolette in her memories.
“Noah was small, about four pounds. The low birth weight only compounded all the other health problems that come witha baby addicted to drugs.” She shakes her head and asks, “Have you ever been around a baby with neonatal abstinence syndrome?”
I shake my head and answer with a soft no.
Her face pinches into a grimace. “It’s not pretty. The tremors, the irritability, the trouble feeding. It pisses me off and makes me sad at the same time.”
“Same,” I grunt, though I mostly feel rage. “Those babies shouldn’t have to suffer because of their mother’s decisions. And it is a decision. I know drug abuse is a disease, but at any point, she could have sought help. Did she even try?”
“She didn’t,” Nicolette answers. “She and Angelica kept partying like it was 1999 throughout her pregnancy.”
“Fucking ridiculous,” I mutter, the anger heating my face on behalf of a baby I’d never met.
“Noah was a fighter though. He held on for two weeks, and then…” She sucks in a breath, and I reach over the table to clench my fingers around Nicolette’s. She raises her chin a notch and says, “He had a seizure. They tried, but there was nothing they could do.”
“I am so sorry, Nicolette. You sound like you’d grown close to Noah.”
Tears rim her lower eyelids but she doesn’t allow them to fall. “I held him every evening for those two weeks. Through the unstoppable crying and the shakes, I held him. I thought he was getting better because he and I found a bit of a rhythm. He started falling asleep when I cuddled him instead of crying constantly.”
I can’t think of a damn thing to say, so I simply squeeze her hand again.
Nicolette’s nostrils flare. “Zoey made quite the spectacle of herself at the funeral, wailing and falling out on the floor. Shewas obviously high again, and it disgusted me. Noah’s death was a hundred percent her fault.”
“Did that provide a wakeup call for your parents?”
Her short laugh was sardonic. “You would think so, right? But no. I had made a pact with myself not to speak to them about Angelica’s drug issues, but I did eavesdrop at the wake. My mother was going on and on about how she was glad Angelica wasn’t into that kind of stuff.”
I want to slam my hand on the table and yell in frustration, but I keep my voice low. “Fucking clueless.”
“Completely. What did give them a wakeup call was when Zoey overdosed a couple months later. Angelica was with her and panicked, calling our dad instead of emergency services. He got there and saw all the drugs and paraphernalia. And the dead body of his niece. That’s what really kicked him in the pants.”
“It’s not like he didn’t already know,” I say. “He’s not a stupid man; he was just in denial, and it’s sad that it took two deaths for him to come to his senses.”
“He called and apologized for not believing me. Told me they were putting Angelica into a drug rehab facility immediately. I told him good luck.”
I’m completely blown away by this woman. In my mind, she acted like a bit of a doormat when it came to her family. Not that I was judging. Family dynamics are complicated, and no one has the right to cast judgment on what a person does to maintain their peace. After all, she was under her mother’s thumb for the first sixteen years of her life, and she didn’t have much choice.
But Nicolette graduated from high school early, turned seventeen shortly after, and then left the state by herself to go to college. At seventeen fucking years old. Then she rocked her way through undergrad in only three years with perfect grades—at Harvard, no less—and then got accepted into an exclusive program where she worked on her medical degree and PhDconcurrently. Completed that in an astonishing six years and was accepted into a competitive dermatology residency.
Yes, I’ve studied her résumé at length. Shut up. It was for work.
