“Do something!” Jill insisted. “Somebody do something! He’s going to hit her again.”
The man did, and this time the woman stayed down. Distantly O’Farrell thought he heard the wail of a police siren. He took Jill’s arm, forcibly leading her back into the hotel toward the long corridor that bisected the building to F Street.
“We can’t walk away!” Jill said. “She could be hurt.”
“It’s okay,” O’Farrell said. “It’s all being taken care of.”
“What are you talking about!”
“Didn’t you hear the sirens?” She’d expected him to intervene, he knew. And was disappointed that he hadn’t.
“No!”
“I did. They’re coming.”
On the pavement outside, on F Street, Jill stopped, head to one side. “I still don’t hear anything.”
“They’ll have gotten there by now: police, ambulance, everyone.” O’Farrell wondered why he was shaking, and why his hands were wet, as well. Jill would think him weak, a runaway coward.
“He could have killed her.”
“No,” O’Farrell said.
“How do you know?”
How do I know! Because I’m an acknowledged and recognized expert, O’Farrell thought: that’s what I do! He said, “It was one of those lovers’ things, matrimonial. An hour from now they’ll be in the sack, making up.”
“Can you imagine anyone capable of hurting another human being like that!”
“No,” O’Farrell said again, more easily now because he’d learned to field questions like that. “I can’t imagine it.”
The show was at the National Theater so they cut down 14th Street, pausing at the Marriott comer to look back along the opposite block. O’Farrell saw, relieved, that the ambulance and police vehicles were there. “See?” he said, snatching the small victory. The fighting couple were side by side now, the woman shaking her head in some denial or refusal, the man with his arm protectively around her shoulder.
“I can’t imagine that, either,” Jill said.
“Probably even turns them on.”
The play was a regional theater company’s far too experimental performance of Oedipus that had been under-rehearsed and mounted too soon. O’Farrell insisted on their going to the bar during intermission—switching to gin and tonic this time, because he wasn’t prepared to risk the martinis—and when they went back into the auditorium a lot of people, practically an entire row at the rear of the orchestra, hadn’t bothered to return. O’Farrell wished he and Jill hadn’t, either. Throughout, Jill sat pulled away from him, against the far arm of her seat.
Afterward, certainly without sufficient thought, O’Farrell suggested they eat, and at once Jill said, “Ellen might have called.”
In the car she continued to sit away from him, as she had in the theater. Neither spoke until they’d crossed the river again, back into Virginia.
“It wasn’t very good, was it?”
“Dreadful.”
“So much for the Post review.” An altogether bad day, O’Farrell thought again.
“I still don’t care,” Jill blurted suddenly.
“Care about what?”
“If it were a lovers’ quarrel or what die hell it was: I couldn’t understand no one going to help that woman.”
It was the nearest she’d come to an outright accusation, he guessed. It wasn’t a good feeling, believing Jill despised him. He said, “It would have been ridiculous for me to have become involved. He might have had a gun, a knife, anything. You really think I should have risked being killed?”
“I wasn’t drinking of you,” Jill said, unconvincingly.
Overly defensive, O’Farrell said. “There’s you to worry about, and John and everyone in Phoenix to worry about, and Ellen and Billy to worry about. You think I’m going to endanger so many people I love!” Hadn’t he endangered them too many times? he asked himself.
“It just upset me, mat’s all.”
“Forget it.”
“I’m sorry. I know you’re right. You’re always right.”
“I said forget it.” What would she have thought if he had gene in, reducing the bullying bastard to blubbering jelly? Another preposterous reflection: he never entered an unarmed combat training session—and he still went through two a month—without die prior injunction that his expertise was strictly limited to what he did professionally and should never be employed in any other circumstance.
Ellen’s call was waiting on their machine and he let Jill return it, very aware of her need. He sat opposite her in die living room, near the bookshelves, smiling in expectation of his wife’s smile of relief at whatever explanation Ellen gave. But a smile didn’t come.
Instead, in horror, Jill exclaimed, “What!”
There was no way O’Farrell could hear Ellen’s reply but his wife apparently cut their daughter off in the middle, telling the girl to wait for O’Farrell to get on an extension.
O’Farrell actually ran to the den, snatching up the telephone to say, “What the hell is it!”
“Nothing,” said Ellen, in a too obvious attempt at reassurance. “No, that’s not quite true. It’s important, but Billy isn’t involved, isn’t in any trouble.”
“What!” repeated O’Farrell.
“It was a special meeting of the PTA today,” their daughter said. “Very special. All the parents and all the teachers. Like I said, Billy isn’t involved; he says he hasn’t been approached and we’ve talked it through and I believe him. But there have been quite a few seizures, so there’s no doubt that drugs are in circulation in the school.”
“What sort of drugs?” Jill asked.
“Everything,” Ellen said. “Even crack. Heroin, too.”
“Billy’s not nine years old yet!” O’Farrell said.
“Nancy Reagan sought no-drug pledges from nine-year-olds,” Ellen reminded them. “And no one’s gotten to Billy yet.”
“Get out of Chicago,” Jill implored. “Come back somewhere around here, near to us.”
“You telling me it’s any better in Washington?”
“You’d be safer here.”
“We’re not in any danger here. You asked me where I’d been, and I told you. If I’d imagined this sort of reaction, I might have lied, to spare you the worry.”
“We’ll come up next weekend,” Jill announced.
There was a question in her voice directed toward O’Farrell on the extension and he said, “Yes, we’ll come up.”
“What for?”
“Because we want to,” said her mother decisively. “We haven’t been up for a long time; you know that.”
“A month,” Ellen corrected. “I’m not going to escalate this into a bigger drama than it is, Mother; let Billy imagine it’s some big deal that’ll attract a lot of family attention if he tries it.”
“We won’t escalate anything,” Jill promised. “We just want to come up. See how you are. That’s all.”
“I’m fine. Really I’m fine.”
“Please let us come up, Ellen,” O’Farrell said, requesting rather than insisting.
“You know you don’t have to ask,” the girl said, softening.
“You sure Billy’s all right?”
“Positive.”
“What’s happening to the people doing it? The dealers?” O’Farrell demanded.
“There haven’t been any major arrests yet. Just kids, pushing it to make money to buy more stuff for themselves.”