Лиза Гарднер - Never Tell - A Novel (A D.D. Warren and Flora Dane Novel)

On the other hand, his face is already changing, his eyes widening in wonder.

“Flora Dane,” he whispers.

“Ted Bundy, I presume?”

His answering smile lights up his entire face. And I realize, I’ve just made a major mistake, as I shoulder my way past Keith Edgar and enter the home of Jacob Ness’s biggest fan.

Chapter 10 EVIE

MY MOTHER TELLS ME TO rest. I should. For myself. The baby. The days to come. But I can’t get comfortable. Everything feels wrong. The too-soft mattress, the sheets that aren’t my sheets, the pillow that’s filled with feathers, because my mother loves all things European, whether my dad or I agreed or not. Even as a child, this room was never my room. Just another stage setting for the drama that is my mother’s life.

As a grown woman, an adult with her own house, own husband—the pang hits me again—I can’t sleep in this place. I just want to go home.

I shower. That at least feels good and allows me to think I’m taking care of myself and, by extension, my unborn child.

Boy or girl. That’s what my mother wants to know. I don’t have the answer. We were going to be surprised. At least, that’s what we’d been thinking. Five months along, still plenty of time to change our minds.

Conrad died never knowing if he was going to have a baby girl or baby boy. Which would he have preferred?

The thought sends a fresh jolt through me, and for a moment, standing under the sting of the shower spray, I can’t tell if I’m going to cry or vomit or both.

My hands are shaking so badly, I can barely handle the soap. I move on to shampoo, lathering my hair. I’ve never seen myself such a mess. Not even the first time. My father splayed back against the refrigerator. The weight of the shotgun. The blood the blood the blood. It had all felt like a terrible, surreal dream. This …

This is a judgment I can’t escape.

I get out of the shower. Pat dry my swelling abdomen. Do what pregnant women have been doing since time immemorial: I turn sideways and stare at my changing profile in the mirror. In the beginning, being pregnant had felt miraculous, but also not quite real. We’d been trying. Long enough we’d both given up hope, without actually admitting it out loud, because that would bring us to discussions on infertility treatments or timing cycles, or some other kind of external intrusion into a relationship that was already fraying.

Except after days of nausea, I gave in to my own curiosity. Peed on a stick, then stared at the results in complete shock.

Conrad’s beaming smile. My own lightening chest. For one moment, we were united again. We loved each other. This new life was proof. Despite ourselves, we would do this and live happily ever after.

For six weeks, eight weeks, we floated long, all fresh promise and forgotten regrets. Except I’m not my mom. I don’t live in a fantasy world of European pillows and exquisitely cultured pearls. I’m my father’s daughter. I see puzzles everywhere. Then I must solve them.

And as any mathematician will tell you, once you’ve worked the equation, numbers don’t lie. What you get is what you get. There’s nothing left to do but accept that truth.

And what is a marriage except adding A to B and hoping it equals an amount greater than the sum of its parts?

Briefly, the promise of a new life almost made the math work. Except A was still A, and B was still B. We could create a new life, but we couldn’t stop being ourselves.

The bathroom in my mother’s house is fully stocked, including a coconut-oil concoction formulated specially for stretch marks. After seeing the nursery, nothing surprises me. I rub the tropical-smelling lotion onto my belly and breasts. I find more products for my face, imported brands way too expensive for a math teacher at a public high school. Generally, I avoid my mother’s generosity, as it definitely comes with a price. Given the past twenty-four hours, however, I figure what the hell. If anyone could use some rejuvenation from a five-hundred-dollar French cream, it’s gotta be me.

In the closet, I find a full lineup of maternity wear, arranged by size and going all the way up to the final trimester. I have a brief, dizzying thought. I’m trapped now. My mother’s going to keep me here, has clearly been planning it all along. I bathed with her soap, used her lotions, and will now put on her clothes. I’ll never get out. I’m like that girl in the Greek myth who ate pomegranates in Hades, then could never fully escape.

Except my mother doesn’t want me. I already know that.

My child, on the other hand, this final addition to my father’s legacy …

I lean against the closet door, trying to figure out once more if I’m going to cry or vomit. When I manage to pass a full minute without doing either, I pull on soft gray stretch pants and a matching gray top. Cashmere, probably.

Conrad would laugh if he could see me now. He’d grin and tell me to enjoy the ride. Not having any family left, he couldn’t understand my ambivalence about mine. Clearly she loves you, he’d tell me again and again, which only proved he never understood my mother at all.

Downstairs, my mother is in the kitchen. There is a heaping plate of fresh fruit on the kitchen table and she has the Cuisinart whirring away. She turns it off when she sees me.

“High-protein smoothie,” she announces cheerfully. “Full of antioxidants and healthy fats for the baby.”

Only my mother can work a blender while wearing pearls.

There’s no use fighting it. Years of training kick in. I sit at the table. I pick at the fruit. I obediently sip the green sludge.

I don’t look at the fridge. I never look at the fridge. Not that it’s the same one, of course. After the “tragic incident,” my mother had the kitchen gutted. New cabinets, marble countertops, high-end appliances, custom window treatments. It’s all creamy and soft and Italian. Not at all like the original dark cherrywood cabinets, green-and-gold granite tops. Meaning nothing in here should remind me of my father or that day.

But it does. It always does. I don’t care that the flooring has been ripped out and replaced. Or that the stainless steel refrigerator was exchanged for a wood-paneled model. I see the spot where my father died. I recall the smell. I remember looking at his face, so waxy and still, and thinking it didn’t look like him at all.

I don’t know how my mom still lives in this house. But I guess I’ll get to figure that out for myself now. How to go back to the home Conrad and I shared. How to pick up the pieces of a life, where I’m still not sure where we went wrong.

I notice for the first time that all the lights are on and the curtains drawn, though it’s only midday. I don’t have to think about it for long.

“The press?” I ask.

“You know how they are.” My mother waves an airy hand. At least on this we’re united. The media descended the first time, too. Harvard math professor killed in his own home by his teenage daughter. How could they resist? Initially, my mom had thought she could control the story, the way she controlled every other facet of her highly fictionalized life. Needless to say, the reporters ate her alive.

She retreated. Took up the tactic of letting her grand silence speak for her. As a minor, at least I wasn’t subjected to such abuse. But it was weeks, maybe even months, before we could leave our house in peace. I learned to hate the sight of news vans. I learned not to believe anything I saw on TV. At least I got that education early in life, because I’m definitely going to need it now.

Knock on the side door. The one used only by close confidants. My mother bustles over.

Dick Delaney, my lawyer, is standing there, still wearing the same sharply pressed gray suit from the courtroom. He’s a handsome man with his silver hair and closely trimmed beard. I have countless memories of him. Poker nights with my father. Laughing indulgently at all the math jokes, as one of the only nonacademics in the room. How did he even know my father? What had earned him a seat at the poker table? I don’t know. But he was always part of our household, brilliant and successful in his own right, a fellow Harvard alum, which maybe was all the credentials he needed. I never even thought of him as a defense attorney.