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

“They’ll take your clothes as evidence,” Mr. Delaney continues, “and hand them over to a waiting officer.”

My escort, Officer Bob.

“In return, you’ll get an orange jumpsuit.”

I don’t speak, but I feel a giggle rising again in the back of my throat. A prison jumpsuit. Like Orange Is the New Black. I’ll be the new girl. Fresh meat. Until I win them over with my story of woe. And get a cool new lesbian roommate. Or maybe I’ll be the muscle, taking some delicate, fragile thing under my wing. After all, two shootings to my credit. I can get double teardrop tattoos on my cheek, swagger across the prison yard with my soon-to-be enormously pregnant belly. Mess with that, bitches.

I’m not doing well. I’m going to start laughing. And once I do, I’ll never stop.

My poor baby, my poor, poor baby.

Conrad.

Mr. Delaney promises to meet me at the courthouse. He reminds me to say nothing. He tells me I have medical rights as well as the right to speak to my attorney at any time. You’re going to get through this, he says gently. Hang tough. Be smart.

Like last time?

When the call ends, the older detective returns. He gives me a disappointed look. I’ve ruined his interrogation, proven that I’m no fun at all.

Then Officer Bob returns, unshackles me from the table, and off we go. Suffolk County Jail.

I sit in the back of the patrol car, my eyes drifting shut with exhaustion. Conrad, face breaking into a smile as he sees me for the first time. Conrad, fingers shaking uncontrollably as he tries to slip the simple gold wedding band on my finger at the courthouse. Conrad, the look at on his face as we both stare wide-eyed at the pregnancy stick.

Conrad, collapsed in his desk chair, half his head sprayed across the wall behind him.

A thousand moments. A hundred memories. Some that felt completely right. Some that I know by now were totally wrong. And yet …

I loved you, I think, and my hands curls once more around my belly. Not just my baby— our baby. The best of both of us, at least that’s what all parents hope for.

Even my parents, once upon a time.

The patrol car stops, slows, turns, comes to a halt. Outside the windows, I can see nothing but the harsh glare of too many lights. The kind designed to rob even the purest soul of all secrets.

South Bay House of Correction.

This is it.

• • •

I GREW UP in a beautiful home in Cambridge. A historic Colonial with dark-stained wood trim, a gorgeous curved bannister, and bull’s-eye molding around a matching set of front bay windows. My mother is partial to richly colored oriental rugs, silk-covered wingback chairs, and decorative tables that hold cut-crystal decanters and silver serving trays.

Do not touch was one of the first phrases I ever learned. Followed shortly by: No running in the house. Comb your hair. Chew with your mouth closed. Sit straighter. Stand taller.

Do not embarrass your father was never actually said, but always implied.

My father wasn’t merely a Harvard professor. By the time I was born, he was already considered one of the greatest mathematical minds of his generation. Bachelor’s in psychology, master’s in computer science, doctorate in statistics. He held honorary degrees from universities all around the world and his office was wallpapered in various awards. We didn’t just have dinners at our house; we had standing Friday night poker games where my father and his fellow geniuses traded discourses on chaos theory, data mining, and string theory, all while vying to see who could count cards.

To the best of my memory, very few women ever attended these nights. There were female mathematicians, of course, as well as physicists, computer scientists, engineers, but not that many. Or maybe my mother didn’t go out of her way to include their company. Accomplished, brilliant females rubbing shoulders with her husband … ? I don’t know. For most of this, I was just a kid.

I understood my father was a great man. I assumed, judging by the quality of our home and the size of my mother’s pearl necklace, that we led a life that others envied. Certainly, I spent my days in an elite boarding school where my teachers were suitably impressed by my own intelligence, while having to break the news to my father that I was no mathematical prodigy. Gifted, definitely. I had a fighting chance at understanding a fraction of the conversations I greedily eavesdropped on every Friday night. But my father, his mind, his intellect … he was a mystery to me till the bitter end.

He loved me. He took pride in my straight-A schoolwork. And he would sit for hours in the front room, his eyes closed as I ran through Bach, Mozart, Beethoven. He said when I played the piano, he could hear the math pouring out. There is a high degree of correlation between math and music. So maybe for me math wasn’t the classroom. Math was the piano, and the notes, scales, tones I found without even trying, and played obsessively day after day.

My father told me I was brilliant.

Back in those days, sitting at the baby grand in the front parlor, I believed him.

I had my own wing, an only child in a home built for when families had eight kids and three servants. My suite of rooms occupied the front of the second floor, with a pillow-covered seat built into the bank of windows that overlooked the street. I had lavender-painted walls and a wrought-iron canopy bed covered in yards of gauzy fabric. A private bath, of course, not to mention a smaller room, perhaps originally intended as a nursery, that had been converted to a walk-in closet with built-in mirror and makeup table. The adjoining sitting room, however, was my favorite. Bookshelves lined all four walls, filled with everything from Nancy Drew to musical compositions to historical fiction. I loved to read about faraway people living in distant times. Their fathers were never world-renowned geniuses. In fact, in most of these novels, both parents were dead—but no worries; the plucky heroine would make it on her own.

I had more than enough space for slumber parties and playdates. But somehow, other kids didn’t want to hang out with a professor’s daughter. Especially one more comfortable playing the piano for hours at a time than engaging in common discourse. Fashion, gossip, popular music? I felt like my father in those moments. I wished someone would break out some poker chips and tee off a discussion of the ten most useful mathematical equations (my father loved Euler’s identity, but I spent plenty of Friday nights listening to passionate arguments for all ten entries). Sometimes, my mother would set up little mother-and-daughter teas, where she and her cohort in crime would cast glances in the direction of me and my obviously unhappy assigned companion, waiting for us to magically hit it off.

What I learned from those teas was that other mothers feared my mom, and that no one really wanted to be friends with a girl as strange as me.

My mother was big on appearances, meaning my bedsheets were of only the finest Egyptian cotton. When not in private school plaid, I could wear Laura Ashley, Laura Ashley, or Laura Ashley. My mother considered me too young for my own pearls, by I was allowed to wear a tasteful heart-shaped silver-and-diamond pendant my father gave me on my thirteenth birthday.

To judge by the look on his face when I opened the Tiffany box, my mother had done the actual picking out of the pendant, but I still hugged my father gratefully, his beard tickling my cheek. And he still hugged me back enthusiastically. Geniuses are geniuses, you know. You can’t expect them to waste their brilliance on such trivial matters as a daughter’s birthday gift. That’s what wives are for, my mother would tell you.