Never Tell (Detective D.D. Warren #10) - Lisa Gardner Page 0,14
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.
If everything had stayed on track, I would have attended Radcliffe, married some up-and-coming genius, maybe one of my father’s own research students, and gotten a string of pearls of my own to wear in a neighboring Cambridge home, where I would teach piano, or something equally respectable.
If everything had stayed on track.
“Squat,” the nurse says now.
I am completely naked. My clothes stripped off and taken away as promised, even my underwear. I stand alone with a female nurse, who—given my rounded belly, or maybe the lack of needle tracks on my arms—is doing her best to appear kind.
I still have that surreal feeling. This can’t be me; this can’t be my life. It’s three A.M. I should be home. With Conrad.
I don’t know what to do with my hands. Cover my belly, as I’ve been doing for months now? Or my bare breasts? My exposed pubis? I settle on my stomach. The rest of me already feels too long gone.
“Nothing but an unfortunate accident …”
She will come. She will come for me next. Then, the real adventure will begin.
“Honey,” the nurse says, snapping the glove on her right hand. “The sooner you do this, the sooner both of us get on with our lives.”
I nod. I squat. She inspects. Next order. I bend over, best that I can. She inspects.
I don’t cry. I’ve never been good at tears. My mom, she breaks into hysterics at the drop of a hat. Sixteen years ago, she did enough crying for the both of us. But me—under stress, loss, extreme pain?
I never cry.
I just … hollow out. A pit of anguish.
I feel it now, for my baby. Who will never grow up in an impressive Colonial in elite Cambridge, or even a well-intentioned fixer-upper in Winthrop.