Chapter 7
Her nose wasn’t broken. Her father’s hand must have been open when it struck her, and what had felt like a punch was likely only a hard slap. Still, her right cheek had swelled, and a crease of purple discolored her undereye. It reminded her of Bessy, the woman in Rod’s office last night.
Fern went to the kitchen for some ice, grateful that Mrs. Jennaway took Sunday mornings off. But it really didn’t matter: The delivered photographs would not be a secret for much longer. Her father’s order to keep her mother out of it would be next to impossible.
The day stretched on, the clocks throughout the house chiming new hours, one after the other. She waited for the commotion. The raised voices. The pounding on her door. But they didn’t come.
Finally, it grew dark, and headlights and lampposts began to light the avenue outside. Maybe her father had succeeded in smothering the morning’s threat from Red Rodney’s henchmen after all.
She sat in the turret’s window, the reading bench pillows cushioning a bruise on her hip that she didn’t recall receiving. It must have been from when she’d fallen in the study. Or from the night before, when she’d been insensate in Cal’s bedroom.
Fern leaned back, crossing her legs at the ankles, her feet stuffed under a blanket.
She wasn’t going anywhere—not with one half of her face bruised and the other half scarred, the way it had always been—so she wasn’t dressed to be seen.
She wore an old, rayon crepe number that her mother had never liked.
Too plain, she’d said when Fern had ordered it from the Sears catalog.
The midnight blue makes you look pale. Fern thought it made her dark blonde hair look lighter, closer to caramel.
Besides, dark colors never made a person stand out in a crowd, and that’s how she wanted it.
Traffic passed on the street, with a few autos parked alongside the curb.
The headlights on one of the parked autos flashed on and off.
Fern sat forward. They flashed a second time.
As the bulbs in the headlamps faded, she pressed her nose to the glass.
She couldn’t see much detail, not with her bedroom lights on.
Fern got up and raced to pull the chains on the three lamps around the room. One by one, they went out, darkening the room and brightening the world outside. She saw it then: a Roadster, parked in front of their neighbor’s home. The headlights flashed again.
She froze, fingers pressing into the bench cushions. It was the car Cal had taken her home in last night. It could be Rodney driving… But no, he wouldn’t bother with caution or have the patience to wait for her to notice his car.
It was Cal. Was he trying to get her attention?
Fern hoped he couldn’t still see her sitting there, hesitating. What was he thinking coming here again? She’d made a mistake last night, leaving her house to follow him. Why on earth would she make the same mistake twice?
Her breath fogged the glass. What could he possibly want? He might have something important to tell her. Something having to do with the photographs? Maybe her father had already responded. She’d been sitting alone in her room all day. Anything could have happened in the world outside her turret.
Fern closed her eyes and wished it would all go away. The photographs. Her father’s anger and disappointment. Cal’s car.
She opened them at the growl of an engine.
The Roadster’s headlamps flicked on, and the car pulled away from the curb.
It drove slowly by the house, then out of sight.
Fern leaned back against the cushions again, certain that this would be the last she saw of Clean Calvin Rosetti.
Certain that she was, in fact, relieved.
Certain.
A knock on the bedroom door the next morning woke her. Fern was still on the turret’s bench seat when she opened her eyes, her neck stiff and sore. The sun was already shining over Lake Michigan, a few blocks in the distance.
The knocking came again, followed by her mother’s voice. “Fern? Are you awake?”
The clock beside her untouched bed said it was only eight o’clock in the morning. Mother didn’t usually breakfast until ten.
“Just a moment,” she replied and, remembering her bruised face, hurried to her vanity. She inspected the curved purple bruise under her right eye. The swelling had decreased, but she still didn’t know how to explain the injury.
Fern opened the door. Her mother’s eyes found the bruising immediately, but her reaction was contained to a mere flaring of her nostrils.
“What happened?”
Fern couldn’t say it. Couldn’t admit that her father had struck her. Her mother would want to know the reason why, and Fern wasn’t supposed to tell her about the photographs. She didn’t want her to know about them either.
She licked her lips and stared at the tips of her mother’s dyed silk shoes. They perfectly matched her dress, a pale lavender chiffon.
“Buchanan said you went out the other night. That you were with that man. That…bootlegger.”
Buchanan had told her?
“Was he the one who did this to you?” She tried to step inside the bedroom. But Fern stood firm, not letting her pass.
“No.” It hadn’t been a gangster who’d blackened her eye. But of course, her mother would accuse him.
“Fern, I don’t know what’s gotten into you, but it must stop. If it’s the dinners, then fine, they’ll end. I won’t host another. But you can’t stay up here forever. That was never our intent. We just wanted to protect you—”
“You have,” Fern replied, barking out the words. Something more pushed at the back of them. She didn’t know what it was. Anger? An accusation? Her mother must have heard it because she waited for Fern to say more.
“Maybe too much,” she said, her eyes slipping to her mother’s shoes again.
“Maybe,” her mother whispered. She took a breath. “It’s just such a delicate situation. I had thought that perhaps, if people only got to know you, they’d see you the way we do. They’d see that your…scars…don’t matter.”
But that wasn’t the truth, was it? Her scars did matter. They’d shaped her whole life.
Her mother crossed her arms. “It appears I was wrong—about everything—and your father…maybe he was right.”
Fern didn’t understand. “What do you mean, Mother?”
“After the fire,” she began, “your father thought we should send you to a home. A school, really, and of course, only the best. It’s in Indiana, on a farm.
” She wouldn’t look at Fern. “But I couldn’t bear to part with you.
You were so little,” she added with a sad laugh, like a good memory had just popped into her head.
“But I suppose now I see that I was being selfish. Maybe you would have been better off there than here in this wretched room.”
Fern was already shaking her head. “A school? What, like an institution? That’s horrible. I’m glad you didn’t send me there.”
And her turret wasn’t wretched. It was her home.
“You could have been with people like you,” her mother said. “No one would have stared at you the way everyone here did.”
Yes, people had stared. They still did. She would never be able to escape that burden.
“It doesn’t matter,” Fern said, and she meant it. Combing through the past was pointless. Dorothy Adair wasn’t the sort to pick apart her decisions anyhow.
“It does, Fern.” Something new changed her tone. Something like hope. “You’re still young. And these schools aren’t just for children. They’re for everyone. And you’re so smart. Why, Fern, you could be a teacher there.”
She watched her mother’s lips moving and heard the words spoken, but she couldn’t understand them. She couldn’t possibly be suggesting that Fern go to this institution now?
“I don’t understand. Teach? Where?”
She couldn’t draw a full breath. Couldn’t think straight.
“Indiana. Just outside Zionsville. It’s a school but also a working farm,” her mother answered, speaking quickly now, with building excitement. “There are fifty or so residents and a full staff, and I think you would fit in so well—”
“No.”
Her mother went quiet, her next word half-formed on her lips. She stared at Fern, her mouth slowly closing.
“I’m not going to an institution,” Fern whispered, her throat tight. The suggestion hurt. It hurt more than the back of her father’s hand.
“But darling, you could have a life there.” Pinpricks of color dotted her mother’s neck. It was where she blushed first. Never her cheeks, but her neck. It stood out against her pale skin and became a mottled rash.
“My life is here.”
“What life? You stay in your room most days. You barely go out, Fern.”
“I like staying in.”
It was comfortable. It was safe. Fern’s life wasn’t like her mother’s.
It wasn’t like her cousin Patrice’s or the odious Jane Farrington’s.
It was hers. Fern knew what to expect from it.
Did her mother honestly think she’d spent her childhood dreaming of marriage and children, and of doing all the things most women were able to do?
Fern’s chest squeezed as the smallest yes elbowed its way into her mind. Yes, she had dreamed of those things. But dreams were all they could ever be.
Her mother crossed her arms tighter and drew back her shoulders. “You would like going out more. You’d like not worrying about being seen by people who don’t understand.”
“You don’t know what I worry about, Mother,” Fern said, but it sounded petty. And weak. She did worry about it. Every day.
“I know that you’ll spend your life alone, hiding in this house, if you don’t do something. Maybe you won’t marry or have children, but you could still have a…a purpose.”
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” Fern stepped back and started to close the door. Her mother put her hand out.
“Please, just give Young Acres a try.”
Young Acres. That was the name of this soul-crushing institution. The one her father had wanted to ship her off to when she’d no longer been the adorable toddler that he could hold up and show off with pride.