IT’S AFTER MIDNIGHT WHEN THEY take me to the police headquarters. I have a brief impression of a monstrous glass building; I think I’ve seen pictures of it on TV. The officer leads me through a vast lobby, then through a warren of hallways. First stop, fingerprints. I was never printed the first time. Ironically enough, it’s my job as a schoolteacher that finally put me in the system. I had to have a background check to chaperone field trips, after-school activities. I’d been nervous then. What if they ran my prints and the previous incident—“nothing but an unfortunate accident,” my mother whispers—popped up for all to see? You’ll be fine, Conrad had kept telling me. You were just a kid; no charges were even filed.
In the end, that’s what saved me—no charges were filed, meaning I had no criminal record, versus a sealed juvie record, which could come back to haunt a person later.
After scanning each fingertip into the digital machine, the uniformed officer—Bob, someone calls him—leads me to a clinical-looking room where a woman in a lab coat swabs both my hands with some kind of substance, then uses a metal file to remove scrapings from beneath my nails. “I’m going to require her clothing,” she informs the officer, who nods as if this is no surprise.
If they’re taking my clothes, what does that leave me with? But no one bothers to tell me, and I can’t bring myself to ask.
I’m tired. The shock, adrenaline, something wearing off. Mostly, I feel like a pregnant woman, up way past her bedtime and deeply self-conscious that it’s not just me the police are arresting, but my unborn child.
I haven’t even met my baby yet, and I’m already filled with so many regrets.
Upstairs. A new floor with miles of blue carpet. I don’t get a chance to look around. My escort leads me straight to a small room with two chairs, one table, and a mirrored wall. Interrogation, I realize, and can’t help but think it looks much nicer than the rooms you see on TV. Then Officer Bob dumps me in the chair, releases my left wrist from the handcuff, only to attach the bracelet to a ring on the table, and any positive impressions I have of the room are over.
Officer Bob exits. At least I still have my clothes, I think, then move my free hand to rest on my rounded belly. As if that can protect my baby from what will happen next.
The door opens. An older gentleman with thinning brown hair walks in. He’s wearing a brown-and-gold-flecked sports jacket over a light-blue shirt. Pleated khakis; the kind that went out of fashion a decade ago, and yet are still favored by people of a certain age. He has a nice face. Serious, but not harsh. Never the bad cop, I think, more like the stern father figure.
I’m grateful I don’t recognize him. Then I wonder if they picked him because, given my history, stern father figure is exactly the right approach to take.
“Evelyn Carter?” he asks. “I’m Detective Phil LeBlanc.”
I have this ridiculous impulse to wave. Years of social training kicking in. I constrain myself to a short nod.
“I understand you’re pregnant?” he says.
I nod again.
“Can I get you anything? A glass of water? Ginger ale? My wife always loved ginger ale.”
Definitely the concerned father. I smile at him. I can’t help myself. He doesn’t understand. They never understood. And now . . . My baby. My poor unborn child.
“I would like my phone call,” I say. “And I’m not saying another word until I get it.”
THERE ARE TWO people I could call. Option A is the most obvious and the call I can’t bring myself to make. Option B will inform Option A of the situation anyway, so it hardly matters. Plus, Option B was my father’s best friend. He has plenty of reasons to doubt me, which is why I trust him more.
He doesn’t seem to be surprised to receive my call in the middle of the night. Because of his job, or because of how well he knows me? I walk him through the evening’s events, at least the bare bones. Conrad shot dead. Me in police custody.
“Have they arrested you?” Dick Delaney, one of Boston’s top criminal defense attorneys, asks me over the phone.
“I think so.” The events of recent months, let alone the past few hours, are starting to weigh heavily on me, dragging me down till everything has taken on a surreal quality. They never handcuffed me the first time. Never put me in a squad car, never drove me to the station for fingerprinting and processing and interrogation. I don’t understand these steps. It’s like watching an old movie, except the story line has been changed.
I don’t know how this story ends.
“Where are you?” Mr. Delaney asks.
“Police headquarters.”
“What did you tell them?”
“Nothing.”
“Keep it that way. They’re at the house now, working the crime scene?”
I nod into the phone, then remember I have to speak. “Yes. I’ve been fingerprinted. And my hands were swabbed. Blood. I had blood on my hands.”
“Probably testing for blood and GSR—gunshot residue,” Mr. Delaney mutters, but he seems to be talking more to himself than to me. “How are you holding up?”
“I’m tired.”
“Are you in pain, do you require medical assistance? How is the baby?”
“I’m okay.”
“You could be in shock. Perhaps you require medical observation.”
“I’m okay,” I say again.
Maybe that’s not the right answer. Maybe he’s trying to tell me something and I’m not getting it, because he falls quiet for a full minute or two.
“Evie—you’re going to have to spend at least one night in jail.”
I don’t know how to process that. Again, the story line is all wrong. I know shootings. I know blood and horror and loss.
The aftermath is not supposed to go like this.
“It’s the middle of the night,” Mr. Delaney is saying. “Nothing can happen till tomorrow, when the charges against you are formally presented in court. At that time, there’ll be an arraignment. I’ll be there to represent you, and hopefully get you released on bail. But again, none of this can happen before tomorrow.”
“They want my clothes,” I hear myself say. “Can they take my clothes?”
“Yes. They’re going to try to question you, Evie. Your job is to say nothing. Next, you will be taken to the county jail for overnight admittance. Given the severity of the charge, you’ll be held in isolation. But you’ll be formally processed. Your personal possessions will be taken and inventoried.”
I don’t have any. It occurs to me for the first time. I’d taken off my coat, set down my purse. I don’t have my cell phone. Not even my wallet. I feel a rising bubble of hysteria.
“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 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 hand 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, but 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.
Then I take it back. Because if I’m found guilty of shooting Conrad, if I go to jail this time, when my baby is born, they will take him or her from me. And there’s only one person they’d give my baby to.
I start shivering then, and I just can’t stop.
The nurse thinks I’m cold. Given my unclothed state, I don’t blame her. She produces the promised orange jumpsuit, along with voluminous panties. She steps back a few feet as I wrestle the clothing on. The underwear are just plain wrong, like granny panties met men’s boxers and tried to mate. The orange jumpsuit is also overly large, and scratchy from harsh chemicals. I can get it over my belly, but it swims around my upper body. The shoulders land somewhere around my ears. The leg length is intended for someone twice my height. The nurse takes pity on me and helps roll up the hems before I trip and fall.
We’ve already run through all my vitals. Physical description, date of birth, identifying tattoos. Foreplay before this main event.
Now it’s done. I’m in the system. Not a prisoner, yet, I’m told, as I’m in jail, which is considered temporary. It all depends on how good my attorney, Dick Delaney, is and what happens at the courthouse a mere few hours from now.
“You’ll be in your own cell,” the nurse tells me now, throwing away her gloves, picking up her clipboard. “How do you feel?”
She nods toward my rounded belly.
“Tired.”
She hesitates. “You’re entitled to a medical hold. If you have any concerns about your health, the baby’s health.”
I have a sense of déjà vu. Mr. Delaney asked me all these questions. I didn’t get it then. I don’t get it now.
“Your pulse rate is fine,” the nurse says now, looking straight at me. “Surprisingly strong, all things considered.”
I don’t have tears. Just an endless void of anguish.
“Your vitals are stable. In my honest opinion, I would stick to your own cell. But of course, you have rights . . .”
“What happens in medical?” I ask finally.
“The infirmary is a different ward. More like . . . a hospital. You’d get your own room there, as well as access to medical staff, twenty-four seven. Are you depressed?” she asks abruptly.
“I’m tired,” I say again.
“If you have concerns, any thoughts of harming yourself, your baby . . .”
“I would never do anything to hurt my child!”
She nods. “This place, it’s loud. The pipes, the walls, the inmates in the wards above you. You’re going to hear noise, all night long.”
I smile; there’s not much of night left.
“But the infirmary . . . let’s just say, it’s its own special kind of shrill. It’s not populated by inmates with physical injuries as much as by prisoners with mental ones. The screazies, the other inmates call them—screaming crazies. But again, if you have any concerns for your or the baby’s well-being . . .”
I get it now. They all think I’m going to kill myself. Or the baby. Mr. Delaney, this nurse, they don’t want me on their conscience. Even if that means assigning me to a night surrounded by frothing lunatics.
“I’m okay,” I say again.
That’s it. A female CO reappears, leads me out of the medical exam room. I have a little baggie of toiletries; a clear toothbrush the size of a pinky; a small, clear deodorant; clear shampoo; and white toothpaste. On my feet, I wear the world’s ugliest pair of flat white sneakers, but at least they’re comfortable. Around my wrists, the CO has once again fastened the restraints.
The hall is wide and cold. Cinder block. Thick, but the nurse is right; I already hear the towering prison moaning and groaning around us. Thudding pipes, booming mechanicals, distant murmurs of hundreds, if not thousands, of caged humans, trying to get through another night.
We arrive at a cell. Cream-painted cinder-block walls. A molded stainless steel toilet, no seat. Thin foam mattress with single beige blanket.
I say nothing. Walk inside. Hold out my wrists. The female CO removes the cuffs.
She closes and locks the heavy metal door, with its cutout window so they can monitor me at all times.
I sink onto the hard platform bed. I pull up my legs with my tennis shoes still on. Then I close my eyes and wish it all away.
My father. Conrad. Beautiful Cambridge. Hard-fought Winthrop. Choices made. Cycles repeated. Around and around and around.
And now, growing determinedly in my own womb, the next generation of tragedy.
I need to do better. I have to do better.
Yet, locked inside jail, waiting to be formally charged with murder . . .
I don’t have any answers. Just distant notes from piano pieces I haven’t played in at least ten years.
Once upon a time, there was a little girl in a big house who loved her father so much she was sure he would never leave her.
But he did.
And now this.
I close my eyes and, curled around my baby, will myself to sleep.