Page 22 of The Daring Times of Fern Adair
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 wasalready 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 hadtoldher?
“Was he the one who did this to you?” She tried to step inside the bedroom. But Fern stood firm, not lettingher 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 toknowyou, 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, likea 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.”
