And When She Was Good by Laura Lippman

Author:Laura Lippman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2012-08-13T23:00:00+00:00

2000

You got fat,” Val said.

“A little.”

“I never would have let you run yourself down that way.”

“Anxiety eating. I was so worried—”

“And now you’re fat and I’m in prison for life, so all the eating in the world didn’t solve a thing, did it?”

“No.” She hung her head as if ashamed, but she was relieved that Val believed her puffy body was the result of bad eating habits.

Scott had been born only seven weeks ago, on the final day of the year. “Oh, look,” the nurse said. “He showed up in time to give you a tax deduction. How considerate.”

It had been a long, hard labor, almost thirty-six hours, complicated by the fact that Hector decided to die in the middle of it, almost as if he were giving up his place in line to his grandson. Beth, forced to choose between life and death in a way almost no one ever is, not really, decided she’d rather be at Hector’s bedside. Helen understood. Sort of. She even believed that it was probably the best choice, a dying man’s final hours over a baby’s seeming infinite number to come.

Besides, Beth might as well get used to not seeing Scott, because Heloise didn’t intend for her mother to spend any time with him at all, once she was cleared by the doctors to head back to Baltimore.

Considerate, the nurse had said, and Scott was that. Ten pounds at birth, he began sleeping through the night before he was a month old. But the delivery hurt. Lord, it hurt. Heloise had believed there was no new pain or indignity that could be visited on her body at this point in her life. Men had pretty much punished every inch of it over the years, but here were completely new sensations. Perhaps there were always new pains, fresh injuries that one couldn’t imagine.

But this was the only pain that brought joy. Pure, uncomplicated, terrifying joy. She would show her mother how it was done, what a woman was supposed to be to her child. And the first step of that was to cut her mother completely out of her life.

Val’s case went to the jury about a week after Heloise brought Scott home. They deliberated for three days, which his lawyer thought a good sign. But the jurors returned a guilty verdict, and he was given the death penalty. The news jolted her. She realized she didn’t want Val to die. She just wanted him to stay inside forever and ever.

The news jolted Val, too. He was furious, but his anger had nowhere to go. George I was in prison, somewhere on the Eastern Shore. That didn’t mean he was safe from Val’s wrath, or so Val said, but there would be no face-to-face retribution. The confidential informant had died in the autumn, as Tom had promised. Bettina, the fake informant to the fake informant, was long gone, almost certainly dead from her own bad habits. Still, Val focused angrily on her. How could she have known where he had hidden the gun? She was an idiot.

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