“I tried calling. . . .” Her mother’s voice was weak and a little bit slurred, as if all the edges were lopped off. It must be after midnight. He must have woken her up from a sleeping-pill slumber.
“Feeding me some bullshit story. I had to hear it from Frank at the department. Thank God someone respects me.”
Gemma’s heart sank. It had been stupid to believe that they could conceal the truth from her father. He had contacts everywhere—in the police department and even in the government, although he kept his most important contacts secret. He’d cofounded the sixth-largest pharmaceutical company in the country, Fine & Ives, which made everything from shampoo to heart medication to drugs for soldiers suffering from PTSD. Although he’d been kicked off the board of his own company after a brutal three-year legal battle when Gemma was a toddler—Gemma had never found out the details, but she knew her dad had disapproved of where the company was putting its resources—he still traveled with a personal security guard and went to Washington, DC, every quarter to meet with politicians and lobbyists and top brass.
Often Gemma feared she would never, ever get truly away from her parents—not even when she went to college, not even when she moved out and moved as far away from Chapel Hill as possible and had her own family. They would always be able to find her. They would always be able to see her, wherever she was.
“I respect you,” Kristina protested, and Gemma got a sudden strangled feeling, as if a hand were closing around her throat. Her father was twelve years older than Kristina. He and his twin brother, Ted, had both been to West Point, like their father before them. Geoffrey had gone on to become a military strategist, and he never let anyone—least of all Gemma and her mom—forget it. Respect. That was the drumbeat of their lives. Respect. He could write a book, she thought, about respect, and discipline, and order, and work. He could probably write a whole series.
On the other hand, what he knew about acceptance and tolerance and his own daughter would barely fill up a tweet.
Sometimes Gemma wondered how it was possible they were made from the same genetic material. Her father was angular and cold everywhere she was warm and soft and sensitive. But the proof was there. She would have so much rather looked like her mother. Instead she had her father’s hazel eyes, his square chin, his way of smiling with the corners of his mouth turned down, as if neither of them had ever quite learned to do it correctly.
“I didn’t want to worry you,” Gemma’s mom went on. “Gemma said it was just a prank. Some girls have been giving her a hard time at school, and—”
“A prank, Kristina? Are you blind? This wasn’t a prank. This was a message. Do you know who Frankenstein is?”
“Of course I know—”
“Frankenstein is the doctor. In the original story, in the real version, he’s the one who made the monster.” There was a long moment of silence. Gemma could feel her heart beating painfully, swollen like a bruise. “This was a message for me.”
He’s the one who made the monster.
This was a message for me.
She tried to love her father. She tried to believe he loved her, as Kristina insisted that he did. She had made excuses, the same ones her mom always parroted back to her. He’s bad at expressing feelings. He’s stressed at work. He didn’t get a lot of love from his father.
But deep, deep down, Gemma had always suspected that the reason her father avoided her, the reason he could barely look her in the eye, the reason he kept all her baby pictures locked up in drawers and desks instead of proudly on display in frames, the reason he could hardly speak to her without losing his temper, as if she were always paying for a crime she didn’t know she had committed, was much simpler.
He couldn’t stand her.
He thought she was a disappointment. A defective model, but one, sadly, that couldn’t be exchanged or returned.
Her mother said something else, something Gemma didn’t hear. There was a high whining in her ears, as if they were filled with bees. She wanted to turn around and run, to flee back to her bedroom, to wake and realize this had all been a dream. But she couldn’t move.
“There was a breach at Haven,” her father said.
“What do you mean, breach?”
“Apparently, one of them escaped,” Geoff said.
A long pause. “Well, it won’t live. No way can it live. The currents on that island . . .”
“But what if it does? Jesus Christ, Kristina. Can you imagine? Can you imagine the absolute shitstorm if the story gets out? We’ll be persecuted. We’ll be executed.”
Kristina’s voice rose in pitch. “No one will know what we’ve done,” she says. “How could they?”
Her father barked out a laugh—an angry, bitter sound. “There are ways, trust me. All you have to do is follow the money.”
“But you left Fine and Ives for that reason. You refused to participate—”
“Too little, too late. I knew what Saperstein was planning. I knew where the new round of funding would go.”
Gemma could no longer follow the thread of the conversation. Still, she remained motionless, gripping the banister, trying to squeeze down a mounting scream. She could see her mother worrying the hem of her bathrobe between her fingers, and her father pacing, passing in and out of view. The angle made it impossible to see his face—a small blessing.
After a while, he spoke again. “Bowling Springs is only fifty miles from Haven.”
Gemma’s mother looked up. Her face was very pale, her eyes like two holes. “No,” she said. Gemma was shocked. She’d never heard her mother say no to her father. “You can’t. Gemma’s been looking forward to this trip for ages. April has been looking forward to it. What will I tell her moms?”