Mother-Daughter Murder Night(43)

“It didn’t get better when my sister came back,” Martin said. “I was seventeen then. She was twenty-four. Things didn’t work out for Di in England, and all she wanted to do was take her disappointment out on me. It got claustrophobic. I couldn’t wait to go to college.”

Beth slowed as they approached the outskirts of Salinas, fields giving way to a long line of blank-faced buildings. Martin stared out at the warehouses.

“But even that was hard.” Martin’s voice caught on the wind, dipping and wavering as it reached Beth’s ears. “When I left for MIT, it was like the last thread had snapped. Dad wanted me to stay on the ranch, go to community college, work with him. He wouldn’t even come east for graduation. Said it was calving season and he couldn’t get away. Implied I was neglecting my duties, that I should be with him pulling heifers out of some cow’s ass instead of walking across the stage.”

“But you did come back,” Beth said.

“To Silicon Valley. Now San Francisco. I’ve built three nanotech businesses. I have a restored loft with eighteen-foot-high ceilings and a guest room with a world-class view of the bridge. Not that my dad would ever come visit. It’s only a ninety-minute drive, but as far as he was concerned, it might as well be the moon.”

He gave her a quick, hopeful glance. Beth could see a request for validation, redemption maybe, in his eyes. She stopped at a red light and touched his forearm. “I know what it’s like to defy your parents’ expectations.”

“Big disappointment when you left home too, huh?”

Beth looked up into the rearview mirror and saw her mother sixteen years ago, doing her eye makeup in the front hallway of the house in Beverly Hills. Beth stood behind Lana, looking past her own unwashed face to her mother’s perfect reflection in the mirror. She tried to stand up straight, to speak calmly. But she was only seventeen, and there was no easy way to say this.

“Ma. I’m pregnant.” The word died in her mouth before it fully got out.

“Winners don’t mumble, Elizabeth.”

So she said it again.

Lana drew the eyebrow wand down from her face and stared at her daughter in the mirror.

“Is this some kind of joke?” Lana said. “Did you take that psychologist’s advice and join an improv group to boost your confidence?”

Beth kept her voice steady. “I’m not joking.”

“Say it again.”

“Ma.”

“Again,” Lana demanded.

“I’m pregnant.”

The dam broke. Her mother’s voice picked up speed and heat, calling her stupid, selfish, saying she’d ruined everything for the both of them. She didn’t ask how Beth was feeling (frightened), whether it was that baseball player Manny (it was), or what he thought (that it was her problem). Lana insisted on an abortion, in Palmdale maybe, somewhere fast and anonymous so Beth could go back to being the perfect Stanford-bound daughter to her perfect business-mogul mother.

Lana raged, and Beth kept her mouth shut. She knew she couldn’t win an argument with her mother. She couldn’t even compete. Lana was always on attack, never truly listening to or caring for another human being, even her own flesh and blood. Silence was the one form of power Beth had at her disposal. Silence, and her own intuition. Beth was scared, and angry, and there were tears sticking to her cheeks. But down in her belly, she felt a kind of tautness, a pressure building. Like she was pregnant with a storm.

And just like that, Beth knew what she wanted.

“I’m keeping the baby.”

Lana’s makeup bag fell to the floor with a clatter, sending compacts, mascaras, and lipsticks rolling across the buffed hardwood.

“So you’re going to ruin your life, is that it?” Lana was talking to her shoes, to the makeup strewn across the floor, looking anywhere but at Beth. “You’re going to throw away college and med school and your goals for what—a squawking pile of poop and need? Where are you and this baby going to live? Not here with me. Not with your father in Costa Rica or wherever the hell he is. What are you going to do?”

Beth had not considered this. But she did now. She took a deep breath and wiped her face with the back of her sleeve. Beth decided to behave as if this were a calm, normal question from her mother. She waited until the storm settled inside her before she spoke.

“I was thinking I could move to the beach house,” Beth said.

Lana snorted. “What beach house?”

“The foreclosure up the coast. The one that client dumped on you.”

Lana stared through her daughter.

“That bungalow is a disaster.” Lana’s voice cooled to its clipped, businesslike baseline. “I never should have accepted it. It’s probably slid down into the marsh by now. No one’s even been in there in ten years.”

Beth didn’t hear a no.

“I’ll clean it up,” Beth said. “I’ll pay rent if you need me to. Once I get a job.”

Beth bit down hard on the inside of her lower lip to keep herself from bursting into tears again. Her head was swimming. But her body felt sturdy. Beth held Lana’s dry gaze until her mother was the one to break eye contact.

“Rent won’t be necessary,” Lana said. “You’ll have your hands full as it is.”

And just like that, she went back to doing her makeup.