Pretty Things

by Janelle Brown

  This cabin was the entirety of our little personal universe, a place where we fit in a world where we otherwise didn’t. Or, at least, it’s where I thought I fit in it, until his family dragged me out and showed me exactly how I didn’t belong.

  I sit down at the table in the dining nook, rubbing my finger across the scars in the wood: a series of circular marks in the finish, faded water rings. Could that be from the beer cans we set down here, years ago, when Benny and I would smoke joints at this table and bitch about our families? How easy it is to be careless when you’re young and ignorant of the permanence of damage.

  Lachlan throws himself down in the chair next to me and unscrews the top on the bottle of wine. He studies the label on the bottle and then picks at a price tag with his finger: $7.99. “Well. She didn’t exactly dig up the wine cellar on our behalf,” he says.

  “We’re commoners. She probably thinks we won’t know the difference.”

  “She thinks you’re a commoner. I’m landed gentry, remember? You should feel lucky to be in my presence.”

  I pick up the bottle and press my lips to the rim, tipping it so the wine rolls down my throat. It’s warm and sweet, but it will do the job. “At least she’s trying to be friendly.”

  “More than friendly. Did you see how much makeup she was wearing? She didn’t do that for you, darling.” He tilts his head, considering something. “But she’s rather pretty, if you scraped all that slap off her face. Has a Grace Kelly patrician blonde thing going for her.”

  I don’t like the expression on his face at all, like he’s about to bite into a particularly enticing bonbon. I take another gulp from the wine bottle. “Can we just focus on the plan now, please?”

  * * *

  —

  And what is the plan, you may be wondering.

  In our luggage, buried beneath a stack of poetry books and my old yoga mat, we have packed a dozen tiny spy cameras. Each is the size of a screwhead, and yet they are capable of streaming high-definition video from Stonehaven to our laptops in the cottage, a few hundred yards away. What was once cutting-edge technology, now available online for $49.99.

  The cameras are to be planted in inconspicuous hiding spots inside Stonehaven, where we might be able to track Vanessa’s movements and pinpoint the location of the safe. The safe is most likely to be in her bedroom, or perhaps a library or an office. We’ll have to find excuses to get into those rooms, however we can. The closer we can get to Vanessa, the easier this will be.

  It’s not that there aren’t other valuable targets within the walls of Stonehaven: Just the grandfather clock that I saw in the parlor would cover six doses of my mother’s cancer medication. And yet, as long as Efram is missing in action, we lack a fence for antiques. The money in Vanessa’s safe is a better bet. Easier to smuggle out, easier to liquidate.

  Once we’ve located the safe, sussed out its contents, and taken measure of the security system, we’ll check out of the cottage and go somewhere else for a while. We’ll hunker down somewhere nearby and let a few more renters come through the cottage, erase ourselves from Vanessa’s memory, delete our trail from the Internet. And then, six weeks or so later, maybe over Christmas if she leaves to visit her brother, we’ll go in and take it all.

  I close my eyes and an old, familiar image rises in my mind: a dark vault, stacks of green bills bound with paper bands and luminous with promise. So much rides on luck, of course: that the code hasn’t changed, that the cash is still there. But I just know. The Lieblings were both paranoid and lazy. I remember how Benny talked about the money in the safe, as if it was simply understood that everyone needed a seven-figure emergency fund: William Liebling had surely passed his neuroses on to his children. After all, we inherit our parents’ habits—good and bad—along with their genes.

  I let myself imagine what else we might find in the safe, once we get it open. Gold coins? Jewelry? The diamonds I saw fastened around Judith Liebling’s neck in the photo from the San Francisco Opera opening: Vanessa surely inherited that, along with the rest of her mother’s jewelry collection. Likely they are in there as well, tucked in velvet boxes alongside the cash.

  Don’t get greedy. Just this once, am I allowed to ignore all my own rules?

  * * *

  —

  Lachlan and I sit there, drinking and scheming, until the wine is gone and we are tipsy and exhausted. I am in desperate need of a shower, so I grab my bag and take it to the bedroom. I throw open the door and then find myself standing in the doorway, unable to go any farther.

  Because there it is, the bed. A great four-poster monstrosity, dulled from years without polishing, but still a piece grand enough for a princeling. Probably it was, once. It is also the bed where I lay as Benny peeled off my jeans, tugging them awkwardly over my calves, while I kept my eyes riveted to the painting on the wall. The bed where I lay waiting for him to take his own clothes off, my body shaking from fear and desire and strange roiling emotions I didn’t know how to name.

  Poor Benny. Poor me.

  I wonder what Benny would think of me, if he could see me now. Not much, probably; but then again, I suppose he never really did, not once that flush of puppy love had faded away and his family reminded him who I really was.

  Lachlan has come up behind me, I can feel his breath on my neck as I stare into the bedroom. “Bringing back memories?” he says.

  “Yeah.” I choose not to elaborate. Because something about this adult lover that I have now—so modern and cunning and slick with deceit—feels like a rebuke to that first, naïve, tender love I so briefly experienced here in this cabin. This is the person I’ve become, a stranger to the child Nina who once trembled in the arms of a skinny teenage boy. No, the Nina I am now has never been in this cottage at all.

  He wraps his arms around me from behind, crossing them over my chest, drawing me in, close to him. “I lost my virginity to my babysitter,” he whispers into my ear. “Emma Donogal. I was thirteen and she was eighteen.”

  “Jesus. That’s child molestation.”

  “Technically, I suppose, but at the time it felt like the greatest thing that had ever happened to me. Her breasts had already been a fixture in my wet dreams for years. Lovely Emma. I had a fixation on older women for a long time, because of her.”

  I spin in his arms to look up at his face, surprised by the wistful tone in his voice, but he looks amused more than melancholy. He laughs at the expression on my face, and then kisses my forehead and rests his chin in my hair. “Of course, younger women are lovely, too. Don’t worry.” And I wonder, not for the first time, if he ever had a thing with my mother. He splits the difference between us—a decade between us both—and God knows my mother has seduced her own fair share of younger men over the years. I am afraid to ask.

  Lachlan was the one who found my mother, three years back. He’d come to pick her up for a poker game and discovered her collapsed in the bathroom, head gashed open on the edge of her sink. Lachlan took her to the hospital for stitches, which turned into an MRI and an overnight stay for further testing. The two of them had been developing a con together—what it was, they never told me; but needless to say, it never happened. Instead, Lily’s cancer happened.

  I wouldn’t have known if Lachlan hadn’t gotten my phone number from my mother and called me in New York City. He was just a strange disembodied voice on the end of the line back then, a barely detectable burr of an accent. “I think your mother needs you here. It’s cancer,” he’d said. “But she’s too stubborn to ask. She doesn’t want to disrupt your life.”

  My life. I don’t know what my mother had told him I was doing out there in New York, how she still dreamed my Great Future had manifested itself, but it certainly wasn’t the life I was actually leading. After graduating from my third-tier college with a BA in art history and six figures in student loan debt, I’d headed to New York, thinking I’d
find a job at an auction house or a Chelsea gallery or an arts nonprofit. It turned out that those jobs were few and far between and, I quickly discovered, reserved for those with real connections—parents on the museum board, family friends who were famous painters, influential mentors from their Ivy League colleges. The only job I could find was as the third assistant to an interior designer whose specialty was redecorating luxury vacation homes in the Hamptons.

  At that point, I was still determined to get as far away from my childhood as possible. I’d groomed myself until I looked like a facsimile of the woman I aspired to be, I was slim and shiny in my fast fashion. But when Lachlan called, I was also impossibly broke, living on falafel and ramen, and sharing an apartment in Flushing with three other women. I scurried about New York and the Hamptons, one of thousands of underpaid and overqualified young women similarly scurrying, sourcing fabric for custom curtains and arranging for Italian settees to be craned into penthouse windows and, most of all, fetching venti macchiatos for my boss. I was fluent in the language of bone and ivory and eggshell. I memorized the contents of Sotheby’s auction catalogs and the names of the oligarchs who bought $60 million paintings and fourteenth-century gold-inlaid secretaries. I spent my days monitoring workmen as they hung hand-painted wallpaper that the homes’ owners—society matrons, hedge fund wives, Russian billionaires—would immediately demand be ripped down because it just didn’t feel right.

  My job, I knew, was a dead end. And yet, there were those moments when I would be alone in one of those enormous houses, alone with all of those beautiful things, and I could pretend that it all belonged to me. I’d come face-to-face with an Egon Schiele drawing hanging on a wall in a bathroom, or would run my hands along a seventeenth-century card table, hand-inlaid with mother-of-pearl marquetry, or sit on the very same Frank Lloyd Wright armchair that I’d studied in an architectural design course. Objects that transcended all of this, objects that had endured centuries of indifferent owners, objects whose enduring mystery and beauty lived in opposition to the ephemeral nature of our digital age. These things would still exist when I did not, and I counted myself fortunate to be able to have time with them at all.

  Nearly a decade had passed since my mother had told me it was time to focus on my Future, and yes, I’d managed to get an education—an education into the way the one percent lived, a way I would never be able to live myself. It was like sitting in the front row of a Broadway show and longing to join all the action on the stage in front of me, but realizing that there was no stairway to get me up there, too.

  So when the strange voice on the other end of the line informed me that my mother needed me in Los Angeles, I quit my job on the spot. Within the day, I’d packed up all my cheap black dresses, given the key back to my roommates, and was on a plane to California. I told myself at the time that I was leaving New York purely out of responsibility for my mother—I was all she had, of course I would go take care of her—but wasn’t I also fleeing my own failure?

  And when I got off the airplane there was a man standing there waiting for me, suit jacket slung over one shoulder, ice-blue eyes roving across the faces of the people coming in until they snagged on mine and stayed there. A faint smile on his face, so impossibly handsome: I felt a little lift of hope at the sight of him, matching the accelerated thrum of my pulse. “You look just like your mother,” he’d said, as he gently pried the suitcase from my hand.

  “We’re nothing alike,” I’d retorted, still clinging to the last residue of that Great Future I’d once been so sure I had.

  * * *

  —

  And yet, as I stand here in the cottage at Stonehaven three years later, I know that my mother and I are more alike than I ever imagined.

  18.

  AND SO IT BEGINS.

  The next morning, at an hour when the light is still pallid and anemic, I drag a mat out to the great lawn and conspicuously run through a yoga routine. The lake is a confrontational gray, and the frigid November air penetrates my workout clothes; I’m shivering even as I sweat. I’ve done plenty of yoga over the years, but never quite like this, like I have something to prove. My body balks at the unnatural exertions, the unnatural hour. And yet there is also something about being out there under the pines that feels clean and elemental. The crisp air that smells of green: It brings me back to my childhood, and the way that Tahoe felt like an oasis to me.

  Sun Salutation and Half Moon, Wild Thing and Side Crane. Toes clawed into my thigh, hands lifted to the sky: I imagine eyes watching me from both the cottage and the main house, and feel powerful under their gaze. An earth goddess; or at the very least, a good enough fake.

  When I’m done, I roll up the mat and do a few showy bonus stretches and then turn around to face Stonehaven. Vanessa is standing at the French doors that lead from the kitchen to the garden, watching me through fogged windowpanes. She steps quickly back, as if embarrassed to have been caught spying on me, but I wave at her before she can vanish, and walk toward the house. When I’m a few feet away, she pushes the door open and stands there with an awkward smile on her face. She’s wearing pink silk pajamas topped with a fuzzy cashmere cardigan, her hands wrapped around another one of those porcelain cups.

  “Sorry about that, I should have asked if you’d mind. But the sunrise was so glorious, I couldn’t resist.” There is sweat trickling down the side of my face; I dab at it with a towel.

  She tugs her cardigan around her body with one hand, tucking it tight against the draft. “I’m impressed. I only just woke up.”

  “I’m an early riser. The dawn is the best time of day. Just so quiet and full of promise.” This is a lie. At home, I’ll stay in bed until noon if given the chance. But sleep eluded me last night; something about being back in the caretaker’s cottage, the claustrophobia of all those memories. Every time I drifted off I would dream of a hulking figure, reaching out to yank me from under the covers, and I would wake with my heart in my throat. Then I’d lie there in the dark, listening to Lachlan’s soft snores beside me, wondering who I was and what I’d done, why I was back here of all places. Thinking also of my mother back in Los Angeles, slowly being eaten away by cancer while she waits for me to return with the money for her cure; remembering also how beautiful she once looked in that blue sequined cocktail dress, her face pink with laughter.

  Around four A.M. I finally gave up on sleep altogether and went to the kitchen to study yoga tutorials on my laptop.

  Now Vanessa takes a sip of her coffee. She is pale and drawn without the heavy makeup she was wearing yesterday, as if someone took an eraser to her features overnight; and I realize how much of her beauty is yet another illusion. “Maybe I should join you tomorrow…?” she says. The sentence trails off into a tentative question mark.

  “Of course!” I wait for an invitation to come inside and, when it doesn’t come, I gesture at the cup in her hand. “Can I beg a cup off you?”

  She looks down at her hands, as if surprised to discover that there’s something there. “Coffee, you mean?”

  “We don’t have any in the cottage,” I say pointedly. “I’m a horror in the morning if I don’t have caffeine.” This is true. Already I feel myself tallying up the truths and the untruths I’m telling her and I wonder how soon I’ll start mixing them all up. She’s still standing there as if she doesn’t understand what I’m talking about. “We don’t have any coffee in the cottage. We haven’t had a chance to do a grocery run.”

  “Oh! Of course. No need to beg, I should have offered.” She smiles and pulls the door open wider and steps back. “I’ve got a pot in the kitchen. Come in.”

  Compared to the closeness of the caretaker’s cottage, Stonehaven is freezing, despite the efforts of the ancient furnace that I can hear creaking and huffing below the polished wooden floorboards. I follow her into the kitchen, where an Italian coffee machine is keeping a pot of coffee warm. “I’m still f
iguring out how to use this thing,” she says as she pours me a cup. “I lived in New York for so long that I started to believe that coffee only came from bodegas.”

  I know for a fact that Vanessa Liebling does not get her coffee from bodegas; that the coffee she drinks generally sports elaborate latte art and fussy little garnishes and is served at outdoor cafés in Greenwich Village or Le Marais. (Her coffee habits have been well documented on her feed.) I suppose she thinks that identifying with the common people who buy crappy coffee in paper bags will somehow make me like her more. I would hate her less if she owned up to her privilege, instead of pretending that she’s slumming it with me.

  Smile, I remind myself. I need access to Stonehaven; I need her to like me. But as the two of us stand here, awkwardly lobbing lies at each other, it feels impossible that any kind of connection—false or not—might be forged between us. We politely sip at our coffees, smiling nervously at each other, until Vanessa finally breaks the silence.

  “So Michael doesn’t do yoga with you?”

  “Oh God, no. He’d murder me if I tried to rouse him that early.” A semi-truth.

  She nods as if she can relate to this sentiment. “Do you want to…sit down? We could go in the library. It’s a little warmer in there.”

  The library. I can still see Mrs. Liebling sitting on that velvet couch, design magazines stacked in slippery piles around her. “That would be lovely. Otherwise I’ll be creeping around the cottage trying not to wake Michael up.”

  Vanessa tops up our coffees and I follow her into the library. It’s all as it was the last time I was in here—the bereft moose, the jacketless tomes, the green velvet couch, all looking a little worse for the wear. Vanessa throws herself down in a corner of the couch where the nap is particularly flattened and she tugs a blanket over her feet. I follow her lead but find myself stopping in front of a photograph in a silver frame that’s displayed prominently on the mantel over the fireplace. It’s a portrait of the Lieblings that I’ve never seen before, one that must have been taken a year before I met Benny because there’s Vanessa at the center in a maroon cap and gown, graduating from high school. Her parents flank her, her mother in a pristine yellow day dress with a silk scarf around her neck and her father in a bespoke suit with a matching yellow pocket square. I am taken aback by the broad, genuine smiles on their faces, the wholesome nature of their obvious parental pride; in my memory, they are both scowling, joyless fiends with pointed teeth.