Pretty Things

by Janelle Brown

  Benny stands on the edge of this pretty troika, awkward in a button-down shirt and a polka-dot bow tie, the only one whose smile looks forced. He looks a little younger than he was when I met him, his cheeks full and downy, his ears too big for his face. He hasn’t yet had the final growth spurt that will propel him into the land of giants, and his father still towers over him. He is just a child, I realize with a start. We were just children. A piano chord chimes inside me, in a poignant minor key. Poor Benny. Despite myself, I wonder how he’s doing in that institution.

  “Your family?” I ask.

  A brief hitch of hesitation. “Yes. Mom, Dad, little brother.”

  I know I should let it go, that I’m poking at an anthill with a short stick, but I can’t help myself. “Tell me about them,” I say. I throw myself on the couch across from her. “You guys look close.”

  “We were.”

  I can’t stop looking at the photograph even though I know I’m staring, and when I glance over at Vanessa, she is watching me. I can’t help it: I blush. I want to ask about Benny but I am afraid that something in my voice would give me away. “Were?”

  “My mother died when I was nineteen. She drowned.” Her eyes flick over to the window, with its view of the lake, and then flick back to me. “My father died earlier this year.”

  And then she bursts into tears.

  I freeze.

  I remember when I came across the news clipping during one of my Google searches, years ago: JUDITH LIEBLING, SAN FRANCISCO ARTS PATRON, DROWNS IN BOATING ACCIDENT. The article was light on details of her death, but heavy on lists of the philanthropies she’d been involved in: not just the San Francisco Opera, but also the de Young Museum, Save The Bay, and (somewhat poignantly) the Mental Health Association in California. I’d had a hard time reconciling the benevolent society do-gooder in the accompanying photos—standing alongside the mayor, red hair flying loose, smile wide—with the judgmental recluse I’d met at Stonehaven. She got her just deserts, I’d thought, before closing the page down. This was before I knew that Benny had been diagnosed with schizophrenia; I didn’t spend much time thinking about how the loss of her would have affected the family she left behind.

  But as I listen to Vanessa sob, it occurs to me that the Liebling children have perhaps experienced more than their fair share of tragedy. I think of the photo of Vanessa’s dying father’s hand and even though that image pissed me off—it felt exploitive, like she was using his death to troll for attention: Look at how sad I am!—now that I’m sitting next to her, I am uncomfortably aware of how genuine her grief is. Both parents gone and a brother in an institution. If I were a better person I would feel sorry for this bereaved woman sitting next to me and reconsider my plans for her, but I’m not. I’m shallow and I’m vindictive. I’m a bad person not a good one, and as I battle through this unwelcome pang of genuine empathy I force myself to think instead of the safe. I look around the room and wonder if it’s in here: Hidden behind a panel of books in that bookshelf? Under that pastoral oil painting of some Liebling ancestor’s prize horse, a beast with oversized haunches and a cropped tail?

  But beside me, Vanessa is still weeping—murmuring “I’m sorry”—and I can’t help it, I reach over and place my hand on hers. Just to make it stop, I tell myself, and yet there’s a hollow feeling in my chest that I can feel filling up with sorrow for this semi-stranger that I am planning to rob. “How did he die?” I can’t think of anything else to ask.

  “Cancer. It came on very quickly.”

  Oh God. The last thing I wanted to hear; I do not want to identify with her, in any way. “How awful,” I manage limply as she launches into a harrowing description of her father’s dying weeks that evokes my own worst nightmares.

  “I’m very…alone…right now,” she gasps. Why is she telling me these things? I want her to stop talking. I want to hate her, but it is hard to hate her when she is dripping tears on my hand.

  “I can’t imagine,” I say lightly, hoping that will end this train of conversation, and gently tug my hand away. But something about the way she looks at me when I say this, as if the only thing she wants in the world is to be understood, makes me rethink my answer. Because dammit, I do understand. I think of Vanessa’s photo of her dying father’s hand and I see my own mother’s shriveled hand; I imagine the choking silence of our house if the cancer takes her before I can save her. I know that if she dies this time I will be alone alone alone forever. Just like Vanessa. And my eyes mist over and my mouth falls open and I hear myself saying, “Or, maybe I can imagine. My father is gone, too. And my mother is…ailing.”

  Her tears stop and she looks at me with bald eagerness in her face. “You, too? How did your father die?”

  I scramble for an answer, because I know the proper one is not Oh, he’s not dead, my mom just chased him off with a shotgun after he hit me one too many times. Instead, I imagine an alternate past for myself, a doting father who played Uno with me instead of drinking tequila until he passed out, a dad who threw me in the air not to make me scream but to make me laugh. “Heart attack,” I offer. “We were really close.” I find myself choking up at the thought of this imaginary father, the purity of his love for me, the safety I feel in his strong arms.

  “Oh, Ashley, I’m so sorry.” She’s not crying anymore. She’s giving me this look and I feel a little sick to my stomach knowing that I now truly have her exactly where I want her: She thinks we are sisters in our struggles.

  I can’t afford to start believing that, too.

  * * *

  —

  I have never done a job like this. I’ve never moved so fully into someone else’s life, infiltrated their home and coerced them to be my friend. Most of my cons have taken place in the dark, under the cover of intoxication: parties, nightclubs, hotel bars. I’ve grown quite good at pretending to like someone that I secretly loathe. It’s easy when it’s four o’clock in the morning, and your mark has just consumed a liter of Finnish vodka, and you don’t have to look past their repelling facade. But this—this is a whole different beast. How do you rebuff someone who is genuinely trying to connect with you? How do you look them in the eye over a cup of coffee, for God’s sake, and hold yourself at arm’s length?

  It’s easiest to judge from a distance. That’s why the Internet has turned us all into armchair critics, experts at the cold dissection of gesture and syllable, sneering self-righteously from the safety of our screens. There, we can feel good about ourselves, validated that our flaws aren’t as bad as theirs, unchallenged in our superiority. Moral high ground is a pleasant place to perch, even if the view turns out to be rather limited in scope.

  But it’s much harder to judge when someone is in your face, human in their vulnerability.

  * * *

  —

  Ten more minutes of making small talk with Vanessa—spinning lies about my mother, my yoga career, my powers of healing (Hello, I am Saint Nina!)—and I am so drained that I can barely see straight. It’s time to get to the point of all this. Finally, I beg off, saying that I need to shower, and let Vanessa lead me down the hall and back toward the rear of the house.

  When we’re almost at the kitchen, I halt abruptly. “I left my yoga mat in the other room,” I chirp, and dash back down the hall before she can stop me.

  Back in the library I softly, silently, fish a camera the size of a pencil eraser from the hidden pocket in the waistband of my leggings. I scan the room and then sidle over to the bookshelf I’d noted during our conversation, one built into the corner with an angle that takes in the sweep of the room. I tuck the camera between two faded volumes—I, Claudius and The Richard D. Wyckoff Method of Trading in Stocks—and position it just so, and then step back to examine my handiwork. The camera is invisible unless you’re specifically looking for it. I grab my yoga mat from under the couch, where I discreetly kicked it while we were talking, and s
lip back out into the hallway.

  I jog back, flushed and breathless. Vanessa is waiting for me exactly where I left her.

  “You found it.”

  “Under the couch.” She’s staring at me, and I wonder, Does she know? But of course she doesn’t. She has no clue. The adrenaline that flushes my body makes me feel more alive and righteous than an entire hour of asanas did. This is going to work. This is why I’m here.

  So when she throws her arms around me and hugs me, it takes me a minute to realize that she is not celebrating my small victory, but is instead anointing me as her new confidante. “I’m so happy that we’re going to be friends,” she breathes in my ear.

  She thinks that we are friends.

  In her arms I am Nina and then I am Ashley and then I am Nina again, my identity as amorphous and shifting as a cloud caught in the wind. Too much of this and I may lose my grip on myself.

  “Of course we’re friends,” Ashley murmurs into Vanessa’s ear.

  I still hate you, Nina thinks.

  And then both of us hug her back.

  * * *

  —

  Back in the caretaker’s cottage, Lachlan is sprawled on the couch with his computer in his lap, surrounded by pastry crumbs. He looks up at me when I come in. “You could have brought me a cup of coffee, at least.”

  “There’s a Starbucks in Tahoe City, be my guest,” I say. I throw myself down on the couch next to him and pick up a half-eaten scone from the coffee table. It’s stale. Famished, I eat it anyway.

  Lachlan fiddles with his keyboard. “I was watching you out there, and you know, you’re not that bad at yoga. Maybe you should consider it as a career option, if all this doesn’t work out.”

  “Do you have any idea how much a yoga teacher makes?”

  He peers over the top of his glasses. “Not enough, I take it.”

  I think of my mother’s cancer treatments, mentally calculating how many $30 classes I would need to teach in order to pay for them. “Not nearly enough.”

  “Check it out,” he says, and swings his laptop around so I can see what he’s been tinkering with. It’s the live feed from the camera that I just hid in Stonehaven’s library. The quality of the image is bad—it’s grainy and dark—but the angle is just right, so that we can survey all three walls of the library and the space in between. The taxidermized bear hulks menacingly by the fireplace. The space heater glows in the corner. Lachlan and I watch together as Vanessa sweeps back into the room—still in the silk pajamas—and throws herself down on the couch. She sinks down into the pillows and pulls her phone out of her cardigan pocket, scrolling rapidly through it. I can tell without even seeing her screen that she is going through her Instagram feed.

  “One camera down, fair play,” Lachlan murmurs. He reaches over and cups my cheek in his hand: “I knew you could do it, my love.”

  I watch Vanessa’s blank face, lightly illuminated by the glow of her screen. Flick. Flick. Flick. She types a few words. Flick. Flick. Flick. I wonder if this is what she does all day: studies what everyone else is doing everywhere else, and decides if it’s worth liking, as she holds it up for comparison with her own life. How pathetic. The vulnerable, agonized Vanessa of before is gone; from here, she is once again a blank and empty vessel that I can observe with contempt. It’s almost a relief.

  “She googled Ashley,” I say. “She quoted my own fake Facebook account back to me. Do you think we were careful enough?”

  He turns his eyes back to the screen. “She’s going to see what she wants to see. She’s thick as a plank, and vain to boot.”

  I am giddy, the heat of victory still pulsing through my body; the dried sweat from my yoga workout sticky between my thighs. A week or two of this, and we’ll have all of our cameras exactly where we need them to be. And then it will be easy to bait our mousetrap and wait for Vanessa to walk right into it.

  We might be back in Los Angeles by the end of the year. By January, my mother could be partway through her new cancer regimen and on the path to remission. And then—Christ, if we get enough from that safe, I may never have to do this ever again. What a relief it would be; to stroll away from here and straight out into a whole new life, all debts paid off, and a bit more to spare. The Lieblings could at least, finally, give me that.

  I try not to think of the policemen standing watch over my Echo Park home, waiting for me to return so they can arrest me; or of the bills piling up in my mailbox; or of my dying mother lying in a hospital by herself, with no one to hold her hand. I try to remain steady in my belief that this horrible, tainted mansion—the same one that tore my life apart—will be the place where everything is magically glued back together again.

  On Lachlan’s laptop, Vanessa is still scrolling through her own tiny screen. The unbearable sadness of watching someone else’s life reduced to a screen on a screen makes me look away, my stomach twisting with sour distaste. What are we about to do to this woman? The thought bubbles up, unbidden: We should leave, now. It is a familiar feeling: this nagging sense that I’ve been looking at the world through a tilted mirror, and that if I were to turn it around and look at myself I would be horrified by what I saw.

  * * *

  —

  I am good at what I do, but that does not mean that I always enjoy what I do. My ability to weave lies, to try on new identities, to stir and deceive—yes, I love the adrenaline kick and vindictive high of it all. But I also sometimes feel it sitting at the bottom of my stomach, a sweet thick secret that sickens even as it thrills. How can I do this? Should I do this? Do I love this or hate this?

  The first time I ran a grift with Lachlan (a coke-addled action-film producer with a history of sexual harassment and a rare set of Pierre Jeanneret chairs worth $120,000), I fell ill for three days afterward. Vomiting all night, a shakiness that kept me abed. It was as if my body was purging some toxin that had infected it. I swore I would never do it again. And yet when Lachlan called me up for another job a month later, I could feel that the toxin was still there: a hot compulsion, a throb along my veins that made me feel faint. Perhaps it was in my blood.

  This, certainly, was what Lachlan believed. “A natural-born con, you are—but of course you would be. It’s in your genes,” he’d said, after we finished that first job together. So this is what my mother feels when she runs a successful con, I’d thought. Maybe it wasn’t so bad. After a lifetime of running away from my mother’s life, it was almost a relief to give up, turn around and run toward it.

  And yet, I hadn’t gone looking for the grift; the grift had come looking for me.

  The day that I arrived back in Los Angeles, Lachlan took me straight from the airport to the hospital to see my mother. I hadn’t visited her in almost a year, and I was shocked by her appearance: the brown roots darkening her blond hair, the dark circles under her eyes, the false eyelashes peeling away at the corners of her lids. She was gaunt, her skin loose and sallow. The ghost of her beauty still clung to her, but in the months since I’d last seen her she’d gone from looking like someone who could have her way with the world, to looking like someone who’d been decimated by it.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  She reached out and took my hand in hers. I could feel her bones clicking together in my grip and it was excruciating. “Oh, baby. There was nothing to tell. I’ve been feeling bad for a while but it just didn’t seem that bad.”

  “You shouldn’t have waited so long to see a doctor.” I blinked away tears. “You might have caught it before stage three.”

  “You know I hate doctors, baby.” This seemed disingenuous. More likely: My mother had the barest minimum of insurance, and was afraid of what the doctor would tell her, and this was why she’d ignored her symptoms for so long.

  I looked across the bed at Lachlan, as if he might have some insight into the situation, and he caught my gaze and
returned it steadily. “So,” I said. “How do you know my mom?”

  “From the poker circuit. She’s a sharp one, your mum.”

  I regarded him warily; noting, again, the crisp cut of his suit, the knowing bite to his smile, his lupine good looks, and a watch as expensive as the ones my mother liked to steal. “The poker circuit”—I knew this was where my mother trolled for marks. Was he a mark, himself?

  “Has she been like this for long? Why didn’t one of you think to call me sooner?”

  Lachlan shook his head, offering a faint smile of apology. “Your mum is a force,” he said, and reached out to smooth the blanket over her legs. “She does what she wants to do. And she puts on a good front, as I’m sure you know.”

  My mother beamed up at him with all the wattage she could muster and yet I could see the bravado in her smile, the panic creeping into the spidery lines around her eyes. She looked old suddenly, far older than her years. I thought of what the doctor had told me, of how weak she already was and how fast the cancer could advance. “Yes, she’s good at faking it.”