Pretty Things

by Janelle Brown

  My mother squeezed my hand. “Don’t talk about me like I’m not here,” she chided. “I’m a little sick. I’m not brain dead. Yet.” I hated the way she laughed at this.

  Lachlan studied me from across the hospital bed. “You know, your mother has told me a lot about you.”

  “She didn’t tell me anything about you.” I looked down at my mom, who dimpled guilelessly back at me. “What has she been saying?”

  He pulled up a chair and settled himself down in it, crossing his left leg over his right. There was a languid quality to him, as if he was slipping through cool water. “That you’ve got a degree in art history from a fancy college,” he said.

  “Not that fancy,” I retorted.

  He was running a thumb along the pale skin of my mother’s inner arm where it lay on the blanket, gently, like a father caressing a sleeping child. I felt something stir inside me, a desire to feel that finger pressed against my own flesh. “That you know lots about antiques. That you’ve spent the last few years making expensive houses look nice. That you are in frequent proximity to rich people. Billionaires. Hedge fund types.”

  “This is interesting to you for some reason?”

  “I could use someone like you. For some work I’ve been doing. Someone with a discerning eye.” I could feel Lachlan’s assessing gaze, studying me, and I suddenly understood: He was a con, just like my mom. That explained his coolheaded demeanor, the invisible power he seemed to wield over my mother. How close to legitimacy was he skating? I wondered. Whatever his game was, it was clearly working for him.

  My mother struggled upright in the bed and shook a finger at him. “Lachlan, stop it. Leave her alone.”

  “What? You can’t blame me for asking. You’ve spoken so highly of her.”

  “Nina has a career.” My mother’s smile shone up at me from the bed. “My bright girl. She has a BA.”

  The way she pronounced those two letters, as if they were a magic spell that was going to protect us both, nearly broke me. I was glad my mother had never seen me fetching soy lattes for my boss, had never visited my sad Flushing apartment or witnessed me polishing a billionaire’s gilded bidet. “I’m weighing some options while I’m out here, but thanks,” I lied to Lachlan. “I’m not sure that your line of work is my cup of tea.”

  “What makes you think you know my line of work? So presumptuous.” His smile undercut his indignation, and I saw that he had teeth that were white but lopsided. I thought of my own crooked teeth, the result of being unable to afford dentistry as a child, and wondered if we had that much in common. I found myself smiling back at him, despite myself. He stood, and patted my mom’s hand. “I have to run.”

  “You’re not leaving?” My mother’s eyes were open suddenly, and pleading.

  “You know you can call me if you need anything at all, Lily-belle.” He leaned over my mother and pressed his lips gently against her forehead, as if she were a tiny precious thing that might break under undue pressure. I wanted to build a wall of steel around my heart, a defense against this man, but something about the tenderness in that kiss moved my defenses. I wondered how long he’d been taking care of my mom, and if it had been a hustle on his part. If there had been anything in it for him, I couldn’t see what it was. My mother was broke and broken; she had nothing to give. He seemed genuinely fond of her.

  “He’s a good man,” my mother whispered to me. She clutched my hand. “A real softy, underneath it all. I don’t know what I would have done without him.”

  Maybe that’s why, as he left the room, I accepted the piece of paper that he slipped me, the one with his phone number on it, “In case you change your mind,” he whispered in my ear. Maybe that’s why I didn’t throw the paper away, but tucked it into my wallet.

  On the day that my mother and I left the hospital, with a fistful of prescriptions and a chemo schedule in my purse, Lachlan’s phone number was still there. It was there when I got to my mother’s Mid-City apartment and discovered the squalor in which she’d been living; it was there when the first hospital bill arrived, a five-figure abomination; it was there when my mother vomited blood after her first chemo treatment, and I understood that her care was going to be a full-time job for the foreseeable future. It was there when I got rejected for jobs at two dozen local art galleries, museums, and furniture shops.

  I hadn’t been around to take care of my mother over the last few years, and I was determined to make up for it; but I had no clear way to live up to this task. My mother had no safety net: I was supposed to be her safety net, and yet I had none of the things she needed most. No money, no job, no friends, no prospects. Only debt and determination.

  On the day that I withdrew the last fifty dollars from my bank account in order to pay my mother’s gas bill, I found Lachlan’s number in my wallet. I fished it out with two fingers and looked at it for a long time—at the crisp boldness of his neatly inked digits, definitive against the stark white bonded paper—before dialing. I thought about the little shiver of desire I’d felt as he pressed his lips up against my ear. When he answered, and I told him who I was, he didn’t even hesitate, as if he already knew exactly why I was calling.

  “I was wondering how long it would take for you to wise up.”

  I steeled myself. “Here’s my rule: only people who have too much, and only people who deserve it.”

  He chuckled. “Well, of course. We take only what we need.”

  “Exactly.” I felt a little better already. “And once my mom is healthy again, I’m out.”

  I could almost hear him smiling. “OK, then. How much do you know about Instagram?”

  19.

  THE NEXT MORNING I run through the same routine—yoga on the lawn—and wait for Vanessa to show up with her mat in tow. An hour of asanas later and my muscles are shaking with fatigue, but no Vanessa. I do my cobras facing the house so that I can watch the windows, but there is no movement behind the curtains. When I take a casual stroll around the property on my way back to the cottage, I see no signs of life at all. The big wooden garage doors are closed tight and the lights in the windows are out. A battered sedan has materialized in the driveway, but even though I linger nearby, I don’t catch sight of the person who drove it.

  I go back to the caretaker’s cottage and pull up the library feed. After a while, an older woman drifts into frame, her hair scraped back into a ponytail, an old-fashioned feather duster in the pocket of her apron. Presumably the housekeeper. I wonder, with some concern, if she will find the hidden camera, but she ignores the shelves of books entirely. Instead she listlessly moves a few things around on the coffee table, plumps up the pillows on the couch, and drifts back out of frame.

  Vanessa passes through the library twice after the housekeeper leaves, but she never stays in the room. She just wanders through, looking like she’s lost, looking like she can’t quite figure out where she’s headed. The phone firmly clutched in her hand, like a child’s well-worn stuffie.

  Lachlan comes and looks over my shoulder. “What a useless human being,” he says. “Does she do nothing at all? Does she even have a mind?”

  Something about his tone makes me sour; I find myself feeling oddly protective. “I wonder if she’s depressed.” I study the somnambulant cant of Vanessa’s walk. “Maybe I should go ring her doorbell again, try to cheer her up.”

  Lachlan shakes his head. “Make her come to us. Don’t want to come off too eager, yeah? Puts us in the power position. Don’t worry, she’ll come ’round.”

  * * *

  —

  But she doesn’t. Two more days pass in the same restless routine—yoga on the lawn, walks around the property, lunch at the general store a mile up the road. We spend most of our time in the cottage, pretending at our writing retreat. Lachlan has scattered books and papers around the room in case Vanessa shows up at the door, but mostly he sits at his laptop, bin
ge-watching true-crime TV shows with an absorbed expression on his face. I’ve brought a pile of novels—I’m working my way through the Victorian era, starting with George Eliot—but there are only so many hours in the day that one can read before one starts to feel like one’s mind is literally melting inside one’s skull. The minutes drip past like a slowly leaking faucet and I wonder how long we’re going to have to stay cloistered inside the manufactured heat of these three rooms.

  On the fifth day of our stay, I drive into Tahoe City to stock up on groceries at the Save Mart. Afterward, I linger in town, where the bustle and activity is an antidote to the deathly stillness of Stonehaven. I go to Syd’s for a bagel, even though I’m not hungry, and find that little has changed in the last dozen years. The fairy lights that hang over the hand-chalked menu have been replaced with fluttering flags, and the flyers pinned to the bulletin board advertise a fresh round of teenage babysitters and lost dogs. But the ponytailed manager is still there, his hair gray now, his belly soft. He doesn’t recognize me, which is to be expected, but is also unsettling, as if I was always invisible but I only just discovered it.

  I order a coffee and then walk down to the picnic bench on the beach where I used to sit with Benny. I think about the turns of the last twelve years until it’s unbearable, and then I pack up my trash and drive back to Stonehaven.

  When I return to the cottage, I find it empty and cold. There’s no sign of Lachlan; his coat and sneakers are missing. I go and stand outside on the lawn, looking up at the lights of the mansion, wondering if I should knock on the door. But something holds me back. Instead, I sit by myself in the gloomy cottage, my mood brooding and sour.

  Lachlan blows back through the door a few minutes later, electric with excitement. “Jaysus.” He exhales. “She’s a bit of a mental case, that one.”

  “I thought you said we should let her come to us.” There’s a petulant note in my voice; I realize that I do not like having been left out. Or is it that I’m jealous that he got back inside Stonehaven when I did not? Or even—a curious thought—that I’m eager to slip back into Ashley’s skin, so simple and good and free of inner turmoil?

  “Ran into her when I was taking a walk, didn’t I? She invited me in.” He shrugs off his jacket and flings it at the couch. “I got one more camera hidden, but she was on me like a hawk, so that was it.”

  “Where?”

  “The games room.”

  I didn’t even know there was a games room in Stonehaven—though of course there would be, a mansion like Stonehaven would always have been intended as a monument to leisure. When Lachlan loads up the camera, it shows a billiards table, a wooden bar with upholstered chairs and dusty decanters of Scotch, and a wall of old golf trophies. The far wall is hung with antique swords, at least three dozen of them, framing a pair of ornately engraved pistols hung in a position of pride above the fireplace.

  “It’s not a games room, it’s an armory. Jesus. What the hell were you doing in there? Playing checkers?”

  Lachlan frowns. “You’re in a mood.”

  “What’d you two talk about?”

  “Just some mild flirtation. Discussion about my family’s castle and so on. She likes me.”

  “She likes both of us,” I say. “But I’m not sure that’s helping much. At this rate, we’ll be here all year.”

  “I set the bait,” he assures me. “Just sit tight. She’ll take it.”

  * * *

  —

  And he’s right. Early the next afternoon, there’s a clatter outside the door to the cottage. Lachlan and I freeze, and stare at each other. He shuts down the video he’s watching, and I gather myself, take a breath, turn myself into Ashley. When I open the door with a bright smile on my face, Vanessa is standing there in hiking pants, her face carefully made-up, designer sunglasses balanced on top of a mass of glossy, blown-out hair. She looks like a model in an advertisement for vitaminwater and I instinctively want to slap the sunglasses right off the top of her head.

  “There you are!” I say instead. I reach out and fold her into another hug; press my warm cheek against her cold one. I pull back, give her a look. “Are we still going to do yoga together? I was so looking forward to that. I’ve been out there every morning, without you.”

  She flushes. “I know. I’ve had a cold. But I’m feeling better now.”

  “Maybe tomorrow, then.” I lean against the doorframe. I notice that she’s holding a backpack in her hand. “You going somewhere?”

  Her eyes skitter over my shoulder to Lachlan, still lying on the couch surrounded by papers. “I’m going for a hike to Vista Point. And I thought maybe you guys would want to come.” When he doesn’t look up from his laptop, she turns back to me. “The weather report says that a winter storm’s coming, in the next day or two. So this might be your last chance. To hike.”

  “I’d love that,” I say. I turn to Lachlan. “Honey? Take a break?”

  Lachlan slowly tears his eyes away from the screen, his eyebrows furrowed, as if his mind has been engaged in deeply intellectual internal debate and he resents being dragged back to the mundane present. If I didn’t know that he was just watching reruns of Criminal Minds, I would almost be convinced myself.

  “I’m in the middle of this—” he says.

  Vanessa blanches. “Oh, you’re writing. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  “Oh, no, it’s fine. A hike, eh?” He sits up and stretches, and his T-shirt rises up a bit, exposing a toned expanse of stomach. He offers us both a dazzling smile as if he couldn’t be more thrilled by the idea, even though I know that hiking is on the bottom of the list of things he enjoys, flanked by taxes and rom-com movies. “I wouldn’t mind stretching my legs. I was struggling with that paragraph anyway.”

  Twenty minutes later we are in Vanessa’s car, a Mercedes SUV so new that it still smells of the factory in which it was assembled. We drive south along the lakeshore, passing weather-beaten motels with neon vacancy signs out front, a shingled general store advertising sub sandwiches and cold beer, A-frames with covered boats in their driveways, away from the multimillion-dollar vacation homes and into the hush of the national forest. Vanessa is gushy, almost manic, as she peppers us with facts about the places that we pass.

  “We’re coming up to the estate where they filmed The Godfather Part II, although it’s all condos now. See, out past that boat? That’s where Fredo gets murdered.”

  “Down that driveway is Chambers Landing, a pier with a historic bar, it’s been around since 1875, though now it’s mostly full of frat boys getting loaded on Chambers Punch cocktails.”

  “There’s a charming little Scandinavian mansion up ahead, it looks like something straight out of a Norwegian fjord. My great-grandfather used to play pinochle with the owner, back during the Depression.”

  I remember some of these stories from when I lived here as a teenager. Every place has its lore, but Tahoe clings particularly tightly to the time when it was more exclusive, more glamorous; when it was more than just an overpriced weekend ski getaway for San Francisco’s tribes of tech bro millionaires. I stare out the window at the forest flying past and think that it’s nice to be in the mountains, away from the toxic bustle of urban life, the glittering lights that advertise desire. I imagine bringing my mother up here, to recover from her disease. The fresh air might be therapeutic; certainly it would be good for us both to get away from city life.

  And then I remember that once Lachlan and I leave here, along with Vanessa’s money, we’ll never be able to come back again.

  Lachlan and I listen intently to Vanessa’s patter, interjecting little appreciative comments at all the right moments, acting like eager tourists on an all-inclusive sightseeing tour. “You must really love it up here,” Lachlan finally says.

  His observation seems to surprise her. She grips the leather steering wheel as she leans
into a tight turn, the corner of her glossed lip anchored between two perfect white teeth. “I didn’t choose the place, it was chosen for me,” she says finally. “I inherited it. It’s not about love, it’s about honor. But yes, it’s awfully lovely up here, too.”

  She accelerates until she’s flying around the curves on the road, and flips on the radio. An old Britney Spears song comes on. In the back seat, Lachlan groans. “You don’t like Britney?” Vanessa asks nervously, then turns to me. “What do you guys listen to?”

  What would a yoga teacher listen to? Indian sitar? Whale song? Jesus, too clichéd. I wait too long to answer. Her hand hovers over the knob, ready to change it.

  “I really only listen to classical and jazz,” Lachlan interjects from the back seat, sensing my struggle. “Growing up in the castle in Ireland, that’s all we had around. Records, yeah? Not even a CD player. My grandmother Alice was a close friend of Stravinsky’s.”

  I suppress a laugh. He’s overreaching with the faux aristocratic intellectualism. I reach over and turn the music up, just to annoy him. “He’s a snob,” I whisper to Vanessa. “Top Forty is fine.”

  Lachlan jabs my shoulder, hard. “I prefer the term aesthete. I’m sure you would understand that, Vanessa? You seem like a woman of discriminating taste.”

  “I have to confess, I know nothing about jazz.”

  Lachlan settles back in his seat and props a foot on the console. His sneakers are brand-new and blindingly white and far too trendy for a poet-professor. A detail he didn’t consider. “I didn’t mean jazz necessarily. It just strikes me that you’re an artistic type. You have that air about you. Surrounding yourself with fine things. You have an eye.”

  Vanessa blushes, rather pleased with herself. She believes in his bogus flattery, the vain fool. “Thank you! Yes, that’s true. But I still like Britney.”

  “There you go.” I flash Lachlan a look. “If you’re seeking a fellow snob, you’re not going to find one with her. We’re not changing the station. Right, Vanessa?” I reach across the seat and grip her forearm possessively and she glances at me and smiles happily. She’s enjoying us fighting over her. We’ve inflated her ego to dirigible size so that she can float, self-satisfied, above us.