Pretty Things

by Janelle Brown

  “Fine, whatever.” I push myself upright, feeling feverish and dizzy. Lachlan helps me back to the kitchen, where Vanessa is waiting for us at the table, wide-eyed with alarm, her glass of wine still untouched as if she’s been too concerned about me to even drink.

  “Ashley needs to rest, we’re going to have to go back to the cottage to give her a lie-down.” We have stopped at the table and Lachlan gently lets go of my waist, taps my back as if to say, Go on. I’m afraid that if I open my mouth again I might vomit all over the table.

  “No, you stay here,” I manage. “Don’t waste all that beautiful food Vanessa cooked. A shame. It would be.”

  Vanessa shakes her head. “Oh, no no, Michael, that’s OK. Ashley needs you.”

  “I’m fine,” I gasp. I am not fine. “I’m just going to sleep.”

  Lachlan gazes at me with a magnificently wrinkled brow. “Well. If you insist. I won’t stay long. You’re right. A shame to waste all this.”

  I’m already at the door, lurching as fast as I can toward the relief of the cold wet air, so I don’t get to see Vanessa’s reaction to this—whether she smiles with delight about him staying or frowns with alarm about me. At this moment, I couldn’t care less: I head off into the dark, and the rain on my face makes me think of my mother’s cool hand on my forehead. And as I stumble toward the cottage the years fall away until I am a child in the dark, looking for relief, calling for my mama.

  * * *

  —

  Back in the cottage, I crawl into bed but I can’t sleep. My body shakes with fever; my guts convulse every time I lift my water glass to clear the terrible taste in my mouth. I make the trip from bed to toilet and back again a half-dozen times, until something finally breaks inside me and I start to cry. I am dehydrated, hollowed out, so alone. Why did I even come here? I find my phone folded in the sheets, sticky with the sweat from my hands, and dial my mother.

  “Mom,” I say.

  “My baby!” Her voice is like a warm bath, like lavender salts, cleaning the rot out of my head. “Are you OK? You sound strange.”

  “I’m fine,” I say. Then, “Actually, I’m not.”

  Alarm sharpens her voice, brings her words into focus. “What happened?”

  “Food poisoning.”

  There’s a momentary silence, and then a soft cough. “Oh, darling. That’s it? That’s not so bad. Drink some ginger ale.”

  “There’s none around here,” I say, letting myself indulge in childish petulance: the unfairness of it all. I realize that my mother doesn’t know where “here” is, but she is making little comforting sounds on the other end of the line, and doesn’t ask for details. “I’ll be OK. I just needed to hear your voice.”

  There’s a faint tinkling sound in the background, ice swirling in a glass. “I’m glad you did. I’ve been missing you.”

  I hesitate, afraid to ask: “Have the police been ’round again?”

  “Once,” she says. “I didn’t answer the door and they went away. And the landline keeps ringing, but I’m not answering it, either.”

  My brain spins, feverish and faint: What do they have on me? What if they track me down here? Can I ever go home again? But of course I will go home. I have to. “How are you?” I ask. “How are you feeling?”

  She coughs again, a muffled sound, as if she’s trying to hide it in her sleeve. “I’m OK. No appetite, though, and I’ve got that bloat again. Mostly I’m just so tired all the time. It’s like, you finish a marathon and you’re exhausted and you look up only to realize you’ve just landed at the starting line of another marathon, and you have no choice but to start running again. You know?”

  Another wave of cramps passes through me but I try to ignore them, stoic in the face of my mother’s greater suffering. “Oh, Mom,” I whisper. “I should be there with you.”

  “Absolutely not. You take care of yourself for once, OK?” she says. “Dr. Hawthorne has been very nice, he wants me coming in after Thanksgiving to start treatment. A first round of radiation. And then the new protocol. But maybe I shouldn’t….I don’t know.”

  “Jesus, Mom, why wouldn’t you?”

  “But, Nina—the cost. I don’t know where you are—and I’m not going to ask, darling. I know all about plausible deniability—but you’re clearly not minding your antiques store here, so…How are we going to come up with the money? It’s going to be a half-million dollars, once you add in the radiation and the fancy drugs and the doctor visits and the home care and the hospital stay. I talked to my insurance company again, they still refuse to cover anything but basic chemo. Said this was an ‘experimental’ protocol they won’t approve.” Another muffled cough, her voice going fainter, as if this conversation has fatigued her. “But I can just do chemo. It will probably be fine.”

  “No,” I say. “Chemo didn’t work the first time around. So you’ll do whatever the doctor is recommending you do. I’ll have the money by the end of the year. Maybe even sooner. All of it. Just—do what he says. Start the protocol.”

  She is quiet on the other end of the line. “Honey, I hope you’re being careful, whatever it is you’re doing. I hope I taught you that much. You should always be thinking three steps ahead.”

  I try to say something reassuring but something horrible is happening in my gastrointestinal tract that requires urgent attention. I gasp a goodbye to my mother and stumble to the bathroom for another round at the toilet, and then collapse into bed and fall, feverish, to sleep.

  * * *

  —

  I dream that I am at the bottom of Lake Tahoe, swimming frantically through the freezing water toward a faint light above, my lungs bursting as the surface keeps receding away. There is someone swimming up there above me, a black shadow against the blue, and I’m trying to call for help but then I realize that they aren’t there to help me. They’re there to keep me from surfacing. When I finally startle awake I am slicked with sweat and disoriented. But my stomach is no longer twisting in knots, although I still feel shaky and queasy.

  I lie in bed listening to the storm howl around the cottage. The rain has turned to hail, and it rattles the windows so violently that I wonder if the glass will break. When I reach for my phone and look at the time I see that three hours have passed. Where is Lachlan? What are they doing?

  Eventually it crosses my mind that I can easily get the answer to this question. I rouse myself from bed and stagger into the living room to find Lachlan’s laptop, and then collapse on the couch and boot it up.

  When his computer leaps to life I see that there are now eleven live camera feeds on his desktop. One I recognize as the downstairs office, anchored by a presidential desk. One camera is in the upstairs foyer, angled just so, to take in the sweep of the halls. Other feeds display the library, and the games room, gazing over the billiards table; plus the front parlor, and a few other rooms I’m not familiar with. A final feed shows what must be the master bedroom. I study this last one closely: I’ve never seen the master suite of the house. It is as dark and grand as the rest of Stonehaven—a canopy bed draped in scarlet linens, a formal settee upholstered in velvet, an armoire the size of an army tank. Brass greyhounds flank the stone fireplace, motionless watchdogs staring balefully at the bed across the room. It is a room designed for a fin de siècle oligarch with pretensions of royalty.

  There’s only one jarring note in this museum-ready tableau: the brown packing boxes that line the far wall, stacked three high and at least a dozen boxes deep. I zoom in and peer at the labels hand-printed on the sides in neat black Sharpie: Dress coats: Celine & Valentino. Skirts—Pleated. Clutches & Minibags. Light sweaters. Misc. Louboutin. Silk blouses. Two things immediately occur to me: First, that Vanessa’s wardrobe could easily fill an entire clothing boutique, and would probably fetch a small fortune in an online consignment shop. Second, that Vanessa has lived here for months now, and apparently st
ill hasn’t unpacked.

  I watch the feed for a minute, waiting for Lachlan or Vanessa to cross the screen, but they never do. They must be in the kitchen. The rest of the house is as empty as a tomb. What is Lachlan finding to talk about with her for three straight hours? I find myself wishing that we’d splurged for the cameras with an audio feed, so I could at least hear echoes of what’s happening out of view.

  Eventually I drift off on the couch. I’m not sure how long I’ve been asleep when I startle awake to see Lachlan looming above me. His breath is fungal and sweet; I can smell the wine on him. “I placed them all. All the cameras,” he says, swaying slightly, and I realize that he’s drunk.

  “I saw,” I say. “Enjoyed yourself, I see?”

  “Don’t be jealous, darling. It’s a bad look on you.” He meanders off toward the bedroom, ricocheting off the furniture that crowds the room.

  I sit up, his laptop still on my lap. “Don’t you want to take a look at the feed?”

  “In the morning,” he calls. “I’m knackered.”

  I listen to him bumping around the cottage, swearing at the antiques, and then the thump of his body collapsing in bed. Deep, rattling snores come from the bedroom. The cottage creaks and groans as the night grows cold, and I think of the coming storm.

  After being woken up by Lachlan, I find I can’t fall asleep again. And so I open the laptop and pull up the feed. There’s Vanessa, moving about her bedroom as if she’s searching for something. She disappears into the bathroom and then comes back out and stands at the end of the bed staring at it for a long time. I can’t figure out what she’s looking at. She wears underwear and a camisole, through which I can practically count her ribs; little crescents of undereye face masks are stuck below her eyes, making her look ghoulish. Finally, she climbs in bed and picks up her phone on the table next to her and flicks through it. But then she changes her mind. She turns off the light and lies back, staring at the ceiling, motionless.

  She is tiny in that enormous four-poster, like a doll in a human-sized bed. I wonder if she can feel all the dead Lieblings that have slept there before her. She should really get a new bed, I think. I watch as her chest slowly lifts and falls; and then lifts and falls a little faster, with odd little hitches; and then Vanessa lifts her hands to cover her face and I realize that she is crying. At first it’s just a gentle weeping, but soon her body starts to heave and convulse with gut-wrenching sobs. Her blond hair spills across her pillow as she writhes with abandon, believing herself alone there in the dark. I have never witnessed such raw despair.

  I feel disgust then, but not for her. I imagine looking at myself from the outside, as if someone is watching me on their own private feed of my life. And what I see is a pathetic voyeur, spying on a woman in her most private moment. An emotional vampire that uses a stranger’s sadness to fuel her own loathing.

  How did I become a person who lives in the shadows, who looks at the world and sees only targets and marks? Why am I cynical instead of optimistic; a taker instead of a giver? (Why aren’t I more of an Ashley, really?) I hate myself suddenly, and the small, petty person I’ve become; it’s a hate more powerful than I ever felt for the Lieblings and their ilk.

  They didn’t do this to you. You did this to yourself, I think.

  I close down the video feed, telling myself as I do that I will not look at it again. I want this whole endeavor to be over. I want to be back home in Echo Park with my mother. I want to make enough money from this job that I never have to do this again. I want this, and I also want so much more—to have a fresh shot at being the person I once thought I could be, the one with the bright Future.

  Right before the feed shuts down, Vanessa’s hands fall away and her face is suddenly visible, pale and shadowed against the scarlet linens. I can barely make out her features in the dark, but something about her face gives me pause. Because I could swear, in that half second before the image blinks out, that Vanessa isn’t crying at all.

  Vanessa is laughing.

  21.

  THE RAIN HAS TURNED to snow overnight. When I wake up and go to the window in the living room, I see a half foot of powder on every surface, softening our view. Thick and silent the snow falls, in perfect dime-sized flakes. The great lawn has vanished, buried under a familiar blanket of white.

  I haven’t seen snow like this in years, and I find myself standing on the stoop in my pajamas, sticking out my tongue. Lachlan comes up behind me with a cup of tea in his hands, a comforter wrapped around his shoulders. He is haggard and hungover; the soft skin under his eyes puffy and wrinkled. He looks his age for once—a man now running up against forty—which comes as a shock.

  “You’re letting all the cold air in,” he says, and then looks at what I’m wearing. “Christ, Nina, you’re going to freeze to death if you’re not careful.” He pulls me in under the comforter with him, trapping the heat of his body against me. He smells sour, like old sweat and stale breath.

  “Do you think we’ll be snowed in?” I ask.

  “Let’s hope not.” He wraps the comforter tighter around us and shivers. “After I moved away from Dublin I swore I wouldn’t live anywhere cold ever again. I was always cold when I was a kid. My parents could never afford the heat and so every winter we’d freeze. I guess they hoped that with eleven kids shoved in three bedrooms, we’d survive off body heat alone.” He looks gloomily at the snowflakes coming down. “I’d be doing my homework with gloves on so I wouldn’t get frostbite in my own goddamn living room. My teachers always gave me bad marks for handwriting.”

  What I want to tell him is that snow feels hopeful to me, in its purity. That I remember looking out at this same vista as a teenager, and feeling like I’d wandered into some kind of fairy-tale wonderland. That maybe I could be happy up here, in different circumstances. But I say none of those things. Instead I slide out from under his arm and slip back inside the warmth of the cottage. “No time for sentimentality,” I say. “Let’s get started.”

  * * *

  —

  A little while later, I trudge across the field of white to Stonehaven. My boots break through the fresh crust of snow, exposing the flattened grass beneath as snowflakes melt in the prints that I leave behind. I climb up to the back porch and have to knock three times before Vanessa finally shows up at the door. She blinks at me, her eyes bloodshot and puffy, a quavering smile plastered across her face. Clearly, she also had too much to drink last night.

  “You’re feeling better already?” Surprise is naked on her face. “That was fast.”

  “It passed quickly,” I say. “The body is a mystery sometimes, isn’t it? Even when you spend your life trying to understand it, it can still do things that surprise you.”

  “Oh!” Her brow wrinkles, parsing this. “What do you think it was? Food poisoning?”

  “Probably the tuna sub I had from the deli down the road.”

  “Oh God, if you’d asked me, I would have warned you off those sandwiches. They have very suspect refrigeration there.” She’s still standing there staring at me as if she can’t believe I’m standing upright. “Well, we missed you at dinner.”

  “I felt terrible to miss it, after all the effort you put into it. I hope you’ll offer a do-over.” I smile.

  She looks over my shoulder, in the direction of the cottage, and I can feel her mind go through some calculation—the value of company versus the effort required to entertain again so soon. “Sure,” she says.

  “When?”

  Her eyes flutter, surprised by my sudden pushiness. “Tomorrow, I guess.”

  “Great.” I nudge my toe in the door. “Look, can I come in and dry off for just a second? I have a favor to ask of you.”

  Inside, the kitchen looks like it was the scene of a violent crime. There are dirty pots and pans strewn across the counters, crimson splashes of braising liquid along the backsplas
h tiles, wineglasses with gritty scarlet residue dried in the stems. The remains of last night’s meal are still on the table: plates of congealing stew in yellow puddles of fat, silverware with crusts on the tines, white napkins marked with lipstick, a green salad wilting in a pool of dressing.

  “Looks like you had fun last night,” I say.

  She regards the mess with a curious sweep of her head, as if it was left there by someone else. “The housekeeper was supposed to come this morning to clean it up, but she got snowed in.” Something about the way she says this suggests that the housekeeper is to blame for the weather. She picks up a half-empty wineglass from the counter and moves it five inches closer to the sink, as if this is as much cleaning as she can muster.

  “I’ll send Michael over to do the dishes. He helped make the mess,” I say, delighting in exactly how much Lachlan will hate this idea.

  “Oh God, please don’t do that. It’ll stop snowing soon, I’m sure. The snowplow will be around eventually.” She looks out the window at the lake and winces at the light reflecting off the snow, then drops into a chair. “You said you had a favor to ask?”

  I pull out a chair next to her, take a breath, make myself become Ashley. “So, I’m not sure if Michael told you this already—he can be so private, sometimes….” I offer her a shy little smile. “But he asked me to marry him. We’re engaged.”

  She stares at me dully for a split second, as if on time delay. And then her face lights up, and she lets out an ear-piercing squeal. It’s so over-the-top, she sounds like a parody of herself. Truly she can’t be this excited for us. “Tremendous! Fantastic! He did not tell me! How wonderful!” She leans in close, dank morning breath in my face, hands clutched to her bosom as if overtaken with joy. It’s all a bit much. “Oh, tell me everything. Where, and how, and oh, show me the ring!”

  “The first night we got here, on the steps of the cottage actually. We were outside looking at the full moon over the lake and he got down on one knee and…well. You can imagine.” I slowly pull off a mitten and push my left hand out for her to examine. Sagging off my ring finger is an Art Deco engagement ring, a cushion-cut emerald shocker the size of my thumbnail, surrounded by diamond baguettes. If it were real, it would be worth at least $100,000. It’s not real. It’s an excellent fake that my mother slipped off a drunk woman’s hand at the Bellagio many years ago. It’s rattled around my jewelry box ever since, coming in useful in moments like this.