I tug the letter out from the pile and hold it under the light of my smartphone flashlight. You’re imagining things, I tell myself, as I start to read. But it feels as if a snake has wrapped itself around my chest and is starting to squeeze.
October 15, 2006
William—
I know you thought this was all over when I left town, but guess what? I’ve changed my mind. I’ve realized that my silence came too cheap. I’m worth more than what you gave me last June.
As you know I have proof of our affair—photos, receipts, letters, phone records. I’m now offering to sell these to you for $500,000. I’m including examples of the photos that I have, so you know I’m for real. If you choose not to pay me $500,000, I’ll send them to your wife instead. And then I will send a copy to the investors on your board. And then I will send a copy to the newspapers and gossip websites.
You have until November 1 to get the money to my account at Bank of America.
You owe Nina and me that much.
Sincerely,
Lily
The snake that is winding around my chest tightens until it stops my breath, and the whole room spins.
Bells are pealing inside my head; but no, it’s just the boudoir clock chiming out the hour. Nearly eight minutes have passed since I left the dining table. I shove the letter back in the safe, hiding it in the middle of the stack of papers; then close and lock the safe with trembling hands. I move blindly back through the dark house, following the sound of voices, trying to make the pieces of my history fit neatly back together again, but I can’t. Nothing makes sense. Or maybe it’s that everything suddenly does.
My mother. I picture her as she was back then, a bombshell in a blue sequined dress; and then I picture her in William Liebling’s sagging, fleshy arms. I shudder.
I need to talk to her. I need to see her.
Eventually I stumble back into the dining room, blinking in the sudden wash of light, the heat from the fireplace. Two sets of eyes fix on me and I wrench my mouth up into what I hope is a calm, reassuring smile. But Lachlan can tell something is wrong. When he looks at the expression on my face the muscles in his jaw tighten, almost imperceptibly, into a mask of alarm.
Vanessa doesn’t seem to notice. “There you are! Michael was just telling me about his novel, I’m dying to read it. Maybe I can get a sneak peek?” She dimples at Lachlan and when he fails to respond immediately, she quickly recalibrates and turns her gaze on me. She frowns. “Wait, Ashley, is everything OK?”
The smell of the salmon fills my nose and makes me want to gag. The candles on the table sputter with the draft that I brought in with me. I study Vanessa, wondering if she knows about the letter, feeling exposed and tender. Vanessa looks back at me wide-eyed, as groomed and guileless as a pedigreed house pet. And then I remember: I’m Ashley. Even if Vanessa had come across the letter in her father’s records, there would be no reason for her to connect the “Lily” in the signature with the woman who stands before her. I wrap myself in Ashley’s protective quilting. I quiver bravely and I improvise.
“It’s my mom,” I say. “She’s been hospitalized. I have to go home.”
* * *
—
Lachlan is furious. He paces the perimeter of the living room, the veins popping in his neck, hands raking his curls into a tangle of static frizz. “Christ, Nina—empty? Where the fuck is everything, then?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Hidden somewhere else, in all likelihood. A different safe. Or a safety-deposit box. Or a bank.”
“Fuck me. You were so sure.”
“Excuse me, but it’s been twelve years. Things change. We knew it was a long shot.”
“You never said it was a long shot. You said it was a sure thing. Our big play.”
I want to throw a chair at him. “At least the code still worked so that I was able to get in to the safe and see.”
He flings himself down on the couch, looking grim. “So now what?”
“Well, it’s not like this place is lacking in valuables. There are pieces in that house that are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. That grandfather clock. I’ll come back and do an inventory, come up with some options. We won’t leave empty-handed.”
He draws his face into a pucker of distaste. “It’s just so much more of a hassle. Finding a way to get it all out of here. Finding another fucking fence to sell it. We only get a fraction of its value once they take their cut. This was supposed to be the big easy score, and now once again we’re talking small potatoes.” He glares at me. “And what the hell is all this about going to visit your mom?”
“It helped with the story, it made the phone call more plausible.” I can tell that he doesn’t believe me, but there is no way I’m telling him about the letter. Besides, what bearing does it have on what we’re doing here? None. Though I feel like something has shifted; as if the pool of moral certainty in which I’ve been swimming for all these years has suddenly drained and I’m looking around at my barren surroundings, wondering where the hell I really am.
I sit down next to him and put a hand on his leg. He ignores it. “Look, I am worried about my mom. We agreed that I’d be able to go home and check on her. That’s why we stayed in California, remember?” He’s still silent. “I’ll only be gone a few days.”
“Vanessa will expect me to leave with you. I’m your fiancé now, remember?”
“No, you stay here and work on a plan B. I’m sure you can muster up a convincing reason why you have to stay behind. Tell her I didn’t want you to interrupt your writing. Tell her my mom isn’t that sick, after all.”
Outside, the snow keeps falling, carpeting the cottage in silence. The ancient thermostat ticks and ticks and then catches, blasting us with a current of scorched heat. Lachlan scowls and tugs his sweater over his head.
“Christ, Nina,” he mutters. “What am I going to do while you’re gone? I’m going crazy here already.”
I shrug. “You’re a big boy. You’ll figure something out.”
23.
I DRIVE TO LOS ANGELES the next morning. First, the slow grind over the snow-tossed summit, tires struggling to bite the road, the windshield splattered with soft brown slush. Then down through the rain-slicked valley, where clots of cars push their way through the mist. Farther south I drive through miles of farmland, dormant for the winter; and finally over the velvet hills of the Grapevine, soft with shadow. It takes nine hours, and yet it feels as if I blink in Lake Tahoe and I blink again and I am parking in front of my bungalow in Los Angeles.
Inside the cottage, it smells like sweet decay. My mother’s perfume, lingering and stale; or maybe it’s the spray of lilies weeping bruised petals over there on the sideboard. The cottage is dark, the damp night pressing in through the seams in the warped wooden windows. I’ve been gone only a few weeks and although I know that isn’t enough time for my mother to have gone radically downhill, I find myself holding my breath, wondering if I will find her supine on her bed, shrunken, already too far gone.
But then there’s a sound from the kitchen, and the door swings open and my mother is there, backlit by a rectangle of yellow light. She must not see me at first in the gloom of the house, because she sways silently toward me, a pale wraith in a moon-satin nightgown.
“Mom,” I say, and a horrible sound comes from the ghost’s mouth. There’s a crack, and the sound of shattering glass, and then the light blinks on overhead. And there my mother stands, frozen by the light switch, surrounded by glittering shards.
“Jesus, Nina. What are you doing creeping around the house like that?” Her voice is sharper than I expect, shaken. She takes a tentative step backward, her toe nudging glass aside to find a clear spot among the floorboards.
“Here, don’t move, you’ll cut yourself.” I rush past her toward the kitchen to get the dustpan and broom. When I
return, she’s still standing motionless, her body vibrating with tension. I peer up at her as I sweep the bits of glass into the pan. She is pale, a faint sheen of sweat on her brow, and I swear she is thinner than she was just a few weeks ago. Signs of the lymphoma settling back into her system. I chide myself for not having called her doctor to expedite her treatment. She shouldn’t be waiting another week for radiation, she needs it now.
The ramifications of that empty safe are growing real to me, now that I’m home: I’ve returned with empty pockets, not a penny to cover my mother’s medical costs. One dose of Advextrix = $15,000 = one Delft vase sold on the black market. I imagine Stonehaven’s treasures, sitting there forgotten in those cold rooms. I need to go back and take a second look. The grandfather clock, two of the chairs from the living room, some of the silver…As I sweep up shards, I mentally walk through the rooms of Stonehaven, putting price tags on the furniture, comparing them to the value of my mother’s life. Surely, Lachlan and I can find a way to smuggle some of it out and sell it without Efram; there must be other fences we could use.
We’ll have to take too much, though. It will be riskier than anything we’ve ever done before. How will we get it all out of Stonehaven? How will we manage to avoid getting caught in the process?
We’ll figure it out, I tell myself. We have to. I have no other ideas.
I’m afraid to look up and meet my mother’s gaze, afraid that she’ll see the failure written across my face.
My mother’s hands are on my shoulders, tugging me up from the floor. I stand and realize that my jeans are soaked from whatever was in her glass: gin, it smells like.
“You shouldn’t be drinking alcohol,” I say. “Not if you’re about to start radiation therapy.”
“What, it’s going to kill me?” She laughs, but I can tell that she’s self-conscious, her lashes fluttering, her hand clutching at the gap in her robe.
“It could kill you faster.”
“Don’t judge me, darling. I’ve been lonely. It’s been so quiet here without you, I needed something to do with myself. It makes the time pass quicker.” She pulls me into a hug, presses her cool face against mine; I can smell her primrose lotion, the medicinal gin on her breath. “I’m so glad you’re back.”
She stands back and studies my face. “You’ve been spending time outside, I can tell. You forgot to put on sunscreen.” But she doesn’t ask exactly where I’ve been; I can feel that careful calculation on her part. Her eyes slide over my shoulder and into the darkness of the room. “Is Lachlan with you?”
“Here’s not here.”
“But he came back to L.A. with you?”
“No.”
“Oh.” She wobbles now toward the living room, her hand clutching at the furniture as she passes. I can’t tell if she’s weak or if she’s a little drunk. Perhaps both, I think, as she flicks on a lamp and collapses onto her couch. The cushion puffs out a small sigh, the springs creak in protest. I sit beside her and tip sideways, let myself slide toward her lap until my head is resting there, like a child. Only now do I realize how exhausted I am. I feel like myself for the first time in weeks. Her hands settle in my hair and smooth the frizzed strands.
“My baby. What brought you home?”
“I missed you,” I whisper.
“Me, too.” I wish I could hug her tight but I’m afraid of breaking her; she feels like a blown egg underneath me, fragile and empty. I pick up her hand and press it against my cheek. “Darling,” she says slowly. “Are you sure it’s safe for you to come back? I love to see you but maybe you shouldn’t be here. The police.”
In my haste to get to her, I had almost forgotten about this; but it seems immaterial at the moment, a vague danger pulsing somewhere at the back of my mind.
“Mom. I have to tell you where I’ve been,” I say. “I’ve been up at Lake Tahoe.”
And I feel it, immediately, how she changes beneath me, how she stiffens, how her breathing suddenly catches and shifts. When I sit up and look at her face I can see her eyes, flickering back and forth, looking for a safe place to settle. She is trying as hard as she can not to look at me.
“Mom.” I keep my voice gentle even though the urgency inside me is fizzing and popping as it struggles for escape. “I’ve been staying at the Lieblings’ house. At Stonehaven.”
My mother blinks. “Who?”
She used to be such a good liar, my mother; she might still be convincing to a stranger, but I know better. “Don’t bother pretending you don’t know who I’m talking about,” I say. “And I have some questions.”
She reaches toward the coffee table as if she might find a glass there, but her hands grab blindly at nothing. Finally she pulls them back into her lap and wraps them in the cord of her robe. She does not look at me.
“Mom,” I say. “You have to tell me what happened, back when we lived there. Between you and William Liebling.”
Her eyes come to rest on the blank screen of the television, just beyond my shoulder. The room is silent except for the ragged whistle of her breath in her throat.
“Mom? You can tell me. It was all a long time ago. I’m not going to be angry.” Except that I am angry, I realize. I am angry because there is a secret that was kept from me, one that set the frame through which I have viewed the world for the last decade. I’m angry because I thought we were close—the two of us a united front against the world—and I’m suddenly realizing that we’re not. How much of my life has been a fiction that she wrote for me?
I sit back in the couch and fold my arms, watching her reaction.
She keeps her eyes on the blank screen, her jaw resolutely set.
“OK, let’s try it this way.” I’m losing patience. “You were having an affair with William Liebling when we were living up at Tahoe, right?”
Her eyes flicker to me. Her voice is barely a whisper. “Yes.”
“You met, I’m going to guess…at the Academy? At Back to School night?” Faint amusement flickers across her face and I realize my mistake—school events would have been Judith’s domain, not William’s. I guess again: “No, you met at the casino. The high-roller room? He came in to gamble and you served him drinks.”
She’s blinking too rapidly, and I can tell that I’m right. “Nina. Please. Don’t. Just let this go, it’s really not important.”
“But it is, Mom.” I study her, thinking. “What was your plan?” She shakes her head slowly, her eyes fixed on me, assessing, waiting to see how much she can still keep from me. “Identity theft? Credit cards?” She shakes her head again. “OK, what then? What was the deal?”
“No deal,” she says defiantly. “I liked him.” She wraps the cord of her robe tightly around her hand, until her palm is turning white.
“Bullshit,” I say. “I met him, Mom. He was an asshole. You didn’t like him.”
She gives me a wry smile. “Well, I certainly liked that he was paying our bills.”
I remember now, the way our money troubles abruptly stopped that spring; how I attributed that to the tips in the high-stakes rooms at the Fond du Lac. Still, I don’t quite buy it. Bilking a business tycoon out of a few hundred bucks for the heating bills? She would have aimed higher than that.
“But what else?” She hesitates. “Come on. You were running a con on him, right?”
There’s a wicked twinkle in her eye, and I can tell that she’s dying to tell me despite it all, that she’s proud of herself for some reason. Her lip twitches into a smile. “Fake pregnancy. I was going to threaten to keep it, scare him a little so that he’d pay me off to get rid of it and go away.”
I want to cry. What a tawdry and sad scam. “But how? Wouldn’t you need a fake pregnancy test and an ultrasound?”
“There was a girl I worked with at the casino, she was knocked up and needed cash. She gave me the urine, in case he wanted me to pee on a stic
k to prove it to him. And she was going to go to a clinic, pretend to be me, get an ultrasound with my name on it. I was going to give her five thousand dollars when it was all done.”
I finally snag on a word she’s been using: was. “But you didn’t go through with it.”
“Things…changed. Unexpectedly.” She sighs.
I am mentally running through those months in my head; remembering the silk scarf that appeared around her neck, the nights that she arrived home at dawn because of “late shifts” at the casino, the subtle change in the color of her hair. And then something else horrible occurs to me. “Did you know about me and Benny when all this was going on?”
She shakes her head. “It started before I knew about you two. And I never really knew for sure, darling. You never told me, you were so…elusive. Such a teenager, with your secrets. When I met Benny that day, at the café, I suspected—the way the two of you looked at each other—but I didn’t know. It wasn’t until…” She stops.
“Until the Lieblings called you? When they drove us out of town?”
“No.” She is quiet for a moment. “At Stonehaven…” Her eyes have gone dark and distant again. At Stonehaven? And then I understand, with sickening clarity: The day that Benny’s father caught us in the caretaker’s cottage, what had he been doing out there anyway? Had Lourdes given us up, told him where to find us? Or had he been headed to the cottage for a discreet assignation of his own? “You were with William Liebling that day, at Stonehaven, right? When he caught me and Benny in the cottage together. You were there.”
She blinks. Her eyes are filling with tears.
“Oh God, Mom.” I feel ill. I imagine my mother cowering in the bushes outside the caretaker’s cottage, listening to William Liebling berate me. I remember how it felt to be naked and vulnerable in front of a strange, powerful man—You are nothing, spat into my face—and I’m suddenly furious that she didn’t come into the cottage to defend me. I stand up from the couch and pace back and forth in front of the coffee table. “Why didn’t you stop him?”
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