Pretty Things

by Janelle Brown

  Her voice is so small I can barely hear her. “I was ashamed. I didn’t want you to know that I was with him.”

  This stops me for a minute. “Why were you even there?”

  She goes quiet again.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Mom. Enough with the twenty questions. Just tell me.”

  She stares at the cord wrapped painfully tight around her hand. She winches it even tighter, then releases it. When she speaks again, her voice is slow and deliberate, as if she’s measuring out each word with a teaspoon.

  “His wife was out of town,” she begins. I nod, remembering. “He brought me there, to the cottage. It was the first time I had been to Stonehaven, but he wouldn’t take me into the main house. I was going to tell him that day. That I was pregnant. I had a test with me and my friend’s pee in a cup, in case he didn’t believe me. But he opened the door to the cottage…and right away we could hear you.” Her voice cracks a little. “I ran back outside and I thought he would follow, but he didn’t. So I hid, and waited. But, darling—I swear. I didn’t know it was you in there.” Her imploring eyes seek out mine. “Until he came back out and was so mad.”

  “At me?”

  Her throat works up and down. “At us. He thought…you and Benny…that you and I were in it together. A team. Targeting his family. He was paranoid. And there was no way I could pretend to be pregnant after that.” There’s something flat and accusatory in her voice, and I realize with a start that she might actually blame me for stepping in the way of her con. “Anyway, that was it. It was over. He dumped me.”

  “And made us leave town.” There’s a long silence. “Right? Mom? That’s why we moved so suddenly? He forced us out of Tahoe because he wanted to break me and Benny up.” But even as I’m asking, I know that this isn’t true; this was never true. I remember my mother’s caginess the day that we left, the way she was so reluctant to elaborate about what the Lieblings had done to drive us from town. Not to protect me, but to protect herself.

  Her head tilts up to look at me. Her eyes are blurred with tears. “We needed money. Nina…the bills. Without him—I couldn’t….It was too hard.”

  I sit heavily on the sofa, which groans beneath me and releases a faint puff of dusty air. Of course. The letter: My silence came too cheap. I’m worth more than what you gave me last June. “We left town because you blackmailed him? God, no wonder Benny wouldn’t speak to me after that!!”

  “Nina.” She huddles in the corner of the couch, shrinking into herself. “I’m sorry about Benny. But your thing with Benny—it wouldn’t have lasted.”

  “What was the trade, Mom?” I’m yelling at her, and I’m sure Lisa can probably hear me all the way in her house next door, but I can’t stop the anger that is pouring out. “What did you demand from him?”

  A tear spills from her eye and worms through the soft crevices of her hollow cheek. “I said…I’d tell his wife about our affair. I had photos, compromising ones I’d taken just in case, when we…” She trails off. “Anyway, I said I’d leave town, if he paid me off. That you’d leave his son alone.”

  I think back to the day that I came home to the packed car, and my mother’s apology: It’s not turning out how I hoped. A lie. And I also understand for the first time that we weren’t driven out of town by a vengeful family who thought we weren’t as good as they were. Instead, we fled, tail between our legs, because my mom was incapable of going straight after all. Because she was greedy. She sent us into exile, not them.

  So I guess they were right: We weren’t as good as they were, not at all.

  “How much, Mom?” I ask. “How much did he give you?”

  Her voice is barely audible. “Fifty thousand.”

  Fifty thousand. Such a pitiful sum, really, for selling out your daughter’s future. And I wonder what my life would have been, had I stuck it out in Lake Tahoe, in the warm embrace of West Lake Academy and its progressive ideals. If I hadn’t walked away from that year thinking myself a failure, a reject, a nobody.

  “Jesus, Mom.” I sit there on the couch with my head in my hands for a long time. “And then you sent a letter. A few months later, when we were back in Las Vegas. You blackmailed him for more money, a lot more, half a million this time.”

  She looks startled. “How do you know that?”

  “I saw the letter you wrote him. It’s still in the safe at Stonehaven.”

  “You saw it? In Stonehaven?” Her words are phlegmy, stuck in her throat, and in the middle of all this revelation I realize that my recent sojourn at Stonehaven is the one thing I haven’t fully explained. “Wait—Nina—”

  “I’ll explain later. But, Mom—you blackmailed him again?”

  She turns slowly to gaze at me, her expression vague and distant, as if she’s looking at me from the bottom of an aquarium. “I tried. He never answered.”

  Of course he didn’t. I can still vividly recall the Vegas apartment where we retreated after Tahoe, a tiny shoebox with a tub that didn’t work and a kitchen that smelled of mold. If my mother had a half million in her pocket, she would have moved us to a penthouse at the Bellagio and blown through the money in six months. “And that’s it? You just gave up?”

  “Well, I saw in the paper…about his wife. That she died.” She looks hard at me. “I figured, I’d lost my opportunity. Plus I felt a little bad for him then.”

  “But apparently you didn’t feel so bad for me when you yanked me away from the only place I’d ever been happy.” I know I sound bitter.

  “Oh, sweetheart. I’m so sorry.” The effort of our conversation seems to have depleted her. She closes her eyes and vanishes back into herself. I watch as another tear forces its way from below her closed lids and darts down her face, until it lands at her chin and clings there, wobbling precariously. I can’t help it—I reach out and gently take it off with my fingertip. It hangs there, a tiny prism reflecting the room, and the two of us in it. Then I wipe my mother’s chin dry with the cuff of my sleeve, tenderly, like a baby. Because that’s what my mother is, I see. It’s what my mother always was: a child, unable to take care of herself, unable to take care of me, lost in a world that no one adequately trained her how to navigate; a child too small to see over the horizon to where the consequences of her actions awaited her.

  This is the great horror of life: that mistakes are forever, and cannot be undone. You can never truly go back, even if you want to retrace your steps and take another route. The path has already disappeared behind you. And so my mother forged blindly ahead, doubling down, hoping that she might miraculously emerge in a better place even as the decisions she’d made guaranteed that she would end up exactly where she is: a cancer-riddled con artist with nothing to her name, and no one except her daughter to care about her existence.

  Her eyelids suddenly fly open again. “The safe at Stonehaven,” she says as if finally registering what I said. “You were in their safe?” She leans forward, a burning spark in her pupils.

  I realize then that my charade is finally up. Because my mother knows—has always known—what I’ve been doing for the last three years: She never believed for a second that I was a legitimate antiques dealer, somehow floating all this on the resale of an occasional Heywood-Wakefield sideboard. It’s time to come clean, to her and myself. I’m Nina Ross, daughter of Lily Ross, a grifter, a talented sham. I am what the world made me. I can’t trace my steps backward, either.

  I lean in and whisper, “Mom—I got into Stonehaven. Vanessa, the older Liebling kid, Benny’s sister? She lives there now. I walked right into her life. She opened the door and invited me in. I got in and I broke into her safe.”

  And as I say this, I feel a little swell of emotion—of pride of accomplishment, because my mother was a small-time grifter and I’m sure she never imagined something quite so audacious and bold. But something about this emotion twists inside me, and I realize that th
ere’s vindictiveness hidden in there, too, because what I also want my mother to know is that I have become the person she never wanted me to be, and it’s her fault.

  I don’t know what I expect to see in my mother’s face, but it’s not what I’m seeing: Curiosity? Or confusion. I can’t quite tell. “What else did you find in the safe?” she asks. Of course, I think. My mother, always the opportunist at heart, would want to know what I got.

  “Nothing,” I say flatly. “It was empty.”

  “Oh.” She stands up abruptly, a little wobble in her knees but she holds herself steady on the arm of the couch. “And Lachlan—is he still there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you going to go back?”

  That’s the question, isn’t it? And for a moment, a brief beautiful moment, I imagine that I won’t. That instead of getting in the car and driving back up to Stonehaven to finish my con, I will drive to LAX and get on a plane and fly…God knows where. That I will hand my mother the little money left in our bank account, tell her that she’s on her own this time, and let her deal with her cancer herself. That I will release myself from my past, and let myself be free.

  Who will I be if I’m not taking care of my mother anymore? If nothing else, I know that I no longer want to be the person I am now. I imagine myself packing up this house, leaving Los Angeles in my rearview mirror, finding someplace quiet where I can start fresh. Someplace green and serene and full of life. The Pacific Northwest. Oregon, Ashley’s home. A place where I really could become her (or at least a facsimile). Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad.

  And what of Lachlan? I wonder. But I already know what I will do, I’ve known it for some time. I don’t need him anymore, and I don’t want him, either. I think of him still up there with Vanessa, and experience a painful twinge of conscience. I’ll call him off, I think. I’ll find some excuse to get him out of Stonehaven and out of Vanessa’s life. An olive branch invisibly proffered to my oblivious nemesis. Or is she my nemesis anymore? Over the last ten days she has evolved for me: She is no longer a caricature on whom I can hang all my resentment, but a human being who has cried on my shoulder. She has her flaws—she is shallow, certainly; she has committed the sins of blind entitlement and conspicuous consumption—but she doesn’t necessarily deserve what we were about to do to her. Especially now that I know the Lieblings are not at the root of everything bad in my life, not in the way that I once believed.

  But I don’t have the chance to make the call to Lachlan, or the drive to LAX, because at that moment the doorbell rings.

  My mother turns to me, her face gone white. “Don’t answer it,” she hisses.

  I stand frozen by the couch, just a few steps away from the front door. I can hear footsteps on her porch, at least four feet shuffling against the creaking boards. I am so close that I can see breath fogging the front window when someone cups their hands against the glass and peers inside. My eyes meet those of a policeman; he holds my gaze, mutters something softly to the person still knocking at the door.

  “Run,” my mother whispers. “Just leave. I’ll take care of this.”

  “I can’t just leave.”

  What is it I’m feeling as I drift toward the front door, like a magnet drawn to its inevitable polarity? Is it self-awareness, that I finally see the consequences of my actions, and am ready to face them? Is it fear, about the future I am headed toward? Or is it a curious kind of relief, that this may not have been the path I would have chosen, but at least I am about to be free of the path I was on?

  I wrench the door open as my mother squeals in protest.

  On my doorstep are two policemen in full uniform, hands draped loosely over their guns even though their trigger fingers are poised and at the ready. One has a mustache and one does not, but otherwise they could be twins, and they are looking at me with cool distrust in their eyes.

  “Nina Ross?” the one with the mustache asks.

  I must have answered in the affirmative because suddenly they are reading me my rights, and one of them is unclipping handcuffs from his belt and the other is grabbing my arm to spin me around. I’m trying to argue and my voice is so panicky and frantic that it doesn’t sound like my own; and then over that we all hear a terrible shrieking moan from behind me in the living room, like the wail of a wounded beast. It’s my mother. Everyone stops.

  I turn to the mustache. “Please, sir, let me have a moment with my mother, she’s got cancer and I’m her primary caregiver. I promise I’ll go willingly if I can just have a minute with her.”

  They look at each other and shrug, but the mustache releases my arm and follows me into the living room. He hovers as I hug my mom, who has gone stiff and soundless, as if the scream has emptied her entirely. I put a hand on her face to calm her.

  “It’s OK, Mom. I’ll be back as soon as I can. Call Lachlan and tell him what happened, OK? Tell him to come bail me out.”

  She twitches in my grip, her breath coming fast and frantic. “This is wrong. How did this happen? We can’t—you can’t.”

  “Don’t go anywhere, OK?” I kiss her on the forehead and smile, as if I’m just going on a little vacation, nothing at all to worry about. “I love you. I’ll be in touch as soon as I can.”

  Her face twists. “My baby.”

  The detective tugs on my arm, dragging me out the door, as my mother gasps soft words of love in my direction; and then I’m being pulled out of the house. The cuffs go on, and the metal bites cold around my wrists; the police car door is thrown ajar, waiting for me to slip inside.

  I see that Lisa is standing in her driveway, in men’s pajamas, gaping at the spectacle unfolding before her. Her graying curls fly wild around her head. She looks stunned, or stoned, or maybe both. She inches toward us, carefully picking her way across the dirt with her bare feet.

  “Nina? Is everything OK? What’s going on?”

  “Ask them,” I say, and jerk my head toward the nearest cop. “I have no idea. I’m sure it’s all just a terrible mistake.”

  She frowns and comes to a stop a safe distance away. “Let me know what I can do to help.”

  The policeman’s hand is on my head, gently pressing me down, but before I duck into the back of the police car I manage to call out to Lisa. “Just…keep an eye on my mom for me,” I say. “Make sure she starts her radiation treatments. I’ll be back home soon, I promise.”

  * * *

  —

  Of all the lies I have conjured up in my life, this is the only one I never intended to tell.

  24.

  Week One

  I WAKE UP A wife!

  * * *

  —

  I wake up a wife and I don’t even realize it, not at first, because my brain is burning and my mouth is chalk and I can still taste the tequila in my throat. I forgot to draw the curtains last night so it’s the morning sun that wakes me, too early, awfully bright because of the reflection off the fresh snow outside. It’s been a good long while (was it Copenhagen? Miami?) since I woke up in this state and it takes a minute to orient myself: I’m in the velvet canopy bed in Stonehaven’s master suite, where my parents once slept, and my grandparents and great-grandparents before them, and so on and so forth for the last hundred-plus years.

  I wonder if any of them ever woke up like this: blind with pain, still drunk, mind wiped clean of memories from the night before.

  But no—not entirely wiped.

  My eyes fly open. Memories are surfacing, startling creatures swimming up from the dark. I roll to one side to check if I’m remembering correctly. And there he is, naked in bed beside me, wide-awake and smiling at me like I am a warm latte that he is about to drink up.

  My husband. Mr. Michael O’Brien.

  * * *

  —

  I wake up a wife, and I wonder what on earth have I done?

  * * *


  —

  “Good morning, my love,” he says in a voice still crackled with sleep. “Wifey.”

  A callback to a moment the night before, after we said I do; I remember that much, and I also remember what I said back. “Hubby,” I whisper. The word is strange in my mouth, but also comforting, a feather duvet settling over my limbs. Then I giggle, because of all the impulsive things I have done in my life this has to beat them all, and laughter seems the appropriate response.

  Oh. Smiling hurts.

  When I wince he brushes a thumb over my brow. “You doing OK?” he asks. “That was a new side of you last night, one I didn’t expect. Not that I’m complaining.”

  So it’s true. Last night we got drunk on tequila and champagne, and he asked me to marry him, and we called a town car to take us across the border to Reno, where we got married at a shabby little place called Chapel o’ the Pines just before midnight. There was an officiant in purple nylon vestments and a professional witness who knitted baby socks while we took our vows. I seem to recall that we laughed, a lot.

  He asked me to marry him!

  Or maybe we asked each other?

  I can’t quite remember.

  Do we even have photos from last night? Blindly, I feel around for my phone—under the pillow? next to the bed?—thinking that my social media feeds will help fill in the gaps. (How many names and faces and unforgettable moments would I have lost, were it not for the convenience of hashtags?) But then I remember that Michael made me leave my phone behind at Stonehaven before we climbed in the car, whispering “I want this to be just for us, just about us” as he gently pried it from my hands. A little burp of panic: If we didn’t document our marriage, if it isn’t in my public photo stream, did it really happen?

  I peer over the edge of the bed and see a heap of clothes on the floor. Apparently I got married in a pair of jeans and a stained Yeezy sweatshirt. (So maybe I am glad there are no photos.) This, despite the fact that somewhere in the packing boxes that still line the edges of this bedroom there is a wedding gown, a custom Ralph & Russo, that has never been worn. Also, I do believe that I walked down the aisle to “Love Me Tender.” This is not how I once dreamed that my wedding would go. (“Halo,” that was always the plan.)