Pretty Things

by Janelle Brown

  I climbed back in bed under the velvet coverlet and for penance I read motivational quotes, which didn’t help much, until finally I took three Ambien and slept for the rest of the night.

  By the time I woke up the next morning, I almost felt calm again, as long as I didn’t think too hard about the Judybird still parked in the boathouse down at the lakeshore.

  And still, Michael and Ashley didn’t come.

  On their fifth afternoon in the cottage, I watched through my bedroom window as the BMW crawled down the driveway toward the gate. Ashley sat behind the wheel, window down, the breeze moving her hair. I wondered where she could be going. And then a little while later—a knock on the back door. Michael? I slapped my cheeks until they stung with life, threw my unwashed hair back into a ponytail, and raced to answer it.

  He stood there on the rear portico, rocking back on his heels, his hands shoved into his pockets. An afternoon wind was blowing off the lake; it picked up his curls and flew them around his head like a halo.

  “I’ve been wondering if you were still alive in there,” he said. His hypnotic blue eyes ran across my face, his brow wrinkled with concern. “You all right, then?”

  I was! Now I was. It did not escape me that this meant Michael had been thinking about me. It also did not escape me that he’d waited until Ashley left to knock on my door. “Just had a bit of a cold. I’m better now.”

  “Well, we thought maybe you were avoiding us. Ashley in particular was worried she’d done something to put you off?”

  “Oh, no, not at all.” Relief bloomed through my chest. So much time wasted in unnecessary self-flagellation! Why did I always do this to myself? “Is she upset? Ashley?”

  “Nah. She just thought you were going to do some yoga with her. Was a little surprised when you didn’t come out and join.”

  “Tell her I’ll be there tomorrow.”

  His eyes flickered over my shoulder; a nervous smile as he surveyed my kitchen. “You going to invite me in, then? Ashley’s gone to town for groceries and I’m desperate for a break from my work.”

  “Oh! Yes! Want to sit down for a few minutes? I could make tea.” I ushered him in toward the kitchen table.

  He hesitated, looking down at a plate of congealed eggs that had been sitting there since yesterday. “Show me another room. It’s a big house, this is. Curious to see it all.” He studied the half-dozen doors leading from the kitchen to various parts of the house, and then headed toward the farthest one, seemingly at random. I chased him down as he flung it open and then, with a look of surprise on his face, coughed out a laugh. “What’s this?”

  “The games room.”

  I followed him in and flicked on the light. This was one of the rooms I never used, because what’s the point of a games room if you don’t have anyone to play with? There is nothing in the world more desperate and lonely than a game of solitaire. I looked around the room, taking in the billiards table and the sterling silver chess set just gathering dust in the corner, and wondered if I should suggest a game of pool. But Michael was already making a beeline to the opposite wall, where a pair of gold-and-mother-of-pearl pistols hung over the fireplace.

  He leaned close to examine them. “These things loaded?”

  “No! The ammunition is locked away in one of the closets. I think they once belonged to Teddy Roosevelt? Or maybe it was FDR.”

  “But they work, yeah?”

  “Oh yes. I remember once my uncle shot a squirrel out of a tree with one of them.” The same uncle that later attempted a boardroom coup against my father; perhaps we should have seen that coming. “My brother went mental about it. He was a vegan.” I corrected myself: “Is a vegan.”

  Michael tore his eyes away from the pistols and looked at me. “I didn’t know you had a brother. Are you close?”

  “Yes, though I don’t see him a lot. He’s living in an institution. Schizophrenia.”

  “Ah.” He nodded, as if filing this away for later reference. “That must be tough.”

  “Very.”

  A blast of wind slammed at the windows, rattling them in their casements. “Blow, blow, thou winter wind,/Thou art not so unkind as man’s ingratitude.” He smiled at me. “You know, it reminds me of back home in Ireland. My family’s castle was near the sea, and the wind would blow up the cliffs so hard that if you were standing up on the battlements you could literally get blown right off and dashed on the stones below.”

  “Where’s your family living now?”

  “All over. My parents died in a car accident when I was young. And my siblings and I all went our separate ways. There was some ugliness over the inheritance.” He walked over to the chess set and picked up a pawn, weighed it in his hand. “That’s why I left Ireland, yeah? I hated all the squabbling over money. Decided I’d rather find a way to live on my own devices, in a place where my name didn’t come with so much baggage. I wanted to do some real good, teaching kids who came from nothing. You know what I mean?”

  I leaned up against the billiards table, a little faint. “I do.”

  “Yeah? I bet you do.” He gave me a sideways look. “We’re awfully alike, you and I, aren’t we?”

  Were we? I let the notion roll around my mind, and found it pleasant. (To not have to explain myself! To be understood! Isn’t that what everyone wants?) “Where was your family’s castle? I did a tour of Ireland with my family when I was a child, we must have visited a hundred castles. Maybe I saw it?”

  “Doubtful.” Michael abruptly put down the pawn and walked over to the sword display, mounted on either side of the hearth. There had to be at least thirty, the leavings of some ancestor with a military fetish. He lifted one sword off its stand—a heavy silver thing, with an engraved handle—and hefted it in one hand. Then he pointed it toward me, and lunged. “En garde!”

  The sword tip flew through the air, stopping perilously close to my chest. I shrieked and scrambled backward, my heart ready to fly right out of my chest. Michael’s eyes went wide; in his hand the sword quivered, then drooped toward the floor. “Oh, shite, I didn’t mean to scare you. I used to do fencing. Sorry, I didn’t think.” He placed the sword back on its stand, then reached for my wrist, gripping it tight. I could feel his thumb gently probing, feeling for my racing pulse. “You’re just a delicate thing, aren’t you? All nervy and sensitive. Emotions written right on your face.”

  “I’m sorry.” It came out as a hoarse whisper. Why was I apologizing? I was acutely conscious of the ball of his thumb, rubbing against the soft flesh of my wrist.

  “Nothing to be sorry for.” His voice was low. His eyes seized mine and held them fast. “I like it. So much going on in there. Ashley, well, she’s not…”

  He didn’t finish the thought; his eyes fell to the carpet and stayed there. The space between us felt dangerously electric with static. I could feel the heat of his body through the flannel of his shirt, smell the spiced tang of his sweat. And I wondered, suddenly, about Michael and Ashley’s unlikely pairing: A yoga teacher and an academic? A middle-class American and an Irish aristocrat? How did that work in reality?

  Maybe their connection is sexual. I recalled the intensity of their kiss in the car that first day, felt myself flush hot at the thought. But now there was Michael’s thumb on my wrist, and the memory of crying in Ashley’s arms, and the disorienting rattle of the wind against the windowpanes. It was suddenly all very close and confusing. My mouth was dry and sour; it tasted of betrayal.

  Metal glinted through the trees outside the windows: A car was coming up the drive. The BMW. I jumped away, my wrist slipping from his grasp. “Ashley’s back! She’ll want your help with the groceries, right?” I darted toward the door.

  Michael hesitated, then followed, but slowly. He was working his way around the perimeter of the games room, stopping to examine the golf cups and sailing trophies, picking up photos an
d peering at them before setting them down. My pulse was still on fire, but if he felt as guilty as I did—if he agreed that we’d just had a moment—he wasn’t showing it.

  At the door to the back porch, he stopped to gaze down the lawn to the lake, churning gray and cold. “So now. You won’t be a stranger anymore, yeah?” His smile dangled precipitously from his lips, casual as could be; but then, right before he turned down the steps, he touched two fingers to his eyes, and then pointed them at mine.

  “I see you,” he said softly.

  Did he? It felt dangerous, but God, it also felt good.

  * * *

  —

  I barely slept that night, tossed by exhilaration and dismay. When I finally drifted off I had dreams in which I was a goose feather being snatched in the wind off the lake, never quite managing to land. I woke and lay there in the dark, hating myself. I didn’t want to be that sort of woman; he had a girlfriend, a girlfriend whom I admired. And yet, the undeniable tug I felt when I was around him— Was I expected just to ignore that?

  Maybe our greatest strength as human beings is also our greatest weakness, I thought. The need to love and be loved.

  By the time the sun rose, I was determined to reach out to Ashley, to return some balance to this strange equation. By seven, I was in my yoga clothes and at the window, waiting. But the temperature had dropped overnight, and the lawn was covered with a lacy crust of frost. Ashley never came outside.

  I paced the house all morning, manufacturing excuses to go knock on their door.

  I presented myself at the cottage door just after lunch, backpack in hand, a gristly lump of nerves. But when Ashley threw the door open, her face lit up, as if she’d been waiting for me all week. (I suppose she had been, though not in the way I was imagining it at that moment.) She flung out her arms, and pulled me into a hug.

  “There you are, I missed you,” she purred. The warmth of her cheek against mine numbed the memory of Michael’s thumb on my pulse, even as I was acutely conscious of Michael gazing at me from the couch across the room. I closed my eyes, and let myself sink into the safety of her embrace.

  Today I’ll make it up to Ashley, I told myself. Today I’ll prove to myself that I’m her friend, not her enemy. I would like myself more that way; that was the person I wanted to be.

  If only I’d known, I wouldn’t have bothered.

  But I didn’t, so I hoisted the pack high: “What do you think of a hike?” I asked.

  * * *

  —

  It was Ashley who I focused my energy on as we drove south down the lakeshore; Ashley who seemed so absorbed with the local lore that I giddily rattled off; Ashley who sang along to Britney Spears with me. (I was so pleased that she liked pop music!) In the back seat, where he grumbled about Ashley’s taste in music, Michael felt like an afterthought. I was surprised that he’d decided to join us at all. (Or was I? I see you. I thought of his words from time to time, with a shiver.)

  But by the time we parked, I was beginning to feel like equilibrium had been restored. We started up the path to Vista Point, Michael walking behind, Ashley alongside me. She hummed quietly to herself as she hiked, a faraway look on her face. She seems at home here, I thought to myself. Even more so than me. I stupidly chalked this up to her athleticism, to her comfort in her own body, her peace in the world. (God, the irony!)

  I hadn’t been back to Vista Point since I returned to Tahoe. Maybe I was avoiding it because it was our spot, Benny’s and mine, our favored hiking destination whenever my family came to visit our grandparents during the summer holiday. It’s not that Benny and I were really so keen on the hiking itself: Going to Vista Point was mostly a way to escape the claustrophobic house, where my mother and grandmother paced around each other like wary lionesses. There was a flat rock at the very top, which overlooked the lake, and I would lie there in my bikini and listen to my Walkman while Benny sat and drew in his notebooks. We’d stay up there until the sun got dangerously low in the sky before slowly making our way back to the house for the formal dinner that awaited us: waitstaff in stiff uniforms, vichyssoise in china bowls, my father drinking too many G&Ts while my grandparents frowned at the water marks on their silver.

  I loved those hikes with my brother. Up there, as we silently gazed out at the mountaintops, it would feel like Benny and I had temporarily tuned in to the same channel, and were for once experiencing the same thing at the same time. Those moments were rare, especially after Benny started to slip.

  The path up to the top hadn’t changed since I had last been there, years before. The way was still marked with splintered wooden signs, mile markers in fading yellow paint. But the pines had crept in closer, and the boulders seemed smaller, as if in the intervening years I’d come to take up more space in the world. With Michael and Ashley there, I felt larger than life; I felt alive.

  But next to me, Ashley’s breath was growing ragged, her steps less sure. (Maybe I should have noticed and suspected at that point, but I was still so determined to be her friend.) When we got to a clearing near the summit, she stopped, and braced a hand against a tree.

  I turned to wait. Michael had vanished far behind us. “Everything OK?”

  She ran the hand up and down the bark of the tree, gazed up into the branches. Her placid smile suddenly looked an awful lot like a grimace. “Just taking it all in. I think I might stop for a minute and meditate.”

  She closed her eyes, shutting me out. I waited, looking out at the view. Storm clouds were gathering. A particularly ominous cloud had impaled itself on the peak of the mountain directly across the lake. The wind had whipped up whitecaps across the surface of the water, blowing south toward the casinos on the Nevada shore.

  How long was she going to stand there? Did she expect me to be meditating, too? The stillness made me twitchy; I instinctively reached for my phone and lifted the camera to frame Ashley where she stood silhouetted against the lake. Her cheeks were flushed pink with exertion, her lashes trembled against her skin. So pretty. I snapped a photo, applied a few filters. I was typing the caption: My new friend Ashley when the phone suddenly flew out of my hand.

  “No!”

  Ashley stood before me, her face purple as she jabbed at the buttons on my phone. (My phone!) “Sorry to be such a stickler but…I’m a very private person. I know social media is your thing, but I’d really rather not have you post photos of me online.” She handed the phone back to me. She’d deleted the photo entirely.

  I blinked away the tears that had sprung to my eyes. It had been ages since I’d spent time with anyone who didn’t want their photo taken: An appearance in someone else’s feed was the best sort of validation, a flag staking your place in a world that you hadn’t curated yourself. But not for Ashley, apparently. “I’m sorry,” I murmured.

  “No, it’s really my fault, I should have said something earlier. Don’t worry about it, OK?” She smiled, but her lower lip was pulled tight against her teeth. I’d clearly made a terrible faux pas.

  She turned away from me and looked down the hill. “Let’s head back down and find Michael. I’m starting to think we may have lost him forever.”

  I nodded, but I was thinking of the photo that I had already uploaded, days before, of Ashley doing yoga on the lawn. I need to delete it before she sees it and gets upset. “You go ahead,” I said. “I’m going to take one more minute. I’ll catch up.”

  As soon as she was out of sight I turned my phone back on, and opened up Instagram, where the photo of Ashley was still at the top of my stream: 18,032 likes, 72 comments. It really was a good portrait—one of the best, artistically, that I’d taken since getting to Tahoe—and I hesitated, a little torn. How identifiable was she, really? I scrolled quickly through the comments, just to see what my followers had to say about it. So idyllic / Whose the yoga hottie?! / Looks fun but R U ever going to start posting fashion again??? / Tire
d of nature shots, unfollow.

  And that’s how, right at the bottom of the page, I came across a comment from my longtime follower BennyBananas. BennyBananas, haha, a joke that I had never found funny at all. The Orson Institute had clearly given Benny cellphone access again, a privilege they only conferred when he was a safe distance out from one of his paranoid phases (otherwise, he’d just end up in a Reddit conspiracy theory spiral), so this was a positive sign about my brother’s current mental state. Distracted by this—and by the lingering sensation that I had made a critical error—it took me a minute to fully absorb what Benny had written under the photograph. When I did, I felt as if the entire mountain was about to collapse under my feet. Boulders shaking and rumbling, tearing themselves from the earth in order to tumble in unison down the hill and smash everything that lay below.

  VANESSA WTF ARE YOU DOING HANGING OUT WITH NINA ROSS WITHOUT ME?

  I stood too long on the top of the mountain, trying to wrap my head around my brother’s message. Nina Ross? That name again. At first I thought that I might have conjured it up, a vestige from my mother’s diary earlier in the week. But I read Benny’s comment again, and the name NINA ROSS was still there; and it still made no sense. Benny had to be hallucinating again. Because there was absolutely no way that Ashley Smith was Nina Ross.

  But Benny had phone privileges. Benny only got phone privileges when he was lucid.

  What did Nina Ross even look like? I still had only the haziest recollection from that day we’d crossed paths at the café. Didn’t she have…pink hair? Wasn’t she chubby? A pimply Goth, with self-esteem issues. That hardly sounded like the toned, self-assured woman who was waiting for me down the hill. And yet…it had been twelve years. All that could have easily changed with a diet and a makeover. (Just ask Saskia.)