Pretty Things

by Janelle Brown

  All Michael and I really possess of each other, for now, is trust. And I trust him! I do! I have to.

  I close the computer. I wouldn’t peek even if I could, I tell myself.

  (Or is it the other way around?)

  30.

  Week Five

  THE HOLIDAYS CREEP UP, and suddenly Christmas is just a week away. One morning I wake up to discover that Michael has installed a tree in the parlor, a sweetly tilting pine that he’s decorated with the same silver and gold ornaments that Grandmother Katherine once put on her trees. Somehow, he’s even managed to place it in the same spot where she put hers: in the window that looks out toward the portico, an invitation to guests coming up the drive. Looking at it, I am suddenly six years old again, and afraid of a spanking.

  As I stand staring at it, this hallucination from my past, Michael comes up behind me and wraps his arms around my neck. “I saw that tree when I was walking around the property last week and thought, Christmas tree,” he says. “Betcha didn’t know that I’m handy with an axe.”

  “I have an axe?”

  “Of course you have an axe. What, you’ve never used one?” He kisses me on the cheek as if he finds me adorable, his pampered little princess, and then steps back to admire his handiwork. As he squints at it, his smile falls away. “Shite. It’s lopsided.”

  “No, it’s perfect. Where did you find the ornaments?”

  “In a closet in one of those rooms upstairs that we never go in.” He senses my hesitation. “Was that OK? I wanted it to be a surprise. Our first Christmas together, I thought it should be special.”

  I can’t quite pin down what about this bothers me. Is it that he’s been poking around the house without me knowing about it? That he suddenly knows more of Stonehaven’s secrets than I do? But why would this be a problem? I wanted him to feel at home here.

  “It’s beautiful,” I say. “But I should have warned you sooner, we need to spend Christmas down in Ukiah, with Benny.”

  Michael tilts his head slightly, as if trying to straighten the tree in his mind. “It’s a little creepy to spend the holiday in a psychiatric ward, yeah?” He reaches out to adjust an ornament but it falls to the floor and shatters, scattering tiny shards of gold glass across the floor. We both freeze.

  I bend over and start to pick up the broken pieces of ornament. “It’s not what you’re thinking, it’s nice there. Look, you haven’t even met Benny yet. He’s wonderful, you’ll see. Eccentric, but wonderful.” My face is hot, something twisting and squeezing in my chest.

  Michael grabs my shoulder, stopping me. He plucks a piece of glass out of my hand and cups it in his own. “Don’t cut yourself,” he says. “I’ll do it.”

  I watch him as he crouches over the polished floors, gently sweeping up bits of glass with the side of his palm in a way that reminds me—with an ache—of Maman, and the little glass bird. “Why don’t we just have Benny here?” he asks.

  “Benny won’t come here. He hates it here, remember? Besides, I’d still need to go down to sign him out. He can’t just leave there on his own.”

  “Right.” He looks up at me from where he’s crouched on the floor. “Is he in line to inherit Stonehaven if something happens to you?”

  What a strange question! “Of course he is. Unless I redo my estate and designate a different trustee.”

  “Right. It’s just—” He frowns. “You told me that he said he wanted to burn this place down, is all. And he’s not so rational, is he?”

  “God, that’s morbid. Can we not talk about that kind of thing?”

  Michael nods. He crawls across the floor to retrieve a piece of glass that’s landed up against the wall. He picks it up and then sits there for a moment, his back to me. I see his breath rise and fall faster than it should and it looks like he’s upset. Have I said something wrong?

  “Benny’s the only family I have,” I say softly. “I can’t spend the holidays without him.”

  “I’m your family now, too,” he says. He sounds wounded; I’ve hurt him. I didn’t even think of that. It never crossed my mind that marriage requires a reshuffling of your priorities, with spouse on top and parents and siblings in the middle and your own needs somewhere far down below. (Where do children fit in all that? I wonder. We haven’t even discussed the fact that I want a baby, sooner rather than later. Was it wrong of me to assume he wants one, too?)

  I stand there, my jaw working up and down, not sure how to respond. Eventually he rights himself, his hands glittering with brutal flecks of gold, and looks at me. I can see him measuring the distress in my face, and I also see the shift in his own when he makes a decision. He’s done some shuffling of his own. He softens, and reaches for me. “I want to make you happy, and if it makes you happy to go to Benny, we’ll go. End of story.”

  * * *

  —

  And that would be the end of the story, except that the morning we’re supposed to leave for Ukiah, my car already loaded with gifts, Michael wakes up sick. He lies there in bed with his teeth chattering, complaining of aches and fever. “Crikey. How the hell did I get the flu?” he murmurs, as I pile the bed with extra blankets. “I’ve barely left the house in weeks.”

  When I finally locate a thermometer in the nursery (an ancient mercury thing, probably dating back to the 1970s) and bring it back to our bedroom, Michael’s temperature is 102 and his forehead is beaded with sweat. I know it’s unfair of me to be bitter (or worse: suspicious) about the timing of this illness, but when I think of Benny waiting for me in Ukiah I want to cry.

  I stand over Michael as he huddles under the covers, his eyelashes fluttering with fever. “We can’t go now,” I murmur.

  He opens one blue eye and fixes it on me. “You can go,” he says. “You should go.”

  “But you need me to take care of you.”

  He tucks the blanket tighter under his chin. “I’ll be fine,” he says. “Your brother is the one who needs you most right now. It’s your first Christmas without your dad, yeah? You two should be together. We’ll have other holidays together, you and I.”

  A tide of gratitude rises in me: that he can see the rightness in this decision, and is willing to sacrifice our first holiday together so that I can be with my brother. He understands! I forgive the untimely flu.

  “I’ll only be gone a few days,” I promise.

  “Take all the time you need,” he says. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  * * *

  —

  The Orson Institute does their best with the holidays—the staff in Christmas sweaters, “Silent Night” piped soothingly into the reception area, the doorways festooned with pine garlands (but not, of course, poisonous poinsettias or toxic holly berries). There’s a tree in every room, and a giant menorah on the lawn, and a holiday meal for visitors featuring ham, duck, and sixteen different pies.

  But when I arrive at the facility, the day before Christmas, Benny isn’t festive at all. At some point since we last spoke, he slipped into mania again, and so his dosage has been upped and his phone taken away.

  When I find him in one of the common rooms, he’s sedated and blank. He sits on the couch with a Santa hat tugged over his unruly red curls, watching a SpongeBob SquarePants holiday special.

  His main psychiatrist—a trim woman with a no-nonsense cap of silver hair—pulls me aside.

  “Something triggered him, maybe the holidays,” she tells me. “We caught him trying to break out of the facility. He stole a nurse’s car keys and was driving out the lower gate when we stopped him. He was raving about going all the way to Oregon.” She frowns. “And he’d been doing so well, too. We were going to talk to you about putting him on a reintegration plan.”

  Oregon: fucking Nina Ross. Why won’t she go away for good? Why does she keep haunting us? I go over to Benny, who is slumped into the cushions of the couch as if
trying to sink all the way inside them. He’s attempting to eat a carton of strawberry Yoplait while in this position, and dribbling yogurt down the front of his sweater. He glances down at the mess, runs a finger through one particularly large blob, licks it clean, and then looks back at the TV screen.

  I sit next to him, dropping a pile of gifts at his feet.

  “Oregon? Benny, you have to let it go.”

  He ignores this, and gestures at the TV with his spoon. “This show is really funny,” he says, but his words are slow and mirthless.

  “Seriously, Benny. That girl is poison.”

  This seems to jerk him out of his stupor. He sits up, shakes his head as if to clear it, and I glimpse the glimmer of mania lurking there behind the drugs. “She’s the only girl I ever loved. She’s the only person who ever loved me.”

  “I love you.” So much. Doesn’t he see that?

  He looks at me balefully. “You know what I mean.”

  “For God’s sake, Benny. You were sixteen years old, just a kid. You have no idea who she really is, now. Her mother—”

  “Her mother had an affair with Dad and then tried to blackmail him.”

  I stare at him. “You knew about that?”

  “Of course I knew. I was there when the letter came. Never saw the point in telling you because Dad asked me not to. Besides, I figured you’d lose your shit about it and spend the rest of your life fuming instead of being a productive member of society and all.” He blinks a few times, takes another bite of yogurt. “But Nina’s not her mother. Think about it: What did she ever really do to you? Because all she ever did to me was be my friend when no one else was interested. And Mom and Dad fucked that up.”

  “Think about it, Benny. She got you hooked on drugs, which set you on a downward spiral and triggered…well. All this.”

  He yawns. “Bullshit. She’d never even smoked pot before I gave her some.”

  This stops the words in my throat. She hadn’t? My mother had it wrong? “Wait. You gave pot to her? But Maman said—”

  He groans. “Mom was too fucked-up to see straight. Really, Van, there’s no reason to be pissed at Nina. Her mom was a piece of work, it’s true. But Nina didn’t do anything to me. I’m here for the same reason that Mom’s dead: We both had some faulty genes that screwed with the chemical balance in our heads. It’s no one else’s fault.”

  It isn’t? My jaw works up and down, as I try to come up with another reason to hate Nina Ross. I feel lost, like I’ve let go of a thread and the path I’ve been following has disappeared. What did she do back then, really? Besides failing to be one of us. (Strange and not quality, I remember Maman writing. Oh.)

  The characters onscreen screech and wail. “But still: You can’t deny that she faked her identity as Ashley Smith. Why would she do that if she wasn’t up to something shifty? And don’t forget that she stole money from Michael!”

  He raises an eyebrow. “You sure about that?”

  “What do you mean?” Something lurches inside me. He’s paranoid, I tell myself. He’s manic. But he doesn’t seem manic at all; if anything, he seems pretty lucid.

  “All I’m gonna say is, I’m not convinced that you’re the best judge of character, sis.”

  “This isn’t about me,” I say. “This is about your health. And fixating on her isn’t healthy for you.”

  He proffers the half-empty container of yogurt toward me, with the spoon sticking out of it. “Speaking of my health, apparently I’m not allowed a fork anymore, unless I have supervision. Twenty-nine years old and I can’t cut my own goddamn food.”

  I put my arm around him. Even like this, he’s still Benny to me; that sticky, warm toddler whom it was always my job to protect. “Do you want to come live with me?” I hear myself say. “It would make me so happy if you did.” Could I bring him to Stonehaven to live with me? Maybe it’s not so unfathomable after all. I always thought that Benny would be too much for me to handle alone. But I have Michael now! We could take care of him together. A family again, finally!

  “I dunno.” He shrugs and slumps back, succumbing to the drugs in his system. “It’s not so bad here at Orson, actually. It’s safe. No voices.”

  “Oh, Benny.” I don’t know what else to say.

  He leans his head on my shoulder. “Merry fucking Christmas, sis.”

  * * *

  —

  When I return to Stonehaven two days later, I discover Michael has recovered from his flu, but is in an inexplicably sour mood. The kitchen is a mess—I gave the housekeeper the week off for the holidays, and Michael has apparently used every pot in the place in the meantime. We forgot to water the Christmas tree and it’s shedding dead needles everywhere. They crunch underfoot when I walk through the house in search of my husband.

  I find him in front of the fire in the library, hunched in the big leather chair with his laptop on his knees. He’s wearing a scarf and hat indoors.

  I wait for him to stand up and take me in his arms, to make some noise about missing me, but he barely turns his head from the screen to acknowledge my presence. “How was the drive?” he asks, as if I’d just gone on a grocery run.

  “Fine.”

  Is he punishing me for leaving him alone for Christmas? I can’t quite understand what’s going on. I point at the woolly hat. “Don’t you think that’s a little overkill?”

  He reaches up and touches it, as if he’s forgotten he is wearing it. “It’s freezing in here. Are you sure this place has central heat? Because I cranked the thermostat up to eighty and I still can’t feel anything.”

  I think of the heating bill we’re going to get next month, and cringe. “The furnace is sixty years old,” I say. “And this house is almost twenty thousand square feet.”

  He makes a face at his screen. “Well, we should replace the furnace, then.”

  I laugh at this. “Do you have any idea how much that will cost?”

  Now he’s looking at me, straight on, with an expression of disbelief. “Seriously? You’re worried about the cost of central heating?”

  The tone in his voice is one I’ve not heard from him before: mocking and petty. And I realize that this may be the moment to honestly disabuse him of the notion that I’m limitlessly rich, but my hackles are raised. “Well, it’s not like you’re the one paying the bill,” I say flatly. “Go ahead. Wear your scarf and hat. Can I get you a blanket while I’m at it? A cup of tea? Hot-water bottle?”

  He seems to realize that he’s upset me, because something in his face shifts and softens. He reaches up and grabs my hand and tugs me onto his lap. “I’m sorry. I just think the weather is getting to me. So cold and dreary.” He pulls me in closer. “I hated being alone for the holiday. I missed you. It made me grumpy to be away from you. Don’t go away ever again, OK?”

  The smell of him, spice and soap; the heat of his skin under my hand. There is friction in every relationship, I remind myself. We’re only just discovering ours, and that’s OK. I could continue to be indignant, but it’s easier to succumb to his demand for forgiveness.

  “I won’t,” I say into his sleeve.

  * * *

  —

  And yet. I am unloading bags from my car that night when I stop and look at the silver BMW parked next to mine. Still off-gassing with newness, this indulgent, impulsive gift I gave my husband. Why am I so hesitant to tell him that I am not as rich as he thinks I am? Is it because I’m afraid that he won’t love me as much? That he won’t believe we are alike anymore? Because I still worry that, if I’m not Vanessa Liebling, heiress, I’m no one at all?

  I sit down in the front seat and inhale the smell of him, still lingering in the leather from his road trip earlier in the month. He’s left the key sitting right there in the console, an act of ease or perhaps just laziness. I turn on the radio, and to my surprise a hip-hop music station blasts
through the speakers. My husband, the pop culture snob—How did he put it? An aesthete—likes Kendrick Lamar? I could have sworn he said he only listened to jazz and classical.

  Maybe this little ping of surprise, like a sonar pulse mapping out the gaps in my understanding of him, is what triggers me to reach over to the car’s GPS control panel. I pull up the list of prior destinations and, with one eye on the door to the house, scroll quickly through them. There aren’t many addresses in the list, the car hasn’t been many places. The supermarket, the hardware store, a few other Tahoe City destinations. I realize that I’m looking for Michael’s Portland address. This would be the very first place he headed after the dealership, so I run my finger down to the bottom of the list.

  And then I stop, my hand skittering across the screen, my fingers thrumming with electric shock. Because the first address that my husband went to in his new car wasn’t in Oregon at all.

  It was in Los Angeles.

  31.

  Week Six

  “WHAT WERE YOU DOING in Los Angeles?”

  Michael stops in his tracks in the doorway of the kitchen, the morning papers in his hand, snow in his hair. This has become his new daily routine, the drive down the road to the general store, where he buys a stack of newspapers that eventually end up scattered across the chairs and the tables, half-read. One of the papers under his arm, I can’t help but notice, is the Los Angeles Times.

  He places the newspapers carefully on the kitchen island, next to yesterday’s papers and our dishes from last night’s meal of frozen pizza. Neither of us has much of an inclination to clean up, and the housekeeper has been off for the better part of the week.