Pretty Things

by Janelle Brown

  The cacophony of county jail is deafening: That’s what happens when you jam thousands of women into concrete rooms that were intended to house a population half our size. We sleep in bunk beds in the common areas, feet away from the tables where we play cards and read all day. We urinate in overwhelmed toilets that clog and overflow. We stand in lines for showers, meals, haircuts, telephones, meds. At all hours of the day and night, the concrete echoes with screams and prayers and tears and laughter and curses.

  There is nothing to do here but wait.

  I mill around the common room in my canary-yellow prison suit, watching the hands of the clock in the cage on the wall slowly ticking away the minutes of the days. I wait for mealtime, though I have no interest in eating the gray slurry that slides around my tray. I wait for the library cart to come around, so I can pick out the least offensive romance novel on offer. I wait for lights-out, so that I can lie in my upper bunk in the semi-dark, listening to the snores and whispers of my fellow inmates while I wait for sleep to come.

  It hardly ever does.

  But mostly, I wait for someone to come help me.

  * * *

  —

  My lawyer is a harried public defender with gray corkscrew hair and orthopedic shoes, who I meet only once, before my bail hearing. She sits across the table from me and pulls a folder off the top of a stack and examines it with purple drugstore bifocals. “They’ve got you for grand theft,” she explains. “Your name was on the lease of a storage unit that was filled with stolen antiques. They traced a pair of chairs back to a robbery that had been reported by someone named Alexi Petrov, who then made a positive ID of you in a photo lineup.”

  So much for my theory that billionaires are too rich to be bothered with police reports. “How soon is my trial?”

  “That. Right. Well, I hope you’re patient,” she says with a sigh. “Because you’re probably going to be in here for a while. The backlog on cases right now is outrageous.”

  At the arraignment, the judge sets my bail at $80,000. It might as well be a million dollars, because I have no way to pay it. When I look around the courtroom, I see no one I recognize: Lachlan hasn’t come, nor has my mother. I realize that they probably don’t even know that the bail hearing is taking place—I have no funds in my prison account to make phone calls, so I haven’t been able to get in touch. Secretly, I’m glad that they aren’t seeing me like this, uncombed, exhausted, sticky with guilt and drowning in my yellow jumpsuit.

  My public defender pats me sympathetically on the back and then races off to her next client, a pregnant teenager who shot and killed her rapist.

  I go back to county jail and prepare to wait some more.

  * * *

  —

  The days crawl past and still no one comes for me. Where is Lachlan? I wonder. He’s the only person I know who might have the money to bail me out. Surely my mother has tracked him down by now, told him what happened, sent him to find me. But after one week passes, and then another, and he still doesn’t show up, it dawns on me that he’s not coming, ever. Why would he show his face anywhere near a police station, and risk being identified? Quite possibly he thinks that I’m planning to implicate him in order to save my own skin.

  Or worse. I think about his muted fury when I left Lake Tahoe; his suggestion that I’d somehow screwed up everything for us both. And I wonder: How did the police know that I was in Los Angeles, anyway? It seems an unlikely coincidence that they showed up at my house, less than an hour after I’d arrived in town. Someone must have tipped them off.

  Only two people knew that I was home: My mother and Lachlan. (Three, if Lisa noticed my car in the driveway.) Of the three, I know exactly which one was most likely to have made the call.

  Of course it was Lachlan. Our time together ended as soon as I stopped being useful to him, and started being dangerous. The minute that safe was empty, my fate was sealed. He never had any loyalty to you, I think as I walk the dusty square of the prison yard, razor wire glinting in the pale December light. You knew that. He was always going to toss you aside eventually. You’re just lucky it took this long.

  So then: Who else might come for me? My mother? Lisa? The landlord of my neglected antiques shop in Echo Park, who has surely tossed my stuff on the street by now? I feel untethered, entirely cut off from the world outside. As I lie on my lumpy plastic mattress, trying to make myself invisible to anyone who might be spoiling for a fight, I see for the first time how isolated I’ve become, how small the circumference of my existence really is.

  * * *

  —

  Finally, after three weeks in county, I get summoned to visiting hours. I make my way to a room jammed with folding chairs and chipped linoleum tables, a garish beach-scene mural painted on one wall alongside a chest of broken toys. The room is packed with life: children and grandparents and boyfriends, some wearing little but their tattoo sleeves and others in their beribboned Sunday best. It takes me a minute to pick out my visitor: It’s my mother. She sits alone at a table in the back, wearing a bright green dress that gapes around her neck and hips, with a silk scarf wrapped around her head. Her eyes are red-rimmed and fixed on a point on the wall across from her, as if she’s trying to center herself amid the madness.

  When she sees me, she lets out a little cry and lurches up from the table, her pale hands fluttering in the air like little birds that have fallen from their nest. “Oh, baby. Oh, my baby girl.”

  The security guard is watching us with cold eyes. We’re not allowed to embrace. I sit down across from my mother and slide my hands across the table to take hers.

  “What took you so long to come visit?”

  She blinks rapidly. “I didn’t know where you were! I didn’t know how to find you and every time I called the inmate information hotline I just got an automated menu instead of an actual human being. There’s an online database but you didn’t show up in the visitation system until just last week and then I had to register and it was just…I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s OK, Mom.” Her hands are slight and bony in my grip, and I’m afraid to squeeze them too hard. I eye her head wrap, wondering if the radiation made her lose her hair after all. Underneath it, her face is drawn and narrow, making her blue eyes even more prominent.

  “How are you feeling? Have they started the radiation therapy yet?”

  She unfurls a palm in front of her face: Stop. “Oh, honey, let’s not talk about that, please. I’ve got it all under control. Dr. Hawthorne is very optimistic.”

  “But how are you going to pay for the treatment?”

  “I mean it, Nina. You have enough to worry about without thinking about that. That’s what got you here in the first place, right?” She places her palm against my chin, pressing it hard against my jawbone. “You look terrible.”

  “Mom.”

  Her liquid eyes threaten to spill over. She sniffles and tugs a crumpled tissue from her sleeve. “I can’t bear to see you like this. It’s all my fault. If I hadn’t gotten sick. If I had better insurance. I should never have let you come back to L.A. to take care of me.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “It is. You should have just let me die three years ago.”

  “Mom, stop.” I lean in. “Look, have you heard from Lachlan?”

  She shakes her head. “I tried calling him but his phone’s been disconnected. God, that was such a mistake, introducing you two. This was all his idea, wasn’t it? And now he’s gone and you’re stuck holding the bag.”

  She peers at me as if waiting for me to pile on Lachlan with her, but I’m not in the mood to place blame; I know why I’m here. It’s only a small miracle I didn’t get caught doing worse. I think of Vanessa: What if I had been caught taking a million dollars from her safe? It’s a strange relief that I found it empty.

  “I wish I had the money to bail you out of
here,” she hiccups. “Look, there’s still about eighteen thousand left in our checking account, I know that’s not enough, but maybe if I made some calls. Maybe I could go to Vegas for the weekend and try my hand at the tables, or…” Her eyes go big and far away and I try to imagine her at a casino bar, working her hustle in her weakened state, keeling over in a marble-tiled hotel bathroom and being left for dead.

  “For God’s sake, don’t do that. I can handle it in here. It’s not so bad,” I lie. “Use the money you have left to cover your medical bills. That’s more important. When I get out of here, I’ll find legitimate work, I promise. There’s got to be a local interior decorator who will hire me. I’ll work at Starbucks. Anything. We’ll make it work.”

  She presses a fingertip to the corners of her eyes. I can barely hear her whisper, “I don’t deserve such a good daughter.”

  “Mom,” I say gently. “When the treatments are over and you’re healthy again, go find a real job. For my sake, please? One where you sit at a desk and get a regular paycheck. With healthcare and benefits.” She stares blankly at me. “Talk to Lisa, I’m sure she’ll help you out.”

  A bell jangles overhead, signaling that visiting hours are over. Before it even stops, the security guards are already yelling at us to stand and line up against the wall. My mother looks at me with panic in her eyes. “I’ll come back soon,” she calls, as I back away from the table. She blows kisses that leave pink streaks on her palms.

  “Don’t,” I say. “It’s too hard to see you in here. Just—focus on getting healthy. That’s the best thing you could do for me. Don’t die while I’m in here, OK?”

  I turn away so that I can’t see her crying as I get in line. I can smell sweat and hair oil and astringent soap emanating from the other women standing in line with me, and I know that this must be what I smell like, too. I close my eyes and follow this scent of humanity back to the room where we will all sit and wonder what comes next, hoping we won’t be forgotten.

  * * *

  —

  And so I go back to waiting, but I’m no longer sure what I’m waiting for.

  * * *

  —

  If there’s one thing you do have in jail, it’s time to think, and so I’ve found myself thinking a lot about blame. I’ve spent my whole life looking out, trying to locate the architects who constructed the walls of this world that I found myself in. I used to blame the Lieblings: It was easy to hate them for everything they had that I did not, and for the way they shut me out of their world. As if one door that closed in my face was the reason that everything else went sideways. But I’m finding it harder and harder to believe that now.

  I could blame my mother, for dragging me along in her bad decisions; for failing to give me the leg up in life that I longed for. I could blame her, too, for failing to take care of herself, so that I had to do it for her.

  I could blame Lachlan, for seducing me into joining his schemes and for turning on me when I became inconvenient to him.

  I could blame society, I could blame the government, I could blame capitalism gone awry—I could tug on the threads of social inequality and watch them unravel all the way back to the beginning and pin my blame on whatever I find there.

  And surely all these elements were pieces of the reason why I am where I am. But wherever I look to lay my blame, I always discover the same person: myself. I am the common denominator. There is no one path in life that is set before you, I’m starting to realize; no one is making your decisions for you. Instead of looking out at the world to find a cause, it’s time for me to start looking inward.

  Especially here, in county jail, where I am surrounded by the truly downtrodden—women born into circumstances that drove them inevitably into drugs, prostitution, abuse, and desperation; women who never had a chance at all—I see for the first time how fortunate I have been. I have a college degree, I am healthy. I was raised without stability or good role models but I at least knew I’d always have food to eat and a place to sleep. I always had a mother’s love. That is more than so many of the women I see around me can claim.

  So I suddenly find that it is hard to blame. Instead, what I mostly feel is shame. Shame that I did not do more with what I did have, and shame that I pretended that the road I’d taken was the only option I had.

  Because it wasn’t. I chose that road. I made it mine. And if this is where it took me, it’s my own fault.

  If I ever get out of here, I swear, I’ll find a better path.

  * * *

  —

  A month passes before I’m summoned to visiting hours again. I assume that it’s my public defender, with news about my upcoming trial. But when I get to the visiting room, I stop short. Because the person sitting there waiting for me is Vanessa Liebling. She looks pale and exhausted, with black circles under her eyes; she is somehow simultaneously bone-thin and bloated. Her jeans strain at the waist, her sweatshirt droops at the chest. But it’s definitely her. Her eyes are bulging with the effort it takes not to stare at her surroundings; her hands are jammed in her lap as if she’s trying to make herself as invisible as possible.

  I’m surprised by the little kick of my heart, the flutter of happiness I feel at her presence. Am I that desperate for a familiar face? I slide into the chair in front of her and she looks almost startled to see me.

  “Hi, Vanessa.” I grin. “It’s good to see you. Really.”

  “Nina,” she says rather primly.

  It takes me a second to realize that she’s used my real name. But of course, if she’s here, it means she knows who I am. How did she find out? Did Lachlan tell her? “So, you know who I am,” I say. “Who told you?”

  She wraps her hand in the hem of her sweatshirt. “Benny figured it out,” she says. “He recognized you in a photo on my Instagram feed.”

  “Smart Benny.” How much of the truth does she know, then? How much of the rest do I want to tell her? I sit there silently, overwhelmed by the web of lies I spun, wondering where I should start unwinding them.

  As I puzzle through this, I feel her eyes on me. “You’ve gotten thin.”

  “The food here leaves much to be desired.”

  She looks me up and down, taking in my unwashed hair and the stiff prison jumpsuit I’m wearing. “Yellow’s not your color, either.”

  I can’t help it: I laugh. “How did you find me in here?”

  “Long story. I went to your address, and no one was there. But I talked to your neighbor, and she told me where you were.” She looks down at her hands. “She told me about your mother, too. How sick she’s been. I’m…sorry.”

  I sit back in my chair. “Are you really? Sorry?”

  She shrugs. “I don’t know how I feel about anything anymore, to be honest. The woman who murdered my mother has cancer, shouldn’t I feel some kind of karmic retribution? But I don’t feel good about it.”

  My feeling of goodwill vanishes as quickly as it came. Is this what we’re going to do now? But of course it is. Our first chance to uncork and air all those years of bottled-up resentment; I dig in deep, let my voice go cold. “Your mother killed herself, I seem to recall.”

  “Your mother gave her a nice little push, though. She would never have killed herself if my father hadn’t gotten blackmailed by your mother. It destroyed her.”

  Oh. I hadn’t anticipated that turn. It makes sense that if my mother mailed her letter to Stonehaven, Judith Liebling would have come across it. But I’m not about to take on this burden, too. “Are you really sure about that? Your mother was completely fine until my mother showed up?” She blinks at this and doesn’t answer. “If you’re going to blame anyone, blame your father. He’s the one who was having an affair.”

  “He was a mark. She targeted him.”

  “Your father was an asshole. He treated me like dirt and broke up my relationship with your brother.”<
br />
  “He was protecting Benny. And you, really. Think about it: How would you have handled being in a relationship with a schizophrenic?”

  “He wasn’t schizophrenic yet.”

  We stare at each other across the table, chairs tipped, both of us ready to jump up and leave. It is at once oddly exhilarating to finally be getting all this out in the open, and yet the words make me feel dirty and small. Why are we fighting our parents’ battles as if they are our own? What will this accomplish now that they are all dead or dying, anyway?

  “So.” I stare daggers at her. “Exactly why are you here? To gloat at my situation?”

  Her eyes flick around the room. At the next table over, a prostitute missing a front tooth is trying not to cry as her daughter, in pigtails and a Moana T-shirt, weeps in her grandmother’s lap. Vanessa watches them with anthropological curiosity.

  “You know, I thought it would feel good to see you like this: that you’d finally gotten what you deserved. But it doesn’t.” She turns back to me. “Your neighbor Lisa, she told me you were arrested for grand theft.”

  “Antiques,” I say. “I stole antiques from a Russian billionaire.”

  She furrows her brow. “Is that what you were going to do to me? Steal my antiques?”

  I shrug. “Tell me why you’re here and I’ll tell you what we had planned.”

  “We.” Her face turns the color of nonfat milk. “You and Michael. You were in it…together?”

  I hesitate for only a second: Do I throw him under the bus? Then again, he already sold me out. “His name’s not really Michael. Does that answer your question?”

  She nods. She slowly draws her hands out of her lap and sets them flat on the table in between us. And that’s when I see it: the emerald engagement ring, on her left hand.