Pretty Things

by Janelle Brown

  “Oh no,” I say, realizing.

  “Oh yes,” she says, stiff as cardboard. “And here’s another fun fact: I’m pregnant.”

  I’m shocked into silence. We both stare at her hand on the table, the pale skin of her fingers, my mother’s fake ring looking garish and out of place against the worn lino. What have I done?

  “What’s his real name?” she finally asks. “If he used a false identity when I married him, the marriage isn’t real, right? It’s illegitimate?”

  I think about this for a long time. Do I even know his real name? With all the slippery lies I saw him tell, I never thought to wonder whether he was lying to me, too.

  “Bail me out of here,” I say, “and I’ll help you find out.”

  * * *

  —

  Lachlan’s apartment is a blank beige box: a generic stucco condo in a big complex in West Hollywood, the kind of place where the walls are thick and no one speaks to their neighbors. I’ve only been here a handful of times over the years: Lachlan usually came to me, which I always assumed was out of respect for my need to be near my mother. Now I wonder if this had more to do with his own desire for secrecy.

  I am back in the clothes that I was arrested in: the clothes I was wearing when I drove away from Stonehaven that November morning. The shirt is still powdery-smelling from the deodorant I was wearing that day, the pants still stained from the coffee I spilled in the car. My clothes are baggy on me now; they feel like the costume of a stranger. After nearly two months in county jail, the sun is blindingly bright, the air so sweet that it’s almost painful to breathe.

  I direct Vanessa to park her SUV down the street from Lachlan’s apartment, just to be safe, and then we walk the rest of the way to the complex. Vanessa trails a half step behind me as we walk between the buildings, her eyes darting left and right as if expecting Lachlan to leap out from behind a stand of oleander. Palm trees keen softly in the wind, lost fronds curling at their feet like plucked feathers.

  “Where does Lachlan think you are, anyway?” I ask.

  “I told him I was going to visit my brother.”

  “Benny. How is he doing, anyway?”

  She keeps her eyes fixed on the sidewalk, gingerly avoiding the blackened nubs of long-abandoned gum that pepper the asphalt. “Up and down. He was doing better, but lately he’s been having trouble again.” A slight hesitation. “Since he heard you were back, actually. He’s been rather fixated on seeing you again. He tried to break out of his institution to go look for you. In Portland.”

  I hear a jab in the emphasis she puts on this last word, but I choose to ignore it. My heart twists at the thought of Benny, fruitlessly trying to hunt me down. Poor Benny. “Maybe I can go visit him, after.”

  She gives me a sideways look, full of distrust. “You’d do that?”

  “Of course.” The thought fills me with lightness, in fact: to be wanted. It is something to look forward to, something to hang in my future and move toward. When was the last time someone actually wanted to see me, even if it is a mentally unstable childhood ex?

  I lead Vanessa around the back of one of the buildings, to where the condos face onto a narrow strip of gravel and a high wooden fence. Above the fence line, I can see the Hollywood Hills, and the eight-figure homes that perch up there among the palm trees, aloof in their isolation. Alexi’s house is up there somewhere, the Richard Prince nurse still on the wall, bloodied and watchful. Already, it feels like another lifetime.

  Each condo in this complex has a tiny little deck, most of which sport a bike or a plastic chair or a cluster of browning plants. Vanessa follows me to a deck at the far end of the building, fronting a unit with windows that are empty and dark. I leap lightly over the railing as Vanessa gapes at me.

  “Come on,” I say.

  “Aren’t we going to get in trouble?”

  I look out at the wall of windows with their blinds closed tight for privacy. People are always so worried about strangers looking in that they forget to look out. “No one is watching.”

  Vanessa clambers over the rail and stands next to me, panting from the effort. “Do you have a key?” she whispers.

  “I don’t need one,” I say. I lift the handle of the sliding door and press my shoulder against the glass, jiggling the door in its frame until the catch releases. The door slides silently open.

  Vanessa has a hand pressed over her mouth. “How did you know how to do that?”

  I shrug. “It’s the one thing my father bothered to teach me before my mother kicked him out. He was always too drunk to keep track of his keys.”

  She frowns. “Who was your dad? Not a dentist, I take it?”

  “No. He was drunk, a gambler, and a wife-beater. I haven’t seen him since I was seven. He’s probably dead or in jail. At least, I hope he is.”

  She can’t seem to stop staring at me, as if she’s never seen me before. “You know, you’re a very different person when you’re honest. I think I like you more this way.”

  “Funny. I think I prefer Ashley myself. She’s not nearly as cynical. And a lot nicer.”

  “Ashley was a fake. Really, I should have known it from the start.” Vanessa sniffs. “No one is that self-possessed in real life. On social media, sure, but not in person. Ashley was always too good to be true.”

  We step into the cool darkness of Lachlan’s living room, and draw the curtains closed behind us.

  * * *

  —

  The condo is a bachelor pad, stark and severe. Leather sofa and chairs, giant TV, a bar cart stocked with expensive alcohol, vintage movie posters on the walls. The condo could belong to anyone: There are no framed photos, no trinkets on the sideboards, no bookshelf reflecting quirks of taste or education. It is barren, as if Lachlan had made a conscious decision to sweep himself off the surfaces and render himself invisible.

  We stand in the gloom, waiting for our eyes to adjust. In the distance I hear a horn honking, the tinny vibrations of distant hip-hop coming through an open window. I turn in a slow circle, taking in the familiar surroundings.

  “What are you looking for?” Vanessa asks.

  “Shhh,” I whisper. I close my eyes and listen to the room, waiting for it to speak to me. But the wall-to-wall carpeting sucks all the sound from the room and so what remains is a void. I imagine Lachlan moving through these rooms, his footsteps silent because of the rug underfoot. He must have left an imprint of his real self somewhere in between these walls, something underneath the careful mirage that he is so good at building.

  There’s a sideboard pushed against the wall. I throw the doors open and begin rifling through its contents: old electronics, a stack of books on human psychology, and a Hugo Boss shoebox filled to the brim with cellphones. I pick up a few phones at random and try to turn them on. Most are dead, but one still has battery life. When it flickers to life, I scroll through it. There are no photos, and the texts have been erased, but in the call history I find a long string of phone calls to a number in Colorado.

  I call and listen to it ring. Eventually a woman answers, breathless and angry.

  “Brian,” she barks. “You have some gall calling here…”

  “Sorry, who is this?”

  “Brian’s ex-girlfriend. Who is this?”

  “Ditto,” I say. “What did he do to you?”

  The woman starts to yell into the phone so loudly that I have to hold the receiver away from my ear. “He racked up forty-three thousand dollars in charges on my credit card, took out a loan in my name without my permission, and then skipped town! That’s what he did. You tell him that Kathy is going to cut his fucking head off if he comes back to Denver….No, wait, tell me where you are and I am going to call the police.”

  I hang up.

  Vanessa is watching me closely, her face wide and fearful. “Who was it?”

 
“A mark,” I say. I look at the pile of phones in the box, repulsed. So this is what Lachlan was doing on the side, when he would disappear for weeks at a time. How many women are in there? Two dozen? Three?

  She tips over the box of phones, her hair falling across her face, and I think she might cry. “Did you know he was doing that?”

  “No.” I put the lid back on the box and push it away with my toe. “OK, let’s keep looking. You take the kitchen, I’ll take the bedroom.”

  * * *

  —

  The bedroom is dark, blinds drawn, dust thick in the air. The drawers of the dresser are stacked neatly with shirts and chinos; the closet filled with designer suits and polished leather shoes. I dig around in the drawers and shelves, peer inside the shoes, but the only thing of interest that I find is a wooden box with a collection of a dozen expensive watches that I didn’t help him steal and have never seen him wear. I am starting to realize how busy he has been without my assistance. I almost wonder why he bothered with me at all.

  I can hear Vanessa in the kitchen, rifling through the cabinets, then a hollow clatter as something wood—a board?—is dropped to the floor. She comes back in with a box of McCann’s oatmeal in her hands, and an odd expression on her face. “Look,” she says. The box is packed tight with hundred-dollar bills, rubber-banded in thick stacks. “I found this behind the toe kick, under the cabinets. It came right off when I pulled at it.”

  I stare at it. “How’d you think to look there?”

  “I watch a lot of TV shows, like Criminal Minds,” she says. “It’s got to be tens of thousands of dollars. And there’s six more boxes just like it.”

  Looking at the money in her hands I feel a quick kick of adrenaline: money for my mother’s treatment. I reach into the box and retrieve one of the bundles of cash—gritty with cereal dust—and instinctively start to tuck it in my pocket. And then I stop. I can’t do this anymore.

  I hand the money back to her. “You keep it,” I say. “I’m done taking other people’s things.”

  Vanessa drops the box on the bed, as if it’s radioactive. “You want me to steal Michael’s money?”

  “Jesus, Vanessa—it was never his in the first place. God knows where it came from. Just, take it. For the bail you covered. And to pay you back for whatever he’s inevitably already taken from you. Did you buy him anything?”

  “A car.”

  “Did you add him to your credit card?” She nods. “Uh-oh. Then he’s probably already figured out how to draw off your bank account.”

  She looks like she might cry. “I can’t believe I fell for his shtick. Both of you—you just…suckered me. Like a fool.”

  “No. You saw exactly what we wanted you to see. We put on a good show, tailored just for you. So you believed it: That makes you an optimist, not a fool.” I pick up the box and hand it to her. “Here. You earned this.”

  “Well, I don’t want it.”

  “Fine. Donate it to charity, then. But for God’s sake, don’t leave it for him.”

  She picks up the box again, peers inside. Shakes it around, then sticks two fingers deep into it, and pincers out something else: a small manila envelope. She looks at me, then opens it and removes a piece of paper. Unfolded, it reveals itself to be a birth certificate, soft with age. The name is almost obscured by the fold lines, and for a few seconds the strange truth fails to register. Michael O’Brien, born in Tacoma, Washington, October 1980 to Elizabeth and Myron O’Brien. There’s a yellowed Social Security card in the envelope as well, and an expired U.S. passport, all belonging to Michael O’Brien.

  He used his real name.

  Vanessa’s face pales. “Oh God.”

  I look at the birth certificate for a long time, remembering the moment in that hotel room in Santa Barbara when Lachlan rolled over in bed and suggested his new pseudonym. Michael O’Brien. No wonder it rolled off his tongue so easily, far more easily than Ashley ever fit onto mine. Did he already see Vanessa as the big fish he had been waiting all these years to hook? I wonder what he has planned for her. A cushy marriage? An even cushier divorce? Or something far worse than that?

  “He’s not even from Ireland,” I mutter.

  Vanessa leans over to study the birth certificate, touching the edges lightly as if fearful of leaving her fingerprints on it. “He’s waiting for me back at Stonehaven. If I file for divorce, he’s going to take me for half of everything I have.” Her voice grows softer. “I’m having his baby. I thought about not going through with it, but I want this baby. I just…don’t want Michael in our lives. I need him gone before he finds out I’m pregnant. Otherwise I’ll never be rid of him.”

  “You need to kick him out.”

  She peers at me from behind a tangled strand of hair. “He’s not going to leave that easily, is he?”

  Guilt gnaws at me, sinking its sharp teeth into my conscience: I dragged Michael to her front door, and then I left him there for her to deal with. “Probably not.”

  She stands up, a little wobbly. “I’m not going to let him drive me out of my own home.”

  “Are you going back there? To Stonehaven?”

  She shrugs. “Where else can I go? It’s my home.”

  “Don’t go alone, at least. Maybe you could take Benny with you? You could confront him together?”

  “You don’t know how Benny is now. He’s not reliable that way.”

  “For God’s sake, just—give it a minute. Stay at a hotel for a night or two. Come up with a better plan than I’m asking you to leave.” I know what I should tell her to do—call the police—but if she does, it’ll just be a matter of time before they find the JetSet profile Michael and I put up and figure out that I was a part of his plans, too. I’m already in enough trouble. So I keep my mouth shut.

  Vanessa picks up the oatmeal box full of money and holds it stiffly out from her body, as if it might accidentally detonate and take off a limb or two. She turns, and goes back to the kitchen.

  The minute she walks away with the money, I regret giving it to her. What was I thinking? I probably just signed my mother’s death warrant. And I’m going to need money for a decent trial lawyer, unless I want to spend the rest of my life rotting in jail. What is my piousness going to gain me in the end? Is a clear conscience really worth all that?

  Too late now. But presumably he has other stashes of cash in other hiding places. I drop to the floor and peer under the bed—nothing but dust—and then lie on my back on the carpet, thinking. The last time I was here must have been six months back. After finishing a job (a B-list rap star, whom we liberated of six figures’ worth of diamond-crusted finger bling), Lachlan took me out to dinner in Beverly Hills and then, too drunk to drive back to Echo Park, back to this condo. I remember waking up hungover in his bed and hearing him rustling around in the bathroom, the soft click of a door being pressed back into place. When Lachlan came back in the bedroom and saw that I was awake, he smiled and dropped onto the bed next to me; but not before I saw his face rearrange itself, as if he was taking a mental eraser to his own expression.

  So: the bathroom.

  I open the bathroom door and flip on the vanity lights, blinking in the sudden glare. A woman is standing there, looking back at me, her face sallow and hair wild. I almost don’t recognize myself. Sometime while I was in jail, the poised and polished Nina Ross shriveled up and vanished. I’m not quite sure who the person that remains inside my skin might be. I think of Vanessa’s words—I like you more this way—and wonder how this could possibly be true.

  The medicine cabinet has nothing but toothpaste and Tylenol, a single bottle of dextroamphetamine, and a very expensive shaving kit. Under the sink, a stack of toilet paper and Kleenex, plus a supersized bottle of Drano. I pull it all out and spread it on the tile floor, just in case something might be tucked in back. There’s nothing there, just some dead silverfish
and a square of Con-Tact liner paper emblazoned with yellowing daisies. But I notice that the edge of the paper is curling and bent, as if it’s been pushed at too many times, and when I tap on the base of the cabinet, it sounds hollow. I wedge a fingernail under the corner of the pressboard, and the bottom pops out easily.

  There’s a flat shirt box underneath. I tug off the cover and study its contents, heart racing.

  Eureka.

  * * *

  —

  Vanessa gives me a ride back to Echo Park. Night has descended on Los Angeles, and rush hour traffic clutches at our car as we join the river of taillights heading east. Her SUV smells like leather and citrus air freshener; the seats are so deep and cushioned after my eight weeks of plastic and metal that I feel like I might suffocate in them. The silence in the car is a thick soup. I can’t bring myself to ask Vanessa what she’s thinking; I can’t afford to care.

  She slows to a stop in front of the bungalow, her eyes flicking nervously at the front door, as if wondering whether my mother is going to materialize to confront her. But the lights are out in the house, windows staring black and empty-eyed at the street.

  I pause before I open the car door. “Are you going back to Stonehaven now?”

  “I’ve got a room at the Chateau Marmont,” she says. “It’s too late to drive back tonight. I’ll leave in the morning.”

  I blink. I could go with her. I could go back to Stonehaven and clean up the mess that I made. “Don’t go,” I try instead. The path of least resistance.

  She turns toward me, her whitened teeth glinting sharply in the dark, and I see from her impatient expression that our tenuous truce has ended. “Stop saying that, as if this mess you made can be cleaned up just by ignoring it. I mean, honestly. Who are you to give me advice on what to do?” Her breath is quick and hot. “No, really: Who are you, anyway?”

  I don’t see as much as hear her father then, in the condescending tone of her voice, her words echoing his: Who are you? I bristle, despite myself.