Pretty Things

by Janelle Brown

  I’m no one, I think. I’m nobody. But so are you.

  “Fine. Figure it out yourself, I don’t care,” I say as I fumble for the door handle.

  “I know you don’t care, you never did, only about yourself,” she says flatly, and maybe she has more barbs to cast at me but I don’t hear them because I’m already scrambling out of the car, away from Vanessa Liebling and Stonehaven and back toward my mother, and home.

  Vanessa’s headlights offer just enough illumination to locate the key under a succulent, and then she’s pulling away and the darkness settles in around me as I let myself into my house.

  Inside, nothing has changed; but there’s a close quality to the air, still and stale, as if the house has been unoccupied for some time. I quickly walk through the empty rooms, looking for recent signs of my mother, but I find no dishes in the sink, no residual coffee in the pot, no dirty clothes on the floor. On a hunch, I look in the front closet: My mother’s overnight bag is missing. I run back out to the porch and peer in the mailbox: There’s at least a week’s worth of mail spilling out.

  Oh God: She’s in the hospital.

  The prison guards gave me back my cellphone when I was discharged, but the signal is disconnected—my mother didn’t pay the bill while I was in jail. So I use the landline to call Dr. Hawthorne; and when I reach his answering service I leave a frantic message begging him to call me.

  Three minutes later, the home phone rings, with Dr. Hawthorne on the other end of the line. I hear the clatter of dishes in the background: I’ve caught him during dinnertime. “Nina, it’s been a while,” he says, and I’m sure I can hear accusation in the carefully neutral tone of his voice. How could you abandon your mother when she’s so sick?

  “Is my mother OK?”

  I hear the faint whine of a small child, which he dismisses with a hush, then footsteps moving through rooms: He takes a long moment before answering. “Your mother? Well, I wouldn’t feel comfortable answering that without examining her first.”

  “Why was she admitted?”

  Silence on the other end of the phone. “Admitted?”

  “To the hospital. I’m sorry, I’ve been out of town for the last few months, so I’m out of the loop. My mother didn’t tell me what was going on. Has she started radiation therapy? And the, the”—I rack my brain for the word—“the Advextrix?” How is she even paying for it? I wonder.

  A soft cough, the whispery rustling of papers. “Your mother isn’t in the hospital, Nina. At least not as far as I’m aware. And she isn’t taking Advextrix. She’s been in remission for over a year. Her last few scans were all clear.”

  “Remission?” The word echoes from somewhere far away, three syllables whose meaning I suddenly can’t reconcile.

  “We’ve got our regular follow-up scan scheduled in March, but my prognosis remains optimistic. As I said before, stem cell transplants have a success rate exceeding eighty percent. I can’t make any guarantees, but I would assume that your mother is doing just fine. Have you spoken with her recently?”

  The phone receiver is slippery in my hand; something cold slides down my throat and lodges, like an ice cube, in my esophagus. Mom is healthy. A little boy shrieks in the background—“Daddy”—and I hear Dr. Hawthorne covering the mouthpiece as he says something soft and placating to his son. Shaking, I replace the receiver.

  Mom is healthy.

  Mom has been lying to me.

  I spin in a circle, looking blindly around the dark bungalow as if my mother might somehow materialize out of a closet. My hands flail, reaching out to the walls to steady myself. I seize on the sight of the file cabinet, hunkering in the corner of the dining room: her medical records. I lurch toward it and yank at the handles. The drawer resists, jammed, until it finally gives way with a metallic shudder.

  I rip through folder after folder of paperwork and bills, tossing them to the floor in a blizzard of pink and yellow and blue. Tissue-thin printouts, lab results, hospital invoices: All the evidence points to how terribly sick she really was. But I know she was sick: I was there during those weeks in the hospital after the stem cell transplant. I was there during the long hours of her chemotherapy. I pulled the blond hairs from her brush and held her hand as the poisonous chemicals dripped, dripped, dripped into her veins. She was sick, she was dying.

  But she’s not dying anymore.

  I don’t know what I’m looking for until I come across it jammed toward the back of the drawer: a letter from Dr. Hawthorne dated last October, the word REMISSION jumping out at me from the middle of a string of otherwise incomprehensible numbers and medical jargon. Right behind this is a folder with the dire CT scan results that she waved in front of me that day that I picked her up from the hospital. There they are, the familiar shadows lurking in the soft tissues of her body, clinging to her spine, her neck, her brain. But now that I look at the scans more closely I can see how the dates were gently rubbed out, the year smudged and doctored with pencil until a 7 was reimagined as an 8.

  She used old scans to convince me that she was still sick.

  But why?

  I’m still staring at the scans when I hear the sound of a key rattling in the lock, and then I’m blinking at the bright wash of light as the lamp in the front room flicks on. My mother is standing there in white pants and a batik top, a sun hat folded in one hand, frozen at the sight of me.

  “Nina!” She drops the hat to the floor, and steps toward me with arms wide in order to gather me into an embrace. “Oh, my baby! But how did you manage to post bail?” I note, bitterly, the strength of her stride, the faint blush of tan on her skin, the cheeks that are once again growing plump. Now that it’s no longer concealed by a scarf, I can see her hair, and it’s blond and shiny. I take a step backward.

  “Where have you been?”

  She stops. She reaches up and tentatively touches her hair, as if remembering its unseemly health. I watch calculation creep across her face; and I think I might be ill. “The desert,” she says. Her voice has gone soft and fluttery again; there’s a purposeful hitch in the movement of her arm. “The doctor said it’d be good for me. The dry air.”

  I feel it like a needle in my heart, then, the horrible realization: I am my mother’s mark.

  “Mom. Stop it.” I hold out the CT scans. “You’re not sick.”

  The soft curve of her lip sucks in and out with her quickening breath. “Oh, honey, that’s ridiculous. You know I have cancer.” But her eyes fix on the paperwork in my hand and then slowly rise to meet mine, with a timorous wobble.

  “You haven’t had cancer for a year.” My voice is a cracked vase, broken and hollow. “You faked the test results and pretended you were sick again. What I don’t get is why you lied to me.”

  She droops against the edge of the couch, her hand feeling around for something solid to keep her upright. She looks down at her toenails—pale pink seashells against the white of her sandals. “You were going to go back to New York. You were going to leave me alone again.” She blinks, black curls of mascara sweeping across her swimming-pool eyes. “I don’t know….”

  “You don’t know what?”

  “I don’t know how to take care of myself. What I’m supposed to do now.” Her voice is tiny, like a little girl’s, and I am suddenly exhausted by my mother, by all her years of excuses and apologies.

  “Just tell me the truth,” I say.

  * * *

  —

  And so she does.

  * * *

  —

  We sit side by side on the porch, in the shadows, where we don’t have to look at each other directly. And she tells me the truth, going all the way back to the very beginning. How she first met Lachlan four years ago when she tried to steal his watch off his arm during a poker game at the Hotel Bel-Air, and he immediately recognized what she was. He grabbed her wrist and looked
her in the eyes and said, “You can do better than that, can’t you?”

  But she couldn’t, not without him. She was spinning rapidly toward her fifties and men’s eyes slid over her at the bars now; they wanted the younger prettier ones and increasingly she knew she gave off a whiff of desperation. Lachlan seemed amused by the determination in her hustle, though. He enlisted her to help him in his cons, using her as a wing-woman to lubricate the path toward his female marks: lovelorn types gullible enough to hand over credit cards and account numbers. (The women on those cellphones, I realize.) After all, women trust men who have female friends to vouch for them.

  For the first time in years, she had enough to cover her rent and more.

  And then she got sick. She ignored it as long as she could, hoping it would go away on its own; but then she fell and got the fatal diagnosis. Cancer. Who was going to take care of her when she couldn’t take care of herself? Lachlan would certainly move on without her once she wasn’t useful to him anymore. She knew I would come when she summoned me, but how was I going to pay the bills? She wasn’t stupid; she knew what kind of salary the second assistant to an interior decorator was making. She sensed, in my hedging phone calls, my own financial desperation.

  Her solution was to offer me up to Lachlan. Her smart, pretty, sly daughter, conversant in billionaire and learned in fine art: Surely Lachlan could find a use for me, surely he would seduce me with just the right kind of con, train me up. He was intrigued, amused; and when he met me in person that day in the hospital, a little smitten, too. She told him the words to whisper in my ear: Only people who deserve to lose what they have. Only take what we need. Don’t get greedy.

  And it worked. I was a natural. There was grift in my blood.

  “There’s no grift in my blood,” I tell her, my face tight against the creeping nighttime damp, my eyes fixed on the dark gravel of the driveway. It hurts to keep my eyes open. “You made me this way because you wanted me to be like you. If I was like you, then you’d feel better about yourself.”

  Her words are so small, they are nearly drowned beneath the groan of the freeway traffic at the bottom of the hill. “I wanted you to go make a grand life for yourself, far away. But you didn’t, so what was I to do? I had bills. I was sick. I needed your help, and you couldn’t help me out with the way you were living.”

  She hadn’t quite anticipated that the hospital bills would be so huge, or that she would come so very close to death, or that I would get so wrapped up in the escalating costs of her illness that I would end up taking as many risks as I did. She also didn’t anticipate that I would start sleeping with Lachlan—

  “Although, of course, I could see the appeal,” she says with a sly glance in my direction. I wonder if this is true; or if my seduction by Lachlan was an unacknowledged part of her plan. After all, it kept me closer to her and it kept outsiders away.

  “Of course it was alarming,” she continues, to see me slipping so easily into the lifestyle that she had spent so long trying to help me escape. When she didn’t need my help anymore, she promised herself, she would make me leave. She would send me back to the East Coast a little savvier, a little wiser in the ways of the world, and free to make a clean life for myself. Except that last October when the test results came back negative, and the bills were almost paid off, she found that she couldn’t let me go. She would lie in bed at night, feeling the poison finally ebbing from her blood, and ask herself: What now? Once I left she would be back where she started, with no savings, no skills, her better grifting days behind her.

  So, she came up with a plan: one last big con, to pad her nest egg, and she’d let me go.

  Tahoe was her idea. She’d been watching the Liebling family from a distance for years, just as I had. Stewing up a bitter little pot of vengeance, waiting for just the right moment to bring it to boil. She had read the news headlines when William Liebling died; she followed online when Vanessa moved back to Stonehaven. For twelve years, she’d been thinking of that safe full of money, the house full of precious antiques and paintings, wondering exactly how she could get inside. And now I was primed and ready, with a decade of my own festering resentment of the Lieblings just waiting to be ignited. Plus, I was far more familiar with the secrets of Stonehaven than she’d ever been.

  “You knew about the money in the safe?” And then I remember—she was there in the coffee shop with me, the day that Benny and his sister were talking about it; studiously pretending not to listen while she absorbed every word he said. But: “How did you know I had the code?”

  The golden cap of her hair swings along her jaw as she shakes her head. “I didn’t. But you’re my smart girl.” She offers a proud little smile. “I knew you’d find a way in somehow. Besides, Lachlan knows how to crack a safe if you couldn’t figure it out yourself.”

  All she had to do was plant a seed—the recurring cancer, the massive bills about to come our way again—and then get Lachlan to give me the tiniest of pushes in the right direction. (I remembered that now, the way he so casually plucked that destination from the air as we sat in that Hollywood sports bar: What about Lake Tahoe?) And voilà, off we went.

  “But the police were looking for me,” I say. “That’s why we left. They caught Efram and he gave me up.”

  She nudges a sandal off one of her feet and rubs her toes, slowly, between her palms. “There were no police. Not then. Efram moved back to Jerusalem, last I heard. It was a story we ginned up, Lachlan and I, just to convince you to leave town, and then keep you away for a time while I was”—she hesitates, the next word half-swallowed—“cured.”

  “But they arrested me,” I object. “For God’s sake, Mom. I’m facing criminal charges. That’s not pretend.”

  And this is when my mother finally cracks. I hear it first, the break in her throat; and when I turn I catch the glint of tears filling the tiny wrinkles around her eyes. “That wasn’t the plan,” she whispers. “I swear, it wasn’t. Lachlan double-crossed me. He screwed us both.”

  Maybe everything would have been OK if the money had still been in the safe when I opened it. Maybe then we could have split a million dollars and walked away into the sunset, no hard feelings, bon voyage. Or—maybe Lachlan had another plan of his own all along. Michael O’Brien’s plan. But my mother knew when I arrived back in Los Angeles, both empty-handed and without him in tow, that something terrible was about happen. It just happened so much faster than she’d anticipated: the knock on the door, the handcuffs on my wrists, and suddenly I was in jail.

  The police hadn’t found that storage unit all on their own. They’d received an anonymous tip, someone had dropped the name Alexi Petrov, and they’d put it all together from there.

  Who else could have done that but Lachlan?

  I’m too furious to speak. I tip my chair back and lean against the shingled wall of the bungalow. Splinters slip through my T-shirt and tug at my skin but I don’t move; I let myself feel the sting of this betrayal fully.

  “You should have known. You should have seen this coming. You knew who he was—he’s a con. How could you just give me to him like that?” I am trying not to cry. “You spend my whole life telling me to trust you, that all we have in this world is each other. And then you do this to me.”

  My mother is silent. I feel her body vibrating beside me, as if something inside her is spinning out of control. “I’d kill him if he gave me the chance,” she says. “But I don’t know where he went. He hasn’t returned my calls.”

  “He’s still at Stonehaven. He got Vanessa Liebling to marry him. Presumably he’s going to make her life hell and then divorce her and take her for all she’s got.”

  “Oh.” Then, in an odd voice: “Poor girl.” A car turns up our road, and we both go quiet as headlights sweep across us. I look at my mother then, and when I do I see the lie on her lips. Her smile is a twist. She is not sorry for Vanessa, not at all.


  I stand up with a lurch, stumbling on the old boards of the porch.

  “Where’s my car?”

  She gives me a blank look. “I sold it. I didn’t think you were going to be getting out any time soon and…”

  “What about Lachlan’s car, the one I drove home from Tahoe?”

  “That one, too.” She ducks her head, and her voice pitches to a whine. “I had bills.”

  “For fuck’s sake, Mom.” I fling open the door to the bungalow. The keys to my mother’s Honda are sitting just inside the door, and I grab them from the dish, along with my purse.

  When I turn, my mother is standing behind me. She grabs my wrist, blocking my path, and I’m shocked by how strong her grip has once again become. Or maybe she was just feigning weakness all along. “Where are you going?” she asks.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Anywhere but here.”

  “Don’t leave me.” In the light from the living room lamps, I can see her ravaged face, mottled with panic, mascara tears worming darkly down her cheeks. “What will I do?”

  I look down at her hand on my arm, at the shell-pink fingernails and the telltale tan lines that whisper of secrets. Where was she last week anyway, and who was she with? But the answer is obvious, really: Once I was in jail and she saw that the Liebling money was not going to feather her nest after all, she realized she was going to have to start grifting again and found herself a mark. Exactly what scheme was she cooking up, out there in the desert? The question itself exhausts me, and I realize I have no interest in finding out the answers anymore.

  “You’ll do what you always do,” I say. “But this time, when you screw it all up, I won’t be there to help you.”

  34.

  WHEN I WALK IN the door of Stonehaven, he is waiting for me. A smile on his face, blue cashmere turtleneck that brings out the color of his eyes (my Christmas gift to him!), a wineglass in his hand. He stands there in the foyer, next to my grandfather’s Delft vases, as if he is welcoming a guest into his home. (His! Oh God, what have I done? Maman, Daddy, Grandmother Katherine, I am so sorry.)