She Regrets Nothing

by Andrea Dunlop

  As Tom and Laila drove north toward Tuxedo Park in the Prius that he’d had borrowed from a friend, he could barely contain his excitement.

  “I’m so looking forward to meeting your aunt and uncle,” he said. “I’ve known Liberty for years, but I’ve never met them.”

  “Well, they’re my family,” Laila said with a smile. She disliked the way he still spoke of her aunt and uncle as though they belonged to Liberty, as though Tom himself still belonged to her cousin, when he was her boyfriend. “So of course you should get to know them.”

  He smiled at her, oblivious, and reached over to squeeze her knee.

  “What is their house in Tuxedo Park like?” he asked.

  Laila gazed out at the illuminated title of the tunnel walls. She felt uneasy leaving Manhattan, as though once gone, she might not be allowed back in. “Oh, it’s gorgeous, enormous. But you’ll see,” she said. She didn’t want to admit to Tom that she had yet to be invited out to the family’s country house. She’d seen pictures; the landscape was lush, and the stone behemoth sat high upon a hill with a clear view of Tuxedo Lake. She had no doubt Tom would be blown away, as she would certainly be herself.

  She hadn’t yet decided whether she would marry Tom. Not that he had asked her, but instinctively, she knew that this option was on the table. If she were to give herself over to the relationship with Tom entirely, he would happily have her. She could tell he was tired of being single, of the hassle of caring for himself without a woman’s devotion. He’d asked her to move in with him, but she was undecided about that as well. He broached the topic now, in a roundabout way, by asking her how things stood with her and Nora.

  “Oh, things are okay. The maddening thing is that she won’t talk about the fact that she’s pissed, but then she does all these passive-aggressive things like telling the maid to skip my room or ordering in from Balthazar and only getting enough for her and Leo.”

  Tom laughed. “The struggle is real.”

  “I know.” Laila smiled self-consciously. “But it’s more what she means by it.”

  “Which is?”

  “That my welcome is wearing thin. I mean, was I never supposed to have my own life here? Only be there for her?”

  “Good thing someone else is rolling out the welcome mat for you, then.”

  She smiled at Tom indulgently, put her hand on his knee, and casually let her fingers brush the inside of his thigh. “And you’re so sweet. But I wonder if I shouldn’t just get my own place for a while.”

  Laila was bluffing, since of course this would mean getting a job, which she didn’t intend to do just yet, if ever. And the money she’d come with wouldn’t last her. Since Nora had gone cold on her, she’d already blown through a shocking amount of it on clothes and eating out with Cece. Thank goodness when they went to nightclubs, someone else always seemed to be picking up the tab. “That’s what Wall Street guys are for,” Cece said, referring to the young bankers who paid a grand for a bottle of vodka to be able to sit at the banquet tables of these nightclubs and have lovely women—at least half of them models too young to legally be standing there—surround them and drink their overpriced Grey Goose. Cece’s lifestyle was like an elaborate sleight of hand: beautiful clothes that she had her pick of from the office; myriad connections that opened mysterious doors and made bar tabs disappear. She was young, beautiful, and cunning, and the perks seemed endless.

  “Well, whatever you do, I’ll support you.”

  By the time they were driving through Paramus, a light snow had begun to fall.

  “Wow, it’s early for snow,” Tom said.

  “Will we make it out there okay?” Snow was yet another thing that reminded Laila of her former home. Her anxiety ratcheted up with the sudden thought that Tom was secretly driving her back to her old life; that at the other end of the drive, instead of the Lawrences—the family with whom she belonged—Laila would be delivered back to Nathan, back to her past. She suddenly, irrationally, imagined a conspiracy between the two men; could see them shaking hands on the doorstep of Nathan’s Victorian on Waterloo Street. “Thanks for bringing her back, man.” “Oh, my pleasure; all just a big misunderstanding, you know?”

  The image was so vivid that when Tom said, “We’ll be fine; it’s barely sticking,” Laila imagined that his soft brown eyes had a traitorous gleam. She took several deep breaths to bring herself back to reality.

  “Remember we have to pick up Birdie,” she said when she’d regained herself, when Nathan’s face had faded into the background once again. “Wow,” Tom said as they drove through the majestic stone gates that led to Tuxedo Park. They’d been tasked with picking up Ben and Gregory’s sister, Elizabeth—“Birdie”—to bring her to the party. She didn’t live far from her brother’s house, but she didn’t drive, which seemed unimaginable to Laila considering how far out in the suburbs she was.

  “Oh, I’m just the madwoman on the bicycle in all weather!” she’d said in her cheerful boom when Laila had asked her about this. She’d only met Birdie once. She’d come into the city earlier that fall and insisted on taking Laila and the twins to dim sum at a place she claimed to know well in Chinatown. She attempted to chat with the waitstaff in Cantonese, but they didn’t appear to understand a word.

  Laila felt a strange relief wash over her as her aunt’s lawn came into view—it was impossible to miss, even with the snow blanketing the rest of the street in anonymity—for it grounded her back in this life, the other one hurtling into the distance far behind her. Birdie’s lawn was covered with dozens of plastic pink flamingos, which looked all the more incongruous with little piles of snow accumulating on their heads.

  “Are those . . . lawn ornaments?” Tom said, choosing what seemed like a rather charitable term for the cheap plastic birds.

  “Oh yes, this is the place. Nora and Leo told me all about it.”

  “So I gather she’s a bit of an eccentric?” Tom’s smile was wide. Being a writer, he loved strange people.

  “I don’t think the flamingos are the half of it.”

  They parked in the empty driveway and made their way toward the blazing lights of the house. I am with my boyfriend who is a famous novelist, and I am spending Thanksgiving with my family who live in New York. And I live in New York, and I work for a literary agency and can get into any nightclub I want. I have a billionaire’s number in my phone. As she formed the words in her head, they felt true and not true.

  Birdie answered the door wearing her nightgown; over it was a blue-and-yellow fur coat. She immediately threw her arms around Laila and squeezed her hard.

  “Oh, Laila! You’re here. And you must be Tom! Oh, you’re a hundred times more handsome than in your author photo, and anyway I always thought you were one of the better-looking authors. . . .”

  She bustled the two of them inside, talking nonstop, her words running together.

  “I was just thinking about getting a fire going, and now I think I definitely will.”

  “Aunt Birdie, I think we’d better get a move on; it’s . . .” Laila looked to the wall in search of a clock but utterly lost her train of thought as she took in her surroundings. It was exactly as strange as Nora and Leo had described: vulgar and magnificent all at once. She reached out to touch the vintage carousel horse that took up the middle of the entryway, mesmerized by its bejeweled eye.

  “I call that one Arabella,” Birdie said shyly, like a little girl showing a grown-up her treasured doll.

  “It suits her,” Tom said, smiling. “This house is amazing!”

  Birdie herself was just as beguiling and grotesque as her house: her hair a mess of springy curls, her long fingernails a livid red, her makeup like something a showgirl might have accidentally slept in. One of her fake eyelashes drooped from her eyelid.

  “She’s my favorite,” Birdie said, beckoning them into the kitchen.

  “She” was by no means the only horse; there was a smaller one in the kitchen and at least one more that Laila could see on
the porch.

  “Tea or wine?” Birdie asked.

  “Auntie, we’re supposed to be there in an hour, and you’re not yet . . . ,” Laila began. She wanted to say that her aunt wasn’t ready to go yet, though it suddenly occurred to her that perhaps this was what she meant to wear to the family Thanksgiving.

  “Wine for me, please,” Tom said, unhelpfully.

  Birdie floated to the kitchen and took down a bottle of wine from a high shelf. “Oh, pooh, Thanksgiving. But must we? It will be so dull. We could stay here and say there was car trouble.” She speedily filled three glasses and beckoned them to sit. Tom and Laila settled themselves on a bright green sofa while Birdie perched herself on a love seat shaped like a giant pair of lips.

  “Aunt B., this is my first Thanksgiving with all the family,” Laila said softly.

  “Oh,” she said, her free hand flying to her cheek, “you poor thing! How could I not have thought of that? I’m such an old flibbertigibbet.” She set her glass down and leaned over to Laila, taking her face in both of her hands. “My darling girl, of course we will go to Thanksgiving!”

  Her aunt Birdie seemed to feel her own unique strain of guilt about not having known Laila growing up. She’d never had any falling-out with Laila’s father; it was only that she was utterly dependent on her own father and her eldest brother and therefore was compelled to side with them in the feud. “But you were always in my heart,” she said to Laila again and again. Laila accepted her torrents of love gracefully but truthfully didn’t care much one way or the other. Different as their circumstances and personalities were, Birdie reminded her of her mother. Both were women who seemed lost in the world of adults, unable to properly fend for themselves, and both were strangled by loneliness; in Betsy it had calcified into bitterness, and in Birdie it radiated off her in desperate waves ensnaring anyone who came close. Betsy and Birdie were names for little girls; Laila would have reverted to the more dignified Elizabeth decades ago.

  Once they finished their wine, Birdie roused herself to give them a tour of the house and get herself ready to go to dinner—she seemed to have realized only belatedly that she was in her nightdress. All the while, she regaled them with a steady stream of stories, her voice taking on a Doppler effect as she moved in and out of rooms, never pausing. She told them of her younger days in New York when she was a dancer in a burlesque troupe and once went on a date with John Voight “before they holed me up way out here in the country,” she said. It seemed just as likely that the stories were true as that they were made up. Tom was devouring them; would Birdie now be a character in his next novel? She would surely love that. Laila had the feeling that their visit was the most exciting thing to happen to her in quite some time.

  By the time they arrived at the Lawrences, they were only a merciful twenty minutes later than they’d planned, which felt like a miracle considering how many outfits Birdie had tried on before at last deciding on a flapper-style green silk dress, which she wore over tights with silver Mary Janes. She looked no less ridiculous when she walked out the door than she had upon their arrival—the fur coat remained—but certainly more purposeful. Tom couldn’t disguise his delight.

  A valet who looked all of thirteen met them in the turnaround of the vast driveway and drove off to park the Prius somewhere below where the stately Tudor sat high atop its hill. Laila and Tom followed Birdie as she walked through the foyer, as though it were as much her house as anyone’s. And perhaps it was: the three siblings were tributaries off the same ocean of wealth; did any one part matter more than the others? In the house’s grand living room, the party was in full swing. There was soft jazz music playing and tasteful, shimmering decorations hanging from the ceiling. Like tiny, elegant swords of Damocles. As they entered the main room, an autumnal smell of cloves and cinnamon hung in the air, as though someone—certainly not Petra—had been cooking spiced breads and mulled wine all day long.

  Ben and Petra were absorbed in conversation with a younger couple, and Laila had a moment to watch them before they noticed her and Tom approaching (Birdie had been distracted by a painter she claimed to know on their way in). Tom went to get drinks, and Laila stood absorbing the lively party around her. Petra stood regally next to her husband as if she were a slender Amazon guarding her camp. Laila thought again of her own mother on Thanksgiving, lumbering around the kitchen with Laila’s other aunties bustling in her wake, instructing her in their grating way at every turn: Did she know that she really ought to use more cream in the mashed potatoes? Those green beans were looking a little limp, and how many glasses of wine had Betsy had already, for heaven’s sake? Laila did not exactly miss her parents; she did not long to be able to talk to them or put her arms around them. She did not, as Cece described about her own father, think of things she wished to tell them only to realize, crushingly, that she could not. What she felt was some primal disconnect: the only two people to have witnessed Laila’s childhood were now gone, and all of the tertiary connections had been shaken off. She had not liked her aunties while her parents were alive, so why would she spend time with them once they were gone? They reached out frequently, cloyingly, for the two years she’d remained in Michigan, but after she’d left for New York, they seemed content to leave her be. Which was fine by Laila.

  “Laila, my darling,” Petra said, spotting her. Her elegant aunt closed the distance between them in several long strides and put her arms around Laila.

  “Thank you for bringing Birdie. Where is Tom?”

  “He’s getting us drinks. This is a beautiful party, Aunt Petra.”

  Her uncle Ben looked over and gave her a smile but held up a finger as if to say that he could not just yet excuse himself from his conversation. Ben had proven thus far unreachable, though whether this had anything to do with Laila was unclear. He was forever absorbed by his phone and the consistent, apparently urgent stream of calls, e-mails, and other information that came through it. Laila didn’t know if she—the only daughter of his only brother—evoked any emotional response in him whatsoever but certainly none showed.

  “Let’s go find your cousins; they’re back here somewhere.” Petra took Laila’s arm. “You must forgive your uncle,” she said quietly to her as they made their way to the back of the house. The expansive windows looked over the rolling green hills behind them, now doubly picturesque covered with snow: the sun had just gone down, giving the landscape a lovely crepuscular glow. “Seeing you reminds him of what he’s lost.”

  She nodded. “But I’m still here.” Laila had only meant this in the literal sense, but she could see that her words moved her aunt.

  “He’ll get better. He has to find a way to forgive himself for never making peace with Gregory. He does not like to admit it when he’s wrong.”

  Laila nodded and took her aunt’s arm affectionately as they walked. She wasn’t sure if Petra was only trying to make Laila feel better, if she was projecting the way she thought Ben ought to feel about Laila, or—a third, more hopeful possibility—that she was right, that Ben had regrets he would in time process, allowing him to be open to the possibility of a relationship with her. Laila found regret to be the most useless of emotions; it kept one tethered to the past when the future was the only possible direction. She tried to devote all of her energy to moving herself forward. Onward ever; backward never.

  They came upon Liberty and Reece perched on one of the long cushy benches that bordered the windows. Reece caught Laila’s eye, and under her gaze, Laila felt as if her dress constricted, felt herself become someone unsightly. But to her surprise, Reece smiled at her and came to kiss her cheek.

  “Happy Thanksgiving,” she said, enveloping Laila in her robust, blond warmth.

  “You too, Reece. Lots to be grateful for this year.”

  “I agree.”

  Liberty smiled at them, clearly pleased to see them both making an effort. Then a different, yet more luminous smile crossed Liberty’s face, and Laila turned to see who had inspired it. For a
moment she doubted her vision: Cameron and Tom, carrying drinks and laughing chummily with each other, were making their way toward them. Laila felt a pang looking at the two men side by side. Cameron towered over Tom, who was a couple of inches shy of six feet. And Tom’s nebbishy handsomeness was obliterated next to Cameron’s golden-boy radiance. Tom was barely older than Cameron, but damned if he didn’t look a decade north of him in that moment.

  “Look who I found!” Tom was jovial, oblivious to Laila’s uncharitable thoughts.

  “You made it!” Reece said, hugging her brother.

  “Hi, Cam,” Liberty said next. Laila watched as they locked in on each other and exchanged a cheek kiss, their eyes full of some unspoken thing. Liberty would still only admit to a friendship, and indeed, Laila believed that nothing romantic—well, nothing sexual—had happened between them, but she knew how much time they had been spending together: going to lunches and dinners and the opera, giving Liberty a chance to wear some of the showier estate pieces she’d collected over the years, even on a drive upstate in a vintage car that Cameron borrowed from his auto club to see foliage. The silver topless heritage Aston Martin was glamorous but had jostled the two of them all the way back; instead of ruining the trip, it seemed to have made for a delightful in-joke. Why it was worth it to Cam to do all of this when he could have any woman with a quarter of the effort, Laila couldn’t fathom.

  “And Laila!” he said, with empty cheerfulness and a too-brief cheek kiss, “how nice to see you.” It was as though her presence here was a surprise instead of his.

  “Are your parents here as well?” Laila asked, turning to Reece. She hadn’t meant it to sound so much like an accusation—the appearance of the Michaels siblings wasn’t something Laila was prepared for. “Do the families always spend holidays together?”