Pretty Things

by Janelle Brown

He told me he loved me just weeks after we met. I chose to believe him.

  Or maybe he’s just a very good actor, after all.

  “I have to go pick up my mom from the clinic,” I say.

  * * *

  —

  I drive west into the midday sun, back toward the side of town where my marks usually live. The imaging clinic is in West Hollywood, a low-lying building that clings like a barnacle to the Cedars-Sinai sprawl. As I pull up, I spy my mother sitting on the steps of the clinic, an unlit cigarette poised between her fingers, sundress strap slipping off her shoulder.

  I slow my car, squinting through the windshield at her. My mind crawls through the strange elements of this tableau as I pull past the parking lot entrance: That my mother is here, outside, when I am supposed to be meeting her inside the clinic. That she has a cigarette in hand, although she quit smoking three years back. The empty, distant look of her as she blinks in the thin November light.

  She raises her head when I pull up in front of her and roll the window down. She offers a wan smile. Her lipstick, too pink, is smudged across the bow of her upper lip.

  “Am I late?”

  “No,” she says. “I’m done already.”

  I glance at the clock on the dashboard; I could have sworn she said to come at noon, and it’s only 11:53. “Why are you out here? I thought I was going to meet you inside.”

  She sighs and struggles to right herself, the cords in her wrist straining painfully as she pushes herself to her feet. “I can’t stand it in there. It’s so cold. I had to get out into the sun. Anyway, we finished early.”

  She pulls open the door and settles herself gingerly into the cracked leather seat. By some sleight of hand, she has already vanished the cigarette into the purse on her hip. She fluffs her hair with her fingers and stares out the windshield. “Let’s go.”

  My mother, my beautiful mother—my God, I worshipped her as a child. The way her hair smelled like coconut and glimmered gold in the sunshine; the moist stickiness of her glossed lips plump against my cheek, leaving behind the marks of her love; the way it felt to be pressed against her chest, as if I might climb into all that soft flesh and hide safely inside her. Her laugh was an ascending scale, airborne, and she laughed at everything: the sour expression on my face when she served me frozen corn dogs for dinner, the way the repo man scratched his enormous rear as he hitched up our car to the tow truck, how we hid in the bathroom when the landlady banged on our door demanding the delinquent rent.

  “You just have to laugh,” she’d say, shaking her head as if she was helpless in the face of such mirth.

  My mother doesn’t laugh much anymore. And that, more than anything else about what has happened to her, breaks my heart. She stopped laughing the day that the doctor gave us the prognosis: She wasn’t just “tired,” like she protested; she wasn’t losing weight because she had lost her appetite. She had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer that was likely treatable but only at great cost, and that also had a pernicious tendency to battle itself back from the brink and recur, ad nauseam.

  You couldn’t just laugh at that, though my mom tried. “Oh, honey, it’s OK, I’ll figure it out. It’s all going to be fine in the end,” she said to me after the doctor left the room that first day, gripping my hand as I cried. She was trying to keep her voice light, but I heard the lie in her words.

  My mother had always lived her life as if she was on a train journey, anticipating the next stop: If you didn’t like where you got off, you just got right back on and moved to the next station. In the doctor’s office that day, she learned that not only had she been booted off the train at the worst station on the line, but that this was quite possibly her final destination.

  That was almost three years ago.

  So this is my mother now: Hair that’s still short and choppy since it grew back from the last round of chemo, its curl now coarse, the blond color a little too close to desperate. Bosom gone concave, ribs visible beneath. Soft hands now veiny despite the cherry-red polish designed to distract. Gaunt, frail, not soft and glimmering at all. Forty-eight years old and you’d think she was ten years older.

  She’s made an effort today—the sundress, the lipstick—which is heartening. But I can’t shake the feeling that something is off. I notice a stack of paper folded into quarters and shoved into the pocket of her skirt. “Wait—you got results already? What did the doctor say?”

  “Nothing,” she says. “He said nothing.”

  “Bullshit.” I reach across the car and try to pluck the paper from her pocket. She smacks my hand away.

  “What do you say we go get pedicures?” she says, her voice as false and sticky as a child with an aspartame lollipop.

  “What do you say you tell me what those test results say?” I make another grab for them and this time my mother remains motionless as I snag the papers from her pocket, careful not to tear the pages, my heart building up to a rapid staccato because I know, already, what they say. I know from the resigned expression on my mother’s face, the faint black smudges under her eyes where mascara recently melted and was wiped away. I know because this is what life is like: Just when you think you’ve reached the end zone, you look up to realize that the goal posts were moved back while you were focused on the turf right in front of your eyes.

  And so even as my eyes scuttle across the CT scan results on the pages—the inscrutable charts, the dense paragraphs of medical jargon—I already know what I am going to see. And sure enough, on the last page, there they are: the familiar gray tumors bleeding shadows across slices of my mother’s body, wrapping their amorphous fingers around her spleen, her stomach, her spine.

  “I relapsed,” my mother says. “Again.”

  I feel it in my own stomach then, the familiar dark spread of helplessness. “Oh God. No. No no no.”

  She plucks the papers from my fingers and carefully folds them along the crease marks. “We knew this was probably going to happen,” she says softly.

  “No we didn’t. The last treatment was supposed to be it, the doctor said, that’s why we…Jesus. I don’t understand….” I trail off before I finish, because this is not the point I mean to make; but my first thought is that we were sold a false bill of goods. But he said…It’s not fair, I think, like a child having a temper tantrum. I throw the transmission into park. “I’m going in to talk to the doctor. This can’t be right.”

  “Don’t,” she says. “Please. I talked it through with Dr. Hawthorne, we already have a plan. He wants to try radioimmunotherapy this time. There’s a brand-new drug—I think it’s called Advextrix?—just approved by the FDA, with really promising results. Even better than the stem cell transplant. He thinks I’m a good candidate.” A soft laugh. “The upside is I won’t lose my hair this time. You won’t have to see me looking like a cue ball.”

  “Oh, Mom.” I manage a wan smile. “I don’t care about what your hair looks like.”

  She stares resolutely out the windshield at the cars that whiz past on Beverly Boulevard. “The drug. It’s expensive, is all. It’s not covered by my insurance plan.”

  Of course it isn’t. “I’ll figure it out.”

  She looks at me sideways, blinking her clotted lashes. “Each dose is about fifteen thousand dollars. I’ll need sixteen of them.”

  “You don’t worry about that. You worry about getting healthy again. Trust me to take care of the rest.”

  “I do. You’re the only person I trust, you know that.” She looks at me. “Oh, honey, don’t look so upset. The only important thing is that you and I still have each other. That’s all we’ve ever had.”

  I nod and reach over to take her hand. I think of a bill still sitting on my desk at home, the final invoice for my mother’s last round of treatments—the bill that Efram’s payment was supposed to cover. This will make a third recurrence of her non-Hodgkin’s lym
phoma: Neither the first treatment (basic chemo, only partially covered by my mother’s bare-bones insurance) nor the second (an aggressive stem cell transplant, not at all covered) kept the tumors at bay for more than a year. When I recently totaled up the cost of my mother’s illness, we were approaching a high six-figure mark. This—her third round—will put us well into seven figures.

  I want to scream. The stem cell transplant was supposed to have an eighty-two percent success rate; so I had taken remission as a certainty, because what were the odds that my mother would be that eighteen percent? Wasn’t that why I had nodded, so unblinking, at the boggling price tag for the transplant? Wasn’t that certainty the justification for everything I’ve let myself do over the past few years?

  We were almost in the clear is what I think to myself now, as I turn over the engine and pull out into the traffic. It isn’t until I feel my mother’s cool hand on mine, tucking a tissue into my fist, that I realize that I’m crying. But I’m not quite sure what the tears are about: my mother, and the invisible tumors once again devouring her from within, or my own future, and how cloudy it once again seems.

  * * *

  —

  My mother and I drive back home in near silence, her diagnosis sitting heavy as a boulder between us. In my mind, I am running through the what next of it all: The medication will be only the half of it, the cost of this round will certainly top a half million. Optimistically, I had no new marks lined up; how naïve I was, to think I might be able to move on to something else entirely. Now I mentally run through the faces I still have bookmarked on social media, the princelings and celebutantes currently cavorting their way across Beverly Hills. I try to recall the ostentatious inventory of their Instagrams. Thinking about this gives me a nasty little sparkle, a lift of anger that helps me rise above my underlying weariness. Here we are, at this, again.

  When we arrive home, I am surprised to see that Lachlan’s car is still parked in my driveway. There’s a movement at the curtain as we park; his pale face flashing behind the glass, and then he’s gone again.

  When we get inside, I find that the lights are off and the blinds are down, casting my home into gloom. I flip on the light switch and see Lachlan standing behind the door, blinking in the sudden wash of light. He turns the light back off and pulls me out of the doorway.

  My mother hesitates in the doorway behind me, and he stops to look over my shoulder at her. “Lily-belle, you all right? How’d those tests go?”

  “Not so good,” my mother answers. “But I don’t feel like talking about it right now. Why are the lights off in here?”

  Lachlan peers down at me, his face shadowed with concern. “You and I have to talk,” he says softly. He grabs my elbow and guides me toward the corner of the living room. “Lily-belle, you mind? I need a moment with Nina.”

  She nods but moves toward the kitchen with glacial slowness, eyes glittering with curiosity. “I’ll make us some lunch.”

  Once she’s out of earshot, he pulls me in close and whispers in my ear, “The police were here.”

  I lurch back. “What? When?”

  “Just an hour or two ago. Not long after you left to pick up your mom.”

  “What did they want? Did you talk to them?”

  “Christ, no, I’m not a bloody idiot. I hid in the bathroom, didn’t answer their knock, yeah? But they were looking for you. I could hear them asking your neighbor if this was where you lived.”

  “Lisa? What did she say?”

  “She said she didn’t know your name. Right cheeky, that one.”

  Thank you, Lisa, I think. “Did they tell her what they wanted to talk to me about?” Lachlan shakes his head. “Well, if it was something serious, they wouldn’t have come politely knocking on my door.” There’s a falter in my voice. “Right?”

  I turn to see my mother standing there, a plate of crackers in her hand. Her eyes swing from me to Lachlan and back again, and I realize that I’ve been talking much too loudly.

  “What did you do?” she asks.

  And at that, I am momentarily silenced, because how am I supposed to answer that?

  For three years, while my mother has been too ill to work, I’ve supported us. As far as we’re both concerned, I am a private antiques dealer, filling the homes of east side hipsters with mid-century Scandinavian design and Brazilian modernism. To that end, I keep a ten-by-twenty storefront in Highland Park, with a handful of dusty Torbjørn Afdal pieces in the window, and a sign that says BY APPOINTMENT ONLY. A few times a week, I drive to the shop and sit there in the quiet, reading novels and studying Instagram on my laptop. (It’s also a useful way to launder the money I make in other, less legal ways.)

  And so I pretend that I have somehow parlayed twenty percent commissions on the occasional cabinet into a six-figure income that covers both of our living expenses, plus a fortune in medical bills and my outstanding college loans. Improbable, perhaps, but not impossible. Yet my mother surely suspects the truth. After all, she’s a con (more specifically, a former con), too; she’s the one who introduced me to Lachlan in the first place.

  My mother and Lachlan met at a high-stakes poker game she was working four years back, when she still could work. “Cons recognize cons when we see one,” as Lachlan explained it to me. Professional respect evolved into friendship, although Lily fell ill before they ever had a chance to do a job together. By the time I was summoned to Los Angeles to take care of her, Lily could barely get out of bed, and Lachlan had stepped in to give her a hand.

  This, at least, is what Lachlan tells me. My mother and I don’t discuss Lachlan’s profession at all, having buried it alongside other untouchable topics like family, and failure, and death.

  So, surely she’s wondered if Lachlan turned me into a con, too—if we aren’t just “clubbing” when we disappear at night—but we tiptoe around the subject, walking a careful line between pretense and willful blindness. Even if she does suspect the truth, I could never admit it out loud to her. I couldn’t bear to witness my mother’s disappointment in me.

  But now I wonder if I was an idiot to think that I had ever fooled her. Because judging by the expression on her face, she knows exactly why the police were at our door.

  “I did nothing,” I say quickly. “Don’t worry about it. I’m sure it’s a mistake.”

  But I can tell by the way my mom’s eyes dart back and forth across mine that she is worrying. She looks over my shoulder at Lachlan and her face changes as she reads something there.

  “You should leave,” she says flatly. “Right now. Get out of town. Before they come back.”

  I laugh. Leave. Of course.

  If there’s one thing my mother was a real expert at when I was growing up, it was leaving. The first time we left was the night that my mother chased my father out of our apartment with a shotgun, when I was seven, but by my count we left again nearly two dozen times before I graduated from high school. We left when we couldn’t cover the rent; we left when a jealous wife showed up on our doorstep; we left when the police did a sweep of the casino and brought my mother in for interrogation. We left because my mother thought she might get arrested if we stayed; we left when opportunity dried up; and we left because she plain old didn’t like where we were anymore. We left Miami, Atlantic City, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Dallas, New Orleans, Lake Tahoe. We left even when my mother promised me that we wouldn’t leave anymore.

  “I am not going to leave you, Mom. Don’t be ridiculous. You’ve got cancer. You’re going to need me to take care of you.”

  I expect her to weep, and soften; but instead her face hardens into something immobile and cool. “For God’s sake, Nina,” she says softly. “You are no help to me at all if you’re in jail.”

  In my mother’s expression, I read disillusionment, even anger, like I have failed her and we are both going to pay the price. And for the first time
since I came to Los Angeles I am truly frightened by what I have become.

  4.

  SO I’M A GRIFTER. You might say that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree—I come from a long line of bagmen and petty thieves, opportunists and outright criminals—but the truth is that I was not raised for this. I had a Future. That, at least, is what my mother used to say to me late at night when she found me reading Pride and Prejudice under the covers by flashlight: “You have a Future, baby, the first one in this family.” When I performed on command for her male visitors, doing long division in my head while they sipped dirty martinis on our sagging settee: “Isn’t my girl smart? She has a Future.” When I told her I wanted to go to college but I knew we couldn’t afford it: “Don’t worry about the money, sweetie. This is about your Future.”

  And for a while there, I even believed her. Got caught up in the great American myth, the Puritan ethic of nose-to-the-grindstone-and-thou-shalt-prevail. That was back when I thought the playing field was even, before I learned that it was not flat at all; and that, in fact, for most people not born into privilege, the playing field is a steep incline and you are at the bottom with boulders tied to your ankles.

  My mother had the ability to make you believe, though. This was her great gift, her sweet con. The way she could fix a man with those innocent eyes of hers, as wide and blue as a spring lake, and convince him of anything she wanted: that the check was on the way, that the necklace in her purse had ended up there by mistake, that she loved him like no one had ever been loved before.

  The only person she truly loved was me; I knew that much. It was just the two of us against the world; it had been that way since she kicked my father out. And so I always believed that my mother couldn’t possibly lie to me, not about this person I was going to become.

  And probably she wasn’t lying to me, at least not intentionally. Instead, the person she was really lying to was herself.

  My mother may have been a con artist, but she wasn’t a cynic. She believed, she truly did, in the great opportunity of life. We were always on the verge of hitting the big time, even as my shoes were being held together with duct tape or we were eating baked potatoes for dinner for the third week running. And when those opportunities did come—when she won big at the card tables or managed to hook herself a big fish—we lived like queens. Dinners out at hotel restaurants, a red convertible in the driveway, a Barbie DreamHouse with a bow on it. And if she wasn’t looking far enough down the road, saving up in anticipation of that convertible being hauled away by the repo man, who could fault her? She trusted that life would take care of us, and it always did, right up until the moment when it didn’t.