My mother was pretty but not a beauty; though what she was, was more dangerous than that. She had a kind of sex-kitten innocence, with the summer-peach complexion of a child, those big blue eyes, blond hair only slightly enhanced with a bottle. Her body boasted an abundance of flesh that she had trained to swing in just the right way. (Once, I overheard a junior high kid in Vegas call her “Tits McGee,” but after I slugged him he never did it again.)
Lilla Russo was her real name, though she went by Lily Ross most of the time. She was Italian, her family had been Mafia-adjacent, or so she said. I wouldn’t know—I never met my grandparents, who had cut her off entirely after she had a baby (me) out of wedlock with a Colombian poker player. (I’m not sure which sin was the unforgivable one: the baby, the lack of a ring, or the lover’s country of origin.) She once told me that my grandfather had been a mob soldier in Baltimore, with half a dozen bodies under his belt. She didn’t seem to want to be around her family any more than they wanted to be around us.
The first years of my life were dictated by my father, whose gambling career kept us moving like migratory birds, our resting spot changing with the seasons or whenever his luck ran out. When I think of him now I mostly remember the lemony scent of his aftershave and the way he used to pick me up and fling me so high in the air that my hair would graze the ceiling, laughing at my screams of terror and my mother’s shrieks of protest. He was less of a grifter than a bully.
Back then, my mother worked odd jobs—waitressing, mostly—but her main job was defending me from him: barricading me in my room when he came home drunk, putting herself in the way of his fists so that they wouldn’t land on me. One night, when I was seven, she didn’t quite manage to get me out of the way, and he threw me against the wall so hard that I temporarily blacked out. When I regained consciousness, there was my mother, blood dripping down her face, pointing my father’s shotgun at his crotch. Her feathery, soft voice hardened to something sharp and lethal: “If you touch her again I swear I will shoot you right in the balls. Now, get the fuck out of here and don’t come back.”
And he did, skulking away like a dog with its tail between its legs. Before the sun rose the next morning, my mother had packed up the car. As we drove out of New Orleans—headed to Florida, where she had “a friend who had a friend”—she turned to look at me in the passenger seat and grabbed my hand. “You and I are all each other has,” she whispered hoarsely. “And I will never, ever let anyone hurt you again. I promise.”
She didn’t, either. When a boy at our next apartment building stole my bike, she marched straight down to the courtyard and pushed the kid up against the wall until he cried and told her where it was hidden. When the girls in my class teased me about my weight, she went straight to their homes, rang the doorbells, and screamed at their parents. No teacher could give me a failing grade without facing my mother’s ire in the school parking lot.
And when confrontation wouldn’t solve the problem, she would just whip out her ultimate solution. “OK,” she’d say to me. “Let’s move and just try it again.”
* * *
—
Chasing off my father had unintended consequences. My mother couldn’t pay the bills with part-time waitressing anymore. Instead, she moved into the only other profession she knew: crime.
My mother’s hustle was soft coercion. She used seduction as a means of access: to a credit card, a bank account, a chump who might cover the rent for a while. She targeted married men, misbehaving cads who were too afraid of getting caught by their wives to file a police report when $5,000 suddenly went missing from their checking accounts. Powerful men too wrapped up in their own egos to admit they’d been conned by a woman. I think it was her revenge on every man who had ever underestimated her: the English teacher who molested her in high school, the father who disavowed her, the husband who blackened her eye.
When she didn’t have a mark on the line, she would hang out at casinos, working the card tables and waiting for opportunity to present itself. Sometimes my mother would dress me up in my fanciest outfit—blue velvet, pink taffeta, itchy yellow lace, bought on sale at Ross Dress for Less—and take me to the glitzy palaces where she plied her trade. She’d deposit me in the casino’s nicest restaurant with a fat book and a ten-dollar bill; the waitresses would coddle me with bar nuts and fizzy orange drinks while my mother cruised the floor. If it was a quiet night, my mother would take me around with her and show me how to slip a billfold out of a jacket pocket, hook a wallet from a purse on the back of a chair. Imparting little lessons along the way: A bulging back pocket is a better bet than an open purse. Men link their egos to the size of their billfold, while women find cash too bulky. Or: Don’t be impulsive. Always look for opportunity, but don’t act on it until you’ve thought three steps ahead.
“It’s not big money,” she’d whisper as she rifled through a money clip in a casino bathroom, “but enough to cover a car payment. So, not bad, right?”
It all seemed so normal to me when I was young. This was just my mother’s job. Other people’s parents cleaned houses or scraped plaque off teeth or sat in offices typing at computers; my mother went to casinos and took money from strangers. And really what she did was no different from what the casino owners did; or, at least, that’s what she told me. “The world can be divided into two kinds of people: those who wait to have things given to them and those who take what they want.” She would hug me close, her false eyelashes brushing my forehead, the scent of her skin like honey. “I know better than to wait.”
My world was my mother, her body the only home I’d ever known. It was the one place where I always belonged, in a world in which everything else was permanently in flux; where “friends” were girls you left behind, a name on a spindled pen pal postcard. I don’t blame her, even now, for my misfit childhood. We moved so often not because she wasn’t trying to be a good mom but because she was trying too hard. She always believed that the next stop would be better, for her and for me. That’s why we didn’t speak to her parents, that’s why we left my father behind: because she was protecting me.
As an adolescent, I skated through school by making myself invisible—always sitting in the back of the classroom, reading a novel that I’d sandwich between the pages of my textbooks. I was overweight, rainbow-haired, and dressed in aggressively emo ensembles that deterred potential friends and staved off the disappointment of their ultimate rejection. I made perfectly mediocre grades that were neither bad enough for anyone in charge to flag my existence, nor good enough to be singled out for special attention. But by my freshman year at a goliath, cracked-concrete high school in Las Vegas, an English teacher finally noted my “missed potential” and called my mother in for a conference. And suddenly I was being sent in for mysterious tests, the results of which my mother wouldn’t show me, but they made her walk around our apartment with her lips pressed into a thin line of determination. Pamphlets began piling up on the counters; my mother pressing stamps onto fat envelopes with triumphant gusto. A new Future was being planned for me.
One spring night toward the end of freshman year, my mother slipped into my bedroom just before lights-out. She perched on the edge of my bed in her cocktail dress, gently pried the book I was reading out of my hands, and began a speech in her soft, whispery voice: “Nina, baby, it’s time we started really focusing on your future.”
I laughed. “You mean, like, do I want to be an astronaut or a ballerina when I grow up?” I grabbed for my book.
My mother held the book out of reach. “I’m dead serious, Nina Ross. You are not going to end up like me, OK? And that’s what will happen if we don’t start taking advantage of the opportunities available to you.”
“What’s wrong with being like you?” And yet, even as I asked, I knew what she meant. I knew that mothers weren’t supposed to stay out all night and sleep all day; they weren’t supposed to monitor the neighbors’ mailbo
xes for credit cards and new checkbooks; they weren’t supposed to pack up the car overnight and move because the local law enforcement was breathing down their necks. I loved my mom, I forgave everything she did, but as I sat there on the lumpy bed in our latest cockroach-infested rental apartment, I recognized that I didn’t want to be like her. Not anymore. I knew that what I felt when I walked through the halls of my school with her—the teachers staring at her skintight bandage dresses and stiletto heels, her peroxided nimbus of hair and her berry-stained lips—was a desire to be anything but her.
But what did I want to be?
She looked down at the book in her hands, puzzling over the title. I was reading Great Expectations, which the English teacher had given me not long after she sent me for testing. “Very superior intelligence. That’s what the IQ tests said. You can be anything you want to be. Anything that’s more than a two-bit hustler.”
“So I can be a ballerina?”
She gave me a withering look. “I never got a fair shot at life and you’re getting one, so dammit, you’re going to take it. So we’re moving. Again, I know. But there’s a prep school up in the Sierra Nevada, Lake Tahoe, that’s offering us financial aid. We’re going to move there and you’re going to focus on your studies and I’m going to get a job.”
“A job job?”
She nodded. “A job job. I got work as a hostess, at one of the casinos up there.”
And even though I felt something jump and quiver inside me at these words—maybe we were about to become a normal family after all—the jaded fifteen-year-old cynic in me couldn’t quite believe it. “And so, what, I took a test and now you think that I’ll go to Harvard someday? Become the first female president of the United States? Come on.”
She sat back and regarded me with frank, blue eyes, wide as silver dollars and as calm as a moonlit night. “Oh, sweetheart. Why the fuck not?”
* * *
—
Needless to say, I didn’t become the first female president. Or an astronaut, or even a goddamn ballerina.
No, instead I went to a college (not Harvard in the end, not even close) and got a liberal arts degree. I walked away with a six-figure student-loan debt and a piece of paper that qualified me to do absolutely nothing of value whatsoever. I figured that just being smart and working hard would clear my path toward a different life.
So is it any surprise that I ended up a grifter, after all?
5.
“YOUR MOTHER IS RIGHT. We should leave. Today.” It is later that day and Lachlan and I have decamped to the darkest corner of an anonymous Hollywood sports bar, whispering as if someone might be listening in, although the only people in this bar are a group of frat types in football jerseys who are too drunk to pay us any attention. Sports games blare from televisions on every surface. “Let’s just get out of town for a little while, until we know what’s going on.”
“But maybe it’s nothing,” I protest. “Maybe it has nothing to do with us. Maybe the police just came by my place because…I don’t know. Community outreach. Maybe there’s been a crime spree in my neighborhood and they want to warn us.”
Lachlan laughs. “Darling, we are the crime spree.” He kneads the knuckles of one hand in the other. “Listen, I made some calls after the cops came by. Efram has vanished. No one’s seen him since last week and he’s still not answering his phone. Word on the street is that he was picked up by the police. So—”
“He owes me forty-seven thousand dollars!” I protest. “And there’s still a few pieces in the storage unit that he was going to move for us. The Gio Ponti armchairs—he said he’d get at least fifteen grand each for them.”
He prods at his dry lips with the tip of his tongue. “Yeah, well, that’s the least of our problems. The police were at your house. Maybe Efram gave us up in a plea deal, or maybe your name was just in his contact files and they’re fishing for information. But, either way, we should get out of town for a while and let the dust settle. And if we hear through the grapevine that they’ve issued a warrant for our arrest, we’ll know we have to run for real, but at least we’ll have a head start.”
“We have to run?” My head spins. “But that’s not possible. I’ve got to take care of Lily.”
“Yeah, well, your mom was right about that, too. You’re not going to be able to take care of her if you’re in jail.” He starts cracking his knuckles, gently tugging at each finger until it yields with a sickening pop. “Look, let’s just take a breather and do a job somewhere else. There’s clearly too much heat in L.A., so we’re not going to be able to work here for a while anyway. It can’t hurt to go find new hunting grounds, for a few months at least.” He snaps his pinkie, and I wince.
“A few months?” I think of the cancer once again spreading its creeping tentacles through my mother’s body. I imagine her lying alone in a hospital bed, an IV snaking into her veins, the steady bleat of the machines. I want to say something like, This is more than I signed up for, but it’s not true. It is what I signed up for, it’s just that I believed that Lachlan knew what he was doing and we would never get caught. We were being careful. We never took too much, even when we could. The rules—they were supposed to be our safeguard against this.
He looks at me coolly. “Or we can go our separate ways. It’s up to you. But I’m leaving town.”
I’m dumbstruck by the icy calculation in his words. Am I just a business proposition, so easily discarded when I start to be inconvenient? I can’t finish my drink. “I thought…” I don’t know how to finish the sentence. What did I think? That we would be together forever? Go straight together, get a house in the suburbs and have a kid or two? No, that was never in the cards. So why does this sting so much? Because I have no one else, I realize.
“Oh, c’mon Nina, love. Don’t look like that.” He reaches across the table and laces his fingers between mine. “It will all be fine. Look, come with me. I promise we’ll figure this out. We’ll go someplace close enough that you can still come back and check on your mom periodically. Someplace within driving distance, like Northern California, or Nevada. But it needs to be a little off the beaten path, so we can lay low. A resort destination, maybe. Like Monterey, or Napa.” He squeezes my hand. “Or, hey— What about Lake Tahoe? That’s where all the Silicon Valley billionaires spend their weekends, right? Have you been tracking anyone up there?”
But I’m thinking about what will have to happen if I leave town: the home care I’ll have to bring in to take care of my mother when she’s weak from the treatment, the help I’ll have to hire to get her to and from her appointments, the staggering bills that will need to be opened and paid. Assuming I even have the money to pay them. My mother’s life is on the line: As long as our bank account remains depleted, there will be no experimental radioimmunotherapy treatment. I don’t really have a choice.
We need a job that is fast, with a big payoff; and my thoughts catch on something that Lachlan just said. Tahoe.
There’s a ruckus at the bar and I look over in time to see one of the football fans vomiting all over the floor. His friends are laughing as if this is hilarious. The bartender, a blond girl with tattoo sleeves, catches my eye with a murderous expression on her face, and I know that she is going to have to clean up their mess. Women always do.
I turn back to Lachlan.
“I have, actually,” I say. “Have you ever heard of Vanessa Liebling?”
* * *
—
Vanessa Liebling. A name and face that I’ve followed for twelve years, although she didn’t materialize on social media until four years ago. An heiress from the West Coast Liebling clan, one of those old moneyed families with their fingers jammed in lots of pies, from real estate to casinos. Instead of going into the family business, however, Vanessa’s made a career as an “Instagram fashion influencer.” In English: She travels the world taking photos of herself
in dresses that cost more than the annual income of the women who sewed them. For this dubious skill set—wearing Balmain in Bahrain, Prada in Prague, Celine in Copenhagen—she has a half-million followers. She’s dubbed her Instagram feed V-Life.
Study her Instagram feed—as I have, in detail—and you’ll see that the earliest posts on her account are your standard rich-girl fare: loving (if blurry) snapshots of her new Valentino bag; close-up selfies of herself hugging her Maltipoo, Mr. Buggles; an occasional shot of the New York skyline from the window of her Tribeca loft. And then, fifty posts in, having likely realized the career-changing potential of being Instagram-famous, the quality of her photos improves dramatically. Suddenly, they are no longer selfies. Instead, another person is taking the pictures, probably a photo assistant paid to document her every wardrobe change and sip of macchiato. There is Vanessa, strolling through SoHo with Mr. Buggles, holding a fistful of helium balloons. There is Vanessa, in the front row of a Chanel fashion show, wearing sunglasses in the dark. There is Vanessa in a red silk dress, posing next to a snaggletoothed sticky-rice vendor in Hanoi: Vietnamese people are so colorful and authentic! (Dress by #gucci, sandals by #valentino.)
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