Pretty Things

by Janelle Brown

  He looked down at the papers in front of him. “Your mom will be OK. She gets like this sometimes, and then she bounces back. You know that by now. Telling her she needs a therapist will just upset her more.”

  “Dad, have you looked at her? She’s skeletal. And not in a good way.”

  My father pushed aside the top paper with the tip of his finger in order to glance at the file underneath. I’d read online that my father’s position at the Liebling Group was tenuous; that my uncle—his younger brother—had just attempted a boardroom coup. The stress was visible in the pouches under my father’s eyes and the furrow bisecting his brow. But he sat back in his chair, as if he’d settled something. “Look. We’re going back up to Stonehaven next week, after your brother gets back from camp. Lourdes is an excellent cook, she’ll make sure your mother is eating. It’s good for her to be up there. Quiet and calm.”

  I hesitated, wondering if I should bring up Benny’s alarming letters. What would my parents do, put him on yet more drugs, or—worse—send him off to some reform school? Maybe he did need help, but it also struck me that Benny had been through enough already—isolated in Stonehaven, shipped off to Italy, his friends monitored by Maman. Maybe he just needed to be left alone, to feel loved for once. I stood there before my father, undecided; but before I could say anything my father rose from his chair. He reached across the space between us and wrapped me in a rare hug, folding me into his chest. He smelled like starch and lemons, a whisper of whiskey on his breath.

  “You’re a good daughter,” he said. “Always looking out for our family. You make us proud. And it’s a relief to know that we don’t have to worry about you.” He laughed. “God knows we have enough to worry about with your brother.”

  I could have said something about the letters then. I didn’t. Because in that moment it felt like the biggest betrayal to my brother would be to set myself up in opposition to him. The easy child and the difficult child. I couldn’t do that to him again.

  So back to Princeton I went, and that was the last I ever saw of my mother. Eight weeks later, she would be dead.

  * * *

  —

  My mother died on the last Tuesday of October. I still hate myself for letting the weeks before her death slide by; for failing to note the fact that she wasn’t calling me to check in. But I had a new, all-consuming boyfriend; and then I dumped him; and then there was another; and then my grades were tanking (again) because of the boys; and then I needed a distraction from all that so I organized a weekend trip to the Bahamas. When I returned, tanned and just a little spun out, it finally occurred to me that my mother was MIA. Even then, it still took me a few days to rally myself to pick up the phone, as if I was afraid what might be waiting for me on the other end of the line.

  Her voice, when she finally answered the phone, sounded like a cloudy day, flat and affectless and gray. “Your father has been having an affair.” She was as matter-of-fact as if she was informing me of the outcome of an opera board meeting.

  Downstairs in my dorm, a party was going on, Eminem blasting so loud that the floor under my feet was vibrating. I wasn’t sure I’d heard her correctly. “Daddy? Are you sure? How do you know?”

  “There was a letter….” She swallowed the end of the sentence, mumbled something I couldn’t hear.

  Girls were shrieking with laughter down the hall. I covered the phone with my palm and screamed out the door, “Shut up shut up SHUT UP!” There was a sudden, resounding silence, and then I could hear them giggle. Vanessa Liebling has lost her shit. I didn’t care.

  An affair. But of course: That’s why he’d been spending his weekdays in San Francisco, instead of at Stonehaven with his family. Maybe that’s even why he’d moved them to Stonehaven in the first place—to keep them separate from his mistress. Poor Maman. No wonder she’d been such a wreck for so long.

  I wasn’t shocked, though; of course I wasn’t. My father was hideously ugly, objectively speaking; but that wasn’t what mattered to some women. Power is its own aphrodisiac. And the lure of taking what already belongs to someone else—even more powerful. Most of my mother’s friends had already gone through a society divorce, their husbands now married to much younger women (gold-diggers/trophy wives/tacky whores) while they resettled themselves in Four Seasons penthouses with generous divorce settlements.

  So of course Daddy had affairs; it was an inevitability.

  “Is Daddy there right now?” I asked.

  She laughed, and it was a terrible sound, like stones rattling inside an empty box. “Your father is never here, darling. He sent us up here to rot, your brother and me, up in this awful house where we can’t embarrass him anymore. Like, what’s that novel? Jane Eyre. We’re the mad relatives he’s shut up in the attic. He thinks my family is the one with the bad genes but let’s talk about his—”

  I cut her off. “Is he in San Francisco?”

  “I think he’s in Florida,” she said, sounding uninterested. “Or maybe Japan.”

  Now it was Snoop Dogg on the stereo downstairs, singing in his nasal, soporific drawl. “Maman, can I talk to Benny?”

  “Oh, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Benny’s not himself.”

  “Not himself how?”

  “Well.” A pause. “To start he says he’s vegan now. He says he won’t eat anything with a face. Apparently he’s conversing with the meat on his plate.”

  I thought of his letters. Oh God, everything is going to hell out there. “I’m going to come home, OK?”

  “No,” she said darkly. “You stay there and focus on your studies.”

  I wanted to reach through the phone and wrap my arms around her until she sounded like herself again. “Maman—”

  “Vanessa. I don’t want you here.” Her voice was chilly.

  “But, Maman—”

  “I love you, darling. Now, I’ve got to go.” She hung up.

  Sitting in my dorm room, listening to the revelry all around me, I wept. I’d been excommunicated. My mother had always wanted me; I was all she wanted. How could she shut me down like that? How could she take away my home?

  In retrospect, I can see what she was doing: She wanted to wound me in order to keep me away. Because she must have already known then, what her plan was: How she was going to untie our yacht, the Judybird, from the dock and drive it toward the exact center of the lake the following morning right after Benny had gone to school. How she would drop anchor and then put on her silk bathrobe with the enormous pockets, pockets that she would weigh down with a half-dozen first-edition law books that she took from the library. How she would jump off the boat into the chilly, choppy water, and drown there.

  She didn’t want me there for all that. Even in the end, she wanted to protect me.

  I should have seen it then. I should have realized when it mattered what she was trying to do. Instead of doing what I did—calling my father at his office in San Francisco (he was doing business in Tokyo, his assistant told me) and leaving messages for Benny (also unanswered)—I should have booked a flight home right away. As it was, it took me far too long to finally work myself up into a panic and get on an airplane to Reno. By the time the town car deposited me at Stonehaven, my mother had been missing for almost a day.

  They found the Judybird floating in the center of the lake, a few hours after I arrived in town. My mother’s robe was tangled in the rudder. She hadn’t made it to the bottom at all, but had drowned within arm’s reach of the surface, one strong kick away from life.

  * * *

  —

  So, now do you feel sorry for me after all? Not that I’m pandering for your sympathy (OK, maybe I am, just a little; isn’t any shared story just a cry to be understood?), but if nothing else makes me human, I think a dead mother certainly will. In the end, we are all our mother
s’ children, no matter how saintly or evil they might be; and the loss of their love is the earthquake that cracks your foundation forever. It’s permanent damage.

  And then, amplifying that: suicide. Yes, yes, of course, it’s part of a disease, but still, a mother’s suicide leaves you with a whisper of self-doubt that will never, ever go away. It leaves you with questions whose answers will never be satisfying.

  Was I not worth living for? What’s wrong with me that my love wasn’t enough for you? Why didn’t I know the thing to say that would have made you want to live again? Why didn’t I get to you sooner, and talk you out of it? Was I in any way responsible for what you did?

  Twelve years on, and I still wake up in the middle of the night, panicked, with these questions echoing through my mind. Twelve years on, and I’m still terrified that her death was somehow all my fault.

  * * *

  —

  Maybe I should have confronted my father about his affair, but in the months after my mother’s death, he was so despondent that I couldn’t bring myself to ask. And besides, there were other, more pressing issues: the fragile state of Benny, for example, who could barely be dragged out of the house now, and refused to go to North Lake Academy entirely. (Sometimes when I lurked outside his door I could hear him holding low conversations with someone who wasn’t there.) Someone had to decide what to do with the Judybird, which was now dry-docked in the boathouse, a hideous reminder. Someone needed to pack up Stonehaven, where no one now wanted to be, and move us back to our Pacific Heights house. This also meant that someone needed to find a new school for Benny, one that would overlook his precarious psychological state.

  I was in no shape to do any of that. It felt like I’d been driving on high speed and suddenly I’d crashed and come to a complete stop. Some mornings I woke up and looked out at the lake and thought of my mother jumping over the edge of the Judybird and felt the same dark tug.

  My father’s brother and sister-in-law arrived, with toddlers and nannies in tow, to help address the mess left in my mother’s wake; and my mother’s personal secretary was assigned to the crisis; but even then I couldn’t make myself go back to school. I took the rest of the semester off from Princeton and spent my afternoons sitting in the study with Benny, blinds drawn, watching West Wing reruns in silence. Eventually, a friend of my mother’s located a boarding school in Southern California that specialized in “equine therapy,” as if all Benny needed was a vigorous horseback ride to shake off both his grief and his incipient madness. It seemed as good an idea as any.

  We left Stonehaven in early January. On our last night there, Lourdes cooked lasagna. My father, Benny, and I sat and ate in the formal dining room, with the crystal and the silver, our first proper meal as a family since my mother’s death. Lourdes cried as she served us.

  My father cut his lasagna into perfect squares and forked them one by one into his mouth, as if eating was a chore that had to be endured. The skin under his eyes sagged like deflating balloons; dry red crescents framed the side of his nose, chapped from blowing.

  Benny glowered at my father across the table, not touching his meal. And then: “You killed Mom,” he blurted.

  My father’s fork stopped in midair, cheese strings dangling from the tines. “You don’t mean that.”

  “Oh, I do,” Benny said. “That’s what you do. You destroy people’s lives. You destroyed mine, and then you destroyed Mom’s. Your business, everything you do, is about leeching the life out of other people.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” my father said quietly to the lasagna.

  “You were having an affair,” Benny said. He pushed his plate away from him and it knocked over his water glass. Liquid slowly spread across the table toward our father’s plate. “Mom killed herself because you cheated on her.”

  My father reached out with his napkin and carefully lay it across the puddle of water. “No, your mother killed herself because she was ill.”

  “You made her ill. This place made her ill.” Benny stood. He threw a long spindly arm out and swiped it through the air, as if trying to chop Stonehaven in half. “I swear to God, if you ever drag me back here after tomorrow, I’m going to burn this fucking place to the ground.”

  “Benjamin, sit down.” But Benny was already gone; we could hear him galloping heavily across the wooden floors, before he was swallowed up by the depths of the house. My father picked up his fork again and carefully tucked a piece of lasagna into his mouth. He swallowed like it hurt, and then looked across the table at me. There was a grim satisfaction in his expression, as if he’d been waiting for weeks (years!) for someone to hit him, and the blow had finally come. Now he was relieved it was over and he could move on.

  “It will help your brother to not be here, I think. This place reminds him too much of your mother.”

  I swallowed against the thick lump in my throat. Then, after a minute, I asked the question I had been afraid to ask for months: “The other woman— Are you still with her?”

  “God, no! She meant nothing.” He weighed the silver fork in his hand. “Look. I was not always a good husband to your mother, I know. We had our issues, just like any married couple. But you need to believe me that I did my best to protect her. I knew she was…fragile. I did what I thought was best for her.” He pointed the fork at me. “Just like I try to do what’s best for you and your brother.”

  I could see my father studying my face, trying to measure how much anger I was harboring against him. And maybe I was angry (I was! I was so angry), but I’d already lost one parent. I couldn’t bear to lose two. It was easier to direct my fury toward the faceless mistress, the opportunistic bitch in her San Francisco flat who tried (and succeeded!) to tear our family apart.

  “I know, Daddy,” I said. I stabbed at my lasagna, splattering marinara sauce across the white china, imagining his mistress’s guts splashed across my plate.

  He watched me eviscerate my lasagna for a moment, alarm in his face. Then he put his own fork down on the plate and aligned it with the edge of his knife. “We have to keep up appearances, cupcake. We’re Lieblings. No one gets to see what’s in our basement and no one ever should; there are wolves out there, waiting to drag us down at the first sign of weakness. You can never, ever let people see the moments when you’re not feeling strong. So you’ll go back to your life and smile and be your charming self, and move forward from this.” He looked up at me, and for the first time since my mother’s suicide, there were tears in his eyes. “But no matter what, you should know that I love you. More than anything.”

  * * *

  —

  We left Stonehaven the following morning, leaving behind rooms cloaked in dustcloths, the windows shuttered tightly against the elements. A fortune of gleaming antiques and priceless artwork, a veritable museum that would be locked up and left in limbo for the next decade. I’m not sure why my father never sold Stonehaven—maybe out of some deference to Lieblings past, a sense of duty to the unbroken chain of our ancestry—but he didn’t. And none of us ever went up there again, not until the day I showed up last spring with a moving truck in tow.

  * * *

  —

  My mother’s death broke something essential in the rest of us, and the next few years unspooled with one crisis after another. I returned to Princeton and promptly flunked a half-dozen classes; I was put on academic probation and forced to repeat my sophomore year. Meanwhile, back in San Francisco, the Liebling Group was contending with the market crash. As the value of its real estate holdings plummeted, my father was ousted as chairman of the board in favor of his younger brother.

  But it was Benny who was in the worst shape of all. Poor Benny. He had squeaked by at boarding school (maybe the horses did help) but by the time he arrived at Princeton, his disease had started to take over his mind. I would spy him on campus sometimes, wearing head-to-toe black,
flying through the crowds of students like a disoriented crow. He had finally reached his full height of six-six, but he bent himself almost in half as he scurried, as though this might make him invisible. I heard through the grapevine that he was doing a lot of drugs, hard stuff: meth and cocaine.

  Just a few months into his fall semester, Benny’s roommate moved out abruptly. When I went to visit the room myself I understood why: Benny had covered his side with disturbing pen-and-ink drawings, mazes of black scribbles that suggested an ominous tunnel, with the eyes of monsters hidden in the shadows. They papered the wall from floor to ceiling, Benny’s nightmares come to life.

  I stood looking at these, fear knocking dully in my chest. “Maybe keep these in your notebook next time?” I suggested. “Try not to creep out the new roommate?”

  Benny’s eyes flew back and forth across the images, as if they were a puzzle he was still trying to solve. “He couldn’t hear them,” he said.

  “Hear what?”

  His eyes drooped at the corners; purple bruises darkened the patches of freckles under his eyes. Disappointment colored his face. “You don’t, either, do you?”

  “Benny, you need to see the school therapist.”

  But Benny was already back at his desk, with a fresh pen and paper in his hand. I could see deep black scratches in the surface of the desk, where he’d scribbled so hard that it went all the way through the paper. When I let myself out of the room I stood out in the hallway for a long time, panicked, on the verge of tears. Normal kids crossed back and forth in the hall before me, on their way to football games and concerts; they skirted past Benny’s room, as if the very door itself were infectious. It broke my heart.

  I called the campus medical center and asked to speak to a doctor. Instead, I got a harried-sounding nurse. “Unless he does something to harm himself, or threatens another student, there’s not much we can do,” she told me. “He has to come to us of his own volition.”