She Regrets Nothing

by Andrea Dunlop

  “She’s really pretty. I wonder why she lives here,” Nora said.

  “Well, she grew up here,” Leo said, “and at least the neighborhood is nice. Look at the houses. We could practically be in Connecticut.”

  “But that guy she was with. Was that really her boyfriend?” Nora pulled at the waistband of her dress. Her clothes were always a size too small, as though she imagined herself thinner when she bought them.

  “I don’t know,” Liberty said, “it seemed that way.”

  Nora made a face.

  Just then Liberty felt her phone buzz with a text message.

  Hi Liberty - it’s Laila. When are you leaving? I thought we might meet up tomorrow. Would it be okay if it was just you and me though? I’m feeling overwhelmed.

  “What is it?”

  “Just Reece checking in.” Liberty felt strangely protective of Laila. She thought of her standing there next to her boyfriend in the church, looking fragile and faraway. Was that strange aunt with the Bible verses the only family she had left?

  “I can’t believe we have to spend the night in Detroit,” Nora said as they were getting out of the car.

  “Nora, hush,” Liberty said, feeling the eyes of the hotel’s doorman on them. She smiled at him warmly and his expression said that she, at least, was forgiven.

  “I like it here,” Leo said, just to be contrary. “It’s so much edgier than New York, so much more real. And this hotel,” he said, stretching his arms wide, smiling up at the dramatic frescos and expanse of marble that engulfed the lobby, “it’s like Vegas or something.”

  “Or something,” Nora muttered.

  “My good man!” Leo said, strolling up to the concierge desk where a thin twentysomething who swam in his dark suit lifted his gaze from his computer.

  “How can I help you, sir?”

  “Tell me,” Leo said, leaning over the counter, his convivial charm working on the young man, “where should we go for dinner? We’re only in town for a night.”

  “Well,” the concierge said, straightening his spine, “were we thinking fine dining or . . .”

  “Oh, God, no,” Leo said.

  “Can you imagine what passes for fine dining in this hellhole?” Nora said under her breath to Liberty, who gave her a sharp look.

  “Something authentic,” Leo said, “what’s your favorite spot?”

  “Pizza okay?”

  “We have pizza in New York,” Nora said, “amazing pizza.”

  “Not like this,” the concierge said, “I promise you. No one has pizza like Papalis.”

  “I’m intrigued,” Leo said. “Girls?”

  They both nodded, Liberty smiling, Nora sulking as the concierge showed Leo the restaurant’s location on a map.

  They were seated in a booth toward the front of Papalis as Leo watched other patrons as if they were performing a cabaret for his amusement. “It’s like being on safari! I should write about this in my column,” he said, meaning his weekly missive for New York magazine’s Man About Town where he mostly chronicled the parties he went to—he’d even sold a book to a publisher off the concept.

  When their pizza arrived, it was a monstrous thing, like five pizzas crammed together and covered with extra cheese and sauce.

  “Ugh,” Nora said, “no wonder everyone here is so fat.”

  “This actually smells pretty delicious,” Liberty said.

  “I’m ordering a salad,” Nora said, “if they even have such a thing here.”

  “So,” Leo said, taking a generous bite of his slice and rolling his eyes in ecstasy, “God, this is good. What’s the plan now with Laila? Just the funeral drive-by or what?”

  “Maybe she can come visit us in New York! The poor thing,” Nora said.

  Liberty knew it was best if she kept her meeting with their cousin a secret for now. Like all siblings—particularly those with nearly a decade’s difference in age—she and the twins had grown up both in the same and completely different households. Their parents had been much stricter with Liberty, imparted different lessons about money and work and privilege. She loved the twins, but they were so woefully naive. She didn’t want to lose her cousin’s trust if they said or did the wrong thing at such a delicate time, which she somehow knew they would.

  “That’s a great idea, Nora, why don’t we invite her once we’ve given her a few days to recover from the funeral?”

  Nora, a bit unaccustomed to having good ideas, beamed.

  “I’m not surprised Dad never told me anything about this family imbroglio,” Leo said to Liberty. It was true Ben wasn’t one for cozy father-son chats. “But you really don’t know what happened with them?”

  “I really don’t, but it must have been big. Mom knows something, I’m just not sure how much.”

  “A mystery,” Nora said.

  Their flight to New York wasn’t until the next afternoon. That morning, Liberty told her siblings she was going to check out a rare bookstore nearby that she’d read about, thereby ensuring they wouldn’t want to come. At any rate, they were settled into their favorite activity, hotel movies and room service. They were already in robes and unlikely to move for hours, giving Liberty ample time to meet Laila for coffee.

  Liberty felt stares trailing her as she made her way to a small two-top table in the corner of a nearby café to wait for Laila. It was always worse outside New York. In Manhattan, she wasn’t so out of place, but here she was like another species, so tall and slender, with her miles of legs, high cheekbones, and dramatic brows. She stared at her phone while she waited, avoiding fervent glances and hoping no one would see the open chair opposite her as an invitation. A few moments later, she felt the energy of the room shift and raised her eyes to see her cousin come through the door. She was wearing a royal-blue peacoat that she shook off upon entering. Underneath she had on a tight sweater and jeans, her lovely red hair splashed out across her shoulders; she looked revived since the previous afternoon.

  Liberty leaned forward and waved to her. She had the impulse to stand and embrace her, but then remembered Laila’s bewildered grimace at Nora’s hug. Laila spotted her and strode toward the table.

  “Thanks for meeting me.” Laila gave her a weak smile as she settled into her chair, draping her coat over the back. Laila scrutinized her. Liberty realized that her presence was being met with something besides curiosity. Suspicion.

  “Of course. I’m glad you texted. I’m sorry we just showed up like that. Maybe that wasn’t the right way to . . . ,” she fell off, embarrassed.

  “Trust me, there’s no right way for anyone to do anything for me right now.” Laila took off her hat and shook out her hair. “Jesus,” she said, looking back at Liberty, “you’re so pretty.” Liberty thanked her, though it sounded more like an accusation than a compliment.

  “It makes sense. I gather my uncle married a supermodel; I read up on you guys this morning. I can’t believe I’d never done it before. But I guess I had no real reason to—I didn’t even know you existed—let alone that you’d be this interesting. You guys are, like, famous.”

  Just then the waiter came by and took their coffee orders. Liberty asked for black; Laila ordered a latte, skim, just a dusting of nutmeg. Thank you so much.

  Liberty laughed off the previous comment, “Hardly. I mean, you’d never heard of us.”

  “Yeah, but there’s all this stuff in the tabloids,” she smiled. “Lots of people seem to care who you date and what you wear.”

  “Well, New York is like that.” Liberty shrugged. She didn’t think they were in the press that much, but she supposed if you Googled it, if it all came up together, it might seem they were. “Have you ever visited?” The idea that her cousin might have come, worn the touristy path from Times Square to the Empire State Building to South Street Seaport, without ever knowing she had family there, struck Liberty as inexpressibly sad.

  Laila shook her head, “No reason to, I guess. I mean, I’ve always wanted to see it, like everyone. But I don’t
travel much.”

  “You really didn’t know anything about us?” It hurt Liberty that her uncle had taken such pains to deny her very existence. But then, her own father had done the same. What must have happened between the two brothers to have caused such a rift?

  “You know how that is: your parents tell you something from the time you’re a little kid. You believe it. My dad said he had a brother he didn’t get along with; he never said anything about cousins. He died before I was old enough to start asking serious questions. My mom didn’t say anything about Ben having children, but then, maybe she didn’t know?”

  Liberty nodded, wishing they’d not started in the deep end. Better to revert to less serious topics, maybe. “So, tell me about yourself. What do you do?”

  “I’m a dental hygienist. I work for my boyfriend, who you met. I mean, he wasn’t my boyfriend when I started working for him.” Laila smiled. “And I guess he’s not really my boyfriend anymore.”

  Liberty tilted her head, waited for her to continue. Had they broken up? They’d certainly seemed like an item the day before.

  “We’re getting married.”

  Liberty breathed a sigh of relief that yet another misfortune had not landed on her cousin.

  “That’s wonderful! He seems really lovely, by the way.” And he had—the vigorous handshake, the warm smile—in their brief interaction, he’d exuded goodness. “When is the wedding?”

  Laila let out a big sigh. The waiter reappeared with their coffees, and Laila shot him a sparkling smile that made him nearly lose his footing. “Not sure. But we’re going to keep it supersmall. It might be just the two of us. After my mom . . . I don’t have . . .”

  “Yeah, of course. Well, that’s some happy news, anyway. So how . . . how are you doing?”

  Laila shrugged. “I’m just numb still, I think. I wake up and I think, Maybe today it won’t be true. That probably sounds nuts. Nathan has been such a support.”

  “I’m glad you have him. I wish . . . our families . . .” Liberty didn’t know what she meant to say but Laila seemed to understand and smiled kindly at her.

  “It’s just such a stupid thing, you know? She was out playing bingo like she always does on Sunday nights and . . .”

  Liberty finally found the courage to reach across the table and take her cousin’s hand, which happily, she accepted and squeezed.

  “What a boring way to die, you know? A car accident.” Laila said.

  Liberty looked at her, confused, resisting the urge to withdraw her hand.

  “Senseless, I mean. You understand.”

  Liberty nodded. It was unfair to expect eloquence from her cousin, in her grief. “You two were close?”

  “It’s complicated. My mother was a very difficult woman, and I’m fairly sure she was never totally enthused about the whole motherhood thing. But I spent a lot of time with her, so in that way we were close, I guess. But mostly it was because she had no one else, and what was I going to do?”

  “But there were all those people at the funeral?”

  “My aunts’ friends. The two of them did more for Betsy last night than they did in the last ten years of her life,” she said with a rueful smile. “My mother didn’t really have friends of her own. God, sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “Why am I telling you all of this?”

  “It’s okay.” Liberty felt relieved that her cousin would confide in her. “I’m glad you feel like you can share.”

  “Well, Nathan doesn’t like talking about it. His mother is, like, the polar opposite of Betsy, she has these four jock-y sons that she still babies, and she’s always baking something. She wears sweatshirts with cats on them, remembers the mailman’s birthday. That kind of mom.”

  “She sounds sweet.” Liberty’s mother, Petra, also bore no resemblance to this paragon. She loved her children and was devoted to her family, but she’d grown up poor in Russia before emigrating and becoming a top-tier model. She was all hard edges: no baking and certainly no cat sweatshirts.

  “She is, but . . . anyway. Tell me about New York!” Laila’s eyes lit up, her posture straightened as though shaking off the burdens she’d just enumerated.

  “Well, it’s the only place I’ve ever lived, so it’s home.” Liberty shrugged. “I love it.”

  “You must have traveled all over the world for your modeling career, though?”

  Liberty smiled, “Not as much as you’d think. I did mostly local stuff because I was really young when I was working.” Her cousin must have gone back a ways with her research. Liberty hadn’t modeled since she was a teenager, and she was thirty now.

  “And now you’re a literary agent. You didn’t like modeling?”

  Liberty shook her head, “Wasn’t for me. I love working with books.”

  “That sounds cool. And are you seeing anyone? A boyfriend?” Laila’s expression was girlish; she suddenly looked years younger, the cloud of her grief clearing.

  Liberty shook her head. “Too busy!” she said cheerfully, the usual answer, the simplest. She was charmed by the childlike bluntness of her cousin’s questioning.

  The two chatted for another half hour, as Laila peppered her with excited questions about New York. Liberty figured she was desperate to talk about anything other than her mom’s death. At last Laila excused herself. “I have to meet my aunts Jennifer and Lisa to go through the stuff at my mom’s condo.”

  “Today?” Liberty said. The task seemed brutal so soon after the funeral.

  “Honestly, I just want to get it over with. You can’t even imagine the amount of random shit there is to deal with when someone dies unexpectedly.”

  “I could change my flight if you need help.”

  “That’s really sweet of you, but no, it’s okay. Aunt Jen has all her church ladies coming, so we’ll have plenty of hands.”

  “Okay, then.” Liberty stood and this time hugged her cousin, who smelled like vanilla.

  They promised to keep in touch, and Liberty walked back in the direction of the hotel. The early-October sun was out and it warmed her face. She texted her best friend, Reece, to see if she could talk, but there was no response. Liberty thought of calling her mother, who didn’t even know they were out of town, just to hear her voice. She was reminded by meeting her cousin that you only had so much time with people, only so many chances to make things right. Holding grudges—as her own father had obviously done with his brother—was never worthwhile.

  Aunt Jen (the eldest) and Aunt Lisa (the middle sister) had been at her mother’s condo since 9:00 a.m. with a half dozen of their interchangeable dowdy church friends, and they were busy pawing through the remnants of Betsy’s life.

  “Do you need me today?” Nathan had asked her before she’d set off to meet Liberty—a part of her day’s itinerary that she hadn’t shared with him. His tone made it quite clear that if he was required to help, it would be as a brave martyr on his fiancée’s behalf, rather than out of any genuine desire to be there. It was a Saturday, which meant hours upon hours of college football blaring from the massive, vulgar television that dominated their living room. It meant the house steadily crowding with his brothers—both biological and fraternity—their voices growing ever louder as they consumed more and more beer.

  “No,” Laila had replied flatly, “it’s fine.”

  “Okay, I’ll just leave you ladies to it, then,” he said, his relief palpable. As though the tossing out of dozens of take-out menus, the sorting of her mother’s vast collection of stretchy pants to determine which were fit for donation and which should just be thrown away, were some fun girly outing his male presence would impinge upon. Not that Laila wanted him to come; there was something deeply humiliating about going through the effects of a middle-aged woman who’d lived alone. She’d succumbed to the sort of squalor in the past several years that showed she’d given up: the fridge full of take-out leftovers and condiment packets; the crusty, expired cosmetics jumbled in the bathroom drawers, long since unused, inexplicably he
ld on to; the trashy romance novels and self-help tomes piled on the window sill.

  The church ladies squawked around Laila as they sifted through the unfortunate detritus. How was she doing? Did she need anything? They’d brought a massive platter of cookies with them, as though refined carbohydrates could somehow make this task more pleasant.

  “Honey, there’s a little pile of some nice things we found, some jewelry you might want to hang on to.” One of the ladies pointed her to the dresser in the corner.

  Laila smiled sweetly and made her way through the chaos. The dresser was in a corner of the room that had already been dealt with and was consequently cleaner than Laila had ever seen it while her mother was alive. There was another version of Betsy buried somewhere in Laila’s memory: the one featured in the photographs at the memorial service. This was the incarnation of her mother whose prettiness and smarts had helped her—for a time, at least—rise above her circumstances by landing a scholarship to the University of Michigan where she met, and soon married, Gregory Lawrence. But that version had lapsed after her husband’s death. The Betsy of the rancid condo where Laila too had spent her teenage years was doomed to be the one who endured in her memory. There were many women who rose to the occasion of single motherhood—in truth, the world would grind to a halt without such women—but Betsy was not one of them. After Gregory’s death, their family was like a rulerless nation—a vacuum that impressed upon Laila the dangerous notion that women were powerless alone.

  Laila picked through the pile of so-called nice things the church ladies had set aside. Her mother had developed an unfortunate QVC habit in her later years and had accumulated a massive amount of junky costume jewelry. But then it caught her eye—the red enamel pendant with the two golden birds, both of them with diamonds for eyes. It was the one beautiful thing Laila’s mother had owned, and she was shocked to find it here, having assumed that her mother would find a way to take it with her to the grave. Laila didn’t know anything about its provenance, but it was her mother’s treasured possession: Laila had already looked through the apartment once and not found it. Somehow the church ladies had unearthed it.