“It’s so beautiful outside,” she said. The sun was just coming up, and the sky was, for the moment, clear. The snow that covered the ground and blanketed the trees glowed, and the heavy icicles that hung from the eaves glinted.
“We should go for a walk!” Leo said, sitting up in excitement.
“I didn’t bring clothes for it,” Reece said.
“You can borrow some of my mom’s; I bet they’ll fit.”
“It might have to be your dad’s stuff.” Reece laughed. “But I’m willing to try.”
Leo and Reece went to the vast closet where the family kept all manner of outdoor equipment for the weekends they spent at the house. The two pawed through great heaps of parkas and skis and scarves.
“Ah!” Leo said, pulling a snowshoe from the pile, “I have an even better idea! Let’s go snowshoeing. There are trails in the woods. It will be beautiful.”
“I’m up for that,” Reece said, “I could use the exercise.” Even one day off her exercise routine left Reece a little jittery. The Michaelses were the kind of clan who’d grown up going on family runs, bike rides, and hikes: all despite their city life. In their family dogma, there was little that a vigorous workout could not cure.
“Fantastic,” he said, giving her a thousand-watt smile.
They left a note on the kitchen table and made their way out behind the house. For a while they trudged forth in companionable silence. Clouds had rolled in, but rays of sun still peeked through the gray, illuminating patches of snow falling through the bare branches of the towering oaks.
“God, it feels good to be outside,” Leo said. “Being in nature: if there was ever a reason to leave New York, that would be it.”
“Can you even imagine leaving, though?”
Leo shrugged. “You know I have a brother who lives in Alaska? Well, a half brother, Beau.”
“Liberty’s talked about him a little, but I’ve never met him.”
“That’s because he won’t come to New York.”
“Won’t come at all?”
Leo shook his head. “He doesn’t speak to our dad. He blames him for what happened to his mom.”
Reece knew this much: that his mother, Patricia, a once-prominent socialite, had killed herself sometime in the two years after Ben left her for Petra. The boy, who was then living with her, had been the one to find her. She’d taken pills and was found dead on the bathroom floor. Beau was eleven years old. He had left for the remote town of Banff the moment he’d finished prep school and turned eighteen.
“Do you guys keep in touch with him at all?”
“Only Liberty.” He took large, deliberate steps as the trail widened and the snow became deeper. “He has a soft spot for her since they were closer in age, and she got to know him before he left. He could give a shit about Nora and me.”
Reece could understand Leo’s bitterness, but Beau had been through something that neither of them could imagine. As had Laila, as had Reece’s Cece, who’d lost her father when she was twelve. Nothing had touched Reece in that way, and despite all that swirled beneath the polished surface of the Lawrence family, Leo and Nora had been sheltered from it. They’d never known any of the deceased. And they didn’t know the half of what their older sister had been through.
“Families are complicated.” Reece shook her head.
“It must be nice having Cameron back,” Leo said. “He seems different than I remember. But I guess I haven’t seen him much since I was younger.”
“Different how?” Reece asked, but she thought she knew what Leo meant. Her brother had grown up, and she was proud of him. He had, at least as far as Reece knew, shaken the desperate trail of girls that had seemed to cling to him throughout his teens and twenties. The girls, if memory served, were mostly desperate because he’d made them so, promising things he no longer wished to deliver once the moment had passed. There was at least one pregnancy that Reece had known about, as it had happened in the days of the landline, when a call could be intercepted by one’s little sister, and a distraught lover could spill one’s secrets. There was a termination—Reece knew this too—and her brother had declined to accompany the girl. He’d paid for it, he said in his own defense. Not as dearly as the girl, Reece imagined. She wished she’d never known about it.
“I don’t know, I just like him better. Don’t take that the wrong way. Can we stop for a minute?” Leo asked as they reached an overturned log in a small clearing that opened from the trail. Nearby, a stream burbled beneath a thin coating of ice.
“Sure.” Reece smiled. Leo was wearing out, but Reece was just getting in her groove, despite this being her first time in snowshoes. Rocket sprang up and sat proprietarily between the two of them. Leo removed his bulky gloves to pull a flask from the inside pocket of his coat. “Want some?”
“It’s ten in the morning, not even.”
“And?” That killer smile. “It’s a holiday!”
“Yeah, okay.” Reece sipped without asking what it was, and a gratifyingly smooth whiskey hit her lips when she tipped the flask back. They settled into a comfortable quiet, the hush of the snow swallowing the sounds of the forest. The snow had begun falling lightly again, and the flakes were catching in the tufts of Leo’s thick hair that stuck out from beneath his cap.
“Speaking of Cameron . . .”
“Yes?”
“And my sister?”
“Nora?” Reece cocked her head. Leo gave her an incredulous look, and she laughed. “Cameron and Liberty are friends.”
“Oh, that’s adorable.”
“Well, they’re not dating, are they?”
“Actually, I believe they are—all the boring parts, anyway. They’re not fucking, maybe.”
“Ew, Leo. Your sister. My brother.”
“What? We’re all just animals.” He gave her a sly smile. Just once, if they could be assured there would be no consequences—which there would be, there always would be—but just once, in a perfect moral vacuum they would. They’d never speak of it again.
“Yes, well, I have given my brother marching orders not to act like an animal if he wants me to keep speaking to him.” She hadn’t meant to tell Leo that. The woods made confessions feel safe somehow.
“Ah. I see.”
Leo smiled to himself.
“What?”
“You’re a good friend, Reece.” With this he kissed her on the cheek and was on his feet. They made their way back toward the house, the snow growing heavier beneath their feet.
14
* * *
YOU HANG out with Laila a lot, right?”
Reece was sitting on the sturdy table of the atelier.
“I do,” Cece said. “How come?” Cece was at the tiny sink in the corner. The two of them had been working on the new designs for hours; Cece had just been pouring two paper cups full of the Reserva Añeja Rum she kept stashed in the cabinet. She only drank rum when she was working. She’d told Reece that she remembered her father, an architect, drank it sometimes when he was up late at his drafting table. She’d been too young to share it with him, but he’d let her try a sip now and then when she was eleven, the year before he died. It was a mark of how close she felt to Reece that she was willing to include her in the tradition; Cece kept things like this close to the vest. They’d worked together ever since Cece graduated from Parsons and Reece had snapped her up to be her assistant. And for two years they’d been working in secret on their clothing line.
Reece let out a long sigh. She and Cece’s personal relationship had long been intertwined with their working one, but still it felt petty to talk to her about this. But Reece was hungry for insight into Laila, to put a name to the discomfort she felt in the girl’s presence, to know if it was simply her own bias curdling into a kind of paranoia. She’d tried her best over Thanksgiving, but there was something about her. It was subtle—a too-loud laugh; a calculating gleam in her eyes when she looked at her cousins—it wouldn’t let Reece go.
“I just . .
. you don’t think there’s something off about her?”
Cece frowned thoughtfully. “I don’t think so, but I mean, we’re not that close. We party together, we get along. We have a lot in common in some ways.”
“You and Laila have a lot in common?” Reece asked skeptically, finishing her rum and holding out her cup for Cece to refill it. In her mind Cece and Laila were about as opposite as two twenty-five-year-olds could be. Cece’s parents had immigrated to New York from the Dominican Republic the year before Cece was born, and her father had died when she was twelve. Her mom was a nurse, and they’d struggled to make ends meet. Her mother, whom Reece knew well at this point, was outrageously proud of her only daughter for graduating from Parsons with honors and for her fancy job. Whereas Laila’s primary achievement seemed to be the way she’d enmeshed herself into her cousins’ lives.
Cece shrugged. “We both lost our dads young, and she knows what it feels like to be an outsider here. That’s huge; that’s hard.”
“You’re not an outsider!” Reece said. “You grew up in New York.”
Cece smiled. “There are many New Yorks; you know this.”
“Well, sure, but I just don’t think of you as an outsider. Period.”
Their relationship was like this—mostly Reece played big sister, but every once in a while, it flipped. “I know you don’t, Mama. But just because you’re not the problem doesn’t mean that there isn’t a problem.”
And of course, when she bothered to think about it, she saw it, the bifurcated Cece—the real and complex woman she knew and the one whose voice and manner subtly adjusted when she was around the girls from work—sliding unnoticed into their overwhelmingly white, upper-middle-class world. She’d started going by Cece because, as she’d once confessed, she could not stand the sound of her name being mispronounced See-lia instead of Sey-lia as it was meant to be. It made her feel like a fraud every time, she told Reece.
“Maybe she gets nervous around you. It’s intimidating, Manhattan, even just coming from the outer boroughs.”
“Do you think I’m intimidating?” Reece said.
“You don’t intimidate me, girl, please. But you know, you wanted to like me. I don’t get the sense you want to like Laila.”
Reece knew Cece was right. And now she was faced with the fact that she might feel a ripple of distaste for Laila for the worst possible reason: class.
15
* * *
LIBERTY KNEW that she and Cameron could not go on forever pretending they were only friends. Over Thanksgiving, he’d asked if there was someplace they could talk privately, and she’d told him of her favorite spot in the house. The sunroom where her reading nook was, where she had spent so many hours of her childhood weekends kept safe from the world with her Jane Austen and Sandra Cisneros and Margaret Atwood: her literary godmothers. But when she’d arrived there at the appointed moment, Cameron was there but not alone: Laila had been sitting there too, drinking wine. She could not have known they were planning to meet there. But how had she found her way to this most sacred spot of Liberty’s? So the conversation they were meant to have remained unspoken, and Liberty feared he might now decide against saying whatever it was he’d meant to tell her. It was by such small accidents that life unfolded, in the end.
The first Monday of December, she was his date to a charity cocktail party that someone from work was hosting, and she hoped that he would tell her then; that the moment hadn’t passed. It didn’t feel out of the question; there seemed to be a struggle going on just beneath the surface of him. He was still trying to decide about her, she thought. So much so that she wondered if there was someone else. She’d resigned herself to being his friend, if that was all he meant to offer her.
But the night had felt different right away. After the charity event, they went to Lavagna, a tiny, romantic Italian restaurant in the East Village where the owner kept a gleaming red Ducati parked on the sidewalk outside.
“I’d like to get one of those.”
“Don’t,” Liberty said, “I really prefer you alive.”
“I’m so glad to hear that,” and with this he’d taken her hand, curling his fingers around hers on the tabletop. The owner came over to say hello, and Cameron greeted him warmly, introducing Liberty as the most beautiful and brilliant woman in New York. It was cheesy, but who cared?
The only discordant moment had happened when the waiter had forgotten to put Cameron’s dressing on the side and he’d snapped at him, rolling his eyes when the man apologetically scurried away to have the salad replaced. But the irritation seemed to pass as quickly as it had come, and he was back in good spirits—leaving, she presumed from the waiter’s smile as they left, his usual hefty tip.
That night at her door, which had become a place of swift hugs and the occasional deliberate cheek kiss, she sensed that he’d either say something now, or he never would.
“Thank you for dinner,” she said softly, her shoulders rounding as though her body was submitting before him.
“Of course,” he said with a smile. He had a palm on the door frame so that he was leaning slightly over her from his great height. “Of course,” he said again. He looked her straight in the eyes to say the things that, suddenly, did not need saying. Instead, he kissed her.
Liberty felt her body shift forward into his and then go slack as he engulfed her in his arms. He pressed her back up against the heavy door to the apartment. His kiss released in her a thousand things, and she felt them all at once, picked up by the wave of them and carried to its dizzying crest. It was joy because he wanted her, and lust and longing because she wanted him; it was decades of wanting him. She felt him hard against her thigh, and the wave went higher, and then suddenly a new variety of thoughts came skittering in. She felt a cold panic gripping her, pulling her down. A tide of unwelcome memories of other lips and other hands. He felt her tense. Pulled back an inch.
“What is it?”
His face was so close to hers, and she felt the warmth of his breath. She wanted to be in the moment but was instead spiraling away from it. She dug into the cloth of his shirt, trying to anchor herself there, but it was hopeless.
She said something a second later; she couldn’t remember what. Not that it mattered: What could she say to excuse the way she practically dove into her apartment and closed the door in his face? He’d called her name once and then she’d heard a deep sigh and his footsteps walking away. She felt the waves of panic coming up from her stomach, and she let herself slide down to the floor. Her desire for Cameron—the potent mix of both present and remembered feelings—had lowered her defenses, and now she was collapsing in on herself. Her mind looped: You stupid girl, you ruin everything, no one could love you, how could they love you, you broken, hopeless, silly thing. She knew what was happening, but the fat yellow pills in the drawer in her bathroom felt a hundred miles from where she sat, her knees curled to her chest. Her breathing got shallower, and her thoughts grew indistinct, simply circling like the whir and thump of an old washing machine. Catniss came in from the bedroom and nudged at Liberty’s tightly crossed arms until she let her cat crawl into her lap.
“Good kitty,” Liberty said, her tears falling into the soft fur. She sat there for she didn’t know how long, until the panic had exhausted itself. Then she took a whole pill—not the half that she was instructed—and fell into a deep and cloudy sleep.
What could he have done differently? Goddamn it! What did this woman want from him? It couldn’t be too soon; he’d waited months to even so much as kiss her. And then she’d slammed the door in his face. Such a thing had never happened to him. He was confused, and his ego—felled and wounded—clung heavily to him like a soldier he was dragging from battle. And why, really, should he even bother with all this? Men like him had the advantage. Liberty was over thirty; certainly plenty of men still wanted her now, but it wouldn’t be so for long. Whereas his advantages over the opposite sex would only increase from here. Why was he obsessing over t
his one girl in a city of millions just as beautiful (and younger, with more years of beauty before them), just as smart, just as accomplished? He could go and find one this very night if he wanted! He made his way past Butter—an overpriced, mediocre restaurant with a well-known nightclub below it—and decided he would prove it to himself. His ego perked, straightened itself, and still clung to Cameron’s back but at least began to carry some of its own weight.
Laila had been there with Cece for nearly two hours. They’d begun their night with two rounds of tequila shots at the bar.
“Fuck!” Laila said when she looked at the eighty-dollar bar tab. “Let’s not pay for any more of our own drinks tonight. Deal?”
“Deal.”
“Thank you for coming out with me tonight. I really needed it,” Laila said to Cece, whom she’d called only hours before and who helpfully knew all of the Monday-night doormen at Butter.
“Yeah, sorry to hear about Nora.”
Nora had suddenly, capriciously, insisted that she needed her guest room back. She said a prep-school friend of hers—a dear friend, the variety of which Laila didn’t think Nora actually had—would be coming to stay with her for a few weeks. The idea that such a person would have no other options, if she did in fact exist in the first place, was ludicrous. Nora segued into a speech that, you know, Laila couldn’t just live here rent-free forever, and oh, of course she knew that she didn’t intend to. But now, if she could be out in a week or so, that would be wonderful. Laila had failed to register the signs of her cousin’s increasing unhappiness with their arrangement. It would seem that she wanted Laila there only if she could have her all to herself.
“What about Liberty?” Cece asked now. Though she was being sympathetic, Laila knew it would not extend too far. In many ways, it was Cece Laila admired most—she’d earned her place in life, unlike Laila’s cousins. And Cece held herself with a steady grace that said she deserved to be there. It was natural that she and Nora repelled each other—Nora didn’t believe status could be earned; she believed it ran in one’s blood. She wasn’t shy about sharing her disdain, referring to Cece as Laila’s “little Mexican friend” on more than one occasion.
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