She Regrets Nothing Read online

  As the day following her mother’s death had dawned, Laila had snuck from Nathan’s bed in silence. She always woke before him, and this morning she’d risen at 5:00 a.m. She didn’t know what exactly she was looking for: only that her mother had been lording some secret over her for years. It was her method of keeping Laila close. “Oh, if you’d only known the life I could have had. But I chose you, my little sweetheart,” she’d say, venomous and sly. Or: “Someday, I’ll tell you everything. Someday you’ll understand what your poor mother has been through.” Laila knew her mother could have easily been bluffing; it was a bit of theater that the two of them went through. Laila continued to see her mother—making sure she took her diabetes meds and keeping her from turning completely feral in her disgusting condo—not because she genuinely thought her mother might have something to offer her one day, but out of a filial duty that she didn’t so much feel as know was expected of her. As much as Nathan wanted no part of this duty, he would have judged her harshly if she’d rejected it herself. And Laila had done well thus far positioning herself as the caretaker Nathan expected her to be: the one who cooked their dinners, folded his laundry, and remembered not only her own mother’s birthday but his mother’s as well. But Laila had woken with a start that morning; if there was something to find, it was she who must find it. And now would be her best chance.

  And she had found something. Secreted away in an old jewelry box on the top shelf of the bedroom closet was a fragile and crumbling cache of letters from Frederick Lawrence, Laila’s grandfather. She’d not yet read through them—she’d wanted to return to the house before Nathan could realize she’d left and then hadn’t, it seemed, had a moment to herself since then. But the very fact of their existence was revelatory. And the fact that the church ladies had managed to unearth the pendant, the one possession of her mother’s that she’d admired, felt like a small miracle.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Laila could see her pious Aunt Jen rooting around her dead sister’s things, sorting, judging. These women were no longer all she had left, Laila realized. She had family: an exciting and beautiful family. She’d not been prepared for them to swan into the little Michigan suburb in all of their glory: the dark mane of Liberty’s hair; Leo’s extraordinary green eyes; the flash of red on Nora’s expensive shoes; the shock of them standing next to Nathan. How different he seemed to her throughout the course of that long day of the funeral. That morning, she’d woken next to a savior—a man who’d taken her into his own family when hers had disintegrated. Here was a man who would allow her to quit her dreadful job upon having children. And yet, she’d fallen asleep that night next to an anchor. Someone who would pin her to a place she’d never truly belonged. She’d felt it with a rush upon seeing her cousins. She’d never had a sibling, never had the experience of looking into someone’s face and seeing a shadow of her own. It could not be a coincidence that they’d shown up now, she decided. That they’d come for her. And she felt it even more deeply that morning at the condo, with its cigarette funk that hung in the air, the stained beige carpet, the fussy, fat church ladies bustling around industriously; New York was coming slowly into view, an unanticipated escape hatch. As she headed for the door, she felt a wild fantasy well up: a desire to break every dish and piece of glassware in the place, to set fire to the curtains and leave them blazing in her wake.

  She would never set foot in here again. Her mother was dead. At last.

  2

  * * *

  LIBERTY LAWRENCE had a distinct memory of the moment she became aware of what her family was, of the distance between them and others in the world. Like any very young child, she started off thinking that the reality of her daily life was all that existed, the sum total of the universe. She saw the occasional homeless person while walking through the vast reaches of Central Park just beyond their doorstep, but she couldn’t be sure that they were real. When she would pass one, with hand outstretched, entreating her mother or her nanny, Esperanza, for money or food, the grown-up clutching her hand would ignore them so entirely that Liberty became convinced that she was the only one who could see them. This worried her a great deal, for if only she could see them, wasn’t she the only one who could come to their aid? They obviously needed help. Then one night, Esperanza came to check on her and finally coaxed out of her what was wrong when she was discovered thrashing around in her bedclothes, whimpering.

  “Oh, don’t worry, pretty girl,” she said. Her nanny, a strict but exceedingly gentle woman from Ecuador, was the primary voice of Liberty’s childhood. But did she see them too? young Liberty asked. She was well aware how fond adults were of telling children that things were “only in their imagination.” Esperanza confirmed that she also saw the homeless people, that they were as real as the two of them sitting in this room.

  “We have to help!” Liberty cried, getting out of bed that moment to search for her pink rain boots.

  “Such a sweet child,” Esperanza said, gathering her onto her lap. “But this is not a job for little girls.”

  But shouldn’t they do something? They had plenty of food, a very big house. Her nanny sighed and stroked her head. “You are a good girl, but this is not the way it works.”

  But why, Liberty wanted to know, why did they not have homes? Why were they out there with no food?

  “Oh, mi niña. Drugs. Crazy,” she said with a pronounced shrug, growing visibly uncomfortable at having to answer these questions. “Okay, mi amor, no more worrying. Off to bed.”

  Liberty was not satisfied but knew that this was the best answer she was likely to get. Esperanza was her main source of wisdom from the adult world; these were not questions Liberty could ask her parents.

  But it was not the destitute men and women—so numerous on the streets of her childhood, long before Giuliani came and swept them all away—who cemented Liberty’s awareness of her family’s place in the world. That defining moment occurred on a Saturday afternoon when she was with her grandfather, Frederick. She must have been five at the time; it was before the twins were born. Her grandmother Helen, whom Liberty had no real memory of, had passed two years earlier from ovarian cancer, leaving Frederick a widower. Her opa, as she called him, came to pick her up at the town house on East Seventy-Third Street, and as they exited the front door, Frederick waved the driver, Geoffrey, away, telling him they would walk. It was a sunny, crisp autumn day, and Liberty was happy to be outside. She normally spent Saturdays with her mother who never wanted to walk anywhere because of her shoes. Liberty asked her what the point of wearing shoes was if not to walk in them, and her mother had laughed as if the girl had said the funniest thing, telling her she’d understand one day, which Liberty doubted very much.

  “Where are we going, Opa?” Liberty had asked her grandfather that day.

  “To get the best sandwich you’ll ever have in your life!”

  Well, that was exciting; she liked sandwiches.

  “Like the ones Mummy and I have with tea?” The tiny cucumber ones were her favorite.

  “Oh, kiddo, no,” he said, laughing. Frederick was wiry and strong, dapper in his suits, always suits. He would never seem old to Liberty, even when he reached his nineties. His laugh could fill a room; his steely gaze could make grown men unravel. He’d been harsh as a father, unforgiving and exacting, but he was indulgent as a grandfather. “Like a hundred of those stacked on top of each other! I’m taking you to the Second Avenue Deli.”

  They took the 6 train down to the East Village, where the famous kosher deli was. Liberty would remember many things about that day: the sandwiches with their menacing names like Instant Heart Attack—which her opa explained would not literally give you a heart attack—the way they’d laughed and laughed as Liberty tried to get her tiny mouth around the massive pastrami he’d ordered her. But she would remember the subway ride most vividly of all.

  She recalled descending into the mouth of the subway, hearing the roaring trains and the cacophony of voices, clutching her o
pa’s hand fiercely, wide-eyed and delighted, knowing instinctively that this was an addition to the long list of adventures with Opa that would have horrified her parents, alongside a ride on the Coney Island Cyclone and a street fair in Harlem. But the subway! This was unprecedented. Everywhere she looked there were people darting from one place to another, there were buskers playing overturned buckets like drums, and more people of different races than she had seen during the rest of her short life.

  It was there, sitting on the bench of the train with her grandfather, that she realized—watching families scolding and joking with and cuddling children her age and younger in ways that seemed exciting and entirely alien to her—that there was another world out there that she was not a part of, an enormous universe of which her family occupied one very narrow slice in their town house on the quiet, tree-lined street. She thought of the immaculate mothers of her schoolmates, all thin, like facsimiles of each other. She thought of the horseback lessons, the drivers, the school uniforms—all ordinary parts of her life and those of her peers, but not of so many other children.

  For the rest of her girlhood, Liberty kept a keen eye on this other world, and once aware, she saw it everywhere. She knew that in addition to her aunt Birdie, her father had a brother, but he and his wife had disappeared, gone off to this other world perhaps. According to her mother, Liberty had met them a few times, but she couldn’t recall much about them. Once, she overheard her parents talking about the fact that her aunt was pregnant, just like her own mother was at the time, with the twins.

  “Why can’t we visit them?” Liberty had asked. So long an only child, she was desperate for company. Her father looked at Petra in a way he often did when exasperated by his daughter; the child was her domain, why was she not handling her?

  “It’s grown-up stuff, honey,” Ben said.

  “Surely Frederick will relent now that there is a little one on the way.”

  He’d given Petra a stern look. The estrangement was fresh then; only six months had gone by. No one, including Ben, imagined that it might become permanent.

  “Opa doesn’t like your brother?” Liberty wasn’t about to let the moment pass without getting at least some information.

  Her father, a tall, broad-shouldered man—not handsome but rather imposing, even dashing, like his father but larger, a natural consequence of being born and raised in the United States rather than wartime Germany—leaned down and cupped Liberty’s chin affectionately.

  “It’s complicated, kiddo.”

  “But why can’t we see them?”

  At this, her father had stiffened and looked down at his watch. “I don’t have time for this,” he said with a huff. And with that, he was out the door. There were a great many things her father didn’t have time for. Liberty’s interactions with him were always fleeting. He seemed never to have the patience for anything beyond a kiss on her forehead and perhaps a few minutes of quotidian chitchat about what she was learning in school. Encouragingly, he did seem to enjoy showing her off to colleagues when the opportunity arose, presenting her as though she were living proof of . . . something.

  In this moment, Liberty looked to her mother for further explanation. Petra turned in her chair to face her daughter, shifting heavily under the enormously pregnant belly that engulfed her tall but slender frame.

  “Your opa,” she began, appearing to choose her words extremely carefully even without her husband’s watchful gaze, “he worked very hard to give his family a good life. Sometimes I think I understand this part better than your father.”

  “Because of growing up in Russia?”

  Petra smiled. On the infrequent occasions when Liberty misbehaved or complained, her mother would admonish her with tales of growing up in Communist Russia. She’d come from a big family, and there was never enough to go around: not enough food or money or clothes, least of all patience from her parents. It had sealed in Petra a cold, hard ambition, which had led her here.

  “Yes, my darling, that is part of it. He wanted his sons to be just like him. He was disappointed when your uncle didn’t want the life he’d worked so hard for.”

  “Why didn’t he want it?”

  One of the chief tenets of Liberty’s childhood was that everyone wanted what they had, and that they must always be grateful for it. Not wanting to be a Lawrence was a new concept entirely.

  “I don’t know. But that’s enough questions for now. I need to rest.”

  That was the last Liberty heard of her other family until many years later, when she was seventeen and her uncle Gregory died. It was a time of closed doors and hushed phone calls, but no détente, no opening of hearts. As for Gregory’s wife, Laila’s mother, Liberty would never know her beyond those unremembered childhood meetings. Liberty had always been plagued by the sense that her immense privilege meant that she owed some substantial debt. But what exactly she owed, and to whom, was never clear.

  So when Laila called her one day, not quite two years after her mother was laid to rest, to tell her that the fragile life she’d pulled together in the wake of the tragedy had fallen apart, Liberty was moved. Her cousin, whose life had diverged from her own by a twist of fate, and who had endured so much, needed her. It was an opportunity to set right some misalignment in the universe. Liberty would do whatever she needed to help her.

  After all, Laila was a Lawrence. And wasn’t keeping family close what mattered most of all?

  3

  * * *

  DO YOU think that this room will do?” Nora asked Liberty. She hung the moon on her sister’s opinion, always had. She’d spent hours the day before wandering the glittering aisles of ABC Carpet & Home, and now the guest bedroom looked like something between a pricey hotel and a high-end French brothel, which rather encapsulated Nora’s style. A stark contrast with that of her twin brother, Leo, who lived in the adjoining penthouse; his decor was so sleek and modern, you were always in danger of sliding off one piece of furniture and impaling yourself on the next.

  “I think she’ll love it,” Liberty said encouragingly. Though who knew what Laila would love? None of them had spent very much time with her. The few times that she’d visited in the two years since they’d met her, she seemed so roundly dazzled by everything she laid eyes on that all they’d seen of her personality was blissful and overwhelmed. It had thrilled Nora, made her feel like New York was hers to share with her cousin, whom she imagined as having been, until that moment, deprived of all luxuries and excitement. Laila always wanted to know more, more, more about New York and what growing up there had been like. And now she was on her way to join them.

  Nora was intent on giving her cousin—who had sensibly ended her marriage with that dentist—the perfect welcome. She’d thought through every detail—buying brand-new guest towels and sheets (though those she already owned were barely used), even a candy-pink silk robe with Laila’s name embroidered on it, which she hung on the hook in the bathroom, a delightful little surprise for her. She filled the bathroom with scented candles and Kérastase hair products. The vases in the bedroom she filled with pink roses (her personal favorite) and white dahlias. It was always good for Nora to have a project, something to drive her energies into, lest they start to turn on her.

  Nora was a true New York hothouse flower who had not, at twenty-five, managed to blossom into any ambition beyond socializing and doing some disjointed charity work—this week for the Lymphoma Society, next week for rescue dogs—she was not organized enough to take one of the board positions that would lend the event-hopping an air of legitimacy.

  Laila had become of particular fascination to her, since the two were the same age and had lived what seemed to be completely opposite lives. Her cousin was an orphan and now a divorcée. The combination nearly blew Nora’s mind and made Laila seem like an exotic species. People in New York, at least the people Nora knew, did not marry in their early twenties, and if they did, they did not marry dentists. It was true that a girl she knew from Spence had elope
d with a pop star she’d known for two weeks (the marriage hadn’t lasted much longer), but that wasn’t the same thing at all. Though of course Laila’s marriage had been practically an elopement—and also brief, less than two years from start to finish.

  Nora found herself captivated by her cousin’s looks too; Laila was beautiful in a way that was unlike what Nora was used to comparing herself to in Manhattan: she had a big smile and thick red hair, and was as petite and curvy as a forties pinup girl. Nora felt the sickening pull that she always did around the beautiful: the vain hope that if she could only get close enough, she might absorb some of what they had for herself. She was the only sibling who did not take after her mother—and could never wrap her head around the idea that the beauty she felt was her due had been denied her. It seemed impossible that this thing she wanted couldn’t be bought, cultivated, or somehow procured for her. After a nose job, a boob job, and several rounds of liposuction, she had acquired a Barbie doll sort of sex appeal; men now responded to her in a Pavlovian way, yet she was doomed to always be not only the less pretty sister but the less pretty twin, outshone by her brother with his cherubic lips, his soft wavy hair, and his mother’s green eyes, bordered by impossibly thick lashes. Laila also had green eyes, from her own mother’s side. To Nora, this seemed fated, a sign that Laila was meant to be more of a sister than a cousin.

  “Will she want to go out tomorrow night, do you think? I don’t want to make plans unless she wants to come along.” Nora sat on the bed, exhausted from her domestic efforts.

  “I don’t know, honey,” Liberty said, sitting beside her. “Why don’t you just ask her when she gets here? She might want to relax. She’s starting at the agency on Monday.”

  “Right. Oh, I just want her to be happy here! She’s been through so much.” In Nora’s mind, Laila’s string of tragedies had a romantic sheen; they made her compelling and mysterious. And perhaps it was natural for someone so unused to struggle to fetishize it.