She Regrets Nothing Read online

  It had occurred to all three siblings that whatever share of bad luck the universe had meant for the Lawrence family had landed squarely on Laila. Not only had she now lost both of her parents, there was nothing in the way of inheritance. There was no money left, period, Laila had at last confessed to Liberty; Betsy had not even taken out a life insurance policy. Liberty had relayed this to her siblings—thinking they ought to know, lest they drag Laila somewhere expensive and leave her with her half of the check—and it made Nora swoon. The drama of it: Orphaned! Impoverished! It all seemed inexplicably, poignantly cruel.

  “She’s had a hard few years,” Liberty agreed.

  “And can you imagine being divorced? I don’t know anyone our age who is even married.”

  “I think she was still grieving when they got married,” said Liberty, absentmindedly fluffing a pillow. “People are vulnerable when they’ve just been through a trauma.” Nora knew that Liberty thought the less of Nathan for asking Laila to marry him when he had. She imagined that he’d sensed an opening in the death of Laila’s mother, a chance to lock in the local dream girl who might otherwise say no. No one was surprised that it hadn’t worked out.

  “Should we have gone to meet her at the airport instead of sending a car? I don’t want her to get lost.” Nora was back on her feet now, pacing.

  “Relax,” Liberty said, wrapping her arm around her sister, enveloping her like a mother bird. “She’ll be fine. She’s been to New York before. And she can call us if she gets lost. But I think that she’ll find her way.”

  4

  * * *

  LAILA SETTLED into her seat in the second row of the plane, the wide leather chair dwarfing her petite frame. She pushed her sunglasses—Yves Saint Laurent, classic tortoiseshell, purchased on her last visit to New York—up onto her head, only to reconsider and pull them back over her eyes. She didn’t want to invite conversation from her seatmate, nor did she want to betray her nervousness. She’d flown infrequently, and the takeoff always made her panic. Laila had been in first class once before: en route to her honeymoon in Hawaii. Her now ex-husband—ex-husband!—wanted to make up for the hurried nature of their wedding and had sprung for first-class tickets and a week at the Grand Wailea on Maui. She’d drunk three mai tais, one after the other, as the gravity of her mistake in marrying Nathan had sunk in over the many hours of connecting flights from Detroit to the island. The effects of her mother’s death, and the insult of discovering that she was left with exactly nothing financially, had not even begun to evaporate. For many reasons, the loss of her mother did not feel exactly tragic, but it had been a shock. Laila, who’d forever been locked in Betsy’s orbit, felt like an astronaut who’d come untethered from her vessel, careening into space looking for anything to ground her. And all of her mother’s warnings had faded from her memory until this very moment: Do not marry the wrong man, Laila; do not get pregnant by the wrong man. These will be the only decisions in your life that will matter in the end.

  Laila felt a familiar twinge of bitterness thinking of her late father, for his decisions had led to all of it, beginning with his choice to attend the University of Michigan, to distance himself from Frederick, Laila’s grandfather. Gregory had loved the Midwest—he’d made his home there after only a brief postcollege stint back in New York—and this was how Laila had ended up in the wrong life. Whatever traits Gregory might’ve inherited from his father, business acumen wasn’t among them. He’d set out to prove he could be a success without his father’s help and had ended up demonstrating just the opposite. This all became painfully clear as various debts and disasters had revealed themselves following his untimely death.

  And what of the secrets her mother’s death had brought to light? The bundle of letters Laila had found were actually a collection of little notes, cards that had accompanied gifts or flowers, dashed off missives on stationery from the Carlyle Hotel. These mementos that Betsy had kept for all of these years—softened from being taken out and read time and again—were, at first, incomprehensible to Laila. Thanks for a lovely evening, Beautiful B! xo Frederick; Make yourself comfortable and meet me in our booth at 7pm. Several of the notes included dates, and all were from the late eighties, during the two years Betsy and Gregory had lived in New York. The only conclusion Laila could come to was that her mother and grandfather had had an affair—a possibility that shocked and thrilled her—but the letters offered no context, no details. In an instant, her memory of her mother shifted. She’d been not a mere bystander in this family feud but its very impetus.

  But why had her mother remained quiet about it all of these years? Why never mention her cousins? Laila might have not met any of them if Liberty hadn’t shown up in Grosse Pointe that day. Betsy had always seemed to harbor bitterness for these mysterious rich relations, who had not only cut her husband off but refused to come to her aid in the wake of his death. Now, knowing she’d had this trump card all along, it made even less sense to Laila.

  Laila’s last two years—the death of her mother, the disastrous marriage, the insipid job in Nathan’s dental office that left her with an unmistakable chemical scent in her hair, the ten pounds gained under the influence of coworkers who grew fat beneath formless scrubs and brought an endless parade of doughnuts, cookies, and dessert bars to the office—it was all meant to break her down so that she might begin again. Her cousins’ visit, the discovery of the letters, hadn’t changed her life’s direction right away. At first, the cousins returned to New York, and Laila’s life went on as it would otherwise have. But not indefinitely. Laila was like a ship that had been steered just a few degrees off course; it would take some time for anyone to notice, but in the end, she would land very far from her original destination. The ugly truth that had her parents not died young, she wouldn’t be on her way to New York, was one she could live with. And she would never have discovered that cache of letters. It horrified her still, the memory of going through her mother’s abandoned earthly belongings. A sudden death, though preferable in many ways to a drawn-out one, leaves no chance to hide anything.

  “Would you like a glass of champagne, miss?” Laila looked up. Even the flight attendants were prettier in first class. A harbinger that she would be surrounded by beauty from now on, she thought.

  “Oh, I shouldn’t,” Laila said in a tone indicating that yes, in fact, she would. The attendant smiled at her and inched the bottle suggestively forward. “Oh, well, just one,” Laila said. Free-flowing champagne. The life of her cousins, she imagined. Hers now too.

  Laila had been to New York twice in the two years since she’d met her cousins. Nathan had been worried about her going alone—he’d been right to worry, just not for the reasons he imagined—but Laila had convinced him she should, she wanted to bond with her family. They were all she had left, she would remind him, and that would do the trick. And though this wasn’t strictly true—there were the dreadful aunties, their multitudinous and criminally dull offspring—Laila indeed felt she’d been robbed of knowing this other side of her family. How might have her childhood world been expanded by having had them in her life? She’d longed for an older sister growing up, and Liberty seemed every bit the living version of those dreams. The world of the Lawrences dazzled her: Liberty with her sophisticated job and cool apartment, and the twins! They lived in a penthouse (actually, two connected penthouses) and were able to breeze into any nightclub in town, it seemed. Since meeting them, Laila had developed a voracious habit of consuming Manhattan gossip blogs as well as Vogue, Vanity Fair, and the New York Post’s infamous Page Six. When she visited her cousins, it seemed to her she had landed on the very pages she’d made a study of.

  A year earlier, Laila had begun emerging from the fog that had followed her mother’s death and her hasty marriage, and she’d felt her life tugging at the seams, needing to come apart. By then, she was talking to, or at least texting with, Liberty and Nora nearly every day.

  “I’m asking Nathan for a divorce,” she’d to
ld Nora one afternoon, sequestered in the guest bedroom in the attic, the only place in the house Laila felt she could go to be remotely alone.

  “Good!” came the reply. “Yay! Now you can move to New York! Oh my God, we’ll have so much fun! You can live in the penthouse with us.” Nora had needed no explanation other than Laila’s wish to no longer be married, so she spared her the trumped-up story of Nathan’s affair with one of the other hygienists that she’d recounted to Liberty. This tale, she knew, would likely preclude further questions.

  Ultimately, the divorce wasn’t big news to anyone, as Laila had been considering it in one way or another since the day she’d married Nathan. Despite the blurry haze that spread over her in the weeks following her mother’s funeral, she remembered feeling a persistent wrongness on the day of the marriage: a throbbing no, no, no that she ignored as she put on her white shift dress from J.Crew. A coworker she wasn’t even terribly close to—but who Nathan inexplicably thought was one of her best friends—pinned baby’s breath in her hair. (For good measure, she later positioned this same coworker as the harlot in her fabricated cheating drama.) She ignored the no as she came downstairs to the small crowd of twenty friends gathered in Nathan’s—now their—backyard. Not a face among them that Laila cared for. She ignored it, for what else was there to do but marry Nathan? She knew everyone else in Grosse Pointe and there was no one better. She had no money, no savings, and where else would she find someone? Detroit? No. The best you could hope for was to try to land one of the professional athletes: to be one of those desperate girls on the hunt for Lions, Tigers, and Red Wings—tits spilling out of the neckline of a tight jersey, blond extensions piled on. Go team! No.

  At first, her cousins had been like an apparition; something she couldn’t wrap her fingers around, with the momentum of the marriage already carrying her along. But then New York had emerged on the horizon, solid and real and beckoning. And now she was on her way.

  5

  * * *

  WHEN LAILA arrived at last at the doorway of the twins’ Tribeca building, her cheeks were flushed from the mid-September heat: she’d worn a sweet, lilac-colored jersey dress that at least would not have become too rumpled by the journey. The doorman knew her on sight, a fact that thrilled her.

  “Welcome, Ms. Lawrence!” he said, a brilliant smile beaming from beneath his dark mustache. He swooped in and relieved Laila of her suitcase and the small shabby duffle bag that had served as her carry-on. He looked cool and crisp in his uniform despite the humidity of the day.

  “It’s so good to see you!” Nora said, throwing her arms around her cousin as she came through their door. She seemed beside herself with excitement. Liberty thanked the doorman, Louis, as they swept her inside. Laila hugged Liberty.

  “Oh no,” Laila said, realizing that Louis had left. “Should I have tipped him?”

  Nora let out a delighted little laugh. “Silly goose! But then, why would you know the first thing about doormen? You’re too adorable! Are the rest of your things being shipped?” Nora asked, gazing upon Laila’s suitcase and duffle.

  “I’m . . . traveling light. This is all I brought.”

  When Laila had packed for her move to New York, she’d been ruthless. Living with her mother, then, briefly, roommates, then Nathan (with whom she had lived right up until the move), she’d never had much of anything in the way of furniture or household items. And her clothes! As she went through them they seemed all wrong. She’d long had a fondness for tight-fitting dresses and tops from Bebe and Forever 21. But after all her months of poring over Vogue and dreaming of her New York life, she’d wanted to burn these clothes. She’d come to feel that some parallel version of herself was already living in Manhattan, wearing chic dresses with a polished haircut and perhaps taking a town car back and forth to some glossy media job, the vague variety of which characters in movies always seemed to have. Now Laila had only to catch up to her phantom self. And clothes from the Twelve Oaks Mall were not going to help. She’d brought only the basics. She’d also brought virtually no mementos—save the letters and the pendant—for what about her former life was worth remembering?

  “What a good idea! A fresh start,” Nora chirped. “We’ll go to Bergdorf’s tomorrow and start building your wardrobe from scratch. Oh, this will be so much fun!”

  The next day they sat drinking champagne in a decadent and quiet section of Bergdorf’s that was unlike anything Laila had ever seen before. Everything about the interior of the store whispered luxury: from the calming neutral tones and the soft lighting to the plush seating stationed everywhere for women shopping in towering heels to sit and rest while an attendant brought them all the things they never knew they needed.

  “I can’t wait to see Aunt Petra and Uncle Ben,” Laila said. They were meeting them in the café in an hour. She’d met Petra during her previous visits, and while Ben had always promised to come, he’d been pulled away by mysterious and pressing work matters each time. Though Laila was assured that this happened regularly, she wondered if he wasn’t so keen to reconnect with her. She suspected that he knew about what had happened between Betsy and Frederick: that he had chosen sides and that had led to the rift. It seemed likely that Petra also knew, but perhaps the uncomfortable history Laila represented was a bit less personal; she could only speculate. “When will I get to meet grandfather?”

  Nora giggled. “Opa?”

  She inexplicably seemed to think everything that came out of Laila’s mouth was adorable. Laila knew she must seem gauche against the backdrop of Nora’s New York where everyone she knew was coated with a lifetime’s worth of polish. She felt Nora regarding her as a Pygmalion-like project, which she did not object to. It was better to be what people needed you to be, especially when it cost you nothing. And in truth, she wanted to be made new.

  “He’s coming back from Europe next week. I know he is excited to see you.” Laila suspected that last part was a fib, but then, it seemed clear that the siblings did not know the history, that Laila’s shameful parents had successfully removed themselves from the equation.

  “What is he like? Opa, I mean,” Laila asked. The word felt strange on her tongue, stranger still because this person—her own grandfather—was unknown to her. A hazy image of him was materializing in her mind—not of the old man pictured in the framed photos in the twins’ penthouses, photos conspicuously placed so that the patriarch was certain not to miss them on his occasional visits—but of a younger, more dashing Frederick. The man who had, evidently, seduced her mother with stolen nights at the Carlyle Hotel.

  Nora scrunched her face as though she’d tasted something sour. “He’s very serious. Harsh with Daddy. The only one he approves of is Liberty. He adores her. He thinks Leo should fall in line to run the business one day.”

  “He doesn’t like that Leo’s a writer?”

  “He doesn’t find it masculine. I mean I guess if Leo was Hemingway, writing about hunting and bullfights, but he thinks Leo’s column is silly. I don’t; I think Leo is the most brilliant person in the world.” Nora seemed dazzled by her brother and, truthfully, a little in love with him.

  “It’s easier for me and Liberty. We’re women; he doesn’t expect as much. He’s old school: for women, being beautiful is enough. Of course, I’m a disappointment on that front,” Nora said flatly.

  “Nora,” Laila scolded. “Stop it! You’re gorgeous.” If such traits were awarded based on effort, Laila thought, she would be.

  “And of course Liberty is so beautiful and smart,” Nora continued, ignoring Laila’s objection. “I know he wishes she’d get married; he’s obsessed with the idea of meeting his great-grandchildren.”

  “What about you?”

  “Well, I’m young still, but yes, I suppose that’s one way I could win him over. Though if I did it out of wedlock, he’d disown me!”

  So the old man was a hypocrite too. For Laila, her grandfather was key to putting her life back on the course it was always meant for: he
was the originator of the fortune she was meant to benefit from, which she’d been kept from. And he, for many reasons, owed her.

  “What’s he doing in Europe?” Laila asked.

  “Oh, no one knows,” Nora said, distracted, her eyes locking on the handsome shoe salesman who was making his way toward them carrying a tower of boxes as colorful and decadent as layers of a cake. “He left suddenly, but that’s not unlike him. He travels all the time.”

  Laila and Nora had already done an impressive amount of shopping that morning. Nora had gleefully pooh-poohed most of what Laila had deemed acceptable from her Michigan wardrobe. “It’s not that these clothes are bad or anything, but you’re in New York now! You’re one of us.” Laila luxuriated in being treated like her cousin’s living doll. Why not be kept? Why not be cared for?

  “We’re about the same size!” Nora exclaimed. “So you can share my clothes too!”

  At Bergdorf’s, they were like children playing dress up, the indulgent shop assistant looking on as though she were a nanny. The thousand-dollar-plus price tags flashed before Laila’s eyes as she tried on brands she’d coveted in Vogue and observed hanging in Nora’s closet: Céline, Hervé Léger, Derek Lam, Narciso Rodriguez. Nora made all the decisions and several times vetoed dresses Laila loved, leaving her to wonder what her error in liking them had been. When Nora enumerated to the shop assistant which items they would take, Laila felt a creeping panic. Would she be presented with a bill? Asked for a credit card? She had no concept of how much it had all added up to, only that it had been a lot.

  Fortunately, no bill appeared and the clothes were sent directly to Nora’s apartment. Laila was relieved on both accounts, as she did not want to see her aunt and uncle while lugging bags with thousands of dollars’ worth of clothes she did not pay for. She didn’t want to look like a freeloader. Besides, she was a part of this family, not a barnacle clinging to it.