and discovered the squalor in which she’d been living; it was there when the first hospital bill arrived, a five-figure abomination; it was there when my mother vomited blood after her first chemo treatment, and I understood that her care was going to be a full-time job for the foreseeable future. It was there when I got rejected for jobs at two dozen local art galleries, museums, and furniture shops.
I hadn’t been around to take care of my mother over the last few years, and I was determined to make up for it; but I had no clear way to live up to this task. My mother had no safety net: I was supposed to be her safety net, and yet I had none of the things she needed most. No money, no job, no friends, no prospects. Only debt and determination.
On the day that I withdrew the last fifty dollars from my bank account in order to pay my mother’s gas bill, I found Lachlan’s number in my wallet. I fished it out with two fingers and looked at it for a long time—at the crisp boldness of his neatly inked digits, definitive against the stark white bonded paper—before dialing. I thought about the little shiver of desire I’d felt as he pressed his lips up against my ear. When he answered, and I told him who I was, he didn’t even hesitate, as if he already knew exactly why I was calling.
“I was wondering how long it would take for you to wise up.”
I steeled myself. “Here’s my rule: only people who have too much, and only people who deserve it.”
He chuckled. “Well, of course. We take only what we need.”
“Exactly.” I felt a little better already. “And once my mom is healthy again, I’m out.”
I could almost hear him smiling. “OK, then. How much do you know about Instagram?”
19.
THE NEXT MORNING I run through the same routine—yoga on the lawn—and wait for Vanessa to show up with her mat in tow. An hour of asanas later and my muscles are shaking with fatigue, but no Vanessa. I do my cobras facing the house so that I can watch the windows, but there is no movement behind the curtains. When I take a casual stroll around the property on my way back to the cottage, I see no signs of life at all. The big wooden garage doors are closed tight and the lights in the windows are out. A battered sedan has materialized in the driveway, but even though I linger nearby, I don’t catch sight of the person who drove it.
I go back to the caretaker’s cottage and pull up the library feed. After a while, an older woman drifts into frame, her hair scraped back into a ponytail, an old-fashioned feather duster in the pocket of her apron. Presumably the housekeeper. I wonder, with some concern, if she will find the hidden camera, but she ignores the shelves of books entirely. Instead she listlessly moves a few things around on the coffee table, plumps up the pillows on the couch, and drifts back out of frame.
Vanessa passes through the library twice after the housekeeper leaves, but she never stays in the room. She just wanders through, looking like she’s lost, looking like she can’t quite figure out where she’s headed. The phone firmly clutched in her hand, like a child’s well-worn stuffie.
Lachlan comes and looks over my shoulder. “What a useless human being,” he says. “Does she do nothing at all? Does she even have a mind?”
Something about his tone makes me sour; I find myself feeling oddly protective. “I wonder if she’s depressed.” I study the somnambulant cant of Vanessa’s walk. “Maybe I should go ring her doorbell again, try to cheer her up.”
Lachlan shakes his head. “Make her come to us. Don’t want to come off too eager, yeah? Puts us in the power position. Don’t worry, she’ll come ’round.”
* * *
—
But she doesn’t. Two more days pass in the same restless routine—yoga on the lawn, walks around the property, lunch at the general store a mile up the road. We spend most of our time in the cottage, pretending at our writing retreat.