laughs, but I can tell that she’s self-conscious, her lashes fluttering, her hand clutching at the gap in her robe.
“It could kill you faster.”
“Don’t judge me, darling. I’ve been lonely. It’s been so quiet here without you, I needed something to do with myself. It makes the time pass quicker.” She pulls me into a hug, presses her cool face against mine; I can smell her primrose lotion, the medicinal gin on her breath. “I’m so glad you’re back.”
She stands back and studies my face. “You’ve been spending time outside, I can tell. You forgot to put on sunscreen.” But she doesn’t ask exactly where I’ve been; I can feel that careful calculation on her part. Her eyes slide over my shoulder and into the darkness of the room. “Is Lachlan with you?”
“Here’s not here.”
“But he came back to L.A. with you?”
“No.”
“Oh.” She wobbles now toward the living room, her hand clutching at the furniture as she passes. I can’t tell if she’s weak or if she’s a little drunk. Perhaps both, I think, as she flicks on a lamp and collapses onto her couch. The cushion puffs out a small sigh, the springs creak in protest. I sit beside her and tip sideways, let myself slide toward her lap until my head is resting there, like a child. Only now do I realize how exhausted I am. I feel like myself for the first time in weeks. Her hands settle in my hair and smooth the frizzed strands.
“My baby. What brought you home?”
“I missed you,” I whisper.
“Me, too.” I wish I could hug her tight but I’m afraid of breaking her; she feels like a blown egg underneath me, fragile and empty. I pick up her hand and press it against my cheek. “Darling,” she says slowly. “Are you sure it’s safe for you to come back? I love to see you but maybe you shouldn’t be here. The police.”
In my haste to get to her, I had almost forgotten about this; but it seems immaterial at the moment, a vague danger pulsing somewhere at the back of my mind.
“Mom. I have to tell you where I’ve been,” I say. “I’ve been up at Lake Tahoe.”
And I feel it, immediately, how she changes beneath me, how she stiffens, how her breathing suddenly catches and shifts. When I sit up and look at her face I can see her eyes, flickering back and forth, looking for a safe place to settle. She is trying as hard as she can not to look at me.
“Mom.” I keep my voice gentle even though the urgency inside me is fizzing and popping as it struggles for escape. “I’ve been staying at the Lieblings’ house. At Stonehaven.”
My mother blinks. “Who?”
She used to be such a good liar, my mother; she might still be convincing to a stranger, but I know better. “Don’t bother pretending you don’t know who I’m talking about,” I say. “And I have some questions.”
She reaches toward the coffee table as if she might find a glass there, but her hands grab blindly at nothing. Finally she pulls them back into her lap and wraps them in the cord of her robe. She does not look at me.
“Mom,” I say. “You have to tell me what happened, back when we lived there. Between you and William Liebling.”
Her eyes come to rest on the blank screen of the television, just beyond my shoulder. The room is silent except for the ragged whistle of her breath in her throat.
“Mom? You can tell me. It was all a long time ago. I’m not going to be angry.” Except that I am angry, I realize. I am angry because there is a secret that was kept from me, one that set the frame through which I have viewed the world for the last decade. I’m angry because I thought we were close—the two of us a united front against the world—and I’m suddenly realizing that we’re not. How much of my life has been a fiction that she wrote for me?