she doesn’t clean all of it, just the rooms I’m using, for now. I’m just letting the whole third floor go, and the outbuildings—no one’s lived in them for years. Half the bedrooms are shut up, too. Honestly, why bother dusting my great-great-grandfather’s hunting trophies? Creepy old relics that no one wants, and I’m supposed to care for them forever just because a relative I never met once shot a bear.” Am I talking too much? I think I’m talking too much, but they are gaping at me as if intrigued, so I just keep going. Stonehaven is freezing and yet I’m so hot that I can feel the sweat trickling under my arms and dripping down the sides of my T-shirt. “That kind of stuff just has to go. Maybe I’ll just give it all away to charity!! Use it to feed hungry children!”
And then we are in the kitchen, where I have pulled out one of my mother’s favorite afternoon tea services and placed it on the table by the window. It makes for a pretty tableau (in fact, I have already popped a photo of it up on Instagram: Tea for three #tradition #soelegant), and yet I wonder if it was overkill: the flowers, the fancy china, food enough for a small army. But we sit without ceremony, and then Ashley is laughing with pleasure as she bites into a scone, and Michael is turning my mother’s teacup in his hand, studying the mark on the bottom with interest. They are handsy with each other and chatty and familiar with me, and I don’t even have to think about how to keep the conversation rolling because they are doing all the work themselves.
I can feel Stonehaven filling up with life, like the wine in my cup (which Michael has slowly, carefully filled to the brim); and as I sip at it and laugh at their jokes I feel the desperation ebbing away from me.
I am not alone I am not alone I am not alone anymore, I think, the words thrumming along with the pulse of my racing heart.
But then, with a clatter of luggage and a blast of cold air, they are off to get settled in at the caretaker’s cottage and suddenly I am alone again. I have failed to make a plan with them. I should have invited them to dinner with me! I should have invited them to go hiking! A Tahoe tour, a movie night— Why did I just let them disappear off into the night, leaving me here by myself? Why didn’t they invite me? (So much for my light shining from within.)
When they are gone, I spend three hours looking at photos of puppies on Instagram and weep.
12.
THERE ARE WINNERS AND losers in life, and not a lot of space for anything else in between. I grew up secure in the knowledge that I had been born on the right side of that equation. I was a Liebling. That meant that I had been conferred with certain advantages, and while there would always be those who would want to take that away from me, I started from a high enough perch that it felt there wasn’t any danger of tumbling all the way down.
Right from the very beginning, right from my very inception, I was lucky, because I never should have existed. Maman had been informed by her doctor, mid-pregnancy, that she suffered from severe preeclampsia, putting both her and me at high risk of mortality. He advised my parents not to bring me to term—tossed around phrases like hemodynamic instability and ethical termination. He suggested abortion.
My mother refused. She forged ahead, through all forty weeks, and delivered me anyway. She bled so much during delivery that they thought she was a goner. When she finally came out of her coma in the ICU, the doctor told her it was the stupidest decision he’d ever seen a woman make.
“I would do it again, in a heartbeat,” she used to tell me, as she swept me up in a perfumed hug. “I would do it again, because you were worth dying for.”
Maman loved me that much.
My brother, Benny, was born via a surrogate three years later. So I was the