when I would be alone in one of those enormous houses, alone with all of those beautiful things, and I could pretend that it all belonged to me. I’d come face-to-face with an Egon Schiele drawing hanging on a wall in a bathroom, or would run my hands along a seventeenth-century card table, hand-inlaid with mother-of-pearl marquetry, or sit on the very same Frank Lloyd Wright armchair that I’d studied in an architectural design course. Objects that transcended all of this, objects that had endured centuries of indifferent owners, objects whose enduring mystery and beauty lived in opposition to the ephemeral nature of our digital age. These things would still exist when I did not, and I counted myself fortunate to be able to have time with them at all.
Nearly a decade had passed since my mother had told me it was time to focus on my Future, and yes, I’d managed to get an education—an education into the way the one percent lived, a way I would never be able to live myself. It was like sitting in the front row of a Broadway show and longing to join all the action on the stage in front of me, but realizing that there was no stairway to get me up there, too.
So when the strange voice on the other end of the line informed me that my mother needed me in Los Angeles, I quit my job on the spot. Within the day, I’d packed up all my cheap black dresses, given the key back to my roommates, and was on a plane to California. I told myself at the time that I was leaving New York purely out of responsibility for my mother—I was all she had, of course I would go take care of her—but wasn’t I also fleeing my own failure?
And when I got off the airplane there was a man standing there waiting for me, suit jacket slung over one shoulder, ice-blue eyes roving across the faces of the people coming in until they snagged on mine and stayed there. A faint smile on his face, so impossibly handsome: I felt a little lift of hope at the sight of him, matching the accelerated thrum of my pulse. “You look just like your mother,” he’d said, as he gently pried the suitcase from my hand.
“We’re nothing alike,” I’d retorted, still clinging to the last residue of that Great Future I’d once been so sure I had.
* * *
—
And yet, as I stand here in the cottage at Stonehaven three years later, I know that my mother and I are more alike than I ever imagined.
18.
AND SO IT BEGINS.
The next morning, at an hour when the light is still pallid and anemic, I drag a mat out to the great lawn and conspicuously run through a yoga routine. The lake is a confrontational gray, and the frigid November air penetrates my workout clothes; I’m shivering even as I sweat. I’ve done plenty of yoga over the years, but never quite like this, like I have something to prove. My body balks at the unnatural exertions, the unnatural hour. And yet there is also something about being out there under the pines that feels clean and elemental. The crisp air that smells of green: It brings me back to my childhood, and the way that Tahoe felt like an oasis to me.
Sun Salutation and Half Moon, Wild Thing and Side Crane. Toes clawed into my thigh, hands lifted to the sky: I imagine eyes watching me from both the cottage and the main house, and feel powerful under their gaze. An earth goddess; or at the very least, a good enough fake.
When I’m done, I roll up the mat and do a few showy bonus stretches and then turn around to face Stonehaven. Vanessa is standing at the French doors that lead from the kitchen to the garden, watching me through fogged windowpanes. She steps quickly back, as if embarrassed to have been caught spying on me, but I wave at her before she can vanish, and walk toward the house. When I’m a few feet away, she pushes the door open and stands there with an awkward smile on her face. She’s wearing pink silk pajamas topped with