“Oh God, no. He’d murder me if I tried to rouse him that early.” A semi-truth.
She nods as if she can relate to this sentiment. “Do you want to…sit down? We could go in the library. It’s a little warmer in there.”
The library. I can still see Mrs. Liebling sitting on that velvet couch, design magazines stacked in slippery piles around her. “That would be lovely. Otherwise I’ll be creeping around the cottage trying not to wake Michael up.”
Vanessa tops up our coffees and I follow her into the library. It’s all as it was the last time I was in here—the bereft moose, the jacketless tomes, the green velvet couch, all looking a little worse for the wear. Vanessa throws herself down in a corner of the couch where the nap is particularly flattened and she tugs a blanket over her feet. I follow her lead but find myself stopping in front of a photograph in a silver frame that’s displayed prominently on the mantel over the fireplace. It’s a portrait of the Lieblings that I’ve never seen before, one that must have been taken a year before I met Benny because there’s Vanessa at the center in a maroon cap and gown, graduating from high school. Her parents flank her, her mother in a pristine yellow day dress with a silk scarf around her neck and her father in a bespoke suit with a matching yellow pocket square. I am taken aback by the broad, genuine smiles on their faces, the wholesome nature of their obvious parental pride; in my memory, they are both scowling, joyless fiends with pointed teeth.
Benny stands on the edge of this pretty troika, awkward in a button-down shirt and a polka-dot bow tie, the only one whose smile looks forced. He looks a little younger than he was when I met him, his cheeks full and downy, his ears too big for his face. He hasn’t yet had the final growth spurt that will propel him into the land of giants, and his father still towers over him. He is just a child, I realize with a start. We were just children. A piano chord chimes inside me, in a poignant minor key. Poor Benny. Despite myself, I wonder how he’s doing in that institution.
“Your family?” I ask.
A brief hitch of hesitation. “Yes. Mom, Dad, little brother.”
I know I should let it go, that I’m poking at an anthill with a short stick, but I can’t help myself. “Tell me about them,” I say. I throw myself on the couch across from her. “You guys look close.”
“We were.”
I can’t stop looking at the photograph even though I know I’m staring, and when I glance over at Vanessa, she is watching me. I can’t help it: I blush. I want to ask about Benny but I am afraid that something in my voice would give me away. “Were?”
“My mother died when I was nineteen. She drowned.” Her eyes flick over to the window, with its view of the lake, and then flick back to me. “My father died earlier this year.”
And then she bursts into tears.
I freeze.
I remember when I came across the news clipping during one of my Google searches, years ago: JUDITH LIEBLING, SAN FRANCISCO ARTS PATRON, DROWNS IN BOATING ACCIDENT. The article was light on details of her death, but heavy on lists of the philanthropies she’d been involved in: not just the San Francisco Opera, but also the de Young Museum, Save The Bay, and (somewhat poignantly) the Mental Health Association in California. I’d had a hard time reconciling the benevolent society do-gooder in the accompanying photos—standing alongside the mayor, red hair flying loose, smile wide—with the judgmental recluse I’d met at Stonehaven. She got her just deserts, I’d thought, before closing the page down. This was before I knew that Benny had been diagnosed with schizophrenia; I didn’t spend much time thinking about how the loss of her would have affected the family she left behind.
But as I listen to Vanessa sob, it occurs to me that the Liebling children have perhaps experienced more than their fair share of tragedy.