4
LAILA SETTLED into her seat in the second row of the plane, the wide leather chair dwarfing her petite frame. She pushed her sunglasses—Yves Saint Laurent, classic tortoiseshell, purchased on her last visit to New York—up onto her head, only to reconsider and pull them back over her eyes. She didn’t want to invite conversation from her seatmate, nor did she want to betray her nervousness. She’d flown infrequently, and the takeoff always made her panic. Laila had been in first class once before: en route to her honeymoon in Hawaii. Her now ex-husband—ex-husband!—wanted to make up for the hurried nature of their wedding and had sprung for first-class tickets and a week at the Grand Wailea on Maui. She’d drunk three mai tais, one after the other, as the gravity of her mistake in marrying Nathan had sunk in over the many hours of connecting flights from Detroit to the island. The effects of her mother’s death, and the insult of discovering that she was left with exactly nothing financially, had not even begun to evaporate. For many reasons, the loss of her mother did not feel exactly tragic, but it had been a shock. Laila, who’d forever been locked in Betsy’s orbit, felt like an astronaut who’d come untethered from her vessel, careening into space looking for anything to ground her. And all of her mother’s warnings had faded from her memory until this very moment: Do not marry the wrong man, Laila; do not get pregnant by the wrong man. These will be the only decisions in your life that will matter in the end.
Laila felt a familiar twinge of bitterness thinking of her late father, for his decisions had led to all of it, beginning with his choice to attend the University of Michigan, to distance himself from Frederick, Laila’s grandfather. Gregory had loved the Midwest—he’d made his home there after only a brief postcollege stint back in New York—and this was how Laila had ended up in the wrong life. Whatever traits Gregory might’ve inherited from his father, business acumen wasn’t among them. He’d set out to prove he could be a success without his father’s help and had ended up demonstrating just the opposite. This all became painfully clear as various debts and disasters had revealed themselves following his untimely death.
And what of the secrets her mother’s death had brought to light? The bundle of letters Laila had found were actually a collection of little notes, cards that had accompanied gifts or flowers, dashed off missives on stationery from the Carlyle Hotel. These mementos that Betsy had kept for all of these years—softened from being taken out and read time and again—were, at first, incomprehensible to Laila. Thanks for a lovely evening, Beautiful B! xo Frederick; Make yourself comfortable and meet me in our booth at 7pm. Several of the notes included dates, and all were from the late eighties, during the two years Betsy and Gregory had lived in New York. The only conclusion Laila could come to was that her mother and grandfather had had an affair—a possibility that shocked and thrilled her—but the letters offered no context, no details. In an instant, her memory of her mother shifted. She’d been not a mere bystander in this family feud but its very impetus.
But why had her mother remained quiet about it all of these years? Why never mention her cousins? Laila might have not met any of them if Liberty hadn’t shown up in Grosse Pointe that day. Betsy had always seemed to harbor bitterness for these mysterious rich relations, who had not only cut her husband off but refused to come to her aid in the wake of his death. Now, knowing she’d had this trump card all along, it made even less sense to Laila.
Laila’s last two years—the death of her mother, the disastrous marriage, the insipid job in Nathan’s dental office that left her with an unmistakable chemical scent in her hair, the ten pounds gained under the influence of coworkers who grew fat beneath formless scrubs and brought an endless parade of doughnuts, cookies, and dessert bars to the office—it was all meant to break her down so that she might begin again. Her cousins’ visit, the discovery of the letters, hadn’t changed her life’s direction right away. At first, the cousins returned to New York, and Laila’s life went on as it would otherwise have. But not indefinitely. Laila was like a ship that had been steered just a few degrees off course; it would take some time for anyone to notice, but in the end, she would land very far from her original destination. The ugly truth that had her parents not died young, she wouldn’t be on her way to New York, was one she could live with. And she would never have discovered that cache of letters. It horrified her still, the memory of going through her mother’s abandoned earthly belongings. A sudden death, though preferable in many ways to a drawn-out one, leaves no chance to hide anything.
“Would you like a glass of champagne, miss?” Laila looked up. Even the flight attendants were prettier in first class. A harbinger that she would be surrounded by beauty from now on, she thought.
“Oh, I shouldn’t,” Laila said in a tone indicating that yes, in fact, she would. The attendant smiled at her and inched the bottle suggestively forward. “Oh, well, just one,” Laila said. Free-flowing champagne. The life of her cousins, she imagined. Hers now too.
Laila had been to New York twice in the two years since she’d met her cousins. Nathan had been worried about her going alone—he’d been right to worry, just not for the reasons he imagined—but Laila had convinced him she should, she wanted to bond with her family. They were all she had left, she would remind him, and that would do the trick. And though this wasn’t strictly true—there were the dreadful aunties, their multitudinous and criminally dull offspring—Laila indeed felt she’d been robbed of knowing this other side of her family. How might have her childhood world been expanded by having had them in her life? She’d longed for an older sister growing up, and Liberty seemed every bit the living version of those dreams. The world of the Lawrences dazzled her: Liberty with her sophisticated job and cool apartment, and the twins! They lived in a penthouse (actually, two connected penthouses) and were able to breeze into any nightclub in town, it seemed. Since meeting them, Laila had developed a voracious habit of consuming Manhattan gossip blogs as well as Vogue, Vanity Fair, and the New York Post’s infamous Page Six. When she visited her cousins, it seemed to her she had landed on the very pages she’d made a study of.
A year earlier, Laila had begun emerging from the fog that had followed her mother’s death and her hasty marriage, and she’d felt her life tugging at the seams, needing to come apart. By then, she was talking to, or at least texting with, Liberty and Nora nearly every day.
“I’m asking Nathan for a divorce,” she’d told Nora one afternoon, sequestered in the guest bedroom in the attic, the only place in the house Laila felt she could go to be remotely alone.
“Good!” came the reply. “Yay! Now you can move to New York! Oh my God, we’ll have so much fun! You can live in the penthouse with us.” Nora had needed no explanation other than Laila’s wish to no longer be married, so she spared her the trumped-up story of Nathan’s affair with one of the other hygienists that she’d recounted to Liberty. This tale, she knew, would likely preclude further questions.
Ultimately, the divorce wasn’t big news to anyone, as Laila had been considering it in one way or another since the day she’d married Nathan. Despite the blurry haze that spread over her in the weeks following her mother’s funeral, she remembered feeling a persistent wrongness on the day of the marriage: a throbbing no, no, no that she ignored as she put on her white shift dress from J.Crew. A coworker she wasn’t even terribly close to—but who Nathan inexplicably thought was one of her best friends—pinned baby’s breath in her hair. (For good measure, she later positioned this same coworker as the harlot in her fabricated cheating drama.) She ignored the no as she came downstairs to the small crowd of twenty friends gathered in Nathan’s—now their—backyard. Not a face among them that Laila cared for. She ignored it, for what else was there to do but marry Nathan? She knew everyone else in Grosse Pointe and there was no one better. She had no money, no savings, and where else would she find someone? Detroit? No. The best you could hope for was to try to land one of the professional athletes: to be one of those desperate girls on the hunt for Lions, Tigers, and Red Wings—tits spilling out of the neckline of a tight jersey, blond extensions piled on. Go team! No.
At first, her cousins had been like an apparition; something she couldn’t wrap her fingers around, with the momentum of the marriage already carrying her along. But then New York had emerged on the horizon, solid and real and beckoning. And now she was on her way.