4. Liliana #3
For half a heartbeat I let myself hope it’s Tristan, home early, keeping the promise.
It isn’t.
Mother: Where are you?
Great, just perfect timing.
I’ve barely finished reading it before the phone lights up in my hand, her name filling the screen, because Aurelia Astor has never in her life trusted a text to do what a call can do better. I answer, because you do not let my mother go to voicemail. That’s a lesson learned early and painfully.
“Hi, Mother.”
“You didn’t answer my message.”
“You called before I could.”
“Where are you? You sound like you’re in a wind tunnel.” A pause, the delicate clink of a thing being set down on the other end. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter. I’m sending a car. Have it bring you to me, we’re having dinner.”
I close my eyes. I was two steps from the exit, keys practically in my hand, one clean straight line home to the quiet and the dark and the not-having-to-perform. “Mother, I actually can’t tonight. I was just heading home, I’m exhausted, and…”
“Which is exactly why you shouldn’t be alone, rattling around that apartment feeling sorry for yourself.” Not unkind. Just immovable, the way she is about everything. “The car’s already coming. Where are you?”
There’s no version of this where I win. There never is with her. Saying no to Aurelia isn’t a door that exists in the house I grew up in, she simply keeps standing there, pleasant and patient, until you understand that the answer was always going to be yes.
“The mall on West End,” I say, defeated. “By the north entrance.”
“Twenty minutes. Don’t wander off.” And she’s gone, no goodbye, because goodbyes are for people who might not get their way.
I lower the phone and stand at the north entrance with a dress I didn’t choose, in a bag I didn’t want, waiting for a car I didn’t call, to go to a dinner I can’t refuse.
Some days I barely feel like a person at all. I feel like a place other people keep deciding to put things.
It didn’t take long for the car to glide up to the curb. I climb into the back and let it carry me off to the next room where I’ll be trading one cage for another instead of getting to go home.
***
My mother’s estate looks exactly the same as it did when my father was alive.
The same manicured gardens, the same tasteful columns, the same air of old money so potent you could choke on it. Aurelia Astor has kept everything preserved, a museum exhibit, a monument to the life she built with a man who was never really there.
“Liliana.” She greets me in the foyer, her cheek pressed briefly to mine in what passes for affection in the Astor family. “You’re late.”
“Traffic.”
“Mmm.” She doesn’t believe me, but she doesn’t push. Instead she leads me to the dining room, where a meal for two has been laid out with the kind of precision that used to make me feel inadequate. “I thought we could eat in here tonight. More intimate.”
“Sure.” I take my seat across from her and try not to notice how small I feel at this enormous table, how insignificant I am in this enormous house. “It looks beautiful, Mother.”
“It’s just dinner.” She unfolds her napkin and places it in her lap, every movement deliberate and elegant. “You look thin.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“You’ve been forgetting to eat, is what you’ve been doing.” She lifts her wine and studies me across the table, her gaze pointed enough to cut glass. “I’d have thought, at the very least, your husband would see to it that you were fed properly.”
“Tristan’s busy too, these days.” I reach for my water so I have somewhere to put my eyes. “I can take care of myself. I always have.”
“Mm.” She turns the glass by its stem. “That isn’t quite what he promised me, though. When he sat in that drawing room across the hall and asked me for your hand, he had a great deal to say about how he intended to look after you.”
The pause after it is deliberate. I feel it coming before it arrives, the whole shape of the evening, and my stomach tightens over the little I’ve managed to eat.
“Don’t,” I say quietly.
“I’m only remembering.” But she goes on anyway, because she never truly listens. “You were the one so determined to defend him, if you’ll recall. I raised every reasonable concern a mother is entitled to raise, and you sat in this very room and told me I didn’t understand him.”
“I remember.”
“A performer, Liliana.”
She sets the glass down.
“A boy with a guitar and a pretty voice with a family fortune he chose to turn his back on. His people built a name that would have lasted generations, a business, a proper place in the world, and instead he ran off to sing for strangers in stadiums. I called it foolish then and I’ll call it foolish now.
Idealistic. A man plays at being an artist when he’s young, and then he grows up and takes the seat he was born to.
Tristan simply never grew up. All useless dreams and nothing. ”
My fork scrapes the plate. I press it into the fish harder than I need to. “He is extraordinarily successful at what you’re calling playing, Mother. He fills arenas. He’s one of the biggest artists in the country.”
“And there you are.” A near-triumph shows behind her eyes. “Defending him. Still. Two years on, half-starved and alone in that glass tower of his, and the reflex hasn’t changed at all.”
She tilts her head, and her voice drops, quieter, more pointed for it. “Let me ask you a question, and I’d like you to answer it honestly, just this once. Are you even happy, Liliana? Truly? With all of this?”
The question opens a door I’ve been leaning my whole body against, and I push back from the table before it can swing wide, my chair scraping against the hardwood.
“I don’t appreciate this.” My napkin lands beside my plate.
“Whatever you think of my marriage, it’s mine.
I know you never liked him. You’ve made that clear since the day I brought him home.
But you don’t get to sit here and pick my life apart bite by bite and call it concern.
That’s a line, Mother, and I won’t sit at this table and let you keep crossing it. ”
“Liliana.”
“I don’t need to stay and be nitpicked in the house I grew up in. This is why I left this behind. Now, I came and I sat to be polite but I’ve had enough.” I reach for my bag.
My hands are shaking. I notice it as I fumble the strap onto my shoulder, a fine tremor running through me, and I can’t tell anymore whether it’s anger, exhaustion, or just the accumulated weight of a day that has taken and taken and given me nothing back.
Because that’s what today has been.
Every hour of it. Ford in my kitchen, Tristan out the door, Hallie’s arm looped through mine while she told me to be grateful, and now this, my mother across a table she set just to remind me of everything I’ve supposedly failed at.
I am so tired of being handled. Nothing has changed inside these walls, I’m as suffocated in this house as I ever was growing up in it, and the only home I traded it for is one where I sit alone and lonely night after night.
Suffocated here, forgotten there. Neither of them has felt mine in longer than I can remember.
Right now I want nothing more than to walk out the door and keep walking, away from my mother and her disappointment, away from the glass tower and the cold dinners, away from all of it. I want to turn my back on every person who keeps deciding what I’m supposed to be and just disappear.
I’ve got the bag on my shoulder and my weight already shifting toward the door when she speaks again.
“I let you marry him.”
It stops me. Not the words themselves, but how she says them, stripped of the cool, gone strangely bare, and when I look back at her, the practiced hardness has slipped and left a rawness underneath it I almost never get to see.
“You know I never liked him,” she says. “You know that. And still, in the end, I stood in that church and I let you go to him, against every instinct I had.”
A pause. Her hands fold, unfold on the linen.
“Because he made you happy. That is the whole of it. He sat across from me and swore he would spend his life doing exactly that, and for a while, whatever I thought of him, I couldn’t argue with what I saw.
You were happy, Liliana. Lit from the inside.
I hadn’t seen you like that since before your father. ”
I don’t say anything, I can’t get the words out.
“You don’t seem quite so happy anymore,” she says softly. “That’s all. That is all I’m saying.”
I don’t answer her. I turn and walk out of the dining room, through the vast preserved rooms of my childhood, past the portraits and the polished floors, and I don’t let the sting behind my eyes become anything until the great front doors are shut behind me and I’m folded into the back of the car, the estate shrinking away and the city sliding past dark, glittering beyond the glass.
Because the terrible thing, the thing I’ll never give her the satisfaction of hearing, is that she’s right.
Not about him being foolish. Not about the business, or the guitar, or any of the reasons she’s carried like grievances for two years.
She’s right about the other thing.
There was a reason I chose Tristan. There was a reason I stood in that church, with my mother’s disapproval pressing against my back, and married the boy with the guitar anyway.
I lean my head against the cool of the window, and I let myself go back to it.
Years ago, I buried my father on the coldest day of the year.
The reception was at the estate, of course. Everything in my family happens at the estate, births and deaths and the small quiet devastations in between, all of it staged in those same preserved rooms.
That afternoon they’d filled with people in black, more of them than I could count, all of them finding me in turn to press my hands and tell me how sorry they were, how he was a great man, how I was holding up so beautifully.
But I wasn’t holding up. I was drowning, and every kind word was another hand on the back of my head, pushing me down.