Dad’s bedside, tears running into my mouth, promising myself that it was the right thing to do, that I shouldn’t feel guilty for doing it.
Maybe somewhere else, it would be possible to believe that those lies were true.
Lauren
If you live in Connecticut, you know my family—or you think you do. You’ve seen us on the news, in the Hartford Register, on campaign posters. We’re the all-American family—the dad, the mom, the three kids, the golden retrievers. We have an estate on eleven acres in Connecticut, a townhouse in Washington, DC, and our very own private island off the coast of Maine.
We’re the all-American family on steroids.
A brief history:
My mother, Elizabeth Holmes, was born into a family that had made its fortune on steel, although by the time I came along the mines were long sold, and the refineries no longer bore any trace of the family name. Being a Holmes meant property and trust funds and serving on the board of various charities and foundations. She graduated from Vassar with a degree in history that she never intended to use, and later that year at a party in Manhattan, she met Charles Mabrey, who was in his third year of law school at Princeton. The Mabreys didn’t have the immense wealth of the Holmeses, but they had their own kind of pedigree; Dad’s father, George Mabrey, was a West Point grad, a general in the US Army and an overall badass. His wife and son had followed him around the world—Germany and Cuba and Kuwait and Italy and Germany again—and by the time my dad met my mom, the Mabreys and the Holmeses were like interlocking puzzle pieces. My parents spoke the same language of private tutors and elite schools, of dinners with ambassadors and troubles with housekeeping staff. I figured Dad was a lawyer for about fifteen minutes before Mom started planning his political career, but I might be wrong. She might have sniffed that out from their first dinner party in 1962. With her old money pedigree and his military connections, they were practically a golden ticket.
Sometimes, I wondered if it had all happened exactly the way Mom had planned it—if she’d been able to foresee each move, like our lives were pieces on a giant chessboard. Because planning was needed, and that wasn’t Dad’s forte—he was best at making one-on-one connections. He could remember every name and face; I used to joke that it took us more than an hour to pass through the dining room at the Wampanoag Country Club, because Dad had to stop to say hello to each person we passed.
There were certain expectations for the Mabrey kids, too—things that were planned in utero, that were written somewhere in Mom’s long-range planner, cousin to her well-worn daily planner. I was the third dark-haired, blue-eyed Mabrey kid, eight years younger than Katherine and six years younger than Michael, who to me were always Kat and MK. There should have been one in between MK and me, another Kennedy-esque boy, another future politician, but that baby was stillborn, the cord wrapped tightly around his neck during delivery. I figured that three was always the goal, and if that baby had lived, there wouldn’t have been a need for me.
Sometimes, I wondered if my parents blamed each other for how I turned out, how I didn’t fit the Mabrey mold. Maybe they worried about how much time I spent with nannies, since Dad and Mom had both been busy with his career. Maybe they questioned whether they’d sent me to boarding school too young—not every kid could hack it as well as Kat and MK had. Maybe they’d been too indulgent, giving in because it was easier than arguing. Maybe I should have been disciplined more or disciplined less, talked to more like an adult, talked to more like a child.
Maybe I was just the bad seed.
It probably started when I was in kindergarten, at the fancy Brillhart School where I didn’t sit the right way, didn’t follow directions and sometimes wandered off in the middle of a lesson. I remember my teacher showing me the proper way to sit at my desk—hands at my sides, thighs parallel to the floor beneath me. Everything was like that, it seemed—there was one exact way to do everything, and a million wrong ways that I tried instead.
Kat and MK had been straight-A students. They were the captains of their teams, honors students and debate winners—the sort of achievers who could be held up as models to everyone else. At Reardon Preparatory School, where I boarded from seventh to twelfth grade, there were reminders of Kat and MK everywhere, in trophies for academic decathlon and essay-writing and long jump and water polo. My most distinguishing characteristic was that I was not at the top of my class; there was a huge pack composed of future doctors and lawyers and Fortune 500 executives, then a large gap and then me—Lauren Mabrey, the senator’s daughter, content with her 2.5 average.
“You’ll never get anywhere in life like this,” Mom had seethed to me more than once, driving me back to our house in Simsbury at the end of the school term.
But I knew that wasn’t true. For one thing, she was determined to get me there, and where I hadn’t succeeded or hadn’t been particularly concerned with succeeding, Mom was going to be victorious—that I never doubted. She’d gotten me into Reardon, after all, no doubt greasing a few palms along the way.
I was eleven when Dad became a state senator, and I was thirteen when a kid at camp passed me my first joint behind the counselor’s cabin. The smoke stung my nose, but I laughed it away. A year later, a girl from Manhattan demonstrated for me on a zucchini how to give the perfect blow job, which I tried out the first chance I could on a skinny boy from Syracuse.
By that time, I was used to seeing my dad in the papers—his graying hair, his dark suits, his demeanor that was serious and affable at once. There was a growing divide between the picture-perfect Mabreys and me. Dad was instrumental in passing legislation that regulated the purchase of pseudoephedrine, an ingredient used in methamphetamine production, and I once snorted a line of coke in someone’s bathroom and danced the rest of the night on top of his kitchen table.
“Our wild child,” Mom would say without a hint of affection when she saw my report card, when she chatted with Reardon’s dean of students, when she saw me slouching next to Kat and MK.
She didn’t mean this as a compliment, but I wore it like a badge of honor.
* * *
When I was seventeen, Dad ran for a US Senate seat, a campaign that consumed our lives all summer with photo ops and media blitzes, the Mabrey name plastered on posters and lawn signs and headlines in the Hartford Register. Since I was officially too old for another summer away at Camp Watachwa, I was forced to present myself with a smile at family outings and lunches around town. Tired of dragging me along with her, Mom found a volunteer position for me at the Hartford Arts Cooperative, half an hour from our house in Simsbury. The Coop, as it was known, was a politician’s dream, bustling with five-to twelve-year-olds who arrived with dirty hands and growling stomachs to produce cheerful portraits of their future lives as pro football players, astronauts, doctors and teachers. Even though I knew my position there was more or less an extension of the campaign, a footnote on the larger résumé of what the Holmes-Mabreys had done for Connecticut, I loved it anyway. Four afternoons a week, I stocked supplies and rinsed brushes and posted artwork on the walls, while as many as thirty kids ran circles around me. By the end of the day I was exhausted and satisfied, convinced that for once I was doing something that actually mattered.
During my first week on the job, I fell hard for Marcus, a sophomore art major at Capitol Community College and one of the few paid staff at The Coop. That summer he was working on a giant mural going up on the south side of the building, where previously there had been only the initials of taggers and a giant F YOU in five-foot letters. Marcus had a broad chest and ropy arm muscles, and his fingers were permanently paint stained with a crusty layer of blues and yellows and greens. The first time he touched me, brushing a piece of hair out of my face as I stood over the sink washing brushes, I felt a thrumming all the way to my toes. The next night he stood behind
