Beautiful Lies (25 page)

“If you’d stayed with me, none of this would ever have happened,” he said petulantly. “You never would have had to deal with any of this.”

He was right, of course. If I’d stayed with him, I’d probably have been in his bed that morning or he in mine. I never would have left my place to meet him. The chances of my being on that corner at exactly the right second were slim to none. But who knows, maybe it was time for my shadow to reveal itself and nothing would have stopped it. Maybe every choice I made, the little ones, the big ones, those choices I thought had so much influence over the course of my life, maybe they weren’t choices at all. Maybe it was just my shadow whispering in my ear, quietly leading me to myself, to the truth, to wholeness.

“Yeah, Zack. Maybe I could have lived out my whole life never knowing who I really am.”

“Has it been so bad…your life?” asked Esme. There was something close to bitterness in her voice. “Have you considered what the alternative might have been?”

I looked at her. She seemed small, even fragile. But there was a terrible anger in her eyes.

“How could I have? I didn’t even know there
was
an alternative.”

She laughed a little. “Well, now you know. Happy?”

I turned from them and ran out of the apartment. “Ridley,” I heard Zack yell after me, his voice sounding desperate. “It’s not safe.”

I had no idea where I was going but I ran.

It is not the strongest among us who survive. Nor is it the most intelligent. It is those among us who are the most adaptable to change.
I don’t remember who said this, but it has always struck me as being quite brilliant. And it kept playing in my mind. I ran for a couple of blocks, then I got winded and limped for a while, clutching my side against the cramp that had seized me just minutes after I fled Zack. Don’t you just love it in the movies when normal people run for miles, scale chain-link fences at the end of alleyways, leap onto moving cars? Those kind of acrobatics weren’t an option for me; I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d worked out. If someone started chasing me right then, they would have caught me pretty easily. I kept looking over my shoulder for the Firebird or the skinhead. Zack said it wasn’t safe and I had every reason to believe him. I moved fast but I had no direction. I couldn’t go home. I couldn’t go back to that grim, lonely hotel room. I couldn’t go to my parents. So I walked.

I was fractured. Damaged but not broken. My mind was a jumble of disconnected thoughts and questions, but I wasn’t insane. I knew that much at least. I walked east toward the river through a city that was starting to wake, the sky fading from black to blue velvet. I went to Jake’s studio but found the door locked tight. I rang the buzzer, knowing the futility of it even as I did so. He wasn’t there. For all I knew, he was gone for good. And maybe I was better off for that, considering that he’d possibly tried to kill me.

The sun was still at least an hour from rising but already traffic had picked up. I passed a man pulling his coffee cart up the street. I walked through an already bustling Chinatown, fresh fish markets opening, fluorescent lights flickering on in shops. On Chambers Street, parked Lincoln sedans were already discharging early-bird lawyers and judges onto the sidewalks, where they walked quickly toward the giant, dirty-white court buildings. I was tired, more tired than I had ever been. But I kept walking. I thought of that footage you always see of those people climbing Mt. Everest. They’re at twenty-six thousand feet or something, at subzero temperatures, barely getting enough oxygen, but they just keep going. They just keep putting one foot in front of the other. They know if they stop, they’ll die. That simple. I don’t know if it was that simple for me. But I felt like I had to keep moving or the weight of my thoughts and my fears was going to crush me. Finally I stood at the base of the walkway that leads over the Brooklyn Bridge. I started up the wooden slats. If I could make it to the other side, I knew I could find a hotel there. Maybe I could check in and sleep for the next week and a half. Or maybe I would just keep going until I walked off the edge of the earth.

I want to say that I always knew there was something fractured about my life, but I don’t think so. I do think, though, that there was a feeling that had always dwelled in the periphery of my consciousness, a specter that never quite came into focus. Esme had asked me,
Has it been so bad…your life? Have you considered what the alternative might have been?

I told you, I just have to close my eyes and my childhood comes back to me in a rush, the scents and feelings. Not specific memories, really, but the essence of memory. Johnson’s baby shampoo and burned toast, birthday parties and cut grass, fireplace embers and Christmas trees. I was loved. I grew up feeling safe, knowing I wouldn’t go hungry. I was never afraid in my home. Was it perfect? I’ll ask you: What is? Were there things I didn’t know or ignored? Obviously. But it was a good suburban American childhood full of minivans and football games. From what I could see, the alternative might not have been as good. I might have been abused by my father, my mother might have been afraid of him, he might have been cruel to her. Who can say who I would be if I had been raised as Jessie by Teresa Elizabeth Stone? I would never know. And I couldn’t say I was sorry. But that didn’t mean that what had happened was right. Someone had murdered Teresa Stone and kidnapped her child. I’m sorry, but I’m just not one of those people who think the end justifies the means.

“Hey.”

I spun to see him standing close behind me.

“You can’t keep walking forever,” he said. “Eventually you’re going to have to stop and face what’s happening to you.”

I felt a rush of emotion at the sight of him, this train wreck of love and anger and fear that I thought might just run me down.

“And I suppose you’re going to help me do that?” I said, unable to keep my voice from shaking.

He nodded slowly. “If you’re ready to hear the truth.”

twenty-eight

“I guess you don’t see the irony in that,” I said, backing away from Jake. I hated my voice and hands, mutinous in their shaking, betraying the emotion coursing through me. He just looked at me. To his credit, he didn’t say anything. The sky was lightening around us and the traffic below on the bridge was starting to pick up, filling the air with the white noise of tires on asphalt, punctuated by the sudden sharp blast of a car horn. He was standing very still, as if he were approaching a bird he was afraid to startle. And I was ready to fly.

“I know everything,” I said, pulling my shoulders back and looking him right in the eye.

“No,” he said with a slow shake of his head. “You don’t.”

In that second he became every person in my life who had lied to me. And I wanted to rage at him, pummel him, break a hole in the universe by the sheer force of my anger and grief and throw him through it. But incredibly I held my temper for a few more seconds, which felt like holding on to a Rottweiler with a piece of dental floss.

“I know that your moving into my building wasn’t an accident. I know that you followed a long trail that eventually, somehow, led you to me. I know that you wrote that second note.”

“Ridley.” It sounded like a prayer.

“Stay away from me,” I said. Meltdown. The tremors in my voice and hands spread to the rest of my body and I was shaking uncontrollably. “Don’t come any closer.”

“I would never hurt you.”

I laughed a short, hard laugh that sounded a little unstable even to my own ears. “You know,” I said, my voice starting to raise a couple octaves. “I keep hearing that tonight. Seems to me like when people feel the need to assert that, there might be a problem.”

Some of the color had drained from his face and he looked tired, black circles shadowing his eyes.

That crazy laugh rocked me again. It didn’t feel like me. Sounded hard and strange. “You’re such a fucking liar. You almost killed us both yesterday. What were you trying to do?” I was yelling and looking around me. In New York City, you can never be alone, there’s always someone around. Except when you’re scared; then the city has a way of being the most deserted place on earth. There was no one else on the bridge.

“What are you talking about?” He was convincing, I’ll give him that. He’d perfected the look of innocent confusion.

“The car!” I screamed, my throat going sore from it. “The fucking Firebird. Were you driving it when it almost forced me into a head-on collision?”

“What?” He shook his head, his eyes glistening. “No. God, Ridley. Are you okay?” He moved a step closer and I moved back again, as if we were dancing.

I had never been sure it was him, you remember. In fact, on an emotional level, I had been nearly sure it wasn’t. But in that moment on the Brooklyn Bridge with the sun rising on a new day, I couldn’t trust what I had felt, what I had seen, or what I had been told five minutes ago, a day ago, thirty years ago. I could operate only in the present tense. I was afraid and angry in equal measure, and that was literally the only thing I knew for sure.

“Listen to me,” he said slowly. “The Firebird is gone. It’s been stolen.”

I shook my head in disbelief. “Do you think I’m an idiot, Jake? You told me yourself it was impounded and I know for a fact that it wasn’t.” A hard, cold wind gusted off the water, blowing my coat open. I pulled it tight around myself.

“Okay,” he said, raising a hand. “I know what I told you. I was wrong. I assumed it had been impounded, but I have since learned that it wasn’t.”

I thought about that for a second, weighed the likelihood of what he’d said and found it pretty weak. “How could you learn that? You couldn’t exactly call up and ask. You’re a fugitive, wanted for the murder of Christian Luna.”

He nodded as if he understood my skepticism. “I still have friends with connections.”

“Who would do that? Who would steal your car and then try to kill me with it?”

“The same people who would leave a rifle registered to me in Fort Tryon Park for the police to find.”

I looked at him hard, as if I was expecting to squeeze the truth from him with the very force of my gaze. “Oh, so now it’s some kind of conspiracy?”

“What do you want to call it?”

There was too much information for me to process about too many different people and circumstances. I started to feel that fog fall over my brain again, everything suddenly nebulous, dark forms moving behind a veil of smoke.

“I need to know everything that’s happening, Jake. No more lies. Are you prepared to tell me everything? No omissions.”

“I’ll tell you everything I know. There’s no more reason to hide anything from you,” he said softly. I was quiet a minute, thinking of all my million questions as they jammed up against one another on the way to my mouth. I could come up with only one.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” I said as the sadness finally pushed its way past the anger and showed its face. The tears came then, too. Silent, heavy, sent directly from my bruised and mangled heart. “After all of this? Murder and lies and manipulation. Did you at least get what you were looking for?”

He sighed and turned his eyes from me, cast them down to his feet, and his body seemed to sag a little beneath the weight of my words. “I haven’t found what I was looking for, no.” His voice was quiet and he raised his eyes back to me as he moved toward me. “But I found something I never even knew existed.”

“Oh, please,” I said, hating him for saying what I wanted to hear. “Don’t even pretend you ever cared about me. You know what? Fuck you, Jake.” I turned my back and started moving away from him.

“Ridley, please.”

He moved quickly, too quickly for me to get away. He held me hard while I fought harder. I’m not talking about little girlie slaps and halfhearted punches. I kicked him in the shin. Pounded on his back. He didn’t release me.

“Let go of me. You’re a liar. I fucking hate you.” Screaming like a maniac. Between blows to his back, which by the way felt like granite, he said, “I’ll let you go when you promise to
hear
me.”

I tried to bring my knee up into his groin, but he deftly blocked me with his leg. Finally I just leaned against him in exhaustion, like boxers seem to do in the ring, holding each other, delivering painful blows to the kidneys. I released a long breath and rested my head against his neck. “Okay,” I said. “Okay.”

He kept his word. But I didn’t. The minute he released me, I took off like a shot heading to Brooklyn. “Ridley, Jesus!” he yelled. I was running with every ounce of strength and speed I had left in me, but he was on me in a heartbeat. I told you I wasn’t very fast. Now he had me from behind, my arms locked to my side. I tried to kick back at him; I thrashed and screamed like a kid throwing a tantrum.

“You’re right, Ridley!” he yelled over my screaming. “I lied to you. Let me explain.”

I don’t know how long this went on, but eventually exhaustion, coupled with the knowledge of Jake’s physical strength, led me to just collapse against him. “Okay,” I said finally. “Let me go. I won’t run. I’m too tired.”

“Please,” he said, his breathing heavy. “Don’t. I’m too tired to chase you.” After another second, he released his hold on me and I moved away from him. I walked over and leaned on the railing. The morning was almost pretty, a moody gray-blue sky, whitecaps on the gray water below us.

“Tell me it wasn’t you,” I said, looking off into the distance. “Tell me you didn’t kill Christian Luna. Tell me it wasn’t you driving that car.”

To be honest with you, as far as what was between Jake and me, even with all the lies and manipulations, those were the only deal breakers, the things for which there could be no forgiveness, no explanation. He moved in next to me, slipped an arm around my shoulder, and lifted my chin with his hand until I had to look into those eyes.

“It wasn’t me.”

I think if he had tried to say more, I might not have believed him. But he let me look into his eyes and I could see it was the truth. I nodded.

“How did you find me?”

“What do you mean? Right now?”

“No. I mean, I know how you found out that my father was Jessie Stone’s physician. But how did you find me?”

He laughed a little. “The same way Christian Luna did. Thank that
Post
photographer.”

I sighed. “God, I hate that guy.”

He hung his head a bit at that and I could see that I had hurt him a little. I didn’t say anything to make it better.

“You’re sorry you met me,” he said after a while.

“Let’s just say you’ve got a lot of talking to do.”

We stood there for I don’t know how long, looking down into the river of traffic rushing beneath us, the smell of exhaust rising, feeling black and gritty in my throat. Neither one of us said a word. My fears and questions were a coil of razor wire between us. We might get through them, but it was going to hurt like hell.

We found a diner on Montague Street in Brooklyn. We’d walked there in silence. He had a lot to say, I know, and I had so many questions, but it was understood between us that we needed to find someplace safe and quiet to talk. He wore a sweatshirt with a hood over his head and the bill of a baseball cap covered his eyes. I kept my distance and walked quickly. With the sun coming up, I felt as if we were both exposed and needed to get inside.

We slid into a red leather booth and ordered coffee. We were quiet, not looking at each other. Neither one of us was sure where to start, I think.

“How did you find me?” I asked. “Right now, I mean.”

“I was watching the studio from Tompkins Square.”

I nodded. “You knew I’d come looking for you?”

“I didn’t know. I hoped.”

More silence.

“I went to see Zack,” I said after a minute.

“Yeah? Why did you go there?”

“Where else was there for me to go?” I shrugged. “I thought because he knew my father, he could help me see things more clearly.”

“But?”

“But…he tried to make me believe I had imagined all of this. His mother was there, too. And then I realized.”

“Realized what?

“Project Rescue. That whatever it is, they’re part of it.”

He nodded as though he already knew it, which he probably did. I reached into my pocket, withdrew the copy of Charlie’s birth certificate and the photograph of Charlie, Adele, and Michael. I placed them on the table, slid it over to him.

“You’re Charlie, aren’t you?” I said quietly.

How did I come up with this? While I’d been on the phone with Detective Salvo, I’d been looking at the birth certificate and noticed that Charlie’s birthday was July 4, 1969. The first night I’d met Jake, I’d wanted to know his sign; he told me Cancer. I looked at the fuzzy picture of the toddler on the pony and I couldn’t be sure then that it was him. But something about his face on the bridge had made me think of the photograph again. And my subconscious had been shifting around pieces of the puzzle. I wasn’t surprised when he nodded, looking down at the items in front of him. “Yeah,” he said. “I think so. Or I was once, anyway.”

“What happened?”

“I still don’t know exactly. I don’t know how I wound up abandoned in the system. All I know is that Charlie was kidnapped from his home when he was three years old. What happened from there is still unclear.”

“But you were right about your mother. She loved you.”

“She tried to abandon me.”

“But she came back for you. She was young and scared. Her husband was a junkie. It doesn’t mean she didn’t love you.”

He gave a shrug and a halfhearted nod. God, aren’t we all just little kids who so badly need to know that we were loved by our parents?

“And you found your grandmother. Why didn’t you tell her?”

Another shrug as he looked into his cup of coffee, which he turned between his palms.

“I don’t understand,” I said when he didn’t respond. “Isn’t that what you were looking for? Your family?”

“I thought so,” he said. “But when I found Linda McNaughton…I don’t know. It didn’t seem right. The boy she loved was so long gone. Her daughter, too. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her. I thought I’d go back when I figured out what had happened to me. I still don’t know.”

We were quiet for a minute. Then he said, “There’s only one person left who knows what happened to both of us for sure. Why and how we were taken, what happened from there.”

“Who?”

“Your father. He was the attending physician for all four of the children that went missing that year. And who knows how many others.”

“There are others?”

“I think there are many, many others.”

“Project Rescue…” I said, more thinking aloud than anything. I couldn’t see the connection between what had happened to Charlie, Jessie, and the others and Uncle Max’s organization, but I knew there was one, like you know an island connects to the ocean floor though it may be miles below the surface of the sea.

“That’s why you sought me out?”

He released a long breath and looked at me. “To be honest, I was kind of at a dead end when I saw you on the cover of the
Post.
I’d seen Dr. Hauser and I knew about your father. But I didn’t know how to get close to him. It’s not like I could just walk up to him and ask about Project Rescue. Then Arnie died. All my other efforts to find out about the organization failed. And I was just lost for a while, grieving, walking around like a zombie, working on some cases to bring in money.

“Then I saw your picture in the paper. You looked
so much
like the picture of Teresa Stone from the
Record,
I had to wonder. I mean, it was jarring. I thought I was losing my mind, becoming so desperate for a lead, so obsessed with this quest that I was seeing things that weren’t there. Then I read that you were Benjamin Jones’s daughter and it just felt like fate. I thought by getting to know you I could find a way closer to your father.”

“So you used me, basically.”

He reached for my hand and I didn’t pull it away.

“It started out that way, Ridley. But…” He didn’t finish his sentence and I was glad, because I didn’t want to hear how he’d never expected to have feelings for me. I think on a cellular level I knew what had happened between us. Words would just make it less than what it was.