Beautiful Lies (29 page)

“How can we believe that?” I said, feeling a strange desperation. “You said yourself it had grown beyond Max.”

“It’s not my concern what you believe, Ridley,” he said, standing, his voice going cold. “All that concerns me is that you keep your fucking mouth
shut.
Don’t make me fail in my promise to Max. Don’t make me silence you.”

Jake got up and walked toward Harriman and I pulled at his hand. But he shook me off and in the next second his powerful fist connected with Harriman’s jaw. Harriman issued a kind of
“Oof,”
and stumbled back. I thought he would fall but he caught himself against the edge of his desk. I jumped up and grabbed Jake’s arm before he could go after him again.

“Stop it. There’s no point,” I said, but he didn’t look at me, kept his eyes on Harriman. Coolly, Harriman pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at the blood that made a line down his jaw.

“Feel better now?” he asked Jake. “I’m going to do you a favor and not hold that against you. You’ve had a rough time.” I felt Jake tense, as if he was going to throw another punch, but I held on to him tight.

“There are no guarantees in this life, kids. Loved or not loved, abused or cherished, adored or neglected…We don’t choose what happens to us, we only choose how we react to it. Jake, you’ve had it rough. Ridley, you’ve had it pretty good. But you’re both here, alive and healthy. And you’ve found each other. Make the most of it. It’s more than a lot of people have.”

There was a Ridley who wanted to lie down on the couch and sob. There was a Ridley who wanted to throw herself at Alexander Harriman and pummel him with all the strength of her anger and her sorrow. There was a Ridley who wanted to run from this man and never think of him or what he’d told her ever again. There was a Ridley who wanted to go to the police and the media and fuck the consequences to her, to Ace, to her parents, to Jake, and to all the Project Rescue babies out there living their beautiful lies.

He was right about all this information seeming like the fruits from a poisonous tree. What could we do with any of it? I felt dead inside. I searched for more questions for him, knowing that this was the last chance I would ever have to ask them. But I couldn’t think of one.

“My father would never be a part of something like this. Never.”

I looked at Jake. More than anything, I wanted him to believe that. But I looked in his face and saw that he didn’t.

Harriman shrugged. “It would be hard to convince the authorities of that, given his position, all the work he did for the legitimate arm of Project Rescue, his relationship to Max, and his possession of you.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. The word
possession
threw me.

Finally I managed, “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that Max is gone. If this comes out, someone is going to have to answer for Project Rescue. You’re the only link between the criminal and legitimate arms of Project Rescue. What do you think that will mean for your father? To his career? To all the good he’s tried to do in his life? It’ll ruin him, at the very least.”

I was numb. I looked at Jake, who seemed to have softened a little, as if an acceptance that he might never know the full story had washed over him and given him some small peace. He came and sat beside me. I moved in close to him and he pulled me into his arms. “I’m sorry,” I whispered to him.

“It’s all right,” he said into my hair. “It’s okay. Let’s get out of here.”

“Where’s my brother?” I said, remembering with a start.

Harriman walked to a door toward the back of his office and opened it. In it there was a large conference table and several desks. On a long leather couch lay my brother. He wasn’t beaten or bound, just completely passed out. He was pale except for his eyes, which had blue canyons beneath them. He was sprawled there, an arm draping on the floor. He looked like a corpse.

“His girlfriend put up more of a fight than he did,” said Harriman. “Today he winds up on my couch. Tomorrow it’s an alley on the Lower East Side. Today he’s alive. Tomorrow…up to you.”

I wish I could tell you that something miraculous happened here, that by some tremendous act of heroism we were able to outwit Alexander Harriman. I wish I could tell you that the cavalry came in and we were all saved and justice was done. But all we could do was pull Ace to his feet and drag him toward the door.

Alexander Harriman was right about something else. I’m not sure how he knew me so well. The knowledge of consequences was a powerful deterrent. Even if he hadn’t threatened Ace’s life, was I really prepared to bring this down on my father? Was I prepared to ask him to pay for what he might or might not have done? Was I strong enough to expose Project Rescue? Righteous enough? In that moment, the answer to all those questions was no.

Remember how we started this, though, talking about the little things. How they can affect the course of our lives more profoundly than any of the major decisions we make. More than where you went to college, more than who you married…or didn’t, more than what you chose to do with your life. In this case, it was that cell phone.

As I hesitated in the cab on arriving at Harriman’s office, I did something silly and desperate, something straight out of the movies. Just me being a dork again. I pressed the call button on my phone and stuck it in my pocket. I knew it would call the last person who’d called me, Detective Salvo. I didn’t know if it would work, if he’d be able to hear anything or if he’d be able to use it to figure out our location. It was just the last-ditch effort of a frightened person way out of her league. It turned out not to be so silly after all.

In the bits and pieces of conversation he was able to pick up through the fabric of my jacket, some of the foggy places in his investigation started to come clear. And as Jake and I emerged from Harriman’s office onto Central Park West, Ace unconscious between us, the street was a sea of squad cars. Detective Salvo stood waiting on the sidewalk, leaning against his unmarked Caprice.

“Ms. Jones, Mr. Jacobsen, good to see you both healthy. Who’s your friend?”

“He’s my brother,” I answered defensively. He was, after all, and always would be, blood or no blood.

He nodded. “Mr. Jacobsen, I’m going to ask you to place your weapon on the ground and kick it out of your reach, please. Then place your hands on your head.”

Jake did as he was told, while I held the bulk of Ace’s weight. Two paramedics emerged from an ambulance that I hadn’t noticed when we first stepped out into the night. I released Ace to them and they placed him on the gurney.

“Is he hurt?” one of them asked.

“Yes,” I answered. “I don’t know. He’s high, I think.”

I looked down at my brother and just felt so sad for him. Then I glanced up to see Detective Salvo watching me. “Rough couple of days, Ridley,” he said quietly.

“How did you find us?” I asked.

He held up his cell phone. “Nice work,” he said. “It wasn’t an accident, was it?”

I shook my head.

“You two need to come with me,” he said. “We have a lot of talking to do.”

“Are you arresting us?” asked Jake.

“Not at the moment. But it’s in your best interest, I think, to cooperate. Otherwise I can do that. I’ll charge you with the murder of Christian Luna, Mr. Jacobsen. And Ridley, I’ll charge you with aiding and abetting. Shall I read you your rights?”

I looked at Jake and shook my head. “We’ll come with you,” I said.

“Good thinking,” said Detective Salvo.

“How much of that did you hear?” I asked, realizing suddenly what I’d done by making that call.

“Enough,” he said as he led me to his car, Jake right behind us.

“Then you know I can’t tell you anything.”

“I heard enough that you don’t have to,” he said.

I thought, If Detective Salvo knows everything I’m not supposed to tell the police, then what’s going to happen to Ace, to my parents? I stopped walking then. I felt as if I had lead in my chest, thinking about my brother who wasn’t my brother and my parents who weren’t my parents and what was going to happen to all of us because of the choices
I
made. I thought about my uncle Max and what he’d tried to do…and what he’d done instead. I thought about him dying, knowing the horrible consequences of his good intentions. None of it could be undone. Justice would not be served. Where was the balance I had always believed in? And then, just for a second, I
did
wish I had never stepped in front of that van. With all my heart and soul, I wished for ignorance again.

I was suddenly having trouble taking in air and all I could hear was my own labored breathing. I heard Jake say something. Detective Salvo’s voice sounded worried and far away. There was a light show of stars in front of my eyes, white noise in my brain, and then everything tilted and went black.

I regained consciousness for a second in the back of an ambulance, my head pounding. I reached up to touch it and felt a bandage. My fingers came back damp with blood. Jake was there. Detective Salvo, too.

“What happened?” I said. But I didn’t stay awake long enough to hear the answer.

In the hallway of a busy hospital, young people in green scrubs rushed back and forth. I could hear a voice over the intercom, smell bandages and disinfectant. Jake was holding my hand, looking at me. He looked so worried. “What’s wrong?” I asked him.

“You passed out,” he said. “I didn’t catch you in time and you hit your head on the sidewalk hard. You have a…”

But then he faded away.

When I woke up again it was dark and quiet. I could hear the soft beeping of a heart monitor and it took me a second to realize that it was
my
heart being monitored. Scratchy, sterile-smelling sheets, hard mattress, metal guardrail. Light shone in from beneath the door, and as my eyes adjusted, I saw a form sitting in a chair across from me. I’d recognize him anywhere.

“Dad?”

“Ridley,” he answered, getting up quickly and walking over to me. “How are you, lullaby?”

“My head hurts.”

He placed a gentle hand on my forehead. “I bet,” he said.

“What happened?”

“You passed out, and before anyone could catch you, you hit your head on the sidewalk. Gave yourself a nasty concussion and lost a lot of blood.”

I tried to remember falling and, in doing so, all the events of the day came back to me in a rush: the diner windows exploding in a shower of glass, the church, finding Ace missing, Alexander Harriman’s office.

“Dad,” I said, releasing a sob. “So many lies.”

My father sighed and pulled a chair over to the bed. He sat heavily and rested his head on one hand. When he lifted his face to me again, I could see that he’d been crying. The sight of it frightened me. The face I’d always looked to for comfort was shattered.

“Dad. Who am I?” I tried to sit up and realized by the warbling of the room that it wasn’t going to happen.

He shook his head slowly. “You’re Ridley. You’re
my
Ridley. You’ll
always
be that.”

There was truth in this that I recognized. But it wasn’t the whole truth and we both knew it. “No more lies, Dad.”

“It’s not a lie,” he said, nearly yelling. “You couldn’t
be
any more my daughter.”

I knew if he could, he’d try to pull his cloak of denial over us both. But it was no use. It didn’t fit anymore. I’d outgrown it.

“I am Ridley, Dad. But I wasn’t always Ridley. Once I was Jessie Amelia Stone, daughter of Teresa Stone. A woman now dead because of Project Rescue.”

He looked at me blankly for a second. There were lines around his eyes I hadn’t seen before. The skin on his hands looked dry and papery. They were the hands of an old man. He rested his head in them.

“No,” he said through his fingers.

“Did you know, Dad? Did you know what they were doing?”

He shook his head vigorously. “No,” he said firmly. “I told you everything I knew about Project Rescue. If they did what that detective thinks they did, I had no idea. You know me, Ridley. You know I would never do that. Don’t you?”

I didn’t know if I could believe him. That was the worst thing about all of this. There was no one I could trust. Everyone had an agenda, good or bad, a reason to hide the truth from me.

“Then how did you wind up with me, Dad? If you didn’t know, how did I become Ridley Jones?”

He looked at me with profound sadness. It mimicked perfectly the expression I’d seen on Max’s face the night my father closed the study door on him.

The door to my hospital room pushed open then and in came my mother. She looked stronger than my father, more reserved. Her eyes were dry and she wore a faint, sad smile on her face. I didn’t know how long she had been listening and I didn’t know how much she knew to begin with. I looked at her and thought of the butterfly at Union Square. She came to stand by my bed and put a cool, dry hand to my head, as if in some motherly instinct to check my temperature.

“It’s time, Ben. Ridley’s right. No more lies.” She kept her eyes on my face but I couldn’t read her expression. All I could think was how different she was from me. There was nothing of my face in hers.

“No, Grace. We made a promise,” he almost whispered.

“Max is dead,” my mother said harshly, the word
dead
like a stone that she threw. My father looked startled by her tone. “I don’t want to keep this secret anymore. It’s caused too much damage already. If we’d have been honest from the beginning, Ridley would never have been vulnerable to this kind of nightmare in the first place.”

My father seemed to sink down in his chair. He shook his head slowly.

“Maybe you’re right,” he said.

thirty-one

I thought they were going to tell me about Project Rescue, that they’d colluded in Max’s plan, had been a part of it in some way. I thought they were going to tell me how I was taken from Teresa Stone and that they bought me and raised me as their own. I thought they’d tell me all the reasons why it was okay, why I was better off for the way things had been. But those weren’t the secrets they’d kept.

“First, Ridley, I want you to understand that your father had nothing to do with Project Rescue,” said my mother. “I don’t care what that private detective says. You have to believe that he would never knowingly be a party to abduction and murder, no matter what. He may have treated those children, he may have noted the potential for abuse, but he would never be an accessory to such a scheme.”

I didn’t say anything. I wanted to believe her. And it didn’t mesh with anything I knew about my father. But it was hard to imagine that he didn’t have at least some idea what Project Rescue was all about. Then, of course, there was the fact that both of them had lied to me for my entire life. I just wasn’t as certain of them, their beliefs, their judgments, as I had been a week ago.

“Ridley.” My mother wanted me to agree with her. So I nodded my head, just so she would go on. “That’s not how you came to us.”

“Then how?”

“There was always a parade of women through Max’s life, and at first no one thought Teresa Stone was any different. A pretty young woman who worked at the reception desk in Max’s Manhattan office; it was only a matter of time before he took notice of her and asked her out. And of course, she would say yes. No one could resist Max, his charm, his money, the way he had of making a girl see stars.

“Truth be told, I never even bothered to remember their names most of the time. I think Teresa was the only girl, other than Esme, that he saw more than once.”

“I knew she was different right away,” my father interjected. “There was a goodness to her that attracted Max, a decency. She wasn’t like the others.”

My mother gave him a look that told him he’d interrupted her. “Sorry,” he said.

They saw her first at a Christmas party, then he brought her to dinner at my parents’ house; a while later he brought her to a performance of
La Bohème
at the Met and they all had dinner afterward at “21.”

“She was quiet,” my mother remembered, “clearly intimidated by the evening. The box seats at the Met, Max’s special treatment at ‘21.’ I don’t know; I liked that about her. She didn’t take it for granted or have the usual air of pampered entitlement that so many of Max’s friends seemed to have.” She leaned heavily on the word
friends,
effectively communicating her disdain.

“Anyway, we thought, Well, maybe this is it. A
real
girlfriend; not one he’s hired—literally or figuratively.” My mother always has been a bit catty. “But then she was gone. We didn’t see her again. I asked about her, though that was a big no-no with Max. He said they didn’t share the same interests…or something vague like that. But it was more than that. You and I have talked about it, Ridley.”

I remembered our conversation about Esme and the things my mother had told me about Max then.

“A man like Max,” my father said, “so broken and lonely inside from all those years of abuse, from the things he’d endured and seen, can’t really love well. He was smart enough to know it. It’s why he never married.”

I thought of Max’s parade of call girls, his aura of loneliness, the way he always looked at my mother and father with that strange mixture of love and envy. The misshapen pieces of my life, the ones I had always ignored, were fitting themselves together.

“What are you telling me, Dad? That he knew Teresa Stone and allowed her child to be taken from her, anyway?”

My parents exchanged a look.

“Not exactly,” my mother said, looking down at her fingernails.

I managed to push myself upright with great difficulty. My father jumped up to help me. My head felt like a helium balloon; the room had an unpleasant spin to it.

“Max and Teresa went their separate ways,” my mother said. “Eventually she left the office, went on to other employment. And I never saw her again.” She released a heavy sigh and walked over to the window.

They were stalling. But I didn’t push. I’m not sure I was any more eager for them to get to the point than they were.

“But a couple of years later, she showed up at the Little Angels clinic with a baby. A little girl, almost two,” my father said. “I remembered her, but she didn’t remember me. I didn’t want to embarrass her, so I didn’t say anything about my relationship to Max. Over the next few months, there were incidents that caused me some alarm.”

“He broke Jessie’s arm. Christian Luna.”

My father nodded. “So you know.”

“He told me before he was killed.” I fought back tears and a wave of fatigue.

My father nodded with a heavy frown. “I had a conversation with her,” he said. “She promised me that Luna wouldn’t have access to her any longer and I let the incident go.”

“But you mentioned it to Max?”

My father shook his head. “No. I didn’t. Couldn’t have. It would have violated her doctor-patient confidentiality.”

“But he found out somehow,” I said.

“I don’t know, Ridley.” He shrugged, looked away from me. “All I know is that he showed up at our house a few weeks later. With little Jessie Stone.” He paused, put a hand on my arm. “With you.”

“With me?”

“Ridley,” my father said, his voice hoarse and his eyes getting glassy. “I’m not your biological father; that much you know. But neither is Christian Luna. He may have believed he was. Possibly Teresa led him to believe it.”

I shook my head. “Then who?”

“Ridley, honey,” my mother said, standing. “You’re Max’s daughter.”

I looked at her and saw that she was telling the truth. I heard Max’s voice in my head.
Ridley, you might be the only good I’ve ever done.
And I started to cry because I finally knew what he meant.

Max came to them late in the evening, after midnight and unannounced. He came with a little girl in his arms. His daughter, he told them, by a woman he hadn’t seen in years. The little girl clung to him, wept quietly, her dark eyes wide, taking in all the unfamiliar sights and sounds.

“Oh, my God. This is Teresa Stone’s little girl,” my father said, taking her from Max’s arms. “I’ve treated her at the clinic.”

Max looked at him, his face blank, a sheen of sweat on his forehead. “You knew I had a daughter?”

“No, of course not,” he said. “I didn’t realize she was
your
daughter, Max.”

Max drifted into the kitchen, rubbing his temples with his hands. He sat at the table. Little Jessie pulled at my father’s earlobe, made a light cooing noise.

“Something terrible has happened to Teresa. She’s dead, Ben. Murdered in her home.” His voice was little more than a whisper. The little girl started to cry and my mother took her into her arms, brought her into the other room to comfort her.

“What? When?” my father wanted to know, shocked.

“What difference does it make?” Max snapped.

“What difference does it make?” my father repeated, incredulous. “Max. What’s going on?”

“I can’t raise this child, Ben. You know that.”

“Wait a minute, Max. Let’s go back. How did you get this little girl?”

“The police called me. Teresa had my name on the birth certificate. I picked her up from Child Services a little while ago.”

“But that was a lie,” I said, interrupting my father. “Teresa Stone was murdered that night and Jessie was never found.”

He nodded. “You’re right. Max wasn’t on the original birth certificate. She’d left the father’s name blank. There was no way the police would have known to call Max. But by the time we realized that, it was too late.”

“What do you mean too late?”

My father shook his head. “We took you from Max that night. We accepted what he told us without question.”

“We’d been trying for eighteen months for a second child and your arrival just seemed like the answer to our prayers,” said my mother. She was sitting across the room from me now. It was dark; I couldn’t see her face.

“So when you figured out that Max had lied, that Jessie was a missing child, that no one knew who’d murdered her mother, you just kept quiet?”

“We fell in love with you right away. And by the time we realized that there was so much Max hadn’t told us, we’d already bent some rules,” my father said. He almost looked sheepish.

“What kind of rules?”

“With the help of some of Max’s connections, we processed you like a Project Rescue baby, like a child who’d been abandoned without documents. We created a new birth certificate and Social Security card.”

“And that’s how you became Ridley Jones,” said my mother with a smile, as if she were telling me the happy ending to a bedtime story.

“And Jessie Stone disappeared,” I said. “Until I saved Justin Wheeler from his fate.”

Nothing about their story rang true. There was a false note to it that could not be denied and there were so many questions. Like how could you just take a child in the night from your friend and ask no questions? Didn’t it seem like a huge coincidence that Jessie, Max’s daughter, would wind up being treated by Dr. Benjamin Jones, Max’s best friend? If Ben didn’t realize Jessie was Max’s daughter and Max’s name wasn’t on that birth certificate, how did Max find out about Jessie? And did he arrange to have Jessie taken that night? Did he arrange to have Teresa Stone murdered? But these questions seemed to dam up against one another, and for a minute I couldn’t bring myself to ask them. The answers were so potentially ugly.

They each had their eyes on me. And I wasn’t sure what to say to them.

“So you took this child, promised Max you’d raise her as your own. You falsified documents so that you could keep her true identity a secret from her for the rest of her life. You never asked any questions about what happened to her mother, how she died?”

“Well, we all thought Christian Luna had killed her. He was on the run. The child had no family except for Max.” He ended with a shrug. “What would have happened to her if we hadn’t taken her? She would have gone into the system. Been adopted by strangers.”

“If Max had kept her, she would have been raised by nannies,” said my mother.

They’d had a lifetime to justify their actions to themselves. Not that I was inclined to judge them. How could I? If they’d lied and broken the law, if they’d looked away from everything suspicious about my arrival at their doorstep, they’d done it for Jessie. They’d done it for me.

“Why not just tell me the truth? Why not just raise me as an adopted child? People do it every day; it’s not exactly taboo.”

“Max was adamant that you never know he was your father. He never wanted you to know that he didn’t have what it took to raise you. He never wanted you to think he didn’t want you.”

“And he never wanted me to start looking into my past. He never wanted me to know what happened to Teresa Stone. And he never wanted me asking any questions about Project Rescue.”

“Project Rescue doesn’t have anything to do with this,” my father said sternly.

I don’t know how he could say that. But I could see that he believed it. That he needed to believe it. But the first of many ugly questions pushed its way through the dirt.

“If Max’s name wasn’t on the birth certificate and the police never called him, how did he wind up with Jessie that night?” I asked.

They looked at each other and then at me.

“Did he have something to do with her murder?” I asked, my voice cracking.

“No,” said my father. “Of course not.”

“Then how? How did he know about me? How did he wind up with me that night?”

They were both silent. Then my mother spoke, quietly, almost in a whisper.

“We never asked those questions, Ridley,” she said. “What would have been the point?”

Denial: my family heritage. If you don’t ask the questions, the truth will never inconvenience you.

I tried to process the information but my exhausted brain wouldn’t allow it. Ben and Grace weren’t my parents. Max was my father. My mother had been brutally murdered. Possibly, maybe probably, Max had something to do with it. And I had been more or less abducted. My birth certificate and Social Security card were falsified documents. I got it. But the information was having no impact on me whatsoever.

You’d expect me to have raged, lambasted them for all the lies and all the mistakes—
crimes
—they’d committed. But I didn’t do any of that. I slipped back down on the bed. I didn’t have a tear left in me. I was numb. Maybe it was the painkillers. I wondered if I could get some more. Like a lifetime supply.

I looked at the people before me and tried to imagine that they weren’t my parents. It was impossible to comprehend. It made me think that it’s not blood that binds us, it’s experience. Teresa Stone was a stranger to me, a sad stranger who’d met a heinous and unjust end. I felt a pain in my chest for her and all that she had endured. But she was as distant and faded as the old photograph that had started all of this. As for Max, I would need some time to recast him as my father, my failed father. He was the good uncle, a man I loved dearly all my life. Incredibly, I couldn’t muster any anger at him for the things I knew he’d done and for the things I suspected. Not then anyway; there would be time for that. Max, for all his joviality, operated from a place of terrible pain; for all his wealth, he was an emotional pauper. Can you judge that? Feel contempt for what a person doesn’t have? Well, maybe you can. But I don’t have it in me.

“What about Ace?”

“What about him?” my father said.

“Is he your son?”

My father nodded. “Ace is our son, our biological child.”

I thought about it a second. “Does he know I’m not your biological child?”

My father nodded. “He overheard your uncle and me talking one day. We were careless and he got an earful. But the problems with Ace started long before that day. In fact, I think he was in my office trying to steal some money when Max and I entered and shut the door. He hid behind the desk and heard everything.”