Beautiful Lies

was breathless in my admiration, wondering how you came to grow up to be like that.

“Really, Max,” I heard my mother say from the kitchen, which was where I’d been headed. I knew that tone, heavy as a bag of stones with the weight of her disapproval. “To bring one of them here. To Ace’s party. How could you?”

“I didn’t want to come alone,” he said, something in his tone I didn’t recognize.

“Bullshit, Max.”

“What do you want from me, Grace, huh? Stop being such a fucking prude.”

I didn’t have time to be shocked that my mother and Uncle Max were talking to each other this way because suddenly my father appeared.

“There’s my girl,” he said, picking me up though we both knew I was getting too heavy for him. He carried me into the kitchen. Maybe he didn’t see how my mother and Max quickly looked away from each other, carefully morphing their angry expressions into happier ones.

“What are you up to in here?” said my father jovially. “Not putting the moves on my wife again, are you, Max?”

They all laughed at the absurdity of such a notion. And then it was time for cake, which naturally wiped the event completely from my seven-year-old mind.

When the walls of the apartment started to close in on me, I showered, dressed, and left the building. I know what people think about New York City, but I’d never felt unsafe here, not for a minute, until that day. Zelda’s warning about the man who’d been looking for me came back to me. I realized that I’d told neither Jake nor Ace about him and I wasn’t really sure why. I sometimes had a tendency to treat worrisome things like bumblebees, a kind of ignore-them-and-they’ll-go-away philosophy. Maybe admitting that someone was now physically seeking me out, as opposed to just sending mail, ratcheted the problem up to a level where it couldn’t be ignored. It elevated the threat vector, and I wasn’t ready for the consequences, the first of which would be to have my freedom limited. And you know how I felt about that.

I pushed my way through the doors of one of the clinics where my father and Zachary volunteered their services. This one was in midtown; the other was out in New Jersey. My father was putting in more time at these places the closer he came to retirement. Usually at the beginning of the week, he was in Jersey, toward the end in the city, so I had a pretty good idea that I would find him there today. I know you’re thinking, Didn’t she just say she didn’t want to see her parents? It was true, I didn’t want to. But my father seems to have a magnetic pull in times of crisis. As much as I swear up and down that I’m not going to call or go to see him when things are bothering me, it’s as if he somehow knows and flips a switch somewhere in the universe, magically compelling me to pick up the phone, or show up at his office.

“I’m looking for Dr. Jones. Is he in today?” I asked the young woman working the desk. She had glowing cafe au lait skin and deep black eyes ridged with lush lashes. I’d never seen her before, though I’d been to the clinic a number of times to visit my dad or Zack. But I wasn’t surprised; there had always been a high turnover there.

“Do you have an appointment?” she asked, not looking up from the file opened in front of her.

“I’m his daughter.”

She glanced up at me and smiled. “Oh, you’re Zack’s fiancee?” she said with a cheerful recognition in her voice.

Something about this annoyed me. We’d ended our relationship more than six months ago now and I’d never accepted his proposal. So, technically, I had never been Zack’s fiancee. Before I could even respond:

“And didn’t you just save that kid a couple of weeks ago? I saw your picture in the paper.”

“Uh, yeah,” I said. “That’s me.”

She looked at me with wonderment in her eyes. “Wow, nice to meet you,” she said. “I’m Ava.”

“Nice to meet you,” I said, feeling impossibly awkward. It was too late to say, “By the way, I’m not engaged to Zack. Really, I never was…it’s a long story.” So I just clammed up and looked away from her.

“Just a second,” she said, still looking at me. “I’ll page him for you. Have a seat.”

I found a chair among the crying babies and toddlers with hacking coughs and runny noses, hoping that my immune system was up to task. A woman breathed heavily beside me, sounding like she had gauze in her lungs.

“Ridley,” called Ava after a few minutes. “You can go back. He’s in the last office.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“You know,” said Ava as she buzzed me through the door to the right of her desk, “you don’t look like your dad.”

I tried for a smile. “I’ve heard that before.”

“Your father’s a saint. You know that? You kids are lucky, so damn lucky. Don’t tell your mother I swear in front of you, okay?”

Uncle Max had said that so many times, it lost its meaning. “You don’t know,” he would say. “You don’t know what it’s like to have a father that doesn’t love you.” And then he’d get that look, the look he had when my mother was around. As if the world were a prom and he was the only one without a date.

I guess Uncle Max may have been the loneliest person I’ve ever known, except Ace. When I was a kid, I sensed it without completely understanding it. As I got older, I recognized that he had an idea of himself as being alone in the world. But I still didn’t quite get why he felt that way; he had my parents, he had Ace and me, he had his parade of Barbie dolls. But I understand now. Loneliness is a condition, an illness. He carried it with him and it infected his life. He could treat it by spoiling us, by loving my parents, with his “girlfriends,” with booze. But there was no cure. His disease? It was terminal.

“Ridley,” said my father with a sigh. He gave me a pained, glancing look from the corner of his eye. “You’ve caused us some worry.”

“Sorry,” I said, closing the door behind me. It was an examining room, really. It smelled, well, you know the smell—Band-Aids and disinfectant. Flickering fluorescents, bad Formica floors speckled with the most awful array of colors: mustard, olive, salmon. Spotless avocado countertops, glass jars filled with cotton balls and tongue depressors still in their paper wrappers.

My father took me in his arms even though I could tell he was angry with me. I loved him for that. My mother, when she was mad, wouldn’t even look you in the eye, as though she had ceased to acknowledge your existence until she had forgiven you. I pulled away after a second and pushed myself up onto the examining table, the wrinkle of the tissue paper beneath me reminding me of a thousand visits to rooms just like this for various reasons. And they all seemed just like the same room. Well, not exactly the same. In spite of its cleanliness, there was a seediness, a run-down quality to this room that identified it as a clinic examining room versus some of the opulent private offices I’d been in. It depressed me. It was sterile and clean but ugly, the decor outdated, with hairline cracks in the wall, water stains on the ceiling. As if poor people didn’t deserve for things to be modern and pretty. A yellowed poster with ripped corners was taped to the wall: the human musculature system. Pretty. The guy’s face looked quite calm, considering he’d been skinned.

“Why did you send Zack to check up on me?” I said.

My father pulled an innocent face. “I didn’t, Ridley. I wouldn’t.”

I was quiet, kept my eyes on him.

“I asked him to call,” he said finally. “That’s it. I thought maybe you’d talk to him.”

“Well, he came to my place and let himself in. I wasn’t happy about that, Dad.”

“I’d say he’s learned his lesson,” answered my father, averting his eyes and sitting on a green vinyl chair with metal legs. He leaned back and crossed his arms across his belly. He heaved a sigh.

“God,” I said, pissed and a little embarrassed. “What, did he run and tell you everything like a little snitch?”

Did I realize that I sounded like a twelve-year-old? Yes, and I disliked it. But I guess it was part of a problem that I was just beginning to understand. When my parents were around, I was a twelve- year-old. And guess what? That’s the way they liked it.

“Are you seeing someone, Ridley?” my father asked, forcing his voice to be light and inquiring.

“Dad. That’s not what I’m here to talk about.”

“No?”

“No, Dad. I want to talk about Uncle Max.”