touchtone keypad; it was his code for most everything—everything that I had access to, anyway.
All you could see upon entering was a panoramic view of the city. We were on the forty-fifth floor, facing west from First Avenue. You could see to New Jersey. At night the city was a blanket of stars.
“Where are we?” asked Jake.
“This is my uncle Max’s place,” I said, flipping on the lights that low-lit the art and illuminated the shelves.
“Why are we here?”
I shrugged. “I’m not sure.”
I went into Max’s office and Jake trailed behind, looking at the gallery of photos hanging on the walls. Pictures of me, Ace, my mom and dad, my grandparents. I barely noticed them as I moved to his desk, flipped on the halogen light, and opened one of the drawers. It was empty of the files I knew were once there. I flipped open two more drawers and found them empty as well. I spun in the chair and looked at the long line of low oak drawers below towering rows of shelves filled with books and some items from Africa and the Orient that my uncle had collected on his travels, as well as more pictures of us. I could see from where I sat that one of the drawers was open just a hair. I walked over and pulled it open slowly. Empty. One by one, I checked the rest of the drawers and found that they were all empty.
I sunk into a thick brown suede couch. Where were the files?
“What’s wrong?” asked Jake, sitting beside me.
“His files are all gone,” I said.
He frowned. “Since when?”
I shook my head. I didn’t know. In all the times I’d come here before and since he died, I’d never had reason to look through his files. I’d just come to lie on his couch, smell the clothes hanging in his closet, look at all the pictures of us together. Same as my mother and father did. Same as Esme had as well. Rumor was that once upon a time they’d had a white-hot love affair, Esme and Max.
“I finally wised up,” she told me. “You can’t squeeze blood from a stone. You can try, but you do all the bleeding.”
She didn’t know I knew she was talking about Max. “I’d have done anything for that man,” she’d said. She’d told me this when I asked her if she’d ever been in love with anyone but Zack’s father, a lawyer who’d died young from a heart attack when Zack was nine.
“Once,” she said. “A lifetime ago.”
My mother said that Esme would have married Max. “But your uncle couldn’t love anyone that way. Not really. He was too…” She paused, searching for the right word. “Damaged,” she said finally. “And he was smart enough to know it. Her heart was broken but eventually she met and married Russ instead. They had Zack. It was for the best. Or it would have been, if he hadn’t died so young. Tragedy. Poor Esme.”
Poor Esme. Poor Zack. Me and my uncle Max…the heartbreakers.
“Would your father have taken them?” asked Jake. It took a second before his words made it to my brain; I was deep in thought about Esme and Max.
I looked at him. “The files? Why?”
“The doorman said he was here earlier. Didn’t you talk to him this afternoon?”
I thought about this for a second. I’d had that conversation with my father and then he’d come over here and confiscated all of Max’s files? No. More likely I’d got him thinking about Max and he just came here to sit and be with his stuff, just to visit. Besides, there were drawers and drawers of files; he’d need boxes and a dolly. I told this to Jake.
“His lawyer probably took everything, then,” said Jake.
“Yeah,” I said, realizing that was probably true. “Of course.”
“Where were you just now?” he asked, dropping an arm around my shoulder.
“I was just thinking about Max. I wish you could have met him.”
A flicker of something crossed his face here and then it was gone. I wished I hadn’t said it. It gave away too much. But he made it all right a second later.
“Yeah,” he said, kissing my forehead. “Me, too.” Then: “He must have loved you a lot, Ridley.”
I looked at him and smiled. “Why do you say that?”
“Look at this place. It’s a shrine to you.”
“Not to
“Sure, yeah. There are pictures of all of you. But you’re clearly the focus.”
“No,” I said. My eyes fell on the picture on his desk. It was me at three or four, riding on his shoulders, my arms wrapped around his forehead, my own head thrown back in delight. I stood and walked into the hallway and looked at the gallery of pictures there. I’d walked that hallway so many times, seen the pictures all my life. I’d stopped seeing them, stopped looking. They were beautiful prints, some black and white, some color, all professionally matted and framed in thick gold- or silver-painted wood. Looking at them now, I saw myself at virtually every stage of my life. In the bathtub as a little girl with my mom washing my hair. My first day on a bicycle, at the beach, in the snow, prom, graduation. Certainly, in many of them my family was all around me: Ace and me on Santa’s lap, my father and me on the teacups at Disney, all of us at my school play. But Jake was right. I’d never seen it.
“No wonder Ace was jealous,” I said aloud.
“Was he?” Jake asked, coming up behind me.
“Well,” I said with a sigh, looking at the picture of Ace and me going down a pool slide together, his arms around my waist. I remembered that a second after that picture was taken we knocked heads as we splashed into the water. I wailed as Ace pulled me to the edge of the pool. “It’s okay, Ridley. I’m sorry,” he told me. “Don’t cry. They’ll make us go inside.” A few seconds later, Uncle Max lifted me out of the pool. I made his blue shirt damp with my bathing suit and dripping arms and legs as he carried me inside.
“Don’t play so rough with her, champ,” he said to my brother, not harshly, not with anger. “She’s just a little girl.”
I remember looking at Ace hanging on the edge of the pool watching us go. I tried to remember his face. Had he been angry, sad, guilty? Had he been jealous? I couldn’t recall.
“We never really talked about it,” I answered Jake. “But my father seemed to think so.” My head was starting to ache again.
“How jealous do you think he is?” he asked.
“Not jealous enough to do this, if that’s what you’re getting at,” I said, pulling the article from my pocket, unfolding it and looking at the picture yet again. Ghosts of a woman and a little girl stared back at me.
Jake didn’t answer me. He ambled toward the door. I sensed that he was uncomfortable in Max’s place, wanted to leave. I didn’t ask him why. I suppose the apartment was intimidating in its opulence. As an artist, Jake must have known that the Miro on one wall, the Dali sketch on another, were original pieces. Zack had told me once that he felt like he was hanging out in a museum when we were at Max’s place, that a guard might come and ask him to take his feet off the couch.
“But jealous enough maybe to fan the flame, to make you think there was more to this than there is?”
I looked at him. Why did everyone always suspect the worst of Ace? Just because he had an addiction, that didn’t make him a psychopath and a liar. Did it? Jake lifted his hands, I guess reacting to whatever he saw on my face.
“Just a question,” he said. And it was a valid question. If I weren’t so defensive about my brother, maybe from years of defending him to Zack, I would have seen that. But at that moment, it just made me feel like I wanted to distance myself from Jake a little bit. Nobody likes people who speak a truth you’re not prepared to examine.
On the way out, I asked Dutch if my father had taken anything with him when he left, if Dutch had helped him out with any boxes. Dutch said no, that my father had just come for a while, then left with nothing.
“Why? Something missing?” he asked with a frown.
