Beautiful Lies

I didn’t answer. He moved over to my bench and I turned to look at him. I didn’t move away from him this time and he didn’t reach out to try to touch me.

“If I’m Jessie, then what happened to Teresa Stone?” I said. “If you didn’t kill her, who did?”

He sighed. “I’ve been asking myself that question every day for thirty years.” More silence where he looked at me and I looked at anything else. A car sped past, subwoofers booming a dance beat into the cold night.

“I was a bad father,” he said. “And I treated your mother badly. But I didn’t kill anyone.” The youthful indignation and barely repressed rage I heard in his voice caused me to turn and examine his face. He was in his late fifties, maybe early sixties. His skin was brownish, sun damaged, marred with deep lines. He had the worn look of a hard life—bad diet, bad choices, bad outcomes. He seemed to sag beneath the weight of it all but with a kind of determination to shoulder the load regardless. In Christian Luna I had expected to find a villain, someone malicious and menacing, someone powerful with the intent and ability to hurt me. But all I saw was someone tired, someone close to defeat without the sense to cut his losses and move on.

“I tried in my way to do right, you know?” he said with that same hopeless laugh. “But I was young. So fucked up. I never had a father, so I didn’t know how to be a man.” He shook his head, remembering, and looked off into the darkness of the park.

It was an interesting admission and it led me to look at him more closely, beyond his physical features. I saw a man who’d lived with regret. Who’d learned his lessons but only after it was too late. It must be the ultimate punishment, don’t you think, to finally gain wisdom, only to realize that the consequences of your actions are irrevocable?

“I met Teresa at work; she was a secretary at a real-estate office. I was the building handyman, a millwright with the union. We both lived in Jersey, commuted on the train to and from the city. That’s where we first started to talk. I could tell the first second I saw her that she was a good girl. Sweet. Pretty. We went out a few times. I told her I loved her—but I didn’t mean it.”

I tried to imagine them, based on the picture I’d seen. Imagine what she would have looked like laughing, how she dressed. Maybe she was in love with him, thought he really loved her, too. I’m a writer and I wanted him to tell me the story the way I would have. But I didn’t think he had it in him.

“After a few dates, she let me sleep with her a couple of times. Then I lost interest. Stopped calling. You know how it goes.”

You know how it goes. I guess I do; I guess most of us have been there at one point or another. You trust someone, you share your body with that person. You think they want to share your life, that physical intimacy is just the beginning. But for the other person, the ultimate goal has been reached and the game is over. Did she cry for him? Was she lonely and hating herself when he’d gone? Did she wish she’d never met him?

He sat silent for a second, I guess waiting for some kind of verbal encouragement, but I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want anything to be easy for him, not even the telling of this story. I don’t know why I felt so selfish and mean, but I did.

“She stopped me one night when I was leaving my shift. It was late, after hours. I hadn’t seen her at work in a while. I knew when I saw her that she’d come to the city and waited in the dark just to talk to me. She told me she was pregnant.”

I tried again to imagine the scene. Maybe it was cold, a light drizzle in the air, a half-moon glowing behind clouds. Was she afraid, crying?

“Were you kind to her?” I asked hopefully.

“No,” he said, lowering his head and sticking his hands in his pockets. “I wasn’t.”

“Was she scared?”

He shook his head slowly. “She was strong when she told me. I asked her, I’m ashamed to say, how she knew it was mine. She told me she hadn’t been with anyone else. I believed her but I pretended I didn’t.” He was silent and stared at me until I was forced to look at him. The shame was so naked on his face that I looked away again in embarrassment.

“I suggested that—” he started.

“That she have an abortion?” I finished for him, forcing myself to meet his eyes again. It sounded ugly but he nodded.

“She refused. And then she said something that I never forgot. She said, ‘We don’t need anything from you. I’m just giving you a chance to be a father, to have that joy in your life.’”

He sighed again here, his eyes starting to shine. “Even though I was a shit, even though I’d mistreated her, she wanted me to have the opportunity to know you. I didn’t get it. You know? It was a concept that was beyond me then. But even so, I offered to marry her. She turned me down.”

“No kidding? After a romantic moment like that?”

He issued a kind of grunt. “Yeah. I was a real prize.”

“You must have been around some. There’s that picture. The domestic abuse calls. The restraining order.”

“What, did you hire a private investigator?”

I didn’t answer him. He nodded and looked around him.

“I didn’t call the police,” I said. “You don’t have anything to worry about.”

He smiled at me then, but there was something odd about it. Like the way you’d smile at someone who had so little knowledge that it was pointless to try to explain anything. I didn’t pay much attention to it then, but I’d remember that look later.

“I was in and out. I gave money when I could. But whenever I showed up to see you, there’d be an argument. I’d go to the apartment, start acting like an asshole. She’d ask me to leave. I’d start yelling. The cops would come and take me away. I don’t know, I was, like, all messed up about you. I loved you, shit. I couldn’t believe how beautiful you were, how the sight of your face lit up my heart. But the responsibility scared me…I was a coward. I mean…”

He paused, shaking his head as if at the stupidity of someone else. It must have seemed like another life to him, so many years had passed. And maybe he was a different man now. He didn’t seem like the kind of person he described, someone so afraid, so inadequate that he could treat the mother of his child like that.

“Then one day she left you with me. It was an emergency; she had to work and the neighbor who usually watched you was sick. So I came to the apartment and stayed with you—you were little, not even two. I wasn’t paying attention to you, and when I wasn’t looking, you pulled a glass of beer off the counter and it shattered all around you. I ran over to you and jerked you by the arm. I was mad, yeah, but I was also trying to get you away from the glass so you didn’t cut yourself.

“You started screaming and I couldn’t get you to stop. I was scared, didn’t know what to do. So I shut you in your room. The neighbor called a couple of times, left a message on the machine, ‘What’s wrong with Jessie? I never heard her cry like that.’”

He started to cry at the memory. Silently, though, not sobbing like before. “You were still screaming when Teresa came home an hour later. The neighbor called her at work and she rushed home. She could tell right away something was wrong with your arm. She rushed you to the clinic and it turned out I’d broken your arm. She took out the restraining order then. I wasn’t allowed to see you anymore.”

The night seemed to get colder. He wiped his eyes with the sleeve of his jacket. At this point I managed some compassion for him, even though, according to what he’d said, if it had been up to him, I wouldn’t be alive today. He’d abused Jessie as a child, was now ruining my life as an adult. I still wasn’t ready to admit we were one and the same, Jessie and I. Still, I did feel some pity for him as he continued.

“A couple weeks later I got drunk and went to the apartment. I was gonna bang on the door until she opened it and let me see you, see that you were okay. I got there, made some noise, but she didn’t let me in. Told me through the door that she called the police and they were on their way. I heard the sirens and took off. I drank some more and then went back a few hours later. But this time the door was open.”

He was breathing heavily now, tears still falling from his eyes as if there was no end to them, as if he’d been saving them up all these years.

“It was dark in the apartment and I knew something wasn’t right. I saw just her one sneaker lying on the floor, lying in a pool of blood. It looked black in the dark, the blood. So thick, almost fake. I flipped on the light and