Beautiful Lies

saw her there on the floor. Her eyes were open, blood on her mouth, her neck twisted in a really bad way. The way she stared at me, like it was my fault…It was my fault; if I’d been a better man, she’d be alive. Maybe we’d be a family.”

He stopped again, his breathing ragged. He covered his face with his hands and spoke through his fingers.

“I looked for you, but you were gone. And so I ran. That night I took money I had saved and kept under my bed. I hopped a Greyhound to El Paso and went to Ciudad Juarez in Mexico. I got a flight from there to Puerto Rico. I’d never been, but that’s where my grandparents were from and I still had a second cousin there. I stayed on; been working in his garage as a mechanic all these years.”

I shook my head. The story was just simple enough and just complicated enough to be the truth. But what was I supposed to do with it?

“So what happened, Mr. Luna? What made you think of me? What made you come back here?”

“I think of you every day,” he said, reaching out his hand to me. I moved away from him. “Every day. You don’t believe that, right? But it’s true.”

He had turned those imploring eyes on me again, but I couldn’t give him a touch or a look of compassion. I just couldn’t.

“Okay,” I said. “So why did you come back now?”

“I saw you on CNN,” he said, a wide smile suddenly lighting his face at the memory. “I saw your picture when you saved that kid in the street. Your beautiful face…I knew it right away. So much like your mother, so much like her, I thought I was seeing a ghost. All these years, I didn’t know if you were alive or dead. And then I saw you. It was like the answer to every prayer I’d ever had. I had to come and find you, see you alive and healthy.”

I didn’t know what to say. A cool numbness had washed over me. He was a stranger to me. I was a stranger to myself. What could we possibly have to offer each other? What good could come of this?

“Whose house are you staying in?” I asked. “Who’s Amelia Mira?”

He looked at me strangely. I guess it was a weird question, considering everything else I could be asking him. But I wanted to know. Jessie had been given her name and I wanted to know who she was.

“It belonged to my mother, your grandmother. She died last year, left it to me in her will. The city will take it soon, I guess. I can’t afford the taxes.”

“She knew where you were?”

He nodded.

Jessie Amelia Stone, given the name of a grandmother she never knew by a father who had wanted to have her aborted, then abused her and possibly killed her mother. Poor Jessie, I thought, and realized I was crying.

He did something awful then. He slid off the bench and went on his knees before me, took my hands in his. I have never felt so ashamed or awkward.

“Mr. Luna, please…” I bent down and took him by the forearm, tried to get him to stand up.

“Jessie, I don’t want anything from you. I just wanted you to know me. I wanted to see you in person.”

“Please,” I said again but stopped, not sure how to go on. He had so much feeling for me; I could see he was sincere, that he really believed I was his Jessie. I just wasn’t sure I believed it.

“I just don’t get it, Mr. Luna,” I said, standing and walking away from him, leaving him kneeling on the ground. “Why did you run? Why didn’t you look for Jessie?”

He raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. “I wouldn’t have had a chance. All those arrests, the restraining order…who would have believed that I didn’t kill her?”

I sighed and shook my head again.

“You don’t believe me, do you?” he said quietly.

“I don’t know what to believe.”

He stood and moved to me suddenly, grabbed me by the shoulders, and the look in his eyes was one of sheer desperation.

“Please, Jessie. Tell me you believe I didn’t kill your mother.”

I didn’t know what to tell him then. How could he expect me to assimilate all this information and then form a judgment? That’s why he’d come, I realized, for absolution. But I wasn’t sure I was the one to give it to him. It wasn’t for me that he’d returned; it was for himself. Maybe he’d realized his mistakes, maybe even atoned for them in some way, but he was the same selfish man who’d abused Teresa Stone and their daughter, Jessie. He was possibly even a murderer; in the least, he’d run like a coward when he thought he might be accused. Now he’d come to shatter my life in the hope that he might be forgiven, finally, after all these years. What was I supposed to think? How could I even believe anything this man said?

I sat back down on the bench and he sat beside me. I kept waiting for some feeling, as if my DNA might recognize its genesis and send some signal to my brain and my heart. But I wasn’t certain of anything. I felt like a kite with its line cut; I was drifting away higher and farther from earth without direction. It dawned on me that the freedom I’d always craved hadn’t really been freedom at all but a kind of rooted independence. This was freedom and it felt like danger.

I opened my mouth to speak and even now I’m not sure what I would have said. Because one minute I was looking at him and the next minute he sagged beside me as though his bones had turned to Jell-O. I grabbed his shoulder to keep him from falling in my lap, and when I pushed him back against the bench, his head lolled to one side and I could see a perfect red circle between his eyes.

Violence is soft and quiet. Or it can be. In the movies, shots ring loud and punches land with a hard crack. People die with a scream or a moan. But Christian Luna’s death was silent. He left the world without a sound.

I shook him. “Mr. Luna? Are you all right?”

Which was a pretty stupid question, but what can I say, shock is the stepsister of denial. It cushions the blow to your psyche when really fucked-up things happen. I felt hands on me then.

“Ridley, holy shit. What the fuck happened?”

“What?” I said, turning around and seeing Jake. “I don’t know.”

He was pulling me but I was holding on to Christian Luna. My father. Maybe. Jake pried my hands off of him while looking around him, I guess trying to figure out where the shot came from. Then he was dragging me back toward the car. I looked back to see Christian Luna tipped on his side, still on the bench. The full gravity of what had happened was slowly starting to dawn. I felt bile rising in my throat.

“Shouldn’t we—” I said. I was going to say “call the police,” but I’m not sure I ever finished the sentence because in the next second I was leaning over the railing edging the park and puking onto the grass. I had the sense of Jake sheltering me with his body, as if he was afraid of more gunfire. He tugged at me, looking behind us. I managed to get moving again.

“The police?” I managed finally. But it came out sounding more like a question.

“We have to get the fuck out of here right now,” said Jake, pulling me close to him with his arm around my shoulder. “Walk fast. But try to look normal.”

This seemed funny to me and I started to laugh. He smiled, too. But it was fake, forced. He was trying to look normal and it wasn’t working. The laughter built on itself until I was laughing so hard that I thought I was going to pee in my pants. Then the laughter shifted. Luckily we were in the car by then. Jake was strapping me in and then suddenly I was sobbing with such force that it doubled me over and made my throat hurt. I’ve never, before or since, felt as powerless against anything as I did against that sobbing. It was like something alive trying to get out of me.

“Ridley,” he said, moving his eyes quickly between me and the road, his voice desperate. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

He kept saying it over and over again as if he thought he could make it true through repetition. At 186th he pulled the car off the highway and drove up the drive that led to Fort Tryon Park. It was closed but we pulled into the parking lot and Jake grabbed me, held on to me hard while I buried my face into his shoulder. He held me like that, breathing assurances into my ear. And eventually the sobbing subsided and I was left weakened, my sinuses so swollen that I couldn’t breathe out of my nose. I sagged against him.

“What happened back there, Ridley?” he asked when I’d quieted. “Did you see where the shot came from?”