Beautiful Lies

But I couldn’t answer him. I felt like he was talking to me through water. “I don’t know,” I said finally. “I don’t know what happened.”

I heard him say something about seeing a shadow on the roof of the building across the street. But I was caught in some kind of mental loop, where I kept seeing Christian Luna as his head rolled back, the bullet hole perfect and red on the middle of his forehead. That moment played over and over.

After a while, he started to drive and we took the Henry Hudson back downtown. I watched the twinkling lights of the city, the speeding red and white blur of taillights and headlights rush past us. A kind of numbness had settled over me and I felt like all my limbs were filled with sand, and that my neck didn’t have the strength to support my head.

“What’s happening to me?” I wanted to know.

“I’m sorry, Ridley,” he said oddly. “I’m so sorry.”

I didn’t even think to ask him what he meant, why he was sorry.

“I should have taken better care of you, protected you better than that,” he said. I wanted to tell him it wasn’t his fault, but the words never made it from my head to my mouth.

We went back to the East Village and to Jake’s apartment. He put me in his bed and lay beside me, stroking my hair. When he thought I had fallen asleep, he left the room. I could hear that he’d turned on NY1 News and I knew he was waiting for the broadcast about Christian Luna. And I fell asleep wondering, Why didn’t he want to call the police?

sixteen

When I woke up, Jake was sleeping beside me, bare-chested but still wearing his jeans. His arm was draped over my abdomen and he wore a slight frown, as if his dreams were troubling him. I smiled, still in that shady place before sleep clears and the consciousness of your life returns. He shifted in his sleep and the features on his face softened, the frown faded. In the dim light he looked, for a moment, peaceful. And I realized what a contrast it was to the dark intensity I normally saw on his face. The thought reminded me that I had so many questions about Jake, and then the events of last night started filing back, flashing before my eyes. Nausea seized me as guilt and grief and fear did battle in my stomach. I lay there, clutching my middle for I don’t know how long, trying to make sense of what happened last night.

I slipped from the bed and went out into the living room. The sun was barely making its debut over the horizon and the light that filtered in through the window was a milky gray. I flipped on the television set and turned the volume down low. It was still tuned to NY1 News, the local cable news channel that broadcasts twenty-four hours. I watched a full cycle of news stories: A dog got hit by a car on Second Avenue, was shot by a cop trying to put it out of its misery, was put in a freezer, and lived. Now, that’s a survivor. Paulie “The Fist” Umbruglia was arrested on charges of fraud and tax evasion. I watched as he was walked from a squad car in handcuffs, flanked by two burly uniformed officers. I did a double take when I saw someone I recognized on the screen. Following behind Paulie was my uncle Max’s lawyer, Alexander Harriman. A frost of thick white hair, weekends-in-the-Bahamas tan, glittering Rolex, five-thousand-dollar suit, a smile that could charm you to blushing but that could freeze and become menacing in a heartbeat. My uncle Max had loved him. He always said, “Ridley, you want your lawyer to have retractable claws, a titanium backbone, and flexible morals.”

I’d met Harriman many times at charity functions, dinners at Uncle Max’s, even once at a New Year’s Eve party my parents threw. As I mentioned, Harriman had a pretty colorful list of clients, but, as with so many of the gray areas in my life, I’d never actually dwelled on it too much. After all, the only time I’d dealt with him personally was to discuss the money my uncle had left me. That was a quick, amicable meeting where he turned over a check to me and offered his assistance in managing the money. I told him that I’d already arranged for it, but thanks.

Something about him had always made me cringe. Maybe it was Max’s description of him, which always brought to mind the Terminator, or maybe it was my parents’ unspoken distaste for him. My heart always beat a little faster around him, and I always was a little uncomfortable beneath his gaze. As I left his office that day, he said, “Ridley, your uncle Max loved you very much. He wanted to be certain, if anything ever happened to him, that you could always come to me for help. If you ever need anything, have any questions about the law, any legal issues, really anything, Ridley, don’t hesitate.” I shook his hand and thanked him for his concern, secretly wondering how rock bottom you’d have to be to call on Alexander Harriman for help. Sitting on Jake’s couch, I wondered if I still had his business card in my Rolodex. I was feeling pretty rock bottom, and thinking that a titanium backbone and retractable claws might be of some use after you’d fled the scene of a murder, because that’s precisely what we’d done.

As the local news stories rolled on, with no mention of Christian Luna, I tried to think of a good reason why we’d run. If it had just been a matter of getting ourselves out of harm’s way, we could have stopped and called the police when we were safe. But we didn’t do that. We watched a man get shot and then we left him there on a park bench.

I took in the cold, industrial room, the absence of personal objects. I thought about the man sleeping in the bedroom. Like I said, I felt as though I knew Jake on some instinctive level that transcended my ignorance of his history. But as I sat on his futon and looked around the room for some sense of him, I felt a growing unease. I mean, think about your own living room. Imagine a stranger came into your home and sat on your couch. What would the stranger be able to deduce about you from the things she saw? Aren’t there at least some clues about your likes and dislikes, pictures of the people you love and value, a magazine on the coffee table…something? Jake’s living room offered nothing. It was sterile like a hotel room, had the air of transience. It felt as though he could walk out of that space and never come back, never think on the objects left there again. For some reason this disturbed me suddenly. It made me realize that as much as I felt as if Jake’s essence was clear, I was equally certain that he was hiding crucial parts of himself.

His laptop sat on a slim desk in the corner of the room. In the absence of clutter, drawers to poke through, papers to rifle, it double-dog dared me to flip the lid and boot it up. I was always up for a dare, and given my circumstances I was feeling particularly bold. I padded over softly and lifted the lid, pressed the power button. It hummed to life with a couple of unpleasantly loud beeps. A screen presented itself, demanding a password. Shit. I thought on the little I knew about Jake and decided that the password wouldn’t be anything predictable. That he was likely to be fairly concerned about security. People with something to hide generally were.

“Quidam.”

I spun around to see Jake standing in the doorway.

“What?”

“The password. It’s ‘quidam.’”

He looked at me and I tried to read his expression. He didn’t seem hurt or even surprised that I was quite obviously snooping around, or trying to, in his computer files. Oddly, I didn’t feel all that embarrassed at having been caught.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“It’s from an epic work by Cyprian Kamil Norwid, a Polish romantic poet. It derives from the Latin word that means ‘someone, some human being.’ But the hero in Norwid’s ‘Quidam’ is a man looking for a place in his life, someone searching for goodness and truth. ‘He was anonymous, without a name—at all orphan, quidam.’”

I walked away from the laptop and back to the futon where I sat earlier and pulled my knees to my chest.

“Is that how you see yourself?”

He shrugged. “I suppose so. In some ways.”

He came over and sat beside me. The same shadow of sadness I’d seen cross his face, settle in his eyes for a second, or briefly pull down at the corners of his mouth seemed to find its home in his features. I could see that he wanted to reach out to touch me but wasn’t sure if it’s what I wanted. Something in the air between us had grown charged. My suspicions, I guess. They kept me from putting my arms around him and kissing all that sadness away, though that’s what my heart wanted.

“Why didn’t you want to call the police last night?” I asked.

He considered the question. “I guess I don’t have a good answer for that except that it would have tied us up