Such vitriol from this man I’ve loved since he was a boy and I was a little girl. My brother. I’d just loved him so long without question, I’d never realized he hated me. But maybe he just hated himself. Esme’s words about Max came back to me.
I left then and slammed the door behind me, feeling its vibration in the floor beneath my feet. I ran down the stairs and out onto the deserted street. I didn’t know which way to turn or where to go. I took a seat on a bench inside Tompkins Square by the band-shell. The universe was trying to tell me something.
I went to the West Village. I did something kind of weird first. I took the train uptown to Ninety-sixth Street and then went out onto the street and hailed a cab. I took the cab to the Barnes & Noble kitty-corner from the Met, walked in the entrance on Broadway, and then exited another door. I went to a cash machine and took out a few hundred, as much as the machine would let me. Then I hopped another cab. All the while, I kept watch for the skinhead, the cops, or anyone else who looked suspicious. I don’t think anyone followed me. But I was new at this. Jake’s warning before he fled the police was ringing in my ears, and I don’t mind telling you that I was scared, scared to the verge of tears.
I checked into a crappy hotel I’d passed a couple of times off Washington Square, one of those places that in spite of attempts to renovate still looks like what it is, a place for transients, people who want to pay for their rooms with cash in advance. The clerk was an old man wearing a denim shirt with a stain on the breast pocket that looked like ketchup. His face, as wrinkled and clenched as a fist, looked like he was wearing a rubber mask. He never even glanced at me, just took my cash and handed me a key.
“Room 203. Elevator to your right. Stairs to your left.”
He couldn’t have picked me out of a lineup, I’m sure. This was probably a job requirement, I thought. Strangely, I wanted him to look at me. I wanted him to acknowledge that I wasn’t a ghost in this world.
“Have a nice night,” I said, lingering at the desk. He didn’t say a word. Just turned his back and walked into an office.
The room was reasonably clean, but there were chipped tiles in the bathroom, water marks on the ceiling, drapes stained yellow with cigarette smoke. Lying on the bed that night, looking out the window at the streetlight’s orange glow and listening to the outside noise, with no one knowing where I was or what was happening to me, I had never been so completely alone. I felt like someone had neatly punched a hole through my chest and the wind whistled through it, making a hollow, mournful sound that kept me up the whole night.
twenty-four
Monday morning. After a sleepless night, I took a cab over to the lot where I’d left that rented Jeep and headed back out to New Jersey. On my way, I stopped at an Internet cafe on Third Avenue and, using MapQuest, got a map that led directly to Linda McNaughton’s doorstep. It’s kind of crazy, if you think about it, that any stranger can enter your address into a computer and get step-by-step directions to your house, but as it was working to my advantage at the moment, I wasn’t really in any position to complain. I used my credit card here. Didn’t have a choice. Anyway, the events of last night were starting to seem surreal and I had achieved a strange mental distance from everything. So much had happened since I’d called Linda McNaughton. My brain was taking a little break from the fact that my boyfriend (he was, wasn’t he?) had fled the police (so, for that matter, had I) and my brother hated me and obviously had for years.
Once I was on the highway, I called my father from my cell phone.
“Ridley,” he said, managing to fit anger, worry, relief, and love into the two syllables of my name. “You tell me what’s going on. Right now.”
“Nothing. Why?” I asked.
“Ridley.”
“Dad, everything’s fine,” I lied. “I just need you to tell me about Project Rescue.”
There was a pause on the line. “Ridley, you need to come home right now. We’ve talked to Alexander Harriman. The police were here this morning.”
It’s sad when your parents give you orders that you are too old to obey. It represents a disconnect between who they think you are and who you actually are. They hold on to this concept of you as a small being within their control and it takes a lot of time before they get the fact that it’s no longer the case.
“I can’t come home, Dad. I need to know what’s happening to me. Tell me about Project Rescue.”
“Project Rescue? Ridley, what are you talking about?”
“Dad, tell me!” I yelled this. I’d never really yelled at my father before and something about it felt good. He was quiet for long enough that I wondered if he’d hung up or if the line had gone dead. Then I heard him breathing.
“Dad.”
“It was the group responsible for getting the Safe Haven Law passed,” he said. His voice sounded strange and his words had a canned quality to them.
“No,” I said. “It’s more than that.” I realized then that I was driving really fast and couldn’t afford to get pulled over. I slowed down, pulled into the right lane.
He sighed. “Well, let’s see. Early on there were safe houses, Project Rescue safe houses. Usually at churches or clinics, sometimes at cooperating orphan facilities. It was before the law was passed, so while it wasn’t illegal, it wasn’t exactly state sanctioned and it was privately funded. We always thought of it as kind of an underground railroad.”
“Who funded it? Max?”
“Yes, and others.” He sounded tired and I thought his voice was shaking just slightly, but it could have been the cell phone reception.
“So what happened at these places?”
“The same thing that happens now. A parent could leave her child safely, the child would be held and cared for for seventy-two hours. If before that time the parent changed her mind, she could come back for her baby. She’d receive counseling and any other kind of assistance she needed.”
“And if she didn’t come back?”
“Then the baby was absorbed into the child welfare system.”
“And you were involved?”
“Not really. Though some of the clinics where I donated my time over the years were Project Rescue sites, and when there was a baby or child abandoned, I’d provide health care just like I would for any child.”
“But were you breaking the law?”
“Not in any real sense. There was no law to say that you couldn’t provide health care to a needy, abandoned child, as long as that abandonment was reported within seventy-two hours.”
“So you were just flying under the radar.”
He released another sigh. “In the best interests of the children, of course.”
It made sense that my father would work the angles of the system to help children. I could see that in him. But the logic seemed slightly faulty to me. I mean, why go to all this trouble to get children away from potentially abusive situations, just to put them into the child welfare system, which was rife with flaws and abuses of its own? I thought of Jake’s childhood experiences.
I was missing something and I knew it. The answers were right in front of me but I wasn’t seeing them. I was tired and the whole thing was too much. It’s like when you start out on a big project, like cleaning out your closet. You’ve got everything you own on the floor and on the bed, the closet is empty, and then lethargy sets in. You think, Why did I even start this? I don’t have the energy to finish. But you can’t just walk away, it’s too late for that. I knew there were a million questions I could be asking my father, but I couldn’t think of one.
“What do I have to say to get you to come home?”
I thought about it a second. “Tell me there’s nothing I need to know, that I’ve got myself wound up in something that has nothing to do with me and that I’ve lost my perspective.”
There was just the slightest hesitation. Then: “Ridley, there’s nothing you need to know.”
I don’t know how, but I knew with a cool certainty that my father was lying to me. I heard my mother in the
