Beautiful Lies

sensed during the conversation with my father.

“I’m saying that there were some people that couldn’t stand by and watch. They couldn’t live with themselves.”

“People like my father and Uncle Max.”

“Among others. Including my mother,” he said, looking up from the floor and meeting my eyes.

I remembered Esme saying, I’d have done anything for that man. The words took on a different meaning. I wondered what she had done for Max.

“That’s enough, Zack.” The voice made me spin around. There was Esme in a pink pajama-and-robe set. I remembered how she sometimes stayed on the futon in Zack’s study when her work kept her late in the city. I used to love the nights when she was there and we’d all cook dinner together and rent a video, make popcorn.

“Ridley,” she said softly. “You’re making a terrible mistake, honey.”

I looked at her. “What mistake am I making?”

“Dredging up the past like this. It won’t be good for any of us.”

“I haven’t dredged up anything. It’s coming up on its own.”

She shook her head, seemed about to say something but then clamped her mouth shut.

“Do you know who I am, Esme?”

“I do, Ridley. I do know who you are. The question is: Why don’t you?”

She wore a sympathetic smile that didn’t do much to hide frightened eyes. I looked to Zack, hoping to see something in his face that I recognized.

His face was pale, his eyes filled with anger and something else. It was a look I recognized from my years with him. It had never been directed at me before, but I had seen it when he talked about certain patients he saw at the free clinic where he worked once a week with my father. It was usually accompanied by a comment like “Some people don’t deserve to have children.” I used to mistake it as passion, a passion for his work, a love for children, a sadness that so many of them fell through the cracks of the system. But now I saw it for what it was: judgment, a lack of compassion, arrogance.

“If you’d stayed with me, none of this would ever have happened,” he said petulantly. “You never would have had to deal with any of this.”

He was right, of course. If I’d stayed with him, I’d probably have been in his bed that morning or he in mine. I never would have left my place to meet him. The chances of my being on that corner at exactly the right second were slim to none. But who knows, maybe it was time for my shadow to reveal itself and nothing would have stopped it. Maybe every choice I made, the little ones, the big ones, those choices I thought had so much influence over the course of my life, maybe they weren’t choices at all. Maybe it was just my shadow whispering in my ear, quietly leading me to myself, to the truth, to wholeness.

“Yeah, Zack. Maybe I could have lived out my whole life never knowing who I really am.”

“Has it been so bad…your life?” asked Esme. There was something close to bitterness in her voice. “Have you considered what the alternative might have been?”

I looked at her. She seemed small, even fragile. But there was a terrible anger in her eyes.

“How could I have? I didn’t even know there was an alternative.”

She laughed a little. “Well, now you know. Happy?”

I turned from them and ran out of the apartment. “Ridley,” I heard Zack yell after me, his voice sounding desperate. “It’s not safe.”

I had no idea where I was going but I ran.

It is not the strongest among us who survive. Nor is it the most intelligent. It is those among us who are the most adaptable to change. I don’t remember who said this, but it has always struck me as being quite brilliant. And it kept playing in my mind. I ran for a couple of blocks, then I got winded and limped for a while, clutching my side against the cramp that had seized me just minutes after I fled Zack. Don’t you just love it in the movies when normal people run for miles, scale chain-link fences at the end of alleyways, leap onto moving cars? Those kind of acrobatics weren’t an option for me; I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d worked out. If someone started chasing me right then, they would have caught me pretty easily. I kept looking over my shoulder for the Firebird or the skinhead. Zack said it wasn’t safe and I had every reason to believe him. I moved fast but I had no direction. I couldn’t go home. I couldn’t go back to that grim, lonely hotel room. I couldn’t go to my parents. So I walked.

I was fractured. Damaged but not broken. My mind was a jumble of disconnected thoughts and questions, but I wasn’t insane. I knew that much at least. I walked east toward the river through a city that was starting to wake, the sky fading from black to blue velvet. I went to Jake’s studio but found the door locked tight. I rang the buzzer, knowing the futility of it even as I did so. He wasn’t there. For all I knew, he was gone for good. And maybe I was better off for that, considering that he’d possibly tried to kill me.

The sun was still at least an hour from rising but already traffic had picked up. I passed a man pulling his coffee cart up the street. I walked through an already bustling Chinatown, fresh fish markets opening, fluorescent lights flickering on in shops. On Chambers Street, parked Lincoln sedans were already discharging early-bird lawyers and judges onto the sidewalks, where they walked quickly toward the giant, dirty-white court buildings. I was tired, more tired than I had ever been. But I kept walking. I thought of that footage you always see of those people climbing Mt. Everest. They’re at twenty-six thousand feet or something, at subzero temperatures, barely getting enough oxygen, but they just keep going. They just keep putting one foot in front of the other. They know if they stop, they’ll die. That simple. I don’t know if it was that simple for me. But I felt like I had to keep moving or the weight of my thoughts and my fears was going to crush me. Finally I stood at the base of the walkway that leads over the Brooklyn Bridge. I started up the wooden slats. If I could make it to the other side, I knew I could find a hotel there. Maybe I could check in and sleep for the next week and a half. Or maybe I would just keep going until I walked off the edge of the earth.

I want to say that I always knew there was something fractured about my life, but I don’t think so. I do think, though, that there was a feeling that had always dwelled in the periphery of my consciousness, a specter that never quite came into focus. Esme had asked me, Has it been so bad…your life? Have you considered what the alternative might have been?

I told you, I just have to close my eyes and my childhood comes back to me in a rush, the scents and feelings. Not specific memories, really, but the essence of memory. Johnson’s baby shampoo and burned toast, birthday parties and cut grass, fireplace embers and Christmas trees. I was loved. I grew up feeling safe, knowing I wouldn’t go hungry. I was never afraid in my home. Was it perfect? I’ll ask you: What is? Were there things I didn’t know or ignored? Obviously. But it was a good suburban American childhood full of minivans and football games. From what I could see, the alternative might not have been as good. I might have been abused by my father, my mother might have been afraid of him, he might have been cruel to her. Who can say who I would be if I had been raised as Jessie by Teresa Elizabeth Stone? I would never know. And I couldn’t say I was sorry. But that didn’t mean that what had happened was right. Someone had murdered Teresa Stone and kidnapped her child. I’m sorry, but I’m just not one of those people who think the end justifies the means.

“Hey.”

I spun to see him standing close behind me.

“You can’t keep walking forever,” he said. “Eventually you’re going to have to stop and face what’s happening to you.”

I felt a rush of emotion at the sight of him, this train wreck of love and anger and fear that I thought might just run me down.

“And I suppose you’re going to help me do that?” I said, unable to keep my voice from shaking.

He nodded slowly. “If you’re ready to hear the truth.”

twenty-eight

“I guess you don’t see the irony in that,” I said, backing away from Jake. I hated my voice and hands, mutinous in their shaking, betraying the emotion coursing through me. He just looked at me. To his credit, he didn’t say anything. The sky was lightening around us and the traffic below on the bridge was starting to pick up, filling the air with the white noise of tires on asphalt, punctuated by the sudden sharp blast of a car horn. He was