Beautiful Lies

and have some hot chocolate.”

I was still looking for that ghost woman.

“What is it?” she said with a smile when she saw me staring.

“You didn’t look like yourself,” I said. “When I saw you from the door. You looked different.”

She gave a little laugh, as if I was silly or playing a game. But her smile twitched a bit. “Did I?” she said. Then she turned and made a face, sticking out her tongue. “Do I look like myself now?” I dissolved into giggles.

What am I trying to say? What am I trying to tell you? I guess that it’s not just the big things that were lies —some of the little things were, too.

I remembered again that day, that birthday party when I overheard Uncle Max and my mother talking in the kitchen, how I couldn’t believe the tones they were using with each other. So angry. I realize now, so intimate. Because, think about it, you don’t talk that way to polite strangers, even to your husband’s best friend, even if over the years he’s become your friend, too. There was so much emotion in their words. As if there was a whole layer to their relationship I hadn’t suspected.

To bring one of them here. To Ace’s party. How could you?

I didn’t want to come alone.

Bullshit, Max.

What do you want from me, Grace, huh? Stop being such a fucking prude.

My maternal grandmother always said with such pride about my mother and her siblings, “Oh, they never, ever fight.” And for the longest time I thought this was the hallmark of a good relationship, a lack of conflict. And then, one night, when my grandmother made the remark, I heard my father whisper under his breath, “Yeah, they never fight because they never talk.”

“What was that, Benjamin?”

“Nothing, Mother.” He called her that, as if it tasted sour in his mouth. He called his own mother Ma.

I remembered how my parents never fought—except about Ace. That I knew when she was angry at him—he was never angry with her that I saw—because of the silence and the darkness. When my mother was in a good mood, all the lights would be on in the house, the fire lighted in winter and autumn, the sound of a television or a stereo somewhere. When she was angry, she sat quiet and alone in the dark until she was appeased. That’s how I knew when things were not good.

“You doing all right?” asked Jake, putting a hand on the back of my head.

“Yeah. Just remembering,” I answered. He nodded as if he understood.

The cab we had hailed on Hicks Street had come to a stop in front of Ace’s building. I won’t say I was thrilled about seeing him again; I was still angry and hurt from our last encounter. But honestly, there was nowhere else to go for answers. He knew more than he’d told me. His passive-aggressive hinting around told me that. And he was going to be honest with me, for once. I wasn’t leaving without answers. Not this time.

The stoop was empty, and though it was just after 4:30 P.M., the sky was nearly dark. We’d waited in the church for a while, considering ourselves safe because no one had followed us there. We dozed off in the confessional, leaning against each other, holding hands. Both of us were so tired, it felt as if we’d been drugged. We awoke during an afternoon Mass and remembered that the sign said confession began at four. When the Mass ended, we filed out with the faithful and got a cab right in front of the church, told the driver to head toward the Lower East Side. Jake watched out the back window, and when he was satisfied that we hadn’t been followed, asked me to give the driver the address. Now we stood in front of the building.

“This is where he lives?” he asked.

“If you can call it a life.”

As we walked into the building, Jake put his hand to the gun at his waist. Like before, that awful odor— garbage, human rot, something chemical—drifted up into my sinuses. But tonight the building seemed quiet, deserted, and there was no sunlight fighting its way in through the dirty windows.

“It’s okay,” I told him, taking his hand.

“I don’t like dark like this,” he said. I thought about all the awful things that had happened to him in the dark and I understood. I squeezed his hand tighter. Our eyes adjusted as we climbed the stairs, the wood creaking beneath our weight. When we came to the apartment door, it stood open and my heart fell like a stone into my stomach.

“Ace?” I said. But there was no answer.

Jake drew his gun and stood to the side, guiding me gently over toward the wall. He pushed the door and with a creak it opened. There was a figure slumped on the bed; I could see the outline in the dark. The thin, frail shadow seemed to shake slightly. Then I heard the sound of low sobbing.

“Ruby?” I said, moving closer to her. Jake reached for my wrist but I shook out of his grasp and walked toward her.

“They took him,” she said quietly between sobs.

“Who took him?” I asked, kneeling beside her. I couldn’t see her face but I could smell the cigarettes on her breath.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Two men in masks. They slammed through the door. One of them hit me so hard in the jaw.” She reached her hand up and rubbed her face. “I blacked out. When I woke up, they were gone and so was Ace.”

“Are you okay?” I said, trying to inspect her jaw in the relative darkness.

She nodded and looked at me, her eyes wide and full of tears.

“They didn’t say anything?” said Jake from the door.

She nodded. “They said to tell you to let it go.”

“To tell me?” I said, incredulous.

“Both of you. They said, ‘Let it go and we’ll let him go.’”

I didn’t say anything for a second because there was something lodged in my throat that kept all the words bottled in my chest. I had that nightmare feeling again, that moment where you look at things around you and hope that something is going to remind you that you’re dreaming.

“It’s my fault,” she was saying. “I told him to help you. I told him he had to tell you the things he knew, that he had to protect you from them.”

“Protect me from who?”

“He knows,” she said, nodding toward Jake. “He knows who.”

Jake just shook his head and raised his shoulders. “No idea,” he said when I looked at him.

“The men who took you, Ridley,” she said, looking at me earnestly. “The people responsible for everything that’s happening to you.”

“Who, Ruby? Who’s responsible?”

She started crying again. I had dueling impulses: One was to embrace her, the other to slap her.

“I don’t know. He wouldn’t tell me,” she said as she cried harder. “For the same reason he wouldn’t tell you. He thought it was too dangerous for us to know.”

Was this girl just a crazy junkie? Did she have any idea what she was talking about? I didn’t know what to say to her.

“They left this telephone number,” said Ruby finally, sitting up and handing me a piece of paper. She kept suspicious eyes on Jake. It was dark in the room but there was enough light that we could see one another’s faces. The smell of cigarette smoke was like a presence. I pulled the cell phone from my pocket and turned it on. With a beep and a flash of green light, the screen announced that I had three messages. I had no idea how to retrieve them. I looked over at Jake.

“Should I call?” I asked him.

He moved in closer to me. “What choice do you have?”

I should have been panicked, crippled with fear over what had happened to Ace and what was happening to me. But I was calm. The only hints of my fear were the persistent rushing sound in my right ear, the dryness in my throat, and the slight, barely perceptible shaking of my hands.

I dialed the number and we all waited while it rang.

“Ridley. That didn’t take you long at all. You always were a smart girl.”