Beautiful Lies

second, I did wish I had never stepped in front of that van. With all my heart and soul, I wished for ignorance again.

I was suddenly having trouble taking in air and all I could hear was my own labored breathing. I heard Jake say something. Detective Salvo’s voice sounded worried and far away. There was a light show of stars in front of my eyes, white noise in my brain, and then everything tilted and went black.

I regained consciousness for a second in the back of an ambulance, my head pounding. I reached up to touch it and felt a bandage. My fingers came back damp with blood. Jake was there. Detective Salvo, too.

“What happened?” I said. But I didn’t stay awake long enough to hear the answer.

In the hallway of a busy hospital, young people in green scrubs rushed back and forth. I could hear a voice over the intercom, smell bandages and disinfectant. Jake was holding my hand, looking at me. He looked so worried. “What’s wrong?” I asked him.

“You passed out,” he said. “I didn’t catch you in time and you hit your head on the sidewalk hard. You have a…”

But then he faded away.

When I woke up again it was dark and quiet. I could hear the soft beeping of a heart monitor and it took me a second to realize that it was my heart being monitored. Scratchy, sterile-smelling sheets, hard mattress, metal guardrail. Light shone in from beneath the door, and as my eyes adjusted, I saw a form sitting in a chair across from me. I’d recognize him anywhere.

“Dad?”

“Ridley,” he answered, getting up quickly and walking over to me. “How are you, lullaby?”

“My head hurts.”

He placed a gentle hand on my forehead. “I bet,” he said.

“What happened?”

“You passed out, and before anyone could catch you, you hit your head on the sidewalk. Gave yourself a nasty concussion and lost a lot of blood.”

I tried to remember falling and, in doing so, all the events of the day came back to me in a rush: the diner windows exploding in a shower of glass, the church, finding Ace missing, Alexander Harriman’s office.

“Dad,” I said, releasing a sob. “So many lies.”

My father sighed and pulled a chair over to the bed. He sat heavily and rested his head on one hand. When he lifted his face to me again, I could see that he’d been crying. The sight of it frightened me. The face I’d always looked to for comfort was shattered.

“Dad. Who am I?” I tried to sit up and realized by the warbling of the room that it wasn’t going to happen.

He shook his head slowly. “You’re Ridley. You’re my Ridley. You’ll always be that.”

There was truth in this that I recognized. But it wasn’t the whole truth and we both knew it. “No more lies, Dad.”

“It’s not a lie,” he said, nearly yelling. “You couldn’t be any more my daughter.”

I knew if he could, he’d try to pull his cloak of denial over us both. But it was no use. It didn’t fit anymore. I’d outgrown it.

“I am Ridley, Dad. But I wasn’t always Ridley. Once I was Jessie Amelia Stone, daughter of Teresa Stone. A woman now dead because of Project Rescue.”

He looked at me blankly for a second. There were lines around his eyes I hadn’t seen before. The skin on his hands looked dry and papery. They were the hands of an old man. He rested his head in them.

“No,” he said through his fingers.

“Did you know, Dad? Did you know what they were doing?”

He shook his head vigorously. “No,” he said firmly. “I told you everything I knew about Project Rescue. If they did what that detective thinks they did, I had no idea. You know me, Ridley. You know I would never do that. Don’t you?”

I didn’t know if I could believe him. That was the worst thing about all of this. There was no one I could trust. Everyone had an agenda, good or bad, a reason to hide the truth from me.

“Then how did you wind up with me, Dad? If you didn’t know, how did I become Ridley Jones?”

He looked at me with profound sadness. It mimicked perfectly the expression I’d seen on Max’s face the night my father closed the study door on him.

The door to my hospital room pushed open then and in came my mother. She looked stronger than my father, more reserved. Her eyes were dry and she wore a faint, sad smile on her face. I didn’t know how long she had been listening and I didn’t know how much she knew to begin with. I looked at her and thought of the butterfly at Union Square. She came to stand by my bed and put a cool, dry hand to my head, as if in some motherly instinct to check my temperature.

“It’s time, Ben. Ridley’s right. No more lies.” She kept her eyes on my face but I couldn’t read her expression. All I could think was how different she was from me. There was nothing of my face in hers.

“No, Grace. We made a promise,” he almost whispered.

“Max is dead,” my mother said harshly, the word dead like a stone that she threw. My father looked startled by her tone. “I don’t want to keep this secret anymore. It’s caused too much damage already. If we’d have been honest from the beginning, Ridley would never have been vulnerable to this kind of nightmare in the first place.”

My father seemed to sink down in his chair. He shook his head slowly.

“Maybe you’re right,” he said.

thirty-one

I thought they were going to tell me about Project Rescue, that they’d colluded in Max’s plan, had been a part of it in some way. I thought they were going to tell me how I was taken from Teresa Stone and that they bought me and raised me as their own. I thought they’d tell me all the reasons why it was okay, why I was better off for the way things had been. But those weren’t the secrets they’d kept.

“First, Ridley, I want you to understand that your father had nothing to do with Project Rescue,” said my mother. “I don’t care what that private detective says. You have to believe that he would never knowingly be a party to abduction and murder, no matter what. He may have treated those children, he may have noted the potential for abuse, but he would never be an accessory to such a scheme.”

I didn’t say anything. I wanted to believe her. And it didn’t mesh with anything I knew about my father. But it was hard to imagine that he didn’t have at least some idea what Project Rescue was all about. Then, of course, there was the fact that both of them had lied to me for my entire life. I just wasn’t as certain of them, their beliefs, their judgments, as I had been a week ago.

“Ridley.” My mother wanted me to agree with her. So I nodded my head, just so she would go on. “That’s not how you came to us.”

“Then how?”

“There was always a parade of women through Max’s life, and at first no one thought Teresa Stone was any different. A pretty young woman who worked at the reception desk in Max’s Manhattan office; it was only a matter of time before he took notice of her and asked her out. And of course, she would say yes. No one could resist Max, his charm, his money, the way he had of making a girl see stars.

“Truth be told, I never even bothered to remember their names most of the time. I think Teresa was the only girl, other than Esme, that he saw more than once.”

“I knew she was different right away,” my father interjected. “There was a goodness to her that attracted Max, a decency. She wasn’t like the others.”

My mother gave him a look that told him he’d interrupted her. “Sorry,” he said.

They saw her first at a Christmas party, then he brought her to dinner at my parents’ house; a while later he brought her to a performance of La Boheme at the Met and they all had dinner afterward