Max.” He ended with a shrug. “What would have happened to her if we hadn’t taken her? She would have gone into the system. Been adopted by strangers.”
“If Max had kept her, she would have been raised by nannies,” said my mother.
They’d had a lifetime to justify their actions to themselves. Not that I was inclined to judge them. How could I? If they’d lied and broken the law, if they’d looked away from everything suspicious about my arrival at their doorstep, they’d done it for Jessie. They’d done it for me.
“Why not just tell me the truth? Why not just raise me as an adopted child? People do it every day; it’s not exactly taboo.”
“Max was adamant that you never know he was your father. He never wanted you to know that he didn’t have what it took to raise you. He never wanted you to think he didn’t want you.”
“And he never wanted me to start looking into my past. He never wanted me to know what happened to Teresa Stone. And he never wanted me asking any questions about Project Rescue.”
“Project Rescue doesn’t have anything to do with this,” my father said sternly.
I don’t know how he could say that. But I could see that he believed it. That he needed to believe it. But the first of many ugly questions pushed its way through the dirt.
“If Max’s name wasn’t on the birth certificate and the police never called him, how did he wind up with Jessie that night?” I asked.
They looked at each other and then at me.
“Did he have something to do with her murder?” I asked, my voice cracking.
“No,” said my father. “Of course not.”
“Then how? How did he know about me? How did he wind up with me that night?”
They were both silent. Then my mother spoke, quietly, almost in a whisper.
“We never asked those questions, Ridley,” she said. “What would have been the point?”
Denial: my family heritage. If you don’t ask the questions, the truth will never inconvenience you.
I tried to process the information but my exhausted brain wouldn’t allow it. Ben and Grace weren’t my parents. Max was my father. My mother had been brutally murdered. Possibly, maybe probably, Max had something to do with it. And I had been more or less abducted. My birth certificate and Social Security card were falsified documents. I got it. But the information was having no impact on me whatsoever.
You’d expect me to have raged, lambasted them for all the lies and all the mistakes—
I looked at the people before me and tried to imagine that they weren’t my parents. It was impossible to comprehend. It made me think that it’s not blood that binds us, it’s experience. Teresa Stone was a stranger to me, a sad stranger who’d met a heinous and unjust end. I felt a pain in my chest for her and all that she had endured. But she was as distant and faded as the old photograph that had started all of this. As for Max, I would need some time to recast him as my father, my failed father. He was the good uncle, a man I loved dearly all my life. Incredibly, I couldn’t muster any anger at him for the things I knew he’d done and for the things I suspected. Not then anyway; there would be time for that. Max, for all his joviality, operated from a place of terrible pain; for all his wealth, he was an emotional pauper. Can you judge that? Feel contempt for what a person doesn’t have? Well, maybe you can. But I don’t have it in me.
“What about Ace?”
“What about him?” my father said.
“Is he your son?”
My father nodded. “Ace is our son, our biological child.”
I thought about it a second. “Does he know I’m not your biological child?”
My father nodded. “He overheard your uncle and me talking one day. We were careless and he got an earful. But the problems with Ace started long before that day. In fact, I think he was in my office trying to steal some money when Max and I entered and shut the door. He hid behind the desk and heard everything.”
I had to give a little laugh. “Well, what right does he have to be so fucked up, then?”
“Ridley,” said my mother, who’d visibly stiffened at the sound of Ace’s name. “Watch your language.”
Watch my language. Can you believe that? They can never stop parenting, can they? Ben and Grace were my parents, and they always would be. There was no changing that.
“Where is he?”
“They’ve got him in rehab. They can’t keep him there, though, so if he wants to leave, they have to let him go.”
I nodded. Normally, I would have felt desperate and worried about him, wondering if he would stay or go back to the streets. But part of me had let Ace go. Not that I didn’t love him as much, or that I didn’t want him to be well. But I’d finally gotten the clue that no matter what I did I couldn’t control him. All this time, that’s what I’d been trying to do. Hoping if I just loved him enough, helped him enough, he’d learn to love himself, help himself. Maybe it was the little bit of concrete to the skull; it knocked some sense into me.
My father sighed. “I think he felt we favored you, Ridley. Me and Max. But it was never that, you know. There was always enough love for both of you. Enough of everything.”
He’d said the same thing to me in his office. It was like a mantra he was repeating to comfort himself. “You were always just easy, Ridley. Easy to please, easy to love.” He didn’t say “easier,” but I heard it in his tone.
“Let’s not get into this,” my mother said to him. Yes, let’s not get into who was whose favorite and how that’s communicated in all sorts of nonverbal ways, I thought but didn’t say. I threw my mother a look and she looked away.
My father was sitting beside me on the bed with his hand on my arm. I looked at him and I saw shame on his face. I wasn’t sure what it was exactly that he regretted; it seemed as though there was a lot to choose from. I didn’t have a chance to ask. The door opened softly and Jake walked in. I was washed with relief at seeing him. He paused in the doorway, seeing me with my father. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah,” I answered. “These are my parents, Ben and Grace.” My mother rose, clutched her purse to her side, and started moving toward me.
“We’ve met,” Jake said. “We had a long talk.”
I looked over at my father and he nodded. My mother made some kind of small sound to communicate her disapproval. She came over and kissed me on the head.
“Get some rest, dear. This will all seem less awful in the morning.”
Just like that. I could tell by the way she’d squared her shoulders and held her head high that she believed it. That she would make it so. I envied her. I knew nothing was going to seem less awful in the morning. That the road ahead of us was dangerous and uncharted. And that there were miles and miles to cross.
My father rose and kissed my head. “I love you, little girl. I’m sorry for all of this.” That apology sounded so simple, as if it was all just some silly misunderstanding that we’d all soon laugh about.
“I love you, too, Dad,” I said, more from reflex than anything. I did love him, of course. He was right about one thing, I couldn’t be any more his daughter, biology or not. He left quietly, picking up his coat from the chair and moving past Jake with a cool nod. He seemed old and stooped, as if the heavy burden he’d carried all these years was finally weighing him down.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said, looking back at me from the door. “We’ll talk everything out, Ridley. It’ll all be okay.”
“Okay,” I said. But I wasn’t sure about what tomorrow held anymore. I could tell he didn’t want to go, didn’t want to leave me with the truth and not be around to spin and control it. He cast a long gaze at Jake, the truth- sayer, and I could see anger on his face. I think he felt unseated by Jake, as if Jake had taken a place in my life that he’d never expected anyone to fill, the place I looked to for the truth. No parent ever wants to give that place up in their child’s eyes, but they all have to sooner or later, don’t they? He left then and that’s when the tears came again. (Who knew I had so many?)
Jake pulled the chair beside my bed closer and took my hand, let me cry, comforted me only by touch, spared me all the platitudes.
“Are
“I’m okay. I feel like a shit for not catching you when you fell.”
