Beautiful Lies

“That’s not what I mean.”

He shrugged and squeezed my hand. “I know. I don’t know what I’m feeling right now. There’s too much to work through. It’s going to take time.”

I tried for an empathetic smile but it made my head hurt. I told him all the things my parents had revealed.

“I’m so sorry for all of this, Ridley—all the lies, all the mess,” he said when I was done.

Like Jake, I still had to sort through what had happened to me. I definitely didn’t know what the future held. And my life as I knew it had literally been shattered. But I was still there, still me. And there was something comforting about that. There’s something comforting about knowing that when all the things that you think define you fall away, you’re still standing.

“I’m not sorry,” I said.

He looked at me, confused.

“On the bridge,” I said, putting my hand to his beautiful face. “You asked me if I was sorry I met you. I never answered you. Well, I’m not.”

He smiled, leaned in, and kissed me on the lips, so softly, so gently, sending off starbursts of pain behind my eyes. He whispered in my ear, “I love you, Ridley Jones…or whatever your name is.”

We laughed then because as sad and awful as the truth was, Alexander Harriman had been right. We were alive and healthy and we had each other. Like he said, that was more than a lot of people had.

thirty-two

I don’t believe in mistakes. Never have. I believe that there are a multitude of paths before us and it’s just a matter of which way we walk home. I don’t believe in regret. If you regret things about your life, then I’ll bet that you’re not paying attention. Regret is just imagining that you know what would have happened if you took that job in California or married your high-school sweetheart or just looked one more time before you stepped out into the street…or didn’t. But you don’t know; you can’t possibly know. I could have spent a lot of time thinking about what would have happened if I hadn’t seen Justin Wheeler toddling into the street that day. And I did spend a little time thinking about that—but not much. You could drive yourself crazy thinking that way.

They were eager to get rid of me at Mount Sinai Hospital. I had only a “catastrophic” health insurance policy (private insurance is expensive and I never get sick) and there was some debate over whether hitting your head on a sidewalk after passing out from what amounts to a panic attack was exactly catastrophic. There was some debate over the meaning of the word and whether it was the incident or the result of the incident that had to be life threatening in order to be covered. Since the less than twenty-four hours I had spent in the hospital was already costing me over two thousand dollars, I figured I could recover more cheaply somewhere else. Jake had gone downstairs to hail a cab and I was washing my face, looking pale and funny in the mirror with a bandage on my head, when Detective Salvo walked in.

“They spring you?” he asked.

“Yeah, they’re sick of me already.”

He smiled and sat on the vinyl chair by the door. He looked tired. I noticed he was wearing the same clothes he’d been wearing the day before.

“The charges against Harley Jacobsen have been dropped,” he said as I sat back down on the bed. He told me about the signatures on his gun registrations and how they hadn’t matched the rifle registration. That and the fact that there hadn’t been any fingerprints on the gun meant that there was no legal basis for charging him.

“That’s good news.”

“For you and Mr. Jacobsen. For me, I’ve still got a murder to solve and no leads.”

We sat in silence. I could have suggested that he start investigating Alex Harriman’s client roster, but I wasn’t going to do that. I couldn’t do that.

“Something interesting, though,” he said, looking at me. “Some of the shell casings found at the scene of the diner shooting match a gun used in another crime, a shooting up on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx last week. Guess who the prime suspect is.”

I shrugged.

“A thug named Angelo Numbruzio, a known associate of Paulie ‘The Fist’ Umbruglia. Does that name ring a bell?”

“I guess it does. I’ve heard about him on the news.”

“His lawyer is Alexander Harriman.”

I looked at him. “That’s quite a coincidence.”

“I thought it was information you might like to have. I mean, somebody who was looking to draw connections between things might find it interesting.”

Jake appeared in the door then and the look on his face told me that he found it interesting. I felt my stomach do a little flip. Was he still looking for justice, for answers?

“I’ve made all the connections I need to make,” I said. “Is there anything else, Detective?”

He stood up as I made my way toward the door and followed me into the hallway. “If there is, I’ll give you a call. I have your number.”

“I’m getting rid of that cell phone.”

He laughed then and I smiled back at him. He was a good man but I knew he wasn’t going to let this thing go. And I couldn’t afford his questions, not with Alexander Harriman’s threats still echoing in my battered head.

Are you disappointed in me? Did you expect me to begin a crusade to find all the Project Rescue babies in the world and reunite them with their possibly abusive parents? Ask yourself, if you’d lost everything, if you were barely clinging to the shreds of what was left of your life, if the lives of the only family you had ever known had been threatened by a lawyer who represented people with names like Paulie “The Fist,” what would you do? Really. What would you do?

In the cab on the way downtown, I leaned against Jake. I wasn’t wearing any shoes because somehow my Nikes had gotten lost between my arrival at the hospital and my departure. So I’d left the hospital in stocking feet.

I watched a sunlit Central Park roll by. The trees were losing their leaves; people were jogging, Rollerblading, walking dogs. Such a normal day for everyone else.

“There’s no proof of any of it, you know that?” he said, as if thinking aloud. “They were so careful. There’s no proof that any of it ever happened.”

“Except that those kids are missing. Except that you’re Charlie and I’m Jessie.”

“Yeah, but there are kids missing all over the country and all over the world. Unsolved cases like Charlie, Jessie, Brian, and Pamela. We could never trace it back to Project Rescue.”

It was true. They’d left no evidence. They’d managed somehow to change the Social Security numbers and birth certificates of the children, to give them new identities altogether. The children, they were…ghosts. Maybe they were better off, maybe not.

“Unless…” said Jake, looking past me out the window.

“Unless what?”

“Unless we could get someone to talk.”

“How are we going to do that?”

“I don’t know,” he said, looking at me. “We don’t have to think about it now. Let’s just get you home.”

“Jake, my family—”

“I know, Ridley. Don’t worry. Forget I said anything.”

I didn’t respond. I was still feeling pretty groggy and all I wanted to do was lie down. But I had this uneasy feeling in my shoulders, and that noise I hear when I’m stressed, the blood rushing in my right ear. And I knew it wasn’t over.