Beautiful Lies

four

It takes only a moment to bring myself back into my childhood completely. I can close my eyes and be overcome with the sense memories of my youth. The aromas from my mother’s kitchen, the scent of Old Spice and rainwater on my father when he returned from work in the evenings, my cold fingers because my father’s body temperature always ran hot and the house, as a consequence, always cold. I can hear my parents laughing or singing, sometimes arguing, and later outright yelling when things really started to go wrong with my brother, Ace. I can remember my green shag carpet and Laura Ashley wallpaper, tiny pink roses with mint-green stems on a white background. And in all the memories I had of those years, that night with the picture in my hand there was one that stood out vivid and terrifying among all the innocuous and happy ones.

I was fifteen and late coming home from the school paper (I was a little bit of a brain, a dork, in high school). Even though I wasn’t supposed to ride with boys in their cars, I had taken a ride from a senior named Frank Alvarez (broad shoulders, long dark hair, kind of a burnout but sexy). When we pulled into my driveway, he’d tried to kiss me. I remember that he had the heat cranking in his car, that Van Halen was playing on the radio, that he exuded a kind of desperate sexual energy and wore way too much cologne. Polo, I think. It wasn’t a scary situation, and although I wasn’t “into him,” as we too-cool adolescents used to say, I was flattered and could barely wait to get out of the car and call my friends.

When I entered the house, my parents were sitting at the kitchen table looking grim. My father held a cup of coffee in his hands and my mother looked as if she’d been crying. It was a bit too early for my father to be home and dinner should have been cooking but the kitchen was cold.

“Oh, Ridley,” my mother said, as if she’d forgotten I was expected home. “What time is it?” My mother was a little bird of a woman, really tiny with small, refined features and lustrous auburn hair. She moved with the grace of a dancer and carried those faded aspirations in her impeccably held posture and jutted chin. She looked ten years younger than the other mothers I knew, though she was actually older than most of them.

“Go on upstairs for a while, will you, lullaby?” said my father, getting up. “We’ll get you some dinner in just a bit.” He was moving into what we would later call his Ernest Hemingway stage, without the drinking. He had a full graying beard and a slight (getting less slight) belly. He stood just over six feet tall and had powerful arms and big hands. He had a way of hugging me that made every childish worry disappear. But he didn’t hug me then, just put a hand on my shoulder and ushered me toward the stairs.

When I’d entered and saw them sitting there, I figured I was in some kind of trouble for being in the car with Frank Alvarez, but I realized quickly that they were too upset for a small transgression like the one I’d committed.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

Before my father could answer, Ace was thundering down the stairs, a large backpack over his shoulder.

My brother and I were raised in the same house by the same parents and still managed to have completely different childhoods. He is older than I am by three years. He was willful where I was yielding; rebellious where I was obedient; sad, angry where I was happy. For the longest time he was to me the very embodiment of coolness. He was movie-star handsome with jet-black hair and ice-blue eyes, defined muscles and chiseled jaw. All my friends were in love with him, and if you’d told me he got up five minutes before me and put the sun in the sky, I’d have believed you.

“Where are you going?” I asked him, because more than just the backpack, he had a nearly palpable aura of leaving and not coming back. He’d threatened this a million times, and every time he and my parents fought, I felt a nausea that he’d make good on it. Fear and sadness opened in my belly as he pushed passed me.

“The fuck out of here,” he said, looking at my father.

“Ridley,” my mother said. “Go upstairs.” I heard a kind of desperation in her tone. I headed up slowly, lingering with my hand on the banister and looking at these three people whom I loved, so sad and angry at one another that they were barely recognizable. They all looked gray, faces stiff as stones.

I couldn’t remember a peaceful moment between Ace and my father. When they were in a room together, it was only a matter of time before an argument erupted, and it had been getting worse in the months before Ace left.

“You’re not going anywhere, son,” said my father. “We’re getting you help.”

“I don’t want your help. It’s too late. And you’re not my father, so don’t call me son.”

“Don’t talk like that, Ace,” said my mother, but her voice was small and her eyes filled with tears.

“Ridley,” my father roared. “Get upstairs.”

I ran, my heart beating in my chest like a drum. I lay on my four-poster bed in the dark and listened to the echoes of their yelling. Far on the other end of the house, I couldn’t hear their words and I didn’t want to. When Ace left, he slammed the front door so hard that I felt its vibration in my room. Silence followed and then was broken by the sound of my mother sobbing. Eventually I heard my father’s footsteps on the stairs. Ace never crossed that threshold again, and that’s the night I realized that every ending is not a happy one.

Somewhere along the line I just blocked out what Ace had said. Or made myself believe that it was just his anger, his addiction, or maybe both that had led him to say, “You are not my father.” When I asked my dad about it later, he’d said, “Ace just meant that he wished I wasn’t his father. But I am and there’s no changing that, no matter what passes between us.”

“Well, I’m glad you’re my father, Daddy,” I said, as much to make myself feel better as to comfort him.

As I sat in my apartment with those papers in my hand, I heard Ace’s words again, and this time I could not silence them. They were like a key that unlocked a box containing myriad other questions that had hovered in the periphery of my consciousness over the years, but to which I had never actually entertained answers. They were little things that might have been easily explained…unless they couldn’t be. Things like: Why were there no pictures of my mother pregnant? Why were there no photographs of me before the age of two? Why did I resemble no one in my family even a little? These little questions now tapped on my consciousness like moths at a light.

I started to feel a little panicky, a little dramatic. Then I remembered my conversation with Zack. And all those pictures of you…forget it. You’re going to have psychos crawling out of the woodwork.

He was right, of course. This was New York City; the crazies don’t need much of an excuse to get busy. I held the Polaroid in my hand; maybe the woman didn’t look that much like me, after all.

I did what I always do in times of crisis, small or large. I picked up the cordless phone to call my father. The receiver was in my hand before I was even conscious of reaching for it, the keypad burning, waiting for me to punch in the numbers. But my finger hovered there above the glowing numbers as I hesitated, hearing blood rushing in my ears. I stared at the phone, not quite able to will my fingers to move. It was silly, wasn’t it? To call over such nonsense. In the distance, over the buzzing of the dial tone, I heard an insistent knocking.

The sound brought me out of my head and it took a second to realize that there was someone at my apartment door. I came back to the present and walked across the room, looked through the peephole. The man standing in the hallway was a stranger but I opened the door a crack. I know what you’re thinking. What New Yorker is going to open her door to a strange man, particularly in a moment like this, after receiving a letter like that?

New Yorkers are really no more savvy than anyone else. We’re just more paranoid. And I was too distracted to think about protecting my life. Besides, the guy I saw through the peephole interested me. As in: He was hot. I opened the door and looked at him. He was frowning, hands on his hips.

You feel the chemistry, you know. It’s that little jolt that lets you know the sex would be good, very, very good. You feel it in your lungs and between your legs. It doesn’t really have anything to do with looks, but for the record: dark brown hair, almost black, cropped close to his head, so short it was really little more than stubble, deep brown eyes, candy lips I was already imagining in the little dip between my collarbone and my throat. He felt it, too, I could tell. He looked less angry for a moment.

“Look,” he said, recovering nicely, “if you have a problem with the noise, how about just knocking on the door