Beautiful Lies

I got up and went to him, eager to feel his familiar embrace, the comfort of my father’s arms.

“How are you, lullaby?” he said, hugging me hard.

“Good,” I said into his shoulder.

“Good,” he said with a smile and a pat on my cheek. “You look good,” he said. I was glad he didn’t think I looked like there was something wrong.

But I guess there was something wrong, even then. I’d brought the picture and the note with me to the house. I had toyed with the idea of trashing it, just putting it in the bin where it belonged and forgetting it altogether. But for whatever reason, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I left the apartment without the envelope but halfway down the stairs turned around and went back for it. I guess I wanted to show it to them so they could tell me how ridiculous it was and we could all have a good laugh. Ha-ha.

After dinner, we all sat full and quiet under the glow of the old Tiffany lamp that hung over the table.

“Something weird happened to me yesterday,” I said, filling a conversational lull.

“I knew there was something,” my mother said, satisfied with herself.

“Mom,” I said with that tone that I think expresses perfectly how predictable and annoying I find her sometimes.

“What is it, Rid?” asked my father, his face open and concerned.

I slid the photograph and note over to them. I watched both their faces since I figured the tale would be told in the first millisecond after they processed the information in front of them. But their expressions told me nothing. My father and mother put their heads together and squinted at the photo. My father pulled glasses from his shirt pocket. I could hear the refrigerator humming and the blood rushing in my ears. The teapot came to a boil but my mother didn’t notice and the clock above the sink ticked quietly.

“What’s this?” my father said finally, a confused but benevolent smile on his face. “Some kind of joke?”

“I don’t get it,” said my mother with a quick shake of her head. “Who are these people?”

I looked at them. It was a perfect innocent reaction and I waited to feel relief, a little stupid for having even brought it to their attention. It was exactly what I had wanted. But instead I felt an inexplicable anger.

“I don’t know who they are.” My voice shook a little and both my parents turned their eyes on me. “This came in my mail yesterday.”

“And…what?”

“And look at it,” I said, tapping it with my finger. “That woman looks just like me.”

My father made a show of looking more closely at the picture. “Well, she does bear a bit of a resemblance. But so what?” My mother, I noticed, had looked at the photograph once but didn’t look at it a second time. Instead, she leaned back and looked at me. I couldn’t read her eyes.

“This person believes I’m his daughter.”

“How do you know it’s a he?” my mother asked pointlessly.

“I just think it is,” I said weakly. “The handwriting is masculine. I don’t know.” Sigh. “I just do.”

At this point my father did something I hadn’t expected. He laughed, a deep belly laugh. “Honey,” he said finally. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Really, Ridley,” said my mother. “This is not funny.”

I looked at them, pulled my shoulders back. “I’m not trying to be funny, Mom. I got this in the mail yesterday and…it resonated with me. I have questions.”

“Well. What kind of questions?” asked my father, his laughter dying. “You can’t possibly be entertaining for a second the idea that you’re not our daughter. This person is having a joke at your expense, Ridley.”

“You’re smarter than this, aren’t you?” asked my mother with another quick shake of her head. “I mean, your face has been plastered all over the television and the newspapers for over a week now. Some nutcase thought you resembled someone he knows or used to know. And he’s either crazy, thinks you’re his daughter…or he’s trying to mess with you. This is so silly.”

I paused, doubt creeping up and tapping me on the shoulder.

“How come there are no pictures of me before I’m two years old?” I asked, sounding more like a child than I would have liked.

“Oh, Christ,” said my mother. “Now you’re starting to sound like Ace.”

I hated when my parents compared me with him, this child who had so injured them, so disappointed them. The one who chose the streets and the life of a junkie over their home and their love. The one who’d caused my parents so much pain over the years. I cringed but I didn’t say anything. I kept on looking at her and she finally answered.

“I’ve told you that we used to keep the photographs in the rec-room closet in the basement. The basement flooded and the pictures were ruined. All your pictures from the hospital, taking you home, and much of your infancy.”

She had told me that, but I had forgotten. I was starting to feel a bit unstable. But something compelled me to press on. “And I suppose all the pictures of your pregnancies were in those albums as well.”

“No,” she said slowly, drawing out the syllable as though she were talking to an infant. “I got very big during both pregnancies and was self-conscious in front of the camera. I know it seems silly but I was young.”

My mother was a beautiful woman with creamy skin and almond-shaped eyes. She had this wide mouth that could curl into a megawatt smile bright enough to light the stars in the sky. But when she was angry, her beauty turned to granite. She had always been one of those mothers who didn’t have to say a word to reprimand; just one of those looks froze you in your tracks. She had turned that gaze on me now and it took real courage, dredged from deep inside, for me to keep at it.

I leaned into them. “I don’t look like anyone.”

My mother looked away from me and made a grunt of disgust. She got up from the table and walked over toward the stove. My father glanced at my mother uneasily. He’d always kowtowed to her temper, and an old resentment about that rose in me but I kept silent. He looked back to me.

“That’s just not true, Ridley,” said my father. “You look a great deal like my mother. Everyone has always said that, don’t you remember?”

Now that he mentioned it, I did. There was a resemblance around the eyes. I did share her dark hair and high cheekbones. For a second it dawned on me that perhaps I’d lost my mind. That I was suffering from some form of posttraumatic stress. You always hear about that on shows like Dateline, you know. People whom the world regarded as heroes for a few days and then forgot about; how they lose it, get depressed. Maybe that was happening to me. Maybe I was creating a drama because I craved the attention I had had for a short time.

“But what about Ace?” I persisted. “What he said that night.”

“How can you ask me to explain the things Ace says?” my father said sadly, and I could see how the mention of Ace pained him. Suddenly the air around us was electric with his grief for a son who lived but chose to be dead to his parents. “I don’t even know him anymore.”

We were all silent for a moment, my mother standing at the stove with her arms crossed and head down, my father sitting across from me at the table, his eyes on me with a gaze that at once implored and accused, me leaning back in my chair and trying to figure out why I had brought this to them and why I was so passionately pressing them for answers, why I felt my heart thrumming and my throat dry in some kind of adrenaline response.

My father pushed the picture back toward me and I picked it up, looked at it closely. It had lost its power; there was just a couple with their child. Strangers.

“I’m sorry,” I said, sticking the photograph back in my pocket. Shame burned at my cheeks and pushed tears into my eyes. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

My father reached out to touch my arm. “You’ve been under some stress, Ridley, with everything that happened last week. Someone preyed on that. I think you should call the police.”

I rolled my eyes. “And tell them what? That some mail really freaked me out?”

He shrugged and looked at me with a compassion that I didn’t feel I deserved. My mother walked back to the table with our tea mugs. She sat and kept her eyes on me. There was something there I hadn’t seen before and