over and he was smiling, breathing hard like a prizefighter.”
“Who?” I asked him, horrified.
He shook his head at me and tears fell down his cheeks and into his beard. He shook his head again and opened his mouth but no words came out.
“Who?” I asked again, leaning forward in my chair.
“Max,” he whispered.
I COULDN’T HAVE been more shocked or devastated if he’d hit me in the head with a crowbar. I wished he had; I wished I could just pass out and get amnesia, forget I ever heard anything he’d told me. I hated myself for being so stubborn and curious and for being there at all. I was having trouble getting a full breath of air.
“No,” I said. “You were so young. It was dark and you were terrified by seeing your aunt like that.”
He stared at me. “I know what I saw,” he said softly. “Won’t ever forget.”
“Then why didn’t you say anything? You let an innocent man die in jail,” I said.
“He turned around and saw me in the window. He wasn’t the Max I knew. He was…a monster. Those dead, empty eyes on me-I knew if I ever breathed a word, he’d rip me in two. I ran and waited all night for that devil to come and turn my face into hamburger. But he didn’t. The next day Race was arrested; Lana died a few weeks later in her coma. Max went to live with Bennie’s parents.”
“Why didn’t he come live with you? You were his only family.”
“My parents were barely making it. With me and my three sisters, they couldn’t afford another kid. As it is, they died in debt, a debt I’m still paying.” He looked around him. “I’m barely holding on to this house.” He cast his eyes to the floor.
“I’ve never even heard of you,” I said angrily. I hated him for what he’d told me and was looking for reasons he could be lying or wrong or just crazy. “Neither Max or Ben has ever spoken of you or your family.”
“They judged us for not taking Max in. Nothing was ever said, but from that point on, we didn’t have much to do with Max.”
I looked hard at his face. I could see, at least, that he believed what he was telling me. The fear and sadness, the ugliness of his memories made a home in his face.
“But it wasn’t the money, not really,” I said. “That wasn’t why they didn’t take him in, was it?”
Nicholas shook his head.
“You told your parents what you saw that night. And they believed you.”
“Yes,” he said. “That’s right.”
“But no one said anything as Race was arrested and stood trial. You were all so terrified of a sixteen-year-old boy?”
“We waited,” he said, clearing his throat. “Hoped that Race would be found innocent. That we’d never have to come forward with what we knew. Even when Race was convicted, my parents still didn’t want me to go forward.”
“Because they were afraid of Max?”
Nicholas released another sigh. “No, it wasn’t that. I think they just didn’t want Max to go to prison. Maybe guilt that they hadn’t stepped in earlier to stop some of the violence in that house. And, well, Race might have been innocent of that murder, but in a lot of ways he was guiltier than Max. That kid was raised with violence; he didn’t even know another way. My parents thought that maybe he just didn’t know his own strength that night. That a lifetime of suffering and regret was punishment enough.”
“But you didn’t think so?”
“He wasn’t sorry,” said Nicholas, holding my eyes. “I could tell by the way he looked at me. He was so sad- faced for everyone else. But when we were alone, he turned those eyes on me and I knew. He killed his mother, accused and then testified against his father. Effectively, he killed them both. And I don’t think he lost a night’s sleep over it.”
I tried to reconcile this version of Max with the man I knew. The child Nick Smiley described was psychotic-a murderer and a liar, a scheming manipulator. I had never seen anything in Max that hinted of that. Never.
“That’s why you came forward finally? Because you didn’t think he was sorry?”
“I don’t know that you’d call what I did coming forward. It was a half-assed attempt to undo one of many wrongs that had been done that night and all the nights leading up to it. I was racked with guilt, couldn’t sleep and couldn’t eat. Finally my parents took me to the police station and I told the cops that I saw someone else there that night. I told them about the walkie-talkies, that I hadn’t seen Race’s car, and that there was another man there, a man I’d never seen before. I never told them about Max.”
He took a sip of his tea, which I knew from my own cup was stone-cold by now.
“I told them I hadn’t come forward because I was afraid this stranger I made up would come and kill me and my family, too.”
“They didn’t believe you?”
He shook his head. “There was nothing to show that anyone else but Race had been there. No one else saw a strange car or saw anyone come or go other than Race later that night. They told me I’d just had a nightmare. I mean, they weren’t going to reopen a case that was long closed, the accused tried and convicted, because of the ramblings of a kid. But someone in the station leaked the story and an article ran in the paper the next day.
“That night I woke up to rocks being thrown at my window. I looked out on the street and saw Max standing there. He had a crowbar in his hand. He just stood there under the streetlight and I could see those eyes. He knew I was a chicken-hell, he’d been pushing me around since we were in diapers. I never said another word.”
I sat in silence. He seemed like an honest man, simple and down-to-earth. The kitchen was neat and clean, like any working-class suburban kitchen-nothing fancy but everything in decent shape. His story had just enough detail but not too much flourish. It had the ring of truth-I could see that he believed the things he’d said, that it still haunted him. I didn’t know what to say. I must have just stared at him with my horror and disbelief because he shifted uncomfortably beneath my gaze.
“I told you to let the dead lie,” he said. “You should have listened.”
Nobody likes a know-it-all.
6
My uncle Max (of course, he’ll always be that in my mind) was a great bear of a man-big in stature with a heart and a personality to match. He was an amusement park, a toy store, an ice-cream parlor. Occasionally, my parents would travel and have Ace and me stay with him (and a nanny, of course, because Max was not one for tying shoes and making grilled-cheese sandwiches). Those memories are among the happiest of my childhood. I never saw him without a smile on his face. His arms were always filled with gifts, his pockets full of money or candy or small surprises.
At least these are my memories of him. These days, though, I distrust my recollection of the past-not the actual events, necessarily, but the layers and nuances that clearly had eluded me. So much of my life was built on a foundation of lies that my past seems like a dark fairy tale-pretty on the surface but with a terrible black undercurrent. There were monsters under my bed and I was too naive to even fear the dark.
On the plane back to New York, I searched my memories for fissures, for the spaces through which the “real” Max might show himself, this psychotic and abused young man who killed his mother and framed his father and terrorized his young cousin into silence. The “real” Max, my father.
I thought about the last conversation I had with him.
It was nearing the end of my parents’ annual Christmas Eve party. My father had led a group out for the inevitable neighborhood candlelight stroll, and my mother was furiously scrubbing pots in the kitchen, rebuffing all of my attempts to help her with the usual implication that no one could do it the way she could. Whatever. I wandered into the front room in search of more cookies and found my uncle Max sitting by himself in the dim light of the room before our gigantic Christmas tree. That’s one of my favorite things in the world, the sight of a lit Christmas tree in a darkened room. I plopped myself down next to him on the couch and he threw an arm around my shoulder, balancing a glass of bourbon on his knee with his free hand.
