“I can’t talk to you,” she said. “You know that.”
“The investigation’s over. You can talk if you want to.”
She put down her groceries and unlatched the gate, walked up the path. I didn’t get up to help her. It wasn’t like that anymore.
“Okay,” she said. “Then I don’t want to. I have nothing to say to you, little girl.”
She looked drawn and pale as she unlatched the door. Black smudges under her eyes told me she wasn’t sleeping well at night, and something within me took a cold, dark victory in that. I didn’t get up as she unlocked the door and pulled her groceries inside. She closed the door; I heard it lock. I walked over and looked at her through the glass.
“I know he’s alive,” I told her loudly. I didn’t really know that. I was, in fact, convinced that he was dead. But I wanted to see what her reaction would be.
She brought her face close to the glass. I expected to see fear; instead I saw some combination of anger and pity.
“Have you lost your mind?” she asked me.
“You identified the body that night,” I said. “Why didn’t my father do it?”
“Because he couldn’t bear it, Ridley. What do you think? He couldn’t stand to see his best friend’s face shredded by glass, unrecognizable, see him dead upon a gurney. He called me. I came and I spared him that.”
“Why you? Why not my mother?”
“How the hell should I know?” she snapped. Her eyes looked wild.
“You’re sure it was him? Or did you lie about that, too?”
She closed her eyes and shook her head. “You should think about getting professional help,” she said unkindly.
I let a beat pass. I looked for the person I used to love, but she was gone in a way more total than if she had died.
“What are you afraid of, Esme?” I asked finally. I was surprised to hear my voice infused with sadness.
Her face went pale, I think more out of rage than anything else. And hatred. She hated me and I could see it, could feel it coming off of her in waves. “I’m afraid of you, Ridley,” she said finally. “You’ve destroyed us all and you’re still coming around with a sledgehammer. You should be ashamed for what you’ve done.”
I laughed, fogging the glass between us. It sounded loud and unpleasant even to my own ears. I knew she believed all of what had happened was my fault. I knew my parents felt that way a little, too. It was amazing how this had become about what I had done to them. It was a staggering show of narcissism, but I guess it’s the same narcissism that allowed them to do what they did to all those children, to me. They would have needed to be utterly convinced of their own self-righteousness. It made me a little sick sometimes; I tried not to think about it. I think it was the single reason that Jake disbelieved my father’s claims of innocence, that he couldn’t forgive.
Once upon a time, it would have hurt to know that Esme hated me. Now it just made me angry.
“I’ll keep swinging until I know all the answers,” I said with a smile.
“You do and you’ll wind up like that New York Times reporter,” she said with such venom that I took a step back. Her words set off bottle rockets in my chest.
“What?” I asked her. “What did you say? Are you talking about Myra Lyall?”
She gave me a dark look and I swear I saw the corners of her mouth turn up in a sick smile. She closed the curtain on me then, and I heard her walk down the hall away from me. Behind the gauzy material I saw her shadow disappear through a bright doorway. I called after her a few times, pounding on the door, but she never answered. I noticed the kids on the street had stopped playing their game. Some of them were staring at me and some of them were walking off.
Finally I gave up and walked toward the train, my heart pounding, head swimming. I was so shocked by what she had said that I couldn’t even come up with any questions to ask myself. I just felt this belly full of fear, this weird sense that I was about to walk off the edge of my life…again. Everyone around me seemed full of malice; the sky had taken on a gray cast and threatened snow.
MY PARENTS LIVED only one train stop from Esme’s, so I headed that way. I knew they were gone, having left last week for a month-long Mediterranean cruise. My father had been pushed into semiretirement, so now they were “finally doing some of the traveling we’d always wanted to do,” as my mother said with a kind of forced brightness. I was happy for them (not really), but something about it galled me, too. I felt wrecked inside and they seemed to be so blithely moving on. It hurt somehow that they could move on while I couldn’t. I know that’s childish.
I walked from the train station through the precious town center, zoned to look like a picture postcard, with clapboard restaurants and shops, a general store that sold ice cream, original gas lamps still in working order. I followed the street that wound uphill, past beautifully restored Victorian homes nestled on perfectly manicured lawns. Every season had its character here; it was always lovely. But today with most of the trees shedding their autumn color, and the hour still too bright for the streetlights to come on but dark enough to be gloomy, it didn’t seem as pretty. I didn’t take much comfort in coming home these days, and especially not today.
I let myself in the front door and went directly to my father’s study. I stood in the doorway, my hand resting on the scroll handle. When Ace and I were kids, this room was strictly forbidden unless there was adult supervision, so naturally, I had always been fascinated by it. I was forever trying to finagle an invitation in, as if spending time in there with my father would signal that I had become a grown-up. But the invitation never came.
I didn’t want to sneak in like Ace did; I didn’t see the point in that then. But Ace always wanted to go where he shouldn’t. And, in fact, he was hiding behind my father’s desk the night he overheard Max and Ben discussing Project Rescue and the night Max brought me home to Ben and Grace. But I didn’t know about that for a long time.
As I got older, I started to see this room as my father’s haven, a place where he could be alone, away from the needs of his children, the criticisms of his wife; where he could smoke a cigar out the window or have a bourbon in peace. Now I just saw it as a symbol of all the secrets that had been kept from me, all the lies that had been told.
As I walked inside, the whole house seemed to hold its breath in the silence. The room seemed cluttered and dusty; it was the only place my mother left alone on her relentless cleaning regimen. It smelled lightly of stale cigar smoke. The couch and matching chair and ottoman were the same evergreen velvet pieces that had sat there since my childhood. A low, heavy coffee table of dark wood was covered with books and magazines. The fireplace contained some fresh wood and some kindling, awaiting its next lighting.
My father used to sit, transfixed by the fire, his eyes taking on a strange blankness as he looked into the flames. As a kid I always wondered what he thought about when he was alone in here. Now I wondered if he thought about the night Max brought me here, asking them to raise me as their child; about the other Project Rescue babies and what had become of them; about the night Max’s mother died. Did he know what Nick Smiley thought had happened that night? Did he worry that there was another side to Max? If he did know, why had they remained so close?
Any affection I might have had for this forbidden place was gone. Now all I wanted to do was tear through it, open drawers, pull books off of shelves. I wanted to find anything this room was hiding. I hated it for all the secrets it had kept, including some of the last moments of Max’s life. What had the two men said to each other that night after the doors closed on me?
You probably think that I am, as usual, in a state of denial about Max. You’re thinking about the photographs, the inconsistencies in the medical examiner’s report, Esme’s bizarre behavior and her threats. You’re probably already convinced that Max was still alive. But the fact of the matter was that Max, my Max, was dead. There would be no resurrections. The man I had adored was lost to me forever.
If it turned out that Max Smiley lived, by some bizarre chance or nefarious design, he would be a stranger-or worse-to me. The man I thought I knew was a fantasy, an archetype: the Good Uncle. The real man remained a mystery-a terrifying mystery I wasn’t sure I wanted to solve. But if he was alive, I was going to find him and look him in the face. I would demand to know who he was, what had happened the night I was abducted and my biological mother was murdered. I would demand to know what had happened to Jake. I would force him to answer for Project Rescue. I would force him to answer for every ounce of rage and heartbreak he had caused.
