“I want to call Jacobsen from your phone. We’ve been trying to reach him but he hasn’t answered. I’m wondering if he’ll answer a call from you.”
I didn’t know what my rights were here. I felt another wash of panic, folded my arms across my chest, and looked down at the floor. He held his hand out.
“Seriously?” he said. “Don’t make me wrestle it from you or take you into custody and confiscate your belongings, search your apartment. I might have to do that eventually, but it doesn’t have to be right now.”
It seemed like he was always issuing threats of this kind. I looked at his face and saw that he meant it. After another second’s hesitation, I handed my phone to him, watched him scroll through my address book and hit send. He put the phone on speaker and we both listened to it ring. I closed my eyes, praying silently for Jake to answer, until the voice mail picked up. My heart dipped into my stomach as Agent Grace ended the call. I held my breath, wondering if he was going to scroll through my call log, check my messages. But he didn’t do that; he simply handed the phone back to me. I was surprised; it seemed like a logical thing for him to do, to check my incoming and outgoing communications. We locked eyes and I considered giving everything up to him. Later I would look back on this as the last moment I could have asked for help out of the hole I was climbing into…a moment I let pass.
A STONE-FACED YOUNG man with a blond crew cut and a scar from his neck to his ear drove me home in a white Crown Victoria. I recognized him as Agent Grace’s partner. I didn’t remember his name. In the passing streetlights, his head looked like a wire brush. I stared out the window and cried quietly, hoping he couldn’t tell, until he handed me a tissue without a word. I was afraid for Jake, afraid for myself, unsure of what to do next.
The man at the wheel didn’t say a word as I exited the vehicle. I almost thanked him (that’s what a good girl I am), but I held it back and slammed the door instead. As I let myself into my building, I noticed that he turned off the engine and seemed to make himself comfortable, as if he were settling in for a while.
MEMORY IS ELUSIVE for me these days. When I learned that most of the things I had taken for truth about my life were lies, I lost faith in memory. The past events of my life? I started to remember them differently; odd tones and nuances started to emerge. And I couldn’t be sure any longer if my original memories or the new ones were truer to the things that had actually transpired.
Like the hours Max and my father spent in his study, for example. I had always imagined them in there laughing and relaxing, drinking cognac and smoking cigars. Now I wondered what they talked about in there. Me? Project Rescue? If Max had had this awful dark side, did my father know about it? Counsel him on how to deal with the “demons” he referred to that last night?
Or the harsh conversations between Max and my mother. She disapproved of the parade of anonymous women through Max’s life, resented bitterly their presence in her home and social life. They argued about it, but only when they thought my father was out of earshot. I wondered now why she cared. In the anger of their tones, was there something more? Intimacy? Jealousy?
I thought about those women. Who were they? All I remember was that they all seemed to be blondes, all in high heels, beautiful and distant, with something cheap about them. Were they call girls? Maybe some of them were. I didn’t really know. I never knew their names, never saw any of them more than once. What did that say about Max? I could have started making connections here: the picture Nick Smiley had painted of Max, the accusations of matricide, how Max had never had a serious relationship with a woman. But I didn’t. Not yet.
Max was not a handsome man. His skin was sallow and pockmarked from the acne he’d suffered as a teenager. His dark hair was thinning. He was big, awkward with his size. But he had a magnetic charisma that drew people to him like metallic dust. And, of course, there was his outrageous wealth. This drew people as well. But even though he was always surrounded by people, he carried an aura of aloneness. In fact, he was the loneliest man I’ve ever known. Maybe because he had so many secrets to hide.
After being dropped off at my apartment, I lay on the couch in the dark and searched my memories again for Max, for moments when I might have glimpsed the man and not my creation of him. But I couldn’t get past the myth, the one to which I had been clinging. When I was a kid, I used to bring my face up close to the television screen and try to look beyond its edges. I was sure there was more to see. But there was nothing, just the two- dimensional image. Now I tried to look beyond the borders of my memory. There was nothing there.
I tried not to think about Esme and how she’d died. I remembered what Jake had said, about how scared she’d been. I’d seen the fear, too. It seemed she’d had good reason to be afraid. Who had killed her and why, I couldn’t begin to imagine. I recalled the last words we’d said to each other.
I’ll keep swinging until I know all the answers, I told her.
You do and you’ll wind up like that New York Times reporter, she’d answered.
The memory was ugly and I cringed inside thinking of it.
I PERIODICALLY PICKED up the phone and dialed Jake’s cell, got his voice mail, and left a message or hung up. I tried not to think about the blood on his floor or what kind of trouble he might be in, or if he was hurt…or worse. Otherwise, my panic and helplessness were like something alive in my chest.
I called Ace.
“Took you long enough to get back to me,” he said by way of answering the phone, presumably having seen my number on his caller ID. Or maybe I was the only person who ever called him. He was living on the Upper West Side near Lincoln Center in a one-bedroom apartment looking out over the Hudson. It was pretty nice, though sparsely decorated with just a couch, desk, computer, and television in the living room, a bed and dresser in the bedroom. He claimed he was trying to write a novel, a claim that annoyed me to no end for reasons I can’t explain.
“I’ve got things going on, Ace,” I said, maybe more harshly than he deserved. “The whole world doesn’t revolve around you.”
“Christ,” he said. “What’s your problem?”
I unloaded. I told him everything that had happened over the last few days, everything I’d learned, everything I’d found, about my trip to Detroit, about Esme, about Jake missing. I even told him about the text message in spite of its ominous warning. When I was done I went silent, waited for him to make some sarcastic comment, tell me to move on, or claim that I was losing it completely. He didn’t say anything right away. I listened to him breathing.
“Ace, are you even listening?”
Sometimes he’d channel-surf when he was talking to me, or I’d hear him tapping on his keyboard, engaged in an online chat during our conversation. But God forbid I’d get a call on the other line while he was talking, or if he got the sense I wasn’t giving him my full attention. He’d flip out. I know; he’s kind of an asshole.
“I’m listening,” he said. He sounded strange and grave.
I paused. “Did you ever get the sense that Max was someone…else?” I asked. “Did you ever see anything in him that would make you think there was something wrong with him? Like really wrong with him?”
He let go of a sigh, or maybe he was exhaling smoke-even though he’d given up cigarettes as part of his detox after rehab.
“Well,” he said softly, “I never saw him the way you saw him.”
I didn’t say anything; I could tell he was collecting his thoughts.
“He was always a hero to you,” he said finally. “You didn’t know he was your father, but maybe on some cellular level you did. You used to look at him with these wide eyes, this adoration on your face. I never understood your relationship. It confused me as a kid. I was never sure what you were seeing.”
I was surprised by what he said, by its presence and wisdom.
“What did you see?”
“Honestly? I saw someone angry and very lonely, someone who glommed on to our family because he didn’t have one of his own. He was always drunk, Ridley, with some prostitute on his arm.” He paused a second and inhaled sharply, telling me definitely that he was smoking. “I’m not sure why Ben and Grace allowed him so much unsupervised time with us. I was never sure what they saw in him, either.”
I took this all in.
“You know he hit me once, hard in the mouth,” he said.
