“Not much to tell,” my father would say. “I worked hard at school. I obeyed my parents. Then I left for Rutgers and never went back for more than a weekend at a time.”
But really, there was a lot to tell. My father and Max grew up together, met each other while riding Big Wheels up and down the block. Ben was shy, the good boy, loved and cherished by strict parents, an only child. Max was the wild one, always unkempt, always in trouble. My father told me he’d look out his window late at night sometimes, after eleven, and see Max riding his bike up and down the road beneath the yellow glow of the street lamps. At the time he was envious of Max’s freedom, felt like a baby in his Howdy Doody pajamas, his homework done and packed in his bag for the next day, his clothes cleaned and pressed and laid out for him.
“I worshiped him,” my father had said of Max. Max echoed the sentiment more times than I can remember.
If you’ve been with me from the beginning, you know what happened to Max. His father, an abuser and an alcoholic, beat Max’s mother into a coma where she languished for weeks and finally died. Max’s father was found guilty of murder, largely due to Max’s testimony, was sentenced to life in prison, and died there years later. Rather than let Max become a ward of the state, my grandparents took him in. Max, who’d always been in trouble, who’d always done poorly in school, calmed down and excelled in my grandparents’ care. They raised him as their own and somehow managed to help both boys through college on my grandfather’s autoworker’s salary.
This is a story I’ve known all my life. I’ve known that my wonderful and loving grandparents took Max in and saved him from God knows what fate. That Max was the wild boy, the rebel child. That my father was the good boy, the honor student. But that wasn’t the truth. My truth was that my father was the abused child, that my grandfather murdered my grandmother and then later died in prison. That was my legacy, that’s what I came from. When I think about it, I feel as if someone hit me in the head with a two-by-four.
I have always been the good girl with my pajamas on and my homework done…just like Ben. Except lately I’ve begun to wonder, what if I’m not like Ben at all? What if at the core of who I am, in the strands of my DNA, I’m more like Max? Even before I knew we were kin, I knew we were kindred spirits. What if nature wins out over nurture? Who am I then?
I THOUGHT ABOUT the conversation with Jake that had precipitated this unscheduled trip to Detroit. He’d had a lot to say about Max. None of it made much sense and I was seriously starting to doubt Jake’s stability. The conversation ended with us screaming at each other like trailer trash and my storming out. I did a lot of storming out where Jake was concerned. Always had, even from the beginning. He had this way of being his most calm when I was at my most furious. And it never failed to throw me over the edge. Okay, so it was me who ended up screaming like an idiot last night in Jake’s studio, while he sat in a state of patient empathy. He’s lucky I didn’t punch him, I hated him so much in that moment. But he was used to this. Jake’s karma was to be the truth sayer, to seek out and bring to light the things that everyone else wanted to bury. It seemed to me that that was his cosmic role, in my life especially.
“I’m just not sure you’re going to want to hear what I have to say,” he’d predicted.
“I do,” I’d said. “I really do.”
Elena Jansen’s denial had cost her the most precious things in her life-her children. There’s always a cost for denial. How high a cost depends largely on the importance of the truth being ignored. You deny that you’re unhappy in your chosen profession and the cost might be, say, migraine headaches. You deny signs that your abusive husband has a psychotic need to control you and he kills your children. Not that I’m blaming Elena, of course. Of course not. What I’m saying is that our actions, our choices have consequences that are sometimes impossible to predict. But when our actions and choices are based on fear and denial…well, nothing good can come of that. Ever. I had learned this the hard way. Was still learning. That was why I had decided that if there was something to know about Max, I wanted to know it. Not that I believed that he’d come back from the dead.
“Okay, Ridley,” Jake said with a sigh. “As you know, after the feds cleared your father and found Esme Gray to have too small and ambiguous a role to prosecute for Project Rescue on anything but possible conspiracy charges, they decided to close the case,” Jake began. “All the major players-Max, Alexander Harriman namely-were dead. Everyone else who might have been involved in the shadow side of the organization was a ghost. There were no records. Project Rescue was a labyrinth of dark connections, impossible to navigate.”
“I know all this,” I told him, sitting on one of Jake’s work chairs.
He nodded. “Those were hard days for me, Ridley.”
“I know,” I said softly, remembering. I thought maybe I hadn’t been there for him like I could have been, but the truth was that I didn’t have a whole lot to give on the subject; I wasn’t exactly standing on solid ground myself.
“I just couldn’t get past it,” he said. “I just couldn’t accept that there were things about my past that I’d never know. That the people responsible for fucking with so many lives would never face any consequences. It ate at me.”
This was the point where Jake disappeared from the relationship, mentally and emotionally. It was like being in love with an addict. He could never be present because he was always jonesing, always fidgeting and preoccupied with his next fix.
“So I went to see Esme Gray.”
I felt a lump in my throat. I used to love Esme like a mother; now the thought of her made my stomach clench.
“What? When?”
Esme had been briefly taken into custody around the same time Zack-her son, my ex-boyfriend-had been. The conditions of her release were still unknown to me. She never stood trial for anything involving Project Rescue, I knew that much. I also knew that she’d retired from nursing. (Zack, though he was never prosecuted for his role in Project Rescue, stood trial, was found guilty, and is serving ten years in a state penitentiary for attempted murder-the attempted murder of me and Jake, by the way. But that’s another story. Even after all that he has done to us, it’s still hard to think of him in prison, of what has become of his young and promising life. He blames me, of course, and has told me so in numerous disturbing letters that I can’t keep myself from opening.)
“I looked in your address book and found out where she lived. I followed her around for a couple of days. I broke into her house and was waiting for her when she came home. I wanted her afraid and off guard when I approached her,” he said. “But she wasn’t. It was like she’d been expecting me.”
A year ago we’d talked about Esme as being the last remaining person who might know what had happened to Jake when he was a child, other than my father (who denied all knowledge). I knew someday he’d pursue that.
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“I know you’ve been trying to forget. I can’t blame you for that.”
I nodded, waited for him to go on.
“I was rough with her-not violent, but loud. I wanted her to think I’d come unhinged. But she stayed calm, sat down on the sofa and said, ‘After the kind of men I’ve been associated with, you think I’m afraid of a punk like you? You might as well cut the shit and sit down if you want to talk.’”
I had to smile to myself. On the outside, Esme looked like everybody’s mom: pretty and roundish with a honey-colored bob and glittering blue eyes. She was pink like a peach. But at her core, she was metal. When we were all kids-Ace, Zack, and me-she, along with my mother, never had to yell or threaten; just a look and all bad behavior ceased.
“She told me if I cared about you, I’d give up on finding out what happened to me. She told me I should start my own family and move forward. She said, ‘If you continue to insist on dredging up the past, you might find things you can’t put back to rest.’”
It was an echo of something she’d said to me once and it made me go cold inside. I didn’t say anything, just listened as he recounted his conversation with Esme.
“She said to me, ‘Nobody knows what happened to you, Jake. Nobody knows who took you after you were abducted by Project Rescue and why you wound up abandoned by the system. Why do you need to know so badly? Do you want to cast someone as the villain in your life? Do you want to prove to someone that you were a good boy who didn’t deserve the awful things that happened to you? Do you want revenge?’”
He paused here a second and looked above my head. She’d gotten to him, I could see that-hit him dead
