Beautiful Lies rj-1

by Lisa Unger

  “Dad,” I said, releasing a sob. “So many lies.”

  My father sighed and pulled a chair over to the bed. He sat heavily and rested his head on one hand. When he lifted his face to me again, I could see that he’d been crying. The sight of it frightened me. The face I’d always looked to for comfort was shattered.

  “Dad. Who am I?” I tried to sit up and realized by the warbling of the room that it wasn’t going to happen.

  He shook his head slowly. “You’re Ridley. You’re my Ridley. You’ll always be that.”

  There was truth in this that I recognized. But it wasn’t the whole truth and we both knew it. “No more lies, Dad.”

  “It’s not a lie,” he said, nearly yelling. “You couldn’t be any more my daughter.”

  I knew if he could, he’d try to pull his cloak of denial over us both. But it was no use. It didn’t fit anymore. I’d outgrown it.

  “I am Ridley, Dad. But I wasn’t always Ridley. Once I was Jessie Amelia Stone, daughter of Teresa Stone. A woman now dead because of Project Rescue.”

  He looked at me blankly for a second. There were lines around his eyes I hadn’t seen before. The skin on his hands looked dry and papery. They were the hands of an old man. He rested his head in them.

  “No,” he said through his fingers.

  “Did you know, Dad? Did you know what they were doing?”

  He shook his head vigorously. “No,” he said firmly. “I told you everything I knew about Project Rescue. If they did what that detective thinks they did, I had no idea. You know me, Ridley. You know I would never do that. Don’t you?”

  I didn’t know if I could believe him. That was the worst thing about all of this. There was no one I could trust. Everyone had an agenda, good or bad, a reason to hide the truth from me.

  “Then how did you wind up with me, Dad? If you didn’t know, how did I become Ridley Jones?”

  He looked at me with profound sadness. It mimicked perfectly the expression I’d seen on Max’s face the night my father closed the study door on him.

  The door to my hospital room pushed open then and in came my mother. She looked stronger than my father, more reserved. Her eyes were dry and she wore a faint, sad smile on her face. I didn’t know how long she had been listening and I didn’t know how much she knew to begin with. I looked at her and thought of the butterfly at Union Square. She came to stand by my bed and put a cool, dry hand to my head, as if in some motherly instinct to check my temperature.

  “It’s time, Ben. Ridley’s right. No more lies.” She kept her eyes on my face but I couldn’t read her expression. All I could think was how different she was from me. There was nothing of my face in hers.

  “No, Grace. We made a promise,” he almost whispered.

  “Max is dead,” my mother said harshly, the word dead like a stone that she threw. My father looked startled by her tone. “I don’t want to keep this secret anymore. It’s caused too much damage already. If we’d have been honest from the beginning, Ridley would never have been vulnerable to this kind of nightmare in the first place.”

  My father seemed to sink down in his chair. He shook his head slowly.

  “Maybe you’re right,” he said.

  thirty-one

  I thought they were going to tell me about Project Rescue, that they’d colluded in Max’s plan, had been a part of it in some way. I thought they were going to tell me how I was taken from Teresa Stone and that they bought me and raised me as their own. I thought they’d tell me all the reasons why it was okay, why I was better off for the way things had been. But those weren’t the secrets they’d kept.

  “First, Ridley, I want you to understand that your father had nothing to do with Project Rescue,” said my mother. “I don’t care what that private detective says. You have to believe that he would never knowingly be a party to abduction and murder, no matter what. He may have treated those children, he may have noted the potential for abuse, but he would never be an accessory to such a scheme.”

  I didn’t say anything. I wanted to believe her. And it didn’t mesh with anything I knew about my father. But it was hard to imagine that he didn’t have at least some idea what Project Rescue was all about. Then, of course, there was the fact that both of them had lied to me for my entire life. I just wasn’t as certain of them, their beliefs, their judgments, as I had been a week ago.

  “Ridley.” My mother wanted me to agree with her. So I nodded my head, just so she would go on. “That’s not how you came to us.”

  “Then how?”

  “There was always a parade of women through Max’s life, and at first no one thought Teresa Stone was any different. A pretty young woman who worked at the reception desk in Max’s Manhattan office; it was only a matter of time before he took notice of her and asked her out. And of course, she would say yes. No one could resist Max, his charm, his money, the way he had of making a girl see stars.

  “Truth be told, I never even bothered to remember their names most of the time. I think Teresa was the only girl, other than Esme, that he saw more than once.”

  “I knew she was different right away,” my father interjected. “There was a goodness to her that attracted Max, a decency. She wasn’t like the others.”

  My mother gave him a look that told him he’d interrupted her. “Sorry,” he said.

  They saw her first at a Christmas party, then he brought her to dinner at my parents’ house; a while later he brought her to a performance of La Bohème at the Met and they all had dinner afterward at “21.”

  “She was quiet,” my mother remembered, “clearly intimidated by the evening. The box seats at the Met, Max’s special treatment at ‘21.’ I don’t know; I liked that about her. She didn’t take it for granted or have the usual air of pampered entitlement that so many of Max’s friends seemed to have.” She leaned heavily on the word friends, effectively communicating her disdain.

  “Anyway, we thought, Well, maybe this is it. A real girlfriend; not one he’s hired—literally or figuratively.” My mother always has been a bit catty. “But then she was gone. We didn’t see her again. I asked about her, though that was a big no-no with Max. He said they didn’t share the same interests…or something vague like that. But it was more than that. You and I have talked about it, Ridley.”

  I remembered our conversation about Esme and the things my mother had told me about Max then.

  “A man like Max,” my father said, “so broken and lonely inside from all those years of abuse, from the things he’d endured and seen, can’t really love well. He was smart enough to know it. It’s why he never married.”

  I thought of Max’s parade of call girls, his aura of loneliness, the way he always looked at my mother and father with that strange mixture of love and envy. The misshapen pieces of my life, the ones I had always ignored, were fitting themselves together.

  “What are you telling me, Dad? That he knew Teresa Stone and allowed her child to be taken from her, anyway?”

  My parents exchanged a look.

  “Not exactly,” my mother said, looking down at her fingernails.

  I managed to push myself upright with great difficulty. My father jumped up to help me. My head felt like a helium balloon; the room had an unpleasant spin to it.

  “Max and Teresa went their separate ways,” my mother said. “Eventually she left the office, went on to other employment. And I never saw her again.” She released a heavy sigh and walked over to the window.

  They were stalling. But I didn’t push. I’m not sure I was any more eager for them to get to the point than they were.

  “But a couple of years later, she showed up at the Little Angels clinic with a baby. A little girl, almost two,” my father said. “I remembered her, but she didn’t remember me. I didn’t want to embarrass her, so I didn’t say anything about my relationship to Max. Over the next few months, there were incidents that caused me some alarm.”

  “He broke Jessie’s arm. Christian Luna.”

&nb
sp; My father nodded. “So you know.”

  “He told me before he was killed.” I fought back tears and a wave of fatigue.

  My father nodded with a heavy frown. “I had a conversation with her,” he said. “She promised me that Luna wouldn’t have access to her any longer and I let the incident go.”

  “But you mentioned it to Max?”

  My father shook his head. “No. I didn’t. Couldn’t have. It would have violated her doctor-patient confidentiality.”

  “But he found out somehow,” I said.

  “I don’t know, Ridley.” He shrugged, looked away from me. “All I know is that he showed up at our house a few weeks later. With little Jessie Stone.” He paused, put a hand on my arm. “With you.”

  “With me?”

  “Ridley,” my father said, his voice hoarse and his eyes getting glassy. “I’m not your biological father; that much you know. But neither is Christian Luna. He may have believed he was. Possibly Teresa led him to believe it.”

  I shook my head. “Then who?”

  “Ridley, honey,” my mother said, standing. “You’re Max’s daughter.”

  I looked at her and saw that she was telling the truth. I heard Max’s voice in my head. Ridley, you might be the only good I’ve ever done. And I started to cry because I finally knew what he meant.

  Max came to them late in the evening, after midnight and unannounced. He came with a little girl in his arms. His daughter, he told them, by a woman he hadn’t seen in years. The little girl clung to him, wept quietly, her dark eyes wide, taking in all the unfamiliar sights and sounds.

  “Oh, my God. This is Teresa Stone’s little girl,” my father said, taking her from Max’s arms. “I’ve treated her at the clinic.”

  Max looked at him, his face blank, a sheen of sweat on his forehead. “You knew I had a daughter?”

  “No, of course not,” he said. “I didn’t realize she was your daughter, Max.”

  Max drifted into the kitchen, rubbing his temples with his hands. He sat at the table. Little Jessie pulled at my father’s earlobe, made a light cooing noise.

  “Something terrible has happened to Teresa. She’s dead, Ben. Murdered in her home.” His voice was little more than a whisper. The little girl started to cry and my mother took her into her arms, brought her into the other room to comfort her.

  “What? When?” my father wanted to know, shocked.

  “What difference does it make?” Max snapped.

  “What difference does it make?” my father repeated, incredulous. “Max. What’s going on?”

  “I can’t raise this child, Ben. You know that.”

  “Wait a minute, Max. Let’s go back. How did you get this little girl?”

  “The police called me. Teresa had my name on the birth certificate. I picked her up from Child Services a little while ago.”

  “But that was a lie,” I said, interrupting my father. “Teresa Stone was murdered that night and Jessie was never found.”

  He nodded. “You’re right. Max wasn’t on the original birth certificate. She’d left the father’s name blank. There was no way the police would have known to call Max. But by the time we realized that, it was too late.”

  “What do you mean too late?”

  My father shook his head. “We took you from Max that night. We accepted what he told us without question.”

  “We’d been trying for eighteen months for a second child and your arrival just seemed like the answer to our prayers,” said my mother. She was sitting across the room from me now. It was dark; I couldn’t see her face.

  “So when you figured out that Max had lied, that Jessie was a missing child, that no one knew who’d murdered her mother, you just kept quiet?”

  “We fell in love with you right away. And by the time we realized that there was so much Max hadn’t told us, we’d already bent some rules,” my father said. He almost looked sheepish.

  “What kind of rules?”

  “With the help of some of Max’s connections, we processed you like a Project Rescue baby, like a child who’d been abandoned without documents. We created a new birth certificate and Social Security card.”

  “And that’s how you became Ridley Jones,” said my mother with a smile, as if she were telling me the happy ending to a bedtime story.

  “And Jessie Stone disappeared,” I said. “Until I saved Justin Wheeler from his fate.”

  Nothing about their story rang true. There was a false note to it that could not be denied and there were so many questions. Like how could you just take a child in the night from your friend and ask no questions? Didn’t it seem like a huge coincidence that Jessie, Max’s daughter, would wind up being treated by Dr. Benjamin Jones, Max’s best friend? If Ben didn’t realize Jessie was Max’s daughter and Max’s name wasn’t on that birth certificate, how did Max find out about Jessie? And did he arrange to have Jessie taken that night? Did he arrange to have Teresa Stone murdered? But these questions seemed to dam up against one another, and for a minute I couldn’t bring myself to ask them. The answers were so potentially ugly.

  They each had their eyes on me. And I wasn’t sure what to say to them.

  “So you took this child, promised Max you’d raise her as your own. You falsified documents so that you could keep her true identity a secret from her for the rest of her life. You never asked any questions about what happened to her mother, how she died?”

  “Well, we all thought Christian Luna had killed her. He was on the run. The child had no family except for Max.” He ended with a shrug. “What would have happened to her if we hadn’t taken her? She would have gone into the system. Been adopted by strangers.”

  “If Max had kept her, she would have been raised by nannies,” said my mother.

  They’d had a lifetime to justify their actions to themselves. Not that I was inclined to judge them. How could I? If they’d lied and broken the law, if they’d looked away from everything suspicious about my arrival at their doorstep, they’d done it for Jessie. They’d done it for me.

  “Why not just tell me the truth? Why not just raise me as an adopted child? People do it every day; it’s not exactly taboo.”

  “Max was adamant that you never know he was your father. He never wanted you to know that he didn’t have what it took to raise you. He never wanted you to think he didn’t want you.”

  “And he never wanted me to start looking into my past. He never wanted me to know what happened to Teresa Stone. And he never wanted me asking any questions about Project Rescue.”

  “Project Rescue doesn’t have anything to do with this,” my father said sternly.

  I don’t know how he could say that. But I could see that he believed it. That he needed to believe it. But the first of many ugly questions pushed its way through the dirt.

  “If Max’s name wasn’t on the birth certificate and the police never called him, how did he wind up with Jessie that night?” I asked.

  They looked at each other and then at me.

  “Did he have something to do with her murder?” I asked, my voice cracking.

  “No,” said my father. “Of course not.”

  “Then how? How did he know about me? How did he wind up with me that night?”

  They were both silent. Then my mother spoke, quietly, almost in a whisper.

  “We never asked those questions, Ridley,” she said. “What would have been the point?”

  Denial: my family heritage. If you don’t ask the questions, the truth will never inconvenience you.

  I tried to process the information but my exhausted brain wouldn’t allow it. Ben and Grace weren’t my parents. Max was my father. My mother had been brutally murdered. Possibly, maybe probably, Max had something to do with it. And I had been more or less abducted. My birth certificate and Social Security card were falsified documents. I got it. But the information was having no impact on me whatsoever.

  You’d expect me to have raged, lambasted them for all the lies and all the mis
takes—crimes—they’d committed. But I didn’t do any of that. I slipped back down on the bed. I didn’t have a tear left in me. I was numb. Maybe it was the painkillers. I wondered if I could get some more. Like a lifetime supply.

  I looked at the people before me and tried to imagine that they weren’t my parents. It was impossible to comprehend. It made me think that it’s not blood that binds us, it’s experience. Teresa Stone was a stranger to me, a sad stranger who’d met a heinous and unjust end. I felt a pain in my chest for her and all that she had endured. But she was as distant and faded as the old photograph that had started all of this. As for Max, I would need some time to recast him as my father, my failed father. He was the good uncle, a man I loved dearly all my life. Incredibly, I couldn’t muster any anger at him for the things I knew he’d done and for the things I suspected. Not then anyway; there would be time for that. Max, for all his joviality, operated from a place of terrible pain; for all his wealth, he was an emotional pauper. Can you judge that? Feel contempt for what a person doesn’t have? Well, maybe you can. But I don’t have it in me.

  “What about Ace?”

  “What about him?” my father said.

  “Is he your son?”

  My father nodded. “Ace is our son, our biological child.”

  I thought about it a second. “Does he know I’m not your biological child?”

  My father nodded. “He overheard your uncle and me talking one day. We were careless and he got an earful. But the problems with Ace started long before that day. In fact, I think he was in my office trying to steal some money when Max and I entered and shut the door. He hid behind the desk and heard everything.”

  I had to give a little laugh. “Well, what right does he have to be so fucked up, then?”

  “Ridley,” said my mother, who’d visibly stiffened at the sound of Ace’s name. “Watch your language.”

  Watch my language. Can you believe that? They can never stop parenting, can they? Ben and Grace were my parents, and they always would be. There was no changing that.

  “Where is he?”

  “They’ve got him in rehab. They can’t keep him there, though, so if he wants to leave, they have to let him go.”