by Lisa Unger
The funny thing was, even after my life had dissolved around me, even after everything I thought defined me had turned out to be a lie, I found that I was still me. I still had the strength to move forward into the unknown. And that was a pretty cool thing to learn about myself.
My life may have looked as if it had been on the business end of a wrecking ball, but Ridley Jones still emerged from the remains. And though there were times when I didn’t think it was possible, my life settled back into a somewhat normal rhythm. For a while, anyway.
If you don’t know what happened to me and how it all turned out, you could go back now and find out before you move ahead. I’m not saying the things that follow won’t make any sense to you or that you won’t get anything out of the experience of joining me on this next chapter of my vida loca. What I’m saying is that it’s kind of like sleeping with someone before you know her name. But maybe you like it like that. Maybe you want to come along and figure things out as we go, like any new relationship, I guess. Either way, the choice is yours. The choice is always yours.
Well, I’ll get to it, then.
I’m the last person in the world without a digital camera. I don’t like them; they seem too fragile. As if getting caught in the rain or clumsily pushing the wrong button could erase some of your memories. I have a 35-millimeter Minolta that I’ve been using since college. I take my rolls of film and then drop them off at the same photo lab on Second Avenue I’ve been using for years.
I had a friend who thought that there was something inherently wrong with picture taking. Memory, he said, was magical for its subjectivity. Photographs were crude and the direct result of a desire to control, to hold on to moments that should be released like each breath that we take. Maybe he was right. We’re not friends anymore and I have no pictures of him, just this memory that resurfaces every time I go to pick up photographs. And then I think about how he liked to sing and play the guitar after we made love (and how he was really terrible at it—the guitar playing, the singing, and the lovemaking, for that matter) but that the sight of Washington Square Park outside his windows always seemed so romantic that I put up with the rest for longer than I might have otherwise. My memories of him are organic and three-dimensional, pictures that exist only for me; there’s something nice about that after all.
So I was thinking about this as I pushed through the door of the F-Stop to pick up some photos that were waiting for me. A desk clerk I’d never seen before looked at me with practiced indifference from beneath a chaos of dyed black hair and twin swaths of eyeliner.
“Help you?” he said sullenly, placing a paperback binding up on the surface in front of him. I saw the flash of a tongue piercing when he spoke.
“I’m picking up photographs. Last name Jones.”
He gave me a kind of weird look, as if he thought it was a name I’d made up. (A note about New York City: Here, if you leave a plain or common name, people treat you with suspicion. Meanwhile, if your name would sound bizarre or made up anywhere else in the world—for example, Ruby Decal X or Geronimo—it wouldn’t even raise an eyebrow in the East Village.)
The clerk disappeared behind a dividing wall and I thought I heard voices as I glanced around at some black-and-white art shots on the wall. After a short time, he returned with three fat envelopes and lay them on the desk between us. He didn’t say anything as he rang up the sale. I paid him in cash, and he slid the envelopes into a plastic bag.
“Thank you,” I said, taking the bag from his hand.
He sat down without another word and returned to his book. For some reason, I turned around at the door and caught him staring at me strangely just before he averted his eyes.
I paused on the street corner at Second Avenue and Eighth Street. My intent had been to stop by the studio and bring the photos to Jake. They were some shots we had taken over the last few months: a long weekend in Paris where we’d tried and failed to reconnect; an afternoon spent in Central Park, where we fooled around on the Great Lawn and things seemed hopeful; a miserable day with my parents at the Botanical Gardens in Brooklyn, characterized by heavy awkward silences, mini-outbursts, and barely concealed dislike. Faced now with the reality of dropping in on Jake, I balked, loitered on the corner staring at the sidewalk.
I don’t want to tell you that my world has gone dark or that the color has drained from my life. That sounds too dramatic, too self-pitying. But I guess that’s not too far off. When last you heard from me, I was picking up the pieces of my shattered life. I think we ended on a hopeful note, but the work has been hard. And like any protracted convalescence, there have been more lows than highs.
As of last month, Jake moved out of the apartment we shared on Park Avenue South and is living semi-permanently in his studio on Avenue A. Far from finding peace with his past and coming to terms with what he has learned, Jake has become obsessed with Project Rescue and Max’s role in it.
By Max, I mean Maxwell Allen Smiley, my uncle who was not really my uncle but my father’s best friend. We shared a special connection all my life. And last year I learned that he was really my biological father. I am currently struggling to recast him in my life as my failed father instead of my beloved uncle.
Project Rescue is an organization developed by Max, an abused child himself, to help pass the Safe Haven Law in New York State years ago. This law allows frightened mothers to abandon their babies at specified Safe Haven sites, no questions asked, no fear of prosecution. I discovered last year that there was a shadow side to this organization. Cooperating nurses and doctors were secretly flagging children they thought were potential victims of abuse and unsafe in their homes. Through a collusion with organized crime, some of these children were abducted and sold to wealthy parents. In a sense, I was a Project Rescue baby, though my story is more complicated. Jake is a Project Rescue baby for whom things went horribly wrong.
Lately, Jake has abandoned his art. And while he and I have not formally broken up, I have become a ghost in our relationship, behaving like a poltergeist, tossing things about, making noise just to get myself noticed.
I am reminded of something my mother, Grace, once said about Max: A man like that, so broken and hollow inside, can’t really love well. At least he was smart enough to know it. They say we all fall in love with our fathers over and over in a sad attempt to resolve that relationship. Is it possible I was doing that before I even knew who my father really was?
“Ms. Jones. Ridley Jones.” I heard a voice behind me and went cold inside. Over the past year, I had developed quite a fan club, in spite of my best efforts to keep myself out of everything other than my legal obligations involving Christian Luna’s murder and the investigation surrounding Project Rescue.
Christian Luna was the man who started all of this. After seeing a clip on CNN about my heroic deed, he recognized me as Jessie Stone, Teresa Stone’s daughter, a little girl he believed to be his daughter, as well. He’d been hiding for more than thirty years, since the night of Teresa Stone’s murder and Jessie’s abduction, certain that he’d be accused because of their history of domestic violence. I watched him die from a gunshot wound to the head as he sat just inches away from me on a park bench in the Bronx. He turned out not to be my father, after all.
Anyway, thanks to the myriad articles and newsmagazine specials featuring the famous Post photograph as the point where it all started, I have become the poster child for an organization that has altered thousands of lives, not necessarily for the better. They call. They write, the other Project Rescue babies. They stop me on the street. I’ve been lauded, embraced, assaulted, and spit upon. They are grateful. They are enraged. They come to me in the various stages of grief and horror, disbelief and anger. In each of them I see a sad mirror of my own journey toward healing.
I ignored the person behind me. I didn’t answer or turn around. I have found that if I don’t answer to my name when it’s called on the street, sometimes people go away, unsure of themselves. Once upon a time,
I’d heard my name called only in love or in query and I answered happily with a smile on my face. Those days are gone.
“Ms. Jones.”
The voice had a kind of authority to it that almost caused me to turn. I’ve always been a good girl and have responded appropriately to commands. Instead I started to walk away toward Jake’s studio. I heard a quickening of steps, which caused me to pick up my own pace. Then I felt a strong hand on my shoulder. I spun around, angry and ready to fight. Standing there were two men in smart business suits.
“Ms. Jones, we need a word.”
His face was stern, not angry, not emotional in any way. And that calmed me. He had strange storm-cloud gray eyes, a tousle of ink black hair. He was tall, nearly a head taller than I am, and big around the chest and shoulders. There was a cold distance to him but a sort of kindness, too. The man at his side said nothing.
“What do you want?”
He pulled a thin leather wallet from his lapel pocket, flipped it open, and handed it to me.
Special Agent Dylan Grace, Federal Bureau of Investigation.
All of my trepidation drained and was replaced by annoyance. I handed the ID back to him.
“Agent Grace, I don’t have anything else to say to the FBI. I’ve told you everything I know about Project Rescue. There’s literally nothing left to say.”
He must have heard the catch in my voice or seen something in my face because the cool mettle of his demeanor seemed to warm a bit.
“This isn’t about Project Rescue, Ms. Jones.”
His partner walked over to a black sedan and pulled open the back passenger-side door. The air was cool and the sky was a moody gunmetal. People turned to look at us but kept walking. Some thugs rode by in a tricked-out Mustang, bass booming like a heartbeat.
“What’s it about, then?”
“It’s about Maxwell Allen Smiley.”
My heart thumped. “There’s nothing left to say about him, either. He’s dead.”
“Can I have the photographs in your bag, Ms. Jones?”
“What?” How did he know about the photos, and what could he possibly want with shots of my almost ex-boyfriend and my very nearly estranged family?
He withdrew a piece of paper from his lapel pocket. I found myself wondering what else he had in there—a deck of cards, a white bunny, a ridiculously long strand of multicolored handkerchiefs?
“I have a warrant, Ms. Jones.”
I didn’t look at the paper. I just reached into my bag and handed him the F-Stop package. He took it and motioned to the car. I moved toward the sedan and slid inside without another word. By then I’d had enough experience with the FBI to know that they get what they want eventually. Whether it’s the easy way or the hard way is up to you.
THEY TOOK ME to a building near FBI headquarters, and after taking my bag, left me sitting in a barren room with only a faux wood table on metal legs and two amazingly uncomfortable chairs. The walls were painted a miserable gray and the fluorescent lighting flickered unpleasantly.
They did this for a reason, I knew, left you sitting in an unwelcoming room with only your thoughts, no clock on the wall, nothing to distract you. They want you to think. Think about why you’re there, about what you know or what you have done. They want you to wonder about what they might know. They want you to work yourself into a state of worry and anxiety so that by the time they return to you, you’re looking for a confessor.
But of course, this works only if you’re guilty or hiding something. I honestly had no idea why they wanted to talk to me, so I just became progressively more bored and annoyed. And exhausted. This encounter, and maybe my life in general, was exhausting me. I got off the chair and walked a restless circle around the room. Finally I placed my back against the wall and slid into a sitting position on the floor.
These days I tried not to think about Max, though sometimes it seemed as if the more I tried to be rid of his memory, the more he haunted me. I pulled up my knees and folded my arms over them, rested my head in the crook of my elbow to escape the harsh white light of the room. I used to do this when I was a kid when I was upset or tired, retreat into this cocoon of myself. When that didn’t work, I’d hide.
I’m not sure how it all started, the hiding thing. But I remember liking to crawl into dark places and lie quietly, listening to the chaos of everyone trying to find me. My parents didn’t think it amusing but I found it positively thrilling, the excitement of them running around, looking under beds and in closets. It was a game I always won, just by virtue of the reaction I created. It didn’t occur to me that I might be angering or frightening anyone. I was too young to care about things like that. I just got better and better at finding places to hide. Eventually I had to reveal myself or never be found. There was something great about that, too.
At some point I got the idea that there was nowhere else in the house to hide. All my secret places had been discovered by my parents, or by my brother, Ace—or by my uncle Max. He was the big gun, called in when no one else could find me. He’d say, “Check inside that wardrobe in the guest room.” Or “Try that crawl space to the attic in her closet.” Somehow he’d always know where to find me. Once my parents realized that Max had this gift for finding me, the game started to get too easy, their reactions were not as much fun and the whole thing lost its charge. I had to raise the stakes.
I don’t know how old I was, seven, maybe six—too young to go into the woods behind my house without Ace. I knew that much. It was just a shallow swath of trees about two miles long, that edged our neighbors’ properties and separated our acreage from the yard behind us. A little creek ran beneath a stone bridge. The space was narrow enough that neighborhood parents felt safe letting us play back there without too much supervision. If you went too far, you just wound up in someone’s backyard. But I wasn’t supposed to go back there by myself. So naturally it was the perfect place to hide.
It was a hot summer afternoon when I left through the backdoor of my house and entered the woods. We’d built a small fort back in the thick and I climbed inside the rickety thing. It was dim and warm. I felt pleased with myself. After a while of lying there, looking out the crooked window at the leaves sighing in the light wind, I fell asleep. When I woke up later, the sky was a deep purple. It was close to dark. It was the first time in my life I was truly frightened. I looked out the fort “window,” and the woods I usually loved seemed full of monsters and witches, the trees smirked with their malice. I started to cry, curled up in a tight ball.
I don’t think I was like that for long before I heard someone moving through the overgrowth.
“Ridley? Are you out here, honey?”
I was old enough to hear the worry in his voice. But my heart flooded with relief; I cried even harder until I saw Max’s face in the makeshift doorway. He was too big to get inside.
“Ridley, there you are,” he said, sitting down heavily on the ground. I could see that he was sweating, maybe from the humidity, maybe from fear. Maybe both. He put his head in his hands. “Kid,” he said through his fingers, “you have got to stop doing this. You are going to give your uncle Max a heart attack. Your mom and dad are about to call the police.”
He lifted his head to the night and yelled, “I found her!”
I crawled out of the fort and into his lap, let him enfold me in his big arms against his soft belly. He was damp with perspiration but I didn’t care. Through the trees, I could see the glow from the lights of my own house, could hear my parents’ voices drawing closer.
“How did you find me?” I asked him.
He sighed and took my face in his hands. “Ridley, there’s a golden chain from my heart to yours.” He tapped his chest lightly, then mine. “Trust me. I’ll always find you.” I never doubted he was right. And I never hid from my poor parents again.
I LIFTED MY head from the crook of my arm and squinted against the harsh white lights of the interrogation room. I closed my eyes again and leaned my head against the
cold wall, tried and failed to clear my mind and relax.
Agent Grace walked in shortly thereafter and offered me his hand, pulled me up from the floor with impressive strength.
“Starting to feel at home here?” he asked. There was something odd in his voice. Was it compassion? For someone who was completely innocent of wrongdoing, I’d spent more time with the FBI than Jeffrey Dahmer had. Or so I imagined, in my self-aggrandizing way. I gave him a short, tight smile, then kept my eyes on the eight-by-ten envelope he had in his other hand. We sat across from each other. He straddled his chair as if he was mounting a horse. Without a word, he opened the envelope and took out three eight-by-ten photographs and spread them out before me.
The first was a photo of me in front of Notre-Dame in Paris. I was eating a crepe filled with Nutella and bananas, gazing up at the cathedral. I wore my leather coat and a beret I had bought on the street just to be a dork. Hazelnut chocolate dripped down my chin. Jake had taken the candid. I think to the casual observer I would have looked silly and happy. But I wasn’t. I remember waking up next to Jake that morning in our posh hotel room with the yellow morning sun beaming in. I looked at him as he slept and thought, I’ve been with this man for a year. He seems more like a stranger to me now than when I was first falling in love with him, when there were so many secrets and lies between us. How is it possible to know someone less intimately the more time you spend with him? The thought had filled me with sadness. He woke up as I stared at him and we made a slow, desperate kind of love to each other, both wanting so badly the connection we’d once shared. I carried the sadness of that lovemaking with me all day.
