Sliver of Truth rj-2

by Lisa Unger

  The next photo was a shot of me and Jake on the Great Lawn in Central Park. The grass looked a bright and artificial green and the skyscape rose up over the tall trees painted gold, orange, and red in the changing season. We’d asked a young woman strolling by to take a picture of us on our blue picnic blanket and cuddled in close. She got only our heads near the bottom of the frame and everything irrelevant behind and above us. It had been a good day. In the photo I noticed that our smiles looked forced and fake. But they weren’t. At least mine wasn’t. I felt hopeful for us, I remember, like a terminally ill patient who thinks a brief cessation of symptoms heralds a miraculous recovery.

  The final photograph before me was a snapshot from the miserable Sunday we’d spent with my parents. We went to the River Café in Brooklyn for lunch and then on to the Botanic Garden. This used to be one of my favorites dates with my father when I was younger. Arranging this get-together was my pathetic and desperate attempt to pretend we could act like a family. Well, we did act like a family, a hateful and unhappy one. Ace, who was also invited, didn’t show and didn’t call. My mother took an attitude of stoic endurance, issuing the occasional passive-aggressive comment under her breath. My father and I chattered on like idiots, mirroring each other in our efforts to keep the faltering conversation flowing. Jake was silent and sullen. We shared an awkward meal. Then, unable to admit defeat, we proceeded to the Botanic Garden. My father used my camera to take a photo of me, my mother, and Jake. I put my arm around my mother’s shoulders and smiled. She turned up the corners of her mouth reluctantly, but I swear she shrunk from me. Jake stood near us but just slightly apart. He looked distracted, seemed to have gazed off in the last second before the picture was snapped. We looked like a group of strangers, uncomfortable and forced together.

  A powerful sadness and embarrassment washed over me. I looked up at Agent Grace with what I hoped was barely concealed hostility.

  “It’s not a crime to have a shitty relationship with your family, is it? Or to document your sad attempts to save your failing love affair?”

  I leaned away, looked at the wall over his head. I didn’t want to look at his face.

  “No, Ms. Jones, it isn’t,” he said softly. “Can I call you Ridley?”

  “No,” I said nastily. “You can’t.”

  I thought I saw a smile tug at the corners of his mouth, as if he found me amusing. I wondered how much trouble you could get in for slapping a federal agent.

  “Ms. Jones,” he said, “what interests us about these photographs is not the subjects, it’s the background. Take another look.”

  I glanced at each picture and saw nothing unusual. I shrugged at him and shook my head. He kept his eyes on me, nodded again toward the photos. “Look closely.”

  I looked again. Still nothing.

  “Why don’t you just cut the crap,” I suggested, “and tell me what you see.”

  He took a black Sharpie from his lapel pocket and circled the figure of a man behind us at the Botanic Garden. He was more like the specter of a man, tall and thin. His face was paper white, little more than a ghostly blur. He wore a long black coat, a dark hat. He leaned on a cane. He seemed to be looking in my direction.

  Agent Grace circled another figure behind us in Central Park. Same coat, same cane; this time the man in the picture wore sunglasses. The figure in the photograph was so far away it could have been anyone.

  He took the Sharpie again and marked another man in the doorway of Notre-Dame. This time he was caught in profile, more clearly, closer. Something about the shape of his brow, the ridge of his nose caused me to lean in. Something about the slope of his shoulder made my heart flutter.

  “No,” I said, shaking my head.

  “What?” he asked, raising his eyebrows. Those eyes of his were weird, at once sleepy and searing.

  “I see what you’re trying to do,” I said.

  “What?” he repeated, leaning back. I expected to see smug satisfaction on his face but I didn’t.

  “It’s impossible.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes.”

  I looked again. They say it’s a person’s carriage that allows you to recognize him across the room or across the street. But I think it’s a person’s aura, the energy that radiates from within. The man in the photograph was greatly dissimilar in physical appearance, perhaps as much as a hundred pounds thinner than the man I remembered. He looked twenty years older. He seemed a damaged, hollowed-out person lacking any of the radiant warmth I’d basked in most of my life. But still there was something familiar about this man. If I had not personally seen his dead body moments before cremation, had I not with my own hands scattered his ashes from the Brooklyn Bridge, you might have been able to convince me that I was looking at the man I’d once known as my uncle Max, who was my biological father. But the fact was I had done all those things. And dead was dead.

  “I’ll admit there’s a resemblance,” I said finally, after a brief but intense staring contest.

  “We think there’s more than a resemblance.”

  I sighed here and leaned back in my chair. “Okay, say you’re right. That would mean that you think Max staged his own death for whatever reason. Why would anyone go to all that trouble just to risk being discovered a couple of years later?”

  Agent Grace regarded me for a minute.

  “Do you know the number one reason why people in the witness protection program get found by their enemies and wind up dead?”

  “Why?” I asked, though I could probably guess.

  “Love.”

  “Love,” I repeated. That wouldn’t have been my guess.

  “They can’t stay away. They can’t help but make that call or show up incognito at a wedding or a funeral.”

  I didn’t say anything, and Agent Grace went on. “I’ve seen his apartment. It’s practically a shrine to you. Max Smiley did some terrible things in his life, hurt a lot of people. But if he loved anyone, it was you.”

  His words put a crush on my heart and I found I couldn’t meet his eyes.

  “I don’t get it. Were you following me? How did you know about these photos? Do you have some kind of relationship with my photo lab?”

  He didn’t answer me and I hadn’t really expected him to. I took a last glance at the pictures. That man could have been anyone; could even have been three different men, I decided.

  “I don’t know who this is,” I told him. “If it is who you want it to be, then it’s news to me. If you want to talk more, it’ll have to be in the presence of my attorney.”

  I clamped my mouth shut then. I knew he could make life hard for me. Since the Patriot Act, federal authorities have more latitude than ever. If they wanted to, they could hold me indefinitely without counsel if they claimed it had something to do with national security. (Which in my case would have been a stretch. But I promise you, stranger things have happened.) I think, though, Agent Grace sensed the truth: I had no idea who the man in those photos might be.

  He looked at me hard with those eyes of his. I found myself inspecting the cut of his suit. Not cheap, exactly, but not Armani, either. I saw he had a bit of a five o’clock shadow coming in on his jaw. I noticed that the knuckles on his right hand were broken, not bleeding but raw. He rose suddenly, gave me a look he might have meant to be intimidating, and left without another word.

  Shortly afterward, his partner came and told me he’d escort me from the building. He slid the photos on the table into the envelope Agent Grace had left behind. He handed them to me with a cordial smile. “Thank you and come again,” I expected him to say.

  “Agent Grace wants you to have these…to look over more carefully.”

  I took the envelope from him, briefly fantasized about ripping it into pieces and throwing the shreds in his face, then tucked it under my arm instead.

  “What about my other photos and my bag?” I asked as we walked down a long white hallway.

  “You’ll get your bag at the door. And you
r photos will be returned to you by mail once they’ve been analyzed.”

  The whole thing suddenly seemed ridiculous and I found I didn’t much care whether I got the pictures back or not. In fact, I didn’t care if I ever took another photo again as long as I lived. My friend with the guitar had been right, they were inherently wrong, taken in an impulse to control something we couldn’t control. And, frankly, they’d never brought me anything but trouble.

  3

  I wish I could tell you where things went bad with Jake. I wish I could say he cheated or that I did. Or that he became abusive suddenly or that I stopped loving him. But none of those things have happened. It was more like he just slowly disappeared, one molecule at a time. There wasn’t a lot of fighting, never any unkindness. Just a slow fade to black.

  There was the fact that he hated my family. Not that I could blame him, really. They hated Jake first. But even though a thorough federal investigation found my father innocent of wrongdoing concerning Project Rescue, Jake never believed that my father was completely innocent. (Note: When I refer to my father, I always mean Ben, even though Max is my biological father. Ben is and always has been my father in every way that counts. And even though a woman I don’t remember by the name of Teresa Stone is my biological mother, I’ll speak only of Grace as my mother.)

  Anyway, none of them have behaved particularly well, leaving me fractured and torn between them. I was trying to heal my relationship with my parents, find a common ground where we could move forward together, but in doing so I was hurting Jake. And by loving and having a life with Jake, I was hurting my parents. (P.S. Ace, my brother, hates Jake, too. But he also hates our parents. The only one he doesn’t hate is me, or so he says.)

  Maybe it was this tug-of-war where I got to play the rope that frayed the fabric of my relationship with Jake. Or maybe it was Jake’s various obsessions regarding his own past, Max, and Project Rescue, all the things I was trying so hard to move beyond. When I was with Jake I felt as if I was trying to walk up a down escalator.

  He was in the apartment when I came home. I heard him move toward the door as I turned the key in the lock.

  “Rid,” he said as I stepped into the apartment and into his arms. “Where have you been?”

  I lingered there a minute, taking in his scent, feeling his body. The only thing that hadn’t changed between us was this ravenous physical appetite we had for each other. No matter how far apart we were mentally and emotionally, we could always connect physically. It was something about our chemistry, the way our bodies fit together. These days, there was rarely an encounter between us that didn’t end in sex.

  “I was detained,” I said, feeling exhaustion weigh down my limbs. He pulled back from me, held on to my shoulders, and looked into my eyes.

  “Detained,” he said. “Ridley, you should have called. I know things aren’t great between us, but I was worried about you. I expected you this afternoon.”

  I looked at the clock; it was nearly eleven.

  “No. I mean literally detained, by the federal authorities,” I said with a mirthless laugh.

  “What?” he said sharply, looking at me in surprise. “Why?”

  I handed him the envelope and moved over toward the couch, where I flung myself down like a bag of laundry. I told him about my encounter with Agent Grace and the FBI. I should have just kept my mouth shut, given the intensity of Jake’s obsessions. But I told him, probably because he was literally the only person in my life I could talk to about any of this. Any conversation relating to Max, or to the events that so changed all of our lives, was strictly forbidden in my family. Even Ace had suggested that I “move on” the last time I tried to talk to him about some things that haunt me still. Isn’t it funny how the people least impacted by tragedy are the most eager to move on? I was eager to move toward healing, believe me. But I was caught in this space between my parents, who wanted to pretend none of it had ever happened, and Jake, who seemed to think nothing else would ever happen again.

  I finished talking and closed my eyes, heard Jake flipping through the photographs. When he didn’t say anything, I looked over at him as he sank into the chair across from me. I tried not to notice how hot he was in his black T-shirt and faded denims, or to watch the tattoos on his arm, the way they snaked around his muscles and disappeared into his sleeve. My body responded to him even without his touch.

  “Well?” he said, raising his eyes from the photos to look at me.

  “Well, what?” I said. “They weren’t able to make a case against my father. The prosecution’s case against Esme Gray was so weak they couldn’t hold her for more than twenty-four hours. They can’t really get Zack for things that started long before he was ever born.” I took a deep breath. “They’re looking for someone to prosecute and they’re willing to resurrect the dead to do it.”

  I hated to even think about Esme, the nurse who had worked at my father’s practice and assisted him in his clinic since long before I was born. She’s also the mother of my ex-boyfriend Zack Gray. At one time, Esme and I were closer than I was to my own mother, but she was intimately involved in the shadow side of Project Rescue, as was Zack. I can no longer be close with either of them for more reasons than I can recount here.

  Jake didn’t respond, just stared at the photos, one after another. There was something so strange on his face. He wore a half-smile but his eyes were dark. I saw him give a small shake of his head. An ambulance raced by, siren blaring, filling the apartment briefly with light and sound.

  “What?” I asked him. “What are you thinking?”

  “Nothing,” he said, putting the photos on the table. “I’m not thinking anything.”

  He was lying. He put his head in his hands, rested his elbows on his knees, and released a deep sigh. I sat up and crossed my legs beneath me, watching him.

  “What is it?”

  He looked at me. “Is this him, Ridley? Is this Max?” There was something desperate in his voice. And something else. Was it fear?

  “No,” I said. “Of course not. Max is dead. I saw his dead body in the casket. I scattered his ashes. He’s dead.”

  “His face was unrecognizable, shredded by glass when he went through the windshield. The face you saw was reconstructed from a photograph.”

  “It was him.” What Jake said was true. But I remembered Max’s hands, his rings, the small scar on his neck. There wasn’t an open-casket viewing for him, but we were able to see the body once it had been prepared for cremation. My father had arranged for postmortem reconstruction of his ruined face so that we could all say good-bye to something we recognized. I guess in retrospect it was pretty macabre (not to mention a huge waste of money), but at the time it felt right.

  “Because if this is Max…” He let his voice trail off and kept his eyes on me.

  “It’s not,” I said firmly.

  “Ridley,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “There’s a lot you don’t know about this man.”

  Sometimes Jake frightened me. That was the other thing that had started to eat away at our relationship. Not that I was physically afraid of him, but the intensity of his obsessions seemed like a natural disaster, something that could shift the ground beneath our feet, open a chasm in the earth. I always wondered when it would swallow him whole—and me along with it.

  “You know what?” I said, rising. “I can’t do this with you right now.”

  “Ridley.”

  “Jake, I want you to go.” I walked over to the door and opened it.

  “Listen to me—” he started but I stopped him with a raised hand.

  “No, Jake, you listen to me. I can’t do this. You need to leave.” I didn’t want to hear what he had to say. Not at all.

  He looked at me for a second. Then he nodded, stood up, and walked over to the bar that separated the kitchen from the living area. He took his leather jacket off one of the stools. I felt bad; I could see that I’d hurt him. But the fatigue I’d felt earlier had burrowed into my soul.
I only wanted to close my eyes and disappear into blissful black.

  “We do need to talk,” he said, leaning in and kissing me on the cheek at the doorway.

  “Okay,” I said. “Tomorrow.”

  He left then and I closed the door behind him. I walked across the loft and went into the bedroom we used to share. I kicked off my shoes and lay on the bed, sinking into the down comforter, and sobbed for I don’t know how long from sheer exhaustion and the crushing sadness that had settled into my heart and threatened never to leave.

  I GUESS I fell asleep because it was hours later that the phone woke me. I looked at the clock to see that it was 3:33 A.M. I reached over to the bedside table and picked up the receiver, thinking it was Ace. He called at all hours—typical of his recovering addict’s personality, totally self-centered. I, the recovering enabler, never hesitated to pick up.

  “Hello,” I said.

  There was a heavy static on the line, the sound of distant voices, a tinny strain of music. I glanced at the caller ID, which told me the number was unavailable.

  “Hello?” I repeated.

  I heard the sound of breathing on the line, then it went dead. I put down the receiver and waited for it to ring again but it didn’t. After a while I got up and brushed my teeth, stripped off my clothes, and got under the covers. I drifted back into an uneasy sleep.

  4

  You may remember that I am a writer. Up until recently, I wrote articles for major magazines and newspapers—features, profiles of celebrities and politicians, some travel pieces. I’ve done well and I’ve always loved my work. But like so many things, that has changed over the last year. (Not that I don’t still love my work, although I’m not sure love is the right word for it. It’s more that I’m indivisible from the work that I do, simply couldn’t be or do anything else.) Lately I’ve been attracted to more serious subjects, wanting to explore things that have real meaning. I’ve found myself interested in survivors, people who have faced extraordinary circumstances and not just lived to tell it, but gone on to create greater purpose in their lives. I am fascinated by human endurance, by the capacity some people seem to have to turn tragedy into victory. Imagine that. Personally, I felt as if I had the whole tragedy thing down. It was the other part that remained elusive.