by Lisa Unger
“Ridley,” he said, reaching for my hair. “I didn’t even recognize you for a second.”
I let him touch me, even though I wanted to slap his hand away. He touched my spiky hair, the side of my face.
I smiled without mirth. “It’s my fugitive do,” I said. “What do you think?”
He shook his head. “I don’t like it.”
“I don’t like it, either,” I snapped. “But it’s just one of many things about my life I don’t like. I can live it with, though, which is more than I can say for the rest of it.”
The fog of my words hung in the cold air between us. I tried to hold his eyes but he looked away.
“I knew he couldn’t be trusted,” he said finally. “I never liked him.”
“Who?”
“That Jake Jacobsen. He lied to you all this time.”
The nerve and the audacity of that statement, his absolute ignorance of its irony, stunned me. I looked at him and felt the most profound loss of faith, the deepest disappointment I think I’ve ever felt in anyone. Including Max. Anger was a stone in my chest, preventing me from answering. I tried to take a long breath, to compose myself. It took a while before I could speak again.
“Have you always known what he is?” I asked finally, surprised at how even and steady my voice sounded.
I wondered if he’d be coy, ask me who I was talking about, pretend I might be talking about Jake. Instead he surprised me.
“Of course,” he said, turning his eyes on me. There was mettle in his expression. “Of course I knew. Why do you think we took you that night, no questions asked? Do you really think that we were that ignorant, that foolish to break the laws we broke, to risk Project Rescue? We took you out of fear, Ridley. We took you out of the terror of what a man like Max might do to a child.”
I stared at him. He said it as if he thought I should understand, as if maybe I should have even surmised as much by now. I envied him his sense of righteousness. I wondered what it was like to be so sure of the virtue of your actions and deeds, in spite of staggering evidence to the contrary.
“So you knew what Project Rescue was, too?”
He shook his head. “I’ve told you before that I only knew we were flying under the radar of the law. I didn’t know about the dark side of the organization. I won’t keep trying to convince you of that. Anyway, it’s not important now what I knew then.”
He had donned an air of huffiness that I found repulsive. I still loved him but I felt a growing chasm opening between us. I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to cross it again. I grieved inside—because my dad had always been the love of my life.
“So tell me, Dad. What do you consider important now?”
“What have they asked you to do?”
“Who?”
He gave me a look. I shook my head.
“It’s none of your business,” I said.
He sat up quickly and grabbed my shoulders. “Don’t ever say that to me. Everything about you is my business. You’re my daughter. Not my blood, no, but my daughter in every way that counts. If anything ever happens to you…” He let the words trail off and I didn’t rush to fill the silence. I didn’t squirm from his grasp, but I didn’t sink into him like I wanted to, either. I looked at his face, his snow-white hair, the deep lines around his eyes, his full pink cheeks. No one could call my father handsome, I’ve told you before. But his face was strong, his gaze powerful.
“You can’t understand,” he said. “Not until you’re a parent yourself. You’ll never know the all-consuming love, the desire to protect that just eats you alive. You’d do anything to keep your child safe.”
I wasn’t sure if he was talking about himself or about Max. Then: “Stay away from him, Ridley.”
“Why?”
“Just stay away.”
“Why did you love him, Dad?”
He sighed. “I knew another side to him. The side that you loved. That was true, you know. That was Max, too. Understand, I didn’t know anything about his business dealings. I didn’t know about the—” He swallowed hard here, shied away from saying the word murders. “I didn’t know about the other things of which he’s accused. I didn’t know.”
Maybe he thought if he could just repeat the words I didn’t know enough, he’d make them true. Or maybe he knew our conversation was likely being listened to and he was being careful to assert his ignorance of Max’s dealings.
“But you knew he killed his mother,” I said. “Or suspected it. Didn’t you?”
He seemed startled, then hung his head. I was glad he didn’t deny it.
“He loves you, Ridley. Truly, deeply, as any father loves his daughter. But I promise you, if he thinks you’ve turned on him, God help you.”
His words ran like liquid nitrogen in my veins. I didn’t say anything.
“I don’t know what kind of deal they offered you. But stay away from Max. Let him die. They’ll never find him. Never.”
“How long have you known that he was alive?”
He shook his head. I knew he wouldn’t say anything out loud. When he was being questioned, I’d heard him say that he’d received a communication from Max a year and a half after his alleged death, but I wondered if my father had helped Max to stage his death. I didn’t ask, mainly because I didn’t want to know.
“Where is he, Dad?”
He looked straight ahead, as if he was searching for a face in the crowd. “I’m begging you, lullaby, stay away from him.”
He stood up and I stood with him. He took me into his arms then and held me with a terrible desperation. I put my arms around him and finally let myself sink into him. I clung to him, grieving for all that was lost between us, wondering what the future held.
“You will always be my daughter,” he whispered fiercely. I wondered if it was true. I didn’t know. I didn’t know who he was. I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t know any longer who we were to each other.
“You do what you have to do, little girl,” he said into my ear. “But protect yourself. Anything that happens to you happens to me. Remember that if you can. In spite of everything, it’s as true today as it always has been.”
He released me then, started to move away, but stopped to say, “There’s something else you should know. About Ace.”
I braced myself. On some level, I already knew. Since I’d heard him smoking on the phone that night, since he’d abandoned me when we were supposed to go to the Cloisters. Since I hadn’t heard a word from him through everything.
“He’s using again. I think we’ve lost him for good this time.”
I nodded and looked up at the sky, shook my head in grief and disappointment.
When I looked back down toward my father, he was walking away. I stood watching him for a long time as he grew smaller and smaller and then turned a corner. I sat back down on the bench and just sat there for a while, watched some kids playing hackey-sack badly. It wasn’t until he was long gone that I realized he’d dropped something in my pocket. It was a smallish silver key with a flat round head. A key to what, I had no idea.
I DECIDED TO walk back to my apartment, wanting the space, the cold air on my face. By the time I got home, my hands were red and painful from the cold, my feet and thighs raw beneath my jeans and boots. All during the walk, my mind worked on what that silver key might unlock—a locker, a safety deposit box…I couldn’t call my father and ask; I’d have to figure it out.
Jake had been serious when he’d said I’d never know they were there. In my imagination, I had anticipated seeing strange men in dark clothing lingering around, reading newspapers on benches, or whistling casually, leaning against lampposts as I passed. I imagined white vans trailing slowly behind me as I moved about my life. I thought they’d be calling all the time with instructions, but the phone I kept with me hadn’t rung or beeped even once. I could almost convince myself that I’d imagined the whole thing. As I entered my building, I pretended for a second that I was just Ridley Jones, freelan
ce writer, returning from a walk, that there was nothing more serious on my mind than what I’d have for dinner.
He was standing in the lobby by the mailboxes. It’s not an exaggeration to say I ran to him, let him enfold me. I wrapped my arms around him and put my mouth to his. His body felt strong and wonderful through the thick suede of his jacket. He held on to me tight. I heard him sigh as I pulled my mouth from his and put my head to his chest.
“Are you okay?” he whispered into my ear, rubbing my back. It felt so good, the tension of the muscles there draining beneath his hands.
I nodded into him. I was afraid to speak.
“They can’t hear us out here,” he said.
“How do you know?” I said. I’d been wrong before when I said his face wasn’t beautiful—the rock of his jaw, the warmth and depth of his eyes, the strength of his nose. I’d been afraid of all the ugly truths that had made a home in his features. That’s what kept me looking away from him.
“Because when I was watching you, we always lost you between your building’s front door and your apartment door. Must be lead in the walls.”
We took the elevator up to my floor, making out the whole time. I couldn’t get enough of him, the comfort of him. I felt a little of the blackness I’d been carrying lighten and lift. He waited in the hallway while I entered my apartment and made some noise, turned on the television. I ordered some Chinese food (yes, again) and went quietly back into the hallway, hoping whoever was listening would think I was just watching TV, waiting for my delivery. They told me there’d be only audio surveillance in my apartment so that I could have some privacy. I hoped they weren’t lying. Either way, I wasn’t sure it mattered. No one ever told me I couldn’t see or talk to Dylan Grace.
We sat on the staircase, huddled together as if for warmth.
“They told me you made a deal so that the charges and reprimands against me would be dropped.”
I nodded.
“Thank you, Ridley,” he said, putting a hand to my face. “I wouldn’t have asked you to do that.”
“I know. I’m sorry you lost your job.”
He shrugged and gave me a weak smile. “It was probably killing me, anyway.”
I just looked at the tiles beneath our feet.
“What do they want you to do?” he asked after some silence.
I told him everything about Jake and everything I’d learned from him. I told him what they wanted me to do.
He shook his head. “It’s not going to work.”
“I told them.”
“I’m sorry about Jacobsen. I can imagine how that must hurt you. I didn’t know. His cover was deep—I never realized he was CIA.”
I shrugged, turned away from him so that he wouldn’t see the pain on my face. It was a private pain; I didn’t want to share.
He tightened his arm around me. “I’m sorry,” he said again.
I told him about Esme Gray, about Ben, about meeting Ben in the park.
“Man,” he said with a slow shake of his head. “They really played us.”
“Yeah.”
We sat there, thinking about it all. Then: “What are you going to do?”
“I’m not sure,” I said.
He nodded. “Whatever it is, count me in.”
I took his hand and squeezed it hard.
The buzzer in my apartment rang and I went inside quietly, asked who it was and let the delivery guy in. Dylan waited on the next level until it was clear, then came back downstairs. I took him by the hand and led him into the apartment and into the bedroom. There we made love in a silent intensity where I lost and found myself all at once.
RIDLEY, GO HOME, Max’s ghost had warned me from a computer screen. The image of him, thin and limping on a cane, was on a loop inside my brain. It came unbidden in my dreams and in idle moments. Ridley, go home. His face had been so pale, so devoid of the energy I’d always expected to see there. His message was grave and dark: an omen. He didn’t look anything like the man I’d known, my dearest uncle, my failed father. But then, he wasn’t either of those things. And yet he was both of them. And he was so much more.
In London, Dylan had asked me, What if knowing Max Smiley doesn’t bring you any closer to yourself? What if the closer you get to him, the further you get from who you really are?
I didn’t really understand what he meant by that. I was from Max, of him, and it was clear to me then that only in knowing him could I discover that part of my own mystery. I wasn’t Ben’s daughter, the good girl. I was Max’s little girl, alone on the street after dark, no one to look after me. But as I lay in the dark beside Dylan, my naked body enfolded by his, I wondered something: Maybe it wasn’t the sudden knowledge that I came from Max that had caused me to become unrecognizable to myself. Maybe it was my refusal to let him go. After all, it was only in the chase for him that my life started to come undone.
I had stepped out of my identity to follow Max. I had led people to their deaths; I had fled from federal custody (or so I thought); I’d cut off my long auburn hair and bleached it blond; I’d gone to the Cloisters in the middle of the night at the bidding of a mysterious text message, been abducted and tortured as a result; I’d fled from custody again in London with Dylan, a man I had no reason to trust, and looked on as he later tortured information from a prostitute in the blue room of an after-hours club in the West End, then been arrested in a gaudy show of international law enforcement agencies at an Internet café. With each outrageous action and awful consequence, I further convinced myself that I was less of Ben and more of Max. But really, the doing of it was all mine. It was neither Ben nor Max calling the plays of my life. It wasn’t my adopted mother, Grace, or my biological mother, Teresa Stone. It was me.
The thought of it, as I listened to Dylan’s steady breathing, hollowed me out inside. I think that’s the moment when we all grow up, when we stop blaming our parents for the messes we’ve made out of our lives and start owning the consequences of our actions.
I lay beside Dylan, felt his breath in my hair, his arm curled over my hip and across my abdomen. My head rested on his other arm, his hand dangled off the bed. I watched the thick muscles of his forearm, the square of his hand as he shifted in his sleep. It was the kind of position that felt wonderful now but would wind up causing his muscles to stiffen and his arm to fall asleep. I shifted the weight of my head onto the pillow to spare him that.
I felt stronger suddenly. The thought that I might be more Ridley than Ben or Max was new and liberating. I felt some of my energy returning.
Ridley, go home.
I started to ponder a question that had been bothering me in the periphery of my consciousness: How could Max possibly have known that I’d log into that website using the log-in Dylan had forced out of Angel? And then it occurred to me what I should have realized all along. It was so obvious, I almost laughed. It wasn’t me who’d been chasing Max. He’d been chasing me. When he said, “Ridley, go home,” he didn’t mean my home. He meant his.
20
I rolled over and looked at Dylan. He opened his eyes. I suspected he hadn’t been sleeping any more than I had. Maybe his mind was churning with a million thoughts of his own. I turned on the radio beside the bed and hiked up the volume a little. Not loud enough to arouse suspicion, I hoped.
“I’ve been thinking,” I whispered in his ear.
“What a surprise,” he answered with a slow smile. I was starting to enjoy the shades of his accent.
We got dressed quietly and headed out into the hallway.
“How did he know we’d wind up logging into that website with Angel’s password?” I said when we were outside. “How could he possibly have known?”
“I wondered the same thing. Maybe he knows you that well,” he answered, leaning against the banister.
I shook my head. “Too many variables. There were too many factors involved in my getting to London.” The tile floor was cold beneath my bare feet. I felt chilled and wrapped my arms around my
self.
“But maybe you would have wound up there, anyway. Maybe you would have figured out where that club was without my help. Maybe you would have gone to London without the assistance of whoever it was that brought you there.”
He was confirming what I already suspected, but I wanted to play devil’s advocate, to see if I might be wrong.
“But I wouldn’t have tortured the information out of that woman,” I said.
“Maybe she would have given it to you, anyway.”
“Why? How?”
He was silent for a second, kept his eyes on me.
“Because she was meant to tell me? Because he was leaving me clues, luring me there?” I said.
“It’s possible, isn’t it? Starting with the photos, then the phone calls, the incident in his apartment where you thought you could smell his cologne, that someone had used the shower. The matchbook you found. Then the text message.”
“You think he sent that message?” I guess I thought so, too.
He shrugged. “Who else?”
No one else. Max had been reaching out to me from beyond the grave, drawing me closer to him. It must have killed him (no pun intended) to know I’d discovered he was my father, to wonder what else I might be discovering about him. He would have wanted his chance to talk to me, to make me understand.
“Love,” Dylan said, echoing our first conversation. “He loves you.”
I wondered if that was true. Could someone like Max really love in the truest sense of the word? If he really loved me, wouldn’t he have let me be, rather than drag me into all of this? Love lets go; it doesn’t hold on with a death grip. It doesn’t drag you down into the grave with it.
I took the key from my pocket and showed it to him.
“I think I know what this key unlocks,” I said.
