Beautiful Lies

by Lisa Unger

  “Consider what?”

  “I know you’ve had a hard couple of days. But I want you to stop for a second and ask yourself if any of this seems reasonable to you.”

  “Reasonable?”

  “Yeah. Has it occurred to you that this whole thing is just bullshit? That the psycho who started all of this and your ‘friend’ Jake were lying? That this whole thing is just some kind of scam?”

  It struck me as a ridiculous thing to say and I was amazed that he could even suggest it. “A scam? What would any of them have to gain? Have you been listening to me?”

  “Yes, I have been,” he said slowly. “Have you been listening to yourself?”

  I shook my head in confusion. He didn’t believe me.

  “I mean, what makes you so ready to listen to these total strangers over your own father?” he asked.

  “Zack, I just told you that he was Jessie Stone’s pediatrician.”

  He shrugged. “So what, Ridley? Your father has been doing clinic work for longer than you’ve been alive. He’s probably seen thousands of kids at these clinics. And yeah, some of them have probably gone missing or died from illness or neglect or abuse. But that doesn’t mean he had anything to do with it.”

  I just looked at him. I felt this veil of confusion fall over my thoughts. If you questioned the basic truth of what had happened to me, then every single one of the events that had occurred in the last few days could be explained away as the elements of a very complicated lie, some kind of plot to make me question my identity. I entertained the idea for a second, the way you might daydream about winning the lottery or moving to the Caribbean. Sitting in the warmth and comfort of Zachary’s living room, I could almost be convinced. It would be so easy to let him convince me that I had been deceived and manipulated, suffered from a kind of temporary insanity. I could check into someplace plush in the country for a little “rest” and recover from my nervous breakdown. And when I got out, I could marry Zack and have children and we’d all be one big happy family. We’d forget all about poor Ridley’s little “episode.”

  I lay back on the couch, closed my eyes, and tried it on. Was it possible? But the question “Why?” was the one that couldn’t be answered. Why would anyone do this? Even Ace, who maybe did have reason to hate me, to be consumed by some kind of irrational jealousy—what would he have to gain?

  Zack rested a comforting hand on my forehead. I opened my eyes and looked at him. He wore a relieved smile.

  “Just rest awhile,” he said. “This is all going to look different in the morning.”

  He grabbed the oversize chenille Knicks blanket I’d given him for his birthday last year and pulled it over me. I could almost imagine doing it, lying there and letting him take care of me. He’d sit with me awhile, until he thought I was sleeping. Then he’d go in the other room and call my parents, tell them I was all right and that he was going to take care of me. It would have been the easiest, most familiar thing for me to do.

  “Tell me about Project Rescue,” I said.

  The relief dropped from his face, the smile faded. Annoyance took its place.

  “You need to move past this, Ridley,” he said. “You can’t believe someone like Christian Luna over your own father.”

  At another point in my life, I might have missed it. It might have slipped past me. But that Ridley was gone. I smiled at Zachary. I imagine it was a sad, angry smile because that’s what I was feeling. I sat up and threw the blanket off of me.

  “I never told you his name,” I said quietly.

  “What?”

  “Christian Luna. I never said his name.”

  “Yes, you did, Ridley,” he said, looking at me sadly.

  But I hadn’t and I was certain of that. In fact, I had purposely omitted the name for reasons I couldn’t have explained at the time. He could pretend that he thought I was insane but I knew that I wasn’t.

  “Ridley. Please.”

  I looked at Zachary then and realized that there had been more than just wanting my freedom, more than just not loving him enough, that had led me to leave him. It was something about him that I had intuited but had never had proof of, something that had disturbed me on a subliminal level. I had caught a glimpse of it when he’d let himself into my apartment that day. I was feeling it now but still couldn’t put into words exactly what it was. I stood up slowly and reached for my coat. He stood with me, and when I looked into his face again, he was someone I didn’t recognize.

  “If you leave here, I won’t be responsible for what happens to you.” His voice cracked when he said it but his eyes were flat and cold.

  “What’s Project Rescue, Zack?” I asked, and I heard my voice quaver. I was scared of him, I realized. Physically afraid. I started backing toward the door.

  He heard the fear in my voice, too. He looked surprised by it, as if I’d slapped him. And for a second he was the man I had loved once. “Rid, please. Don’t look at me like that. I would never hurt you. You know that.”

  But I didn’t want to see any more lying faces, any more masks.

  “What is it, Zack?” I was screaming now.

  “Calm down. Stop yelling,” he pleaded, looking past me down the hall. “Project Rescue is exactly what your father told you it was. It’s an organization that gives frightened mothers an alternative to abandoning their babies in the street. It’s nothing more than that.”

  “You’re a liar.”

  “No. It’s the truth.”

  I didn’t say anything and he sighed and sat down on the couch. “The child welfare system wasn’t always what it is today. Now, whatever its flaws, at least it errs on the side of safety for the child. But in the seventies, it wasn’t like that. It was hard to get a kid away from an abuse situation. Physicians a lot of times had a front-row seat to the systematic neglect and abuse of a child that would eventually end in that child’s death. Their hands were tied.”

  “What are you saying?” I asked. But I was starting to see. I was starting to understand. The missing piece I’d sensed during the conversation with my father.

  “I’m saying that there were some people that couldn’t stand by and watch. They couldn’t live with themselves.”

  “People like my father and Uncle Max.”

  “Among others. Including my mother,” he said, looking up from the floor and meeting my eyes.

  I remembered Esme saying, I’d have done anything for that man. The words took on a different meaning. I wondered what she had done for Max.

  “That’s enough, Zack.” The voice made me spin around. There was Esme in a pink pajama-and-robe set. I remembered how she sometimes stayed on the futon in Zack’s study when her work kept her late in the city. I used to love the nights when she was there and we’d all cook dinner together and rent a video, make popcorn.

  “Ridley,” she said softly. “You’re making a terrible mistake, honey.”

  I looked at her. “What mistake am I making?”

  “Dredging up the past like this. It won’t be good for any of us.”

  “I haven’t dredged up anything. It’s coming up on its own.”

  She shook her head, seemed about to say something but then clamped her mouth shut.

  “Do you know who I am, Esme?”

  “I do, Ridley. I do know who you are. The question is: Why don’t you?”

  She wore a sympathetic smile that didn’t do much to hide frightened eyes. I looked to Zack, hoping to see something in his face that I recognized.

  His face was pale, his eyes filled with anger and something else. It was a look I recognized from my years with him. It had never been directed at me before, but I had seen it when he talked about certain patients he saw at the free clinic where he worked once a week with my father. It was usually accompanied by a comment like “Some people don’t deserve to have children.” I used to mistake it as passion, a passion for his work, a love for children, a sadness that so many of them fell through the cracks of the system. But now I saw it for w
hat it was: judgment, a lack of compassion, arrogance.

  “If you’d stayed with me, none of this would ever have happened,” he said petulantly. “You never would have had to deal with any of this.”

  He was right, of course. If I’d stayed with him, I’d probably have been in his bed that morning or he in mine. I never would have left my place to meet him. The chances of my being on that corner at exactly the right second were slim to none. But who knows, maybe it was time for my shadow to reveal itself and nothing would have stopped it. Maybe every choice I made, the little ones, the big ones, those choices I thought had so much influence over the course of my life, maybe they weren’t choices at all. Maybe it was just my shadow whispering in my ear, quietly leading me to myself, to the truth, to wholeness.

  “Yeah, Zack. Maybe I could have lived out my whole life never knowing who I really am.”

  “Has it been so bad…your life?” asked Esme. There was something close to bitterness in her voice. “Have you considered what the alternative might have been?”

  I looked at her. She seemed small, even fragile. But there was a terrible anger in her eyes.

  “How could I have? I didn’t even know there was an alternative.”

  She laughed a little. “Well, now you know. Happy?”

  I turned from them and ran out of the apartment. “Ridley,” I heard Zack yell after me, his voice sounding desperate. “It’s not safe.”

  I had no idea where I was going but I ran.

  It is not the strongest among us who survive. Nor is it the most intelligent. It is those among us who are the most adaptable to change. I don’t remember who said this, but it has always struck me as being quite brilliant. And it kept playing in my mind. I ran for a couple of blocks, then I got winded and limped for a while, clutching my side against the cramp that had seized me just minutes after I fled Zack. Don’t you just love it in the movies when normal people run for miles, scale chain-link fences at the end of alleyways, leap onto moving cars? Those kind of acrobatics weren’t an option for me; I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d worked out. If someone started chasing me right then, they would have caught me pretty easily. I kept looking over my shoulder for the Firebird or the skinhead. Zack said it wasn’t safe and I had every reason to believe him. I moved fast but I had no direction. I couldn’t go home. I couldn’t go back to that grim, lonely hotel room. I couldn’t go to my parents. So I walked.

  I was fractured. Damaged but not broken. My mind was a jumble of disconnected thoughts and questions, but I wasn’t insane. I knew that much at least. I walked east toward the river through a city that was starting to wake, the sky fading from black to blue velvet. I went to Jake’s studio but found the door locked tight. I rang the buzzer, knowing the futility of it even as I did so. He wasn’t there. For all I knew, he was gone for good. And maybe I was better off for that, considering that he’d possibly tried to kill me.

  The sun was still at least an hour from rising but already traffic had picked up. I passed a man pulling his coffee cart up the street. I walked through an already bustling Chinatown, fresh fish markets opening, fluorescent lights flickering on in shops. On Chambers Street, parked Lincoln sedans were already discharging early-bird lawyers and judges onto the sidewalks, where they walked quickly toward the giant, dirty-white court buildings. I was tired, more tired than I had ever been. But I kept walking. I thought of that footage you always see of those people climbing Mt. Everest. They’re at twenty-six thousand feet or something, at subzero temperatures, barely getting enough oxygen, but they just keep going. They just keep putting one foot in front of the other. They know if they stop, they’ll die. That simple. I don’t know if it was that simple for me. But I felt like I had to keep moving or the weight of my thoughts and my fears was going to crush me. Finally I stood at the base of the walkway that leads over the Brooklyn Bridge. I started up the wooden slats. If I could make it to the other side, I knew I could find a hotel there. Maybe I could check in and sleep for the next week and a half. Or maybe I would just keep going until I walked off the edge of the earth.

  I want to say that I always knew there was something fractured about my life, but I don’t think so. I do think, though, that there was a feeling that had always dwelled in the periphery of my consciousness, a specter that never quite came into focus. Esme had asked me, Has it been so bad…your life? Have you considered what the alternative might have been?

  I told you, I just have to close my eyes and my childhood comes back to me in a rush, the scents and feelings. Not specific memories, really, but the essence of memory. Johnson’s baby shampoo and burned toast, birthday parties and cut grass, fireplace embers and Christmas trees. I was loved. I grew up feeling safe, knowing I wouldn’t go hungry. I was never afraid in my home. Was it perfect? I’ll ask you: What is? Were there things I didn’t know or ignored? Obviously. But it was a good suburban American childhood full of minivans and football games. From what I could see, the alternative might not have been as good. I might have been abused by my father, my mother might have been afraid of him, he might have been cruel to her. Who can say who I would be if I had been raised as Jessie by Teresa Elizabeth Stone? I would never know. And I couldn’t say I was sorry. But that didn’t mean that what had happened was right. Someone had murdered Teresa Stone and kidnapped her child. I’m sorry, but I’m just not one of those people who think the end justifies the means.

  “Hey.”

  I spun to see him standing close behind me.

  “You can’t keep walking forever,” he said. “Eventually you’re going to have to stop and face what’s happening to you.”

  I felt a rush of emotion at the sight of him, this train wreck of love and anger and fear that I thought might just run me down.

  “And I suppose you’re going to help me do that?” I said, unable to keep my voice from shaking.

  He nodded slowly. “If you’re ready to hear the truth.”

  twenty-eight

  “I guess you don’t see the irony in that,” I said, backing away from Jake. I hated my voice and hands, mutinous in their shaking, betraying the emotion coursing through me. He just looked at me. To his credit, he didn’t say anything. The sky was lightening around us and the traffic below on the bridge was starting to pick up, filling the air with the white noise of tires on asphalt, punctuated by the sudden sharp blast of a car horn. He was standing very still, as if he were approaching a bird he was afraid to startle. And I was ready to fly.

  “I know everything,” I said, pulling my shoulders back and looking him right in the eye.

  “No,” he said with a slow shake of his head. “You don’t.”

  In that second he became every person in my life who had lied to me. And I wanted to rage at him, pummel him, break a hole in the universe by the sheer force of my anger and grief and throw him through it. But incredibly I held my temper for a few more seconds, which felt like holding on to a Rottweiler with a piece of dental floss.

  “I know that your moving into my building wasn’t an accident. I know that you followed a long trail that eventually, somehow, led you to me. I know that you wrote that second note.”

  “Ridley.” It sounded like a prayer.

  “Stay away from me,” I said. Meltdown. The tremors in my voice and hands spread to the rest of my body and I was shaking uncontrollably. “Don’t come any closer.”

  “I would never hurt you.”

  I laughed a short, hard laugh that sounded a little unstable even to my own ears. “You know,” I said, my voice starting to raise a couple octaves. “I keep hearing that tonight. Seems to me like when people feel the need to assert that, there might be a problem.”

  Some of the color had drained from his face and he looked tired, black circles shadowing his eyes.

  That crazy laugh rocked me again. It didn’t feel like me. Sounded hard and strange. “You’re such a fucking liar. You almost killed us both yesterday. What were you trying to do?” I was yelling and looking around me.
In New York City, you can never be alone, there’s always someone around. Except when you’re scared; then the city has a way of being the most deserted place on earth. There was no one else on the bridge.

  “What are you talking about?” He was convincing, I’ll give him that. He’d perfected the look of innocent confusion.

  “The car!” I screamed, my throat going sore from it. “The fucking Firebird. Were you driving it when it almost forced me into a head-on collision?”

  “What?” He shook his head, his eyes glistening. “No. God, Ridley. Are you okay?” He moved a step closer and I moved back again, as if we were dancing.

  I had never been sure it was him, you remember. In fact, on an emotional level, I had been nearly sure it wasn’t. But in that moment on the Brooklyn Bridge with the sun rising on a new day, I couldn’t trust what I had felt, what I had seen, or what I had been told five minutes ago, a day ago, thirty years ago. I could operate only in the present tense. I was afraid and angry in equal measure, and that was literally the only thing I knew for sure.

  “Listen to me,” he said slowly. “The Firebird is gone. It’s been stolen.”

  I shook my head in disbelief. “Do you think I’m an idiot, Jake? You told me yourself it was impounded and I know for a fact that it wasn’t.” A hard, cold wind gusted off the water, blowing my coat open. I pulled it tight around myself.

  “Okay,” he said, raising a hand. “I know what I told you. I was wrong. I assumed it had been impounded, but I have since learned that it wasn’t.”

  I thought about that for a second, weighed the likelihood of what he’d said and found it pretty weak. “How could you learn that? You couldn’t exactly call up and ask. You’re a fugitive, wanted for the murder of Christian Luna.”

  He nodded as if he understood my skepticism. “I still have friends with connections.”

  “Who would do that? Who would steal your car and then try to kill me with it?”

  “The same people who would leave a rifle registered to me in Fort Tryon Park for the police to find.”