Beautiful Lies (15 page)

“A couple weeks later I got drunk and went to the apartment. I was gonna bang on the door until she opened it and let me see you, see that you were okay. I got there, made some noise, but she didn’t let me in. Told me through the door that she called the police and they were on their way. I heard the sirens and took off. I drank some more and then went back a few hours later. But this time the door was open.”

He was breathing heavily now, tears still falling from his eyes as if there was no end to them, as if he’d been saving them up all these years.

“It was dark in the apartment and I knew something wasn’t right. I saw just her one sneaker lying on the floor, lying in a pool of blood. It looked black in the dark, the blood. So thick, almost fake. I flipped on the light and saw her there on the floor. Her eyes were open, blood on her mouth, her neck twisted in a really bad way. The way she stared at me, like it was my fault…It
was
my fault; if I’d been a better man, she’d be alive. Maybe we’d be a family.”

He stopped again, his breathing ragged. He covered his face with his hands and spoke through his fingers.

“I looked for you, but you were gone. And so I ran. That night I took money I had saved and kept under my bed. I hopped a Greyhound to El Paso and went to Ciudad Juárez in Mexico. I got a flight from there to Puerto Rico. I’d never been, but that’s where my grandparents were from and I still had a second cousin there. I stayed on; been working in his garage as a mechanic all these years.”

I shook my head. The story was just simple enough and just complicated enough to be the truth. But what was I supposed to do with it?

“So what happened, Mr. Luna? What made you think of me? What made you come back here?”

“I think of you every day,” he said, reaching out his hand to me. I moved away from him. “Every day. You don’t believe that, right? But it’s true.”

He had turned those imploring eyes on me again, but I couldn’t give him a touch or a look of compassion. I just couldn’t.

“Okay,” I said. “So why did you come back now?”

“I saw you on CNN,” he said, a wide smile suddenly lighting his face at the memory. “I saw your picture when you saved that kid in the street. Your beautiful face…I knew it right away. So much like your mother,
so much
like her, I thought I was seeing a ghost. All these years, I didn’t know if you were alive or dead. And then I
saw
you. It was like the answer to every prayer I’d ever had. I had to come and find you, see you alive and healthy.”

I didn’t know what to say. A cool numbness had washed over me. He was a stranger to me. I was a stranger to myself. What could we possibly have to offer each other? What good could come of this?

“Whose house are you staying in?” I asked. “Who’s Amelia Mira?”

He looked at me strangely. I guess it was a weird question, considering everything else I could be asking him. But I wanted to know. Jessie had been given her name and I wanted to know who she was.

“It belonged to my mother, your grandmother. She died last year, left it to me in her will. The city will take it soon, I guess. I can’t afford the taxes.”

“She knew where you were?”

He nodded.

Jessie Amelia Stone, given the name of a grandmother she never knew by a father who had wanted to have her aborted, then abused her and possibly killed her mother. Poor Jessie, I thought, and realized I was crying.

He did something awful then. He slid off the bench and went on his knees before me, took my hands in his. I have never felt so ashamed or awkward.

“Mr. Luna, please…” I bent down and took him by the forearm, tried to get him to stand up.

“Jessie, I don’t want anything from you. I just wanted you to know me. I wanted to see you in person.”

“Please,” I said again but stopped, not sure how to go on. He had so much
feeling
for me; I could see he was sincere, that he really believed I was his Jessie. I just wasn’t sure
I
believed it.

“I just don’t get it, Mr. Luna,” I said, standing and walking away from him, leaving him kneeling on the ground. “Why did you run? Why didn’t you look for Jessie?”

He raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. “I wouldn’t have had a chance. All those arrests, the restraining order…who would have believed that I didn’t kill her?”

I sighed and shook my head again.

“You don’t believe me, do you?” he said quietly.

“I don’t know what to believe.”

He stood and moved to me suddenly, grabbed me by the shoulders, and the look in his eyes was one of sheer desperation.

“Please, Jessie. Tell me you believe I didn’t kill your mother.”

I didn’t know what to tell him then. How could he expect me to assimilate all this information and then form a judgment? That’s why he’d come, I realized, for absolution. But I wasn’t sure I was the one to give it to him. It wasn’t for me that he’d returned; it was for himself. Maybe he’d realized his mistakes, maybe even atoned for them in some way, but he was the same selfish man who’d abused Teresa Stone and their daughter, Jessie. He was possibly even a murderer; in the least, he’d run like a coward when he thought he might be accused. Now he’d come to shatter my life in the hope that he might be forgiven, finally, after all these years. What was I supposed to think? How could I even believe anything this man said?

I sat back down on the bench and he sat beside me. I kept waiting for some feeling, as if my DNA might recognize its genesis and send some signal to my brain and my heart. But I wasn’t certain of anything. I felt like a kite with its line cut; I was drifting away higher and farther from earth without direction. It dawned on me that the freedom I’d always craved hadn’t really been freedom at all but a kind of rooted independence.
This
was freedom and it felt like danger.

I opened my mouth to speak and even now I’m not sure what I would have said. Because one minute I was looking at him and the next minute he sagged beside me as though his bones had turned to Jell-O. I grabbed his shoulder to keep him from falling in my lap, and when I pushed him back against the bench, his head lolled to one side and I could see a perfect red circle between his eyes.

Violence is soft and quiet. Or it can be. In the movies, shots ring loud and punches land with a hard crack. People die with a scream or a moan. But Christian Luna’s death was silent. He left the world without a sound.

I shook him. “Mr. Luna? Are you all right?”

Which was a pretty stupid question, but what can I say, shock is the stepsister of denial. It cushions the blow to your psyche when really fucked-up things happen. I felt hands on me then.

“Ridley, holy shit. What the fuck happened?”

“What?” I said, turning around and seeing Jake. “I don’t know.”

He was pulling me but I was holding on to Christian Luna. My father. Maybe. Jake pried my hands off of him while looking around him, I guess trying to figure out where the shot came from. Then he was dragging me back toward the car. I looked back to see Christian Luna tipped on his side, still on the bench. The full gravity of what had happened was slowly starting to dawn. I felt bile rising in my throat.

“Shouldn’t we—” I said. I was going to say “call the police,” but I’m not sure I ever finished the sentence because in the next second I was leaning over the railing edging the park and puking onto the grass. I had the sense of Jake sheltering me with his body, as if he was afraid of more gunfire. He tugged at me, looking behind us. I managed to get moving again.

“The police?” I managed finally. But it came out sounding more like a question.

“We have to get the fuck out of here right now,” said Jake, pulling me close to him with his arm around my shoulder. “Walk fast. But try to look normal.”

This seemed funny to me and I started to laugh. He smiled, too. But it was fake, forced.
He
was trying to look normal and it wasn’t working. The laughter built on itself until I was laughing so hard that I thought I was going to pee in my pants. Then the laughter shifted. Luckily we were in the car by then. Jake was strapping me in and then suddenly I was sobbing with such force that it doubled me over and made my throat hurt. I’ve never, before or since, felt as powerless against anything as I did against that sobbing. It was like something alive trying to get out of me.

“Ridley,” he said, moving his eyes quickly between me and the road, his voice desperate. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

He kept saying it over and over again as if he thought he could make it true through repetition. At 186th he pulled the car off the highway and drove up the drive that led to Fort Tryon Park. It was closed but we pulled into the parking lot and Jake grabbed me, held on to me hard while I buried my face into his shoulder. He held me like that, breathing assurances into my ear. And eventually the sobbing subsided and I was left weakened, my sinuses so swollen that I couldn’t breathe out of my nose. I sagged against him.

“What happened back there, Ridley?” he asked when I’d quieted. “Did you see where the shot came from?”

But I couldn’t answer him. I felt like he was talking to me through water. “I don’t know,” I said finally. “I don’t know what happened.”

I heard him say something about seeing a shadow on the roof of the building across the street. But I was caught in some kind of mental loop, where I kept seeing Christian Luna as his head rolled back, the bullet hole perfect and red on the middle of his forehead. That moment played over and over.

After a while, he started to drive and we took the Henry Hudson back downtown. I watched the twinkling lights of the city, the speeding red and white blur of taillights and headlights rush past us. A kind of numbness had settled over me and I felt like all my limbs were filled with sand, and that my neck didn’t have the strength to support my head.

“What’s happening to me?” I wanted to know.

“I’m sorry, Ridley,” he said oddly. “I’m so sorry.”

I didn’t even think to ask him what he meant, why he was sorry.

“I should have taken better care of you, protected you better than that,” he said. I wanted to tell him it wasn’t his fault, but the words never made it from my head to my mouth.

We went back to the East Village and to Jake’s apartment. He put me in his bed and lay beside me, stroking my hair. When he thought I had fallen asleep, he left the room. I could hear that he’d turned on NY1 News and I knew he was waiting for the broadcast about Christian Luna. And I fell asleep wondering, Why didn’t he want to call the police?

sixteen

When I woke up, Jake was sleeping beside me, bare-chested but still wearing his jeans. His arm was draped over my abdomen and he wore a slight frown, as if his dreams were troubling him. I smiled, still in that shady place before sleep clears and the consciousness of your life returns. He shifted in his sleep and the features on his face softened, the frown faded. In the dim light he looked, for a moment, peaceful. And I realized what a contrast it was to the dark intensity I normally saw on his face. The thought reminded me that I had so many questions about Jake, and then the events of last night started filing back, flashing before my eyes. Nausea seized me as guilt and grief and fear did battle in my stomach. I lay there, clutching my middle for I don’t know how long, trying to make sense of what happened last night.

I slipped from the bed and went out into the living room. The sun was barely making its debut over the horizon and the light that filtered in through the window was a milky gray. I flipped on the television set and turned the volume down low. It was still tuned to NY1 News, the local cable news channel that broadcasts twenty-four hours. I watched a full cycle of news stories: A dog got hit by a car on Second Avenue, was shot by a cop trying to put it out of its misery, was put in a freezer, and lived. Now,
that’s
a survivor. Paulie “The Fist” Umbruglia was arrested on charges of fraud and tax evasion. I watched as he was walked from a squad car in handcuffs, flanked by two burly uniformed officers. I did a double take when I saw someone I recognized on the screen. Following behind Paulie was my uncle Max’s lawyer, Alexander Harriman. A frost of thick white hair, weekends-in-the-Bahamas tan, glittering Rolex, five-thousand-dollar suit, a smile that could charm you to blushing but that could freeze and become menacing in a heartbeat. My uncle Max had loved him. He always said, “Ridley, you want your lawyer to have retractable claws, a titanium backbone, and flexible morals.”

I’d met Harriman many times at charity functions, dinners at Uncle Max’s, even once at a New Year’s Eve party my parents threw. As I mentioned, Harriman had a pretty colorful list of clients, but, as with so many of the gray areas in my life, I’d never actually dwelled on it too much. After all, the only time I’d dealt with him personally was to discuss the money my uncle had left me. That was a quick, amicable meeting where he turned over a check to me and offered his assistance in managing the money. I told him that I’d already arranged for it, but thanks.

Something about him had always made me cringe. Maybe it was Max’s description of him, which always brought to mind the Terminator, or maybe it was my parents’ unspoken distaste for him. My heart always beat a little faster around him, and I always was a little uncomfortable beneath his gaze. As I left his office that day, he said, “Ridley, your uncle Max loved you very much. He wanted to be certain, if anything ever happened to him, that you could always come to me for help. If you ever need anything, have any questions about the law, any legal issues, really
anything,
Ridley, don’t hesitate.” I shook his hand and thanked him for his concern, secretly wondering how rock bottom you’d have to be to call on Alexander Harriman for help. Sitting on Jake’s couch, I wondered if I still had his business card in my Rolodex. I was feeling pretty rock bottom, and thinking that a titanium backbone and retractable claws might be of some use after you’d fled the scene of a murder, because that’s precisely what we’d done.

As the local news stories rolled on, with no mention of Christian Luna, I tried to think of a good reason why we’d run. If it had just been a matter of getting ourselves out of harm’s way, we could have stopped and called the police when we were safe. But we didn’t do that. We watched a man get shot and then we left him there on a park bench.

I took in the cold, industrial room, the absence of personal objects. I thought about the man sleeping in the bedroom. Like I said, I felt as though I
knew
Jake on some instinctive level that transcended my ignorance of his history. But as I sat on his futon and looked around the room for some sense of him, I felt a growing unease. I mean, think about your own living room. Imagine a stranger came into your home and sat on your couch. What would the stranger be able to deduce about you from the things she saw? Aren’t there at least some clues about your likes and dislikes, pictures of the people you love and value, a magazine on the coffee table…something? Jake’s living room offered nothing. It was sterile like a hotel room, had the air of transience. It felt as though he could walk out of that space and never come back, never think on the objects left there again. For some reason this disturbed me suddenly. It made me realize that as much as I felt as if Jake’s essence was clear, I was equally certain that he was hiding crucial parts of himself.

His laptop sat on a slim desk in the corner of the room. In the absence of clutter, drawers to poke through, papers to rifle, it double-dog dared me to flip the lid and boot it up. I was always up for a dare, and given my circumstances I was feeling particularly bold. I padded over softly and lifted the lid, pressed the power button. It hummed to life with a couple of unpleasantly loud beeps. A screen presented itself, demanding a password.
Shit.
I thought on the little I knew about Jake and decided that the password wouldn’t be anything predictable. That he was likely to be fairly concerned about security. People with something to hide generally were.

“Quidam.”

I spun around to see Jake standing in the doorway.

“What?”

“The password. It’s ‘quidam.’”

He looked at me and I tried to read his expression. He didn’t seem hurt or even surprised that I was quite obviously snooping around, or trying to, in his computer files. Oddly, I didn’t feel all that embarrassed at having been caught.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“It’s from an epic work by Cyprian Kamil Norwid, a Polish romantic poet. It derives from the Latin word that means ‘someone, some human being.’ But the hero in Norwid’s ‘Quidam’ is a man looking for a place in his life, someone searching for goodness and truth. ‘He was anonymous, without a name—at all orphan, quidam.’”

I walked away from the laptop and back to the futon where I sat earlier and pulled my knees to my chest.

“Is that how you see yourself?”

He shrugged. “I suppose so. In some ways.”

He came over and sat beside me. The same shadow of sadness I’d seen cross his face, settle in his eyes for a second, or briefly pull down at the corners of his mouth seemed to find its home in his features. I could see that he wanted to reach out to touch me but wasn’t sure if it’s what I wanted. Something in the air between us had grown charged. My suspicions, I guess. They kept me from putting my arms around him and kissing all that sadness away, though that’s what my heart wanted.

“Why didn’t you want to call the police last night?” I asked.

He considered the question. “I guess I don’t have a good answer for that except that it would have tied us up in something that I’m not sure would have been good for either one of us.”

“We just left him there,” I said, and was surprised to hear my voice crack, feel tears rush to my eyes. I put my head to my hand, rubbing at a headache that was now pressing at the back of my eyes.

“He was dead,” he said, and seemed to realize that he sounded cold and harsh. “I’m sorry, Ridley.” He leaned into me. “I’m sorry it happened. I’m sorry you had to see it. And I’m sorry I didn’t do a better job of protecting you. But—I mean—it’s not as if we could have helped him. Or even that we knew who’d shot him. The only thing that would have come from calling the police would have been a lot of questions. I just wanted to get you out of there.”

I saw him focus on something over my shoulder and I turned to look at the television screen. A young reporter with a blunt blond bob was standing in front of Van Cortlandt Park, police officers milling about behind her.

“An unidentified man was found murdered this morning in Van Cortlandt Park, located in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. Discovered by joggers, the man appears to have died from a gunshot wound to the head,” the reporter said with an odd cheeriness to her voice, as if she were reporting on the progress of a parade.

Behind her, I could see a fleet of squad cars, and the place where I’d sat was cordoned off with yellow crime-scene tape. A coroner’s van blocked the entrance to the park. I wondered how many people had passed Christian Luna’s dead body slumped on the bench before someone figured out he was dead. How many people had jogged by thinking he was just another bum taking a nap in the park? We’d left him to be discovered like that, a man who might have been my father. No matter what he might have done, he didn’t deserve that. Did he?

The reporter continued: “Police say that while they can’t be certain until ballistics tests have been completed, the bullet appears to have come from a rifle, and the trajectory indicates the shot was fired from a rooftop across the street.” The camera panned to the buildings across the street from the park, the residential apartment buildings and row houses we’d sat in front of for hours. “Again, these are just initial reports and cannot be verified without further investigation.

“Witnesses say that a woman and man were seen leaving the park shortly after midnight, but so far no one has come forward with a description. Police say that while these two are not suspects at this time, they
are
wanted for questioning.

“This is Angela Martinez reporting, New York One News.”

I got up and turned the television off and stood staring at the blank screen.

“Holy shit,” I said, whispering to myself more than anything. “I
cannot
believe this.
What
is happening to my life?”

I spun around to look at Jake. He sat still, looking unbelievably calm. “Did you hear that?” I demanded. “We’re
wanted
by the
police.
”

I started walking the length of the room.

“For questioning,” he said, as if it was nothing. Maybe it was nothing to him, but to someone who’d never had so much as a parking ticket, it seemed like a pretty big deal.

“Jake,” I said, stopping in front of him. “We have to go to the police.”

He shook his head. “Forget it. Not an option. Anyway, the police are the least of our concerns.”

“What are you talking about?”

“
Think,
Ridley,” he said, pointing to his temple. “Who killed Christian Luna? And why?” Actually, believe it or not, in my monumental selfishness, it had not even occurred to me to wonder who had killed Mr. Luna. I was still trying to deal with the fact that a man had been murdered before my eyes. The reasons why hadn’t even begun to dawn.

“Nobody knew we were going to meet him,” Jake said. “
We
didn’t even know until an hour before.”

“So maybe it was just an accident. I mean, like something random,” I said, reaching, not wanting to even consider the other possibilities.

“A shot like that?” said Jake with a sharp exhale. “No way.”

“Then what? Someone was following him? Or tapped his phone?”

“Maybe. Or someone was following
you.
”

“Me?” I said, letting go a little laugh. “Why would anyone be following me?”

You’re thinking, Is she nuts? The man in my building, the man in the pizzeria, the man I’d seen on the train. In my frazzled mind, all of these things still remained nebulous and unconnected. But I did think of the man on the train. Remembered his dead eyes and the case he’d carried. Had he been following me? Or was he some random weirdo? There was no way to know.

“Seems like,” said Jake, “if someone had been following him with the intent to kill him, they could have done it before they did. When he was walking up the street to the house, for example. If he was the target, it would have been much easier and less risky to hit him when he was alone. But maybe the shooter, whoever it was, didn’t know who the target was. Wouldn’t know until you led them to him.”

“I saw someone on the train,” I said. “He might have been following me but he got off before I did.” I wondered with a sickening twist in my stomach if I had inadvertently led Christian Luna’s killer to him.

“What do you mean?” asked Jake, concerned. “Why would you think he was following you?”

“He was staring at me. He smiled at me,” I said. It sounded lame as I described how the man had inched closer to me when he thought my eyes were closed. How he waved as the train pulled away from the station.

“But he got off the train before you?”

“Yeah.”

Jake shrugged. “Could have been some freak. It’s hard to say.”

I sat down beside him again and tried to turn this information around in my mind and draw some conclusions, but I just couldn’t get my head around it. Instead, that moment when Christian Luna fell toward me started playing again and I put my head back in my hands.

“Ridley—” he started, putting a hand on my back. But I stood up before he could finish. I walked into the bedroom, pulled on my jeans and socks, grabbed my shoes. Jake slid forward on the futon and looked at me with worry.

“I can’t do this right now,” I said. He nodded and looked down at the floor. I turned my eyes from him; I didn’t want to see how beautiful he was. I didn’t want my growing feeling for him to cloud my judgment about what I needed to do next.

“I need to think.”

“Ridley, wait,” he said, standing. “You need to be careful.”

“I will be. I’m just going downstairs for a while.” He nodded and sat back down. The look on his face—kind of compassionate and worried, a little hurt—made me feel like a bitch. But I left anyway.

If he had come over to me, put his arms around me, I would have melted into him. Not that it was an unattractive option, but I was starting to see my real self through the fissures that had opened in the fantasy of my life. If I turned to him now, scared and weak, how could I know if what I felt for him was love or just need? And if I turned to him in need, how could I face whatever it was he was hiding from me? Of course, none of these thoughts were fully formed at that moment. The only thing I knew was that I had to get away from him and from this nightmare. As fast and as far as I could.