Beautiful Lies (9 page)

eleven

After Jake left, I made some coffee and the caffeine buzz got me through the rest of the morning. I talked to Tama Puma.

“Ms. Thurman would be enchanted to meet with you,” she said, her voice a warm and self-important purr. Enchanted? Who used words like that in the real world? I imagined her in a boa, with a long cigarette holder dangling from her fingers. Though naturally, Ms. Puma would die before bringing a cigarette to her lips.

I checked in with the accounting department at
New York
magazine on some money they owed me. Check’s in the mail, as they say. By noon, the caffeine was wearing off and I could no longer ignore the thoughts that were weighing on me. I felt the familiar tug of guilt—I should call my parents to let them know I’m okay. But I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to hear their voices, because as soon as I did, I knew I wouldn’t be able to hear my own anymore.

I spent awhile on the Internet, searching through LexisNexis for some information on a missing toddler and a murdered mother in the early seventies, but there were too many listings. I narrowed the search to the tristate area, but still there were more than ten thousand hits. The thought chilled me. I thought about my idyllic childhood, how I always felt safe and loved, how the only things I feared were bad grades and embarrassing myself trying to climb that stupid rope in gym class.

I scrolled through the articles, archives from old newspapers and magazines, Web sites with those terrible age-graduated photographs that tell you someone lost a child who was never found. That they had to imagine what that baby might look like five, ten years later, if they were alive at all. It made me realize there is this world, this awful place of pain and violence, where some people have been exiled and the rest of us cannot visit even if we wanted to. I didn’t find anything that connected to the partial newspaper clipping I’d received, didn’t see any images that matched those sitting on my desk. But I have to admit my search was somewhat half-assed, as my mother would say. I’m not sure how much I really wanted to know then, you know?

I kept a picture of my brother and me as kids on my desk. I picked it up and looked at it. In it I sat on a swing in this park by our house, my brother standing behind me, his hands directly above mine on the chains that held the swing. He rested his chin upon the top of my head and we both smiled for the camera, as red, gold, brown, orange leaves danced around us in a cool, strong wind that was blowing that day. A strand of my hair had drifted up and looked like a thin mustache on his face. I remember the easy days like that, when we were young together, before the circumstances that finally took Ace were even a blip on the radar. I remember walks and parties, vacations and family reunions, where there was no dark specter of my missing brother to shadow our happiness.

My mother likes to tell a story about Ace and me. Or she used to, back when she still liked to talk about Ace, when she still acknowledged him as her son. We were little, I’m not sure how old, about four and seven maybe. I remember the yellow light of Saturday morning leaking in through my blinds and me waking with the excitement of knowing that Ace didn’t have to go to school and that a morning of lying on the floor in front of the television watching cartoons stretched before me. It was fall and the morning was chill, the floor cold beneath my bare feet as I padded from my room through the bathroom and into Ace’s side of the loft. I crawled up onto his bed and lay beside him, and then, very gently, pried open one of his eyes. Of course, he was already awake and only pretending to be asleep. After the usual grumbling and complaining, he allowed himself to be led down the stairs.

Generally, we began Saturday mornings by eating giant bowls of Cocoa Pebbles. My parents were still asleep and would remain so for at least another hour, so the kitchen was ours—no one to tell us what to eat and to turn the television down and to sit back from the screen. This was a brief, golden universe where Ace and I made the decisions, an orgy of sugary cereal and chocolate milk, jumping on the furniture, and tickle fights where I occasionally wound up wetting my pajamas.

For whatever reason, this morning Ace decided that it was going to be cookies for breakfast. He found a package of Oreos in the pantry and we took it, along with two glasses of milk, to our comfortable spot in front of the television.

I think we were about half through with the bag when my mother came down.

“Ace. Ridley. What do you think you’re doing?”

We both stopped chewing mid-bite, the next cookie paused halfway to our chocolate-covered lips.

“Give me those cookies right now.”

At this point, I reached out my hand to return the cookie to my mother and began to cry. My brother stuck his hand into the package and stuffed as many as he could into his mouth before she reached us.

My mother always told this story with a tone of marvel about how different her children were, even though they came from the same people, were raised in the same home. I remember crying, not because I wanted to eat more cookies—truth be told I was rather sick from what I’d eaten already—but because my mother’s arrival marked the abrupt end of the magic time.

I also remember it as the fault line that divides my memory of my childhood and Ace’s. My mother and Ace engaged in a full-out battle over the Oreos—my brother cut and ran with the bag, up the stairs and into his room, where he slammed and locked the door, leaving my mother enraged and banging on it like a madwoman.

“For Christ’s sake, calm down, Grace. We’re talking about cookies here,” said my father, climbing the stairs after them.

But, of course, it wasn’t about cookies. It was about control. How she had to have it and how I easily acquiesced and how Ace rebelled. Each of us extracted different people from our parents by our personalities and hence we had different experiences growing up. I wound up sniffling in the arms of my father; Ace earned the stony silence of my mother that generally followed one of her peri-menopausal rages.

But my mother turned the incident into a charming and amusing dinner anecdote, drained of the drama of the moment and distilled to illustrate how
quirky
and
funny
kids can be. I always cringed at her retelling, not because I thought of it as a traumatic experience (though Ace certainly remembered it that way), but because I wasn’t sure what she was trying to say about me. Did she mean I was weak where my brother was bold? Obedient where my brother was rebellious? Was I to be ashamed or proud? There was a kind of grudging respect in her tone when she spoke about Ace, as though she actually admired him for rebelling against her. But then, of course, she stopped speaking about him altogether. It’s strange how memory gets twisted and pulled like taffy in its retelling, how a single event can mean something different to everyone present.

As I sat with the picture of the swing in my hand, memories came marching through my mind like soldiers, things I hadn’t thought of in years, sepia-toned by present events. And I couldn’t be sure if I was more clear-headed now than I’d ever been, or if I was losing my mind and everything—my recollection of the past, my perception of the present—was distorted by recent events.

My uncle Max was a mountain, a shooting star, a big bear of a man, a piggyback ride waiting to happen, his pockets full of candy and, later money, or whatever the particular currency of our ages happened to be. He was rock concerts, baseball games, he was yes when my parents were no, he was a consolation for every disappointment. He was the embodiment of fun, and the weeks spent with him when my parents were away are some of the happiest memories of my childhood. Ace and I loved him, of course. How could we not? It’s easy to be popular with children when you’re not the one making the rules, when your only role in their lives is to show them how much fun the world can be.

There was always a woman with my uncle Max, but never the same one. They all kind of run together in my memory, none of them really standing out from the parade of hair dye and silicone, tanned skin, straight silky hair, and high heels. Always high heels, no matter what they were wearing—dresses, blue jeans, bikinis. I do remember one woman, though. It was some party at our house, something during the day; I think it was Ace’s birthday. The dining-room ceiling was missing, covered completely by helium balloons—red, orange, blue, green, purple. I remember music, and in my memory it sounds like a carnival ride. Laughter, someone spilling soda on the white rug, a popped balloon and delighted shrieking and a clown doing magic tricks. I remember rounding a corner too fast and running into the bleached denim legs of one of Uncle Max’s girlfriends.

“I’m sorry,” I said, looking up at her. All I can see now is blue eye shadow, feathered blond hair, and bubble-gum lip gloss.

“That’s okay, Ridley,” she said sweetly, and walked off. And all I could see was that she wore the most fabulous red leather pumps.
Candies,
if I’m not mistaken, the very height of sexy-cool. I was breathless in my admiration, wondering how you came to grow up to be like that.

“Really, Max,” I heard my mother say from the kitchen, which was where I’d been headed. I knew that tone, heavy as a bag of stones with the weight of her disapproval. “To bring one of them here. To Ace’s party. How could you?”

“I didn’t want to come alone,” he said, something in his tone I didn’t recognize.

“Bullshit, Max.”

“What do you want from me, Grace, huh? Stop being such a fucking prude.”

I didn’t have time to be shocked that my mother and Uncle Max were talking to each other this way because suddenly my father appeared.

“There’s my girl,” he said, picking me up though we both knew I was getting too heavy for him. He carried me into the kitchen. Maybe he didn’t see how my mother and Max quickly looked away from each other, carefully morphing their angry expressions into happier ones.

“What are you up to in here?” said my father jovially. “Not putting the moves on my wife again, are you, Max?”

They all laughed at the absurdity of such a notion. And then it was time for cake, which naturally wiped the event completely from my seven-year-old mind.

When the walls of the apartment started to close in on me, I showered, dressed, and left the building. I know what people think about New York City, but I’d never felt unsafe here, not for a minute, until that day. Zelda’s warning about the man who’d been looking for me came back to me. I realized that I’d told neither Jake nor Ace about him and I wasn’t really sure why. I sometimes had a tendency to treat worrisome things like bumblebees, a kind of ignore-them-and-they’ll-go-away philosophy. Maybe admitting that someone was now physically seeking me out, as opposed to just sending mail, ratcheted the problem up to a level where it
couldn’t
be ignored. It elevated the threat vector, and I wasn’t ready for the consequences, the first of which would be to have my freedom limited. And you know how I felt about that.

I pushed my way through the doors of one of the clinics where my father and Zachary volunteered their services. This one was in midtown; the other was out in New Jersey. My father was putting in more time at these places the closer he came to retirement. Usually at the beginning of the week, he was in Jersey, toward the end in the city, so I had a pretty good idea that I would find him there today. I know you’re thinking, Didn’t she just say she didn’t want to see her parents? It was true, I didn’t want to. But my father seems to have a magnetic pull in times of crisis. As much as I swear up and down that I’m not going to call or go to see him when things are bothering me, it’s as if he somehow knows and flips a switch somewhere in the universe, magically compelling me to pick up the phone, or show up at his office.

“I’m looking for Dr. Jones. Is he in today?” I asked the young woman working the desk. She had glowing café au lait skin and deep black eyes ridged with lush lashes. I’d never seen her before, though I’d been to the clinic a number of times to visit my dad or Zack. But I wasn’t surprised; there had always been a high turnover there.

“Do you have an appointment?” she asked, not looking up from the file opened in front of her.

“I’m his daughter.”

She glanced up at me and smiled. “Oh, you’re Zack’s fiancée?” she said with a cheerful recognition in her voice.

Something about this annoyed me. We’d ended our relationship more than six months ago now and I’d never accepted his proposal. So, technically, I had never been Zack’s fiancée. Before I could even respond:

“And didn’t you just save that kid a couple of weeks ago? I saw your picture in the paper.”

“Uh, yeah,” I said. “That’s me.”

She looked at me with wonderment in her eyes. “Wow, nice to meet you,” she said. “I’m Ava.”

“Nice to meet you,” I said, feeling impossibly awkward. It was too late to say, “By the way, I’m not engaged to Zack. Really, I never was…it’s a long story.” So I just clammed up and looked away from her.

“Just a second,” she said, still looking at me. “I’ll page him for you. Have a seat.”

I found a chair among the crying babies and toddlers with hacking coughs and runny noses, hoping that my immune system was up to task. A woman breathed heavily beside me, sounding like she had gauze in her lungs.

“Ridley,” called Ava after a few minutes. “You can go back. He’s in the last office.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“You know,” said Ava as she buzzed me through the door to the right of her desk, “you don’t look like your dad.”

I tried for a smile. “I’ve heard that before.”

“Your father’s a saint. You know that? You kids are lucky, so damn lucky. Don’t tell your mother I swear in front of you, okay?”

Uncle Max had said that so many times, it lost its meaning. “You don’t know,” he would say. “You don’t know what it’s like to have a father that doesn’t love you.” And then he’d get that look, the look he had when my mother was around. As if the world were a prom and he was the only one without a date.

I guess Uncle Max may have been the loneliest person I’ve ever known, except Ace. When I was a kid, I sensed it without completely understanding it. As I got older, I recognized that he had an idea of himself as being alone in the world. But I still didn’t quite get why he felt that way; he had my parents, he had Ace and me, he had his parade of Barbie dolls. But I understand now. Loneliness is a condition, an illness. He carried it with him and it infected his life. He could treat it by spoiling us, by loving my parents, with his “girlfriends,” with booze. But there was no cure. His disease? It was terminal.