Sliver of Truth (4 page)

“Ridley, there you are,” he said, sitting down heavily on the ground. I could see that he was sweating, maybe from the humidity, maybe from fear. Maybe both. He put his head in his hands. “Kid,” he said through his fingers, “you have
got
to stop doing this. You are going to give your uncle Max a heart attack. Your mom and dad are about to call the police.”

He lifted his head to the night and yelled, “I found her!”

I crawled out of the fort and into his lap, let him enfold me in his big arms against his soft belly. He was damp with perspiration but I didn’t care. Through the trees, I could see the glow from the lights of my own house, could hear my parents’ voices drawing closer.

“How did you find me?” I asked him.

He sighed and took my face in his hands. “Ridley, there’s a golden chain from my heart to yours.” He tapped his chest lightly, then mine. “Trust me. I’ll
always
find you.” I never doubted he was right. And I never hid from my poor parents again.

I lifted my head from the crook of my arm and squinted against the harsh white lights of the interrogation room. I closed my eyes again and leaned my head against the cold wall, tried and failed to clear my mind and relax.

Agent Grace walked in shortly thereafter and offered me his hand, pulled me up from the floor with impressive strength.

“Starting to feel at home here?” he asked. There was something odd in his voice. Was it compassion? For someone who was completely innocent of wrongdoing, I’d spent more time with the FBI than Jeffrey Dahmer had. Or so I imagined, in my self-aggrandizing way. I gave him a short, tight smile, then kept my eyes on the eight-by-ten envelope he had in his other hand. We sat across from each other. He straddled his chair as if he was mounting a horse. Without a word, he opened the envelope and took out three eight-by-ten photographs and spread them out before me.

The first was a photo of me in front of Notre-Dame in Paris. I was eating a crepe filled with Nutella and bananas, gazing up at the cathedral. I wore my leather coat and a beret I had bought on the street just to be a dork. Hazelnut chocolate dripped down my chin. Jake had taken the candid. I think to the casual observer I would have looked silly and happy. But I wasn’t. I remember waking up next to Jake that morning in our posh hotel room with the yellow morning sun beaming in. I looked at him as he slept and thought, I’ve been with this man for a year. He seems more like a stranger to me now than when I was first falling in love with him, when there were so many secrets and lies between us. How is it possible to know someone less intimately the more time you spend with him? The thought had filled me with sadness. He woke up as I stared at him and we made a slow, desperate kind of love to each other, both wanting so badly the connection we’d once shared. I carried the sadness of that lovemaking with me all day.

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 your 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 has 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.