Sliver of Truth (40 page)

24

The woods behind my parents’ house were just as I remembered them. It was cold, and as usual I wasn’t dressed for it. Another hour and the sun would be rising. Already I could see a silvery lightening of the horizon. As a child, I’d been frightened by these woods at night, my imagination turning slim black trees into witches, rocks into goblins, bushes into bogeymen. Tonight nothing scared me as I made my way through the thin tree cover. I could see the lights from the neighbor’s porch as I stepped over the creek bed, which was always dry in winter.

It was still there, just as we left it a lifetime ago, when it was the center of all our imaginary play. The fort that Ace and I had built seemed so small as I came to stand beside it. I was surprised at how tiny it was; I always remembered it large, as big as a car. Instead it was more like the size of a refrigerator box, maybe a little bigger. But for its size, the unstable little structure seemed solid and righteous. It had a place in these woods and in my memory; it would always be there.

I climbed inside and sat on the cool dirt of the ground. It was just barely big enough for me. I had to scrunch up a little to fit. Outside, I could almost hear the sounds of my childhood summers: crickets chirping, the sparrows waking with the rising sun, off in the distance the sound of the trains going to and from the city. But this winter night was silent. And I felt profoundly how far I was from my childhood, from the girl who hid herself so that she could be sought after, found, and brought home.

It glowed, the whiteness of the envelope stuck between the rotting slats of wood. The paper was still clean and fresh; it hadn’t been there long. On its surface my name had been scrawled. I plucked it from its place, ripped the seal, and pulled out a single sheet of paper.

I know you well enough to know that you’re looking for answers. You always were a kid that wanted a beginning, a middle, and a happy ending. Remember how mad you got when we watched
Gone With the Wind
? You couldn’t believe that Rhett would leave Scarlett after all of that. Or how you chased Ace for years. He was a junkie, using you, destroying himself, but still you met him, gave him money, tried to help. (You thought I didn’t know? There’s not much I don’t know about you.) You always want to fix the broken things, make the wrong thing right. You always believed you could be the one to do that. That stubborn confidence is part of what makes you who you are, and I love you for it. But you can’t do that here. I’m too far gone . . . have been since before you were born.

I sat there holding the letter for a while, thinking how predictable I must be for him to know that one day I’d come back to this place. Or how connected we were that he knew he could leave a note for me here and I would find it.
Ridley, go home.
He’d meant for me to come here. Not my home. Not his. But the home of my childhood, where he had always been my beloved uncle Max. He meant for me to come home to the place where I had loved him. And a sad homecoming it was.

I heard some movement in the brush outside then, and I held my breath, tried to make myself small. The movements grew louder, moved closer. Then:

“Ridley, is that you?”

“Dad?”

I looked out the small window to see Ben standing there. He had on sneakers below his pajamas and robe.

“I was awake,” he said, squatting down near me. “I heard your car and saw you walk across the back lawn. What in the world are you doing here?”

“I had a feeling I’d find something I was looking for here.”

He reached a hand in and touched my face, looked at me strangely, as if he thought I might be losing my mind.

“Did you find it?”

“I found
something.
”

I handed him the letter and waited as he read it in the growing light of morning. I told him what had happened to me since Dylan Grace first stopped me on the street. I told him about Potter’s Field and how I saw Max. I didn’t tell him how a dark and secret part of myself had sought to kill him that night, and how I’d done reckless and stupid things to make that possible.

“Why did you give me that key?” I asked. “Did you know what was in that drawer?”

He shrugged. “He told me you needed it, that you’d know what to do with it. That everything had been lost, and you and I were in trouble for the things he’d done. He said it was our ‘Get out of jail free’ card.”

I told him what was in that drawer, and what turning it over to the CIA had accomplished. He didn’t seem upset or even surprised. “Max is always one step ahead,” he said. “He’s a street fighter, always has been. Me, I play by the rules. He’s a berserker. Nobody beats Max Smiley.”

There was unadulterated admiration in my father’s voice. I was wondering if
he’d
lost
his
mind.

“Do you understand what I’m telling you, Dad? Do you understand who he was?”

“I understand what they think he is. But like the letter says, ‘Don’t believe everything you hear.’”

“He provided proof, Dad.”

“He gave them what they wanted to keep them off his back. That’s not the same thing.”

When that cloak of denial wrapped around my father, there was no way through it. He had chosen to see only one sliver of Max, one thin shred of who he was, and he clung to that. He didn’t care to see the whole man. Maybe he was afraid.

“What does he have on you, Dad? How has he held you in his thrall all these years?”

“He has the same thing on me that you do, Ridley. That your mother does. Even Ace. Love.”

I guess I had expected people to change. I had expected Max to own the things he’d done. I had expected Ben to acknowledge who Max truly was and the impact all their myriad lies had had on me. I had expected Ace to get clean, to live a decent life. Maybe
expect
is not the right word.
Hope
is better, however equally pointless. But you cannot hope for change in others, you can only work toward it in yourself. And that’s hard work.

I left my father in the woods and crossed the back lawn. I felt the dew soak through my boots as the rising sun painted the windows of my parents’ house golden. The air was frigid and the sky was pink. I saw my mother standing in the master bedroom window, looking down at me, just as she had a year ago. Since then, nothing had changed here—except for me. I guess that’s what they mean when they say you can’t go home again.

EPILOGUE

So, no, I didn’t shack up with Dylan Grace. I had grown smart enough to realize that after everything I’d been through, all the shape shifting I’d done, I needed time to get to know Ridley Jones. I had learned the hard way that I wasn’t Ben and Grace’s daughter, and I wasn’t Max and Teresa Stone’s daughter, but I was both of those things. And more than that, I was my own person forging my own path in this life. Nature, nurture, free will—it all plays a role. Ultimately it’s all about choices. The big ones, the little ones . . . Well, by now you know my shtick.

So Dylan and I are dating. I think it’s funny that his last name is my mother’s first name. It’s such a feminine name and he’s such a tough guy—there’s something cool about the dichotomy of it. There are lots of cool things about Dylan Grace. Anyway, we go to the movies, go out to dinner, visit museums . . . but most of all we talk.

“All that time, watching you,” he said during our first official date dinner. “That was the thing that drove me crazy, that we couldn’t have a conversation.”

He pretends he doesn’t know everything about me, and we stay up all night trying to find out if we have anything in common, other than our obsession with Max, and a knack for getting into mortal danger and high drama. And I don’t think I have to tell you, the sex is white hot.

I was thinking about how nice it all was between us, as we walked up Fifth Avenue after doing some gallery hopping in SoHo. I think he thought most of the art we saw was pretty awful, though he didn’t say anything. We’d cut through Washington Square and were passing Eighth Street, sipping hot chocolate from Dean & Deluca cups. I caught my reflection in a storefront window. I’d been to the John Dellaria Salon earlier in the week and had my hair dyed back close to my natural color, but it was still short and spiky. I’d kind of started to like it like that, though I guessed I’d probably let it grow out eventually. As I was looking at myself, I caught another reflection: a thin man in a long overcoat, across the street, resting his weight upon a cane.

I turned to look at him. A stranger. Not Max.

This happens a lot and I suppose it will continue to, though I know he’ll never come looking for me again. He’s with me. He’ll always be with me. In my darkest fantasy, I thought I could rid myself of him, but I know now that had I done that, he would have haunted me day and night as long as I lived.

As it is, there are things that still bother me; I’ll never understand some of the things that have happened. I don’t think I’ll ever fully remember my voyage on the plane, or how I got from the Cloisters to that plane in the first place. The passport in my bag was a fake; mine was waiting undisturbed in its file when I got home. And all that cash in my bag? That wasn’t mine, either. Looking on the bright side, at least I got some cool new clothes out of the deal.

“What are you thinking about?” Dylan asked as we waited at the light. I guess I’d been quiet for a while.

We usually avoided talking about Max. Neither of us brought up Potter’s Field—how we didn’t get what we were looking for that night, and we never would.

“I was wondering if you ever felt robbed. Like you didn’t get the justice you were seeking for your parents, for the women Max murdered. He got away. Does it hurt you? Do you think about it?”

He shook his head. “He didn’t get away.”

I looked at him, wondered if he knew something I didn’t. I couldn’t see his eyes behind the thin sunglasses he wore. He tossed his empty cup in a wire trash basket.

“I have come to believe that we carry our deeds with us. The evil he’s done must eat at him like a cancer. One day it will consume him.”

I wasn’t sure I agreed. I thought of my conversation with Nick Smiley.

He wasn’t sorry,
Nick had told me.
I could tell by the way he looked at me. He was so sad-faced for everyone else. But when we were alone, he turned those eyes on me and I knew. He killed his mother, accused and then testified against his father. Effectively, he killed them both. And I don’t think he lost a night’s sleep over it.

“I’m not talking about remorse,” said Dylan, reading the doubt on my face. “I’m saying that justice is more organic than a trial and punishment. Karma, you know?”

I nodded. I wasn’t going to argue with him. If he’d found a way to make peace with the fact that the man who killed his parents was at large and probably living pretty well, I wasn’t going to try to talk him out of it. He was clearly a more evolved person than I.

I won’t lie to you; I have lost some sleep over the fact that Max got away, that his appetites probably haven’t diminished. If anything, I imagine exile has made him more ravenous. I’m sure you were hoping for a neater package—the villain is caught and brought to justice. I live happily ever after. Wouldn’t it be great if we could change all the people and circumstances that pain us? But, of course, that’s not always the way life works. Sometimes things are as they are, no matter how you struggle against them. The real challenge is making peace with that, making the best of it, and moving forward, even if that means, as it does in my case, that you’ll always be looking over your shoulder.

I tossed my own cup into the trash and Dylan took my hand. We walked in heavy silence toward the Flatiron Building.

“What about you?” he asked, lifting up his sunglasses and resting them on top of his head. He turned those gray eyes on me. “Is that how you feel, Ridley? Do you feel robbed?”