Sliver of Truth

5

The Detroit Metro Airport was absolutely grisly. The walk from my gate past dirty walls and over worn, hideous carpet was endless; I swear it was at least a mile before I made it outside. Standing out in the bitter cold, I waited for what seemed like an eternity for the rental car shuttle as the wind whipped at my thin leather jacket, snaked up my sleeves, and chilled me to the bone. I felt nervous on top of it. I was shaken by the things Jake had told me yesterday and had a strange feeling of being watched. I hoped I was just being paranoid.

The area surrounding the airport was equally grim. I stared out the filthy shuttle-bus window at miles of flat gray landscape, black dead trees, and ground already dusted with snow though it was only early November. Because of the thick cloud cover, it was hard to imagine the sun ever shining down on this place.

I’d been here before as a child, though I barely remembered those infrequent visits to my grandparents when they were still alive. My father hated the place where he’d grown up with Max. They both hated it, remembered it as a rough industrial town grinded by poverty, crime, and bitter cold. He and Max spoke of their leaving as if it had been a prison break.

“Places like that breed a low expectation of what your life can be. That grayness leaks concrete into your skin. So many people never leave, never even think of leaving. Once you do, you can hardly stand to go back even to visit.”

My father had told me that more than once, and driving out of the rental car lot, I could see it. The landscape alone was exhausting in its ugliness. As I pulled onto the highway, I thought about Max and Ben, how they never talked much about their childhoods.

“Not much to tell,” my father would say. “I worked hard at school. I obeyed my parents. Then I left for Rutgers and never went back for more than a weekend at a time.”

But really, there was a lot to tell. My father and Max grew up together, met each other while riding Big Wheels up and down the block. Ben was shy, the good boy, loved and cherished by strict parents, an only child. Max was the wild one, always unkempt, always in trouble. My father told me he’d look out his window late at night sometimes, after eleven, and see Max riding his bike up and down the road beneath the yellow glow of the street lamps. At the time he was envious of Max’s freedom, felt like a baby in his Howdy Doody pajamas, his homework done and packed in his bag for the next day, his clothes cleaned and pressed and laid out for him.

“I worshiped him,” my father had said of Max. Max echoed the sentiment more times than I can remember.

If you’ve been with me from the beginning, you know what happened to Max. His father, an abuser and an alcoholic, beat Max’s mother into a coma where she languished for weeks and finally died. Max’s father was found guilty of murder, largely due to Max’s testimony, was sentenced to life in prison, and died there years later. Rather than let Max become a ward of the state, my grandparents took him in. Max, who’d always been in trouble, who’d always done poorly in school, calmed down and excelled in my grandparents’ care. They raised him as their own and somehow managed to help both boys through college on my grandfather’s autoworker’s salary.

This is a story I’ve known all my life. I’ve known that my wonderful and loving grandparents took Max in and saved him from God knows what fate. That Max was the wild boy, the rebel child. That my father was the good boy, the honor student. But that wasn’t the truth. My truth was that my father was the abused child, that my grandfather murdered my grandmother and then later died in prison. That was my legacy, that’s what I came from. When I think about it, I feel as if someone hit me in the head with a two-by-four.

I have always been the good girl with my pajamas on and my homework done…just like Ben. Except lately I’ve begun to wonder, what if I’m not like Ben at all? What if at the core of who I am, in the strands of my DNA, I’m more like Max? Even before I knew we were kin, I knew we were kindred spirits. What if nature wins out over nurture? Who am I then?

I THOUGHT ABOUT the conversation with Jake that had precipitated this unscheduled trip to Detroit. He’d had a lot to say about Max. None of it made much sense and I was seriously starting to doubt Jake’s stability. The conversation ended with us screaming at each other like trailer trash and my storming out. I did a lot of storming out where Jake was concerned. Always had, even from the beginning. He had this way of being his most calm when I was at my most furious. And it never failed to throw me over the edge. Okay, so it was me who ended up screaming like an idiot last night in Jake’s studio, while he sat in a state of patient empathy. He’s lucky I didn’t punch him, I hated him so much in that moment. But he was used to this. Jake’s karma was to be the truth sayer, to seek out and bring to light the things that everyone else wanted to bury. It seemed to me that that was his cosmic role, in my life especially.

“I’m just not sure you’re going to want to hear what I have to say,” he’d predicted.

“I do,” I’d said. “I really do.”

Elena Jansen’s denial had cost her the most precious things in her life—her children. There’s always a cost for denial. How high a cost depends largely on the importance of the truth being ignored. You deny that you’re unhappy in your chosen profession and the cost might be, say, migraine headaches. You deny signs that your abusive husband has a psychotic need to control you and he kills your children. Not that I’m blaming Elena, of course. Of course not. What I’m saying is that our actions, our choices have consequences that are sometimes impossible to predict. But when our actions and choices are based on fear and denial…well, nothing good can come of that. Ever. I had learned this the hard way. Was still learning. That was why I had decided that if there was something to know about Max, I wanted to know it. Not that I believed that he’d come back from the dead.

“Okay, Ridley,” Jake said with a sigh. “As you know, after the feds cleared your father and found Esme Gray to have too small and ambiguous a role to prosecute for Project Rescue on anything but possible conspiracy charges, they decided to close the case,” Jake began. “All the major players—Max, Alexander Harriman namely—were dead. Everyone else who might have been involved in the shadow side of the organization was a ghost. There were no records. Project Rescue was a labyrinth of dark connections, impossible to navigate.”

“I know all this,” I told him, sitting on one of Jake’s work chairs.

He nodded. “Those were hard days for me, Ridley.”

“I know,” I said softly, remembering. I thought maybe I hadn’t been there for him like I could have been, but the truth was that I didn’t have a whole lot to give on the subject; I wasn’t exactly standing on solid ground myself.

“I just couldn’t get past it,” he said. “I just couldn’t accept that there were things about my past that I’d never know. That the people responsible for fucking with so many lives would never face any consequences. It ate at me.”

This was the point where Jake disappeared from the relationship, mentally and emotionally. It was like being in love with an addict. He could never be present because he was always jonesing, always fidgeting and preoccupied with his next fix.

“So I went to see Esme Gray.”

I felt a lump in my throat. I used to love Esme like a mother; now the thought of her made my stomach clench.

“What? When?”

Esme had been briefly taken into custody around the same time Zack—her son, my ex-boyfriend—had been. The conditions of her release were still unknown to me. She never stood trial for anything involving Project Rescue, I knew that much. I also knew that she’d retired from nursing. (Zack, though he was never prosecuted for his role in Project Rescue, stood trial, was found guilty, and is serving ten years in a state penitentiary for attempted murder—the attempted murder of me and Jake, by the way. But that’s another story. Even after all that he has done to us, it’s still hard to think of him in prison, of what has become of his young and promising life. He blames me, of course, and has told me so in numerous disturbing letters that I can’t keep myself from opening.)

“I looked in your address book and found out where she lived. I followed her around for a couple of days. I broke into her house and was waiting for her when she came home. I wanted her afraid and off guard when I approached her,” he said. “But she wasn’t. It was like she’d been expecting me.”

A year ago we’d talked about Esme as being the last remaining person who might know what had happened to Jake when he was a child, other than my father (who denied all knowledge). I knew someday he’d pursue that.

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“I know you’ve been trying to forget. I can’t blame you for that.”

I nodded, waited for him to go on.

“I was rough with her—not violent, but loud. I wanted her to think I’d come unhinged. But she stayed calm, sat down on the sofa and said, ‘After the kind of men I’ve been associated with, you think I’m afraid of a punk like you? You might as well cut the shit and sit down if you want to talk.’”

I had to smile to myself. On the outside, Esme looked like everybody’s mom: pretty and roundish with a honey-colored bob and glittering blue eyes. She was pink like a peach. But at her core, she was metal. When we were all kids—Ace, Zack, and me—she, along with my mother, never had to yell or threaten; just a look and all bad behavior ceased.

“She told me if I cared about you, I’d give up on finding out what happened to me. She told me I should start my own family and move forward. She said, ‘If you continue to insist on dredging up the past, you might find things you can’t put back to rest.’”

It was an echo of something she’d said to me once and it made me go cold inside. I didn’t say anything, just listened as he recounted his conversation with Esme.

“She said to me, ‘Nobody knows what happened to you, Jake. Nobody knows who took you after you were abducted by Project Rescue and why you wound up abandoned by the system. Why do you need to know so badly? Do you want to cast someone as the villain in your life? Do you want to prove to someone that you were a good boy who didn’t deserve the awful things that happened to you? Do you want revenge?’”

He paused here a second and looked above my head. She’d gotten to him, I could see that—hit him dead center. She’d always been an uncanny diviner of motives.

He went on: “She sounded tough, sure of herself. But I started to realize something while she was talking to me. Her hands were shaking and there was sweat on her forehead. She was afraid. She was afraid of something or someone, and it definitely wasn’t me. She knew I wasn’t capable of hurting her.”

I leaned forward on my seat. “Did you ask her what was frightening her?”

“Of course. She said, ‘I’ve made a deal with the devil, Mr. Jacobsen. And he’ll be waiting for me when I die. I’m afraid all the time. Afraid I’ll get hit by a car, have a heart attack and have to face him before I’ve atoned for my sins. The things I’ve done…you couldn’t have convinced me they were wrong at the time. But now I see the damage we caused.’”

Jake shook his head here, stood up. “But that wasn’t it,” he told me. “It wasn’t a spiritual fear. She was afraid of some clear and present danger. I told her I thought as much. I told her she could start atoning for her sins right now by telling me what I wanted to know.

“I kept at her, asked her, ‘What still scares you? What are you still hiding? Everyone associated with Project Rescue is dead and buried, Esme.’”

When she didn’t answer him, Jake explained, that’s when an idea struck him.

“‘He’s alive, isn’t he?’ I asked her, not even believing it as I said it. ‘Max Smiley. He’s still alive.’

“She looked at me like I’d slapped her. Her face went paper white. She screamed at me to get out, told me I was crazy, that she’d call the police. She wasn’t just scared; she was terrified. I tried to calm her down but she was freaking. ‘You idiot,’ she screamed at me. ‘If you know what’s good for you, you’ll take Ridley and get as far away from here as you can. Change your names and disappear. And don’t come near me again.’”

“Jesus,” I said.

“That’s when I started to suspect that Max was still alive.”

“Jake,” I said with a light laugh. “Esme’s obviously come unglued. She’s sick with guilt.”

“No. Well, maybe. But not only that. You didn’t see her. She was panicked when I talked about Max.”

“Okay. But telling you to take me away, to change our names and disappear? Those don’t sound like the words of a well woman.”

“They’re the words of a frightened woman. And with the things I’ve learned since then, Ridley, I think she had good reason for saying what she did.”

He sat next to me and I leaned away from him. There was something bright in his eyes, a tension to his bearing. I felt my heart start to thump. I didn’t know if I was afraid of what he was saying, or afraid of him. It sounded to me as if Esme had lost it. And if he believed her, did that mean he’d lost it, too?

“Max is dead,” I said again.

“Then how are you explaining those pictures to yourself?” He said this in a tone of smug condescension. In the past, he’d accused me of being more comfortable in a state of denial than I was in reality (which never failed to throw me off the deep end, since it was my favorite criticism of my mother). I heard the echo of that judgment in his voice.

“There’s nothing to explain,” I said, raising my voice a little. “Those pictures were out of focus. That man—he could have been anyone.”

He looked at me hard but I couldn’t read his expression. It could have been disappointment, disbelief.

“Come. On,” I said to him, yelling now. I stood up and started moving toward the door. “I thought you had something real to tell me, Jake. This is just more insane speculation on your part. More craziness. What are you trying to do to me?”

He looked at me sadly, stood, and followed me out into the loft space. “I’m sorry, Ridley.”

“You’re not sorry!” I screamed. I took a deep breath and lowered my voice. “You just want me to be as miserable and obsessed as you are. You want me trapped with you in a past that neither one of us can ever change no matter how badly we want to. It’s not fair. I don’t want to be here with you anymore.”

He didn’t react, though I could see the pain in his eyes. He walked back into his office for a second, returned with a file folder.

“Just read this stuff, Ridley. I’m not going to say another word about any of this to you…ever again. Just read my research and come to your own conclusions. Call me when you’re ready.”

I wanted to throw the file at him. I wanted to throw myself at him and punch him as hard as I could a thousand times. I wanted to take him in my arms, comfort him and be comforted by him. Instead of any of these options, I exited the loft in silence. I could have left him and the file behind and never looked back. But, of course, you know me better than that by now. Once we’ve started on the road toward the truth, there’s no turning back. The Universe doesn’t like secrets.

FOLLOWING THE DIRECTIONS I’d printed out from MapQuest, I pulled off the highway and onto a smaller main drag that led past strip malls and office buildings. This suburb of Detroit seemed like a parade of prefab buildings, indistinguishable from every other American ’burb: Chick-Fil-A and Wal-Mart, Taco Bell and Home Depot, the mandatory Starbucks. Peppered among the chains, small run-down independent stores—a butcher, a mechanic’s garage, a consignment shop—stood like rebel soldiers protesting the encroachment of the corporate giants. They seemed dilapidated and near defeat. I noticed that there were no sidewalks, though I could see houses on the back streets. I drove for miles and didn’t see one person walking. And people think New York City is scary.

The area seemed to improve after a while and started to look familiar as I neared my grandparents’ old neighborhood. I knew that their one-story ranch house, where my father and later Max had been raised, had been purchased by a young professional couple and torn down, replaced by a much larger, brand-new home. I turned onto their old street, narrowly avoiding a side-impact collision that would have been completely my fault. (I’m the world’s worst driver, partially from inexperience and partially from my mind’s tendency to wander. Many New Yorkers, most maybe, don’t drive—we walk or we ride. We take the subways or—too often in my case—hail cabs. These are activities where mind-wandering is perfectly acceptable, even preferable. Driving, I’ve noticed, requires more focused attention.)

I looked for my grandparents’ lot on the street, but it seemed that most of the homes had recently been erected. I couldn’t remember the street number nor could I pick it out based on any of the nebulous memories I had. The old ranch houses that had once characterized the neighborhood were now mostly gone, except for a few that looked dwarfed and gray among the gleaming new two-stories. At the end of the street, I found the address I was looking for: 314 Wildwood Lane. It was easily the oldest and most run-down house on the street, with an old Chevy up on blocks in the driveway. I pulled along the side of the lawn and came to a stop, felt my heart start to hammer.

You’re probably wondering, What the hell is she doing in a Detroit suburb? It was a question I asked myself as I sat in the rented Land Rover, heat blasting. I was starting to wonder if I was as nuts as Jake, in my own way.

I’D LEFT JAKE’S loft filled with fury, but on the train ride home, I felt the black fingers of depression tugging at me. I’d been fighting them off for a year, but the blackness always loomed, threatening to take me over. I knew if I stopped moving and turned around to see its face, it would eat me alive. My anger faded, leaving a killer headache in its wake.

I didn’t even take my coat off after I entered my apartment. I just sat at the dining-room table (a mammoth metal thing Jake had made and which I hated more with each passing day for its cold and utterly unwelcoming aura) and flipped open the file, which was crammed with newspaper articles, documents, and pages of handwritten notes in what I recognized as Jake’s nearly illegible scrawl.

At first glance it seemed like a jumble of unconnected pieces of information, most of which was already known to me. I noticed a copy of the medical examiner’s report from the night Max died; I flipped through the stapled pages, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary to me (not that I’d ever seen an actual medical examiner’s report). Jake had circled the estimated time of death, but it seemed consistent with what I knew about that night. I saw that Esme Gray had identified the body. This gave me pause. I had always believed that my father had been the one to ID the body. Max’s face was ruined, I remember him telling me; he wasn’t wearing a seat belt and had gone through the windshield. Jake had circled Esme’s name but I couldn’t determine why.

There were a few articles from the days following Max’s death reporting the incident, as well as some larger features about Max and his philanthropy, about his foundation being established to fund programs that aided battered women and abused children, about his incredibly successful career as a real-estate developer. I flipped through these without really reading Jake’s notes in the margins—the ones I glanced at seemed vague and somewhat weird, paranoid. For example, next to a sentence that lauded Max’s charity work, Jake had written: Lies!

The next grouping of articles seemed to have no relationship to Max at all; they were various crime stories about the tristate area and from around the world. The London Times reported on a frightening trend of young women in Eastern Europe disappearing from nightclubs and raves, never to be heard from again. The Guardian reported on the investigation of the murder of a young black woman whose torso was found floating in a canal. Police were making tentative connections between the young woman, who was of African Caribbean descent, and the ritual killings of a young boy and a prostitute earlier in the year, whose dismembered bodies were found in close proximity. A printout from the BBC website reported on the trafficking of women and children out of Albania and their subsequent torture and sexual slavery. The whole enterprise was nearly impossible to prevent or prosecute because of the Albanian and Italian police forces’ collusion with organized crime and the unwillingness of the women who had been rescued to identify their captors. There were pictures of an Albanian Mafia speedboat being intercepted by police in the Adriatic Sea, some photos of pretty, sad-faced women standing before a judge, some blurry images of known mobsters at a table in a café.

There were several articles from the New York Times related to organized crime, to body parts found in the East River, a murder on the Upper West Side, some missing young women. At the time, I didn’t see anything that connected them. Ugly news about an ugly world—what else was new? I realize now that I came to that file wanting it to prove that Jake had grown unstable, that he was grasping at straws. And I saw what I wanted to see: nothing. I released a sigh and realized that I was sweating. I shifted off my coat and closed my eyes. When I opened them again the room swam with my fatigue; I decided to close the file and go to bed. As I flipped the folder closed, a single article floated out. I picked it up off the floor, registered the date and region.

I opened the file again and saw that it came from a grouping of Detroit Register articles obviously printed from microfiche. They were the articles written about Max’s mother’s murder and the trial of his father. There were some grisly crime-scene photos that I would have rather not seen; I couldn’t believe that they’d actually been published in a newspaper.

I looked at the article in my hand. The headline read VICTIM’S NEPHEW PROTESTS GUILTY VERDICT.

I SAT IN the rental car for a few minutes until I saw a light snow start to fall. I turned off the engine and stepped out into the bitter cold. I watched my breath cloud and I pulled my coat close around me. Then I walked up the short drive toward the stout brown house, listening to the gravel crunch beneath my feet. No interior lights burned that I could see. I glanced at my watch and realized that anyone who might live there was probably still at work.

ACCORDING TO the Register, Max’s cousin had come forward after Race Smiley’s conviction to say that he’d seen another man there the night of Lana’s murder. He claimed not to have come forward earlier because he thought he’d been spotted and he was afraid for himself and his family. The police disbelieved the boy and found no evidence to corroborate the story. They said he might just be trying to help his uncle. The article had fired me up for a couple of reasons. First of all, no one had ever mentioned this cousin of Max’s, though he’d apparently grown up on the same street as Max and Ben. I found that odd and intriguing. And the idea that maybe my grandfather wasn’t a murderer after all, that he had been wrongly accused and convicted, gave me some weird kind of hope. Maybe the place from which I’d come wasn’t as dark and joyless as a tar pit.

I’d used the Internet to search for Nick Smiley and found that he was still living in his childhood home. The phone number was listed but I couldn’t bring myself to call. What would I say? Hi, I’m Ridley, your second cousin. How’s it going? So, about the night my grandmother was beaten into a coma…

My father always says that people get into trouble when they have too much money and too much time on their hands. If I had a nine-to-five job where I was accountable to someone for my days or if I struggled to make ends meet, I might not have been able to do what I did. But maybe it was more than just opportunity, a lack of anything better to do. There was and always had been a drive within me to know the truth of things. That’s what had caused all the trouble in my recent life. I thought about that as I booked myself on the next flight to Detroit.

“WHAT DO YOU WANT? ”

A bulky, bearded man had appeared from the side of the house. One word summed him up: menacing. He had a heavy brow and deep-set dark eyes. His thin line of a mouth seemed as though it had never smiled or spoken a kind word. Clad in a thickly lined flannel shirt and brown corduroy pants, he looked squared-off, ready for a fight.

“I’m looking for Nicholas Smiley,” I said, fighting an urge I had to run back to the Land Rover and drive away as fast as possible, tires screeching up the street.

“What do you want?” he repeated.

What did I want? A good question.

I figured there was no use softening the blow with a guy like this; he looked as if he could take a punch and might even like it. “I want to talk about the night Lana Smiley died.”

He jerked and stepped back as if I’d thrown a stone at him.

“Get off my property,” he said. He didn’t advance or retreat farther, so I held my ground. We stared at each other while I tried to think of something to say that might convince him to talk to me. I didn’t come up with anything.

“I can’t,” I said finally. “I need to know what you saw that night. And I’m not leaving until you tell me.” I pulled back my shoulders and stuck out my chin. It was a sad display of bravado since I think we both knew that if he’d advanced toward me, I would have run screaming for my car. Maybe that’s why he seemed to soften up just a bit, his shoulders sagging, his eyes on the driveway.

“Ancient history,” he said. “They’re all dead now.”

“Yes,” I said. “Lana, Race, and Max…they’re all gone. But I’m still here and I need to know what you saw that night.”

He let out a short, unpleasant laugh. “Well, who the fuck are you?”

“I’m Max’s daughter.” I almost choked on those words; they tasted so much like a lie on my tongue. He didn’t say anything, just turned his dark, suspicious eyes on me. I couldn’t tell if he didn’t believe me or if he just didn’t care. I felt him examining me, looking for signs of Max in my face. A blizzard of snowflakes had collected in his hair and the beard that covered most of his face.

“Let the dead lie, girl,” he said, and turned away from me.

I raised my voice and called after him. “You said you saw someone else kill Lana. You said Race wasn’t even home when she died. If that was true, why did you wait until after he was convicted to say anything?”

He stopped in his tracks but he didn’t turn around.

“Please,” I said more quietly. “I need to know what happened that night. They’re all dead now, Mr. Smiley. What harm could it do to tell me the truth?”

He turned around to look at me, then glanced uneasily up and down the street. There was no one about, no one standing in a window watching. I was really feeling the cold work its way into my center; I started to shiver. Then something in his face went from angry to sad. I wasn’t sure what changed his mind about talking to me; to this day, I still don’t know. Maybe I looked as pathetic and desperate as I felt. Maybe he didn’t want me to make a scene in his driveway. But he began walking toward the house and motioned for me to follow. Then it was my turn to change my mind. Maybe he was just luring me into his house to kill me, or tie me up in his basement, or something equally terrifying. I hesitated as he disappeared around the side of the house. Finally, curiosity got the better of me. I hurried after him.

“People know I’m here,” I said as I caught up to him. Unfortunately, this was a complete lie. The truth was no one even knew I was in Detroit. If I were to go missing, how long would it take people to notice I was gone, to track me here?

Tall hedges separated his property from his neighbor’s; round concrete blocks acted as a path. He walked through a side door that led into a neat kitchen that looked as if it hadn’t been updated in decades. I followed him over the threshold and shut the door behind me, but kept my hand on the knob. He walked over to the sink and filled a kettle with water, placed it on the stove, and turned on the burner.

“You gonna sit?” he asked me.

“No,” I said. “I’d rather stand.” I was nervous.

“I never knew Max had a daughter,” he said, his back to me as he stared out a window over the sink.

“I didn’t know until last year, after he died. It’s a long story. I was raised by other people. In fact, you probably know the man who raised me, Benjamin Jones.”

He nodded slowly, seemed to take in the information. “Bennie Jones. We came up together right on this street. He was a good kid. Haven’t seen him in years. Decades.”

We were silent a minute. I could hear the water in the kettle, little clinks in the metal pot as it changed temperature. I realized it wasn’t much warmer in the house than it had been outside. I looked around at the old wallpaper patterned with little cornices overflowing with fruit, the yellowed Formica countertops, the green tiled floor.

“Tea?” he asked. I was surprised by the civility of his offer.

“Sure,” I said. “Thanks.”

He moved to get some cups out of the cupboard. He tossed a look behind him as he took teabags out from a white ceramic canister. “I’m not gonna hurt you. You might as well sit.”

I nodded and felt silly. I moved toward the kitchen’s round wood table, pulled out a chair, and sat down. It was wobbly and uncomfortable but I stayed seated just to be polite. He came to the table and sat across from me, bringing the tea with him. I took the cup he offered gratefully and warmed my hands on it.

“This is a bad idea,” he said, shaking his head. My heart sank; it looked as if he might be clamming up on me. His face had gone still. He’d pressed his mouth back into a thin line. I gave him an understanding smile. I wasn’t sure what to say to convince him to talk, so I said nothing.

“You seem like a nice girl,” he said, holding my eyes briefly. “I don’t want…” He let his voice trail off and didn’t pick up the sentence again. I closed my eyes for a second, drew in a breath, and said the only thing I could think of.

“Please.”

He looked at me sadly. Gave me a quick nod.

“I haven’t thought about that night in a long time,” he told me, but for some reason I didn’t believe him. I suspected he’d thought about that night a lot, and maybe this was the first time in years he’d been able to talk about it. Maybe he needed to talk about it. Maybe that’s why he changed his mind.

“ ’Course, it’s not the kind of thing you forget, either. It stays with you, even when it’s not on your mind directly. I busted an arm at work about five years ago, been on disability ever since. The arm healed but it’s never been the same. Some things are like that. After they happen, nothing’s right again.” I could definitely relate to that.

He didn’t seem quite as menacing as he had on first glance. He seemed softer and kinder now, more beaten down than angry. He didn’t say anything else for a minute, just stared into his cup. I listened to the clock ticking above the sink and waited. Finally:

“We’d been over there, at Race and Lana’s, for supper. We always spent the holidays together,” he said, looking at the tabletop. His voice seemed hoarse, as if it had been a while since he’d used it so much. I wondered if he’d feel unburdened by the telling of this. Or if it would be like exhuming a body, an unholy dredging of something better left to rest.

It struck me again, as it had when I first read the article, that I had never heard of Nicholas Smiley or his family. Neither Max, my father, nor my grandparents had ever mentioned this cousin who’d apparently grown up with Max and Ben, living just down the street. I wondered if there was any end to the layers of secrets and lies.

“It hadn’t been a very good night,” he said, looking at me shyly. “Race didn’t show up for dinner and Lana was drunk and mad as hell. Ranting about her shit life.”

He looked down at his teacup again and I could see that his hand was shaking just slightly. For some reason, the sight of that made my heart rate rise.

“Race was a bastard. Beat the crap out of Lana and Max, ran around on her. Everyone knew it.” He spoke in short, quick-fire sentences, as if he had to get the words out before a timer went off. But there was something rhythmic, almost metered, about the way he spoke. I felt hypnotized.

He must have seen something on my face. Any good interviewer knows to keep judgment out of her voice, and I’d always been okay at that. It was keeping it off my face that gave me trouble.

“I don’t know why no one ever did anything,” he said, as though I’d asked the question I’d been thinking. “Been plenty of years to regret that. I guess in those days you just didn’t interfere between a man and his family.”

I nodded my understanding and he went on.

“Anyway, we left early. Lana had, like I said, been ranting and Max had barely said a word the whole night. He got that way sometimes, like he was trying to be invisible. Not that I blamed him; it was like living in the valley between two active volcanoes. You never knew which one of them was gonna blow.”

“Lana was abusive to Max as well?”

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “She got her licks in.”

Max had always spoken of his mother as if she were the Madonna and Mother Teresa wrapped into one. I’d heard him talk only of her beauty, of her kindness, of her strength.

“You look a lot like her. Did you know that?” Nicholas said to me.

“No,” I said. “I didn’t.” I hadn’t wanted that information, didn’t even know what to do with it. Suddenly I regretted coming.

He shrugged. “Compared to Race, she wasn’t so bad. But that kid never knew where it was coming from. Never knew if he was going to get stroked or slapped.”

I didn’t know what to say, thinking about this abused little boy who was not my uncle but my father. I waited for emotion to bloom in my chest, but instead it felt as if it was filled with lead, heavy and numb. I looked into my teacup and saw that the milk had curdled slightly.

“Max and I got walkie-talkies that year. But in my parents’ rush to get out of there, we’d left mine under the tree by mistake. I wanted it, couldn’t think or talk about anything else, drove my parents crazy. Tomorrow, they promised. But to a kid tomorrow seems like forever. I waited for them to go to bed, then I pulled on my coat and boots and snuck out of the house.”

I could picture it. The block dark, but illuminated by Christmas lights on the houses and from the trees glimmering inside, snow on the ground. I could see him trundling up the street in his coat and pajamas. I could smell the cold winter air, hear the cars on the busy road that ran perpendicular to their block.

“If Max was sixteen that year, I was fourteen. But Max was huge for his age. Not quite as big as Uncle Race but getting there. I figured Race wouldn’t be pushing Max around much longer. Still I looked for Race’s car in the driveway. He been home, I’d have gone right back to my house.”

I could tell he was back there on that night; his eyes had taken on a kind of shine and he looked right through me. I kept quiet.

“I remember that the air seemed different, like the night already knew something bad had happened. I didn’t go to the door. I went to Max’s bedroom window, but he wasn’t in there. I could hear the television up loud, so I went around to the living-room window.”

He stopped and released a sigh, as if the memory still frightened him all these years later. He put his head in his hands, then lifted it again. “That’s where I saw Aunt Lana,” he said. “I only recognized her by the outfit she’d had on at dinner. Her face was a pulp; her clothes were soaked with blood.”

“But Race wasn’t there?” I asked.

He looked up at me. “I told you, his car wasn’t in the drive.”

“He could have come home, killed her, and left again,” I said. “He could have been parked on the street.”

“No,” he answered.

“How can you be sure?”

He looked at me with something like pity in his eyes. I guess I sounded as desperate as I was feeling at that moment.

“I saw him standing over her. There was blood on his fists, on his shirt, and on his face. His eyes were glazed over and he was smiling, breathing hard like a prizefighter.”

“Who?” I asked him, horrified.

He shook his head at me and tears fell down his cheeks and into his beard. He shook his head again and opened his mouth but no words came out.

“Who?” I asked again, leaning forward in my chair.

“Max,” he whispered.

I COULDN’T HAVE been more shocked or devastated if he’d hit me in the head with a crowbar. I wished he had; I wished I could just pass out and get amnesia, forget I ever heard anything he’d told me. I hated myself for being so stubborn and curious and for being there at all. I was having trouble getting a full breath of air.

“No,” I said. “You were so young. It was dark and you were terrified by seeing your aunt like that.”

He stared at me. “I know what I saw,” he said softly. “Won’t ever forget.”

“Then why didn’t you say anything? You let an innocent man die in jail,” I said.

“He turned around and saw me in the window. He wasn’t the Max I knew. He was…a monster. Those dead, empty eyes on me—I knew if I ever breathed a word, he’d rip me in two. I ran and waited all night for that devil to come and turn my face into hamburger. But he didn’t. The next day Race was arrested; Lana died a few weeks later in her coma. Max went to live with Bennie’s parents.”

“Why didn’t he come live with you? You were his only family.”

“My parents were barely making it. With me and my three sisters, they couldn’t afford another kid. As it is, they died in debt, a debt I’m still paying.” He looked around him. “I’m barely holding on to this house.” He cast his eyes to the floor.

“I’ve never even heard of you,” I said angrily. I hated him for what he’d told me and was looking for reasons he could be lying or wrong or just crazy. “Neither Max or Ben has ever spoken of you or your family.”

“They judged us for not taking Max in. Nothing was ever said, but from that point on, we didn’t have much to do with Max.”

I looked hard at his face. I could see, at least, that he believed what he was telling me. The fear and sadness, the ugliness of his memories made a home in his face.

“But it wasn’t the money, not really,” I said. “That wasn’t why they didn’t take him in, was it?”

Nicholas shook his head.

“You told your parents what you saw that night. And they believed you.”

“Yes,” he said. “That’s right.”

“But no one said anything as Race was arrested and stood trial. You were all so terrified of a sixteen-year-old boy?”

“We waited,” he said, clearing his throat. “Hoped that Race would be found innocent. That we’d never have to come forward with what we knew. Even when Race was convicted, my parents still didn’t want me to go forward.”

“Because they were afraid of Max?”

Nicholas released another sigh. “No, it wasn’t that. I think they just didn’t want Max to go to prison. Maybe guilt that they hadn’t stepped in earlier to stop some of the violence in that house. And, well, Race might have been innocent of that murder, but in a lot of ways he was guiltier than Max. That kid was raised with violence; he didn’t even know another way. My parents thought that maybe he just didn’t know his own strength that night. That a lifetime of suffering and regret was punishment enough.”

“But you didn’t think so?”

“He wasn’t sorry,” said Nicholas, holding my eyes. “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 tried to reconcile this version of Max with the man I knew. The child Nick Smiley described was psychotic—a murderer and a liar, a scheming manipulator. I had never seen anything in Max that hinted of that. Never.

“That’s why you came forward finally? Because you didn’t think he was sorry?”

“I don’t know that you’d call what I did coming forward. It was a half-assed attempt to undo one of many wrongs that had been done that night and all the nights leading up to it. I was racked with guilt, couldn’t sleep and couldn’t eat. Finally my parents took me to the police station and I told the cops that I saw someone else there that night. I told them about the walkie-talkies, that I hadn’t seen Race’s car, and that there was another man there, a man I’d never seen before. I never told them about Max.”

He took a sip of his tea, which I knew from my own cup was stone-cold by now.

“I told them I hadn’t come forward because I was afraid this stranger I made up would come and kill me and my family, too.”

“They didn’t believe you?”

He shook his head. “There was nothing to show that anyone else but Race had been there. No one else saw a strange car or saw anyone come or go other than Race later that night. They told me I’d just had a nightmare. I mean, they weren’t going to reopen a case that was long closed, the accused tried and convicted, because of the ramblings of a kid. But someone in the station leaked the story and an article ran in the paper the next day.

“That night I woke up to rocks being thrown at my window. I looked out on the street and saw Max standing there. He had a crowbar in his hand. He just stood there under the streetlight and I could see those eyes. He knew I was a chicken—hell, he’d been pushing me around since we were in diapers. I never said another word.”

I sat in silence. He seemed like an honest man, simple and down-to-earth. The kitchen was neat and clean, like any working-class suburban kitchen—nothing fancy but everything in decent shape. His story had just enough detail but not too much flourish. It had the ring of truth—I could see that he believed the things he’d said, that it still haunted him. I didn’t know what to say. I must have just stared at him with my horror and disbelief because he shifted uncomfortably beneath my gaze.

“I told you to let the dead lie,” he said. “You should have listened.”

Nobody likes a know-it-all.