Sliver of Truth

11

I’ve always been attractive—not hot, not gorgeous, but pretty enough to get along, not so beautiful as to attract undue attention. Weirdly, I’ve always been grateful for this. I was never one to wish I looked like the girls in the Victoria’s Secret catalog, with their jutting bones and vamping eyes, or the models on magazine covers, with their airbrushed beauty. I never primped or starved or strutted for male attention—attempts I’ve always found to be somewhat sad and desperate in other women. My mother always said, “You are the one to do the choosing, dear. Not the one who waits to be chosen.” She knew something that most women don’t seem to know anymore, that an awareness of your own worth is the most attractive quality in the world. That a woman centered and secure in her own power need never starve herself or subject herself to self-mutilating surgeries, may not even choose to hide her grays. She’ll always have the kind of beauty that age and changing fads can’t touch.

My mother also said, “If you do things to cheapen yourself, men will think they can have you cheaply and then discard you.” These things included dyeing my hair, getting a henna tattoo, wearing midriff tops and fishnet stockings. Even when I resented these restrictions, even as I railed against them, I think I heard the truth in what she was saying. I was thinking about this because of the leering glances I drew on the street with my new platinum-blond hair peeking out of my cap. I wasn’t used to being leered at on the street, really. I mean, this is New York, and there’s always some lowlife catcalling or making a disgusting noise as you pass. But the most I might get from the average man is a quick glance or a smile. As I walked up Broadway toward the subway, men stared at me with odd looks and disrespectful grins. I walked faster and had to keep myself from running my hand through my hair. Was it the blond hair dye? Or was there something about me now that showed my fear and desperation?

I jogged down the stairs into the Times Square station and waited for the 1 or the 9. When a train came, I got on and walked through the cars to find the emptiest one, then sunk into a seat on the far end in the corner and closed my eyes.

I felt someone sit next to me and I scooched over toward the wall, kept my eyes shut.

“It’s an interesting look for you. A little bit Madonna, the Vogue years.”

I opened my eyes. Jake with an amused smile. I didn’t know whether to slap him or hug him. I opted for the latter. He held me tight, as tight as I held him.

“I’m sorry,” he said into my ear with a low whisper. “I’m sorry.”

We got off the train at 191st Street and found a Cuban coffee shop in the bustle of the busy Inwood neighborhood. It’s the tip of Manhattan, not quite the Bronx but close enough. The train is elevated here and the streets a grimy mix of mom-and-pop restaurants and Laundromats, bodegas and apartment buildings. It’s a fairly safe working-class area but close enough to the bad stuff that liquor stores are gated, their clerks behind bulletproof glass. There’s a heavily Latino influence in this area, which means the coffee is fantastic and the aromas of roast pork, rice and beans, and garlic are in the air.

We found a table toward the back, and I took off my ridiculous glasses.

“They think you killed Esme,” I said.

“And you’re wanted for questioning in the murder of that Times assistant,” he answered, “and escaping NYPD custody.”

He seemed tired and pale but his eyes were bright. There was an edginess to him that was unfamiliar. The waitress came and we ordered café con leche and Cuban toast.

“I wasn’t anywhere near Esme Gray yesterday,” he said. “Last time I saw her was when I confronted her about Max.”

“What about the blood in the studio?”

He shook his head. “I came back to the studio last night, hoping you’d meet me. The door was open. I knew I hadn’t left it open, so I slipped into Tompkins Square Park. I thought I’d stop you before you went upstairs, but I looked away for a second, and when I saw you, you were moving so fast, I didn’t get to you in time. I was about to follow you in when I saw the feds making their move. I hung back. Eventually I saw you leave with one of them. I bolted.”

“You could have called,” I said sullenly. “I’ve been sick about you. I left about a hundred messages.”

He held up his cell phone. “Battery’s dead. And I knew they’ve been watching you and your phone. I figured it was better if I just tried to tag you on the street somewhere.”

I nodded, looked down at the table. I noticed that he didn’t seem surprised about the blood in the studio, that he didn’t ask any questions about what else I had seen there or what the feds (if that’s what they were) had found. I didn’t ask him why he wasn’t even curious.

“I almost didn’t recognize you,” he said, lifting his hand to my hair. “Why’d you do that to yourself? You should just turn yourself in. This is crazy.”

“I can’t,” I answered, running one hand over my head, feeling the stiff, spiky pieces.

“Why not?”

“You know why.”

“He’s dead, Ridley.”

“You don’t believe that. And even if he is…I still—” I found I couldn’t finish my sentence.

“You still what?”

“I still need to know who he was. You of all people should understand that.”

He reached across the table and grabbed both of my hands. I looked into his beautiful face, those sea-glass green eyes, the soft lines at their corners, the dark stubble on his perfect jaw. His mouth was the most delicious shade of pink, like raspberry candy. I felt that physical pull to him.

He lowered his eyes for a minute, then raised them to me again.

“I was thinking about what Esme said. About changing our names and getting as far away from here as possible. Maybe we could do that. You and me. We could go anywhere in the world. Just start over. Start our own family. Just disappear. I want to let go. I want to move on. I feel like I’ve wasted so much of my life with this thing, with all the anger. It’s possible, isn’t it, just to walk away?”

Everything inside me wanted to tell him yes, yes, it is possible, and let’s go. We could open some kind of tiki bar in the Caribbean or find an olive farm in Tuscany. I’ll shift off my lousy family and the nightmare of Max and who he might have been. We’ll have children and tell them we were both orphans, no family at all. They’d never be touched by the poison in each of our pasts. They’d have a clean slate. It sounded like a beautiful idea and for a split second I could almost believe it was possible. But we can’t do that, can we? You can cut the ties that bind but not without losing a part of yourself. You can walk away and hide from the people who made you, but you’ll always hear them calling your name. At least that’s true for me.

I didn’t say any of these things. But I know he saw my emotions play out on my face. He released my hands and leaned back in his chair. He started working his nail against a corner of laminate that was coming off the table. I saw him abandon his fantasy with a long exhale.

“So what now?” he asked. I didn’t hear disappointment, only resignation, in his voice, as though he’d already known it wasn’t possible for us. I hesitated only briefly before I told him about the text message, my meeting at the Cloisters. About Grant and the phone call I had to make.

“You saw it, too,” I said. “The website. It was up on your computer. There was streaming video of a street in London. How did you log on?”

He shook his head. “I never saw it. I told you, I didn’t go back to the studio that night.” There was something oddly still about his face and I wasn’t sure if I believed him. But I nodded. “And you didn’t send that text message?”

He shook his head. “No, of course not.” After a beat: “Who do you think sent you this message, Ridley? Who are you expecting to find up there?”

I didn’t know the answer to that. Did I expect to go and find Max waiting for me with answers to every question I had about him in my heart? That his answers would enable me to make peace with who he was and what he had done? Maybe part of me thought that might happen. But a larger part of me had no idea, wasn’t even convinced that this was such a good idea. I know: duh.

We were there, Jake and I, in that place where silence is an answer, where you know each other so well that some questions don’t require a response.

I took a sip of my coffee and kept my eyes on the door to the street, as I had done since arriving.

“I need you to promise me something,” I said.

“What?”

“If he’s alive, if we find him, I need to know you won’t hurt him.”

He gave me a flat look. “Is that what you think? That I want revenge on Max Smiley?”

“Isn’t it?”

He didn’t say anything for a second, just lifted his eyes to the ceiling. Then: “Why are you so interested in protecting him?”

“He’s my father,” I said.

“He’s your biological father,” he said, shifting forward in his seat.

“Yes. That counts for something. There are things I need from him even now, just like there are things you need from your biological parents. You get that, right?”

He nodded slowly. “I get that.” Then: “The thing I’m most interested in is protecting you, Ridley. I don’t want to see you get hurt. That’s my only agenda.”

“What do you need to protect me from?” I asked.

“Mostly from yourself. I’m trying to keep you from getting in over your head.”

“Are you being purposely vague? What aren’t you telling me?”

We had a staring contest then, which he lost. He cast his eyes to the table and didn’t look up again. Jake seemed like a black box to me sometimes. I had the feeling that I wouldn’t know everything there was to know about him until our lives were in a burning wreckage all around us.

“Call your Web guy,” suggested Jake after a minute of silence. “We might at least have a better idea of what we’re walking into.”

He hadn’t answered my questions. He hadn’t given me the promise I’d asked for. I was starting to regret that I’d told him about the meeting at all.

I took the phone from my pocket and noticed that the charge was dangerously low. I dialed each of the numbers Grant had given me and got voice mail. I was surprised; I imagined him waiting by the phone for my call. A dark sense of worry started to settle on me.

“No answer?” said Jake.

I shook my head and rubbed my eyes, then glanced at the clock over the counter. Just two hours to go. Jake seemed edgy suddenly, kept looking over his shoulder toward the door and around the restaurant.

“Let’s get out of here. It’s better to keep moving.”

WE WALKED ALONG Broadway quickly, huddling close together, our arms interlaced. I’m sure that to anyone passing us, we looked like a normal young couple, maybe headed home for the evening. But we were so far from that, each running our own agenda, each with a head full of fears, a heart full of questions, and goals we barely understood ourselves. If I could have seen into the future a few hours, we would have hopped a cab to JFK, been in Tuscany by morning.