Sliver of Truth

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 have 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.

“What?” he said sharply, looking at me in surprise. “Why?”

I handed him the envelope and moved over toward the couch, where I flung myself down like a bag of laundry. I told him about my encounter with Agent Grace and the FBI. I should have just kept my mouth shut, given the intensity of Jake’s obsessions. But I told him, probably because he was literally the only person in my life I could talk to about any of this. Any conversation relating to Max, or to the events that so changed all of our lives, was strictly forbidden in my family. Even Ace had suggested that I “move on” the last time I tried to talk to him about some things that haunt me still. Isn’t it funny how the people least impacted by tragedy are the most eager to move on? I was eager to move toward healing, believe me. But I was caught in this space between my parents, who wanted to pretend none of it had ever happened, and Jake, who seemed to think nothing else would ever happen again.

I finished talking and closed my eyes, heard Jake flipping through the photographs. When he didn’t say anything, I looked over at him as he sank into the chair across from me. I tried not to notice how hot he was in his black T-shirt and faded denims, or to watch the tattoos on his arm, the way they snaked around his muscles and disappeared into his sleeve. My body responded to him even without his touch.

“Well?” he said, raising his eyes from the photos to look at me.

“Well, what?” I said. “They weren’t able to make a case against my father. The prosecution’s case against Esme Gray was so weak they couldn’t hold her for more than twenty-four hours. They can’t really get Zack for things that started long before he was ever born.” I took a deep breath. “They’re looking for someone to prosecute and they’re willing to resurrect the dead to do it.”

I hated to even think about Esme, the nurse who had worked at my father’s practice and assisted him in his clinic since long before I was born. She’s also the mother of my ex-boyfriend Zack Gray. At one time, Esme and I were closer than I was to my own mother, but she was intimately involved in the shadow side of Project Rescue, as was Zack. I can no longer be close with either of them for more reasons than I can recount here.

Jake didn’t respond, just stared at the photos, one after another. There was something so strange on his face. He wore a half-smile but his eyes were dark. I saw him give a small shake of his head. An ambulance raced by, siren blaring, filling the apartment briefly with light and sound.

“What?” I asked him. “What are you thinking?”

“Nothing,” he said, putting the photos on the table. “I’m not thinking anything.”

He was lying. He put his head in his hands, rested his elbows on his knees, and released a deep sigh. I sat up and crossed my legs beneath me, watching him.

“What is it?”

He looked at me. “Is this him, Ridley? Is this Max?” There was something desperate in his voice. And something else. Was it fear?

“No,” I said. “Of course not. Max is dead. I saw his dead body in the casket. I scattered his ashes. He’s dead.”

“His face was unrecognizable, shredded by glass when he went through the windshield. The face you saw was reconstructed from a photograph.”

“It was him.” What Jake said was true. But I remembered Max’s hands, his rings, the small scar on his neck. There wasn’t an open-casket viewing for him, but we were able to see the body once it had been prepared for cremation. My father had arranged for postmortem reconstruction of his ruined face so that we could all say good-bye to something we recognized. I guess in retrospect it was pretty macabre (not to mention a huge waste of money), but at the time it felt right.

“Because if this is Max…” He let his voice trail off and kept his eyes on me.

“It’s not,” I said firmly.

“Ridley,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “There’s a lot you don’t know about this man.”

Sometimes Jake frightened me. That was the other thing that had started to eat away at our relationship. Not that I was physically afraid of him, but the intensity of his obsessions seemed like a natural disaster, something that could shift the ground beneath our feet, open a chasm in the earth. I always wondered when it would swallow him whole—and me along with it.

“You know what?” I said, rising. “I can’t do this with you right now.”

“Ridley.”

“Jake, I want you to go.” I walked over to the door and opened it.

“Listen to me—” he started but I stopped him with a raised hand.

“No, Jake, you listen to me. I can’t do this. You need to leave.” I didn’t want to hear what he had to say. Not at all.

He looked at me for a second. Then he nodded, stood up, and walked over to the bar that separated the kitchen from the living area. He took his leather jacket off one of the stools. I felt bad; I could see that I’d hurt him. But the fatigue I’d felt earlier had burrowed into my soul. I only wanted to close my eyes and disappear into blissful black.

“We do need to talk,” he said, leaning in and kissing me on the cheek at the doorway.

“Okay,” I said. “Tomorrow.”

He left then and I closed the door behind him. I walked across the loft and went into the bedroom we used to share. I kicked off my shoes and lay on the bed, sinking into the down comforter, and sobbed for I don’t know how long from sheer exhaustion and the crushing sadness that had settled into my heart and threatened never to leave.

I GUESS I fell asleep because it was hours later that the phone woke me. I looked at the clock to see that it was 3:33 A.M. I reached over to the bedside table and picked up the receiver, thinking it was Ace. He called at all hours—typical of his recovering addict’s personality, totally self-centered. I, the recovering enabler, never hesitated to pick up.

“Hello,” I said.

There was a heavy static on the line, the sound of distant voices, a tinny strain of music. I glanced at the caller ID, which told me the number was unavailable.

“Hello?” I repeated.

I heard the sound of breathing on the line, then it went dead. I put down the receiver and waited for it to ring again but it didn’t. After a while I got up and brushed my teeth, stripped off my clothes, and got under the covers. I drifted back into an uneasy sleep.