Beautiful Lies

seven

Obviously, I didn’t sleep much the rest of the night. I checked the gates on my windows and double-locked my front door and basically sat in my bed wide-eyed, startling at every little sound until the black sky lightened from charcoal to gray. Another night I might have called Zack or even my father, but since everyone seemed convinced that I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, I didn’t want to give them an incident that might prove them right. After a little while I began to doze until my alarm went off an hour or so later.

I got up and made a pot of coffee. As I listened to the machine’s familiar hiss and gurgle and smelled the aromas from Veniero’s, I started to feel normal again. Everything about the night before began to seem surreal, as though I might have been dreaming from the moment I got on the train to go to New Jersey. I’d thrown out the photo and made a decision to consider the whole thing a hoax. In my sunny kitchen, I could halfway believe that I had imagined the whole encounter on the stairs. You know, because the stress was causing me to hallucinate. Anyway, it was over. It was just me, Ridley, on a normal Thursday morning. Denial…it ain’t just a river in Egypt. Seriously, I think it’s something your mind does when it has too much to handle. It takes a little vacation.

I went into my office—really, it’s just a little space I have sectioned off with an Oriental screen where I keep my files and laptop. I rummaged through some papers on my desk and found the business card Uma Thurman’s publicist had given me. We’d met at a yoga class and wound up going to Starbucks afterward for some chai. Her name was Tama Puma. She was crunchy, smelled of patchouli. Tall with broad shoulders, had that gray complexion and limp hair that people who eat a macrobiotic diet always seem to. She was impossibly thin and spoke softly but with a lofty self-importance. We’d chatted briefly about the article I wanted to write and I had told her I’d call if the features editor at Vanity Fair accepted my pitch. I left a message for Tama and felt glad to be getting back to work, moving forward from a neatly diverted disaster.

When I opened my door, I saw it there on the ground. The sight of it felt like a blow to the solar plexus. Another envelope with my name scratched across in black marker in the same harsh, scrawling hand. I picked it up and went back into my apartment. The whole world seemed to spin around me as I ripped the envelope open. There was a clipping from an October 27, 1972, newspaper. The headline read YOUNG MOTHER FOUND SLAIN; TODDLER MISSING. The rest of the article had been clipped away, but there was a headshot of the young woman from the first picture and another photo of the little girl. Looking at the woman’s face again, even in the grainy newsprint, I could have been looking in the mirror. And looking at the child, I noticed something on her face that I hadn’t seen in the first picture. She had a small brown birthmark under her left eye, identical to one I had on my own face. There was a note as well.

It said simply, They lied.

I was out of my apartment and down the stairs in a shot, racing for the garbage cans. I ran into my landlady, Zelda, in the hallway. “Did the garbage pick up?” I said, running to the front door.

“Ah,” she said in disgust, lifting her hands. “Sanitation strike. Lazy sons of bitches, like they don’t get enough money. It’s still in the back. Goddamn unions.”

The garbage bag was on top of the can and the picture and number easy to find. I unwrinkled the photograph and the note and went back upstairs. I stopped at my apartment and picked up the clipping. Then I took everything upstairs to Jake. Why would I do this? I barely knew him. But I think it was precisely because he was a stranger, utterly unconnected to the other people in my life, that I thought he might be the only one with any perspective.

“I’m sorry,” I said when he opened the door. “I need some help.”

I handed everything to him and pushed past him without being invited in. He looked at me, then down at the papers in his hand.

“This is what you were telling me about last night?”

“Yes. And something I found at my door this morning.”

He nodded, his face still and solemn. He never asked why I’d brought this to him, what I wanted him to do. He sat at the table, started flipping through the items, and I saw lines crease his brow as he frowned down at the papers in his hand.

“This woman could be you,” he said after a minute. “She looks just like you.”

“I know,” I answered.

“Could be someone fucking with you.”

“Why? What would anyone have to gain?”

“Some people just like to play with lives. Some psycho sees your picture in the paper, you remind him of someone he used to know, someone who died. You become his target.”

“Okay. Explain this,” I said, pointing to the tiny mole just below the corner of my left eye. He looked at the photograph and saw an identical mark on the face of the child as I sat across from him.

He nodded slowly and looked over at me. “I’ll admit it’s weird.”

There were things about him that I hadn’t noticed the night before. There was something sad around his eyes, lines there that seemed to mark the vision of tragedy. I could see through his white T-shirt that the tattoo, which peeked out of his short shirtsleeve, also worked its way along his chest and over his collarbone. I saw a scar on his neck; it was an inch long, thick and raised as though there were something beneath the skin.

“But what do you want me to do?” he asked gently, coming to sit beside me.

I looked at his hands; they were thick and square, the knuckles calloused, blue veins roping beneath the skin. Something about them simultaneously turned me on and sent a shock of fear through me. In the daylight, he looked harder, tougher, bigger than I remembered him looking last night.

“You know what?” I said, getting up. “Forget it. You’re right. I don’t even know you. I’m sorry.”

He didn’t say anything. What an idiot I was. I gathered up the papers. I wished the floor would fall out beneath me.

“I’m overreacting. And it has nothing to do with you,” I said. He stood and blocked my exit.

“I don’t think you’re overreacting,” he said. I let him take the papers from my hand. He put them down out of my reach, then put his hand in mine.

“It’s okay, Ridley. I’m not sure how, but I’ll help you figure this out if you want me to.”

And we stood like that. The joining of hands is highly underrated in the acts of intimacy. You kiss acquaintances or colleagues, casually to say hello or good-bye. You might even kiss a close friend chastely on the lips. You might quickly hug anyone you knew. You might even meet someone at a party, take him home and sleep with him, never to see him or hear from him again. But to join hands and stand holding each other that way, with the electricity of possibilities flowing between you? The tenderness of it, the promise of it, is only something you share with a few people in your life.

His pull was irresistible.

“Really?” I said, feeling a wash of relief and gratitude.

“Really.”

“Okay.”

I felt the skin of his hand, hard but warm against mine. I could see all the facets in the gems of his eyes and I could feel that gaze searching me inside. I could sense the many layers of the stranger before me and I was afraid, intrigued, and deeply moved. When he guided me into his arms and held me there, the lines of our bodies melted into each other. I placed my cheek to his throat and felt his pulse throbbing. I was on the precipice of some yawning darkness, glad to have even this uncertain ally.

I don’t know how long we stood like that. A long time, I think.

Finally he said, “So this guy wants you to call him.”

“Yeah, I guess,” I said, lingering a second in his arms and then pulling away. I sat at the table.

“Doesn’t that seem weird to you?”

“Why?”

“Well, think about it,” he said, sitting across from me.

“First of all,” I said, “why did you assume it was a man?” I had made the same assumption and was wondering what it was that led him to that as well.

He considered it a second. “The handwriting is masculine, for one thing. And the article says the woman in the picture is dead and the little girl missing.”

“Okay, why do you think it’s weird that he’d send a note?”

He shrugged. “If this guy thinks he’s your father and that you’re the little girl in this picture, then he’s been looking for you for a long, long time. And it means his daughter was kidnapped. If your child was missing, for whatever reason, and you’d spent all these years looking for her and suddenly thought that she might be alive and well, wouldn’t you come running, call the police, something more drastic than sending a note and a picture?”

I thought about it a second. “Maybe he’s uncertain. Or afraid.”

He shook his head slowly. “Maybe,” he said. “But maybe he’s got something to hide himself.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know,” he said, picking up the newspaper clipping. He seemed to be considering something but stayed silent.

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

“I have a friend,” he said, turning his eyes on me. He seemed suddenly unsure and held up his hands. “Listen. I don’t want to overstep my bounds with you.”

I figured that he was thinking about last night when I’d scurried away from him, when he thought he’d scared me off.

“If anyone’s overstepping their bounds,” I said, “it’s me dumping all of this on you.”

He hesitated another second. Then: “This friend of mine, he’s a detective,” he said, not looking at me but at his feet. “Someone I grew up with. He might be able to help.”

If you’re wondering why he would be helping me, I didn’t know. But I was more grateful than curious. Men who are attracted to you will pretty much do anything, right? Right.