Beautiful Lies

fourteen

I know what you’re thinking: What a baby! Here’s this beautiful man who went out of his way to help me, though we barely knew each other, who was willing to go up to the Bronx (the Bronx!) to try to figure out what was happening to me. He cared about me; I could feel that he cared about me in a very real and rare way. So, naturally, I acted like a brat and stormed out of his apartment. My behavior wouldn’t have surprised anyone who knew me—just ask Zack. All I can say is that I was scared and confused and suffered some kind of core meltdown, some kind of flight response. “Get away! Get away!” my brain (or was it my heart?) commanded and I obeyed.

How many people can you claim truly care about you? I mean, not just the people in your life who are fun to hang out with, not just the people who you love and trust. But people who feel good when you are happy and successful, feel bad when you are hurt or going through a hard time, people who would walk away from their lives for a little while to help you with yours. Not many. I felt that from Jake and I wasn’t sure how to handle it. Because there’s another side to it, you know. When someone is invested in your well-being, like your parents, for example, you become responsible for them in a way. Anything you do to hurt yourself hurts them. I already felt responsible for too many people that way. You’re not really free when people care about you; not if you care about them.

I fumbled at the lock on my door and heard Jake come down the stairs. He sat on one and looked at me through the slats of the banister.

“Hey,” he said. There was a smile in his voice that told me he found me amusing. “Take it easy.”

I leaned my head against the door and smiled to myself.

“You want to go somewhere with me?” I asked him.

“Sure.”

Long before I married New York City, I had a passionate love affair with the place. I don’t remember ever wanting to live anywhere else. The gleaming buildings, the traffic music, the glamorous Manhattanites—everything about it said grown-up to me. I always imagined myself walking its streets, wildly successful and impossibly cool. My uncle Max’s apartment was the embodiment of everything I loved about New York, every dream I ever had of the city. The penthouse at the top of the Fifty-seventh Street high-rise that he’d developed. Sleek lines, crisply dressed doormen, marble floors, mirrored elevators, plush carpeted hallways. Naturally, at the time I had no concept of what such a place might cost. I figured everyone in Manhattan had a sprawling penthouse with panoramic views of the city.

I pushed through the doorway and was greeted with a solemn nod from Dutch, the doorman. He moved as if to get up to push the elevator button for me, but I lifted a friendly hand, tossed him a smile. He looked over a pair of bifocal lenses, the flat gray eyes of the retired police officer. Cool. Level. Missing nothing.

“Good evening, Miss Jones. You have your key?” He gave a long glance at Jake.

“Yes, Dutch. Thanks,” I said, my voice bouncing off the black marble floors, the cavernous ceiling.

“Your father was here earlier,” he said, looking back down at a paper laid out before him on the tall desk.

“Was he?”

I wasn’t surprised, really. We all came here at different times for our different reasons. We visited Max’s apartment like some people visit a grave, just to feel close. He’d asked that his ashes be scattered from the Brooklyn Bridge and we’d done that, all of us feeling that a terrible mistake had been made once all that was left of him floated on the air and then into the water below. It was as if we’d given him back, without keeping anything for ourselves. But it was just a moment. We can’t hold on to anyone or anything, you know. We lose everything except that which we carry within us.

Max’s lawyer kept reminding my father how much Max’s apartment was worth, how much the maintenance alone was costing him. But nearly two years after Max’s death, it sat just as he’d left it.

“Sweet digs,” said Jake as we entered the door and I punched in the alarm code: 5-6-8-3. It spelled love on a touchtone keypad; it was his code for most everything—everything that I had access to, anyway.

All you could see upon entering was a panoramic view of the city. We were on the forty-fifth floor, facing west from First Avenue. You could see to New Jersey. At night the city was a blanket of stars.

“Where are we?” asked Jake.

“This is my uncle Max’s place,” I said, flipping on the lights that low-lit the art and illuminated the shelves.

“Why are we here?”

I shrugged. “I’m not sure.”

I went into Max’s office and Jake trailed behind, looking at the gallery of photos hanging on the walls. Pictures of me, Ace, my mom and dad, my grandparents. I barely noticed them as I moved to his desk, flipped on the halogen light, and opened one of the drawers. It was empty of the files I knew were once there. I flipped open two more drawers and found them empty as well. I spun in the chair and looked at the long line of low oak drawers below towering rows of shelves filled with books and some items from Africa and the Orient that my uncle had collected on his travels, as well as more pictures of us. I could see from where I sat that one of the drawers was open just a hair. I walked over and pulled it open slowly. Empty. One by one, I checked the rest of the drawers and found that they were all empty.

I sunk into a thick brown suede couch. Where were the files?

“What’s wrong?” asked Jake, sitting beside me.

“His files are all gone,” I said.

He frowned. “Since when?”

I shook my head. I didn’t know. In all the times I’d come here before and since he died, I’d never had reason to look through his files. I’d just come to lie on his couch, smell the clothes hanging in his closet, look at all the pictures of us together. Same as my mother and father did. Same as Esme had as well. Rumor was that once upon a time they’d had a white-hot love affair, Esme and Max.

“I finally wised up,” she told me. “You can’t squeeze blood from a stone. You can try, but you do all the bleeding.”

She didn’t know I knew she was talking about Max. “I’d have done anything for that man,” she’d said. She’d told me this when I asked her if she’d ever been in love with anyone but Zack’s father, a lawyer who’d died young from a heart attack when Zack was nine.

“Once,” she said. “A lifetime ago.”

My mother said that Esme would have married Max. “But your uncle couldn’t love anyone that way. Not really. He was too…” She paused, searching for the right word. “Damaged,” she said finally. “And he was smart enough to know it. Her heart was broken but eventually she met and married Russ instead. They had Zack. It was for the best. Or it would have been, if he hadn’t died so young. Tragedy. Poor Esme.”

Poor Esme. Poor Zack. Me and my uncle Max…the heartbreakers.

“Would your father have taken them?” asked Jake. It took a second before his words made it to my brain; I was deep in thought about Esme and Max.

I looked at him. “The files? Why?”

“The doorman said he was here earlier. Didn’t you talk to him this afternoon?”

I thought about this for a second. I’d had that conversation with my father and then he’d come over here and confiscated all of Max’s files? No. More likely I’d got him thinking about Max and he just came here to sit and be with his stuff, just to visit. Besides, there were drawers and drawers of files; he’d need boxes and a dolly. I told this to Jake.

“His lawyer probably took everything, then,” said Jake.

“Yeah,” I said, realizing that was probably true. “Of course.”

“Where were you just now?” he asked, dropping an arm around my shoulder.

“I was just thinking about Max. I wish you could have met him.”

A flicker of something crossed his face here and then it was gone. I wished I hadn’t said it. It gave away too much. But he made it all right a second later.

“Yeah,” he said, kissing my forehead. “Me, too.” Then: “He must have loved you a lot, Ridley.”

I looked at him and smiled. “Why do you say that?”

“Look at this place. It’s a shrine to you.”

“Not to me,” I said with a little laugh. “To us, to our family.”

“Sure, yeah. There are pictures of all of you. But you’re clearly the focus.”

“No,” I said. My eyes fell on the picture on his desk. It was me at three or four, riding on his shoulders, my arms wrapped around his forehead, my own head thrown back in delight. I stood and walked into the hallway and looked at the gallery of pictures there. I’d walked that hallway so many times, seen the pictures all my life. I’d stopped seeing them, stopped looking. They were beautiful prints, some black and white, some color, all professionally matted and framed in thick gold- or silver-painted wood. Looking at them now, I saw myself at virtually every stage of my life. In the bathtub as a little girl with my mom washing my hair. My first day on a bicycle, at the beach, in the snow, prom, graduation. Certainly, in many of them my family was all around me: Ace and me on Santa’s lap, my father and me on the teacups at Disney, all of us at my school play. But Jake was right. I’d never seen it.

You two had a special connection, my father had said. I knew it was true, of course. But I’d just taken it for granted, like so many things about my life. It just was.

“No wonder Ace was jealous,” I said aloud.

“Was he?” Jake asked, coming up behind me.

“Well,” I said with a sigh, looking at the picture of Ace and me going down a pool slide together, his arms around my waist. I remembered that a second after that picture was taken we knocked heads as we splashed into the water. I wailed as Ace pulled me to the edge of the pool. “It’s okay, Ridley. I’m sorry,” he told me. “Don’t cry. They’ll make us go inside.” A few seconds later, Uncle Max lifted me out of the pool. I made his blue shirt damp with my bathing suit and dripping arms and legs as he carried me inside.

“Don’t play so rough with her, champ,” he said to my brother, not harshly, not with anger. “She’s just a little girl.”

I remember looking at Ace hanging on the edge of the pool watching us go. I tried to remember his face. Had he been angry, sad, guilty? Had he been jealous? I couldn’t recall.

“We never really talked about it,” I answered Jake. “But my father seemed to think so.” My head was starting to ache again.

“How jealous do you think he is?” he asked.

“Not jealous enough to do this, if that’s what you’re getting at,” I said, pulling the article from my pocket, unfolding it and looking at the picture yet again. Ghosts of a woman and a little girl stared back at me.

Jake didn’t answer me. He ambled toward the door. I sensed that he was uncomfortable in Max’s place, wanted to leave. I didn’t ask him why. I suppose the apartment was intimidating in its opulence. As an artist, Jake must have known that the Miró on one wall, the Dalí sketch on another, were original pieces. Zack had told me once that he felt like he was hanging out in a museum when we were at Max’s place, that a guard might come and ask him to take his feet off the couch.

“But jealous enough maybe to fan the flame, to make you think there was more to this than there is?”

I looked at him. Why did everyone always suspect the worst of Ace? Just because he had an addiction, that didn’t make him a psychopath and a liar. Did it? Jake lifted his hands, I guess reacting to whatever he saw on my face.

“Just a question,” he said. And it was a valid question. If I weren’t so defensive about my brother, maybe from years of defending him to Zack, I would have seen that. But at that moment, it just made me feel like I wanted to distance myself from Jake a little bit. Nobody likes people who speak a truth you’re not prepared to examine.

On the way out, I asked Dutch if my father had taken anything with him when he left, if Dutch had helped him out with any boxes. Dutch said no, that my father had just come for a while, then left with nothing.

“Why? Something missing?” he asked with a frown.

No, not really. Just a little girl named Jessie. I smiled and shook my head.

I was quiet on the train and on the walk back to our building, and if Jake minded, he didn’t show it.

I’d made a decision. I was being tossed around in this situation like a skiff in a hurricane and I was sick of it. All I had so far was the information other people had given me. The mysterious freak sending me mail, my parents, my brother, even Jake. Everyone was telling me his version of the truth, and all of it was different. The only way to make any sense of what was happening was to find out for myself what the truth was. So I decided that it was time to head up to the Bronx. I told Jake. He didn’t think it was a good idea and tried to be polite about it.

“It was your idea,” I said as we stood at the door to his apartment.

“Yes. It was my idea for me to go. Not you. Not we. Me.”

“Why is this your problem?” I asked. “Why do you care about this?”

He turned and looked at me, put his hands on my shoulders. I could have melted, really, beneath the intensity I saw on his face.

“I don’t care about this. I care about you. A lot. More than I should this soon, I guess.” He paused here, sighed, and looked down at the floor. I saw the color come up in his cheeks. “But I can’t let you do something I think is dangerous without at least speaking my mind. For Christ’s sake, Ridley, someone’s watching you. Have you forgotten that? He’s been at the pizzeria, in the building.”

“Right. So I’m not even safe here in my home. So what difference does it make if I go to the Bronx or not? You can come with me.”

Does my logic sound a bit shaky? I guess it was. But I didn’t have a lot of experience with this sort of thing. I was just consumed all of a sudden with a desire to know what was happening to me, to find out for myself, not to be told or lied to or manipulated by people with an agenda that might or might not conflict with the truth. I told him this much.

“Ridley, be reasonable.”

This made me angry. I didn’t like being talked to like a kid. Be reasonable? Like just because I disagreed with him that made him reasonable and me unreasonable? How typical.

“No, fuck you. Don’t patronize me,” I said. Temper, temper.

He sighed. “Okay.”

He walked into his apartment and I followed, closing the door behind me. He took off his leather jacket and flung it on the couch. I tried not to look at how the black shirt he wore clung to every ripped muscle on his chest. He sat down.

“You’re on your own, then,” he said, and looked at me. “I go alone or I don’t go at all.”

He was bluffing.

“That’s it? What’s the point of that?”

“I won’t willingly put you in a situation that I think might be dangerous for you. If you want to put yourself in harm’s way, fine. But I won’t be a part of it.”

Isn’t it just like a man to pretend that trying to control you is the same as trying to protect you?

His jaw tightened and I could see a muscle throbbing there. He was bluffing. I was sure of it. I didn’t really want to go it alone, by the way.

“Great. Good. See you later.” I was definitely bluffing.

But he didn’t move, just kept those eyes on me as if expecting me to come to my senses. So I left the apartment and slammed the door. All the way down the stairs I expected him to come after me but he didn’t. Then I was on the street again. I took a left onto Fourteenth Street and caught a bus to the West Side. I took the 1/9 to 242nd Street in the Bronx, out of sheer stubbornness. All the way up there, a long train ride, for nearly an hour I wondered what the hell I was going to do when I got there.

The New York City subway system is pretty mythic, don’t you agree? Whether you’ve ridden it or not, you probably have a picture in your head of what it’s like. And it’s probably not a pretty picture. When you close your eyes, you probably see these old red cars that rattle and shake their way beneath the streets of Manhattan. In your mind’s eye, they’re covered with graffiti, lights flickering and going dark around corners. In your imagination, they are likely the habitat for every rapist, mugger, murderer, gang member, and serial killer in the five boroughs. Old New Yorkers, the people I know who grew up on these trains, have told me that once, in the not-too-distant past, that description wasn’t too far off. But in my New York, the subway is just another way to get around, probably the fastest way in most cases. The new cars are graffiti resistant and regularly maintained. The most offensive thing about them is the unfortunate beige-and-orange color scheme that seems to dominate. Between the homeless people, the rush-hour crushes, the odd, often inexplicable and interminable delays, and the fact that the stations themselves are not air-conditioned (making them feel like the first layer of hell in the summer), the subways are probably one of the most unpleasant places on the planet. But I’ve never felt unsafe on the trains.

You can usually count on people all around you, no matter what time it is, but by the time the local 1/9 train passed Ninety-sixth Street and was crawling up to the Bronx, there were only a few people in my car. A young kid in a private-school uniform carrying a bulging backpack listened to a Walkman, rocking to a beat that I could just hear over the rumble of the train. An old woman in a navy wool coat and flowered skirt read a romance novel. A bald (as in shaved, not as in losing) guy in a leather jacket and faded jeans dozed, his head back, mouth agape. By 116th Street I was nodding a bit myself, not sleeping but slipping into a reverie, thoughts of my uncle Max circling my consciousness.

For all his joviality, my uncle Max was a powerful man in New York City, but it wasn’t the kind of important that makes much of an impression on you as a kid. When you’re twelve it’s not a big deal that your uncle plays golf with senators and congressmen or that you see his picture in magazines like Forbes rubbing elbows with Donald Trump and Arthur Zeckendorf. Maybe if he’d been hanging out backstage with Bono or Simon LeBon, I might have paid more attention. But real-estate development isn’t exactly sexy, if you know what I mean.

Later on, after my first foundation ball, I started to get the idea of the kind of influence my uncle had, the kind of people he knew. He was a major campaign contributor to people like Al D’Amato, George Pataki, and Rudolph Giuliani. The guy was connected in a serious way. He had to be in his business. You had to have a way to part the sea of red tape, a way to get around zoning laws—and if not, a way to see that those zoning laws get changed. There were whispers, too, of other, shadier connections. And if you think about it, as a real-estate developer on the East Coast, there was no way he could do business without associating with the people who controlled the construction industry. The fact that my uncle’s business interests sometimes coincided with the business interests of less-than-reputable characters had always stayed in the periphery of my mind. I mean, my uncle’s lawyer was Alexander Harriman, a lawyer known for his notorious client list. But I’d never devoted any serious thought to it. Until now.

I always think of him just as my uncle Max, never as the man that he was separate from our family. A powerful businessman, rich, influential, lonely, and the only women around him seemed, I don’t know, transient, hollow in their affections, going through the motions. Were they call girls? I wondered now. Or were they just gold diggers, women who spent time with him for the gifts he could buy, the places he could take them, the other people he knew and had influence over? Uncle Max, I said in case he could hear me, I’m sorry, but maybe I never knew you. It’s funny how the titans in our lives, the people who have the most influence over our childhoods, over the people we become, never seem like people, flawed and separate from us. They’re like archetypes, The Mother, The Father, The Good Uncle, existing only as characters in the movie of our lives. When other facets of their personalities come clear and other elements of their lives uncovered, it’s shocking, as if they suddenly peeled their face off and revealed another. Does it seem like that to you? Well, maybe it’s just me.

The train jerked and rocked and I opened my eyes to find that I was alone in the car with the sleeping man wearing a leather jacket and faded denims. Just one more stop, I knew, and the train would move from the underground tunnel to the elevated tracks. I closed my eyes again. Then I thought, Wasn’t that guy all the way on the other end of the car before? The thought made my belly hollow out and my throat go dry. I opened my eyes just a crack and saw that the man was now wide awake and staring at me with a strange half-smile. My breathing came deeper and I tried to keep my chest from heaving. I noticed a long case on the ground beneath his legs. It looked like it might hold some kind of instrument. I felt a little relieved at the sight of it. I’ve always had this theory that you have nothing to fear from people who have something to carry. The murderer, mugger, rapist, even your random serial killer would not carry anything on his nefarious errands. I mean, think about it, he needs both his hands free. Even a backpack would slow him down.

But that feeling of relief passed as I noticed him inching closer to me. The train flooded suddenly with lamplight as we moved aboveground. I cleared my throat and sat up, opened my eyes. He immediately dropped his head to his shoulder and pretended to be sleeping again.

I stared at him, not sure what to do. My legs felt as if they were filled with sand and my heart was doing step aerobics in my chest. But I forced myself to get up and walk to the front of the car, where I heaved the door open and moved between the cars to the next one. Then I turned around and through the windows looked back the way I’d come. The man sat there looking at me, with that same half-smile, but his eyes seemed dark with menace. I stood staring at him, convinced that as long as my eyes were open, he wouldn’t come any closer. I thought about Zelda, about what she had said—God, was it only yesterday?—about someone looking for me, someone who was no good. Was this the man she’d seen? Was he following me? I couldn’t be sure. After all, there’s no shortage of staring freaks and weirdos in this city.

The train stopped at the next station and we were still in a staring contest. But when the doors opened, he got up suddenly, grabbed his case, and left the train. If he came into my car, I was ready to flee through the door to the platform, and move toward the front car, where I knew I would find the conductor. I stood for what seemed like an hour, waiting for him to come in after me. I was all alone, no one in any of the cars I could see from where I was standing and no one on the platform. But then the tone sounded and the conductor said over the intercom, “Stand clear the closing doors.” The doors closed. Then jerked open again.

“Hands and bags away from the door,” the conductor said over the PA system, sounding annoyed.

I moved to look out onto the platform, but I didn’t see the man standing there or walking away. I went back to the window and looked through the train into the other cars but didn’t see him there, either. Where is he? I wondered, thinking I should be able to see him on the platform if he’d exited. By now I had so much adrenaline pumping through me that my hands were shaking. Again the tone sounded and the doors closed, then pulled apart again at the last second. I started to move through the train toward the conductor’s car in the front. It was so quiet, I could hear only the sound of the heavy doors pushing open and then slamming hard behind me. I kept looking behind me, each time expecting to see the man in pursuit.

“Stand clear the closing doors, asshole,” the conductor said loudly. I stopped and looked out the window of the car I was in. Then I saw him, standing on the platform as if he’d moved from behind one of the pillars. The doors finally closed and the train moved slowly away from the station. My body flooded with relief and I sank onto one of the benches, leaned my head back.

“I’m getting paranoid,” I said aloud to no one.

Then I opened my eyes to see that he stood staring at me as the train moved past him, one hand raised in farewell, that same smile plastered on his face. I didn’t wave back.

I got off at the last stop, still a bit shaken, and walked out onto the landing. Though it was dark, I could see in the glow of the street lamps that Van Cortlandt Park was in high color, its acres of trees painted gold and orange, deep red against the still-green grass of the parade ground to my right. Some kids played handball in the courts next to the staircase as I made my descent to the sidewalk, and their cheers and cries lifted into the air. Riverdale is one of the last nice areas in the Bronx, and that evening it felt safe and idyllic.

At the bottom of the stairs, a black ’69 Firebird idled in the street. The engine hummed and rumbled, communicating power like a dog baring its teeth. Jake sat at the wheel. I tried not to smile in relief, kept my eyes ahead and walked past him.

“Hey,” he called as I passed by. “I thought you were bluffing.”

He trailed me with his car, moving slowly up Broadway, causing the drivers behind him to lean on their horns before passing him by, hurling obscenities.

“Come on, Ridley,” he said finally after a few blocks of this. “You win.”

That was all I needed to hear. I got into the passenger side and he sped off. The car was cherry inside, leather polished and unblemished, smelling of Armor All. An Alpine compact disc changer was mounted beneath the dash; the knobs on the dash and the gearshift were all new, brushed chrome. It was exactly the kind of car I would have envisioned for him. It was tough, but there was something careful about it, too.

I noticed that we passed the address he found for Amelia Mira by a block before he did a U-turn and got closer so that we could see the row house from the car. After pulling under the large, old branches of some trees beside the park, he handed me a worn blue baseball cap and some Oakley sunglasses, both too big for me, and made me put them on.

“You don’t want anyone to recognize you,” he said. “That would sort of blow the whole point of our being up here.”

I still hadn’t said anything and I could tell it was starting to get to him. We sat like that for a few minutes. Finally he said, “Christ. Are you always this stubborn?”

“Yes,” I answered. “I really am.”

I looked at him then and smiled. He reached for my hand and I took it in mine.

“Ridley, I really didn’t think you’d come up here by yourself. I never would have let you walk out if I had thought that.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. And I meant it because now that I was looking at him, I could see that I had scared him. The relief on his face was clear, and in his eyes I could read his concern. I felt bad for acting like a brat. Again.

“You know what, Jake? I’m just feeling manipulated. Everyone’s got a different version of what’s going on and I don’t know what to believe. I can’t do this alone, but I need to see things for myself. Do you get that?”

He nodded his understanding. “I get it.” I saw something pass across his face, but it was gone before I could put a name to it.

“So what do we do now?” I asked.

“We sit and watch,” he said, looking at the scene around us. It was a cold but gorgeous autumn evening, kids still playing soccer in the park, people jogging, walking dogs. It seemed like a strange night for a stakeout, in the middle of all these people living their quiet, happy lives. It should have been raining, with an occasional rumble of thunder and flash of lightning. The park should have been full of thugs, gangs ready to rumble.

“Watch for what?”

“Hopefully,” he said with a shrug, “we’ll know it when we see it.”

I thought about this and what it could mean—hours of just sitting in the car. Sometimes getting your own way is not as gratifying as it should be. He was smiling at me as if he could read my thoughts. My stomach growled and I had to pee.

After making Jake take me to the Burger King we’d passed earlier so that I could get a Whopper and relieve my aching bladder, we parked across the street from 6061½ and watched as people came and went. Dark houses came to life, interior lights began to glow. Some of the houses went dark again as we waited. But 6061½ remained black and still among them.

We didn’t talk much, but the silence between us was comfortable. Every half hour or so, Jake would turn on the car for a while to let the heat run and take some of the chill out of the air. I was a little scared and a little uncomfortable, not sure what we were looking for and not sure what we would do if and when we found it. But I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of complaining aloud. After a couple of hours, I climbed into the backseat and lay on my belly, peering out the side window, just for a change of position. I could just see the top of Jake’s head.

“What did you mean, Jake? When you said there were things I needed to know about you.”

He didn’t answer right away and I wondered if he’d fallen asleep.

“I don’t know where to start,” he said finally.

I realized that all the talking we’d done in the last few days, ninety percent of it had been about me. I knew a little bit about his art. About where he’d lived before he moved to the East Village. And that was pretty much it. I had the need to look into his face, but something in the air, something about the way he didn’t turn around to look at me when he responded, told me that he’d prefer that I didn’t. I thought about the scars on his body, and I felt something stutter inside me. This man, for as intimate as we’d become, was still a stranger to me. Somehow I kept forgetting that. I felt as though I knew him in a different way than I’d ever known anyone, that my knowledge of him went beyond his history and straight to the heart of him.

I sat up and snaked my arms over the seat, wrapping them around his neck and putting my face to his. I could just see the outline of him, feel the stubble on his jaw, smell the scent of his skin mingling with the polished leather of the seat. He raised his hands and held on to my forearms.

“Just start at the beginning,” I said softly into his ear. “Tell me everything.”

“I really wish I could.”

There was something dark in his voice, something almost angry. I didn’t have a chance to ask him what he meant by that because we both saw the figure of a man making his way up the sidewalk. We’d seen a lot of people tonight, but somehow both of us knew that this was the man we’d been waiting for.

We watched him move quickly, shoulders hunched, a baseball cap pulled down, hiding his face. He had his hands in the pockets of a thin black jacket, which couldn’t have been enough to protect him from the cold. There was nothing about him that would cause anyone to look twice: average height, about five-ten; average size, maybe 185. But we both followed him with our eyes, forgetting our conversation as he turned and jogged up the flight of stairs that led to 6061½ Broadway.

We waited another ten minutes in a loaded silence. The house stayed dark.

“Is that him? Is that the man who sent me the letter?” I’d imagined him bigger, more menacing, this person who’d moved through my life like a wrecking ball.

“It could be.”

“What do we do now?” I asked.

“You stay here, watch the front door. I’m going to go take a look around back.”

Before I could answer, he slipped quietly from the car and walked up the street away from the house. I saw him in the rearview mirror cross Broadway and then approach the house from the opposite direction, then disappear into an alley. My heart was beating so fast I thought I might be having a panic attack. I waited with nothing but the sound of my own breathing for what seemed like an hour but might have been ten minutes. I didn’t have a watch, so I had no way of knowing. Finally I just couldn’t take it anymore, so I slipped from the car myself and followed the path Jake had taken.

The dark silence of the park yawned to my right and unlike earlier there was no one around. The lamplights cast an orange glow as I crossed the street. But the west side had no street lamps. Between the convenience store and the first row house was an area of trees. It was a spooky little stretch, the ground slick with wet leaves. Darkness and silence leaked out of the woods like an odor.

I came to the alleyway where Jake had disappeared and peered into its narrow darkness. A light glowed at the end and I made my way toward it, past reeking garbage cans and menacing shadowy spaces where anyone or anything could be hiding, waiting.

I knocked into one of the garbage cans hard with my knee and the metal lid went clanging to the ground. Somewhere close a dog started barking, startling a little burst of adrenaline into my blood. I ran the rest of the way through the alley, which let out into—take a guess—another alleyway that ran along the back of the row houses.

Some of the houses had lights lit in the back, and up above me I could see the glow of interior lamps and the blue flicker of television screens through the windows. I could hear the lightest strains of Pink Floyd’s “Money.” Someone was cooking pot roast or something meaty, the scent making my stomach grumble (yes, again). It was still dark back here, but at least if I screamed someone might hear me.

I was pretty sure the dark house in the middle was 6061½. But I didn’t see Jake. I managed to continue my way through with a little more stealth and without banging into anything else. I saw a narrow metal staircase that led up to a landing that ran the length of the back of the house. From one of the back windows I thought I caught the movement of light. I climbed the staircase and peered in the window.

He was sitting there on the floor, the man from the street, beside one of those battery-operated lanterns that you can get at Kmart. Leaning against the wall with his legs outstretched and crossed at the ankle, he’d taken off his baseball cap but left his jacket on. I couldn’t see his face clearly, couldn’t tell for sure if it was the man in the photograph. The light was dim and he was washed in shadows. Beside him sat an old green rotary phone.

He ate slowly from a can of Chef Boyardee ravioli with a plastic fork. Looking intently at the can, he seemed to hold each bite of food in his mouth for a long time before swallowing. I could see the outline of his mouth, full lips pulled down hard at the corners. Sadness, anger, disgust…it was hard to tell. But he struck me as the very image of loneliness. Whoever this was, however it was that our lives had come to intersect in this strange way, his loneliness was a contagion and I felt it fill me. Tears welled in my eyes. I don’t know why. I had peered into this window of desolation and somehow in doing that I had let what I’d seen into my own heart.

I suddenly felt warm arms around me and a hand over my mouth. I didn’t struggle because I knew it was Jake somehow, maybe by his scent.

“What are you doing? Are you crazy?” he hissed into my ear.

He released me and took me by the hand. Together we left and went back to the car.

“Why did we do this?” I said when we were back in the Firebird.

“Because I wanted to see what we were dealing with.”

“And what are we dealing with?”

“From what I can see? One lone guy sitting by a phone in an empty house with no electricity.”

“So what does that mean?”

“It means that whatever threat he might pose, I can handle it.”

My expression must have been blank with my lack of understanding.

“Look,” he said patiently, putting a hand on my shoulder. “You asked me to help you find out what’s going on, right? I got some information, found out some background, figured out the address for that telephone number. Before you called, I wanted to know what we were walking into, who exactly we were calling.”

“And who are we calling?”

“My bet? That guy is Christian Luna. What he wants, why he thinks you’re his daughter, where he’s been all these years? I don’t think we can find that out without talking to him. So that’s the next logical step.”

“Call?”

He handed me a cellular phone from his pocket and the telephone number.

“Call.”

I paused with the phone in my hand.

“Only if you want to, Ridley. Otherwise, I bust in there, scare the shit out of the guy, and he goes away. I guarantee you never hear from him again. The guy’s on the run. He’s scared and he’s hiding from something or someone, probably the police. He’ll slink right back under whatever rock he came out from. And you pretend none of this ever happened.”

But it was too late for that now and we both knew it. It took a few minutes of us sitting there in the dark before I turned the phone on and punched in the number. My hands were shaking and I felt sweat on my brow, though it was so cold in the car I could see my own breath.

He picked up the phone on the first ring. His voice was deep and had a slight accent I couldn’t make out.

He said, “Jessie?”

I could picture him there on the floor. I heard the naked mixture of a deep sadness mitigated by a tentative hope.

“This is Ridley,” I said, my voice sounding a little wobbly even to my own ears. “I’m Ridley.” I felt the need to assert that, at least. To hold on to that one thing that helped to claim my life as my own.

“Ridley,” he repeated. “Of course. Ridley.”

“I’d like to meet you.”

“Yes,” he said, and it sounded like a plea.

The benches at the entrance to Van Cortlandt Park in an hour, Jake had scribbled onto a piece of paper. I told him this and he paused. I wondered if he’d be suspicious of the nearness to his location, but he agreed after a second.

“You’ll come alone?” he asked. And I agreed, though I was not comfortable lying, even to this stranger who was ruining my life.

“What’s your name?” I asked him.

“I’m your father,” he said after another pause.

“What’s your name?” I repeated.

“I’ll see you in an hour,” he said, and hung up.

I ended the call and handed the phone back to Jake.

“Did he tell you his name?”

“No.”

Jake shifted in his seat. “I guess I wouldn’t, either.”

I looked at him, puzzled.

“If I were a fugitive? I told you my name, you could call the police and have a hundred squad cars waiting for me. There’s no statute of limitations on murder.”

I shrugged. “Then why risk it at all?”

“You’ll have to ask him.”