Beautiful Lies

fifteen

We waited until he left the row house and watched as he walked toward the park entrance. Jake said he wanted to see him leave to make sure he was in this alone. I wasn’t sure who else he thought might be involved but I didn’t ask. Jake seemed oddly comfortable with the scenario of waiting and observing, plotting action, making sure things were safe—the whole thing. To me, the situation was surreal, strange enough for me to wonder a few times whether I was dreaming. A couple of times I thought I might actually wake up.

After a few minutes had passed, we trailed behind him in the Firebird. He was hunched again but walking fast. He threw a glance over his shoulder a couple of times, but I don’t think he was looking at us.

“He seems so lonely. Lonely and sad,” I said.

After a strangely long pause, Jake said, “You can’t tell that by looking at him. You only see what he wants you to see.”

I thought this was a very odd thing to say and I turned to see Jake’s face. But he was totally focused on the dark form in front of us, his eyes trained on the man like a preying owl on a mouse far below.

“You can tell a lot about how someone holds himself when he thinks no one’s looking,” I said. “I saw him. I saw the sadness.”

“I don’t believe that. I think we project what we’re feeling on the people we see. If you’re dishonest, you see dishonesty in people. If you’re good, you see only good things when you look at someone’s face. Physical cues might tell you if someone’s lying or if someone’s nervous, but I don’t think you can read much about a person, about who they are, by just looking at them.”

I considered this for a moment. “So are you saying you think I’m sad and lonely?”

Another pause. The darkness was like a physical substance between us, keeping me from connecting with his eyes.

“Aren’t you?”

Denial rose in my throat, indignation pulled my shoulders back. But before I spoke I realized he was right. That was exactly how I felt. It was how I’d felt from the second I got that envelope in the mail. And maybe on some deep, subconscious level even before that, if I was really honest with myself. I didn’t say anything and felt a kind of numbness wash over me as we got closer to the park entrance. Jake reached through the darkness and took my hand and squeezed it hard. I squeezed back and wished he’d never let go.

He drove past the entrance, did another U-turn, and parked the Firebird. We both got out. This time I got a good look at the car. It really was mint; an extremely tough, hot car with a shiny paint job. Not exactly inconspicuous.

“You like it?” he said when he saw me looking at the car. I smiled.

“You know what they say about guys who feel compelled to drive a muscle car like this?”

“What’s that?” he said, moving into me.

“Overcompensation.”

“Well,” he said, pulling me close. “You know better than that.”

I felt heat rise to my cheeks. “I guess I do.”

He placed his lips to mine and kissed me, long and soft, lighting me up inside. He pulled back and placed a hand on my face. His expression had gone from playful to serious.

“It’s going to be okay,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said, nodding an assurance that I didn’t feel. “I know.”

“You don’t,” he said softly. “But I do. Let’s go.”

Jake and I walked into the park about two blocks from where I’d told Christian Luna—or whoever he was—to meet me. Jake hung back in the trees, about a hundred feet away, as I walked up to the path where the man sat on a bench. He turned, startled, when he heard my footsteps on the asphalt, then stood. I stopped walking and he came a little closer.

“Don’t come any closer,” I said when he was about five feet from me. I was afraid; I wanted him to keep his distance.

He was older and seemed smaller than I would have imagined, but there was no mistaking that he was the man in the picture. It was the dark intensity of his eyes, the heavy brows, the fullness of his lips. We stared at each other, as though we were separated by a sheet of glass and could only see our own reflections. For a moment, I thought I saw something in him that I had never seen in anyone else. The shadow of my own features. I’m not sure it’s anything that I could put my finger on, exactly. Something around the eyes, maybe something in the shape of his jaw. I thought, Maybe it’s my imagination. Maybe I’m seeing only what I want to see…or what I fear the most. Maybe it’s the drama of the moment.

“Jessie,” he said. Relief, joy, and an intense grief mingled in his tone. He took a step closer and I took one back. He raised his arms slightly, as though he thought he would embrace me. But I wrapped my arms around myself tightly, moved back even farther. I hated him suddenly. Hated him for looking like me.

“Did you kill her?” I said. My voice was an open hand, hard and unyielding, and he jerked as though he’d been slapped.

“What?” he said softly, almost a whisper.

“Teresa Elizabeth Stone. Did you kill her?”

“Your mother,” he said, and sat down on the bench as if he’d lost his strength to stand. “No.” He dropped his head into his hands and began to sob. It was embarrassing, really, in its intensity, in the depth of its misery. I sat on the bench next to his and waited until he’d stopped crying. I couldn’t look at him and I couldn’t bring myself to comfort him, but the hatred I’d briefly felt drained away. I leaned back and looked up at the few stars I could see twinkling in the sky. I placed my cold fingers in the pockets of my jacket.

“Are you Christian Luna?” I asked when his sobbing had stopped.

“How do you know all of this?” he asked.

“That’s not important,” I answered.

Does it sound like I was cold? I was. Hard. Cold. Colder than liquid nitrogen. I have come to regret this. He might have deserved more compassion from me, but I just couldn’t afford it at that moment. I was wrecked inside. His face had done it.

“Look,” I said after more silence where he seemed to be wrestling with what to say. “What do you want from me?”

I could see disappointment and disbelief in his eyes. Whatever he had imagined of this moment, I was pretty sure he wasn’t getting it. And in the state I was in, I took a small, dark victory in depriving him of his fantasy reunion.

“What do I want? You’re my daughter,” he said, sounding incredulous. “My Jessie.” His voice and his eyes were pleading with me, but he would have had more luck moving the Statue of Liberty.

“You don’t know that really,” I said, stubborn, my arms folded across my chest like a judge. Judgment is such a useful shield, isn’t it? We can hide behind it, rise above others on its crest, keep ourselves safe and separate.

He laughed then, just a little. “Look at me, Jessie. You see it, don’t you?”

I didn’t answer. He moved over to my bench and I turned to look at him. I didn’t move away from him this time and he didn’t reach out to try to touch me.

“If I’m Jessie, then what happened to Teresa Stone?” I said. “If you didn’t kill her, who did?”

He sighed. “I’ve been asking myself that question every day for thirty years.” More silence where he looked at me and I looked at anything else. A car sped past, subwoofers booming a dance beat into the cold night.

“I was a bad father,” he said. “And I treated your mother badly. But I didn’t kill anyone.” The youthful indignation and barely repressed rage I heard in his voice caused me to turn and examine his face. He was in his late fifties, maybe early sixties. His skin was brownish, sun damaged, marred with deep lines. He had the worn look of a hard life—bad diet, bad choices, bad outcomes. He seemed to sag beneath the weight of it all but with a kind of determination to shoulder the load regardless. In Christian Luna I had expected to find a villain, someone malicious and menacing, someone powerful with the intent and ability to hurt me. But all I saw was someone tired, someone close to defeat without the sense to cut his losses and move on.

“I tried in my way to do right, you know?” he said with that same hopeless laugh. “But I was young. So fucked up. I never had a father, so I didn’t know how to be a man.” He shook his head, remembering, and looked off into the darkness of the park.

It was an interesting admission and it led me to look at him more closely, beyond his physical features. I saw a man who’d lived with regret. Who’d learned his lessons but only after it was too late. It must be the ultimate punishment, don’t you think, to finally gain wisdom, only to realize that the consequences of your actions are irrevocable?

“I met Teresa at work; she was a secretary at a real-estate office. I was the building handyman, a millwright with the union. We both lived in Jersey, commuted on the train to and from the city. That’s where we first started to talk. I could tell the first second I saw her that she was a good girl. Sweet. Pretty. We went out a few times. I told her I loved her—but I didn’t mean it.”

I tried to imagine them, based on the picture I’d seen. Imagine what she would have looked like laughing, how she dressed. Maybe she was in love with him, thought he really loved her, too. I’m a writer and I wanted him to tell me the story the way I would have. But I didn’t think he had it in him.

“After a few dates, she let me sleep with her a couple of times. Then I lost interest. Stopped calling. You know how it goes.”

You know how it goes. I guess I do; I guess most of us have been there at one point or another. You trust someone, you share your body with that person. You think they want to share your life, that physical intimacy is just the beginning. But for the other person, the ultimate goal has been reached and the game is over. Did she cry for him? Was she lonely and hating herself when he’d gone? Did she wish she’d never met him?

He sat silent for a second, I guess waiting for some kind of verbal encouragement, but I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want anything to be easy for him, not even the telling of this story. I don’t know why I felt so selfish and mean, but I did.

“She stopped me one night when I was leaving my shift. It was late, after hours. I hadn’t seen her at work in a while. I knew when I saw her that she’d come to the city and waited in the dark just to talk to me. She told me she was pregnant.”

I tried again to imagine the scene. Maybe it was cold, a light drizzle in the air, a half-moon glowing behind clouds. Was she afraid, crying?

“Were you kind to her?” I asked hopefully.

“No,” he said, lowering his head and sticking his hands in his pockets. “I wasn’t.”

“Was she scared?”

He shook his head slowly. “She was strong when she told me. I asked her, I’m ashamed to say, how she knew it was mine. She told me she hadn’t been with anyone else. I believed her but I pretended I didn’t.” He was silent and stared at me until I was forced to look at him. The shame was so naked on his face that I looked away again in embarrassment.

“I suggested that—” he started.

“That she have an abortion?” I finished for him, forcing myself to meet his eyes again. It sounded ugly but he nodded.

“She refused. And then she said something that I never forgot. She said, ‘We don’t need anything from you. I’m just giving you a chance to be a father, to have that joy in your life.’”

He sighed again here, his eyes starting to shine. “Even though I was a shit, even though I’d mistreated her, she wanted me to have the opportunity to know you. I didn’t get it. You know? It was a concept that was beyond me then. But even so, I offered to marry her. She turned me down.”

“No kidding? After a romantic moment like that?”

He issued a kind of grunt. “Yeah. I was a real prize.”

“You must have been around some. There’s that picture. The domestic abuse calls. The restraining order.”

“What, did you hire a private investigator?”

I didn’t answer him. He nodded and looked around him.

“I didn’t call the police,” I said. “You don’t have anything to worry about.”

He smiled at me then, but there was something odd about it. Like the way you’d smile at someone who had so little knowledge that it was pointless to try to explain anything. I didn’t pay much attention to it then, but I’d remember that look later.

“I was in and out. I gave money when I could. But whenever I showed up to see you, there’d be an argument. I’d go to the apartment, start acting like an asshole. She’d ask me to leave. I’d start yelling. The cops would come and take me away. I don’t know, I was, like, all messed up about you. I loved you, shit. I couldn’t believe how beautiful you were, how the sight of your face lit up my heart. But the responsibility scared me…I was a coward. I mean…”

He paused, shaking his head as if at the stupidity of someone else. It must have seemed like another life to him, so many years had passed. And maybe he was a different man now. He didn’t seem like the kind of person he described, someone so afraid, so inadequate that he could treat the mother of his child like that.

“Then one day she left you with me. It was an emergency; she had to work and the neighbor who usually watched you was sick. So I came to the apartment and stayed with you—you were little, not even two. I wasn’t paying attention to you, and when I wasn’t looking, you pulled a glass of beer off the counter and it shattered all around you. I ran over to you and jerked you by the arm. I was mad, yeah, but I was also trying to get you away from the glass so you didn’t cut yourself.

“You started screaming and I couldn’t get you to stop. I was scared, didn’t know what to do. So I shut you in your room. The neighbor called a couple of times, left a message on the machine, ‘What’s wrong with Jessie? I never heard her cry like that.’”

He started to cry at the memory. Silently, though, not sobbing like before. “You were still screaming when Teresa came home an hour later. The neighbor called her at work and she rushed home. She could tell right away something was wrong with your arm. She rushed you to the clinic and it turned out I’d broken your arm. She took out the restraining order then. I wasn’t allowed to see you anymore.”

The night seemed to get colder. He wiped his eyes with the sleeve of his jacket. At this point I managed some compassion for him, even though, according to what he’d said, if it had been up to him, I wouldn’t be alive today. He’d abused Jessie as a child, was now ruining my life as an adult. I still wasn’t ready to admit we were one and the same, Jessie and I. Still, I did feel some pity for him as he continued.

“A couple weeks later I got drunk and went to the apartment. I was gonna bang on the door until she opened it and let me see you, see that you were okay. I got there, made some noise, but she didn’t let me in. Told me through the door that she called the police and they were on their way. I heard the sirens and took off. I drank some more and then went back a few hours later. But this time the door was open.”

He was breathing heavily now, tears still falling from his eyes as if there was no end to them, as if he’d been saving them up all these years.

“It was dark in the apartment and I knew something wasn’t right. I saw just her one sneaker lying on the floor, lying in a pool of blood. It looked black in the dark, the blood. So thick, almost fake. I flipped on the light and saw her there on the floor. Her eyes were open, blood on her mouth, her neck twisted in a really bad way. The way she stared at me, like it was my fault…It was my fault; if I’d been a better man, she’d be alive. Maybe we’d be a family.”

He stopped again, his breathing ragged. He covered his face with his hands and spoke through his fingers.

“I looked for you, but you were gone. And so I ran. That night I took money I had saved and kept under my bed. I hopped a Greyhound to El Paso and went to Ciudad Juárez in Mexico. I got a flight from there to Puerto Rico. I’d never been, but that’s where my grandparents were from and I still had a second cousin there. I stayed on; been working in his garage as a mechanic all these years.”

I shook my head. The story was just simple enough and just complicated enough to be the truth. But what was I supposed to do with it?

“So what happened, Mr. Luna? What made you think of me? What made you come back here?”

“I think of you every day,” he said, reaching out his hand to me. I moved away from him. “Every day. You don’t believe that, right? But it’s true.”

He had turned those imploring eyes on me again, but I couldn’t give him a touch or a look of compassion. I just couldn’t.

“Okay,” I said. “So why did you come back now?”

“I saw you on CNN,” he said, a wide smile suddenly lighting his face at the memory. “I saw your picture when you saved that kid in the street. Your beautiful face…I knew it right away. So much like your mother, so much like her, I thought I was seeing a ghost. All these years, I didn’t know if you were alive or dead. And then I saw you. It was like the answer to every prayer I’d ever had. I had to come and find you, see you alive and healthy.”

I didn’t know what to say. A cool numbness had washed over me. He was a stranger to me. I was a stranger to myself. What could we possibly have to offer each other? What good could come of this?

“Whose house are you staying in?” I asked. “Who’s Amelia Mira?”

He looked at me strangely. I guess it was a weird question, considering everything else I could be asking him. But I wanted to know. Jessie had been given her name and I wanted to know who she was.

“It belonged to my mother, your grandmother. She died last year, left it to me in her will. The city will take it soon, I guess. I can’t afford the taxes.”

“She knew where you were?”

He nodded.

Jessie Amelia Stone, given the name of a grandmother she never knew by a father who had wanted to have her aborted, then abused her and possibly killed her mother. Poor Jessie, I thought, and realized I was crying.

He did something awful then. He slid off the bench and went on his knees before me, took my hands in his. I have never felt so ashamed or awkward.

“Mr. Luna, please…” I bent down and took him by the forearm, tried to get him to stand up.

“Jessie, I don’t want anything from you. I just wanted you to know me. I wanted to see you in person.”

“Please,” I said again but stopped, not sure how to go on. He had so much feeling for me; I could see he was sincere, that he really believed I was his Jessie. I just wasn’t sure I believed it.

“I just don’t get it, Mr. Luna,” I said, standing and walking away from him, leaving him kneeling on the ground. “Why did you run? Why didn’t you look for Jessie?”

He raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. “I wouldn’t have had a chance. All those arrests, the restraining order…who would have believed that I didn’t kill her?”

I sighed and shook my head again.

“You don’t believe me, do you?” he said quietly.

“I don’t know what to believe.”

He stood and moved to me suddenly, grabbed me by the shoulders, and the look in his eyes was one of sheer desperation.

“Please, Jessie. Tell me you believe I didn’t kill your mother.”

I didn’t know what to tell him then. How could he expect me to assimilate all this information and then form a judgment? That’s why he’d come, I realized, for absolution. But I wasn’t sure I was the one to give it to him. It wasn’t for me that he’d returned; it was for himself. Maybe he’d realized his mistakes, maybe even atoned for them in some way, but he was the same selfish man who’d abused Teresa Stone and their daughter, Jessie. He was possibly even a murderer; in the least, he’d run like a coward when he thought he might be accused. Now he’d come to shatter my life in the hope that he might be forgiven, finally, after all these years. What was I supposed to think? How could I even believe anything this man said?

I sat back down on the bench and he sat beside me. I kept waiting for some feeling, as if my DNA might recognize its genesis and send some signal to my brain and my heart. But I wasn’t certain of anything. I felt like a kite with its line cut; I was drifting away higher and farther from earth without direction. It dawned on me that the freedom I’d always craved hadn’t really been freedom at all but a kind of rooted independence. This was freedom and it felt like danger.

I opened my mouth to speak and even now I’m not sure what I would have said. Because one minute I was looking at him and the next minute he sagged beside me as though his bones had turned to Jell-O. I grabbed his shoulder to keep him from falling in my lap, and when I pushed him back against the bench, his head lolled to one side and I could see a perfect red circle between his eyes.

Violence is soft and quiet. Or it can be. In the movies, shots ring loud and punches land with a hard crack. People die with a scream or a moan. But Christian Luna’s death was silent. He left the world without a sound.

I shook him. “Mr. Luna? Are you all right?”

Which was a pretty stupid question, but what can I say, shock is the stepsister of denial. It cushions the blow to your psyche when really fucked-up things happen. I felt hands on me then.

“Ridley, holy shit. What the fuck happened?”

“What?” I said, turning around and seeing Jake. “I don’t know.”

He was pulling me but I was holding on to Christian Luna. My father. Maybe. Jake pried my hands off of him while looking around him, I guess trying to figure out where the shot came from. Then he was dragging me back toward the car. I looked back to see Christian Luna tipped on his side, still on the bench. The full gravity of what had happened was slowly starting to dawn. I felt bile rising in my throat.

“Shouldn’t we—” I said. I was going to say “call the police,” but I’m not sure I ever finished the sentence because in the next second I was leaning over the railing edging the park and puking onto the grass. I had the sense of Jake sheltering me with his body, as if he was afraid of more gunfire. He tugged at me, looking behind us. I managed to get moving again.

“The police?” I managed finally. But it came out sounding more like a question.

“We have to get the fuck out of here right now,” said Jake, pulling me close to him with his arm around my shoulder. “Walk fast. But try to look normal.”

This seemed funny to me and I started to laugh. He smiled, too. But it was fake, forced. He was trying to look normal and it wasn’t working. The laughter built on itself until I was laughing so hard that I thought I was going to pee in my pants. Then the laughter shifted. Luckily we were in the car by then. Jake was strapping me in and then suddenly I was sobbing with such force that it doubled me over and made my throat hurt. I’ve never, before or since, felt as powerless against anything as I did against that sobbing. It was like something alive trying to get out of me.

“Ridley,” he said, moving his eyes quickly between me and the road, his voice desperate. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

He kept saying it over and over again as if he thought he could make it true through repetition. At 186th he pulled the car off the highway and drove up the drive that led to Fort Tryon Park. It was closed but we pulled into the parking lot and Jake grabbed me, held on to me hard while I buried my face into his shoulder. He held me like that, breathing assurances into my ear. And eventually the sobbing subsided and I was left weakened, my sinuses so swollen that I couldn’t breathe out of my nose. I sagged against him.

“What happened back there, Ridley?” he asked when I’d quieted. “Did you see where the shot came from?”

But I couldn’t answer him. I felt like he was talking to me through water. “I don’t know,” I said finally. “I don’t know what happened.”

I heard him say something about seeing a shadow on the roof of the building across the street. But I was caught in some kind of mental loop, where I kept seeing Christian Luna as his head rolled back, the bullet hole perfect and red on the middle of his forehead. That moment played over and over.

After a while, he started to drive and we took the Henry Hudson back downtown. I watched the twinkling lights of the city, the speeding red and white blur of taillights and headlights rush past us. A kind of numbness had settled over me and I felt like all my limbs were filled with sand, and that my neck didn’t have the strength to support my head.

“What’s happening to me?” I wanted to know.

“I’m sorry, Ridley,” he said oddly. “I’m so sorry.”

I didn’t even think to ask him what he meant, why he was sorry.

“I should have taken better care of you, protected you better than that,” he said. I wanted to tell him it wasn’t his fault, but the words never made it from my head to my mouth.

We went back to the East Village and to Jake’s apartment. He put me in his bed and lay beside me, stroking my hair. When he thought I had fallen asleep, he left the room. I could hear that he’d turned on NY1 News and I knew he was waiting for the broadcast about Christian Luna. And I fell asleep wondering, Why didn’t he want to call the police?