Beautiful Lies

thirty-three

We had dinner with injustice sitting between us. It drank a glass of wine and ate heartily while we pushed pasta around our plates and picked at salad. We had been crushed by fear and it sat with us fat and victorious, untouchable.

We barely talked through the meal. As Jake cleared the plates I sat on the couch and looked out onto First Avenue, thought about where I would move. I couldn’t even stand to go into my apartment. Jake had promised to go down for me and retrieve some clean clothes, shoes, and toiletries after we’d finished eating. I turned the television on and pressed the mute button and zoned out on the silent images flashing on the screen.

After a while, Jake came to the futon and sat beside me. I leaned into him and we sat in silence for a while, listening to the street noise outside. There was so much hanging between us that the silence was not comfortable. I could hear the wheels in his mind turning and I’m sure he could hear mine.

“Can you walk away from this?” I asked him finally. “Can you settle for what we know and move on from here?”

He was quiet for a minute. “Can you?”

“I think I have to,” I said, even as uncertainty tugged at me. “You said it yourself. There’s no proof. No trail to follow.”

“Unless we can get someone to talk; someone to admit what happened. Unless we can get someone to take responsibility for Project Rescue.”

“Like who?”

“I’ve been thinking. Your father is adamant that he had no knowledge of the other side of Project Rescue. But someone was flagging those kids. Someone who worked with him, maybe?”

I turned to look at him. He had his eyes down as if he didn’t want to see the expression on my face.

“Hasn’t your ex’s mother worked with your father for years?”

“Esme?”

“I saw her name on every one of those files.”

I thought of Esme, that night in Zack’s apartment, the conversation we’d had about Max. I’d have done anything for that man, she’d said. What had she done?

“Maybe, Ridley, maybe she’d talk to us. Maybe because of her love for you, she’d tell us what she knows about Project Rescue.”

I remembered how she acted at Zack’s. Not like a woman prepared to talk about the past, that’s for sure.

“You want to risk all our lives for this, Jake?” I asked.

He shook his head but kept his eyes on the floor. “You have a life, Ridley,” he said softly. “I don’t.”

I felt inexplicably hurt at that statement. I guess part of me thought we had a life together, a possible future, and that would have been enough for me to move forward and leave all of this behind. But I guess the difference was I knew the answers to my questions. I knew what happened to Jessie and Teresa Stone. I knew what happened to Christian Luna. I knew who I was then and who I had become. Jake was still an orphan, still quidam. His place with me was not enough.

I saw the choice I had to make. If I chose Jake, I had to choose the truth no matter how painful, no matter how ugly, no matter the risk involved. If I chose to keep silent and protect my family, I chose the beautiful, familiar lie, where everything was a false front. I would have to choose a place where my past would, over the years, become like the Loch Ness monster or Bigfoot, a creature that someone claimed to have seen once, but one in which no one quite believed.

You don’t have much faith in me, I’m sure. I haven’t exactly made the noblest choices up to now. It’s been Jake pushing me along the path, coaxing me to ask the questions that led us here. I felt his eyes on me then, and when I met them, I knew. We had already allied ourselves in this world. The day I stood here and held his hand, we began our trek to the edge of my reality. And at the precipice, there was nothing to do but jump.

“She was there that night, at Zack’s. She knows what happened, I think. She told me that I was dredging up things that wouldn’t be good for anyone.”

Jake leaned forward. “How much do you think she knows?”

“I really don’t know. She didn’t say much. But she was clearly in the loop. I think Zack knows something, too. She stopped him from telling me everything he knew about Project Rescue.”

“If she was the one doing the flagging, she’d at least know who she flagged for Project Rescue,” said Jake. “And she might know how Max found out about you.”

“You mean she might know if Max was responsible for Teresa Stone’s murder.”

Jake was looking at me intently. Then suddenly he got up quickly and moved past me. I realized then that he hadn’t been looking at me but at the television that was on behind me.

“Notorious mob attorney Alexander Harriman and an unidentified associate were found murdered execution style in his Central Park West office today,” said the grim-faced newscaster when Jake turned up the volume. In the background, I could see the entrance to Harriman’s brownstone office, where we’d just been twenty-four hours earlier. Someone was being rolled out on a stretcher, in a body bag. “So far the police have no information on any suspects.”

“Mr. Harriman had no shortage of enemies,” said a homicide detective at the scene to the reporter. “We have our work cut out for us.”

Jake turned to look at me. His face was a mirror of my own heart, stunned, afraid.

“Our deal was with Harriman,” I said slowly.

“I have a bad feeling the deal is off.”

We wouldn’t have gone back to my apartment at all except for the small problem of my not having any shoes, remember. I’d gone from the hospital to the cab to our building in socks and couldn’t stand to enter my apartment on my way up to Jake’s. So I changed into a clean pair of Jake’s socks at his place and left it at that. I was regretting it as Jake pulled on his jacket and handed me mine.

“We are most definitely not safe here. We have to go.”

“Where?”

“Someplace we’ve never been before.”

I looked down at my feet.

“Shit,” he said, moving toward the door. “Okay. Wait here.”

“No way. We go together or we leave like this.”

He sighed and disappeared into his bedroom. He came back with the gun I’d seen before. He shoved it in his waistband and zipped his jacket up over it.

“Okay, let’s go.”

We moved quickly and quietly down the stairs and onto the landing that led to my apartment. At the door, Jake motioned for me to be quiet as I handed him my keys.

“Ridley!” A sharp whisper startled us both. I turned and saw Victoria’s one eye peering out from the darkness of her apartment. I put my finger to my lips and moved toward her. I couldn’t help but think, She does know my name!

“Victoria, it’s not safe. Go back to your apartment and close the door.”

She huddled in the crack, staring at me with fear. Her wig was forgotten and a few gray strands on her bald head were caught by a breeze and stood nearly on end.

“There’s someone in there. In your apartment.”

“How many?” asked Jake, coming up behind me.

“Just one,” she said, and closed the door. I heard the turning of three locks in quick succession.

I was ready to make a run for it without my shoes, but Jake was moving toward the door. He gave it a push and realized there was no need for a key. It was open. He walked in slowly, gun drawn, staying close to the wall. He motioned for me to stay back but I followed behind.

The desk light behind the screen that separated my “office” from my bedroom was on and we could hear the sound of someone shuffling through papers. A bulky shadow moved there. We didn’t enter the room but stayed behind the cover of the wall.

“Put your hands where I can see them and step out from behind the screen,” said Jake. His voice boomed; he was downright terrifying. Something clattered hard to the floor and I hoped it wasn’t my laptop. The shadow stood frozen.

“Put your hands where I can see them or I’m just going to unload, asshole.” His voice was flat and hard and I had to look at him to be sure it was actually coming from his mouth. He sounded like a stone-cold killer. We waited a moment and then I watched as Jake’s finger started to tense around the trigger. I have no doubt he would have opened fire, but then two hands reached above the screen.

“Don’t shoot,” said a voice I recognized. The shadow stepped out where we could see him. The tension of the moment drained. Fear, anger, and relief vied for their positions in my chest.

“What are you doing here, Zack?” I asked from behind Jake, surprised that my voice sounded so steady.

“I’m trying to save your life, Ridley.”

“How’s that?”

“There are people looking for you…people who are very curious about what you know. I’m trying to figure it out before they do.”

“The same people who killed Alexander Harriman?” I asked.

He nodded. “You’re in real trouble. Both of you. But I can make it all go away. I can make it so both of you walk away from this safely.”

His face was a mask of earnest benevolence. I wanted to believe that he was trying to help us, but I was having a hard time trusting people. Imagine that.

He moved closer to us. Jake and I backed up. “Stay where you are,” said Jake, and Zack froze.

“Okay, okay,” he said. “Just hear me out.”

“We’re listening,” I said.

“All Jake has to do is disappear. No one will look for him if he stops digging around, if he stops making inquiries. There’s money for him to set up somewhere and start over, anywhere in the world. Just not here.”

He nodded over to a duffel bag that lay on my bed. “Go ahead,” he said. “Take a look.” I walked over to the bag and pulled the zipper. It was packed with bricks of cash. I couldn’t even guess how much. A lot, seriously.

“Unmarked. Untraceable,” said Zack.

I saw Jake’s eyes rest on the cash for a second. I tried to read his face but it was hard and expressionless. He kept the gun on Zack, who still had his hands in the air.

“And what about Ridley?” Jake asked. I felt my stomach flip at the question. Was he considering the offer?

“They just want my word that she’s not going to pursue the matter, that she’s going to come back into the fold of the people who have loved and cared about her, and as long as it stays that way, she has nothing to worry about. She’ll be fine. Her family will be fine.”

“So why will they take your word?” Jake wanted to know.

He laughed a little. “Because I’m in this so deep, they know they own me. And my mom, too. She’s been in this since the beginning. You’ve probably figured out as much.”

“So it still exists. Children are still being abducted and sold.”

“Don’t make it sound so sinister, Ridley,” said Zack defensively. “We’re saving children that are being neglected and abused. Turn on the fucking television—every day you’ll hear about some animal who killed his girlfriend’s baby because it was crying too much, or some crazy bitch who thinks God wants her to save her children from sin by drowning them in a bathtub. We’re not the criminals.”

“You don’t have the right to make these choices,” said Jake. His voice was shaking. “We only get to make the choices for one life, our own.”

“Wrong,” said Zack. “If everyone thought like you, Ridley might be dead right now. Killed by her mother’s boyfriend. Even you, Jake, even you might not have survived your childhood.”

“My mother loved me,” said Jake. “I was loved.”

“That’s not enough,” said Zack. “Lots of people love their children and fail to protect them from harm. Lots of people claim to love their children and hurt them, neglect them, or murder them, anyway.”

There was a logic to the argument and I think we all heard it, even Jake. But it didn’t make any of it right. It didn’t make the fact that children had been abducted from their homes and sold to wealthy families the right thing. All the children who may have been helped didn’t make what happened to Teresa Stone or what had happened to Jake okay. Life’s not like that. We don’t get to make those kinds of bargains. No one has that right.

We stood in an awkward triangle. Jake looked at me and I was sad to see that he was wondering what my choice was going to be. I could see that if I chose to return to “the fold,” he would let me go and wouldn’t judge me. He would let me be safe if that’s what I wanted. Even though he’d said it last night, I knew in my heart at that moment that he loved me. I walked back over to him.

“I’m sorry,” I told Zack. “I can’t live with this.”

He looked surprised and sad.

“What about your family, Ridley? What about my mother? She’s always treated you like her own daughter. What do you think will happen to them if people find out about Project Rescue? Do you think anyone will believe your father wasn’t involved?”

I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t be concerned with the consequences of choices other people had made. Right now I could worry only about the consequences of my own choices. And the way I saw it, I was in a lose-lose situation. I couldn’t go back into the fold. It wasn’t an option for me; I’d seen everyone and everything too clearly. We’ve already talked about how you can’t go dark again. If I left with Jake, the consequences were impossible to predict. I could hurt a lot of people I loved. I could be hurt myself. I walked over to the closet and got a pair of sneakers, sat down on the bed next to that pile of cash, and laced them up.

“Let’s go,” I said to Jake, rising.

“Are you sure?” he asked. “It’s not safe. I don’t know what we’re up against and if I can protect us.”

I nodded. “I know.”

“If you leave here, Ridley, I can’t be responsible for what happens to you,” said Zack. All the concern had left his voice and there was just a petulant anger there. I wondered if he realized that it was the second time he’d said that to me in two days. “Even if you’re not interested in protecting your family, I’ll do what I have to do to protect my mother.”

Jake and I left Zack standing there with his arms outspread. In the hallway, Jake took me in his arms and kissed me hard on the mouth. I clung to him for a moment, and when I pulled back I could see the relief in his eyes. He wasn’t alone anymore and he knew it. We ran down the remaining flights of stairs and Jake headed toward the front door. I pulled at his arm.

“There’s another way out of this building,” I told him, and showed him the way to Zelda’s tunnel.