Beautiful Lies

Epilogue

Quidam, the stranger, the anonymous passerby. The man walking in the rain on the street after midnight. The sound of a violin through your apartment wall. The homeless man asking for change on the steps of a church. The old woman next to you on the bus. Disconnected from your life but joined to you by a moment in time. All the choices and events of his life and the choices and events of yours have led you to be in the exact same place at the exact same time. Think about it.

I am writing this from my new apartment on Park Avenue South, across from the 4/5-train station. It’s an artist’s loft, big and breezy, washed with light, overlooking downtown Manhattan. The floors don’t sag and there’s no aroma of pastry or pizza, which I really miss. Those little quirks of East Village living. There’s enough room for both our offices, though Jake still keeps his studio downtown. I actually have a room where I write now, not just a corner divided by a screen from the rest of my bedroom. We wanted a new place, where we could start all over again together. New life, new apartment. Makes sense, right?

Jake and I are getting to know Linda better. She’s starting to feel like family. Little by little, Jake is getting to know his parents, too, or at least Linda’s memory of them. They were flawed people to be sure, but aren’t we all? In learning about them, Jake is learning about himself. For the first time in his life he says he doesn’t feel quidam, like a stranger in his skin, disconnected from the world around him. And I like to think I have something to do with that.

Ace is still in rehab, nearly three months now. I see him on Thursdays. I am really getting to know him for the first time. As a child, he was my hero; as an adult, he was the part of me I was always trying to save. Now he’s just Ace, my brother who I’ve known all of my remembered life but who has been a stranger to me, partly because of his addiction and partly because of my addiction to an idea of him. We’re in counseling together. He has told me that he believed I had always loved an idea of him and that I’d never really seen the true person there. Just my memories and my dream of him. I suppose he’s right. Isn’t that so often true with family, that we see them through the filters of our own fears, expectations, and desire to control? He’s struggling with this thing. I don’t know if he’ll succeed, but I know now that I can’t help him. Only be present for him, be honest with him, and love him for who he is rather than who I want him to be.

He never had anything to do with what happened to me. He’s guilty only of never telling me the truth that he knew. And he kept it from me only because he knew the pain it would cause. He did love me, after all. He did want to protect me from the bad guys.

Ace and my parents have begun to tentatively negotiate a new relationship. It’s a series of fits and starts. There’s so much anger there, so many years of hurt. Each meeting so far has ended in yelling and tears, or so I’m told. But at least they keep meeting. That’s something, isn’t it?

Ruby’s gone. She came to see Ace once a few weeks after he’d been in rehab when visitors were allowed. He tried to convince her to try to get clean. I offered to pay for the private facility where Ace is being treated, but she refused. And Ace was smart enough to know you can’t help someone who doesn’t want to be helped. We haven’t seen her since. At Ace’s request, I went to the Lower East Side one Sunday with Jake to look in on her, to tell her that Ace was asking after her. But she had gone, packed her things and moved on. Ace is hopeful that he’ll see her again.

Hope is good. Without it, well, you do the math. But hope has to be like a prayer. Putting it out there to something more powerful than yourself. If the last few months have taught me anything, it’s this: We don’t have control, we have choices. The little ones, the big ones, these are the points on which our lives pitch and pivot. All we can do is make the best choices we can with what we know, and hope that things turn out the way we want.

My parents and I are muddling through in our new relationship. There have been a few screaming matches; all that rage and sadness I didn’t feel during our first confrontation have come to the surface more than once. But no one’s walked away or severed ties, no one has given up. The big stuff hangs between us. But we love each other, and we’re learning how to be together in this new life where there are no secrets and no lies between us. I have faith that when the hurt fades, our relationship will be stronger for being based on honesty. And I hope that my parents can find a way to love Jake, too, though I know in their hearts they blame him for all of this.

Christian Luna’s murder trial still looms. I will testify to what he told me and how I watched him die. The prosecutors will use that to prove motive for Angelo Numbruzio and the people from whom he takes his orders. Depending on the outcome of the trial, state prosecutors will decide how to proceed with the Project Rescue case. And that will determine Zack and Esme’s fate. My father will probably have some questions to answer. I know he’s frightened and so am I.

I haven’t spoken to Zack or Esme. Zack is in custody, charged with attempted murder. I try not to think about him the way I last saw him, about the fact that he tried to kill me and Jake. I try not to think about what has happened to his life. He and Esme have been advised by their lawyers not to speak to any of us. The deal they’ve made with prosecutors in the Project Rescue case prohibits it. Not that they’d want to talk to us. But I’d like to talk to Esme. I’d like to know who she was then and what she knows about the night that Teresa Stone died and about the other children who passed through the Little Angels clinic and disappeared. I think she’s the link, that she has the answers Jake and I still need. What do you think? Anyway, we may get those answers yet, as the investigation unfolds.

The media has already begun to feed. A show about Max and his alleged involvement in Project Rescue has already aired on Dateline. They made him seem like a monster. And to some people, I’m sure he is. But not to me. Project Rescue was ill conceived and the ramifications unspeakable. But he’s still Max. And more than that, he was my father. I’ve tried to recast him in my memory as that. But I can’t; not really. Not yet. As my father, he was flawed, guilty of some terrible errors in judgment at best. As my uncle Max, he was perfect, this bright star in the memory of my life. Is it wrong to want to keep that?

I don’t know what happened that night when he brought Jessie to my parents. I don’t know what his involvement was, if Teresa Stone’s murder was an accident. I may never know if my father was responsible for the murder of my mother. Whether the terrible legacy of abuse and murder Max spent his whole life trying to flee had caught up with him just the same. I remember often what he said to me that last night. Ridley, you might be the only good I’ve ever done. He was in so much pain. The demons he’d battled all his life had come for him. Later that night, they took him home.

The Dateline people called me, too, but I, of course, don’t do interviews. Not anymore. It will take all my courage and all my strength to talk about the things that have happened during Christian Luna’s murder trial when the time comes.

There are no villains here. Not really. If you think about it, there are no true villains in life. Only in fiction do we see distilled versions of good and bad. In life, there are only good and bad choices. And sometimes even choices can be judged only by their consequences. And sometimes not even then. I guess if you want to see Zack as a villain or Esme, you can. Maybe you think Max is the villain. But I think they all believed that they were doing right, right for the children, right for one another, right for me. No matter how wrongheaded their thinking was, it counts for something, doesn’t it?

What about all those children, all those other Project Rescue babies? I heard that a hotline has been established for people who suspect that they might have been one of those children. But my suspicion is that most of them don’t have the first clue about what has happened to them. I suspect that not many would want to know. I can’t imagine many parents stepping forward to say they’d obtained their child through an illegal adoption, if they weren’t forced to do so. But who knows, the truth can be a powerful lure to the shadow side. Maybe the universe will lead some of those children kicking and screaming to their truth, as it did for me.

From the moment Jake and I stood standing in his apartment, our hands locked, we have been allies. Yes, there have been lies and moments of doubt between us. And though those moments have been more extreme for us than for others in a new relationship, I don’t see it as being all that different. Don’t we reveal ourselves slowly, in parts, to the people we are starting to love? Don’t we pick and choose what we want them to see and when? Aren’t we afraid to be judged or rejected because of who we are, at least a little at first, until we grow more intimate, feel safer beneath each other’s gazes? Now Jake and I have a policy of total honesty between us. And that’s not always easy (as in, “Do these jeans make me look fat?”), but it’s always real. And I’ll take real any day over lies, no matter how they glimmer and shine, no matter how beautiful.