Sliver of Truth

22

“Ridley, don’t do it. You’ll never be able to live with it.”

The voice comes from behind me and I spin around to see someone I didn’t expect to see again. It’s Jake.

“This is none of your business,” I yell, and turn back to Max.

It’s then that I realize why I’ve really been chasing him, what I really wanted to do once I’d found him. The thought makes me sick; I hold back vomit. He has continued to move closer. He moves through patches of light quickly, lowering his face. He either doesn’t see or doesn’t care that I have a gun aimed at him. Without wanting to, I start backing away just a bit.

“Ridley, don’t be stupid. Put that gun down.” Jake’s voice behind me sounds desperate, cracks with emotion. “You know I can’t let you kill him.”

My heart rate responds to the fear in his voice. What am I doing? Adrenaline is making my mouth dry, the back of my neck tingle. I can’t fire but I can’t lower the gun, either. I have the urge to scream in my fear and anger, my frustration and confusion, but it all lodges in my throat.

When Max is finally close enough to see, I gaze upon his face. And he’s someone I don’t recognize at all. I draw in a gasp as a wide, cruel smile spreads across his face. And then I get it. He is the man they say he is.

“Oh, God,” I say, lowering my gun. “Oh, no.”

Then for a second I see him. I look into his eyes and I see my uncle Max, the man who always found me and brought me home. He still resides in the eyes of this stranger. His face momentarily loses its cruelty and the little girl in me aches for him, wants nothing more than to run to him. Without thinking, I lower my gun and lift my hand to him. Our eyes lock briefly. Then night comes alive with sound and light, and he turns and runs.

Suddenly there are men all around me. Clad in body armor, guns drawn, they chase after Max’s fleeing form. His cane has been discarded and he runs faster than I would have ever imagined he could. Jake grabs my arm hard. His face is pale and strained in anger.

“Stay here!” he yells at me. I can see that he’s beyond furious. “Goddamn it, Ridley, don’t fucking move.”

He’s gone then, too. They’re all chasing Max. Dylan comes up behind me and I turn to him.

“I couldn’t do it,” I say. It’s only as the words pass my lips that I realize the reason for all of this was not because I wanted to find my father, but because I wanted to kill him. I didn’t want him alive in custody somewhere, helping the CIA end the sex slave trade. I wanted to cut him out of this world like a cancer, as if in doing so I could rid myself of every part of him that lived in me, good and bad. I guess I thought because I was his daughter, I had it in me to do that. Wrong again.

“Of course not,” he answers. He takes my face in both his hands. “You’re not him. You’ll never be anything like him.”

I hear the blades of a helicopter then and the sound of guns firing. We move quickly through the building toward the sound and come outside to find a black helicopter rising into the night. I see Max through the window and remember his wolfish smile. He lifts a hand and points to his heart, then he points to me. I know then that I’ll never see him again. As the helicopter grows smaller, I wonder what happened to the man I loved, if he ever existed at all.

Jake and the men with him continue to fire pointlessly at the helicopter long after it is out of range. Jake is screaming something into a cell phone as his eyes fall on me. He runs over to me.

“We’re going to get him tonight, Ridley. He can’t get far.”

I can’t tell if he thinks he’s issuing a threat or making a promise to me. Either way, I find I don’t care. I turn from him and into Dylan. I don’t want to look at Jake’s face ever again.

“The two of you are so fucked,” says Jake, moving closer to us. He’s in Dylan’s face. “How could you do this?”

Dylan pushes him back. “Step off, man.”

For a second, I think they’ll come to blows. In both their voices I can hear anger and frustration. But the heat between them fizzles out. It hurts to be so close to the thing you’ve been chasing and then have it snatched away. There’s nothing you can do about it. No one understands that better than me.

But as I look around me at the flat, dead island and into the sky at the fading lights of Max’s helicopter, I don’t feel their anger or their sadness. For the first time since I learned that I was Max’s daughter, I feel free.