by Lisa Unger
one
It’s dark in that awful way that allows you to make out objects but not the black spaces behind them. My breathing comes ragged from exertion and fear. The only person I trust in the world lies on the floor beside me. I lean into him and hear that he’s still breathing but it’s shallow and hard won. He’s hurt, I know. But I can’t see how badly. I whisper his name in his ear but he doesn’t respond. I feel his body but there’s no blood that I can tell. The sound of his body hitting the floor minutes before was the worst thing I’ve ever heard.
I feel the floor around him, looking for his gun. After a few seconds I feel the cool metal beneath my fingertips and I almost weep with relief. But there’s no time for that now.
I can hear the rain falling outside the burned-out building, its loud, heavy drops smacking on canvas. It’s falling inside, too, trickling in through gaping holes in the roof down through floors of rotted wood and broken staircases. He moves and issues a low groan. I hear him say my name and I lean in close to him again.
“It’s okay. We’re going to be okay,” I tell him, even though I don’t have any reason to believe this is true. Somewhere outside or up above us a man I thought I loved, along with other men whom I couldn’t identify, are trying to kill us, to protect an awful truth that I’ve discovered. I am hurt myself, in so much pain that I might pass out if I didn’t know it meant dying here in this condemned building on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. There’s something embedded in my right thigh. It’s possibly a bullet, or a large spike of wood, or maybe a nail. It’s so dark I can just barely see the large hole in my jeans, and the denim is black with my blood. I’m dizzy, the world tilting, but I’m holding on.
I hear them up above us now, see the beams of their flashlights crossing in the dark through the holes in the floors. I try to control my breathing, which to my own ears sounds as loud as an oncoming train. I hear one of the men say to the others, “I think they fell through. They’re on the bottom.” There was no answer but I can hear them making their way down over creaking wood.
He stirs. “They’re coming,” he says, his voice little more than a rasp. “Get out of here, Ridley.”
I don’t answer him. We both know I’m not leaving. I pull at him and he tries to get up, but the pain registers on his face louder than the scream I know he suppressed to protect us for a few minutes more. If we’re not walking out of here together, we’re not walking out at all. I drag him, even though I know I shouldn’t be moving him, over behind an old moldy couch that lies on its back by the wall. It’s not far but I can see his face white and gritted in terrible pain. As I move him, he loses consciousness again and in an instant feels fifty pounds heavier. But I’ve seen all four of his limbs move and that’s something. I realize that I’m praying as I pull him, my leg on fire, my strength waning. Please God, please God, please God, over and over again like a mantra.
The way the couch is lying, it forms a crawl space against the wall just big enough for the two of us. I pull him in there and lie on my belly beside him. I pull an old crate over toward the edge of the couch and look through the wooden slats. They’re closer now and I’m sure they’ve heard us because they’ve stopped talking and turned their flashlights off. I hold the gun in both hands and wait. I’ve never fired a gun before and I don’t know how many bullets are left in this one. I think we’re going to die here.
“Ridley, please, don’t do this.” The voice echoes in the dark and comes from up above me. “We can work this out.”
I don’t answer. I know it’s a trick. Nothing about this can be worked out now; we’re all too far gone. There have been plenty of chances to close my eyes and go back to the sleep of my life as it was, but I haven’t taken any of them. Do I wish now that I had? It’s hard to answer that question, as the wraiths move closer.
“Six,” he whispers.
“What?”
“You have six bullets left.”
two
Until recently my life has been fairly uneventful. Which isn’t to say I was just plodding along when the single occurrence I am about to share with you turned my world on its axis, but now that you mention it, that’s not too far off. And yet I have come to believe that it was not one event precisely but an infinite number of small decisions that led me into the circumstances that have so changed me and those around me. People have died, lives have been altered, the truth has not so much set us free as it has ripped away a carefully constructed facade, leaving us naked to begin again.
My name is Ridley Jones, and when all of this started, I was a thirtyish writer living alone in an East Village apartment I’d rented since I was a student at NYU. It was a third-floor walk-up in a small building on the corner of First Avenue and Eleventh Street above a pizzeria called Five Roses. With its black gated front door, its dim hallways and sagging floors, its ubiquitous aroma of garlic and olive oil, it had a certain kind of charm. And beyond that it was miraculously cheap at eight hundred dollars a month. If you know New York, you know that rent like that is almost impossible, even for an eight-hundred-square-foot “junior” one-bedroom that looks out over a back courtyard where dogs barked for most of the day, even when the only view is of the tenants in another building living their parallel lives with as much self-importance as I lived my own. But it was a good place and I was happy there. Even when I could afford something better, I stayed, just for the comfort of a familiar space and the proximity to the best pizza in New York City.
You might be wondering about my first name. My father, Dr. Benjamin Jones, a New Jersey pediatrician living in a quaint and comfortable Victorian house with my mother, a former-dancer-cum-housewife whom he has loved and who has loved him since the day they met at Rutgers University in 1960, has always lamented his plain last name. He thought of it as a name you give when you don’t want people to know who you are, like Doe or Smith. Growing up, he was almost embarrassed by the ordinariness of it. He was raised in a flat gray suburb of Detroit, Michigan, by ordinary people who expected him to live an ordinary life. But he didn’t think he was only ordinary, and when it came time to name his children he didn’t want them to feel that they were expected to be ordinary, either. He gave me the name Ridley after Ridley Scott, the filmmaker…he always was a bit of a film buff. He thought this was a very unusual first name for a girl, something special, and that it would encourage me to lead an extraordinary life. And he felt that as a writer living in New York City, I was doing just that.
Even before the events that I am going to share with you, I suppose in my own way I have been extraordinary, but only in the fact that I have loved and been loved by my parents, that I have been a happy person for most of my adult life, that I like pretty much everything about myself (except for my thighs), love my work, my friends, the place I live. I have had good relationships with men, though I couldn’t say until recently that I’ve ever known true love. When you live in New York City, you know that these things are indeed extraordinary.
But there was so much I didn’t know, so many layers hidden in a past that I wasn’t even aware existed. I don’t want to think that ignorance is to be held accountable for my relative bliss, but I suppose you’ll think that’s so. Certainly now something within me has changed. The world is a different place, and happiness, true peace, seems elusive. The woman I was seems hopelessly naive. I envy her.
When I look back on my life, I marvel at how it hasn’t been the major decisions that have most impacted its course. It’s been the tiny, seemingly inconsequential ones. Think about it. Think about the sudden events that have affected your life. With most of them, wasn’t it just a matter of seconds one way or the other? Wasn’t it the little decisions that caused you to cross this street or that, to move yourself into or out of harm’s way? These are the things that get you in the end. Who you marry, what you choose as your profession, how you were raised—yes, that is the big picture. But, as they say, the devil’s in the details.
Well, I’ll get to it then.
It was a Monday morning, autumn going on winter in New York City. The Indian summer had passed and the first chill had settled in the air. It was my favorite time of year, when the oppressive heat and humidity trapped within the concrete walls of the city lifted, leaving behind a place that was new in its briskness.
When I woke that Monday, I could tell by the meager amount of light that struggled in through my windows that it was a gray day. I could see that the glass was freckled with raindrops. It was this small detail that affected my next decision. I reached from beneath the down of my comforter for the cordless phone that rested by my bedside, checked my caller ID for the number, and then dialed.
“Dr. Rifkin’s office,” came a voice as flat and hard as a city sidewalk.
“This is Ridley Jones,” I said, faking a hoarseness in my throat. “I’ve come down with a bad cold. I can still come in, but I don’t want to make the dentist sick.” I added a pathetic cough for emphasis. Dr. Rifkin was my dentist, a tiny little gnome of a man who’d taken care of my teeth since I was a freshman at NYU. With a long white beard and a potbelly, checkered shirt under suspenders, orthopedic shoes, and an endearing waddle, he always disappointed me with a thick Long Island accent. He should have been Scottish. He should have called me “lass.”
“Let’s reschedule,” she said officiously, as if she didn’t buy it but couldn’t care less.
With that I was free. Freedom, I’d have to say, is probably the most important thing to me, more important than youth, beauty, fame, money. I wouldn’t say more important than love. But some people who know me well have claimed that it’s at least a toss-up deep inside me. One of those people was Zachary.
“Breakfast at Bubby’s?” I said when he answered. There was a pause where I heard him turn over in bed. A few months ago, I might have been beside him.
“Don’t you have a job?” he asked.
“I’m between assignments at the moment,” I said with mock indignation. It was true; I was between freelance assignments. But it wasn’t an issue for a number of reasons.
“What time?” he said, and in his voice I heard the sad mingling of hope and regret that I often heard when we spoke.
“Give me an hour?”
“Okay, see you then.”
Zachary was the man I should have married, the one I was supposed to marry. Our lives have been intertwined since we were children. My parents loved him, maybe more than they did my own brother. My friends loved him, his sandy blond hair and bright eyes, his fit, athletic body, his successful private pediatric practice, the way he treated me. Even I really liked him. But when it came down to decision time, I balked. Why? Fear of commitment? A lot of people believe that about me. But I don’t think so. All I can say is, forever and Zachary just didn’t seem compatible. There was nothing that I could point my finger at precisely. We had a great friendship, good sex, a shared passion for the dinosaur room at the Museum of Natural History and Häagen-Dazs French Vanilla ice cream, among other things. But love is more than the sum of its parts, isn’t it? In the end, I cared about him so much that I just thought he deserved someone who loved him more than I did. If that doesn’t make a lot of sense to you, you’re not alone. My parents and Zack’s mother, Esme (whom I sometimes felt closer to than my own), were still floored by my decision. Since we were children they’d harbored a (not so) secret fantasy that Zack and I would be together. So when we started dating, they were nothing short of jubilant. And when we split, I think they had a harder time with it than Zack and I did.
That morning, Zack and I were trying to be friends. I’d ended our relationship a little over six months earlier and we were struggling past his disappointment and injured feelings (and pride, I thought) toward what I hoped would be an enduring friendship. It was awkward but hopeful.
I rolled from my bed and pushed it back against the wall. Remember how I said the building sags? Well, there’s literally a dip in the floor of my bedroom. Since my bed is on casters, I occasionally wake up, particularly after a restless night, to find that it has rolled into the middle of the room. It’s a small inconvenience. Some might even call it an endearing quirk of East Village living.
I ran the water in the shower and closed the door to steam up my narrow black-and-white-tiled bathroom. Listening to the sound of the rain, I padded into the kitchen and started a pot of coffee. I zoned out, still not quite awake, as the espresso maker hissed, sending the smell of Café Bustelo into the air. I could hear the street noise from First Avenue in the distance and smell the pastries baking in Veniero’s, the bakery behind my building whose venting system released its aromas into the courtyard. I looked across the courtyard: The cute guitar player still had his shades drawn; the gay couple were dressed for work and sitting at their kitchen table with large black cups of coffee, the blond reading The Village Voice and his dark-haired lover The Wall Street Journal; the young Asian girl was doing her morning yoga stretches while her roommate seemed to be reading aloud from a script in the next room. Because of the cool temperature, all the windows were closed and all of these lives played out before me like muted television screens. They were all accessories to my morning, just as I would be to them if they happened to look out their windows and see me waiting for my coffee to espress.
Like I said, I was between assignments. I had just finished a profile on Rudy Giuliani for New York magazine for which I had been paid quite nicely. I had a couple of other irons in the fire, articles I’d pitched to editors who knew me at Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. As someone who had been working regularly for nearly seven years, I was confident that one of those ideas would turn into an assignment, though later, I hoped, rather than sooner. I was comfortable that way. At first, the freelance writing gig had been a bit of a struggle. If my parents hadn’t subsidized my meager income when I graduated from college, I probably would have had to move back home with them. But as I have a modicum of talent, am a professional who meets deadlines, and am a writer without much of an ego who takes editing well, I made a reputation and some good contacts and the rest is just a lot of hard work.
Even with that, I might not be as comfortable if my uncle Max hadn’t died nearly two years ago. Max was an uncle who wasn’t actually an uncle, but really my father’s best friend from Detroit, where they had been boys together. Both sons of autoworkers, my father and Max lived in the same suburb for eighteen years. While my father came from a solid home, my grandparents hardworking blue-collar people, Max’s father was an alcoholic and a physically abusive man. One night when Max was sixteen, his father’s violence turned deadly. Max’s father beat his mother into a coma from which she never awoke. Rather than let him become a ward of the state, my grandparents took Max in and somehow managed to help both him and my father through college.
My father went on to medical school and later became the pediatrician that he is to this day. Max went into real estate and became one of the biggest developers on the East Coast. He never stopped trying to pay back my father and my grandparents. Because my grandparents flat out refused a cash payback, he lavished them and us with Caribbean cruises and outrageous birthday gifts, from bicycles to new cars. Naturally, we adored him. He never married and, without children, treated my brother, Ace, and me like we were his own.
Everyone always thought of him as a happy man, rarely seen without a smile on his face, always ready with a belly laugh. But even as a child, I remember sensing a deep sadness in him. I remember looking into his blue eyes and seeing grief edging his lashes, pulling down at the corner of his mouth. I remember how he’d glaze over, lost in thought, when he thought no one was looking. And I remember the way he always looked at my mother, Grace, as if she were a glittering prize that had been awarded to someone else.
Uncle Max was an alcoholic, but because he was a happy drunk, no one seemed to mind. The Christmas Eve before last, after leaving my parents’ house, where we’d all spent the evening together, he never returned to his home. He’d apparently stopped off at a
bar after leaving us, then several hours later got into his black Mercedes sedan and proceeded to drive off a bridge and into the frigid water below. By accident or design, we’ll never know, though a lack of skid marks indicated that there was no last-second slamming of the brakes. It was icy that night. That might have been it, the rubber of the tires unable to find purchase on the slick road. Or perhaps he passed out at the wheel, never saw it coming. We prefer to think of it as an accident, since the alternative would haunt us all.
As a family, we were bereft, but my father most of all; he’d lost the person with whom he’d shared most of his life. It still didn’t feel quite right to celebrate Christmas Eve, a night we’d always shared with Max and the night we lost him.
In his will, he’d left most of his money to my parents, and to the Maxwell Allen Smiley Foundation. He’d created this foundation long before I was born, and it existed to fund myriad charities that offered assistance and shelter to battered women and abused children. But he also left a large sum of money to me and my brother, Ace. With the help of an accountant, my share of the money had been solidly invested. As a result, I had the freedom I so cherished. My brother, on the other hand, injected that money into his veins. Or so I assumed. But that’s something else.
I wasn’t thinking about any of this that morning. I was just looking forward to a day that I owned, where I could do anything I wanted. I showered, blew-dry my hair, pulled on my four-year-old Levi’s, as faded and soft as memory, a bright red Tommy Hilfiger sweatshirt, Nikes, and a Yankees cap, and headed out the door. If I had known, I would have paused at the door to say goodbye to a perfectly lovely existence, an enviably simple, comfortable, happy life. Not perfect, of course. But pretty close, comparatively speaking.
In the hallway I tried to be as quiet as possible. I strongly suspected Victoria, my elderly neighbor, of waiting by her door to hear when I entered and left my apartment. The knowledge of this caused me to come and go quietly. Not that I disliked her. It was only that because of her loneliness and my compassion for her, an encounter could represent a ten-to twenty-minute delay. But I wasn’t quiet enough that morning. As I locked my door, I heard hers open.