by Lisa Unger
“What’s this?” my father said finally, a confused but benevolent smile on his face. “Some kind of joke?”
“I don’t get it,” said my mother with a quick shake of her head. “Who are these people?”
I looked at them. It was a perfect innocent reaction and I waited to feel relief, a little stupid for having even brought it to their attention. It was exactly what I had wanted. But instead I felt an inexplicable anger.
“I don’t know who they are.” My voice shook a little and both my parents turned their eyes on me. “This came in my mail yesterday.”
“And…what?”
“And look at it,” I said, tapping it with my finger. “That woman looks just like me.”
My father made a show of looking more closely at the picture. “Well, she does bear a bit of a resemblance. But so what?” My mother, I noticed, had looked at the photograph once but didn’t look at it a second time. Instead, she leaned back and looked at me. I couldn’t read her eyes.
“This person believes I’m his daughter.”
“How do you know it’s a he?” my mother asked pointlessly.
“I just think it is,” I said weakly. “The handwriting is masculine. I don’t know.” Sigh. “I just do.”
At this point my father did something I hadn’t expected. He laughed, a deep belly laugh. “Honey,” he said finally. “That’s ridiculous.”
“Really, Ridley,” said my mother. “This is not funny.”
I looked at them, pulled my shoulders back. “I’m not trying to be funny, Mom. I got this in the mail yesterday and…it resonated with me. I have questions.”
“Well. What kind of questions?” asked my father, his laughter dying. “You can’t possibly be entertaining for a second the idea that you’re not our daughter. This person is having a joke at your expense, Ridley.”
“You’re smarter than this, aren’t you?” asked my mother with another quick shake of her head. “I mean, your face has been plastered all over the television and the newspapers for over a week now. Some nutcase thought you resembled someone he knows or used to know. And he’s either crazy, thinks you’re his daughter…or he’s trying to mess with you. This is so silly.”
I paused, doubt creeping up and tapping me on the shoulder.
“How come there are no pictures of me before I’m two years old?” I asked, sounding more like a child than I would have liked.
“Oh, Christ,” said my mother. “Now you’re starting to sound like Ace.”
I hated when my parents compared me with him, this child who had so injured them, so disappointed them. The one who chose the streets and the life of a junkie over their home and their love. The one who’d caused my parents so much pain over the years. I cringed but I didn’t say anything. I kept on looking at her and she finally answered.
“I’ve told you that we used to keep the photographs in the rec-room closet in the basement. The basement flooded and the pictures were ruined. All your pictures from the hospital, taking you home, and much of your infancy.”
She had told me that, but I had forgotten. I was starting to feel a bit unstable. But something compelled me to press on. “And I suppose all the pictures of your pregnancies were in those albums as well.”
“No,” she said slowly, drawing out the syllable as though she were talking to an infant. “I got very big during both pregnancies and was self-conscious in front of the camera. I know it seems silly but I was young.”
My mother was a beautiful woman with creamy skin and almond-shaped eyes. She had this wide mouth that could curl into a megawatt smile bright enough to light the stars in the sky. But when she was angry, her beauty turned to granite. She had always been one of those mothers who didn’t have to say a word to reprimand; just one of those looks froze you in your tracks. She had turned that gaze on me now and it took real courage, dredged from deep inside, for me to keep at it.
I leaned into them. “I don’t look like anyone.”
My mother looked away from me and made a grunt of disgust. She got up from the table and walked over toward the stove. My father glanced at my mother uneasily. He’d always kowtowed to her temper, and an old resentment about that rose in me but I kept silent. He looked back to me.
“That’s just not true, Ridley,” said my father. “You look a great deal like my mother. Everyone has always said that, don’t you remember?”
Now that he mentioned it, I did. There was a resemblance around the eyes. I did share her dark hair and high cheekbones. For a second it dawned on me that perhaps I’d lost my mind. That I was suffering from some form of posttraumatic stress. You always hear about that on shows like Dateline, you know. People whom the world regarded as heroes for a few days and then forgot about; how they lose it, get depressed. Maybe that was happening to me. Maybe I was creating a drama because I craved the attention I had had for a short time.
“But what about Ace?” I persisted. “What he said that night.”
“How can you ask me to explain the things Ace says?” my father said sadly, and I could see how the mention of Ace pained him. Suddenly the air around us was electric with his grief for a son who lived but chose to be dead to his parents. “I don’t even know him anymore.”
We were all silent for a moment, my mother standing at the stove with her arms crossed and head down, my father sitting across from me at the table, his eyes on me with a gaze that at once implored and accused, me leaning back in my chair and trying to figure out why I had brought this to them and why I was so passionately pressing them for answers, why I felt my heart thrumming and my throat dry in some kind of adrenaline response.
My father pushed the picture back toward me and I picked it up, looked at it closely. It had lost its power; there was just a couple with their child. Strangers.
“I’m sorry,” I said, sticking the photograph back in my pocket. Shame burned at my cheeks and pushed tears into my eyes. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”
My father reached out to touch my arm. “You’ve been under some stress, Ridley, with everything that happened last week. Someone preyed on that. I think you should call the police.”
I rolled my eyes. “And tell them what? That some mail really freaked me out?”
He shrugged and looked at me with a compassion that I didn’t feel I deserved. My mother walked back to the table with our tea mugs. She sat and kept her eyes on me. There was something there I hadn’t seen before and then it was gone. I thought it was disdain for my lack of faith, my willingness to hurt them.
“I’m sorry, Mom.”
“That’s all right, dear. I understand how you could become confused. Especially with all the stress.” I heard in her tone that she didn’t understand and it wasn’t all right.
Later, on the train ride back to the city, I watched burbs roll by me as I sat with my feet up and my head pressed against the glass. I’d shared an awkward dessert of chocolate ice cream with my parents and then left after helping my mother clean the kitchen. My mother had turned cold on me and gave me only the briefest embrace as I left. She was like that. She demanded absolute loyalty; anything less and she would freeze me out until I had made penance.
A metacommunication had passed between us years ago and I had always accepted it on a cellular level. She could accept the loss of one child and blame it on him, blame it on his addiction. But the loss of two children, and she saw any digression on my part as a kind of loss, would cause her to look within herself. And this she was not willing to do. As a child, I feared her anger and disappointment. As an adult, I could accept them but I still didn’t like it. I felt bad about the evening, unsure how I’d allowed myself to be so rattled by an anonymous note and a photograph of strangers.
As the upper-middle-class burbs morphed into the urban ruin of Newark, I thought about my brother. I hated him. Hated him like a child hates a fallen hero. I hated him for his unlimited potential and his failure to realize it. I hated him because I could see everything that was wonderful abou
t him, how brilliant, how beautiful he was, and how he had turned his back on everything he could have been, cast it off like a designer suit for which he’d paid an obscene sum and never wore. And I loved him for all those things as well. Pitied him, worried after him, adored him, and despised him. I remembered how it was to be pinched by him, chased by him, teased by him, hugged by him, comforted by him. There was an open wound in my heart for my brother. When I thought of him, a tsunami of emotion always welled and crashed within me.
After all the heartache Ace had caused my parents, the drugs, the petty crimes, the arrests for DUI, and finally his departure from our home at the age of eighteen, I was an absolute angel by comparison. I did the usual stuff, lied, did some minor drinking, once I drove the car with just my learner’s permit, got caught with cigarettes. But otherwise I got straight A’s, edited and wrote for the school paper, had nice friends whom my parents thought were okay. No major dramas. I felt I owed it to them to be good. Maybe even deeper, I believed that if I caused them any more pain it would destroy them. So I kept myself safe, in line, and out of trouble.
We never talked about Ace after he left. And I mean never. I couldn’t mention his name without my mother bursting into tears and running from the room. We all pretended he had never lived there. The silence allowed him to grow into this mythic figure in my mind. This beautiful rebel who was too bright, too sensitive for the normal life we lived. I imagined him a musician or a poet, hanging out in cafés, stoic in the pain of the misunderstood genius. A secret part of me harbored resentment toward my parents for driving him away.
After that horrible night when he left, I didn’t see him again until I was a freshman at NYU. I was living in the dorms on Third Avenue and Eleventh Street. I’m not sure how he found me, but when I left the building one morning heading to class, I saw him on the corner. His skin was pasty with raw red patches, and even from a few feet away I could smell the stench of his unwashed body. His face was gaunt. He’d shaved the long dark hair I’d always loved and his skull was a mess of black stubble and tiny scars. His blue eyes, my mother’s eyes, were bright and hungry.
“Hey, kid,” he said.
I must have just stood there gape-jawed for longer than it seemed because he cringed beneath my gaze and said, “Do I look that bad?”
“No…” I managed. I felt so awkward, torn between the urges to run away from this person who wasn’t even supposed to exist and to embrace the brother, the hero that I had lost and grieved so desperately.
A stuttering “How are you?” was all I could manage.
“Um…good,” he said, running his hand self-consciously over his head. As he did this, I saw track marks on his wrist. I took a step back. Remember that Batman episode where everyone thinks he’s turned into a criminal, given into the dark side after so many years as the Caped Crusader saving Gotham from the Penguin and the Riddler? That’s how I felt about Ace that day. There was disbelief; there was horror. But most of all there was this deep, wrenching sadness that my childhood hero had been brought low by the forces of evil.
“Listen,” he said. “Do you have any money? I’ve had the flu this week and haven’t been able to work. I need to get some breakfast.”
I gave him all the money I had in my wallet. I think it was twenty-five bucks. And that’s pretty much the way it was from that point on with Ace and me. My parents never knew it, but since that day, I usually saw him about once a month. We generally met at Veselka on Second Avenue. He always had a knish and I usually ordered the potato pancakes. We’d sit in the crowded East Village institution and no one paid any attention to the junkie and the hip (well, I am) student (later, urban professional) sitting across from each other. He talked shit about getting clean. I gave him money. I knew I shouldn’t. What can I say? I was the classic enabler. But I just loved him so damn much, and that was the only way he would let me show him. Besides, I couldn’t even imagine what he’d have done to get cash if I hadn’t given it to him. Actually, yes I could, and that was another reason.
Sometimes he would disappear for months and I wouldn’t hear from him, not even once. I rarely had a way to reach him. For a while he was squatting somewhere up in Spanish Harlem, or so he said; other times on the Lower East Side. I never knew for sure. When I didn’t hear from him I would be sick, absolutely haunted with fear. I took out an ad in the back of The Village Voice once, not even knowing if he ever read it. It was an act of desperation, one that yielded no results. But eventually he would run out of money or get lonely and he’d call me again. I never asked him where he’d been, what he’d done, why he hadn’t even tried to call. I didn’t ask because I was afraid to run him off again.
“When are you going to wise up?” Zachary had wanted to know. “He uses you. He doesn’t love you. People like that don’t even know what love is.”
That’s the thing about love that Zachary never seemed to understand. When you love someone, it doesn’t really matter if they love you back or not. Having love in your heart for someone is its own reward. Or punishment, depending on the circumstances.
The train screeched into Hoboken and I got out with the crush of people heading into the city. I had to push my way onto the PATH train and it took an eternity to groan its way into Manhattan. I walked from Christopher Street home. The cold air and long walk made me feel better, made the conversation with my parents seem farther away, helped me forget that I still had the photograph in my pocket and doubt in my heart. By the time I reached the building, I was feeling almost normal again. I walked right past my mailbox and didn’t even look at it. No mail tonight. I jogged up the stairs and stopped in front of my door. Sitting before me was a bottle of Merlot and two glasses. A note folded into one of the glasses read: Allow me to apologize properly? Jake, 4E.
six
I walked up the flight to Jake’s floor. But at the top of the stairs I hesitated. The fluorescent ceiling light hummed and flickered, casting the hallway in an eerie glow. I looked at the wine bottle and glasses in my hands and thought, Who is this guy? What am I doing? Before I could answer myself, the door opened and he was standing there in a black T-shirt and faded Levi’s button-flies. He reached out to take the wine and glasses from my hands and smiled. It was a tentative smile, shy.
“I wasn’t sure you’d come.”
I’ll tell you something about myself. I can get my head turned by a good-looking guy as much as the next girl. But sexy doesn’t impress me. Smart impresses me; strength of character impresses me. But most of all, I’m impressed by kindness. Kindness, I think, comes from learning hard lessons well, from falling and picking yourself up. It comes from surviving failure and loss. It implies an understanding of the human condition, forgives its many flaws and quirks. When I see that in someone, it fills me with admiration. I saw it in him. His eyes, a deep brown, almost black, heavily lidded with dark lashes, made me want to confess all my sins and secrets and do penance in his arms.
“You don’t have to apologize,” I said, nodding toward the note still in the wineglass. “I would have been annoyed, too.”
He stepped to the side and held the door open for me and I walked in. He closed the door quietly behind me. I turned to look at him and I must have seemed skittish.
“You want me to leave it open?” he said, concern wrinkling his brow.
“No,” I said with a small laugh.
“I’ll just pour the wine,” he said, disappearing into the kitchen.
Where my apartment looked out on the back of the building, his looked out onto First Avenue. The street noise was not much diminished by the thin windows, and a cold draft made the sills freezing to the touch. He had the heat on high but the room was still uncomfortably cool. He had the same bleached wood floors as I did but that’s where the similarities ended. In my place, I strove for absolute luxury and comfort. Four-hundred-count cotton sheets, down pillows and comforters, plush area rugs, warm blankets. I liked bright colors, fresh flowers, scented candles. Not in a girlie way, but in a wa
y that indulged the senses.
Jake’s place looked like a prison cell, albeit in an urban-industrial cool way. A sheet-metal sculpture, with jagged geometric shapes overlapping one another, dominated one wall. A glass-and-brushed-chrome table was surrounded by six elaborate wrought-iron chairs. A futon and a few scattered wooden Eames chairs provided an unwelcoming sitting area. In the corner a laptop glowed on a spare black table. There were no photographs, not one object of any personal nature, not even a scrap of paper out of place. I glanced over at the door that I imagined led to his bedroom and wondered if a peek inside would reveal a bed of nails beneath the glare of an interrogation lamp.
“It’s a bit spartan, I know,” he said, coming out with the wine.
“Just a bit,” I said.
“I find I don’t need that much,” he said.
He handed me a glass and raised his to mine. The tone that sounded when they touched together told me that they were crystal.
“To getting off to a better start,” he said.
We looked at each other for a moment and I felt that electricity again. It brought heat to my cheeks. There was a silence between us but it was comfortable. The lighting was low; a few pillar candles were burning and the overhead light was turned down to little more than a glow.
“So where did you move from?”
“Uptown,” he said. “I had a cheap place up by Columbia. But the neighborhood was getting so bad that I felt like I was living in a war zone. The gunfire was literally keeping me up at night.”
“So you moved to the safety of the East Village?”
“I like a little grit in my neighborhood. I’m not into posh,” he said, and that shy smile came back. My heart did a little rumba.
“What do you do?” I asked him, even though I hate the question.
“Do you want to sit down?” he said, leading me by the arm over to the futon. He sat beside me at a polite distance, but still close. I could smell just the lightest scent of his cologne. If I reached out my hand just an inch, I could touch his thigh.