Four Thrillers by Lisa Unger

by Lisa Unger

  ten

  I never asked for Zack’s key back. I’m not sure why; I guess I felt like it would have been adding insult to injury. And ostensibly, we were still close, still good friends. But I thought that it was understood that he was no longer entitled to use it without my permission. Friday morning proved me wrong.

  My heart nearly stopped as I stepped from my bedroom into the living space and my sleepy brain registered a form lounging on my couch. I felt the rush of fear to my fingertips and a shriek rise in my throat in the seconds it took me to recognize Zack. He was looking at me with an expression I’d never seen on his face before. It was worry, but it was anger, too, shaded by resentment.

  “Zack,” I said quietly, raising a hand to my chest. The fear had drained, leaving annoyance in its place. “What are you doing here?”

  “What am I doing here?” he said incredulously. “Ridley, people are worried about you.”

  “People?” I said with a frown. “Like who?”

  “Like your parents, for Christ’s sake. What’s going on with you?”

  “I just saw my parents the day before yesterday.”

  “Yeah, ranting and raving like a lunatic about their not really being your parents. And then you don’t even call to let them know you’re okay?”

  “Zack, what does that have to do with you?”

  I was flashing on something here, something I had always hated about my relationship with Zack—or should I say Zack’s relationship to my parents. I often had the feeling that he was a clone they had created for the sole purpose of marrying me and taking care of me in a way that they no longer could. It annoyed me to no end when we were together. And now that we were no longer a couple it was downright infuriating. I felt heat rise to my skin and my throat got tight.

  “Zack, you need to go. Right now,” I said, continuing on to the kitchen.

  “Ridley, talk to me,” he said. “What’s happening?”

  I ignored him as he followed me into the kitchen. I noted that he wasn’t wearing his shoes and this rather threw me over the edge. How could he take off his shoes? What gave him the right to come into my apartment and make himself at home?

  “Zack, did you not hear me?” I said, turning to stand and look him in the eye. “Leave.”

  He looked so hurt then, as if I’d slapped him in the face. What was wrong with me? Why was I being so mean to him? My childhood friend, my former boyfriend, the son of a woman I loved like a mother. It was Zack. Why did he feel like an interloper, someone I needed to put out of my apartment?

  “I’m sorry,” he said, shaking his head. “You’re right. It was wrong of me to come here. I was—” He stopped short and looked down at his stocking feet.

  I sighed, feeling like a total bitch.

  “I know you were just worried,” I said as gently as I could, moving toward him. “But this was not a good idea.” I put my hands on his arms.

  “Ridley,” he said, holding my eyes with his icy blues. In the syllables of my name I heard all the ways I’d hurt and disappointed him, all the hope he still held for us. Hope fanned by my parents and his mother, I’m sure: Let Ridley have some time. She’ll come around.

  “Zack, I’m sorry,” I said. I’m not sure why I was apologizing. He pulled me into his arms and I took in his familiar scent and rested against him for a moment, like we visit our memories. You’re a fool to let that boy go, my mother had complained. Maybe she was right, as she had been about so many things. But I didn’t love Zack, not like that.

  “What’s up, Ridley?” said Jake, emerging from the bedroom. Zack pulled away from me quickly, as though I’d bit him hard on the neck, looking at me with surprised hurt. For a second they both stood in my line of vision, and the contrast between them was so stark it was nearly comical. Zack: blond, perfectly pressed chinos, white oxford, Lands’ End barn jacket slung over the arm of my couch, Rockports under my coffee table. Jake: dark, the giant dragon tattooed across his ripped chest and abs, faded denims, bare feet (irresistible).

  Zack’s face fell and I felt like a kid caught playing hooky, hanging out with the wrong crowd. My stomach bottomed out for the hurt he must be feeling, but in my rebel heart there was just the smallest twinge of satisfaction. Let’s not forget, he’d stormed my boundaries and was in essence checking up on me for my parents. That was not okay with me.

  “Who’s this?” said Zack.

  “Zack, this is Jake. Jake, Zack.”

  “Nice to meet you,” said Jake, offering his hand.

  Zack just looked at him, and after a second Jake withdrew his hand with an understanding nod. Zack brushed past him, grabbed his shoes and his jacket. Guilt and sadness brought heat into my cheeks. I’m not sure why, but it’s a feeling I was pretty comfortable with in my relationship with Zack. I didn’t say anything as he walked toward the door, carrying his things.

  “I need your key, Zack. This wasn’t fair.”

  He pulled the key from his pocket and handed it to me with a half-smile I couldn’t read. A strange thought flashed through my mind: He made a copy.

  “I’m not even sure who you are right now, Ridley,” he said.

  “I’m not sure you ever did, Zack,” I said. The words just slipped from my mouth. I don’t know why, since it wasn’t something I had consciously considered before. But as I said it, I knew it was true. I knew it was why I’d left the relationship, because I was never able to be myself without feeling guilty or as if I’d disappointed him. Like a child acting out against a controlling parent, where every independent action causes the parent pain and the child is punished. Subtle, though, not overt so that people would see. Almost imperceptible, in fact…except to me.

  He left still in stocking feet. I guess the act of putting on his shoes in front of Jake was more than he could bear. I looked out the peephole after I’d closed the door and saw him sit on the top step to lace up his sensible shoes. I felt guilt and anger like a ball of gauze in my throat.

  “Everything all right, Ridley?” said Jake from behind me. I liked the way he said it, with concern but with the underlying assumption that I could handle the events of my life. He wasn’t jealous or angry. I liked that, too. I appreciated that I didn’t have to babysit his emotions while mine were in a twister in my chest.

  “Not really. Things pretty much suck at the moment.”

  He nodded and walked over to me.

  “Except for last night, right? Don’t forget about my delicate ego,” he said with a broad smile that was contagious and pulled up the corners of my own mouth. I felt a heat in my belly and his hands were on my shoulders.

  “That didn’t suck too much,” I said, putting my face to his chest and letting him hold me solidly against him. In a minute we were at it again.

  I dozed a little after we made love again. When I woke, I didn’t open my eyes right away because for a second I didn’t think he was next to me on the bed. If I opened my eyes and he was gone, then I’d have been afraid that what had passed between us was nothing more than my fantasy. If he was gone, I was a fool. But after a second, I could smell his cologne. A second later I felt his palm on my belly and it sent a current of electricity through me.

  “You’re awake,” he said.

  I opened my eyes to see him looking at me. “How did you know?”

  “Your breathing changed.”

  “You were listening to me breathing?”

  He nodded, his lips curling into a sexy, lazy smile. I thought he would say something corny here but he didn’t say a word. I liked him more every minute. I felt a flutter of worry at the realization and checked my emotions. Take it easy, cowgirl.

  “What time is it?” I asked, sitting up and looking at the clock. It was after ten.

  “You have work to do,” he said simply. I liked that he knew that and it wasn’t an issue. Zack never considered my job a real job and viewed any time spent on it when he was around as an infringement on our time together. Jake threw his legs over the bed and got out. I got a nice l
ittle show as he pulled on his jeans, grabbed his shirt from the floor. Very nice.

  “My studio’s on Tenth and A,” he said, sitting down on the bed and taking my hand. He put it to his lips. “Come by if you want to see some of my work later. First door on the west side of A between Ninth and Tenth, across from the park. It’s red; you can’t miss it.”

  “I’d love that,” I said. I felt like sighing but smiled instead. “Around four.”

  He leaned in to kiss me, lightly but for a long, sweet minute. Then he left without another word.

  eleven

  After Jake left, I made some coffee and the caffeine buzz got me through the rest of the morning. I talked to Tama Puma.

  “Ms. Thurman would be enchanted to meet with you,” she said, her voice a warm and self-important purr. Enchanted? Who used words like that in the real world? I imagined her in a boa, with a long cigarette holder dangling from her fingers. Though naturally, Ms. Puma would die before bringing a cigarette to her lips.

  I checked in with the accounting department at New York magazine on some money they owed me. Check’s in the mail, as they say. By noon, the caffeine was wearing off and I could no longer ignore the thoughts that were weighing on me. I felt the familiar tug of guilt—I should call my parents to let them know I’m okay. But I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to hear their voices, because as soon as I did, I knew I wouldn’t be able to hear my own anymore.

  I spent awhile on the Internet, searching through LexisNexis for some information on a missing toddler and a murdered mother in the early seventies, but there were too many listings. I narrowed the search to the tristate area, but still there were more than ten thousand hits. The thought chilled me. I thought about my idyllic childhood, how I always felt safe and loved, how the only things I feared were bad grades and embarrassing myself trying to climb that stupid rope in gym class.

  I scrolled through the articles, archives from old newspapers and magazines, Web sites with those terrible age-graduated photographs that tell you someone lost a child who was never found. That they had to imagine what that baby might look like five, ten years later, if they were alive at all. It made me realize there is this world, this awful place of pain and violence, where some people have been exiled and the rest of us cannot visit even if we wanted to. I didn’t find anything that connected to the partial newspaper clipping I’d received, didn’t see any images that matched those sitting on my desk. But I have to admit my search was somewhat half-assed, as my mother would say. I’m not sure how much I really wanted to know then, you know?

  I kept a picture of my brother and me as kids on my desk. I picked it up and looked at it. In it I sat on a swing in this park by our house, my brother standing behind me, his hands directly above mine on the chains that held the swing. He rested his chin upon the top of my head and we both smiled for the camera, as red, gold, brown, orange leaves danced around us in a cool, strong wind that was blowing that day. A strand of my hair had drifted up and looked like a thin mustache on his face. I remember the easy days like that, when we were young together, before the circumstances that finally took Ace were even a blip on the radar. I remember walks and parties, vacations and family reunions, where there was no dark specter of my missing brother to shadow our happiness.

  My mother likes to tell a story about Ace and me. Or she used to, back when she still liked to talk about Ace, when she still acknowledged him as her son. We were little, I’m not sure how old, about four and seven maybe. I remember the yellow light of Saturday morning leaking in through my blinds and me waking with the excitement of knowing that Ace didn’t have to go to school and that a morning of lying on the floor in front of the television watching cartoons stretched before me. It was fall and the morning was chill, the floor cold beneath my bare feet as I padded from my room through the bathroom and into Ace’s side of the loft. I crawled up onto his bed and lay beside him, and then, very gently, pried open one of his eyes. Of course, he was already awake and only pretending to be asleep. After the usual grumbling and complaining, he allowed himself to be led down the stairs.

  Generally, we began Saturday mornings by eating giant bowls of Cocoa Pebbles. My parents were still asleep and would remain so for at least another hour, so the kitchen was ours—no one to tell us what to eat and to turn the television down and to sit back from the screen. This was a brief, golden universe where Ace and I made the decisions, an orgy of sugary cereal and chocolate milk, jumping on the furniture, and tickle fights where I occasionally wound up wetting my pajamas.

  For whatever reason, this morning Ace decided that it was going to be cookies for breakfast. He found a package of Oreos in the pantry and we took it, along with two glasses of milk, to our comfortable spot in front of the television.

  I think we were about half through with the bag when my mother came down.

  “Ace. Ridley. What do you think you’re doing?”

  We both stopped chewing mid-bite, the next cookie paused halfway to our chocolate-covered lips.

  “Give me those cookies right now.”

  At this point, I reached out my hand to return the cookie to my mother and began to cry. My brother stuck his hand into the package and stuffed as many as he could into his mouth before she reached us.

  My mother always told this story with a tone of marvel about how different her children were, even though they came from the same people, were raised in the same home. I remember crying, not because I wanted to eat more cookies—truth be told I was rather sick from what I’d eaten already—but because my mother’s arrival marked the abrupt end of the magic time.

  I also remember it as the fault line that divides my memory of my childhood and Ace’s. My mother and Ace engaged in a full-out battle over the Oreos—my brother cut and ran with the bag, up the stairs and into his room, where he slammed and locked the door, leaving my mother enraged and banging on it like a madwoman.

  “For Christ’s sake, calm down, Grace. We’re talking about cookies here,” said my father, climbing the stairs after them.

  But, of course, it wasn’t about cookies. It was about control. How she had to have it and how I easily acquiesced and how Ace rebelled. Each of us extracted different people from our parents by our personalities and hence we had different experiences growing up. I wound up sniffling in the arms of my father; Ace earned the stony silence of my mother that generally followed one of her perimenopausal rages.

  But my mother turned the incident into a charming and amusing dinner anecdote, drained of the drama of the moment and distilled to illustrate how quirky and funny kids can be. I always cringed at her retelling, not because I thought of it as a traumatic experience (though Ace certainly remembered it that way), but because I wasn’t sure what she was trying to say about me. Did she mean I was weak where my brother was bold? Obedient where my brother was rebellious? Was I to be ashamed or proud? There was a kind of grudging respect in her tone when she spoke about Ace, as though she actually admired him for rebelling against her. But then, of course, she stopped speaking about him altogether. It’s strange how memory gets twisted and pulled like taffy in its retelling, how a single event can mean something different to everyone present.

  As I sat with the picture of the swing in my hand, memories came marching through my mind like soldiers, things I hadn’t thought of in years, sepia-toned by present events. And I couldn’t be sure if I was more clearheaded now than I’d ever been, or if I was losing my mind and everything—my recollection of the past, my perception of the present—was distorted by recent events.

  My uncle Max was a mountain, a shooting star, a big bear of a man, a piggyback ride waiting to happen, his pockets full of candy and, later money, or whatever the particular currency of our ages happened to be. He was rock concerts, baseball games, he was yes when my parents were no, he was a consolation for every disappointment. He was the embodiment of fun, and the weeks spent with him when my parents were away are some of the happiest memories of my childhood. Ace and I love
d him, of course. How could we not? It’s easy to be popular with children when you’re not the one making the rules, when your only role in their lives is to show them how much fun the world can be.

  There was always a woman with my uncle Max, but never the same one. They all kind of run together in my memory, none of them really standing out from the parade of hair dye and silicone, tanned skin, straight silky hair, and high heels. Always high heels, no matter what they were wearing—dresses, blue jeans, bikinis. I do remember one woman, though. It was some party at our house, something during the day; I think it was Ace’s birthday. The dining-room ceiling was missing, covered completely by helium balloons—red, orange, blue, green, purple. I remember music, and in my memory it sounds like a carnival ride. Laughter, someone spilling soda on the white rug, a popped balloon and delighted shrieking and a clown doing magic tricks. I remember rounding a corner too fast and running into the bleached denim legs of one of Uncle Max’s girlfriends.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, looking up at her. All I can see now is blue eye shadow, feathered blond hair, and bubble-gum lip gloss.

  “That’s okay, Ridley,” she said sweetly, and walked off. And all I could see was that she wore the most fabulous red leather pumps. Candies, if I’m not mistaken, the very height of sexy-cool. I was breathless in my admiration, wondering how you came to grow up to be like that.

  “Really, Max,” I heard my mother say from the kitchen, which was where I’d been headed. I knew that tone, heavy as a bag of stones with the weight of her disapproval. “To bring one of them here. To Ace’s party. How could you?”

  “I didn’t want to come alone,” he said, something in his tone I didn’t recognize.

  “Bullshit, Max.”

  “What do you want from me, Grace, huh? Stop being such a fucking prude.”

  I didn’t have time to be shocked that my mother and Uncle Max were talking to each other this way because suddenly my father appeared.