by Lisa Unger
“When’s the last time you saw your boyfriend?” He leaned on the word boyfriend with some kind of sarcasm or even hostility, maybe both. I thought about telling him that Jake wasn’t technically my boyfriend any longer, but I didn’t want to be disloyal to Jake. Or answer the questions that would follow about the current nature of our relationship.
“The night before last.”
“And the last time you heard from him?”
“He left a message earlier today. Asked me to meet him here for dinner around eight.”
“What time did he leave the message?”
“I don’t know. Around three or four, I guess.”
“How did he sound?”
“Fine.” The truth was I couldn’t quite remember what he had sounded like.
“Did he call you from the landline here,” he said, nodding toward the phone on Jake’s desk, “or from his cellular phone?”
“I don’t know. I think from this phone. I can’t remember.” He’d called me from his cell; I could tell by the background noise. At least I thought so; I would check my caller ID when I got home. In any case, I didn’t want Agent Grace to know that he’d been on his cell; it seemed incriminating somehow. I was dying to call Jake now but didn’t know if it was wise to do this in front of Agent Grace.
He continued with the questions, writing my answers in a little black notebook he’d extracted from his pocket. “Where were you today that you weren’t available to take his call around that time?”
I hesitated, thought about lying, decided against it. “I went to Max’s apartment.”
He looked up at me. “Why?”
I explained to him the reasons I sometimes visited that place. I could tell by the look on his face that he didn’t understand, thought my behavior was suspicious. Which, of course, it was.
“Can anyone confirm that you were there?”
“The doorman, Dutch.” I watched him write. “Is that the time around when she died?” I asked, deducing as much from his questions. “This afternoon around three or four?”
He didn’t say anything, just kept scribbling in his pad. I felt a tide of panic swell for Jake, a desperate worry aching in my chest.
“I have to be honest with you, Ridley,” said Agent Grace after a moment. “I don’t think you’re telling me everything you should be. I’m having a hard time trusting you right now.”
I tried for indignation but it didn’t take. I shrugged instead. “I really don’t give a shit what you think of me, Agent Grace,” I said, keeping my voice mild. It was true; I couldn’t care less. This was new for me; I used to be worried about what people thought, eager to please and play by the rules. But that was before. Before I knew I was Max’s daughter. “I don’t trust you, either.”
I wondered how long it would be before he started sifting through Jake’s office, before he looked at the computer and discovered the strange website. I wondered if he’d make the connection between the streaming video in London and the overseas call that had come into my apartment. Of course he would. He was all about making connections. I wondered how much he knew already. Probably a lot more than I did.
“I’m going to have someone take you home, and I want you to stay there, Ridley.”
“I want to stay here in case Jake comes back,” I said.
“If he comes back here, I guarantee he won’t be available for dinner,” he said coolly. “Give me your cell phone.”
“What? Why?”
“I want to call Jacobsen from your phone. We’ve been trying to reach him but he hasn’t answered. I’m wondering if he’ll answer a call from you.”
I didn’t know what my rights were here. I felt another wash of panic, folded my arms across my chest, and looked down at the floor. He held his hand out.
“Seriously?” he said. “Don’t make me wrestle it from you or take you into custody and confiscate your belongings, search your apartment. I might have to do that eventually, but it doesn’t have to be right now.”
It seemed like he was always issuing threats of this kind. I looked at his face and saw that he meant it. After another second’s hesitation, I handed my phone to him, watched him scroll through my address book and hit send. He put the phone on speaker and we both listened to it ring. I closed my eyes, praying silently for Jake to answer, until the voice mail picked up. My heart dipped into my stomach as Agent Grace ended the call. I held my breath, wondering if he was going to scroll through my call log, check my messages. But he didn’t do that; he simply handed the phone back to me. I was surprised; it seemed like a logical thing for him to do, to check my incoming and outgoing communications. We locked eyes and I considered giving everything up to him. Later I would look back on this as the last moment I could have asked for help out of the hole I was climbing into …a moment I let pass.
A STONE-FACED YOUNG man with a blond crew cut and a scar from his neck to his ear drove me home in a white Crown Victoria. I recognized him as Agent Grace’s partner. I didn’t remember his name. In the passing streetlights, his head looked like a wire brush. I stared out the window and cried quietly, hoping he couldn’t tell, until he handed me a tissue without a word. I was afraid for Jake, afraid for myself, unsure of what to do next.
The man at the wheel didn’t say a word as I exited the vehicle. I almost thanked him (that’s what a good girl I am), but I held it back and slammed the door instead. As I let myself into my building, I noticed that he turned off the engine and seemed to make himself comfortable, as if he were settling in for a while.
MEMORY IS ELUSIVE for me these days. When I learned that most of the things I had taken for truth about my life were lies, I lost faith in memory. The past events of my life? I started to remember them differently; odd tones and nuances started to emerge. And I couldn’t be sure any longer if my original memories or the new ones were truer to the things that had actually transpired.
Like the hours Max and my father spent in his study, for example. I had always imagined them in there laughing and relaxing, drinking cognac and smoking cigars. Now I wondered what they talked about in there. Me? Project Rescue? If Max had had this awful dark side, did my father know about it? Counsel him on how to deal with the “demons” he referred to that last night?
Or the harsh conversations between Max and my mother. She disapproved of the parade of anonymous women through Max’s life, resented bitterly their presence in her home and social life. They argued about it, but only when they thought my father was out of earshot. I wondered now why she cared. In the anger of their tones, was there something more? Intimacy? Jealousy?
I thought about those women. Who were they? All I remember was that they all seemed to be blondes, all in high heels, beautiful and distant, with something cheap about them. Were they call girls? Maybe some of them were. I didn’t really know. I never knew their names, never saw any of them more than once. What did that say about Max? I could have started making connections here: the picture Nick Smiley had painted of Max, the accusations of matricide, how Max had never had a serious relationship with a woman. But I didn’t. Not yet.
Max was not a handsome man. His skin was sallow and pockmarked from the acne he’d suffered as a teenager. His dark hair was thinning. He was big, awkward with his size. But he had a magnetic charisma that drew people to him like metallic dust. And, of course, there was his outrageous wealth. This drew people as well. But even though he was always surrounded by people, he carried an aura of aloneness. In fact, he was the loneliest man I’ve ever known. Maybe because he had so many secrets to hide.
After being dropped off at my apartment, I lay on the couch in the dark and searched my memories again for Max, for moments when I might have glimpsed the man and not my creation of him. But I couldn’t get past the myth, the one to which I had been clinging. When I was a kid, I used to bring my face up close to the television screen and try to look beyond its edges. I was sure there was more to see. But there was nothing, just the two-dimensional image. Now I tried to look
beyond the borders of my memory. There was nothing there.
I tried not to think about Esme and how she’d died. I remembered what Jake had said, about how scared she’d been. I’d seen the fear, too. It seemed she’d had good reason to be afraid. Who had killed her and why, I couldn’t begin to imagine. I recalled the last words we’d said to each other.
I’ll keep swinging until I know all the answers, I told her.
You do and you’ll wind up like that New York Times reporter, she’d answered.
The memory was ugly and I cringed inside thinking of it.
I PERIODICALLY PICKED up the phone and dialed Jake’s cell, got his voice mail, and left a message or hung up. I tried not to think about the blood on his floor or what kind of trouble he might be in, or if he was hurt …or worse. Otherwise, my panic and helplessness were like something alive in my chest.
I called Ace.
“Took you long enough to get back to me,” he said by way of answering the phone, presumably having seen my number on his caller ID. Or maybe I was the only person who ever called him. He was living on the Upper West Side near Lincoln Center in a one-bedroom apartment looking out over the Hudson. It was pretty nice, though sparsely decorated with just a couch, desk, computer, and television in the living room, a bed and dresser in the bedroom. He claimed he was trying to write a novel, a claim that annoyed me to no end for reasons I can’t explain.
“I’ve got things going on, Ace,” I said, maybe more harshly than he deserved. “The whole world doesn’t revolve around you.”
“Christ,” he said. “What’s your problem?”
I unloaded. I told him everything that had happened over the last few days, everything I’d learned, everything I’d found, about my trip to Detroit, about Esme, about Jake missing. I even told him about the text message in spite of its ominous warning. When I was done I went silent, waited for him to make some sarcastic comment, tell me to move on, or claim that I was losing it completely. He didn’t say anything right away. I listened to him breathing.
“Ace, are you even listening?”
Sometimes he’d channel-surf when he was talking to me, or I’d hear him tapping on his keyboard, engaged in an online chat during our conversation. But God forbid I’d get a call on the other line while he was talking, or if he got the sense I wasn’t giving him my full attention. He’d flip out. I know; he’s kind of an asshole.
“I’m listening,” he said. He sounded strange and grave.
I paused. “Did you ever get the sense that Max was someone …else?” I asked. “Did you ever see anything in him that would make you think there was something wrong with him? Like really wrong with him?”
He let go of a sigh, or maybe he was exhaling smoke—even though he’d given up cigarettes as part of his detox after rehab.
“Well,” he said softly, “I never saw him the way you saw him.”
I didn’t say anything; I could tell he was collecting his thoughts.
“He was always a hero to you,” he said finally. “You didn’t know he was your father, but maybe on some cellular level you did. You used to look at him with these wide eyes, this adoration on your face. I never understood your relationship. It confused me as a kid. I was never sure what you were seeing.”
I was surprised by what he said, by its presence and wisdom.
“What did you see?”
“Honestly? I saw someone angry and very lonely, someone who glommed on to our family because he didn’t have one of his own. He was always drunk, Ridley, with some prostitute on his arm.” He paused a second and inhaled sharply, telling me definitely that he was smoking. “I’m not sure why Ben and Grace allowed him so much unsupervised time with us. I was never sure what they saw in him, either.”
I took this all in.
“You know he hit me once, hard in the mouth,” he said.
“When?” I asked, surprised.
“I was thirteen, maybe. I was arguing with Mom.” I hadn’t heard him call her that in so long. He always called our parents Ben and Grace, as a way to express the distance he felt from them, I guess. “We were screaming at each other—I can’t remember about what. Seems like there was so much screaming between us. I can’t remember a whole lot of peace in our house, can you?”
I couldn’t answer him. We’d had such different childhoods, though we grew up in the same house with the same people. I’ve said before that the two of us extracted different people from our parents, saw different faces. From Max, too, I guess. Max had never so much as raised his voice to me, never mind his hand. He’d never even been stern with me.
Ace didn’t wait for me to answer. “He came at me quickly,” he said. “Told me not to speak to my mother like that, and he clocked me in the jaw.”
“With a closed fist?”
“Yeah. Probably not as hard as he could have, but hard enough.”
“What did Mom do?”
“She freaked. She kicked him out. She comforted me, put ice on my jaw, but she made me promise never to tell Dad.”
“Why not?”
He was quiet for a second. “I don’t know.”
I felt sorry for him, also angry with Max that he would hit my brother like that, and confused that my mother would want to keep the incident from my father.
Ace lied a lot; it’s an element of the addictive personality. He exaggerated much of the discord in our house, or so I thought most of the time. I’d always believed that it was his way of excusing the bad choices he’d made over the years. But he wasn’t lying about this. It lacked the usual self-conscious drama. It wasn’t followed by a tirade about how it made him feel and what it led him to do to himself.
“Do you believe me?” he asked. He sounded almost sad. The curse of the liar: When you have a truth to tell, no one believes.
“Of course I do,” I said. If we’d been beside each other, I would have wrapped my arms around him. “I’m sorry, Ace.”
“For what?”
I thought about it for a second. It seemed lonely for him that he’d had these feelings about Max. Max was my father’s best friend, my hero, my mother’s …I don’t even know what. It seemed so strange and sad that all along Ace was seeing Max as someone else completely, and that he might have been right.
“I don’t know,” I said finally.
I heard the metallic flick of a Zippo, the crackle of burning paper, and a sharp inhale.
“Ridley, is it even possible for you to keep yourself out of trouble?” he said with a long exhale. His usual arrogance and sarcasm were back. It was almost a relief.
“I didn’t ask for this. Not for any of it.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I mean, a year ago you could have chosen to turn away from all of this. You didn’t. Now you have the chance to turn all of this over to that FBI guy, but you’re not going to. You’re the one who’s always going on and on about choices, how they impact the course of our lives, blah, blah, blah. So what’s it going to be?”
No one likes their own philosophies thrown back at them. Though I had to admit that he was right in certain respects. I had made some questionable choices. I had been guilty of putting myself in the path of harm when I could have easily crossed the street. But sometimes turning away just isn’t an option.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I have to think.”
“Well, I bet I know where to find you tomorrow night at eight.”
I thought about the text message, about Jake. The fear in my chest made my breathing shallow.
“Ace?” I said, remembering suddenly what it felt like to be a kid, needing my big brother to chase nightmares away.
“Yeah?”
“Will you come with me?”
“Shit,” he said, drawing out the word softly. I thought of how he never wanted me to crawl into bed with him when we were little, but that he always shifted over to the side to give me room.
“Will you?” I said, surp
rised at how scared my voice sounded.
I heard him sigh. “Okay.”
I DRIFTED OFF into a fitful sleep on the couch, the cell phone in my hand. I woke up a couple of times, sure I’d heard it ringing, expecting to see Jake’s number blinking on the screen, only to find I’d imagined it. When it did finally ring, I answered it without even looking to see who it was.
“Jake?” I said.
“No. Not Jake.” Agent Grace.
“What time is it?”
“Three A.M.”
“What do you want?”
“Your boy is O negative, right?”
I thought of the pool of blood, how dark and thick it had been.
“Yeah,” I said. I knew this only because the time we’d been in the hospital together, I’d peeked at his chart. He is what they call a universal donor—he can give his blood to anyone but can receive blood only from another type O negative. This seemed so unfair to me. And Jake is most definitely a giver; he never asks for anything in return.
“The blood in his studio is AB positive.”
I felt something release its grip on my heart, let relief wash the tension from my muscles. Whatever had happened there, it hadn’t been Jake bleeding out on the floor. That was something. Then I wondered: Was it Jake who sent the text message?
“I thought you’d want to know.”
I didn’t say anything. It was uncharacteristically nice of him to call. But I figured he had another agenda.
“Did you happen to look at his laptop while you were there?” he asked me.
I thought about lying but couldn’t seem to force the words out.
“Don’t bother answering,” he said. “Your fingerprints are all over the keyboard.”
I found it fascinating that he could carry on an entire conversation without my having to say a word. It was a real skill.
“That website with the streaming video of London—does it mean anything to you?”
“No,” I said, just to feel as if I was part of the conversation. “I have no idea what it is.”