Sliver of Truth (5 page)

“What?” he said sharply, looking at me in surprise. “Why?”

I handed him the envelope and moved over toward the couch, where I flung myself down like a bag of laundry. I told him about my encounter with Agent Grace and the FBI. I should have just kept my mouth shut, given the intensity of Jake’s obsessions. But I told him, probably because he was literally the only person in my life I could talk to about any of this. Any conversation relating to Max, or to the events that so changed all of our lives, was strictly forbidden in my family. Even Ace had suggested that I “move on” the last time I tried to talk to him about some things that haunt me still. Isn’t it funny how the people least impacted by tragedy are the most eager to move on? I was eager to move toward healing, believe me. But I was caught in this space between my parents, who wanted to pretend none of it had ever happened, and Jake, who seemed to think nothing else would ever happen again.

I finished talking and closed my eyes, heard Jake flipping through the photographs. When he didn’t say anything, I looked over at him as he sank into the chair across from me. I tried not to notice how hot he was in his black T-shirt and faded denims, or to watch the tattoos on his arm, the way they snaked around his muscles and disappeared into his sleeve. My body responded to him even without his touch.

“Well?” he said, raising his eyes from the photos to look at me.

“Well, what?” I said. “They weren’t able to make a case against my father. The prosecution’s case against Esme Gray was so weak they couldn’t hold her for more than twenty-four hours. They can’t really get Zack for things that started long before he was ever born.” I took a deep breath. “They’re looking for someone to prosecute and they’re willing to resurrect the dead to do it.”

I hated to even think about Esme, the nurse who had worked at my father’s practice and assisted him in his clinic since long before I was born. She’s also the mother of my ex-boyfriend Zack Gray. At one time, Esme and I were closer than I was to my own mother, but she was intimately involved in the shadow side of Project Rescue, as was Zack. I can no longer be close with either of them for more reasons than I can recount here.

Jake didn’t respond, just stared at the photos, one after another. There was something so strange on his face. He wore a half-smile but his eyes were dark. I saw him give a small shake of his head. An ambulance raced by, siren blaring, filling the apartment briefly with light and sound.

“What?” I asked him. “What are you thinking?”

“Nothing,” he said, putting the photos on the table. “I’m not thinking anything.”

He was lying. He put his head in his hands, rested his elbows on his knees, and released a deep sigh. I sat up and crossed my legs beneath me, watching him.

“What is it?”

He looked at me. “Is this him, Ridley? Is this Max?” There was something desperate in his voice. And something else. Was it fear?

“No,” I said. “Of course not. Max is dead. I saw his dead body in the casket. I scattered his ashes. He’s dead.”

“His face was unrecognizable, shredded by glass when he went through the windshield. The face you saw was reconstructed from a photograph.”

“It was him.” What Jake said was true. But I remembered Max’s hands, his rings, the small scar on his neck. There wasn’t an open-casket viewing for him, but we were able to see the body once it had been prepared for cremation. My father had arranged for postmortem reconstruction of his ruined face so that we could all say good-bye to something we recognized. I guess in retrospect it was pretty macabre (not to mention a huge waste of money), but at the time it felt right.

“Because if this is Max . . .” He let his voice trail off and kept his eyes on me.

“It’s not,” I said firmly.

“Ridley,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “There’s a lot you don’t know about this man.”

Sometimes Jake frightened me. That was the other thing that had started to eat away at our relationship. Not that I was physically afraid of him, but the intensity of his obsessions seemed like a natural disaster, something that could shift the ground beneath our feet, open a chasm in the earth. I always wondered when it would swallow him whole—and me along with it.

“You know what?” I said, rising. “I can’t do this with you right now.”

“Ridley.”

“Jake, I want you to go.” I walked over to the door and opened it.

“Listen to me—” he started but I stopped him with a raised hand.

“No, Jake,
you
listen to
me.
I can’t do this. You need to leave.” I didn’t want to hear what he had to say. Not at all.

He looked at me for a second. Then he nodded, stood up, and walked over to the bar that separated the kitchen from the living area. He took his leather jacket off one of the stools. I felt bad; I could see that I’d hurt him. But the fatigue I’d felt earlier had burrowed into my soul. I only wanted to close my eyes and disappear into blissful black.

“We do need to talk,” he said, leaning in and kissing me on the cheek at the doorway.

“Okay,” I said. “Tomorrow.”

He left then and I closed the door behind him. I walked across the loft and went into the bedroom we used to share. I kicked off my shoes and lay on the bed, sinking into the down comforter, and sobbed for I don’t know how long from sheer exhaustion and the crushing sadness that had settled into my heart and threatened never to leave.

I guess I fell asleep because it was hours later that the phone woke me. I looked at the clock to see that it was 3:33
A.M.
I reached over to the bedside table and picked up the receiver, thinking it was Ace. He called at all hours—typical of his recovering addict’s personality, totally self-centered. I, the recovering enabler, never hesitated to pick up.

“Hello,” I said.

There was a heavy static on the line, the sound of distant voices, a tinny strain of music. I glanced at the caller ID, which told me the number was unavailable.

“Hello?” I repeated.

I heard the sound of breathing on the line, then it went dead. I put down the receiver and waited for it to ring again but it didn’t. After a while I got up and brushed my teeth, stripped off my clothes, and got under the covers. I drifted back into an uneasy sleep.

4

You may remember that I am a writer. Up until recently, I wrote articles for major magazines and newspapers—features, profiles of celebrities and politicians, some travel pieces. I’ve done well and I’ve always loved my work. But like so many things, that has changed over the last year. (Not that I don’t still love my work, although I’m not sure
love
is the right word for it. It’s more that I’m indivisible from the work that I do, simply couldn’t be or do anything else.) Lately I’ve been attracted to more serious subjects, wanting to explore things that have real meaning. I’ve found myself interested in survivors, people who have faced extraordinary circumstances and not just lived to tell it, but gone on to create greater purpose in their lives. I am fascinated by human endurance, by the capacity some people seem to have to turn tragedy into victory. Imagine that. Personally, I felt as if I had the whole tragedy thing down. It was the other part that remained elusive.

The next morning, bright light flooded the loft as I made a pot of coffee. I turned the television on to watch the
Today
show as I got ready to head out, but muted it finally because I couldn’t stand the chatter, the incessant commercials. I zoned out on the screen for a minute as I sipped the strong coffee. There was a picture of a smiling man and woman in the corner of the screen. The words
Missing Couple
were emblazened above them. I think they’d been missing awhile, no clue to what might have happened to them. I got the horrible unsettled feeling I get about this type of thing when I considered the possibility that no one might ever know their fate. I don’t like unanswered questions, unsolved mysteries. They give me angst. I turned away from the screen. I had my own problems to worry about, not the least of which was a looming deadline for
O Magazine.

I peered out the window and saw that the people moving along Park Avenue South were in coats and hats. It was sunny but cold, my favorite kind of New York City day. I lingered for a while and found myself searching the street for the man I’d seen in the photographs. I looked for the tall, thin form, the sunken face. But, of course, he wasn’t there. And Max was dead. I wasn’t sure of much in my life. But I was sure of that.

I took a shower and got dressed. As I bundled myself up in my black wool peacoat and light-blue cashmere scarf, I pushed aside the events of yesterday and headed out the door.

Elena Jansen was a tiny bird of a woman, a former dancer with the New York City Ballet. She had a grace and strength to her carriage, a steel to her posture that made her seem powerful in spite of the fact that she just barely cleared five feet. Her eyes, a deep cocoa brown, were warm and liquid, her handshake firm and sure. I expected to find a shattered woman, to see some evidence of her tragedy in her physical bearing. But what I saw was defiance, a dare to the Universe to try to take her down again. I’d seen this before. In fact, I’d say it was the defining feature I’d found in the survivors I’d interviewed lately. A refusal to cower, to surrender, even when the world has revealed all its ugliness and horror. I imagined that sometimes I’d seen it in my own reflection, though that might have just been wishful thinking.

I followed her into a warm parlor overlooking Central Park. The room was decorated in deep reds with cream and gold accents. The walls were a gallery of photos of her years as a dancer and of her children. She was beautiful now in her early fifties, but as a younger woman, she had been truly stunning. I’d seen many of these photos in my preliminary research for this article I was writing for
O Magazine.

“Well, then,” she said, sitting elegantly in an overstuffed brocade chair by the window. She motioned toward the matching sofa across from her. I took off my coat and extracted my notebook and pen from my bag and sat. “Shall we begin?”

She seemed not to want to waste any time, launched right into her story. “People say ‘stormy,’ and there’s a kind of romance to it, you know?” she said, looking straight into my eyes. “But I don’t think many people understood how dark, how dangerous those storms could be. At first even
I
thought his temper, his jealousy were signs of how much he loved me. But I was a stupid girl. What did I know?”

She told me how she met her husband. He was a wealthy surgeon who fell in love with her as she danced across the stage at the Met, was bold enough to send her a dozen white roses every day until she consented to dinner. Their engagement was brief, their wedding one of the social events of the year. She constantly heard how lucky she was to have found a man so in love, so devoted. She believed it, too, so it took her longer to notice the signs—or maybe she just ignored them—that there was something wrong with him, something frightening about him.

Slowly, the things she’d found so charming became oppressive. Things that were once romantic—the way he planned all their evenings, showed up unexpectedly in cities where she was performing—started to feel controlling. After a year, she began to wonder if they’d married too quickly. She felt trapped, oppressed, and her performance suffered.

“Maybe
trapped
wasn’t the right word,” she said, looking at me. “Because I could have left, really. I guess I liked the illusion as much as everyone else. And there were plenty of good times. I don’t know . . .” She let her voice trail like a woman who’d spent a lot of time contemplating the past and still came up short on answers.

Then the children came, first Emiline, then Michael. By the time Alex, their third, was born, she had stopped dancing. Gene seemed more relaxed now that Elena was settled into her roles of wife and mother, with most of her independence and her life without him a memory. Not that the marriage was ever what she hoped it would be. Gene was an emotional and physical abuser, an angry controller demanding perfection from Elena at all times.

“But it just became normal,” she said with a shrug. “He never touched the children. And I developed techniques for avoiding his rage—he was predictable in the things that set him off. I just
managed.
”

“You never thought of leaving him?” I asked. It was hard for me to understand how a woman of such obvious strength would endure a marriage like that, but I knew enough to understand the psychology of an abused woman. There’s a systematic erosion of self-esteem, a slow fading of personal power.

She laughed. “I thought about it every day. But the consequences of leaving just seemed too monolithic. In a weird way, I didn’t have the energy—he robbed me of that.”

Emiline was eight, Michael six, and Alex just three when she finally realized she was unable to
manage
anymore and decided to leave her husband.

“There was no event I could point to, exactly. It was more like I looked at myself in the mirror one day and I saw a woman I didn’t recognize. I looked . . . haggard. My hair was brittle and going gray. There were black circles beneath my eyes. The corners of my mouth had started to turn down, as if I hadn’t smiled in years. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d laughed. I saw someone shelled out . . . empty. It wasn’t so much that I was afraid for myself—I’d abandoned myself a long time ago. I was afraid of what kind of role model I had become for my children.”

The divorce and custody battle that followed was textbook in its viciousness. But Elena attained full custody; Gene was allowed to have the children every third weekend. Elena had lobbied for supervised visitation only, but she lost that fight.

The weekend after their divorce was final and the uneasy custody arrangement had been settled, Gene picked up the kids for some time in the country. Elena would remember that he seemed relaxed and cordial, even regretful on their last encounter. He was taking the children to a rented cabin on the grounds of a resort in the Adirondack Mountains. Emiline loved birds and Michael was learning to horseback ride. Alex just adored his father and couldn’t wait for the canoe trip Gene had promised.