Lisa Unger - Sliver Of Truth

I have to believe now that I am not my father. That his DNA is not a contagion I carry in my body, a sleeper virus that might take hold of me one day and turn the blood in my veins to poison.

I think Dylan gave me an hour with the file and then returned to the room, sat back beside me. The file was open in my lap. There was more to read but I’d lost my nerve. I couldn’t bring myself to turn the page. In my mind, I saw Max standing over his mother’s beaten body, smiling ghoulishly. I saw him waiting outside Nick’s window staring up with soulless eyes, his very presence a terrible threat. I saw him punching my brother in the face with his closed fist.

“I’m sorry,” Dylan said.

I stared at the flames, which were flickering low. The air around me was growing colder. I could hardly believe the things I’d read, the photographs I’d seen. I tried to fit my brain around them, tried to make it work, but I felt like I do when I see images of grinding poverty or war on the television. You know it’s real but part of you just can’t accept what you’re seeing, so removed are you from the actual experience.

“I don’t know this man,” I said.

He nodded; he understood what I meant.

“Why did you show this to me?” I asked him mildly. It seemed as if someone was always handing me a file filled with bad news. I was starting to resent it.

He was quiet for a moment, just stared at the floor between his feet.

“We’ve talked about this before. I think you’re the only way to him.”

I remembered then our conversation that first day.

Do you know the number one reason why people in the witness protection program get found by their enemies and wind up dead?

Why?

Love.

Love.

They can’t stay away. They can’t help but make that call or show up incognito at a wedding or a funeral. I’ve seen his apartment. It’s practically a shrine to you. Max Smiley did some terrible things in his life, hurt a lot of people. But if he loved anyone, it was you.

I knew it was true. It had always been true. Max and I were connected. We would always find each other.

“You want to use me as bait,” I said without emotion.

“The truth is, Ridley, you’ve been bait for a while. We just haven’t had any bites until recently.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Jake Jacobsen has been using you since before he met you,” he said softly.

“It might have started out that way,” I admitted. “He wanted to get to Ben.”

Dylan shook his head, lowered his eyes to the floor again. The conversation seemed to pain him.

“He saw my picture in the Post,” I said, leaning forward. Something in my chest started to thump. “Same as Christian Luna did. It was a coincidence. He needed my help.”

“You think that’s how he found you?”

That day on the Brooklyn Bridge (it seemed like a lifetime ago) when Jake finally told me the truth (part of it, anyway), he admitted that he’d moved into my building to get close to me, to find a way to get closer to Ben. He needed to know more about Project Rescue and couldn’t think of another way. I’d forgiven him for that-a long time ago. I told Dylan as much.

“Think about it, Ridley. When did Jake move into that building?”

I searched my memory for something that might orient the event in the time line of my recent life. I thought of the morning I’d saved Justin Wheeler. Two things had delayed me in getting out of the building. First there was my mailbox overstuffed with bills and magazines and an angry note from my mailman. I’d retrieved the mail from my box and run it back up to my apartment. But before that, it had been my elderly neighbor Victoria. She stopped me to talk about the noisy man moving in upstairs. I felt my stomach bottom out as I remembered the conversation. It was a week later that Jake and I met face-to-face. As it came back to me, the present disappeared and all the events of our meeting and what followed swirled around me.

Our meeting and the passion and the drama that had followed had been so intense, so all-consuming. Maybe that’s why I never made the connection. Or maybe I just didn’t want to. I realized now the point Dylan was trying to make: Jake moved into my building the night before the single event that forever altered my world.

Was it possible? What did it mean? I’m not sure how long I sat there, analyzing the time line, trying to figure out a way that I might be wrong. A thick fog moved into my brain.

I had to force the words out. “Are you saying that he knew who I was…before I did?”

Dylan hung his head.

“How is that possible?” I felt so ashamed suddenly, like the kid who’d been the butt of a terrible joke at school, around whom everyone had gathered to laugh. I felt my face grow hot.

Acceptance was slow. Then, when I realized that it was true, I tried to think of something to make it all right that he’d lied to me about how he’d found me, a reason he would have to make up a false scenario as he did. Pathetic, I know. Anyway, I couldn’t think of anything. Then I started to wonder: If he’d lied about how he found me, what else had he lied about? I thought about the things Jake had told me. How he’d tracked Max to a bar in Jersey and confronted him about Project Rescue. How just a few weeks later Max was dead.

I’d come to believe that it had been Max’s realization of how much harm he’d done that led him to drink so much the night he died-that in a sense Max had killed himself by drinking and driving off that bridge. But the man in the dossier was not a man to die over the grief of others. The man in the dossier didn’t have a conscience at all. Did that mean Jake had something more to do with his death than I’d believed? Or something more to do with Max than he’d revealed? The possibilities were chilling.

“A lot of what you know about Jake is true, I think,” Dylan said kindly. “He didn’t make up the stuff about his childhood, about his quest to find out who he really is and where he came from.”

“How do you know?” I said angrily. “How do you know all this about Jake?”

“Because I’ve been watching him for years.”

I looked at him sitting there.

“Why?” I asked him.

He smiled at me sadly. The answer was clear. I spoke for him.

“Because he’s been watching me, waiting for Max to approach me. He never believed Max died that night, and he believed that one day Max would reach out for me, try to contact me. Is that what you’re telling me?”

“And when Max did, Jake would be sleeping beside you,” said Dylan. “He knew he’d be the first person you told.”

I felt as if someone was stepping on my chest. I thought of all my nights with Jake and all the love I’d had for him. The idea that it had all been a part of some design, or something to do to pass the time as he waited for Max to make contact, sliced me open.

“And you’d be listening when I did.”

He shrugged again. “Max Smiley is a man with the means, the resources, and the motives to drop off the face of the earth forever. As far as we know, he only has one weakness, one place in his heart that feels.”

I didn’t have to ask who or what that was. I thought about the patience it must have taken to wait day after day for Max to contact me, how badly Jake must have wanted it.

“I’ve never understood Jake’s obsession. All this time, I thought it was just his needing to know what happened to him, his wanting to bring Max and the other people responsible for Project Rescue to justice. I thought he just wanted some closure. But there has to be more to it than that.”

“That’s probably how it started.”

“Then?”

“My guess is that the more he learned about Max, the more obsessed he became with finding him. I think his obsession grew beyond his personal quest for answers. I think the search for Max became his whole reason for living. Eventually it started to define him.”