Lisa Unger - Sliver Of Truth

“I see what you’re trying to do,” I said.

“What?” he repeated, leaning back. I expected to see smug satisfaction on his face but I didn’t.

“It’s impossible.”

“Is it?”

“Yes.”

I looked again. They say it’s a person’s carriage that allows you to recognize him across the room or across the street. But I think it’s a person’s aura, the energy that radiates from within. The man in the photograph was greatly dissimilar in physical appearance, perhaps as much as a hundred pounds thinner than the man I remembered. He looked twenty years older. He seemed a damaged, hollowed-out person lacking any of the radiant warmth I’d basked in most of my life. But still there was something familiar about this man. If I had not personally seen his dead body moments before cremation, had I not with my own hands scattered his ashes from the Brooklyn Bridge, you might have been able to convince me that I was looking at the man I’d once known as my uncle Max, who was my biological father. But the fact was I had done all those things. And dead was dead.

“I’ll admit there’s a resemblance,” I said finally, after a brief but intense staring contest.

“We think there’s more than a resemblance.”

I sighed here and leaned back in my chair. “Okay, say you’re right. That would mean that you think Max staged his own death for whatever reason. Why would anyone go to all that trouble just to risk being discovered a couple of years later?”

Agent Grace regarded me for a minute.

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

“Why?” I asked, though I could probably guess.

“Love.”

“Love,” I repeated. That wouldn’t have been my guess.

“They can’t stay away. They can’t help but make that call or show up incognito at a wedding or a funeral.”

I didn’t say anything, and Agent Grace went on. “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.”

His words put a crush on my heart and I found I couldn’t meet his eyes.

“I don’t get it. Were you following me? How did you know about these photos? Do you have some kind of relationship with my photo lab?”

He didn’t answer me and I hadn’t really expected him to. I took a last glance at the pictures. That man could have been anyone; could even have been three different men, I decided.

“I don’t know who this is,” I told him. “If it is who you want it to be, then it’s news to me. If you want to talk more, it’ll have to be in the presence of my attorney.”

I clamped my mouth shut then. I knew he could make life hard for me. Since the Patriot Act, federal authorities have more latitude than ever. If they wanted to, they could hold me indefinitely without counsel if they claimed it had something to do with national security. (Which in my case would have been a stretch. But I promise you, stranger things have happened.) I think, though, Agent Grace sensed the truth: I had no idea who the man in those photos might be.

He looked at me hard with those eyes of his. I found myself inspecting the cut of his suit. Not cheap, exactly, but not Armani, either. I saw he had a bit of a five o’clock shadow coming in on his jaw. I noticed that the knuckles on his right hand were broken, not bleeding but raw. He rose suddenly, gave me a look he might have meant to be intimidating, and left without another word.

Shortly afterward, his partner came and told me he’d escort me from the building. He slid the photos on the table into the envelope Agent Grace had left behind. He handed them to me with a cordial smile. “Thank you and come again,” I expected him to say.

“Agent Grace wants you to have these…to look over more carefully.”

I took the envelope from him, briefly fantasized about ripping it into pieces and throwing the shreds in his face, then tucked it under my arm instead.

“What about my other photos and my bag?” I asked as we walked down a long white hallway.

“You’ll get your bag at the door. And your photos will be returned to you by mail once they’ve been analyzed.”

The whole thing suddenly seemed ridiculous and I found I didn’t much care whether I got the pictures back or not. In fact, I didn’t care if I ever took another photo again as long as I lived. My friend with the guitar had been right, they were inherently wrong, taken in an impulse to control something we couldn’t control. And, frankly, they’d never brought me anything but trouble.

I wish I could tell you where things went bad with Jake. I wish I could say he cheated or that I did. Or that he became abusive suddenly or that I stopped loving him. But none of those things have happened. It was more like he just slowly disappeared, one molecule at a time. There wasn’t a lot of fighting, never any unkindness. Just a slow fade to black.

There was the fact that he hated my family. Not that I could blame him, really. They hated Jake first. But even though a thorough federal investigation found my father innocent of wrongdoing concerning Project Rescue, Jake never believed that my father was completely innocent. (Note: When I refer to my father, I always mean Ben, even though Max is my biological father. Ben is and always has been my father in every way that counts. And even though a woman I don’t remember by the name of Teresa Stone is my biological mother, I’ll speak only of Grace as my mother.)

Anyway, none of them have behaved particularly well, leaving me fractured and torn between them. I was trying to heal my relationship with my parents, find a common ground where we could move forward together, but in doing so I was hurting Jake. And by loving and having a life with Jake, I was hurting my parents. (P.S. Ace, my brother, hates Jake, too. But he also hates our parents. The only one he doesn’t hate is me, or so he says.)

Maybe it was this tug-of-war where I got to play the rope that frayed the fabric of my relationship with Jake. Or maybe it was Jake’s various obsessions regarding his own past, Max, and Project Rescue, all the things I was trying so hard to move beyond. When I was with Jake I felt as if I was trying to walk up a down escalator.

He was in the apartment when I came home. I heard him move toward the door as I turned the key in the lock.

“Rid,” he said as I stepped into the apartment and into his arms. “Where have you been?”

I lingered there a minute, taking in his scent, feeling his body. The only thing that hadn’t changed between us was this ravenous physical appetite we had for each other. No matter how far apart we were mentally and emotionally, we could always connect physically. It was something about our chemistry, the way our bodies fit together. These days, there was rarely an encounter between us that didn’t end in sex.

“I was detained,” I said, feeling exhaustion weigh down my limbs. He pulled back from me, held on to my shoulders, and looked into my eyes.

“Detained,” he said. “Ridley, you should have called. I know things aren’t great between us, but I was worried about you. I expected you this afternoon.”

I looked at the clock; it was nearly eleven.

“No. I mean literally detained, by the federal authorities,” I said with a mirthless laugh.

“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.