“But it wasn’t the money, not really,” I said. “That wasn’t why they didn’t take him in, was it?”
Nicholas shook his head.
“You told your parents what you saw that night. And they believed you.”
“Yes,” he said. “That’s right.”
“But no one said anything as Race was arrested and stood trial. You were all so terrified of a sixteen-year-old boy?”
“We waited,” he said, clearing his throat. “Hoped that Race would be found innocent. That we’d never have to come forward with what we knew. Even when Race was convicted, my parents still didn’t want me to go forward.”
“Because they were afraid of Max?”
Nicholas released another sigh. “No, it wasn’t that. I think they just didn’t want Max to go to prison. Maybe guilt that they hadn’t stepped in earlier to stop some of the violence in that house. And, well, Race might have been innocent of that murder, but in a lot of ways he was guiltier than Max. That kid was raised with violence; he didn’t even know another way. My parents thought that maybe he just didn’t know his own strength that night. That a lifetime of suffering and regret was punishment enough.”
“But you didn’t think so?”
“He wasn’t sorry,” said Nicholas, holding my eyes. “I could tell by the way he looked at me. He was so sad-faced for everyone else. But when we were alone, he turned those eyes on me and I knew. He killed his mother, accused and then testified against his father. Effectively, he killed them both. And I don’t think he lost a night’s sleep over it.”
I tried to reconcile this version of Max with the man I knew. The child Nick Smiley described was psychotic—a murderer and a liar, a scheming manipu-lator. I had never seen
anything
in Max that hinted of that. Never.
“That’s why you came forward finally? Because you didn’t think he was sorry?”
“I don’t know that you’d call what I did coming forward. It was a half-assed attempt to undo one of many wrongs that had been done that night and all the nights leading up to it. I was racked with guilt, couldn’t sleep and couldn’t eat. Finally my parents took me to the police station and I told the cops that I saw someone else there that night. I told them about the walkie-talkies, that I hadn’t seen Race’s car, and that there was another man there, a man I’d never seen before. I never told them about Max.”
He took a sip of his tea, which I knew from my own cup was stone-cold by now.
“I told them I hadn’t come forward because I was afraid this stranger I made up would come and kill me and my family, too.”
“They didn’t believe you?”
He shook his head. “There was nothing to show that anyone else but Race had been there. No one else saw a strange car or saw anyone come or go other than Race later that night. They told me I’d just had a nightmare. I mean, they weren’t going to reopen a case that was long closed, the accused tried and convicted, because of the ramblings of a kid. But someone in the station leaked the story and an article ran in the paper the next day.
“That night I woke up to rocks being thrown at my window. I looked out on the street and saw Max standing there. He had a crowbar in his hand. He just stood there under the streetlight and I could see those eyes. He knew I was a chicken—hell, he’d been pushing me around since we were in diapers. I never said another word.”
I sat in silence. He seemed like an honest man, simple and down-to-earth. The kitchen was neat and clean, like any working-class suburban kitchen—nothing fancy but everything in decent shape. His story had just enough detail but not too much flourish. It had the ring of truth—I could see that he believed the things he’d said, that it still haunted him. I didn’t know what to say. I must have just stared at him with my horror and disbelief because he shifted uncomfortably beneath my gaze.
“I told you to let the dead lie,” he said. “You should have listened.”
Nobody likes a know-it-all.
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6
My uncle Max (of course, he’ll always be that in my mind) was a great bear of a man—big in stature with a heart and a personality to match. He was an amusement park, a toy store, an ice-cream parlor. Occasionally, my parents would travel and have Ace and me stay with him (and a nanny, of course, because Max was not one for tying shoes and making grilled-cheese sandwiches). Those memories are among the happiest of my childhood. I never saw him without a smile on his face. His arms were always filled with gifts, his pockets full of money or candy or small surprises.
At least these are my memories of him. These days, though, I distrust my recollection of the past—not the actual events, necessarily, but the layers and nuances that clearly had eluded me. So much of my life was built on a foundation of lies that my past seems like a dark fairy tale—pretty on the surface but with a terrible black undercurrent. There were monsters under my bed and I was too naive to even fear the dark.
On the plane back to New York, I searched my memories for fissures, for the spaces through which the “real” Max might show himself, this psychotic and abused young man who killed his mother and framed his father and terrorized his young cousin into silence. The “real” Max, my father.
I thought about the last conversation I had with him.
It was nearing the end of my parents’ annual Christmas Eve party. My father had led a group out for the inevitable neighborhood candlelight stroll, and my mother was furiously scrubbing pots in the kitchen, rebuffing all of my attempts to help her with the usual implication that no one could do it the way she could. Whatever. I wandered into the front room in search of more cookies and found my uncle Max sitting by himself in the dim light of the room before our gigantic Christmas tree. That’s one of my favorite things in the world, the sight of a lit Christmas tree in a darkened room. I plopped myself down next to him on the couch and he threw an arm around my shoulder, balancing a glass of bourbon on his knee with his free hand.
“What’s up, Uncle Max?”
“Not much, kid. Nice party.”
“Yeah.”
We sat like that in a companionable silence for a while until something made me look up at him. He was crying, not making a sound, thin lines of tears streaming down his face. His expression was almost blank in its hopeless sadness. I think I just stared at him in shock. I grabbed his big bear-claw hand in both of mine.
“What is it, Uncle Max?” I whispered, as if afraid that someone would find him like this, his true face exposed to the world. I wanted to protect him.
“It’s all coming back on me, Ridley.”
“What is?”
“All the good I tried to do. I fucked it up. Man, I fucked it up so bad.” There was a shake in his voice.
I shook my head. I was thinking, He’s drunk. He’s just drunk. But he grabbed me then by both of my shoulders, not hard but passionately. His eyes were bright and clear in his desperation.
“You’re happy, right, Ridley? You grew up loved, safe. Right?”
“Yes, Uncle Max. Of course,” I said, wanting so badly to reassure him, though I was uncertain why my happiness meant so much to him at that moment. He nodded and loosened his grip on me but still looked at me dead in the eye. “Ridley,” he said, “you might be the only good I’ve ever done.”
“What’s going on? Max?” We both turned to see my father standing in the doorway. He was just a black form surrounded by light and his voice sounded odd. Something foreign had crept into him. Max’s whole body seemed to stiffen, and he released me as if I’d burned his hands.
“Max, let’s talk,” said my father, and Max rose. I followed him through the doorway and my father placed a hand on my shoulder. Max continued and walked through the French doors that led to my father’s study. His shoulders sagged and his head was down, but he turned to give me a smile before he disappeared behind the closing doors.
“What’s wrong with him?” I asked my father.
“Don’t worry, lullaby,” he said with a forced lightness. “Uncle Max has had a bit too much to drink. He’s got a lot of demons; sometimes the bourbon lets them loose.”
“But what was he talking about?” I asked stubbornly, having the sense that I was being shut out of something important.
“Ridley,” said my father, too sternly. He caught himself and softened his tone. “Really, honey, don’t worry about Max. It’s the bourbon talking.”
He walked away from me and disappeared behind his study doors. I hovered there a minute, heard the rumbling of their voices behind the oak. I knew the impossibility of listening at those thick doors; I’d tried it many times as a kid. Plus, I ran into my favorite aunt in the hallway. You remember her, Auntie Denial. She wrapped her arms around me and whispered comforting sentiments:
Just the bourbon. Just Max’s demons talking. You know Max. Tomorrow he’ll be fine.
As fragile as she is, she’s powerful when you cooperate with her, when you let her spin her web around you. Yes, as long as you don’t look her in the face, she’ll wrap you in a cocoon. It’s safe and warm in there. So much nicer than the alternative.
That’s the last time I saw my uncle Max. His face still wet with tears and flushed with bourbon, his sad smile, his final words to me.
Ridley, you might be the only good I’ve ever done.
Those words had taken on different meanings for me with every new thing I’d learned about Max. They meant one thing when I thought he was just my sad uncle whom I had loved and who had died later that night. They meant another when I found out he was my father, a man who’d made so many awful mistakes, who’d failed me in so many ways. I wondered what they’d mean to me at the end of the road I found myself on now. I flashed on the articles in Jake’s files—those grisly crimes, those missing women, children and girls abducted from nightclubs and sold into prostitution. Why had he saved those articles? What did it have to do with Max? And why was the FBI still interested in him?
The man next to me snored softly, his head leaning at an awkward angle against the airplane window. The girl across the aisle read a Lee Child novel. Normal people leading normal lives. Maybe. They probably thought the same of me.
I found the harder I reached for my memories of Max, the more vague and nebulous they became. One thing was certain, though: If Nick Smiley was right, if Max was who Nick believed him to be, then I had never met that man. He’d been so well-hidden behind a mask that I’d never even caught a glance. I’d seen only a sliver of the man, the part of himself he’d allowed me to see.
In the cab on the way home from La Guardia, I pulled the cell phone from my bag. Yes, I’d kept my cell phone in spite of my repeated threats to get rid of it. You might remember my disdain for the things (I hate them even more than I do digital cameras). Cell phones are just another excuse for people to not be present, another reason for them to be even ruder and more unthinking than they normally are. But what can I say? I got hooked on the convenience.
There were three calls from Jake, according to the log, but no messages. I was aching to call someone. Not Jake; I didn’t want to fan the flame of his obsession. I couldn’t call Ace or my father; neither of them would want to hear the questions I had to ask (though my father was the most logical person to go to). I hadn’t had a real conversation with my mother in over a year. I leaned my head back against the vinyl seat and watched the glow of red taillights and white headlamps blur in the darkness.
Then the phone, still in my hand, started to ring. I didn’t recognize the number on the caller ID, but the 917 exchange told me it was a wireless phone. I picked up out of sheer loneliness.
“Detroit’s nice this time of year,” said a low male voice when I answered. “If you like shitholes.”
“Who is this?” I said, my stomach clenching. Nobody knew I’d been to Detroit. I’d told no one, took off that morning, paid a ridiculous sum for a round-trip same-day ticket.
“Let me guess. The pictures got to you, right? Then I suppose you talked to your boyfriend. Has anyone ever told you that you have an investigative mind? You might have missed your calling.”
“Agent Grace?” I said, annoyance replacing trepidation, a feeling that was beginning to characterize our encounters.
“So what did Nick Smiley tell you?”
“That Max was a psychopath,” I answered, figuring he probably already knew that much. “A killer.”
“Do you believe him?”
“I don’t know what to believe anymore,” I said.
“An interesting fact about Nick Smiley: Did he tell you that he is a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic who has been doped up on various medications for the last twenty years on and off?”
“No,” I said. “He failed to mention that.” Something like relief made the muscles in my shoulders relax a bit.
“Doesn’t make him a liar. Just makes his version of the truth questionable.”
Isn’t that what the truth comes down to? An agreement of variations? Think about your last family drama or the last fight you had with your spouse. What really happened? Who said what and when? Who was the instigator and who was the reactor? Is there an absolute truth, one that exists separately from the personal variations? Maybe. But maybe not. Quantum physics tells us that life is a series of possibilities existing side by side in any given moment; it is our choices that create our version of reality. Nick Smiley has chosen his memory of Max. I have chosen mine. Who’s right? But maybe the truth is that Max was a shape shifter, becoming what he needed to be to control whatever situation he was in. He controlled Nick with terror, me with adoration, and kept his true form hidden from both of us.
“So what are you trying to tell me?” I asked him. “And why are you following me?”
“I don’t have to answer your questions,” he said calmly.
I thought on it for a second. First they snatch me on the street and take my photographs, then they let me go after showing me blowups of a man they obviously believe is Max even though I know him to be dead. Then Agent Grace makes this call, clearly toying with me, clearly letting me know that they’re on my every move. I couldn’t figure out his agenda, what he was trying to accomplish. Maybe he was just lonely, alone with his obsession, like me, like Jake. Maybe he needed someone to talk to.