Sliver Of Truth

I could see my breath cloud and my feet were numb. I’d waited a couple of hours, was prepared to wait longer if necessary. As the sun started to set, I saw her get off a bus on the corner and walk toward me. She looked thin and hunched over in a plain wool coat and a blue woolen hat. She carried grocery bags, her eyes on the sidewalk as she approached her house. At the gate, she paused, looked up at me. She shook her head.

“I can’t talk to you,” she said. “You know that.”

“The investigation’s over. You can talk if you want to.”

She put down her groceries and unlatched the gate, walked up the path. I didn’t get up to help her. It wasn’t like that anymore.

“Okay,” she said. “Then I don’t want to. I have nothing to say to you, little girl.”

She looked drawn and pale as she unlatched the door. Black smudges under her eyes told me she wasn’t sleeping well at night, and something within me took a cold, dark victory in that. I didn’t get up as she unlocked the door and pulled her groceries inside. She closed the door; I heard it lock. I walked over and looked at her through the glass.

“I know he’s alive,” I told her loudly. I didn’t really know that. I was, in fact, convinced that he was dead. But I wanted to see what her reaction would be.

She brought her face close to the glass. I expected to see fear; instead I saw some combination of anger and pity.

“Have you lost your mind?” she asked me.

“You identified the body that night,” I said. “Why didn’t my father do it?”

“Because he couldn’t bear it, Ridley. What do you think? He couldn’t stand to see his best friend’s face shredded by glass, unrecognizable, see him dead upon a gurney. He called me. I came and I spared him that.”

“Why you? Why not my mother?”

“How the hell should I know?” she snapped. Her eyes looked wild.

“You’re sure it was him? Or did you lie about that, too?”

She closed her eyes and shook her head. “You should think about getting professional help,” she said unkindly.

I let a beat pass. I looked for the person I used to love, but she was gone in a way more total than if she had died.

“What are you afraid of, Esme?” I asked finally. I was surprised to hear my voice infused with sadness.

Her face went pale, I think more out of rage than anything else. And hatred. She hated me and I could see it, could feel it coming off of her in waves. “I’m afraid of you, Ridley,” she said finally. “You’ve destroyed us all and you’re still coming around with a sledgehammer. You should be ashamed for what you’ve done.”

I laughed, fogging the glass between us. It sounded loud and unpleasant even to my own ears. I knew she believed all of what had happened was my fault. I knew my parents felt that way a little, too. It was amazing how this had become about what I had done to them. It was a staggering show of narcissism, but I guess it’s the same narcissism that allowed them to do what they did to all those children, to me. They would have needed to be utterly convinced of their own self-righteousness. It made me a little sick sometimes; I tried not to think about it. I think it was the single reason that Jake disbelieved my father’s claims of innocence, that he couldn’t forgive.

Once upon a time, it would have hurt to know that Esme hated me. Now it just made me angry.

“I’ll keep swinging until I know all the answers,” I said with a smile.

“You do and you’ll wind up like that New York Times reporter,” she said with such venom that I took a step back. Her words set off bottle rockets in my chest.

“What?” I asked her. “What did you say? Are you talking about Myra Lyall?”

She gave me a dark look and I swear I saw the corners of her mouth turn up in a sick smile. She closed the curtain on me then, and I heard her walk down the hall away from me. Behind the gauzy material I saw her shadow disappear through a bright doorway. I called after her a few times, pounding on the door, but she never answered. I noticed the kids on the street had stopped playing their game. Some of them were staring at me and some of them were walking off.

Finally I gave up and walked toward the train, my heart pounding, head swimming. I was so shocked by what she had said that I couldn’t even come up with any questions to ask myself. I just felt this belly full of fear, this weird sense that I was about to walk off the edge of my life…again. Everyone around me seemed full of malice; the sky had taken on a gray cast and threatened snow.

MY PARENTS LIVED only one train stop from Esme’s, so I headed that way. I knew they were gone, having left last week for a month-long Mediterranean cruise. My father had been pushed into semiretirement, so now they were “finally doing some of the traveling we’d always wanted to do,” as my mother said with a kind of forced brightness. I was happy for them (not really), but something about it galled me, too. I felt wrecked inside and they seemed to be so blithely moving on. It hurt somehow that they could move on while I couldn’t. I know that’s childish.