Sliver Of Truth

“He was always a hero to you,” he said finally. “You didn’t know he was your father, but maybe on some cellular level you did. You used to look at him with these wide eyes, this adoration on your face. I never understood your relationship. It confused me as a kid. I was never sure what you were seeing.”

I was surprised by what he said, by its presence and wisdom.

“What did you see?”

“Honestly? I saw someone angry and very lonely, someone who glommed on to our family because he didn’t have one of his own. He was always drunk, Ridley, with some prostitute on his arm.” He paused a second and inhaled sharply, telling me definitely that he was smoking. “I’m not sure why Ben and Grace allowed him so much unsupervised time with us. I was never sure what they saw in him, either.”

I took this all in.

“You know he hit me once, hard in the mouth,” he said.

“When?” I asked, surprised.

“I was thirteen, maybe. I was arguing with Mom.” I hadn’t heard him call her that in so long. He always called our parents Ben and Grace, as a way to express the distance he felt from them, I guess. “We were screaming at each other-I can’t remember about what. Seems like there was so much screaming between us. I can’t remember a whole lot of peace in our house, can you?”

I couldn’t answer him. We’d had such different childhoods, though we grew up in the same house with the same people. I’ve said before that the two of us extracted different people from our parents, saw different faces. From Max, too, I guess. Max had never so much as raised his voice to me, never mind his hand. He’d never even been stern with me.

Ace didn’t wait for me to answer. “He came at me quickly,” he said. “Told me not to speak to my mother like that, and he clocked me in the jaw.”

“With a closed fist?”

“Yeah. Probably not as hard as he could have, but hard enough.”

“What did Mom do?”

“She freaked. She kicked him out. She comforted me, put ice on my jaw, but she made me promise never to tell Dad.”

“Why not?”

He was quiet for a second. “I don’t know.”

I felt sorry for him, also angry with Max that he would hit my brother like that, and confused that my mother would want to keep the incident from my father.

Ace lied a lot; it’s an element of the addictive personality. He exaggerated much of the discord in our house, or so I thought most of the time. I’d always believed that it was his way of excusing the bad choices he’d made over the years. But he wasn’t lying about this. It lacked the usual self-conscious drama. It wasn’t followed by a tirade about how it made him feel and what it led him to do to himself.

“Do you believe me?” he asked. He sounded almost sad. The curse of the liar: When you have a truth to tell, no one believes.

“Of course I do,” I said. If we’d been beside each other, I would have wrapped my arms around him. “I’m sorry, Ace.”

“For what?”

I thought about it for a second. It seemed lonely for him that he’d had these feelings about Max. Max was my father’s best friend, my hero, my mother’s…I don’t even know what. It seemed so strange and sad that all along Ace was seeing Max as someone else completely, and that he might have been right.

“I don’t know,” I said finally.

I heard the metallic flick of a Zippo, the crackle of burning paper, and a sharp inhale.

“Ridley, is it even possible for you to keep yourself out of trouble?” he said with a long exhale. His usual arrogance and sarcasm were back. It was almost a relief.

“I didn’t ask for this. Not for any of it.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I mean, a year ago you could have chosen to turn away from all of this. You didn’t. Now you have the chance to turn all of this over to that FBI guy, but you’re not going to. You’re the one who’s always going on and on about choices, how they impact the course of our lives, blah, blah, blah. So what’s it going to be?”

No one likes their own philosophies thrown back at them. Though I had to admit that he was right in certain respects. I had made some questionable choices. I had been guilty of putting myself in the path of harm when I could have easily crossed the street. But sometimes turning away just isn’t an option.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I have to think.”

“Well, I bet I know where to find you tomorrow night at eight.”

I thought about the text message, about Jake. The fear in my chest made my breathing shallow.

“Ace?” I said, remembering suddenly what it felt like to be a kid, needing my big brother to chase nightmares away.

“Yeah?”

“Will you come with me?”

“Shit,” he said, drawing out the word softly. I thought of how he never wanted me to crawl into bed with him when we were little, but that he always shifted over to the side to give me room.

“Will you?” I said, surprised at how scared my voice sounded.

I heard him sigh. “Okay.”