Sliver Of Truth

“Max is dead.”

“You know what? You might be right. But you still need to find him, don’t you? You still need to know who he was…or who he is.”

I looked anywhere but into his face.

“Do you even know why?” he asked, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his thighs. I sensed another of those one-sided conversations coming on. “Because until you know, really know, you think you can’t find out the answer to an even more important question. You can’t know who you are. Who is Ridley Jones?”

“I know who I am,” I said, raising my chin at him. But he’d opened a chasm of fear through my center, a fear that he might be right, that I wouldn’t know who I was until I truly knew Max. Since last year, the only thing I knew for sure about myself was that I wasn’t Ben and Grace’s daughter. That I wasn’t the good child of good people. I didn’t know whose daughter I was, not really. I had a better knowledge of my biology, but that was it.

You might be thinking that I am wrong. You might be thinking that if I was raised by Ben and Grace, taught and loved by them, then they are the people I come from-they are my true parents. And of course, in part that’s right. But we’re more than just our experiences, more than the lessons we have learned, aren’t we? Isn’t there some mystery to us? Any mother will tell you that her child was born with at least a part of his own unique personality, some likes and dislikes that had nothing to do with learning or experience. That was the piece of myself I was missing. I was missing my mystery, the part that existed before I was born, that lived in the strands of Max’s DNA. If I didn’t know him, how could I ever know myself? For some reason, I didn’t have the same burning questions about Teresa Stone, my biological mother. She seemed distant and almost like a myth I didn’t quite believe. Maybe those questions would come later. Max occupied this huge space in my life.

I’d been so hard on Jake for his obsession with Max. I guess I was really angry with myself for having one of my own.

“Do you?” Agent Grace asked. “Do you know who you are?”

“Yes,” I said, defensively.

“So why are you chasing him?” he asked.

I gave a little laugh. “I’m not chasing him. Why are you chasing him?”

“It’s my job.”

“No,” I said, sitting down beside him and looking at him hard. “It’s more than that.” Now it was his turn to look away. It wasn’t until that moment that I realized why I didn’t trust this man. He had an agenda, something that ran deeper than just a drive to do his job. He needed something from Max, too. I had sensed it in him, without being able to name what I was feeling.

“What is it, Dylan?” It was the first time I’d called him that. It felt right all of a sudden, made us equals. I’d noticed he’d started calling me Ridley a while back, though I’d denied him that privilege more than once. “What are you looking for?”

I expected him to snap at me or to tell me he didn’t have to answer any of my questions. But he released a long breath instead, let his shoulders relax with it a little. I saw something I hadn’t seen on his face before. It made him look older somehow, sharper and sadder around the eyes.

“Max Smiley-” he started, and then stopped, shut his mouth into a firm, tight line. The words seemed to stick in his throat. He looked at something off in the distance, something very far away. I didn’t push him, cast my eyes to the concrete so it didn’t seem as if I was staring at him. I shoved my hands in my pockets against the deepening cold.

After a while, maybe a minute, maybe five, he said, “Max Smiley killed my mother.”

I LET HIS words hang in the air, mingle with the sounds of traffic and distant salsa music. Somewhere I heard a basketball bouncing on concrete, slow and solitary. In the distance I caught sight of a painfully thin teenage boy alone on a court, shooting for the basket and missing.

I didn’t know what to ask him first. How? When? Why? The information spread through my body. I tingled with it; a headache started a dull roar behind my eyes.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Forget it,” he said. “It’s irrelevant.”

I put a hand on his arm but quickly withdrew it.

“Don’t do that,” I said. He still had his eyes on that faraway place. “Tell me what happened. If you didn’t want to, you wouldn’t have brought me here, you wouldn’t have said anything at all.”

I thought about Jake then, all the secrets in his past that I’d had to find out slowly, sifting through layers of lies and half-truths. The wondering of where he was and why he hadn’t called was like having a sprained ankle-I was walking around but was always mindful of the pain. Since we met, there’d been only one other time that he’d disappeared like this, and that had occurred amid desperate circumstances. I’d wondered more than once if maybe he had killed Esme, if he was on the run. But I couldn’t really see it. Or maybe I just didn’t want to acknowledge the possibility that Jake’s rage might have finally got the best of him.

“The details aren’t important,” he said.