Beautiful Lies: A Novel by Lisa Unger

Author:Lisa Unger [Unger, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 0739325809
Publisher: Broadway
Published: 2006-04-18T00:00:00+00:00

I am not a very good driver. Partly from inexperience and partly because of the tendency of my mind to wander. I got into a bunch of accidents as a teenager. Minor stuff, always my fault, leading my father to lament, “Ridley, do you ever leave the house and not hit something?” Their insurance went up, the repair bills were not small. But I think their major concern was how much worse it could get. Every fender bender was a reminder of the frailty of my life and how my independence meant that they could no longer be on the lookout for dangers that might befall me. They represented a loss of control.

I rented a black Jeep Grand Cherokee (unbelievably expensive) in the West Village later that day and headed out of the city. I crawled up the Henry Hudson through a gauntlet of construction sites (which I swear have been under way for more than fifteen years) and I finally broke free of the snarl at the exit to the George Washington Bridge. I was headed to Jersey. Not to my parents, as I’d promised Harriman. No. I couldn’t have done that, good as it sounded. There was no going home now.

I’m no private investigator, unlike some people, but I am a writer. Which means I’ve followed up a few leads, tracked down a few people over the years. I’ve convinced a few reticent people to talk to me. After leaving Alexander Harriman, I’d returned to my place and sat on the couch with a giant cup of coffee and stared out my window at the concrete wall and dark windows that were my view. I thought about my story. And I asked myself something that I often wondered when I was writing an article or a profile: If I was reading this story, what would I want to know next? What are the big questions left unanswered so far?

I had no intention of going home to my parents or of pretending none of this had ever happened. It wasn’t an option. The point of safe return had passed when I agreed to meet Christian Luna in the park. The path back to my old life was closed completely and there was nothing to do but move forward.

I felt unbelievably calm. You’d think I’d have been a complete basket case, but I remember something a psychologist once told me, someone my parents and I saw after my uncle Max died and my father decided we all needed grief counseling. She said that grief is not linear. It’s not a slow progression forward toward healing, it’s a zigzag, a terrible back-and-forth from devastated to okay until finally there are more okay patches and fewer devastated ones. The mind can’t handle emotions like grief and terror for any sustained period of time, so it takes some downtime, she’d said. I’m not sure that I was in a state of grief, but maybe. Christian Luna, a man who believed himself to be my father, was dead.

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