Page 52 of The Lies We Play

Not because of Creed.

Because of her.

Only half her face is visible, blurred by motion, but I know the angle of her jaw. The dark sweep of her hair. The way her hand is lifted as if she were about to make a point and expected the world to take notes. I see the tattoo. The Celtic knot on the inside of her wrist, just like mine.

Pain splits behind my eyes.

I lean against the brick wall, breathing through it. Rain starts in earnest now, tapping the awning above me. People hurry past. No one stops.

Manhattan is kind that way.

I put the phone away. I hail a cab.

I am surprised when my mouth says, “Chelsea” instead of heading home to Park Avenue.

The driver neither asks why nor understands my hesitation. He pulls into traffic the way New York drivers pull into traffic. When we stop, the cab is parked outside a building I have never seen and have always known.

Pre-war. Six floors. Brick, the color of old wine. A Mexican restaurant on the ground floor that was not always Mexican. A canopy that was green when I am sure it should not have been green. A doorman I have never met, whose face doesn't look up at the cab.

I sit there for almost a minute.

I don't get out.

I can’t tell the driver why.

What I know is that whatever is upstairs in that building, or what was upstairs in that building, is not for the version of me sitting in this cab right now. The version of me who could walk into that lobby is not a version I have access to yet. The version of me who could ride that elevator and stand at that door and knock is a man who has not been inside this body in a long time. That man is trying very hard to come back, but he is not back yet, and I will not knock on a door I don't have the right to knock on with hands my family has been signing paperwork for.

“Sorry,” I say. “Take me back uptown.”

The driver shrugs, mumbling something about it’s your money, buddy. He pulls away from the curb.

The building gets smaller in the rear window.

I don't look at it.

He drops me a few blocks away from my place. By the time I reach my apartment, my shirt is damp from rain and sweat. The doorman says good evening. I nod, resign to come back to a life I don’t want. Upstairs, the rooms are lit the way my stepmother prefers: lamps warm, overheads dim, art positioned to imply history instead of taste.

There is too much happening in my head, and then I hear it.

Talk to the lawyer, son.

Cornelius’s voice. Not in the boardroom this time. In my own apartment. Behind the bookcase, behind the lamps my stepmother arranged, behind the careful museum-piece that has been built around me for ten years.

Talk to the lawyer.

For a second, I don't know which lawyer he—or my mind—is referring to. I take a shower, change, and that’s when I know.

Nine years ago, at the first hearing of my conservatorship—the hearing I'm not supposed to remember and can only remember in pieces—there was a man at the back of the courtroom in a brown suit who was not on my family’s payroll. Fitzhenry Everhart. He had been hired by someone. He left the case three weeks in. The reason given to the family was personal conflict.

The reason he gave to me, in a hallway, three minutes before he walked out of my life, was: Call when you’re ready—tell no one about this.

I open the drawer. The one that looks like a trash can. No one cares to look into it. There are notebooks, loose pages, photographs, napkins, receipts, medical appointment cards—anything I have collected in nine years when memory arrived faster than explanation. I have told no one about any of it. Not Everett. Not my stepmother. Not the neurologist my family likes because he uses words like “stability” and “management” with spiritual conviction.

I spread the fragments across the desk.

A sketch of a ring, another of a wedding band.

A sentence in my handwriting: She hates the word gentle.