Page 45 of The Lie Maker

I shrugged. “Honestly, I have no idea. I don’t know what they found, in my room, the rest of the house, in those computer towers. But they found something.”

“How do you know?”

I smiled. “Because they had leverage.”

“Okay.”

“For a while, I didn’t see him at all. They had him in custody, and his lawyer—it was a woman later, Dad switched—was doing what she could to get him out. She came to the house a few times, and I’d hear my mom on the phone with her, hearing words like ‘deal’ and ‘testify’ and ‘life.’ Sometimes, she’d actually talk to me about it, when she’d had too much to drink. I think that’s when my mom’s drinking really started to become a problem, but that’s another story. No matter how many times I asked, she wouldn’t tell me what Dad had done, just that he was in a lot of trouble, that he could go away for a long time. But one day she said there was some kind of deal, that if my father agreed to cooperate he might not have to go to prison.”

I felt my chin quiver at the memory. I’d been doing pretty well, telling this story without getting emotional, but there was something about that moment, when my mother talked about how my father was being offered a way out. I speculated that the reason it got to me, after all this time, was because that was when I convinced myself Dad would come home and everything would return to normal, that we’d be a family again.

I could not have been more wrong.

“Mom said it all hinged on Dad telling the police things they really wanted to know. I remember saying that it was like telling. Remember when you were a kid, and you’d threaten to get one of your friends in trouble, you’d say ‘I’m telling!’ You know, a tattletale.”

“I remember.”

“And Mom said, yes, it was like that, but it was different this time because he’d be telling on a very bad person. I thought, Okay, if that’s what it takes. But there was a catch. He wouldn’t go to jail, but he wouldn’t be safe. The people he was testifying against, they’d want to get even. I was familiar with that concept, too. Like, when you were a kid and you tattled on someone, the next day, walking to school, watch out, right? You were likely to get the shit beat out of you. Except, as my mom explained, in Dad’s case it would be much worse. If they could, they’d do it before he testified, but they’d still do it after, to send a message. That scared me, knowing there were people out there who wanted to kill my dad.”

“When did you hear about the plan to give him a new identity, relocate him?”

“Not sure,” I said. I glanced out the window. We were almost back to my place. “Soon enough, I guess. I had mixed feelings about it when I found out what was involved. I was glad there was a plan to keep my dad alive, but we’d have to move. I’d lose all my friends and never be able to see them again. But as time passed, that seemed less important. Other kids stopped having anything to do with me. Their parents read the papers, watched the news. And the morning the house was raided, well, the whole street took notice. All those flashing lights on the street woke people up. I was the kid whose dad was in deep shit. My friends were forbidden to have anything to do with me. And my enemies, if you could call them that, were emboldened. I was teased, bullied, beat up. So I was coming around to the idea. Starting over somewhere else, where nobody would know what trouble my dad had been in, where nobody knew me, that might not be so bad after all.” I sighed. “But there was a problem.”

“Your mother.”

Scorsese had turned the van down my street.

“She wanted no part of it. She had extended family she wasn’t about to walk away from. Her parents were still alive, although not in the greatest health, and she refused to abandon them in their later years. The way she saw it, this was my father’s mess, and his alone. I think she loved him, in spite of everything, but this was a sacrifice she wasn’t prepared to make. He kept pressuring her to change her mind. How would she survive? What if the guys who wanted him dead settled on her and me? Mom said she wasn’t worried about that. Although maybe she should have been.”

“What do you mean?”

“There were a few scares after Dad left. Threatening phone calls. Anonymous letters. Notes left under the windshield wiper on Mom’s car when she went to the market. Saying something would happen to me if she didn’t tell where Dad was.”

“Christ,” Gwen said. “Did they ever actually hurt you or your mother?”

I shook my head. “But the threat hung over us for a long time. I still... I still look over my shoulder, wondering.” I paused, wondering whether to bring it up. “My car got torched the other night. Probably just bad wiring, or worst case, some random act of vandalism. But you always wonder whether someone is sending a message.”

“It’s always there,” she said.

“After I finished college, I kind of just disappeared for several years. Hitchhiked around the country, did random jobs for cash, wasn’t online at all. I needed a break. I needed to go for a period of feeling invisible until I felt it was safe to poke my head up above the parapet. That was when I got a newspaper job. And it’s why, when I wrote those two books, I did them under another name.”

“I get it.”

“So can you do it?”

“Do it?”

“Connect me with my father.”

“I don’t know. Why’s it important?”

“I’d like to know if he’s okay. For all I know, the pandemic got him. There are things going on in my life I’d like to tell him about.” I paused. “He’s my dad. I’d like to see him.”

Gwen considered what I’d had to say. “I don’t know that I can deliver,” she said. “We have strict protocols. We get a hundred requests like yours every day. And in only the rarest of circumstances do we grant them. Let me give you an example. We had an incident not too long ago. Kid needed a liver transplant. Best possible outcome involved a liver donation from the father, who, like your dad, had been relocated and didn’t take the family with him. We reached out, presented the situation to him, asked if he was willing to be part of the procedure.”

“What’d he say?” I asked.

“He passed.”

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