Beautiful Lies by Lisa Unger Page B

renovations it had been divided into two smaller rooms with an adjoining bathroom. It was a separate universe from the rest of the house, and the master bedroom where my parents slept on the ground floor, overlooking my mother’s garden. A baby monitor left over from my infancy served as an intercom in case I needed my parents in the night. If I needed them, I could turn it on and call out. But when I woke in the night, frightened from dreams or thirsty or just lonely, it was Ace that I wanted.
    I would slip out of my bed and walk softly across my carpet in the dark, through the bathroom that adjoined our rooms. I could see the shadow of the great oak tree dancing in front of his window, hear the heavy breathing of his sound sleep, see the outlines of his
Star Wars
action figures on their shelf, the pile of books on his desk; I could smell the scent of Johnson’s baby shampoo, which we both used long after we weren’t babies anymore. Pushing myself up onto his bed and into the curl of his body, I would always wake him.
    “Ridley,” he would say, his sleepy voice a combination of annoyance and resignation and love. “Go back to your own bed.”
    “I will,” I’d say as he draped an arm around me and fell back to sleep. “In a minute.”
    I’m not sure I’ve ever slept that well again. You get too old for that kind of comfort, you know? That innocent physical closeness where all you want from other bodies is their cozy, gentle warmth, like puppies in a litter. As you approach adolescence and develop a sexual consciousness of your body, contact with other bodies becomes charged. It happened to Ace first, of course. He started closing the bathroom doors when he got up to pee in the night. The first time I heard him do that, I knew on some instinctive level that I couldn’t crawl into his bed anymore. Overnight we had lost each other in that way.
    On the building’s second landing, the floor creaked beneath my feet in a way that made me feel unsafe. I felt it give just slightly under my weight. With every step I took, I half expected to go crashing through the floor and land in a crumbled pile on the level below. Ace had told me he was staying with a girl on the second floor, that she had a window that looked out onto the street. So I walked toward the door closest to the street side of the building and knocked.
    “Ace,” I called. “It’s Ridley.”
    There was only silence as the sunlight from outside filtered in through the dirty hall window; its gate was so rusted it looked as though a single touch might dissolve it to dust. A car cruised by outside and I felt the heavy bass of the subwoofers resonate in my chest and fingertips. The murmurs I’d heard on entering the building had quieted in the wake of my relative shouting. The walls and doors around me seemed to hold their breath. I heard a shuffle behind the door and could sense that someone stood tentatively on the other side listening out as I listened in. From the other end of the hall came an unmistakable squeaking, a scratching within a pile of rubbish that I could just make out in the dim light. I pretended not to see the rats as they skittered and rummaged. I knocked on the door again, this time louder.
    “Ace,” I said, sounding nervous and desperate. “Please.”
    I startled when the door opened and a wide blue eye peered out through the space allowed by the chain. Long strands of filthy blond hair hung before the eye, a woman’s eye that might have been pretty once. But now it was bloodshot and smudged black with fatigue.
    “He’s gone,” she said.
    “Where?”
    “What do I look like, his wife?”
    I shrugged, not sure how to answer. The eye blinked slowly. “Do I know you? You look familiar.”
    I shrugged again, feeling at a loss for words. I gave a mild shake of my head to indicate that I didn’t know if she’d seen me before. The eye looked me up and down. I could see something living in the lashes, in the lines beneath. It was