Four Thrillers by Lisa Unger

by Lisa Unger

  Gray is not a handsome man, not in the classical sense. Though there’s something in the way he carries himself that makes a girl forget he’s not easy on the eyes. He is older than I am by twelve years. There’s a hard silence to him, a shell you’re not sure you want to crack. There was no reason for me to fall in love with him. In fact, the circumstances of our meeting were not conducive to the start of a relationship. The first time I met Gray, he handcuffed me and threw me in the back of his car. He wasn’t sure what to do with me, and he couldn’t leave me as he found me, or so he would tell me later. I was a mess of a girl, nearly starved and half crazy with fear and grief. Anyone else in his position might have just left me to fend for myself. He could have turned me over to the police or dropped me at a hospital. But he didn’t.

  “I loved you before I even knew I loved you,” he told me once.

  “Then why the handcuffs?”

  “I loved you, but I didn’t trust you. You can’t trust a beaten dog. Not until it learns to trust you.”

  “That’s not a very flattering analogy.” Though I suppose that’s what I was then, a dog so badly beaten that I wouldn’t have known the difference between a hand poised to strike and one poised to caress.

  He touched me in that way he had, to soften his words, a gentle stroke on the back of my head that ends in him tracing my jaw and then resting his hand on my cheek. “Sorry.”

  There was no reason for us ever to be together and every reason for us never to see each other again after he got me the help I needed and then made Ophelia disappear completely. I fell in love with him because he was the only upright person I had ever known. He was the first safe place I found in my life. Because he came every day to be with me, even if I couldn’t talk or didn’t want to, even when I ranted and hated him and threw him out. He always came back.

  I try to remember that now as I watch his chest rise and fall. I sit back down in the chair. After a minute I wonder if he’s fallen asleep. Sometimes he is so exhausted after he’s been away that he falls asleep during arguments or while making love. I try not to take it personally.

  “Annie,” he says finally with a sigh. He sits up and comes over to me, kneels before me on the floor. He takes my hands in his and puts them to his mouth for a second. Then, “Whatever is going on, I swear to you, Marlowe Geary is dead.”

  Over the last few hours, sitting in my vigil, I had convinced myself that Marlowe didn’t die that night, that Gray has lied to me all these years. I thought of at least five ways he might have survived. My twisted imagination spun a web around me, and I was sure of all of this, positive. But now, with Gray to ground me, I’m more inclined to believe that my mind is playing tricks on me—again. Maybe Drew’s right; someone knows my secrets and is trying to get to me. Or maybe, as Gray seems to think, it was just a stranger on the beach and my mind did the rest.

  “Okay?” he asks when I don’t say anything. I put my hand to his face, trace the bruise under his eye, place my finger gently on his broken lip. There are deep wrinkles around his mouth, but somehow they don’t make him look old, just rugged and wise. I love him, I truly do. And I know he loves me. I can see it in the stormy depths of his eyes. My first safe place.

  “He said, ‘Ophelia,’” I tell him again.

  “Are you sure?”

  I’m not certain now. I was deep in thought at the time. It was windy. Maybe I should go back on the medication, endure the dull fog that falls over my life, the mental lethargy. At least I know what’s real. That’s something, isn’t it?

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “We’re going to find out what’s happening,” he says. “We’ll find out who went to see your father, who was on the beach.” He pats the mattress. “Don’t do anything stupid in the meantime.”

  I look at him blankly.

  “You don’t think I know, Annie, what you have under the bed?”

  I feel a wash of shame. I don’t say anything.

  “I know it makes you feel safe. I understand. Just stay cool.”

  I slide down onto the floor with him and let him enfold me. I want to remember what it feels like to be held by him. I don’t want to forget when I’m gone.

  11

  “I know what you two are up to,” my mother hissed. She’d cornered me in the bathroom, come up behind me and put her mouth up close to my ear. “I see the way you look at each other.”

  There was venom in her; it was her jealousy. I’d seen this face before.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, examining my teeth in the mirror over the sink, not looking at her. She grabbed my arm and pulled me in close to her.

  “It’s practically incest,” she said. I could feel her hot breath in my ear. “He’s going to be your stepbrother.”

  My mother and Frank planned to have a jailhouse wedding. Disgusting. The thought of it made me ill. She was squeezing my arm so hard it brought tears to my eyes. But I would rather she’d pulled my arm out of its socket than let her see me cry. I blinked my eyes hard and turned my face from her.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I repeated.

  Her eyes were two angry, black points. When she was mad, her pretty face turned into an ugly grimace of bared yellowed teeth and furrowed brow. I could smell the coffee on her breath, the bleach on her waitress uniform.

  “I won’t have my daughter acting like a whore,” she said to me.

  Even then I knew she didn’t care about my chastity or my morality. She wasn’t afraid that her sixteen-year-old daughter was in too deep with someone who clearly had major problems. She just couldn’t stand it when someone paid attention to me instead of her. It made her feel old.

  I forced my face to go blank and my body to go limp in her grasp while she hurled a few Bible passages at me. She never got them quite right, usually wound up tongue-tied and sounding foolish. When she didn’t get a reaction from me, she released me in disgust and stalked off.

  “You’ll reap what you sow, little girl,” she said loudly as she left me. I heard her storm and bang through the trailer and then finally exit with a slam of the door that was too weak to make much of a noise.

  We all reap what we sow, don’t we?

  I was so ripe for him. There were so many empty spaces within me that he could fill; it’s nothing short of a miracle that I didn’t disappear altogether.

  “She’s jealous, Ophelia,” Marlowe said, coming up behind me. I always loved the way he said my name. I’d gone through phases with it, hating it, loving it, hating it again when I was introduced to Hamlet in my honors English class. When Marlowe said my name, it took on a new life. O–feeel-ya. The O was short and sharp. He drew out the eee like he was caressing it with his tongue. The final syllable was soft and breathy, like a sigh.

  I saw his face in the mirror beside my own. He rubbed my shoulders and then wrapped his arms around me. I hid my eyes from him, too. I’ve never wanted anyone to see me cry; I can’t bare the vulnerability of it.

  “I hate her,” I said. And I meant it, but only in the way that every teenage girl hates her mother.

  When I raised my eyes from my hands again, he was still watching me in the mirror, a lopsided smile on his face. I could see that my anger at my mother pleased him and I was soothed by this.

  “I wish she was dead,” I said, the words feeling forced and uncomfortable. But when his smile widened, I basked in the warmth of his approval.

  When the rage of adolescence is contained by rules and boundaries, banked by the assurance of strong and present parents, it burns white hot but burns out fast. When it’s allowed to run unchecked, it turns everything to ash.

  A few days after her bathroom sermon, my mother made me accompany her to choose her wedding dress. We took the bus to a strip mall off the highway and picked through racks of used gowns in various states of disrepair—this one stained with red wine, that one with the hem ripped out. She was sweet and happy on this day, excited in this girlish way she had. If
she remembered that just a few days earlier she’d bruised my arm and called me a whore, accused me of sleeping with my soon-to-be stepbrother, she didn’t let on. She wanted to be happy that day; she didn’t want to think about me.

  What do you think of this one, Ophelia? Oh, look! Frank would love this one.

  I sat in the shabby dressing room and watched as she twirled in front of the mirror, losing herself in a fantasy of the life before her. She had hard miles on her but she was still beautiful. Her hair had lost most of its estrogenic glow, and her skin looked papery, lined around the mouth and eyes. But she had true beauty, not just the prettiness that fades with age. Looking at her that day, I thought she could have had any man once, she could have been anyone, but instead she was this, this desperate woman in a used bridal gown getting ready to marry a convicted murderer. It was as if before she was born, God hung a sign on her that read, KICK ME. And every single person and circumstance she’d run into had obliged.

  “Do you have to look at me like that?” she asked.

  I snapped out of the trance I was in and caught sight of myself in the mirror, slouched and sullen, staring at her blackly.

  “Mom,” I said, sitting up, “are you really going to do this?”

  She walked over to me and sat in the chair beside me. She rubbed her forehead with one hand.

  “Why can’t you be happy for me, Ophelia?” she asked in a whisper. “I just want us to have a normal life, you know? We deserve that. Don’t we?”

  She reached down and pulled a tissue from her purse, dabbed at tears I hadn’t seen.

  “Mom,” I said. She looked so tired and sad.

  “Please, Ophelia,” she said, dropping the tissue into her lap and grabbing my hands. “Please. I love him.”

  She loved him. How sad. Frank Edward Geary, my mother’s death-row sweetheart, had been convicted of raping and murdering three women in Central Florida between March 1979 and August 1981. He was suspected for the murders of several others as well. There was just no evidence to link him conclusively to those crimes. The women he killed were all pretty and blond, petite and fine-featured. They all had a brittleness to their bearing, as though if you looked at them closely, you’d see them quivering like Chihuahuas. They each bore a striking resemblance to my mother.

  “What did you say to her?” my shrink prodded, though we’ve been through this before. It was another of those moments that were caught on a loop in my mind. These various markers on the way to the point of no return.

  “I told her that I was happy for her. That I’d try to be more optimistic.”

  “But that’s not how you felt.”

  “No,” I said flatly. “That’s not how I felt.”

  “So why did you tell her that?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  He looked down at his hands. This was not an acceptable answer in his office. I’m not ready to discuss it or I need to think about that—those were okay. I don’t know was a cop-out.

  After a minute, “I really did want her to be happy. And I didn’t want her to start shrieking about the new evidence that was going to set him free. That God wouldn’t let an innocent man die for crimes he didn’t commit. I didn’t want to hear about her prayers and about the private investigator she’d paid for while we ate fried-bologna sandwiches and leftover food she snuck home from the restaurant. I guess for an afternoon I just wanted to visit that fantasy she seemed to be living in. Christ. Maybe I wanted to be happy.”

  He let a beat pass, let the words float around the room and come back to my ears.

  “That’s good, Annie,” he said. “That’s really good.”

  I wake up hearing my shrink’s voice in my ears. I am dreaming of my sessions lately, this bizarre mingling of the past events of my life and composites of conversations I’ve had with the doctor. I’m not sure why. I suppose he would say that it’s my subconscious mind working overtime.

  Gray is sleeping deeply beside me. He’ll sleep like this until the middle of the day, his exhaustion is so total. There’s no telling the last time he slept in a bed, or slept at all. I slip on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt and quietly head down the hall. She hasn’t made a sound, but I know that my daughter is awake. She’s always waiting for me in the morning; it’s our time.

  We usually walk down to the beach. We started doing this as soon as she was able to walk, and I would let her toddle as far and as fast as she could. I’d let her run from me to give her a taste of freedom. On the beach she was safe. She could never leave my sight, any fall was a soft one, and what she found here she could keep. The windowsills and shelves of her room were lined with her treasures: dried pieces of coral, all sizes and shapes of shells, sea glass, and ice-cream-colored rocks.

  Today there is heavy rain, and after last night the beach doesn’t seem very safe. I pad down the hallway and slip into her room. I can see the crown of her head and the subtle rise and fall of the blankets. I try for stealth, just in case she is still asleep after all. I won’t wake her if she is. But as I draw close, she pulls the covers away and jumps up.

  “Boo!” she yells, smiling and pleased with herself.

  I feign surprise, then scoop her up and smother her with kisses.

  “Shhhh,” I say as she laughs the helpless giggle of the tickled. “Daddy’s sleeping.”

  “Daddy’s home?” She is wiggling out of my arms and then off like a bolt down the hall. I’m always thrown over for Gray. He’s the celebrity parent. I’m just the everyday slog who wipes up puke, burns the cookies, and combs tangles out of hair. He’s the rough-and-tumble, hide-and-seek, carry-me, read-it-again barrel of fun. I can’t get to her before she’s leaping onto our bed and Gray is issuing a groan as she lands full weight on his chest. Then she disappears beneath the covers, shrieking with delight.

  After a few minutes of Victory love-torturing poor, exhausted Gray, I convince her to let him sleep and come downstairs for breakfast. Only toaster waffles will do this morning. We sit together at the table and eat our waffles with peanut butter and jelly. Outside, the rain has stopped and the thick gray cloud cover has parted to reveal a fresh blue sky. The wind is wild. My eyes rest on the place where my visitor stood last night, and I’m only half listening as Victory tells me about the girl who wouldn’t share red during finger painting and the little boy who won’t come to school without his blankie. The events of last night seem not to have affected her in the least.

  We bundle up and head outside. The golden sun has emerged, making the beach seem like our place again. At the edge of our path, Victory breaks into a run toward the ocean and expects me to give chase. But something in the sand by the gate has caught my eye, a glint of gold. I bend down and pick it up. It’s a gold necklace, half of a heart.

  I’d seen girls at school—those girls with their silky hair and adult bodies, the girls whose boyfriends drove shiny sports cars and walked them to class, brought them roses on Valentine’s Day—wearing necklaces like that. Now I can see how cheap they were, how tacky and common. But back then I always felt a twinge whenever I noticed one hanging around some girl’s slender neck, something akin to jealousy without being quite that. Really, it was more of a sad wondering what it was like to feel a part of something, to be the cherished half of a whole, not to have to beg and act out for attention. It was more of an ache, an awareness of this empty place inside me.

  After that night under the strangler fig, I fell hard in love with Marlowe in a way that’s possible only once in your life. I was on fire and burned beyond recognition. I am ashamed of it now, the way I loved him. More than that, I am ashamed of how vividly I remember that love. Even now, when the barometric pressure drops before a thunderstorm and the sky turns that deadly black, I think of the summer he arrived in my life when there were violent, torrential downpours every afternoon. I remember what it was like to love without boundaries, without reason. As adults we learn not to love like that. But when we’re young, we don’t know better than to give ourselves over
to it. The falling is so sweet that we never even wonder where we’ll land.

  Sometimes I can’t recall what I had to eat yesterday, but that time with Marlowe lives in the cells of my body, even though I’ve tried to forget, even with every horror that followed. I have forgotten so much, but not that. And I remember understanding on some level, even in the throes of it, that it could never last—just like those storms that turn the streets into rushing rivers and whip up dangerous tornadoes but can only sustain themselves for a brief time.

  I absorbed each moment like a person going blind, trying to soak up all the color, all the little details: the way he smelled of Ivory soap and charcoal, the way the stubble on his face was sharp against my mouth. The way the wind howled against the thin walls of our trailer, how the rain pounded on the roof, but how we were safe inside, my mother at work or off to visit Frank.

  It was my birthday; I’d turned seventeen. My mother made pancakes before she went to work that morning and placed a candle on my stack. Together, she and Marlowe sang to me. My mother gave me a shirt I’d admired during a trip we’d taken to Macy’s, a tiny pink sparkling makeup bag containing a bottle of nail polish, a tube of lipstick, and fifteen dollars, and a card that read, To my beautiful daughter. I think it had a picture of a fairy princess on it. She was sweet that day, a loving mother. I remember that, remember feeling giddy with her attention.

  She left after breakfast, giving me a quick hug and a kiss, promising pizza for dinner and a real birthday cake.

  “What’s your birthday wish, Ophelia?” he asked me when we were alone, as I cleared the table of our dishes. The question, his grave tone in asking it, put me on guard. He had bizarre, ugly mood swings; I’d grown to fear them already. Not because he’d ever hurt me, but because they took him someplace I couldn’t follow. His gaze would go empty, his body slack. He might disappear like that for hours, then return to me as though he were waking from a nap. I was too naïve to understand that this was not normal. That’s what I tell myself, anyway.