by Lisa Unger
“These men, these fathers, all searching for their kids,” says Harrison, drifting over toward the glass doors leading to the deck. “Alan Parker’s daughter murdered by Frank Geary, Teddy March’s daughter held in the thrall of Marlowe Geary, Drew Powers’s son far from the fold, estranged for years. They all had a common purpose, to do right by their kids in the ways that they could.”
I think about this, the deviousness and planning, the deception that it took to make all this happen.
“And how was it that both you and Melissa fell prey to the Gearys? Coincidence, maybe. Or maybe it was their karma, their bond? I don’t know, but it’s poetic in its way, isn’t it?”
That’s our karma, our bond. Marlowe’s words come back to me.
Harrison goes on, “The only thing they didn’t plan for was Gray falling in love with you.”
“It doesn’t make sense,” I say, even though, on a cellular level, it does. “There are too many variables, so many coincidences. Did my father go to Drew for help, too? Is that how he connected to Gray? They used me to draw Gray in, knowing he couldn’t resist the idea of rescuing a lost girl?”
“Paul Broward—your Dr. Brown—he had a lot of experience with manipulating people’s psyches. You should know that better than anyone.”
My emotions—a terrible alchemy of impotent anger, disbelief, and fear—must be playing on my face, because suddenly Harrison seems to regret coming. He looks over toward the door, then back at me, and raises his palms.
“I’m sorry, Annie. You know what? It’s just a theory. I’m talking out of my ass.”
“What about Briggs?” I ask quickly, still turning his words over, still trying to punch holes in his theories.
“A longtime employee of Powers and Powers, that much I do know for a fact. Maybe Gray wasn’t aware of that. When he couldn’t figure out who Briggs worked for, he killed him fearing for your safety.”
I feel exhausted, and my head is pounding now, accompanied by a terrible ringing in my ears. I try to think about what all this might mean, that we’ve been under the control of these men, my father included, since before Gray and I ever met. It hurts too much to think about, and I feel myself powering down emotionally. I’m grateful.
“As for me, I made a nuisance of myself,” Harrison said. “And they laid waste to my life.”
I think about what Sarah Harrison told me, how Ella attacked Ray with a Taser. I’ve hardly known what to do with that information. I’ve wanted to confront her, but she’s gone. Who was she, this woman I called a friend? I can feel my chest constricting. Ever since the smoke inhalation, my lungs ache when I get upset. I struggle to slow my breathing. Harrison seems to sense my discomfort.
“Look,” he says, moving toward the front door, “maybe you should consider yourself lucky at this point, Annie. Move on, you know? My life is a train wreck. But you, you’ve exorcised your demons—you’ve won. You can walk away with your family and start over.”
I laugh. It sounds harsh and bitter as it bounces back to me. “You mean just forget all this? I think we’ve seen how that works out.”
“Not a denial, Annie,” he says. “A rebirth.”
I get up and walk to the back glass doors, watch the waves lick the shore. I take the salt air into my lungs and wonder if Detective Harrison might be right.
“Is it possible?” I ask him. “Is it possible to cast it all off and start again—the new and improved Annie? Or will it come creeping after me again one day when I least expect it?”
I listen to my voice echo in the empty room. Harrison doesn’t answer me.
I keep looking at the shoreline. I lose myself in thought for a moment and notice that my headache is lifting.
“Maybe it is possible,” I say, answering my own question.
“Annie?”
I turn around to see Gray standing behind me with an odd expression, something between amusement and worry. We are alone.
“Who are you talking to?” he asks.
The headache I had is gone, but it is replaced with a rush of panic. As I walk past him, he reaches for my arm, but I slip by. I lift the three pieces of paper from the couch, two receipts from the grocery store and a baby picture of Victory. Not a check, not old pictures of Vietnam.
I sweep the room again with my eyes, wondering if Detective Harrison will come out of the kitchen with a fresh cup of coffee. But no. I crumple the papers and shove them into my pocket. I walk to the front window and see that Gray’s car has blocked the driveway. I can’t bring myself to ask if another car was parked on the street when he arrived.
“Annie,” Gray says, walking over to me. His tone is more insistent now. “Who were you talking to?”
I find it difficult to answer; the words won’t come. I’m in a tunnel of dawning, swallowed by a stone-cold understanding of my own twisted psyche, a realization that Ray Harrison was exactly who I needed him to be.
“Do you remember Ray Harrison?” I ask, trying to keep my voice level. I find I can’t bring myself to meet his eyes. I lean against the window’s edge for support.
He looks confused for a minute, seems to search his memory for the name. Then, “The cop? The one who answered the 911 call—the one with all the questions?”
I nod slowly. “Did you ever see him again—after he came that morning?”
Gray frowns. “Me? No. Why would I?”
I hear blood rushing in my ears. “Did you ever give him any money?”
Gray releases a little laugh. “No,” he says, surprised. “Of course not.”
I walk over to the back of the house, look at the ocean and the white sand. The ground beneath me seems soft, unstable.
“Annie, what’s this about?”
“The night—” I begin, then stop. I was going to say the night you killed Briggs but I don’t want to say those words out loud. “When you said all threats had been neutralized, you meant Briggs.”
Gray is behind me, his hands on my shoulders now. “Why are we talking about this?”
“Just answer me,” I say quickly.
I hear him release a breath. “Yes, that’s what I meant.”
I lean against him, my back to his front. “What’s happened?” he whispers.
But I can’t bring myself to say the words. I can’t bring myself to tell him about the Ray Harrison I knew. Not now, not when my husband has started to believe in my sanity for maybe the first time.
“Annie,” Gray says, insistent now as he spins me around to face him, lifts my face to his. He looks frightened; it’s not an expression I’m used to seeing on him. “What’s going on? Who were you talking to when I came in?”
I force a smile, a bright and happy one, and I see his fear start to melt away, his eyes brighten.
“I don’t know,” I say lightly. “I must have been talking to myself.”
Epilogue
Victory and I walk up Eleventh Street from our brownstone on Tompkins Square Park, heading for school. It is a crisp fall day in New York City, the sky a crayon drawing of blue air and puffy white clouds. Cabdrivers lean on their horns, birds sing in the trees lining the streets, children yell on the playground as we approach. Victory is chattering about how much she likes her new shoes and book bag. She wonders, “Do you have snack and naptime at your new school, too?” I tell her, “No, enjoy it while you can.” Naptime is one of the many casualties of adulthood.
I leave her at the bright green doors and watch as she runs down a happily muraled hallway to her teacher, a lovely older woman with graying hair, café au lait skin, and the lilt of a Jamaican accent. She has the warmest smile for my daughter.
“Victory!” Miss Flora exclaims. “I love your shoes!”
“Thank you!” says Victory, shooting a pleased glance back my way. I don’t feel the terrible twinge I used to feel when I leave my daughter. Not yet a year after we have left Florida, I feel like we own this life we live in New York. I won’t be dying again until it’s my time for good. Hopefully, I have a while.<
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I continue down Eleventh and turn left on University Place, on my way to class at NYU. I blend in easily with the crowd of tourists and shoppers and students, New Yorkers of every size and color and style. I am home here in a way that I have never been in Florida. I love the cold air and the changing leaves, the smell of the vendors’ honey-roasted nuts, the rumble of the subway beneath my feet.
We have left Gray behind in the brownstone, affectionately referred to as the money pit. We bought it cheap by New York City standards, but we’ll be renovating indefinitely, tearing it apart inside to re-create it, to make it ours. This is something with which I’m quite familiar. In the meantime Gray is using the top floor as the office for his private-investigation firm. He already has a few clients. I’ll be happy if his desk doesn’t fall through the ceiling onto our bed below.
I enter the white building on University Place and wait for the elevator. I had to fight hard to get into this school, but good test scores, a compelling essay, and a little bit of begging made up for a blotchy transcript, a GED, and a degree from a Florida community college. I am studying for my master’s in psychology. I’m also conducting an internship with the Ophelia Foundation (believe it or not), which is dedicated to helping young girls who have experienced abuse, abandonment, and trauma. I find the work healing in ways I couldn’t begin to explain. With all my vast experience, I consider myself uniquely qualified for this profession.
I move with the throng into the large classroom and find a seat toward the back. I take my notebook and my new pen, a gift from Gray, out of my bag. Today we’ll be discussing trauma and the various ways in which the personality seeks to defend and heal itself. The other day my professor made an interesting comment: “No one ever talks about issues like dissociative identity disorder, fugue, or psychotic breaks in anything but the most negative light. No one ever talks about how the personality does this type of thing to protect itself, to save itself, or how powerful and effective it is.”
I must say I agree. I have a therapist now, one with whom I’m actually honest, and we’ve been over the events of my life again and again—rehashing without judgment the things I’ve done, the things that have been done to me, and how I ultimately saved myself. We’ve talked about all the players, the archetypes both real and imagined, and the roles they have played in my illness and recovery. The Terrible Mother. The Absent Father. The Rescuer. The Destroyer. The Lost Girl.
The truth is that I may never be fully able to discern between the actual events—or people—in my recent life and the dreams created by my psyche to heal itself. Sometimes I’m not sure it matters. Take Ella, for example: Other than Gray, she’s the only true friend I’ve ever had. Though, naturally, her sudden and total disappearance from my life makes her suspect. I suppose it’s possible that, like Ray Harrison, she was a person I met, someone I knew in passing, and that the fuller relationship we shared was something created in my mind, a fantasy established to fulfill some deep need in my psyche. It’s equally possible that she was someone who worked for Drew, someone hired to keep tabs on me; this is what Gray believes, though he has no evidence or knowledge to support his theory. Sometimes I search my memory for clues that might have indicated that my friendship was a fantasy—like the white shock of hair my imaginary Ray Harrison had, or the searing headaches that were the inevitable backdrop to my encounters with him. But there’s nothing like that. Whatever the case, Ella Singer was friend enough that I feel her loss deeply. And that means something in this world. It means a lot.
I am less hard on myself these days. I try to treat myself the way I treat my daughter—with patience and understanding. I strive to treat my memories of the girl I was in the same way. Ophelia was a damaged young woman who did what she had to for survival. I see a version of her every day at the clinic—with her head hung, her arms wrapped around her middle, her eyes dull. I see her cut herself, starve herself, slit her wrists, poison herself with drugs and alcohol. I know that Victory is not in danger of becoming one of these lost girls. We have taught her to know and value herself, to respect and protect herself. I hope to be better at teaching by example.
I look around the large classroom, watch the other students tap furiously on laptop computers or chat with their friends before class begins. A girl flirts with the guy behind her while another girl looks on with unmasked envy. Two young men talk heatedly in the corner, one of them gesticulating wildly, the other listening with his hand on his chin. They all seem so put together, so well dressed and healthy. I imagine their idyllic childhoods, their close relationships with parents and siblings. I realize that this is just a fantasy. No one knows the dark places inside others; no one knows what pain, however horrifying or banal, has been visited upon them.
Last month I claimed my mother’s ashes. She’d been cremated and stored with her belongings at the county morgue. We took her ashes to Rockaway Beach last Sunday and scattered them as the sun rose. I picked this place because it is the setting for the only happy memories I have with both of my parents. I like to think that she remembered those times, too, that sometimes, maybe when she was alone in bed at night, she missed me. I know I have missed her. I loved my mother. And, in her way, I believe she loved me, too.
I still haven’t talked to my father. After we moved into town, I went to see him, to confront him about what he knows, what his role was in the things that happened to me. But the shop is closed. His landlady says she gets a rent check every month from his bank. She let me into his apartment while she waited at the door. I walked around, looking for some clue as to where he might have gone. But there’s nothing—it’s exactly the same as it was that night, except his clothes are gone. I walk by his building once a week or so, check to see if she’s heard from him. I have a hole in my heart where my father should be. I’ve been chasing him all my life; I guess I won’t stop now. Gray thinks he’s our last, best link to the truth. But I know that even when he returns, he’ll do what he’s always done. He’ll lie.
I know he wanted to help me, to save me from Marlowe, to save me from myself. He did what he could do. I guess he finally did come for me in his way. But then he left again. Maybe that’s all he knows.
The instructor enters through a door near the front of the classroom. It’s a large room, more like a theater really, with a podium and microphone and many rows of seats grading upward. He is a tall, lean man with a chaos of ink black hair and ice blue eyes. His voice is deep and booming; he hardly needs the microphone. His class is called The Secret Life of Trauma, and it is packed, most of the seats taken. He teaches his students about things with which I am intimately familiar: the defenses created by the personality to survive the unthinkable. I’m my own best case study.
Today he has a slide show, some artwork created by trauma patients. He asks one of the students to bring down the lights. Before the room goes dark, out of the corner of my eye, I see her. She sits down the aisle from me, the girl who waited for a rescue that never came, who finally rose to save herself. I see her finally as Janet Parker saw her, a beautiful young woman with everything before her. There’s a light to her, something powerful that radiates from within, something that none of the horrors of her existence could extinguish. Just before she fades away with the dimming lights, she turns to look at me and smiles, at peace. At last.
Author’s Notes
Fiction writers dwell most comfortably in the land of their imagination. But we frequently need to venture forth to learn a thing or two about the real world. I have had the good fortune to find some very accomplished and fascinating people who have taken time out of their busy lives to make my fictional world more viable.
Raoul Berke, Ph.D., very kindly pointed out a mistake I made in an earlier novel and was rewarded by my hounding him for information on various forms of mental illness. My thanks for his interesting insights and observations on fugue states, dissociative identity disorder, and psychotic breaks.
K. C. Poulin, CEO, and Craig Dundry, vice president of
special projects at Critical Intervention Services in Clearwater, Florida, spent an afternoon with me and shared their tremendous wealth of knowledge on privatized military companies. I can’t thank them enough for their generosity, openness, sense of humor, and amazing expertise. Fair warning: You haven’t heard the last of me!
Mike Emanuel, renowned Florida cave diver, took the time to answer a ridiculous number of questions about Florida’s underwater caves and the sport of cave diving. His website (www.mejeme.com) features some remarkable pictures that provided me with insight and inspiration. And it’s a good thing, because you couldn’t pay me to go down there.
Marion Chartoff and her husband, Kevin Butler, both extraordinary attorneys and dear friends, offered their expert knowledge on death-row appeal cases.
As always my good friend Special Agent Paul Bouffard with the Environmental Protection Agency has been my source for all things legal and illegal. He never gets tired of answering my questions—or, if he does, he hides it very well.
The following books were very important in the writing of this novel:
The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit (Routledge, 1996) by Donald Kalsched is in turns moving, disturbing, and illuminating.
Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry (Cornell University Press, 2004) by P. W. Singer is the best resource I found on privatized military companies and their role in modern warfare.
Naturally, I take responsibility for any and all mistakes I have made and liberties I may have taken for the sake of fiction.
Acknowledgments
There are a number of people without whom I couldn’t do what I do. I am truly blessed by their presence in my life, and I’ll take this opportunity to thank them for all the myriad ways they bolster and support me.
I thank my lucky stars for my husband, Jeffrey. Without his love and support, I wouldn’t be where I am or who I am today. I would also slowly starve to death because, at some point since the birth of our daughter, I have lost the ability to prepare food. My daughter, Ocean Rae, has brought a light into my life and shone it into places that I didn’t even know were dark. I am a better writer and a better person since she arrived. Together, Jeffrey and Ocean are the rock-solid foundation of my life.