Black Out

by Lisa Unger

  Later that night I found Marlowe sitting on the floor of the stable smoking a cigarette. We hadn’t spoken since that night in my room when he’d suggested unthinkable things to me. Instead we’d been circling each other ever since. I was simultaneously drawn to him and repelled by what he’d whispered to me that night. His eighteenth birthday was just a week away, and then he’d be gone. I’d be all alone here.

  I sat down beside him, and he offered me a drag, which I took.

  “He met someone today,” he said as I exhaled smoke. “A woman at the feed store. It won’t be long.”

  I took in the lean lines of him, the hair in front of his eyes, his arm draped over one bent knee.

  “He started chatting her up, flirting with her in that way he has,” he said when I didn’t respond.

  I had a hard time imagining Frank “flirting” with anyone. He was as gray and stiff as an old piece of wood. The air was still and thick with humidity. I felt a sheen of perspiration rise on my forehead, a bead drip down my back.

  “It’s like an appetite. It rises up in him. He can’t control it.”

  He had an odd half smile on his face as he stubbed out the cigarette, started fingering the butt, rolling it between his thumb and forefinger so that tiny brown pieces of tobacco left there drifted onto his leg. The smell of burned tar settled in my sinuses.

  “He’ll start out slow at first, but then it will escalate. Before long it’ll be your mother.”

  An anxious dread moved through me, made my fingers and the back of my neck tingle. I stared out through the open doors of the barn. I could see the house from where I sat. A light glowed in my mother’s window.

  “No,” I said, but it was more like a prayer than a denial. Even though I’d never seen a hint of violence in Frank, I thought I could feel the truth in what Marlowe said. It wouldn’t be long before terrible things started happening; it seemed electric in the air.

  “After her it will be you.” He’d dropped his voice to a whisper, peered at me through the strands of hair that hung in front of his eyes.

  I pulled my legs in tight to my chest and held them there.

  “Why do you think he keeps your mother so isolated? He doesn’t even let her go to the grocery store,” Marlowe asked. “No one here even knows she exists.”

  If he noticed that I’d only said one word since I joined him, it didn’t seem to bother him. I traced circles in the dirt on the ground.

  “When you’re missed at school, it’ll be weeks before they send someone to look for you,” he went on. “Then he’ll tell them your mother left him, took you with her. He’ll tell them he doesn’t know where you’ve gone.”

  “My father will come looking for me,” I said lamely.

  “Eventually,” he said with a shrug. “Maybe. But what good will it do you? You’ll already be dead.”

  One of the things I liked about the horse ranch was the sky at night. I never knew there were so many stars. I gazed up at them through the open door and wished I were as high and far away as that.

  “Do you see how he was manipulating you?” the doctor asks. “How he used your fear, your alienation from your parents to spin a web around you?”

  I nodded, chewed on my fingernails, something I did in our sessions only when we talked about the past.

  “You were seventeen years old. Literally abandoned by your father, emotionally abandoned by your mother, living with a man you believed to be a serial rapist and murderer who was about to start killing again-who might even kill you. You were afraid and very vulnerable.”

  I nodded grudgingly. Ophelia was afraid, but she was also desperate, starving for love and acceptance.

  “What could you have done at that point that you didn’t do?” he wants to know.

  We do this, go round and round, rehashing the past. Thinking of alternatives for Ophelia and shooting them down like bottles on a shelf. The doctor thinks I’m too hard on her. He thinks she was just a kid. But he doesn’t know the whole story-and neither do I, for that matter. I wonder if I’m not hard enough.

  “I could have gone to the police.”

  He gives a slow, careful nod. “Your stepfather was an innocent man in the eyes of the law. You had no evidence that he’d done anything wrong or planned to. What do you think the police could have done for you?”

  I look at anything else but him-the degrees hanging on his wall, the view outside his window, the glass paperweight on his desk, its facets taking in light and casting rainbow points on the wall. “I’m not sure.”

  He sighs and shifts in his seat. Behind him, outside his window, the sun is setting in a riot of color-purple, orange, pink-over the Intracoastal Waterway.

  “So what did you do?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  He lifts his chin up, puts his hand to his face, and starts rubbing at his jaw. The stubble there and the dry, hard skin on his hands makes an irritating scratching sound. He regards me carefully, seems to think twice before deciding to say, “You’re not being honest with me, Annie.”

  “I don’t remember,” I say quickly. “You know that.”

  “I’m starting to get the feeling that there’s a great deal you’re not sharing with me. I’m afraid it’s affecting how much good I can do.”

  I give a slow shake of my head and purse my lips. There’s a moment-no, a millisecond-when I think maybe, just maybe, I’ll come clean, tell him everything. But the moment passes in silence.

  He looks at his watch and stands up. This means our session is over. “I can’t help you if you won’t face the truth. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I say, getting up and walking to the door. I think we’re coming to the end of our relationship. He doesn’t know Ophelia; he doesn’t even know her name. I have kept that from him. I wonder if he thinks I’m making the whole thing up, if he’s just humoring me and taking my money.

  “See you next week?”

  “Yes. Next week,” I say with a nod. I stop at the door, turn to look at him. He’s a nice man and a good doctor. I know he has tried his best to help me. “Did I tell you I’m considering scuba-diving lessons?”

  “I thought you were afraid of the water,” he says with a surprised smile.

  “You’re the one who’s always on me about facing down my fears. I thought this might be a good first step.”

  “Is it helping?”

  “It’s too soon to tell.”

  “Take care of yourself, Annie,” he says. This is what he says after every session, but I wonder if I detect an extra bit of concern, a final note of farewell.

  The corridor outside the doctor’s office is empty, and I wait in the silence for the elevator. I listen to the electronic beep as the elevator passes each floor on its way to me. I never see anyone in this corridor; no one ever comes and goes from the other office suites. It has never seemed odd before, but today it does. The quiet is total, as though there is no one else behind the other doors.

  Maybe I never noticed before because I am always lost in thought when I leave the doctor, but this time I feel a strange unease as I wait for the elevator that seems to take forever. It has paused two floors down and not continued its ascent. I wait for a minute longer, then decide to take the stairs, but when I try the door to the staircase, it’s locked. I guess I don’t have any choice but to wait for the sluggish elevator.

  I hear something then, I’m not sure what. It might have been a shout or something falling to the floor. Then there are voices lifted in argument, just a few words, and then it is silent so suddenly again that I’m not sure that’s what I heard at all. It’s then that I find myself walking back down the hall toward the doctor’s office.

  Of course the elevator picks this moment to arrive. I listen to the doors open and close as I enter the waiting room and knock lightly on the door to the doctor’s office. There’s no answer, but I’m certain he’s there-I don’t think there’s another exit. I wonder if he’s in the bathroom. I put my ear to the door, wait a second, but I don’t
hear voices inside. I knock again. As I do, the door pushes open slightly, and I help it along.

  “Doctor,” I say, “is everything all right?”

  It takes a beat for the scene to register in my head. The doctor is slumped over his desk, blood pooling on its surface and dripping over the side onto the floor beneath. On the window I can see a high ghastly arc of blood against the sunset.

  “Doctor,” I say as I move toward him. My voice sounds like it’s coming from the end of a long tunnel. “Paul?”

  I approach the body, battling the urge to run in the other direction. I put my hand on his neck. But there’s no pulse. His skin is still warm, but he is dead.

  I try to draw a breath into my lungs, but panic is constricting my airways. My flight response is in high gear; it’s all I can do not to break into a sprint. Then I notice that the door to the bathroom is ajar; the light is on inside. I think I see a flicker of movement, but I’m not certain.

  My brain has stopped working; adrenaline kicking, my body takes over. I move toward the exit, keeping my eyes on the thin rectangle of light shining through the opening in the bathroom door. I am not thinking about the poor doctor and the awful way he has died or about who might still be hiding in the bathroom. I am just thinking about getting out of here as fast as possible. I can’t help the doctor, and I can’t afford another run-in with the police.

  I start moving backward, my eyes still on the bathroom door. As I do, it starts to open. I find myself paralyzed; I can’t move. I stand and watch it swing wide. She is pale and grim, the young woman I have seen at Ella’s party and standing outside the Internet café. She is soaked in blood. There’s a knife in her hand. Her chest is heaving with the deep, shuttering breaths she is drawing and releasing. We stare at each other for a moment. And then I recognize her. It’s Ophelia.

  23

  It’s nearly dark when I wake up in my car in the parking lot of my doctor’s office. The sun has disappeared below the horizon line, and the sky is glowing a deep blue-black. My peripheral vision is almost gone from the migraine I have coming on. I am struggling to orient myself, to separate reality from fantasy. I see her face again, her blood-drenched clothes. I see my doctor slumped over his desk, blood draining from him onto the floor.

  I don’t feel the appropriate level of terror, I’m just stunned, numb. I look at my watch; it has been only forty minutes since my session with the doctor ended, which seems impossible given what’s happened. There’s a large bloodstain, still wet but drying quickly, on my jacket. I shrug out of it, crumble it into a ball. I don’t want to look at the blood. Then my cell phone, balancing on the dash, starts ringing. I answer.

  “Hi, Annie.”

  I already recognize the voice-it’s Detective Harrison. I don’t say anything.

  “Just wondering if you’ve had any time to think things over.”

  “Why are you doing this to me?” I ask him. My voice sounds hysterical, even to my own ears. I am shaking as I put the key in the ignition and start the car. “Did you do this?”

  There’s a pause on the other end, as if he’s registering the pitch and tone of my words.

  “Annie, what’s wrong?” he asks me. He sounds legitimately concerned. “Where are you?”

  “Why are you doing this?” I say again. It must be Harrison. He has done this somehow. He knows about me and is trying to drive me insane. “For money? You can have whatever you want.”

  “Take it easy,” he says. His tone is calm and soothing; he must be used to talking to hysterical people. “What’s going on?”

  There’s something in his voice that reminds me why I liked him that first night. Even though he’s trying to destroy my life, it’s almost as though he would put that on hold to be a cop for me in this moment. I’m half considering telling him about the doctor, but since I’m not a hundred percent sure that he’s dead and that it wasn’t me who killed him, I decide against it. I’d be admitting that I’m either mentally ill or a murderer, probably both.

  “What happened, Annie?” he says, more firmly this time.

  But his voice sounds tinny and distant. I end the call and throw the phone on the seat beside me. I drive out of the parking lot, heading for home.

  The small causeway that leads to our island is not heavily trafficked in the evening. I pull over and grab the jacket from the passenger seat, race to the railing, and toss it over. I watch for a moment as it drifts into the water, then quickly get back to the car and start driving again, too fast. The sight of a cruiser hiding in a speed trap encourages me to slow down, to take the rest of the drive at the speed limit.

  I wave at the guard as I pull through the gateway to our neighborhood. Lights glow in windows, televisions flicker, and there are a couple of kids still playing in the street even though it’s fully dark now. Everything is so quiet, so normal. I do not belong here. I realize more than ever that I never have.

  I park the car in the drive and walk, though I want to run, into the house. As I shut the door, I hear Gray in the kitchen making dinner.

  “You’re late,” he calls with a smile in his voice when he hears me enter.

  There are candles lit on the table and lobsters in a huge pot on the stove. When he turns to look at me, his smile fades, he goes a little pale. My legs buckle when he reaches me, and I sink into him.

  “What happened?” he asks. His frightened expression tells me how bad I look. “What the hell happened?”

  I awoke in the middle of the night with a start to the sound of the horses. They were restless in their stalls, agitated and making noise. I’d heard them act like that twice since we’d been there. Once a Florida panther had been spotted the next day on a neighbor’s property. The second time we never figured why they’d been anxious. I slipped from beneath the covers of my bed and walked over to the window. The doors to the barn stood open. Frank’s truck sat idling, the hatch wide, waiting like a mouth. A full yellow moon cast a strange glow.

  I moved to the side of the window and peered through the curtains. I’m not sure how long I stood there, but finally Frank emerged from the dark interior of the barn. In his arms he carried a large bundle wrapped in horse blankets. He leaned back against the weight of it and then dropped it awkwardly into the truck. He closed the hatch quietly, glancing up at the windows of the house. He looked stricken, like a man grieving a terrible loss. Then he got into the driver’s seat of the truck and rolled out of sight.

  I stood rooted, my whole body shaking. I thought of all the things Marlowe had told me. Part of me hadn’t really believed him…the collection of purses, the shoe under the porch, his recent dire predictions that Frank’s “appetites” couldn’t be kept at bay much longer.

  I saw Marlowe leave the barn then, a garbage bag in his hand. He pulled the doors closed behind him and locked them with the key. As he did this, he turned and looked up at my window. Maybe he could sense my eyes on him. I was certain he couldn’t see me where I stood. But something in his face told me that he knew I was there.

  I got back into my bed quickly, wrapped myself up in the covers, and closed my eyes. I measured my breathing, made it deep and steady. After a minute I heard Marlowe creaking on the stairs. The floorboards outside my door groaned beneath his weight, and I heard the knob on my door start to turn. I tried to control the quaking of my body, to fight the urge to scream as I heard the door open just a little. The seconds dragged on as I waited to hear him come in or to speak my name. But he didn’t. After a moment I heard him walk away and go back down the stairs.

  When I thought it was safe, I raced to my mother’s room. I was sure I’d see an empty bed. But when I burst through her door, she was sleeping soundly, undisturbed by the events that had just transpired. I thought of waking her, telling her what I’d seen, but I didn’t. I just went back to my bed, lay there wide-eyed and listening to the night. Frank didn’t return until just before dawn.

  24

  It is several hours later when Gray and I return to the doctor’s
office. I have told him everything that’s happened. We’ve gone over and over every detail a thousand times. He has made me shower, and while I stood with the scalding water beating down on my skin, scrubbing myself so hard that my skin turned raw and red, Gray disposed of my clothes. I’m not even sure why; it makes me wonder if he thinks I may have actually killed my doctor. I haven’t asked him if this is what he thinks.

  We pull in to the lot, which is empty now. I expected to see a swarm of police vehicles and ambulances, some news vans. I expected to see Detective Harrison waiting for me. Instead there’s only a sea of blacktop edged by the Intracoastal. The tall streetlamps cast an eerie amber glow as Gray stops the car. My stomach is churning. There are still some lights burning in the windows of the office building. A night guard sits at the reception desk reading a paperback.

  “Wait here,” Gray says, putting a hand on my leg.

  “No,” I say, unbuckling my seat belt. “I’m coming.”

  He doesn’t argue, waits as I get out of the car and then drops his arm around me as I come to stand beside him. We walk toward the building. I’m keeping my migraine at bay with the medicine I’ve taken, but it’s waiting for me like a predator in the brush.

  “It’s okay,” he tells me.

  The old bulldog of a guard looks at us with sullen boredom over the edge of his novel. He has dull eyes and a thin mouth that disappears into the flesh of his face.

  “I had a doctor’s appointment earlier,” I tell him. “I left my cell phone.”