by Lisa Unger
I’m sure she doesn’t believe me. You can’t fool children, you know. You shouldn’t even bother trying; they just grow up doubting themselves.
“Did you call Gray?” says Vivian, her brow creased. She smells like lemon verbena. She puts a hand on my arm and rubs gently.
I offer her what I hope is a dismissive, self-deprecating smile. “No need.”
She looks at me skeptically but says nothing more, just places a kiss on my cheek, one on Victory’s, then squeezes us both with her expansive arms. As I pull away down the drive, I see Drew watching me from the upstairs window.
That afternoon while Victory is down for her nap, I sit on the lanai, looking out onto our own view of the ocean, and start to think about all the ways that I can die.
Gray is late coming home, and Victory is already sound asleep upstairs in her room. I am sitting on a leather sofa I didn’t choose and don’t actually like, watching the high, dancing flames in our fireplace as he walks through the front door. For a second he is just a long shadow in the foyer; he could be anyone. But then he steps into the light and he is my husband, looking strained and tired. He doesn’t know I’m watching him. When he sees me, though, he smiles and looks a little less world-weary.
“Hey,” I say, getting up and going to him.
“Hey.” His embrace is powerful and I sink into it, hold on to him tightly. There is no softness to him; the muscles on his body are hard and defined. In this place I am moored. The churning of my day comes to calm.
“Want a drink?” I ask as I shift away from him. He holds me for a second longer, tries to catch my eyes, then lets me go.
“What are you having?” he wants to know.
“Vodka on the rocks.”
“Sounds about right.”
I walk over to the bar that in the daylight looks out onto our back deck. At night all I can see is my reflection in the glass doors as I fill a square lowball with ice and pour cold vodka from the freezer. This is another feature I didn’t choose about our house, a wet bar stocked with liquor we rarely touch. There is so much about this place, a ridiculously extravagant wedding gift from my father-in-law, furnished and decorated by Vivian, that has nothing to do with me—or Gray. It is hard to ever be grateful enough for such a gift and impossible to complain about the various features that don’t appeal. Sometimes I feel like we live in a model home, everything shiny and perfect but just slightly off from what we would have chosen ourselves.
I walk back over to him, hand him his drink, and we sit together. I put my legs up on his lap, take my waiting glass from the table. The ice has melted, the vodka gone watery and tepid. I drink it anyway, too lazy to make myself another.
I have one of the glass doors open, and the unseasonably cold salt air drifts in, warmed by the fire. I see him glance over at it. I know he’s thinking that the door should be closed and locked, but he doesn’t say anything. I notice the deep crescent of a scar between his right eye and his temple. I realize that I barely see his scars anymore. In the beginning they made me wary of him, made him seem hard and distant. I wondered what kind of violence could leave so many marks on a man. But I know the answer now. And I know his heart.
“It’s happening again,” I say after a minute of us just sitting there staring at the flames. Somehow the words seem melodramatic even before I add, “Worse than it’s ever been.”
He barely reacts, but I see a muscle clench in his jaw beneath the shadow of black stubble. He stares at the fire, closes and opens his eyes slowly, and takes a breath. We’ve been here before.
He puts a hand on my arm, turns his eyes to mine. I can’t see their color in the dim light, but they’re steel gray, have been since the day he was born, hence his name.
“He’s dead,” he says. “Long dead.”
He’s always gentle with me, no matter how many times we’ve been through this. I curl my legs beneath me and move into the hollow of his arm.
“How do you know for sure?” I say. I’ve asked this question a thousand times, just to hear the answer.
“Because I killed him, Annie.” He turns my face up to his to show me how unflinchingly certain he is. “I watched him die.”
I start to cry then, because I know that he believes what he says to be true. And I want so badly to believe it, too.
“Do you need to start up the meds again?”
I don’t want that. He leans forward to put his drink on the table. I move back into him, and he wraps me up in his arms and lets me cry and cry until I feel all right again. There’s no telling how long this can take. But he’s always so patient.
2
I descend a narrow, rusting stairway and walk quickly down the long hall, steadying myself against the walls. The lighting is dim and flickering. I struggle to remember what my cabin number is—203, I think. There are five men on board other than the captain, and I don’t see any of them.
I reach my cabin and fumble with the lock for a second, then push into my room. A small berth nestles in the far corner. Beneath it is a drawer where I have stowed my things. I kneel and pull out my bag, unzip it, and fish inside until I find what I’m looking for—my gun. A sleek Glock nine-millimeter, flat black and cold. I check the magazine and take another from the bag, slip it into the pocket of my coat. The Glock goes into the waist of my jeans. I’ve drilled the reach-and-draw from that place about a million times; my arm will know what to do even if my brain freezes. Muscle memory.
I consider my options. Once again suicide tops the list for its ease and finality. Aggression comes a close second, which would just be a roundabout way toward the first option. Hide and wait comes in third. Make him work for it. Make him fight his way through the people charged with protecting me and then find me on this ship. Then be waiting for him with my gun when he does.
The thrumming in my chest has stilled, and I listen for the sounds that will signify that the fight has begun, but there’s only silence and the distant hum of engines. I’m not afraid at all—or else fear has become so much a part of me that it has come to feel like peace.
3
My father is a tattoo artist and a pathological liar. The latter is nearly the only thing I can count on, that, likely as not, every word out of his mouth is a lie. He truly can’t help it.
“How are you, Dad?” I’ll ask.
“Great,” he’ll say enthusiastically. “I’m packing.”
“Packing for what?” I’ll say, skeptical.
“I’m taking a Mediterranean cruise, heading out tomorrow.”
Or:
“Did I ever tell you I was a Navy SEAL?”
“Really, Dad?” I’ll go along, half listening. “When?”
“Served in Vietnam.”
“Wow. Tell me about it.”
“I can’t; too painful. I’d rather forget.”
That’s how it goes. It doesn’t even bother me anymore, partly because he usually doesn’t lie about anything important. Just weird stuff. Almost like hiccups, they seem to bubble up from within, unbidden, unstoppable. I generally play along, because in spite of all the lies there’s something true about him. Even though he was a lousy father, he loves me and I know it, always have.
When he comes to the phone, I can hear chatter in the background, the hummingbird buzz of the tattoo needle. His shop, Body Art, is located on Great Jones Street in NoHo. And though it’s a hole in the wall, barely five hundred square feet, people from all over the world travel there for my father’s skill. Rock stars, supermodels, even (it is rumored) rebelling young Saudi royals have been beneath my father’s needle. He’d told me this for years, but naturally I didn’t believe him. Finally he sent me a Village Voice article about him, and I realized he’d been telling the truth. How about that?
“Everything all right?” he asks, lowering his voice when he realizes it’s me.
“Great,” I say. “We’re doing great.”
He’s quiet for a moment, and I know he heard the lie in my voice. Takes one to know one. I listen
to him breathing as he ponders what to say. I remember a lot of heavy silences over long-distance lines with my father, me desperate, him inadequate or unwilling to help. At last I say, “Tell me again, Dad.”
“Oh, honey,” he says after a slow exhale. “Come on. I thought you were past this.”
I sigh and listen to Victory chatting to her doll in the other room. “You’re so pretty,” she tells it. “On the outside and the inside. And you’re smart and strong.” She’s mimicking the things I’ve told her about herself, and it makes me smile.
“Opie, are you there?”
My father always thought my name was silly. He calls me “O” or “Opie” or sometimes just “Ope.” As if those aren’t silly things to call someone. I think he used them to annoy my mother. And they did, to no end. But those silly nicknames stuck, at least between us.
“Just tell me,” I say, trying to keep the edge out of my voice.
I close my eyes, and I can see my father’s face, brown and wrinkled from too much time in the sun on his Harley. When he was a younger man, he wore his hair in a long black mane down to the middle of his back. I’ve never seen the entirety of my father’s face, hidden as it has always been behind a thick black beard. The last time I saw him, years ago now, his hair and beard were well on their way to ash gray. He is forever dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, motorcycle boots. His voice sounds like cigarettes and whiskey.
“You were kids when you came here, you and him,” he says, because he knows that’s where I want him to start. “Right away I didn’t like him. Something not right about his eyes.” He issues an angry grunt. “I really didn’t like how you were mooning over him. It made me jealous. Even though you said otherwise, I knew you were in big trouble. But I let you down, kid. I’m still sorry about that.”
I just listen and remember.
“I should have taken care of the guy right then and there. Or called the police or something, but I didn’t. That was always one of my biggest flaws as a parent: I was always trying to be your friend.”
My father had multiple “flaws as a parent,” lying and abandonment chief among them. Trying to be my friend was not high on my list of things for which he should be sorry, but I don’t say this.
“I let you hide out at my place for a while. I didn’t know how bad things had gotten. I really didn’t.”
I hear the stuttering wail of a siren in the background. Someone comes into the room and coughs. I hear my father put his hand over the receiver and say something that sounds like, “Give me a minute, for fuck’s sake.”
“You’d never done a tattoo like that. Never before and never since,” I prompt impatiently.
“That’s right,” he says quickly. “I gave the bastard a tattoo. It was unique in all the world. His drawing, my bodywork.”
“It couldn’t be duplicated,” I say.
He releases a disdainful breath. “Not by anyone I know in the industry. And I know everyone. It was the kind of art I wanted to do for you. But you never wanted that.”
I never have. Life is hard enough, leaves enough scars—why voluntarily put your flesh under a needle? Piercing is another thing I’ve managed to avoid. I don’t get people who take pleasure in pain.
“Tell me about the tattoo.”
He sighs before going on, as if he regrets starting down this road with me. “I’ve never seen anything like it. That was part of the reason I wanted to do it. It was a nice piece. Stormy seas, breaking waves on these crags that jutted out of the water like shark teeth—lots of lines and shadows, lots of small hidden images within, even the shadow of a girl’s face. Your face, Opie. That’s how I know.”
He doesn’t have to describe it; I can see it so clearly in my mind’s eye. It’s an image that comes back to me again and again in my dreams, and sometimes when I’m awake.
“And when they showed you the picture, there was no mistaking it.”
There’s silence. “No, girl. There was no mistaking it.” Then, “He’s dead, Opie.”
“Call me Annie.”
I know he hates the name Annie even more than he does Ophelia. He thinks it’s common. But it’s no more common than his name, Teddy March. Everyone calls him “Bear.” Anyway, I’d give my right arm to be common.
“He’s dead, Annie. He’ll never hurt you again. Not you or anyone else. He didn’t kill you back then. You fought and won.” I like his words; I try to let them in and become my truth. Pathological liar or not, he has a kind of horse sense that always calms me.
“Don’t turn your life over to him now,” he goes on. “You’re hurting yourself and Victory—and that husband of yours. Move on, kid.”
These are my little rituals, the things I do and need to hear to comfort myself. In the past couple of years, knowing what I know, it has taken only one or two of these things to calm me, to assure myself that it is safe to live my life. But this time nothing’s working; I don’t know why. I feel like I’m seeing these signs that no one else is seeing: the dog running in circles because some vibration in the ground has told him that an earthquake is coming, a hundred crows landing on the lawn. I tell myself it’s not real, that it’s all in my head. Of course, there’s no worse place for it to be. Maybe I do need to talk to the doctor.
Esperanza, our maid and nanny, is unloading the dishwasher, putting the plates and bowls and silverware away with her usual quick and quiet efficiency. She’s got the television on, and again there’s that image of the now-dead woman on the screen. It’s as though nothing else is ever on the news. I find myself staring at the victim, her limp hair, her straining collarbone and tired eyes. Something about her expression in that image, maybe an old school portrait, makes her look as though she knew she was going to die badly, that her mutilated body would be found submerged in water. There’s a look of grim hopelessness about her.
“Terrible, no?” said Esperanza, when she sees me watching. She taps her temple. “People are sick.”
I nod. “Terrible,” I agree. I pull my eyes away from the screen with effort and leave the kitchen; as I climb the stairs, I hear Esperanza humming to herself.
Upstairs, Victory’s happily playing in her room. She’ll go on like this for a while before she needs some company or attention from me. For now she’s rapt in the world she’s created with her dolls, Claude and Isabel. Her babies, as she calls them.
In my bedroom I can hear her whispering to them on the baby monitor I still keep in her bedroom. The sound of her breathing at night is my sweet lullaby. I wonder when she’ll make me take it out of her room. How old will she be when she doesn’t want me to hear her every breath any longer? Mom, she’ll say, get a life.
When I was sixteen, my mother moved us from government housing on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to a trailer park in Florida so that she could be closer to a man with whom she’d become involved. They’d been having a white-hot correspondence for a number of months, involving thick letters written in red ink and the occasional collect telephone call where my mother cooed into the phone, holding the receiver to her mouth so intimately that I’d half expected her to start sucking on it. After some tearful proclamations and heartfelt promises between them, my mother and I packed our few belongings into the back of a brown Chevy Citation we bought for seven hundred dollars and headed south to begin our new life.
“We can live much better in Florida,” my mother told me with certainty. “Our money will go a lot farther. And it’s so pretty there.”
I watched the Lower East Side pass outside the car window and wondered how anything could be more beautiful than New York City. Sure, it can be cold and dangerous—a frightening place, a lonely one for all its crowds. But the grand architecture, the street noise, the energy of millions of people living their lives—you can never mistake yourself as being anywhere else when you’re there; there’s no mistaking that heartbeat. It’s unique in all the world. If one considers the great beauties in history—Cleopatra, the Mona Lisa, Ava Gardner—none of them were pretty in that ch
eap, cookie-cutter way that seems to pass for gorgeous these days. They were beautiful for what was unique about them from the inside out, for features that might have been ugly on anyone else. If you don’t know how to look at her, her hidden alleys and minuscule precious side streets, her aura of mischief, her throbbing nightlife, you might find yourself intimidated by New York City, even repulsed by her odors and sounds, you might even turn away from her because she’s too brash, too haughty. But it would be your loss.
I thought my father would put up more of a fight when my mother wanted to leave with me. But he seemed to agree that the move would do me good. I’d been getting into some trouble in school for insolence, tardiness, and absence. The city offered too much temptation to a young girl with too little parental supervision. In any case, my needs always came last in any decision-making process my parents employed. My mom was motivated only by male attention. My father could never love anything as much as he loved his art. I fit in there somewhere, I think. I’m not saying they didn’t love me.
“Don’t worry about it, kid. Florida’s a hop and a jump. We’ll be back and forth all the time,” my father told me as I sobbed into his chest.
He never once came to Florida to see me, though. And I didn’t see him again until I ran away almost two years later. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
So we moved into a trailer park, and my mother got a job as a waitress in a diner that was just a few blocks away, which was good because that Chevy overheated about three times on the drive to Florida and died altogether on our arrival.
“Well, everything happens for a reason,” my mother said with her usual depraved optimism as the car sputtered and went on to a better place. “At least whatever we need is walking distance. If there’s an emergency, we can take a cab. And I can take the bus to see Frank. Meanwhile, we’ll save on gas and insurance.” If there was ever anyone with less reason to look on the bright side, I wouldn’t want to meet her. Nothing ever worked out for my mother. And if there was any reason for the things that happened to her, it has never been made clear to me.