Black Out: A Novel

by Lisa Unger

  He writes it down in a little book he takes from his dash. He asks for the address, and I give it to him.

  “I’ll look into it,” he tells me. “In the meantime, are you sure you’re safe at home?”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” I remember the question he asked on my voice mail: How much do you really know about your husband?

  That wolfish smile again. “Sometimes the people we know least of all are sleeping in our beds.”

  “You must be thinking about your wife,” I snap. “What does she know about you? Not much, I bet.”

  He doesn’t like that—too close to center. His face takes on that dark expression, the one that frightens me. He starts the engine of his car. “I’ll be in touch.”

  “Wait,” I say, sorry for my smart mouth. “Who else is looking for me?”

  He rolls up his window and pulls away, leaving me alone to watch his car merge onto the highway and disappear. I wonder if he’s trying to unnerve me, make me think there are other people after me, that my husband is not who I believe him to be so that I’m more vulnerable to his blackmail. Or maybe he’s just a sadist. Or maybe he’s telling me the truth. I look for Ophelia in the darkness, but she’s gone.

  I return to the house. It’s dark, quiet. Esperanza has gone to bed. I peek in on Victory, and she’s sound asleep with Claude under one arm. The colored fish from her night-light dance around the room. Gray is not back from his deadly errand. And I wonder where he is, what he’ll tell me about his night when he gets home. I consider calling my father but decide it would be reckless and pointless. I go to the bedroom, close the door, and wait—for Gray, for Marlowe, for Ophelia, whoever comes first.

  As I wait, the memories start their parade. I can’t stop them. I lie down on the bed, the sheer force of their relentless march exhausting me. The articles say I watched as Marlowe tortured innocent girls, that I stood by and did nothing as he murdered them—convenience-store clerks, gas-station attendants, hotel maids. It’s true, without being the whole truth.

  We traveled at night, stealing a new car every few days from roadside diners and rest stops along the highway. We stole mostly old junkers with empty soda cans on the floor and plastic Jesuses on the dash, pictures of toddlers tucked in the visor, piles of cigarette butts in the ashtrays. Each car had its particular aroma: cigars or vomit, bad perfume or sex. As Marlowe drove, I rummaged through the glove boxes, trying to figure out whose day we’d ruined, whether they had insurance and would be able to afford another car.

  By the end of the second week, what little money we had was nearly gone; we’d had nothing but soda and vending-machine junk for days. We were hungry, our bodies starving for nutrients, and I was starting to feel desperate. We’d spent two nights in the car. When I managed to sleep, my dreams were wild, chaotic, punctuated by my mother screaming and the sound of gunfire, the smell of burning wood. The rest of the time, I moved through a kind of haze of fatigue, hunger, and fear. This is a nightmare, I’d tell myself. It isn’t happening.

  I’d been in a kind of half sleep when we pulled up at the gas station. The clock on the dash read 2 A.M. I knew we didn’t have any money. I thought he was stopping to use the restroom. Then he pulled a gun from the duffel bag.

  “We need money,” Marlowe said.

  I stared at the gun. Its shape seemed natural in his hand. “What are you going to do?” I said with a laugh. “Rob the place?”

  Marlowe rolled his eyes. “We’re fugitives,” he said sharply. “We’re wanted for murder. Robbing a gas station is nothing.”

  I felt like he’d slapped me in the face. “We didn’t kill anyone,” I said. “Janet Parker killed Frank.”

  “You let her onto the property, Ophelia,” he said nastily. “That makes you an accomplice.”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “Yes,” he said, pulling something from the duffel bag. He handed it to me. It was a Florida newspaper. RUNAWAYS WANTED FOR QUESTIONING IN CONNECTION TO THE MURDER OF FRANK GEARY, the headline read.

  “No,” I said again. The reality of our situation, of what I’d done, was settling into my body. Marlowe moved to get out of the car, but I grabbed his arm. “We’ll go to my father in New York. He’ll help us. We don’t need to do this.”

  “We’re not going to make it to New York,” he said, pushing my hand away. “We’re out of gas. What do you think will happen then?”

  “We’ll steal another car.”

  He swept his hand around the empty gas-station lot. “Do you see another car?” he spit. “In a mile we’ll be stranded by the side of the road.”

  I let go of a sob that had been dwelling in my chest. “I did what you told me to do!” I screamed through a sudden wash of tears. “I saw you talking to her! You planned everything with her! I just did what you told me to do!” It felt good to scream and sob, to release all my anger and fear.

  Marlowe got very quiet in response. He lowered his voice to a whisper and moved his face in so close to mine that I could smell his rancid breath.

  “I did this for you, Ophelia, to save you from Frank,” he said. “You wanted me to rescue you, to take you away? Well, I did that. All of this has been for you, you ungrateful little bitch.”

  He had his hair back in a ponytail, and long strands were escaping. The dark circles under his eyes made him seem ghoulish. I turned away from him, my gut churning with fear and guilt and shame.

  “Do you want me to go to jail? Do you want to go to jail?”

  “No,” I managed, all my anger exhausted.

  “Then fill the tank, get in the driver’s seat, and shut your fucking mouth,” he said. “Keep the engine running.”

  He got out of the car then, and I watched him stride toward the building. I pulled the car over to the pump and did as I was told, keeping my eyes averted from the store. I didn’t want to see him hold a gun to someone. I didn’t want to see the fear on that person’s face. And I didn’t want to be the person who was waiting outside while he did that. When the tank was full, I got back into the car. As I sat there, “New Year’s Day” by U2 played on the radio; I sang along, with the harsh lights above me revealing all the ugliness of my situation. I almost put the car in gear and drove. It was another of those moments when if I’d acted differently, things might not have broken apart the way they did. I was still me in that second. I could still have saved Ophelia. But I didn’t.

  I never thought to wonder why Marlowe didn’t bother to cover his face, or why he didn’t consider it an issue that I waited in plain sight with the car under the lights. When the shots rang out, I felt the vibrations in my bones. I sat there for a second, gripping the wheel, and felt any hope I had for my life drain from my body. Even then I could have run, gone to the police and taken my chances. Instead I got out of the car and walked through the glass doors of the gas station’s store.

  Marlowe was behind the counter, taking money from the register. All I could see was the top of her head, her long golden hair soaking up the pooling black blood on the white linoleum floor.

  “What happened?”

  “Go back to the car,” he said quietly, not looking at me. “Now.”

  I did as I was told. I sat in the driver’s seat for a long time. More than an hour. He came out finally, carrying bags filled with food—Twinkies, cans of pop, candy bars. When he got into the driver’s seat, nudging me back over to the passenger side, he presented me with a Snickers bar, my favorite, and that wide, charming smile that used to thrill me. “I’m sorry I yelled at you,” he said sweetly, leaning in and kissing me gently on the cheek. I clung to him, my lifeline, my only hope, even as my mind screamed, What did he do in there? “I know you’re scared. I am, too. We’ll go to your dad.”

  “What did you do, Marlowe?” I finally managed to whisper into his hair. I felt his body go stiff, and he pulled away from me quickly.

  “Everything I’ve done, I’ve done for you,” he said, turning on the ignition.

  I’d fallen into a hol
e, a slick-walled abyss, and there was no way for me to climb out of the darkness that was closing in around me. I look back on this as the moment when I started to fear him more than I loved him, when the part of me that still wanted to survive started to hate him. But I was too lost to know the difference.

  “No one else will ever love you like I do,” he said darkly as we pulled onto the highway.

  I’m not sure how many more women and girls there were. I remember flash details—garishly red lipstick, a turquoise barrette, a flower tattoo, sparkling pink nail polish badly applied. I hear a nervous giggle, a cry of terrible pain. These things stay with me.

  When Gray comes home, I’ve moved out onto the balcony to listen to the Gulf, trying to remember more. He comes outside and sits next to me. For a second, my past and present mingle.

  “I think our problems have been eliminated,” he says. He doesn’t reach for me or turn to face me. He is just a dark figure beside me, staring out at the sea.

  “What happened?” I ask, dreading his answer. He doesn’t respond right away. Then, “Let’s just say I took care of it.”

  “Gray.”

  “Trust me.”

  I think of my conversation with Ray Harrison at the rest stop, how tired and discouraged he seemed. Maybe he felt sorry for me. Maybe he decided to take what Gray offered and walk away. Or maybe he was planning to work other angles as well.

  “Did Harrison tell you there are other people looking for me?”

  He shifts lower in his seat, puts his feet up on the railing. “There’s no one else looking for you.”

  “He told me there was.”

  “When?”

  I release a sigh, knowing he’s not going to be happy. “I saw him tonight. He called me and asked me to meet him. I did.”

  “That was stupid, Annie.”

  We sit in silence. I want to tell him that I saw him kill Simon Briggs. But I don’t. I’m afraid. Afraid that he did it, afraid of why he shook Briggs’s hand. I’m also afraid he didn’t do it, that I imagined the whole thing. I’m suddenly very cold, though the night air is mild and slightly humid. I walk back into our bedroom. Gray follows, takes me by the shoulders, and spins me around.

  “We’re okay,” he says. “Trust me. All the threats have been neutralized.”

  This is the language he uses when he’s afraid, these passive military phrases: Threats have been neutralized. Our problems have been solved. But I don’t see fear when I look at him. His eyes are flat, cool; his mouth is pulled into a grim, tight line. In the dim light of the room, the scars on his face look darker, nastier.

  “What about Briggs?” I ask. I’m hoping here that he’ll say something true, something that grounds me. I want him to tell me he killed Briggs. But he doesn’t.

  “He won’t be a problem,” Gray says quietly.

  I feel the slightest flicker of fear at his words. I walk toward the bed. He doesn’t move to follow me. I remember that he thought Briggs was working for someone. Even if he’d killed Briggs, wouldn’t that person still be looking, and wouldn’t Briggs’s death be a red flag that he’d gotten close? Suddenly I recall the envelope that I stuffed under the seat of my car. I never looked inside.

  “What were you thinking, Annie?” says Gray. “Where did you meet him?”

  “At a rest stop by the highway. He said, ‘Ophelia March is not forgotten. Not forgiven, not forgotten.’”

  “He’s wrong. It’s over.”

  “What about the person who followed me on the beach? The necklace I found in the sand?”

  “You said yourself you’re not sure what you heard, who that might have been. It could have been anyone, or even Briggs trying to unnerve you. And there must be a million of those necklaces around, Annie.”

  Can it be this easy to explain away?

  “Trust me, Annie. We’re okay.” He kisses me softly on the lips and pulls me into a tight embrace. I can feel his relief, his love for me. I do know my husband—I don’t care what Harrison thinks.

  I want so badly to believe Gray that I actually start to. When he releases me and looks into my eyes, his face comes into focus and the room around me starts to seem like my bedroom again, not a place where I’ll be sleeping until I flee my life. I don’t care whether Gray has killed Briggs or not. I know he’ll never tell me if he did. For a minute I can believe that Detective Harrison won’t come sniffing around again, that the person on the beach was Briggs or some teenager playing a prank. I’ll walk with Victory on the beach tomorrow and then take her to school just like any other day. In a week all of this will be a fading memory, like the car accident you just narrowly avoided that leaves you shaken and glad to have survived.

  Gray’s hands start roaming my body, and I come alive inside. My relief and the strength of his body, the warmth of his skin against mine, awake a deep hunger. His lips are on my neck and then my collarbone as he peels away my shirt and goes to work on my jeans. I am tearing at his clothes as he pushes me gently onto the bed. When he’s inside me, he wraps his arms around me so that I can feel every inch of his body against mine. He whispers my name over and over, soft and slow, like a mantra. “Annie. Annie. Annie.” Somewhere beneath the heat of my desire, I find myself wishing he’d call me by my real name. I wish he’d call me Ophelia. Even though I’m making love to my husband, I feel suddenly so lonely.

  Afterward, as he’s drifting off to sleep, he whispers, “I can’t lose you, Annie. Stay with me.” I don’t know why he would say that. Does he sense that Annie is coming apart and drifting away? I ask him what he means, but he’s already sleeping.

  I close my eyes. When I open them again, Ophelia is sitting in the chair by the fireplace. She’s laughing.

  28

  There are questions I’ve asked myself a number of times over the past few years: Can you shift yourself off and start again? If you’ve done unthinkable things, can you cast them away like unflattering garments, change your ensemble, and become someone else? What of the relief of punishment, the wash of atonement, the salve of forgiveness? I thought I was free. I was confident that I’d started over with the birth of my daughter. In motherhood, in the surrender of self, I became someone new. The ugly parts of myself and my other life were forgotten, literally. The blackouts, the strange flights—all of that ended when she was born. I couldn’t be that person anymore. I had to be someone worthy, able to protect and care for the tiny life in my charge.

  But I suppose I should have known that Ophelia would return. The doctor always said as much. You cannot hide from yourself forever. The terrible migraines and nightmares, he said, were a sign that my subconscious was working hard to suppress the memories my conscious mind couldn’t handle. Ultimately the shadow wants to be known, and she’ll do what she must to be acknowledged.

  The next few days pass without incident, and I lull myself into thinking that everything has gone back to normal. I walk on the beach with Victory, take her to school and pick her up, we watch videos together in the evenings. Drew and Vivian have gone on a short trip, so I don’t have them hovering over my life—Drew with his dark, suspicious glances; Vivian with her concerned, motherly expressions. We are a small, happy family: me, Victory, Gray, and even Esperanza, whom none of us can imagine living without. Even when Gray and I bicker over whether Victory is too pampered, too spoiled (she is, of course, but so what?), it’s heaven in its normalcy. I am giddy with relief. Detective Harrison has stopped coming around. Ophelia is gone. Marlowe, too. No more dark forms lurking on the beach. No more pale, fragile-looking girls walking toward me in the night.

  But they are not forgotten. No, never that. So I begin the scuba-diving lessons I told my escape artist (as I have come to think of him) I would. Just in case. Just as a precaution.

  I am terrified of the water, the leaden quiet of it, the suffocating weight of it. I feel the first cut of panic even as I wade into the shallow end of a pool, as though it might start to rise and take me over, swallow me with its terrible silence. The brighter
the sun, the clearer and bluer the water, the worse it is. It seems like a deceiver then, so inviting, so refreshing. You might forget how deadly it is, how it can effortlessly suck the life from you. When I watch Victory flitting through the water of Vivian’s pool or in the ocean, I envy her confidence and her complete comfort, even as I suppress a scream every time she disappears beneath the surface for more than a second or two.

  “Don’t worry, Mommy!” she’ll call as she comes up for air, knowing instinctively of my fear even though I’ve never said a word, have worked very hard not to telegraph my dread to her. Somehow she knows.

  I wasn’t always afraid. I remember going to Rockaway Beach with my father when I was little, five or six. He would take me into the cold, salty water, and together we would jump the waves. My mother stayed on shore waving to us in her red bikini. I remember swallowing gallons of ocean water, my stomach churning with it. My eyes burned. But I loved it, loved being with my dad, hearing his loud, whooping laughter. Even wiping out was its own kind of fun, those few seconds beneath the blue-gray swirl of the Atlantic, the relief of planting my feet again and taking in air, feeling the tide pull the ground out from beneath me, currents of sand running through my toes. When we were both waterlogged, we’d run back to my mother. I’d have goose bumps, even though the sun was hot. And my mother waited with a towel, wrapped me up tight and dried my hair. I remember feeling safe in the water, feeling like it was friendly, a place to have fun. I have to believe that it was Janet Parker who caused me to fear it with the images she evoked. They expanded and found a home in my mind. After the words she spoke, I could never swim again. Strange how powerful she was, as if she’d issued a curse and changed me.

  The dive instructor I have chosen is very patient with me. She’s a pretty young redhead who I think is used to dealing with children. She talks to me in soothing tones, coaxes me into the water with bland assurances, holds my hand when necessary. The dive equipment, the buoyancy control device, the regulator and tank are somehow comforting in spite of their weight and awkwardness. It’s as if I’ve brought a little of the land with me. Once I learn how to control my buoyancy and measure my breathing, after just two mornings, I find I can float effortlessly in the deep end of the pool. It feels like flying. I’m still afraid, but I’m starting to have it under control.