Black Out (16 page)

25

They waited on the road rain or shine, blistering heat or lightning storms, with posters featuring pictures of their daughters, sisters, mothers, chanting, “Murderer. Murderer. Murderer.” They were careful to stay on the public road. For the most part, they were orderly and nonviolent. Even so, the police could have caused the group, which called itself the Families of Frank Geary’s Victims, to disperse—but they didn’t. There wasn’t much sympathy for Frank among the citizens or law enforcement in our new hometown.

I saw them when I left for school in the morning and usually when I came home. They seemed to work in shifts, the same ten or fifteen people taking turns on the road in front of our property. Twice I saw Janet Parker, appearing shrunken and even more haggard than she had when I first met her at our trailer. Her grief and pain were wasting her; she was slowly disappearing. Every time I saw her, I thought about her daughter floating in the water where Frank had left her.

There was one man, the father of one of Frank’s victims, who was so sick with rage that he looked like he’d stuck his finger in a socket every time he laid eyes on Frank. He’d go from this slack, tired-looking man to someone whose whole body was rigid and red with fury. He’d scream and hurl obscenities.

The morning after I’d watched Frank place the unidentified bundle in the trunk of his car, the Angry Man (as I’d come to think of him) tried to throw a rock at us before the others in his group stopped him. He collapsed, wailing, into the arms of a woman.

“These people need to move on,” my mother said that morning, annoyed by their grief and suffering. She was driving me to school, and Marlowe was along for the ride. “Frank’s not even in the car. Why would he be throwing rocks at us?”

“He wants revenge,” said Marlowe from the backseat. We locked eyes in the rearview mirror.

“He wants it from the wrong man,” said my mother. If she remembered her confession to me about Frank, about his strangeness, she showed no sign. I hadn’t even bothered to tell her what I saw the night before; she wouldn’t have believed me, and I didn’t want her to tell Frank. Fear was a stone I carried in my chest, so heavy I could barely stand upright. I thought of her in her used wedding dress, how she’d pranced about like Cinderella at the ball, thinking no one could see the frayed edges or the cigarette burn in the lace. The story of her life.

At school that day, I just sort of drifted from class to class, not participating, not hearing anything that was said to me. I had the feeling that I’d stepped out of normal life, that my circumstances so separated me from everyone around me that I could no longer communicate in this world. I wonder if this is when I started “dissociating,” as they say. Nothing seemed real to me, everything took on a kind of foggy quality. The change in me must have been apparent. People who had harassed and taunted me because of Frank were suddenly giving me a wide berth. My social-studies teacher asked me to stay after class and inquired about my home life.
Is everything okay? I don’t know you that well, Ophelia, I admit, but you don’t seem like yourself.
He’d placed a call to my mother, he told me, to tell her my grades were in a precipitous drop from my prior school records, but she hadn’t called back.
The honors English teacher from your former school wrote to say what a talented writer you were, how remarkably well read you were for someone your age. We’ve seen no evidence of any of that here, Ophelia. How can we help?
He seemed so sincerely worried that I didn’t have the heart to tell him no one at all cared about me or my grades.

That is another of those moments I reflect upon. This teacher was throwing me a lifeline, and if I had grabbed at it, maybe things wouldn’t have continued on their deadly trajectory. But I was too far gone by then, too alienated from the world around me to know a way out when I saw it.

As I stepped off the school bus that afternoon, I crossed the street to avoid the protesters. To their credit, they generally left me alone. They must have recognized me as the victim I was, as helplessly cast in this miserable production as they were. They threw alternately pitying and suspicious looks in my direction as I came and went each school day. That day I saw Janet Parker watching me. She held a cup of coffee, raised it slowly to her lips. I glanced away from her, and as I did, I noticed Marlowe standing beside her. It looked like he was whispering something in her ear. I turned away quickly, cast my eyes to the ground, and walked through the gate to make the long trek to our house.

Gray Powers is not a man who is often wrong. With a name like that, it seems almost impossible that he could ever be mistaken about anything. He should be jumping into telephone booths, slipping into superhero garb, and saving the day—which is actually not that far from what he does. But he was wrong about Detective Ray Harrison. Gray had sized him up as a small-town cop, corrupt and not that bright, looking for a big payday. He’s the one who always says that the worst mistake you can make in a fight is to underestimate your opponent. And it’s true.

I go through the motions even though my head is reeling from the events of the night before. I put on a big show for Victory, who races toward me when she sees me waiting for her after school. I squeeze her hard and hold on until she squirms and giggles, and says, “Mommy, you’re squishing me!”

In the car she regales me with stories of princesses and castles, giant cartoon characters, endless junk food, and the big bed in her room at Drew and Vivian’s suite. As I listen, I push back images of Simon Briggs, the dark shadow on the beach, my slain psychiatrist. I want to be present for my daughter’s joy. But I can’t. I’m sure she senses it, as her enthusiasm wanes and her tale peters out.

Probably about the same time I was driving Victory back home, Detective Harrison was making connections Gray didn’t think he’d be able to make. There
was
something to link Annie Fowler and Ophelia March. It should have been obvious, since it was Gray. The articles I searched online to ease myself out of the black patches were among the same ones that Detective Harrison found when he researched Gray Powers. Of course there was the slew of articles about Gray’s military career as a decorated Navy SEAL, the articles about Powers and Powers and the rise of privatized military companies. After scrolling though page after page, Detective Harrison found an old item, an article from the
Albuquerque Journal.
The headline read:
INVESTIGATOR HUNTS
,
KILLS CRIME-SPREE KILLER MARLOWE GEARY
:
Ophelia March, believed to be Geary’s captive or his accomplice, also killed.
He might otherwise have glanced over the article except for the picture of Ophelia, which he quickly recognized. It was all there for him to see, my ugly past.

Maybe it’s the disappearance (death? murder?) of my (imaginary?) shrink or the fact that I can feel Harrison’s breath on my neck. Or maybe it’s as my doctor believed, that I’m stronger than I’ve ever been, that I’m ready to face the things I have packed away. Whatever the reason, the flashes of memory I’ve had, the dreamlike images, begin to coalesce. The blanks start to fill in.

It’s not as dramatic as I believed it would be, this return of my past. I envisioned being bowled over by it, taking to my bed, feeling helpless to do anything as the memories trampled me like runaway horses. But it is more like watching the rerun of a black-and-white horror film I saw as a child. The images are familiar, but too grainy and drained of power to be truly frightening.

After I put Victory to bed her first night back home, I start to remember. I tuck her beneath her sky blue sheets and sit with her as she drifts off, watching the delicate rise and fall of her chest. As I get up quietly and slip from her room, she says sleepily, “I want my baby.” I find Claude on the floor and put him beside her, but she is already sound asleep again. As I leave the room, I hear Janet Parker’s voice and there’s a terrible ringing in my ears. Once I’m back in my bedroom, I’m swept away, traveling back to a place I haven’t visited in a lifetime.

I watched Marlowe leave the house that night. He had his headphones on, and he walked out the front door and disappeared into the trees. As usual, Frank was gone and my mother was in a stupor in front of the television.
Don’t you wonder where Frank goes at night?
Marlowe had asked.
He’s hunting.
I easily slipped out after him. In the dark, I saw his form move quickly through the woods, and I followed. I could smell the acrid scent of his cigarette smoke hanging in the air.

He walked for so long and he was so fast that I didn’t think I’d be able to keep up. By the time he came to a stop, I was breathless and sweating. My legs had been lashed by the overgrowth. The mosquitoes were in a feeding frenzy at my ankles and my neck.

He came to a creek that ran through the property and waded across. Through the trees I could see a trailer, a rusted-out old thing up on concrete blocks, not much smaller than the one I’d lived in with my mother. He opened the door and went inside. I saw a light come on. I stood in the darkness, waiting, not sure whether to follow or to go back home. As I was about to walk over to the trailer, he emerged again. He came back to the creek and squatted there, looked into the water as though gazing at his own reflection. I approached him.

At first I thought he was laughing, laughing at me for following him. It was only as I drew closer that I realized he was crying. His whole body was shivering with it. I didn’t know what to do. I stood and watched him for I don’t know how long, listening to the sound of his weeping, an owl calling up above us, tree frogs singing all around.

“Marlowe,” I said finally, softly.

He didn’t jump at the sound of my voice, and I assumed he couldn’t hear me, that he had the Cure or the Smiths blasting in his ears.

“We have to get out of here,” he said, his voice a choked whisper. “It’s started again. You saw. I know you did.”

I had the strong urge to turn and run from him, even though I’d followed him out there. Or was I just a fish on a line, he the fisherman reeling me in—too foolish, too naïve to feel the hook in my cheek?

“You helped him,” I said. His back was still to me. “Who was it?”

He stood and spun around then, came and grabbed me by the shoulders. “Does it fucking matter who it was?” he hissed. “Do you understand now?”

I saw him then, saw what he was. This is why I can’t forgive Ophelia. She knew.

“I’m ready,” I told him. And his face changed again. It was as white as the thin slice of moon.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.” And I was.

He brought me into the trailer. There was a kitchen and a small bedroom. A bathroom that didn’t work, of course. No electricity or running water. The lights were all battery-operated. I recognized the bedding, the pots and dishes from our old trailer. The table was piled high with Marlowe’s books and notebooks.

“What is this place?”

“I found it walking one night when we first came. Abandoned, gone to shit. I’ve been fixing it up, staying out here sometimes. You could live out here, you know. If you have provisions, you could live out here forever. He doesn’t know about it. No one does.”

He took me by the hand and led me to the bed, turning out the little plastic lights as we went. In the darkness we lay close. I couldn’t see his face anymore. I was grateful that the darkness was so total. I could only hear the sound of his voice, feel the warmth of his body next to mine. We talked about what we would do. It didn’t seem real. It was all a dream.

When I come back to myself sitting on the edge of my bed, my daughter sleeping down the hall, an hour has passed. I feel shaken and weak. I’m not sure I want to remember the things I have forgotten. But I know that the memories will come now, unbidden, the dead rising.

26

In music a fugue is a movement in which different voices combine to state or develop a single theme. These voices mingle and weave together, each tone complementing the other, creating a multilayered but unified part of the composition. In psychology the term refers to a dissociative state characterized by a sudden departure from one’s life, bouts of amnesia or confusion regarding one’s identity, significant distress, generally the result of a major emotional or physical trauma. I have no musical ability whatsoever, but I’m painfully familiar with fugue. Or so I’m told.

Yet this is not a fugue, this most recent flight from my life. For the first time maybe, I am sure of who I am and what I must do. This has been a purposeful escape to protect my daughter from mistakes that I have made, to protect her from the woman I have been. If I can’t do that, then she’s better off without me.

The boat is pitching horribly now, and I cling to the rail on the wall as I make my way back to my cabin. The wind is wailing, and I think of Dax on his little boat and wonder how he is faring in the big waters and if he’ll survive, if he’ll come back for me. My stomach is in full mutiny, and I hold back vomit as I move through the door, pull it closed behind me, and resume my crouch in the small triangle of space that will be created when the door swings open. I listen to the wind and the churning water.

It isn’t long before I hear the thrum of a powerful boat engine, then footfalls on the deck above me. I take the gun from my waist and am comforted by its heft. I am aware of a tremendous sense of relief, something akin to the euphoria that sweeps over me when a migraine has passed, the wonderful lightness that follows the cessation of pain. It feels good to be Ophelia again, to face the things that Annie never could. My memories have come back to me; I remember it all. I am not proud, but I am whole, at last.

It was Gray who gave me the name Annie Fowler. It was someone from his company who created the documents I needed—driver’s license, passport, Social Security card—to move about the world as someone else. But I made Annie what Ophelia always wanted to be—a wife and mother with a big house and a beautiful child, a husband who cherished her—someone totally different from who her mother had been. Annie had a past unmarred by shame and regret; she was not haunted by the things she had done or the things that had been done to her. I became Annie—rich and pampered, dependent on Gray for strength, dependent on Victory for a feeling of purpose. Like everyone else in her life, I abandoned Ophelia, left her to die in a fiery blaze.

As the heavy footfalls draw closer, I am grateful that Ophelia has returned. She is so many things that Annie was not. She is temperamental where Annie was cool. She is angry where Annie was numb. And unlike Annie, the loving wife and doting mother, princess of suburbia, Ophelia March is a stone-cold killer.

They’re kicking open doors now; there’s more than one man on this boat, and they’re searching the cabins one by one. I don’t know how many men or how many cabins they have to go before they get to mine. But I’m ready.

When they kick my door open and enter the room, I wait for the door to swing back before opening fire. There are two men, both wearing black paramilitary gear—mask, vests, boots. I get one of them in the shoulder, and he issues a terrible scream. The other one takes a round in the vest and is knocked back hard against the wall with a groan. I break from the room but am surprised in the hallway by two more men. They disarm me quickly and bind my arms, slip a heavy hood over my head. It happens so fast I’m in darkness before I even know what hit me. I hear a dull thud, then see a flash of white. Before I lose consciousness, I have enough time to wonder if there’s more to what is happening here than I have imagined. I see my daughter’s face, then nothing.

It’s not terribly hard to take a life. Or anyway, not as hard as you’d imagine. There are those who would tell you I was not in my right mind, that I had dissociated from reality, from myself, on the night I made this discovery. But I’m not so sure. In my memories I am quite willing. Of course, all I did was leave the gate open. But that was enough, wasn’t it?

I don’t remember feeling anything, less than a week later after the night out in the woods, as I walked the drive on the horse farm to open that gate. I was basically sleepwalking.

Marlowe told me to wait until the house was quiet, to get to the gate before midnight. I wasn’t afraid of the long road or the errand before me. And as I let the gate swing open before I walked back to the stable, where I was supposed to meet Marlowe, I didn’t feel any anticipation or excitement or dread—I just felt empty. Even when a black sedan passed me with its lights off, slow and deadly like a shark through dark water, I observed it with detachment.

All the lights in and around the house were off, and a heavy quiet blanketed the night; even my soft footfalls seemed to echo. In the stable the horses were restless in their stalls again. I heard them shuffling, exhaling loud breaths from their nostrils. But Marlowe was nowhere in sight. The black sedan, a Lincoln I recognized as belonging to one of the protesters, was parked to the side of the barn, its engine clicking as it cooled.

Something about that sound brought me into the reality of what we were about to do. I felt as though I’d been startled awake. That’s when I noticed a flickering orange glow in the windows that had been dark just moments before. The scent of burning wood began to fill the air. I started running toward the house, my legs feeling impossibly slow and heavy, the house seeming so far away. As I burst through the door, the air was already thick with smoke.

“Mom!” I yelled, grabbing the banister and racing up the stairs. I covered my mouth and nose with my arm, but the smoke was insidious, burning my eyes, clawing at the back of my throat. By the time I got to the top landing, I was coughing and light-headed.

I found my mother alone in her bed, passed out cold, oblivious to the fire raging through the house. I don’t know what I thought would happen to her in all this, but I couldn’t leave her to die. I shook her but couldn’t rouse her. Finally I dragged her until she stumbled from the bed, leaning her full weight on me.

“What’s happening?” she muttered.

“There’s a fire!” I yelled, struggling to get to the door. “Where’s Frank?”

But she didn’t seem to hear. “Ophelia,” she slurred, “let me sleep.”

I dragged her into the hall, where through the smoke I saw two figures on the staircase, one long and lean, the other smaller by far but holding a gun. The taller was Frank, halfway up the stairs, probably headed up to get my mother. Where he’d been, I had no idea. But he’d stopped and turned to face the figure behind him. As I moved closer, I recognized. There was a wild look to Janet Parker, desperate and so, so sad.
She doesn’t care what happens to her,
I thought. Her whole body was rigid, as though it took the strength of all her muscles to hold that gun steady.

“You’re making a mistake, ma’am,” Frank said soothingly. He had one hand lifted as if to deflect the shot. His eyes fell on us.

The scene seemed to sober my mother a bit. “What’s happening?” she said, groggy and confused. “Frank, what’s going on?”

“You let my wife and her daughter leave the house,” he said to Janet Parker. “They’re innocent here.”

I heard a crash come from behind us, and the shattering of glass. My mother let go a little scream.

“Let them leave,” Frank said again. “They’ve got nothing to do with any of this.”

Janet Parker nodded at us, barely seeing us, and I grabbed my mother’s arm, dragged her toward the staircase.

“What are you doing?” my mother yelled as we moved past Frank down the stairs. My mother reached for Frank, and he clasped her to him, then pushed her away.

“Go,” he told her.

I saw then that they truly loved each other, and it shocked me. I’d seen them as these sick, damaged people who had formed an insane union. It never occurred to me that they’d actually cared for each other.

“The only peace I had was knowing you’d burn in hell for what you done!” Janet Parker yelled when we reached the bottom of the stairs. These were almost exactly the words she’d said at the trailer park.

“I didn’t kill your child, ma’am. I’ve never killed anyone. I swear it.” He sounded so sincere I almost believed him.

“Frank!” my mother shouted as I dragged her out the door and away from the house. I could see the flames coming out of the roof now, and as we watched, my bedroom window blew out, raining glass onto the ground below. I stood staring, disbelieving my own eyes. The house was burning. Where was Marlowe?

My mother broke away from me then and ran. I chased after her, but she moved back through the front door before I could stop her. I heard her screaming, a terrible howl of protest, and I came up behind her just in time to see Frank’s chest exploding as Janet Parker shot him dead center. He spun and seemed to pause in midstride, as though he’d decided to walk away from her but changed his mind. Then he fell flat and hard onto the stairs and slid down like a plank.

I looked up at Janet Parker, and for the first time I saw her smile. Then she turned the barrel and stuck the gun into her own mouth and pulled the trigger. I saw an awful spray of red.

My mother was wailing as I pulled her away from Frank’s body, and as we moved through the door, two more windows burst upstairs. She threw herself to the ground outside and wept as the fire raged. I stood beside her staring. The world seemed to lose all its sound, the ground was gone from beneath my feet and I was spinning. Regret and fear cut a valley through me.
What did we do? Oh, my God, what did we do?
The things I’d seen had changed something within me, like one bright red sock in a white wash. Everything in my world was a different color now.

I saw him then, standing beside the barn, just another shadow in the darkness, licked by the orange light of the flames. He might have been laughing, he might have been crying. I don’t know—I couldn’t see his face. That was the thing about Marlowe, you could
never
see his face. I walked to him as if he’d called me. He’d cast and directed us all; we’d each played our roles for him perfectly. That was his gift.

I got into the passenger side of the Lincoln and watched him climb behind the wheel. He looked at me as he started the ignition, didn’t say a word as we started down the long, dark drive. My mother didn’t even raise her head from the ground. She never noticed I’d gone.

“Are you okay?” It’s Gray standing in our doorway.

I am sitting on the edge of our bed in the dark, staring at the wall as though my memories are playing on a screen there.

“I’m fine,” I tell him. “Just tired.”

I don’t want to share my memories with him; I’m not sure why.

“Look,” he says, “we’re going to find out what’s happening and put an end to it.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to go see Harrison, find out what he wants, and give it to him.”

He has come to sit beside me and is holding my hands in his. I’m surprised by what he’s saying. It sounds like a desperate move. It’s not like him. “Always operate from a position of strength”—that has been his motto as long as I’ve known him. It sounds to me now as if he’s waving a white flag.

“Whoever came to see your father, whoever was on the beach, whatever happened to your psychiatrist—these are unknowns. Maybe you were right, maybe it’s all part of the same problem. I don’t know. But Harrison is a threat we can deal with. Buy him off, he goes away. Who knows? Maybe everything else goes away, too.”

I feel a glimmer of hope, that maybe we just have to write a check and all of this disappears. I can go back to being Annie Powers and Ophelia can slip back into the darkness where she belongs. Maybe it’s really that easy.

“Okay,” I say.

“I’ll be home soon,” he says, kissing me softly on the mouth. I reach for him, pull him to me, and hold on tight. He leaves me, and I listen to him on the stairs and then watch as his car pulls from the drive. I get up quickly and grab my keys.

“I’m going to run out for a second,” I tell Esperanza as I pass by the family room on my way to the garage. “Gray’s gone, too.”

“It’s late,” she says.

“I won’t be long,” I say. “Victory’s sleeping.”

I don’t hear what she says as I leave. At the end of our street, I just catch a glimpse of Gray’s taillights as he makes a left. I’m following him. I don’t know why.