by Lisa Unger
“I really don’t need to go to school today, Mommy,” says Victory from her car seat behind me. We’re driving along the road that edges the water. Her school is just ten minutes from the house. An old plantation home converted into a progressive preschool where lucky little girls and boys paint and sing and sculpt with clay, learn the alphabet and the numbers.
“Oh, no?” I say.
“No,” she says simply. She gives me a look in the rearview mirror; it’s her innocent, helpful look. “You might need me today.”
My heart sinks a bit. I am a bad mother. My four-year-old daughter has sensed my agitation and is worried about whether she can leave me or not.
“Why do you say that, Victory?”
In the rearview mirror, I see her shrug. She’s fingering the piping on her pink backpack now. “I don’t know,” she says, drawing out the words in that sweet way she has. “Esperanza said she was going to make cookies today. She might need help.”
“Oh,” I say, with relief. “And you don’t think I can help.”
“Well, sometimes when you help, the bottoms get black. They taste bad.”
I am a terrible cook. Everyone knows this about me.
“Well, I guess we’ll just have to wait until you get home so that you can help Esperanza,” I say.
She looks up at the mirror and offers a smile and a vigorous nod. “Okay,” she says. “Good.”
It is settled. I drop her off, chitchat with the other moms on the front porch. Before I walk back to the car, I look in the window to see Victory donning a red smock and settling in for finger painting. I feel a familiar twist in my heart; I feel this whenever I leave her someplace, even a place as safe and happy as this little school.
When I return home, Esperanza is gone. Probably off to run errands or to pick up whatever I forgot to get at the store the other day-I always forget something, even when I take a list. I can smell her famous chili simmering in the slow cooker; she probably went to get fresh tortillas from the Mexican grocery downtown. I nuke some leftover coffee from earlier and walk up to the second level. At the door to Gray’s office, I enter a code on the keypad over the knob and slip inside.
It’s dim; the plantation shutters are closed. This is a very manly room, all leather and oak, towering shelves of books, a huge globe on a stand in the corner, a samurai sword in a case on the wall. I stare at the sword a minute and think how not like Gray it is to have a weapon hanging on his wall like some kind of trophy. This is another affectation of Drew’s. The only things in this room that Gray chose for himself are the photos of Victory and me on his desk.
I sink into the roomy leather chair behind his desk and boot up his computer. I stare at the enormous screen as it goes through its various electronic songs and images. When it’s ready, I enter my code and open the Internet browser.
My doctor asked me to spend time trying to remember the things that I have locked away somewhere inside me, to explore those gaping blank spaces that constitute my past. I’ve decided that I am going to do that, just as soon as I’ve done this one last thing, my last tic to assure myself that everything is okay.
I enter his name in the powerful search engine to which we subscribe and spend the next two hours reading about his crimes, the pursuit of him, and his ultimate death. Then I open Gray’s case file, read the notes he took during an investigation that spanned two years and five states. I stare at crime-scene photos, drinking in the gore, the horror of it all. When I’m done, I feel an almost total sense of relief. I move over to the leather couch and lie down, close my eyes, and try to relax myself with deep breathing. But the harder I grasp for my memories, the more they slip away. I get frustrated and angry with myself quickly and decide instead to go for a run.
I run along the beach, passing the empty winter houses that look more like well-appointed bed-and-breakfast hotels than private homes. The sky is turning from an airy blue to gray, and far off I can hear the rumble of the storm that’s headed in this direction. The towering cumulous clouds are soft mountains of white and black against a silver sky, threatening and beautiful. I run hard and fast. I want pain and exhaustion. I want to collapse when I’m done, have a headache from the exertion.
After I pass the last house, I am on the nature preserve. The beach ahead of me is empty; to the east there are sea oats, tall grass swaying, all varieties of tall palms. Every few feet, small signs warn walkers to stay to the water’s edge and not venture into the sea grass, because birds and turtles nest in the protected patch of land. It’s hard to believe that there can be a place this empty, this private, in Florida the way it is today, so overdeveloped, condo buildings rising fast on the horizon as if they sprang fully formed from the earth. The locals joke that the building crane is the state bird. I cherish this quiet and emptiness about where we live, wondering how long it can last. At the tip of the island, exhausted and breathless, I turn back. I slow a bit, thinking I should pace myself to make the distance back to the house.
The Gulf is a relatively calm body of water, the warm, anemic waves a disappointment to anyone accustomed to the roaring of the Atlantic coastline. But today the waves come in high and strong, the water an eerie, churning gunmetal. The sky is ever darker, and I realize that I might not beat the storm home. It’s not wise to be the only thing on the beach when lightning threatens here. It’s far too early and too cool for this type of weather, I think. I pick up my pace again, though my body protests.
As the wind begins to assert itself, I see something lying on the beach that I don’t think was there on my way up. It’s far ahead of me still, a kind of large, formless black lump lying half in and half out of the water. A garbage bag, maybe. A mass of seaweed. A dead tarpon or grouper, both large gray fish. Something tells me to slow down, to stay away from it. But there’s no other route home, and I can hear the thunder louder now, see the clouds flashing. I press on.
The grass and sea oats have started to dance and whisper in the wind. The form ahead of me-I’ve just seen it shift. Could be the wind, but I don’t know. In spite of the encroaching storm, I slow my pace.
I move over to the side to give the thing a wide berth as I pass. I won’t stop to investigate as Victory would. She insists on throwing every stranded thing back into the sea or weeps inconsolably in my arms for those she cannot save. I don’t have that kind of heart anymore. We’re all washed ashore, thrashing, looking for our way home. “Every man for himself” is more my motto these days.
My heart lurches as I draw close enough to see that the form is a man, his back to me. His black clothes are soaked; he is draped in sea grass from shoulders to knees. I can see one of his hands, mottled with sand, dead white. I stop, look up and down the beach. Not a soul. The sky is nearly black now, the thunder closer. I should keep running; I know this. Move fast, get to a phone, call for help. But I slow to a walk, approach the man. I remember that I thought I saw him move in the distance. But that could have been the wind billowing his clothes. Still, I find myself thinking, Maybe he’s alive. Maybe I can save him.
“Hello,” I say loudly to the man who is most likely a corpse, washed in from sea. I don’t feel the fear that I should, just this ferocious curiosity. “Are you all right?”
That’s when I hear him groan, low and terrible. A slender, white bolt of lightning slices the sky some miles away. I move in quickly without thinking and put my hand on his cold, wet shoulder, turn him on his back. I see his face then, the face I always see, white and terrible, a deep gouge in his cheek, his mouth gaping, his eyes fixed and staring.
From deep inside his chest, he growls, “You belong to me.”
I wake up then on the couch, an afternoon storm raging outside, the rain coming down in slicing sheets. My chest is heaving, and I’m sweating.
“Mrs. Annie!” Esperanza’s knocking on the door. I get up and open it for her. She steps back and looks down at her feet when I do, as though she’s embarrassed. She’s a youngish-looking forty-something with a wide, pretty face, ca
fé au lait skin, and the kind of deep brown eyes that men drown in. She looks up at me with concern; she’s been witness to my waking from these types of dreams before. I’m the one who should be embarrassed. I must have cried out; that must be what brought her to the door. I don’t know, and I don’t ask. We both just pretend it didn’t happen.
“One half hour until you have to pick up Miss Victory,” she says quietly.
I nod and look at my watch. I resist the urge to snap at her, to say, You don’t think I know I have to pick up my daughter? She loves my daughter and takes care of us, while I nap on the couch in the afternoon. I can never muster anything but gratitude for her.
“Thank you, Esperanza.”
7
Impossibly, I have drifted off in my crouch behind the door. That’s the level and nature of my fatigue. I am not sure how long it has been since Dax came to tell me about the other boat. Might be minutes, might be hours. Through my porthole I can see that the sun has not risen, that there’s not even a hint of morning light in the sky.
My feet and legs are aching with that horrible tingle of having too much weight on them awkwardly for too long. I stand painfully and stretch, try to walk it off. As I make tight circles in my small cabin, trying to get blood flowing to my limbs, I have a growing sense of unease. Something’s wrong. It takes another minute of anxious pacing, but I realize eventually what’s bothering me: I can’t hear the engines anymore. The boat has come to a stop.
I’m not sure what this means, but suddenly I’m a fox in a trap; I’m stuck in the box of my cabin. When he finds me, I’ll have no place to hide. It’s almost as though he choreographed it that way, like some elaborate dance that we do, that we have always done. But for the first time since we’ve met, I won’t allow myself to be led, to be circled around and dipped at the finale. Tonight I’ll take the lead.
I open the door just a crack and peek out into the empty hallway. As I do this, I hear the boat power down, and everything falls into pitch black. There’s not even a pinprick of light, and I’m rendered blind. I draw my gun, step into the corridor, and put my back to the wall, then start edging my way toward the staircase that leads to the deck.
8
After an early and incredibly healthy dinner of fish sticks, macaroni and cheese, and a side of broccoli spears that no one eats, Esperanza, Victory, and I make chocolate chip cookies. Or Esperanza and Victory make cookies and I watch with rapt attention, sitting on a stool at the bar that separates the kitchen from the family room. It still thrills me to watch Victory walk and do things like hold the hand mixer from her stepstool. She’s such a little person that it’s already impossible to imagine she came from my body.
“I don’t think you put enough vanilla in there,” I say, trying to be helpful.
“Oh, Mommy,” says Victory with a sigh. I smile into my cup of chamomile tea. After the last couple of days, I’ve decided no more caffeine for me. I clearly don’t need any extra stimulation.
The sun is setting, painting the horizon purple and pink. I have pushed my dream as far away as it will go and focus on being present for this time with my daughter. When the cookies are ready, the three of us eat them together on the deck. I’ve built a fire in the chimenea, and we help Esperanza practice her English as the sun makes its final bow. When the air gets too cold, we all go inside.
“When does Daddy come home?” Victory asks as we head upstairs for her bath.
“Soon,” I tell her.
“Soon when?” she asks, dissatisfied with my answer.
“Soon,” I say, resting a hand on her hair.
She nods and looks a little sad. I feel bad that I can’t tell her more. But the truth is, I don’t know the answer to her question, and even if I did, I still wouldn’t be able to tell her where her daddy goes.
By the time she’s lathered up and playing with her bath toys, I’m off the hook; Victory has forgotten all about poor Gray. She’s far too wrapped up in the drama unfolding between Mr. Duck and Mr. Frog, who are in a heated debate about who is faster. I’m cheering for Mr. Frog when Esperanza comes in.
“Telephone for you, Mrs. Annie,” she says, coming to take my place beside the tub.
“Who is it?”
She shrugs and looks uncomfortable. She searches for the words in English, then finally gives up. “No sé. Pero pienso que es importante.”
“She says she doesn’t know but she thinks it’s important,” translates Victory, my little bilingual.
I nod and go to the phone. My heart is thudding as I walk down the hall to our bedroom. I am always afraid when the phone rings while Gray is away. I’m always waiting for the call. I remind myself that if anything were really wrong, they’d come in person.
“Hello.”
“Annie.” It’s my father. He sounds tense, urgent. He’s not supposed to call me. In fact, I’m not really supposed to call him, either. But every once in a while, like the other day, I can’t help it. In recent years we’ve become a little careless. Part of the overconfident phase I’ve been going through.
“Where are you calling from?”
“From a friend’s place.”
“What’s wrong?”
“There was someone looking for Ophelia today. He came by the shop, said he was a cop. But he wasn’t. A bald, beefy guy making a show of himself with a big gun in a holster.”
“Okay.” This is the hard part. I don’t know if he’s lying or not.
“Seriously,” he says into the silence. “No bullshit.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him that my daughter has been dead for over five years.”
“Okay.” This seems to be the only word I can manage. I realize that my whole body is tense, that I’m gripping the phone too hard.
“He didn’t believe me. He wasn’t just casting for information; he knew something. He got all friendly with me, said there was a reward, a big one, for any information about you. I went crazy on him, started to cry and shit about how you were dead and how dare he play these kinds of games with an old man. Then he left in a hurry.”
“But he wasn’t a cop.”
“No way. You can always tell a cop, even the bad ones. They think they got the law on their side. This guy was too dirty even to be a dirty cop.”
“Okay,” I repeat again, not wanting to say too much.
“Be careful,” he says, and hangs up.
I sit for a second with the phone in my hand. I’m not sure what to think about what he’s told me. Ophelia has been dead for so long. After so much time I’d come to believe that everyone had forgotten her except me. I hang up the phone and then pick it back up, punch in a number I know very well.
“Hello?” says Drew.
“Can you come by later? It’s Annie.”
“Sure,” he says after a second’s hesitation. “Something wrong?”
“I don’t know.”
Drew always looks at me as though I’m an unwelcome solicitor at his door asking for a donation to a charity in which he doesn’t believe. I don’t like the woman I see reflected in his gaze. She’s someone unworthy, not to be trusted. But maybe I’m just projecting, as my doctor might say.
He sits at our dining-room table, a bottle of Corona nearly disappearing in his big, thick hand. His brow furrows with deep lines as I tell him what my father told me. He is a heavier, harder version of Gray. He has the same storm-cloud eyes without any of the wisdom or kindness I see in his son’s.
“Could just be someone fishing,” he says with a shrug. He takes a long swallow of his beer, puts the bottle down heavily on the table. “Unfortunately, the circumstances of Ophelia’s death wouldn’t hold up to any real scrutiny. We never expected anyone to come looking.”
I feel a little jolt at hearing that name from him. I hate the way it sounds coming from his mouth, the way it bounces on the walls of this house.
“But there might be a few people who haven’t forgotten her,” he says when I don’t say anything. He rests
his eyes on me, and I fight the urge to shift beneath his gaze. I hear the television playing in Esperanza’s room; she’s watching one of her novelas. I can tell by the staccato of Spanish and the strains of melodramatic music. (¡Ay, Dios! Esperanza will exclaim about one of the characters. She is so bad!) Outside, a strong wind bends our palms, whispering through the fronds. I wish I hadn’t called Drew.
“I’ll have someone look into it,” he says finally.
I realize I haven’t really participated in the conversation, though he doesn’t seem to have noticed. “Thanks,” I say.
“In the meantime,” he says after draining the rest of the beer, “tighten up around here. Keep the system armed, no doors or windows left open. No more phone calls to Ophelia’s father or anyone from her past. You’ve gotten careless by talking to him. That phone call you made last week might be the reason someone’s looking for her.”
“Okay,” I say, feeling contrite. I know he’s right.
He gets up to leave.
“Any word on Gray?” I ask.
“No news is good news,” he says, patting me on the shoulder in an uncommonly friendly gesture. I wonder if our relationship might be improving.
It stormed the day Frank’s son came. Of course it did. One of those storms that roll in from the coast and make a blue day turn black suddenly, as though someone drew a curtain. Wind kicks in and turns the leaves white side up. The barometric pressure plummets, and the sky starts to rumble. We were alone, me and Mom. She’d worked the morning shift, I’d had a half day at school because of some teachers’ conference. We sat on her bed and watched As the World Turns on the tiny black-and-white television that we’d moved in from the kitchen, eating fried-bologna sandwiches. This was a ritual we’d practiced as long as I could remember; I’d been watching the soaps with her for probably longer than that. Even now I’ll sometimes turn one on guiltily in the middle of the day and disappear for a little while, remembering what it was like to be close to my mother, to smell her perfume and hold her delicate white hand.
