by Lisa Unger
After that night under the strangler fig, I fell hard in love with Marlowe in a way that’s possible only once in your life. I was on fire and burned beyond recognition. I am ashamed of it now, the way I loved him. More than that, I am ashamed of how vividly I remember that love. Even now, when the barometric pressure drops before a thunderstorm and the sky turns that deadly black, I think of the summer he arrived in my life when there were violent, torrential downpours every afternoon. I remember what it was like to love without boundaries, without reason. As adults we learn not to love like that. But when we’re young, we don’t know better than to give ourselves over to it. The falling is so sweet that we never even wonder where we’ll land.
Sometimes I can’t recall what I had to eat yesterday, but that time with Marlowe lives in the cells of my body, even though I’ve tried to forget, even with every horror that followed. I have forgotten so much, but not that. And I remember understanding on some level, even in the throes of it, that it could never last-just like those storms that turn the streets into rushing rivers and whip up dangerous tornadoes but can only sustain themselves for a brief time.
I absorbed each moment like a person going blind, trying to soak up all the color, all the little details: the way he smelled of Ivory soap and charcoal, the way the stubble on his face was sharp against my mouth. The way the wind howled against the thin walls of our trailer, how the rain pounded on the roof, but how we were safe inside, my mother at work or off to visit Frank.
It was my birthday; I’d turned seventeen. My mother made pancakes before she went to work that morning and placed a candle on my stack. Together, she and Marlowe sang to me. My mother gave me a shirt I’d admired during a trip we’d taken to Macy’s, a tiny pink sparkling makeup bag containing a bottle of nail polish, a tube of lipstick, and fifteen dollars, and a card that read, To my beautiful daughter. I think it had a picture of a fairy princess on it. She was sweet that day, a loving mother. I remember that, remember feeling giddy with her attention.
She left after breakfast, giving me a quick hug and a kiss, promising pizza for dinner and a real birthday cake.
“What’s your birthday wish, Ophelia?” he asked me when we were alone, as I cleared the table of our dishes. The question, his grave tone in asking it, put me on guard. He had bizarre, ugly mood swings; I’d grown to fear them already. Not because he’d ever hurt me, but because they took him someplace I couldn’t follow. His gaze would go empty, his body slack. He might disappear like that for hours, then return to me as though he were waking from a nap. I was too naïve to understand that this was not normal. That’s what I tell myself, anyway.
“To be with you,” I said, because I knew that was the answer he wanted. I remember that the sunlight had a way of coming in golden at that time of day. It made the place seem less dingy than normal.
“Forever?” he asked, reaching out his hand. I took it, and he pulled me onto his lap. He held on to me hard, buried his face in my neck. I wrapped my arms around him.
“Forever,” I whispered in his ear, drawing in the scent of him. And I meant it as only a teenage girl could mean it, with a fairy tale in my heart.
He released me and took a small black box from his pocket. I snatched it from him quickly with a squeal of delight that made him laugh. I opened it and saw the gold half heart glinting back at me. He pulled back the collar of his shirt and showed me the other half around his neck.
“You belong to me,” he said as he hung the pendant around my neck. It sounded so strange for a moment, it moved through me like a chill. But when I turned to look at him, he was smiling. No one had ever said anything like that to me. It was a drug-I couldn’t get enough.
I told my shrink about this. I hadn’t told anyone else; I have been ashamed of the way I loved him, of the things I allowed myself to do to keep that love. Just like my mother. Worse.
The doctor said, in that soothing manner of his, “It’s not how we feel about someone that makes us love them, Annie, it’s how they make us feel about ourselves. For the first time in your life, you were the center of someone’s attention, the primary object of someone’s love. Not waiting for a sliver of truth to shine through all your father’s lies or for your mother to put your needs before her need to be with a man. You were the one. At least that’s how he made you feel.”
I heard the truth in that but thought it was a kind of clinical way to look at love. Isn’t it more than that? Isn’t it more than just two people holding up mirrors to each other? I asked him this much.
“In a healthy relationship, yes, there’s much more to it. There’s support, respect, attraction, passion. There’s admiration for the other person, his character and qualities.” Then the doctor asked, “What did you love about him? Tell me about him.”
But when I thought of him, he was a phantom slipping away into the shady corners of my memory. The adult, the woman who had survived him, couldn’t remember what the girl in her had loved.
The cheap necklace glints in my hand. I remember how a tacky piece of jewelry, for a while and for the very first time, made me feel loved. And I hear the echo of a voice, the voice I heard last night on the beach:
When the time is right, I’ll find you and you’ll be waiting. That’s our karma, our bond, Ophelia. I’ll leave my necklace somewhere for you to find. That’s how you’ll know I’ve come for you.
When and under what circumstances Marlowe spoke these words to me, I can’t recall, but they are ringing in my ears now, drowning out the sound of the surf.
“What’s wrong, Mommy?” Victory has come back and is looking at me with an uncertain, worried expression. I’m in space; I’ve already stuffed the necklace in my pocket.
“Nothing, sweetie,” I say, resting my hand on her head.
“You look scared,” she says. She is small, her hair a golden flurry about her in the strong wind.
“No,” I answer, forcing a smile. “Race?”
She takes off in a run, shrieking. I chase her to the water, let her beat me there. When I catch her, I pick her up and spin her in a wide circle, then pull her body to mine and squeeze her tight before releasing her. She takes off again. All the while I pretend I don’t know that my time is up.
12
I am thinking about my daughter as I edge my way along the hall. She is my shield and my weapon. Everything I have done and will do is to keep her safe, so that I can return to her. I force myself to breathe against the adrenaline thumping. Fear has always been my disadvantage. It makes me clumsy and sloppy. I have made so many mistakes acting out of fear.
Now that the engine is off, the ship has started to pitch in the high seas, and my stomach churns. I pause at the bottom of the staircase that leads up to the deck. I can hear the wind and the waves slapping the side of the ship. I strain to hear the sound of voices, but there’s nothing, just my own breathing, ragged and too fast in my ears.
I make my way up the stairs, my back pressed against the wall. My palm is so sweaty that I’m afraid I’ll drop my gun. I grab on to it tightly as I step onto the deck. I am struck by the cold and the smell of salt. The sea is a black roil. The deck is empty to the bow and to the stern; the light on the bridge has gone dark, like all the other lights.
Suddenly I am paralyzed. I can’t go back to the cabin, but I don’t want to move outside. I don’t know what to do. I close my eyes for a second and will myself to calm, to steady my breath. The water calls to me; I feel its terrible pull.
13
There wasn’t much to Detective Ray Harrison. At least there didn’t seem to be at first blush. He was a man you’d pass in the grocery store and wouldn’t glance at twice-medium height, medium build, passable looks. He’d hold the door for you, you’d thank him and never think of him again. But watching from an upstairs window as Detective Harrison approaches the house, my heart is an engine in my chest. The gold necklace in my pocket is burning my thigh. I go downstairs to greet him before Esperanza can get to the door and let him in.
I remember his face from last night; he’d seemed nice. Kind and without artifice. I’d liked him. But there’s something else I see in him as I open the door that I don’t like: suspicion. Today he’s a wolf at my door.
“Detective Harrison,” I say, offering my best fake smile. “Are you checking in on us?” I keep my body in the door frame, careful not to welcome him in with my words or gestures.
He smiles back at me, squints his eyes. I notice a few things about him: His watch is an old Timex on a flexible metal band, his breath smells faintly of onion, his nails are chewed to the quick. “Everything all right here last night after we left?”
“Fine,” I say with a light laugh and a wave of my hand. “I think Esperanza overreacted a little by calling the police.”
He keeps that slow, careful nod going, his eyes looking past me into the house. “You seemed pretty freaked out yourself,” he says.
Freaked out. It strikes me as an odd turn of phrase, unprofessional and ever so slightly disrespectful.
“It was just the moment,” I say. “Today in the sun, it all seems a little silly, to tell you the truth. I’m kind of embarrassed about the whole thing-you all showing up like that. I almost wish there had been a real reason for the cavalry to come riding in.” I’m talking too much.
“That’s what we’re here for,” says the detective.
An uncomfortable beat passes. “I was wondering, though,” he says, “if I could ask you a few more questions.”
“Regarding?”
“Can I come in?”
I have a hard grip on the door; I can hear the blood rushing in my ears. “I don’t know what else we have to discuss,” I say. “I told you everything that happened last night.”
“It’ll just take a minute, Mrs. Powers.” His tone has shifted from friendly and chatty to slightly more serious. He has stopped nodding and smiling and has fixed me with his gaze.
I find myself moving aside to let him in, in spite of knowing that this is a mistake. But I don’t want to seem like I have anything to hide. So I force another smile and offer him a glass of water, which he declines. He seems to look around and take inventory as I escort him into the living room.
“If you don’t mind my asking, what kind of work do you and your husband do?” he says as he makes himself comfortable on the couch. Everything I liked about him last night is gone. I don’t see the kindness and the empathy I imagined in him. His eyes seem narrow and watchful now. There’s an unpleasant smugness emerging.
I have the feeling it’s a mistake to lie, but I do it anyway. Force of habit. “I’m a stay-at-home mom, and Gray is an insurance investigator.”
He turns up the corners of his mouth. “But that’s not really the truth, is it, Annie? Can I call you Annie?”
I don’t answer, just keep my eyes on him.
“Your husband and his father own a company, Powers and Powers, Inc. Isn’t that right?”
I give him a shrug. “It’s in the interest of our safety that no one around here is aware of that.”
“I understand. Can’t be too careful in his business.”
“Detective, what does this have to do with anything?” I ask. I have stayed standing by the archway that leads into our living room. I lean against the wall and keep my arms wrapped around my middle.
“It could be relevant. Your intruder last night might have something to do with your husband’s work.” He takes out a small notebook, flips through its pages. “They call themselves security consultants, but it’s a little more than that, right?”
“It’s a privatized military company,” says Gray, entering the room. He has been sleeping, but he doesn’t look it. He’s alert and on guard. The detective is clearly startled, like he expected me to be alone here. He rises quickly and offers Gray his hand.
“Detective Ray Harrison,” he says. “I answered the 911 call last night.”
Gray leans in and gives his hand a brief, powerful shake. “Thanks for taking care of things,” says Gray, his voice flat and cool.
My husband pins the detective with a hard, unyielding gaze, and Harrison seems to shrink back a bit. I notice that he looks past Gray, as if interested in something on the wall. We all stand in an awkward silence for a second, in which Gray crosses his arms and offers neither question nor statement, just a scowl of assessment directed at Harrison.
Finally the detective clears his throat and says, “When I learned the nature of your business, I wondered if it had something to do with the man who followed your wife.”
The detective is looking toward the door now. He hasn’t seated himself again, stands with his hands in his pockets. He does a little rocking thing, heel to toe, toe to heel. That Cheshire-cat look he had is long gone. He’s a coward, I think. The kind of bully who would corner the skinny kid on a playground, then lift his palms and widen his eyes in mock innocence when the teacher comes.
“I really doubt that has anything to do with it,” says Gray with a patient smile. “Most of the work I do is overseas. And in the unlikely event that someone developed a personal vendetta against me, I promise you we’d have more to worry about than someone lurking on the edge of our property.”
The two men engage in a brief staring contest until the detective averts his eyes and brings them to rest on me.
“Well, it was just a thought,” he says. He has a lot more to say, but he won’t say it now. “Sorry to have bothered you.”
Harrison walks toward the door, and Gray follows.
“There was just one other thing,” he says as Gray opens the door for him. “I noticed that Mrs. Powers was born in Kentucky. But I swear I hear New York in your accent, ma’am.”
Noticed where? I wonder. Did he check me out after he left here last night, look at my driving record or something?
“I was born in Kentucky but moved to New York with my family when I was a child.”
Kentucky, land of lenient birth-records release policies. Just a little easily obtained information-birth date, mother’s maiden name-and you’re on your way to a brand-new life. If he keeps asking questions and checks on my answers, these lies won’t hold. But he just gives me a half smile and a long look.
“We’ll keep you posted on the area break-ins and if we learn anything more about who might have followed you on the beach last night,” he says as he moves down the stairs. “Have a good one.”
We wave as he drives off. Gray has taken my hand and is holding it tight. I look at him, and he’s watching the detective’s SUV.
Detective Ray Harrison, on the day he began to suspect that I wasn’t who I was pretending to be, was in a bit of a mess. He wasn’t a corrupt man, not totally. Nor was he an especially honorable one. He was a man who’d made some bad choices, taken a few back alleys, and found himself dangerously close to rock bottom. One wouldn’t have known it to look at him. He drove a late-model Ford Explorer, had never missed a payment on his mortgage, had never in his career taken a sick day. But there was debt. A lot of it. In fact, he was drowning in it. He went to bed and woke up thinking about it, could barely look his wife in the eye lately. It was making him sick; he was vomiting up blood from his ulcer. But it wasn’t the kind of debt you could get help with; he didn’t owe money to Citibank or Discover. The detective had a gambling problem. The problem was that he lost, often and extravagantly. The day before Esperanza’s 911 call, a man to whom he owed money sent the detective a picture of his wife at the mall as she buckled their nine-month-old daughter into her car seat. On the back his debtor had scrawled, Where’s my fucking money?
That’s the hole he was in when he had a hunch about me, a vague idea that I might be hiding something. So he started doing a little poking around, not really going out of his way. A totally blank credit report was the first red flag. A driver’s license granted just five years ago was the second. Finally a birth certificate issued in Kentucky when he was certain he’d heard just the hint of New York in my accent.
Detective Harrison was the kind of
man who noticed how much things were worth: our house on the beach, the ring on my finger, the secret I had to keep. He did a little calculating and decided to take a gamble, as he was wont to do.
I don’t know any of this as Gray and I watch him cruise away from the house. His visit is just another bad omen.
14
When I try to visualize Marlowe as he was when we were young, I can’t quite pin him down. The memory writhes and fades away; I can see the white of his skin, the jet of his eyes, the square of his hand, but the whole picture is nebulous and changing, as though I’m watching him underwater.
He is lost to me. Part of that has to do with my blotchy memories. There’s so much that exists in a black box inside me. But part of it has to do with him. Because, like all manipulators, Marlowe was a shape-shifter. He was always exactly what he needed to be to control me-loving or distant, kind or cruel. Maybe I never even saw the real Marlowe. Maybe the doctor was right about love after all, at least this particular brand.
At first Marlowe wouldn’t talk much about his father. If I brought Frank up, he’d change the subject. Or he’d talk about him vaguely in the past tense, the way a person mentions a distant relative he remembers from his childhood. He’d make random comments such as, My father liked the smell of orange blossoms. My father had a red hat like that. Or, My father gave me a baseball bat for my fifth birthday. His memories seemed to visit him in vivid snapshots, bright and two-dimensional. The first time I pressed for more, he went to that dark place. We were talking on my bed, sharing a cigarette I’d lifted from my mother’s purse.
“Didn’t you know what he was doing?” I asked. I took a shallow drag, tried not to cough, and then handed it to him.
