by Lisa Unger
“Annie?” says Gray.
“Don’t call me that,” I say. “It’s not my name.”
Later I tuck Victory into her bed and lie down beside her. She clutches Claude in one arm, holds my hand with her free one. She’s drifty, eyelids droopy. I drink in the delicate lines of her profile, the soft pink of her skin, run my fingers through her silky hair. Sometimes it seems that all you do as a mother is say good-bye in tiny increments. The minute they leave your body, they just get further and further away, first crawling, then walking, then running. But tonight it’s even worse. Tonight I really am saying good-bye. Of course, she has no idea.
“Are you still mad?” she asks me, turning suddenly to meet my eyes.
I shake my head, “No. Everything’s fine. Sometimes grown-ups argue.”
She gives a small nod and a sleepy smile; she seems satisfied with this. She has always been such a reasonable child, always seeming to understand things beyond her years.
“I love you, baby,” I tell her. “More than anything.” It’s so important for her to know this now.
“I love you, too, Mommy.”
I watch as her little face finally relaxes, her breathing deepens. When I’m sure she’s asleep, I slip off her bed and leave the room quickly. If I stay any longer beside her, I’ll never have the strength to do what I know I must.
I find Gray waiting for me in the hallway. We have left our conversation dangling, and it will need to be finished tonight. I follow him to our bedroom and close the door behind me. I tell him everything, the return of my memories, the arrangements I have made with my old friend Oscar.
“Annie,” he says when I’m done, “listen to yourself. You met this guy in the psychiatric hospital?”
“It’s what he does, for companies like yours. He makes people disappear, gives them new identities, helps them to stage their deaths.”
Gray shoots me a skeptical look. “But he’s crazy?”
“No crazier than I am,” I say defensively. “He was just having a hard time. Depression. An occupational hazard.”
Gray sits down in the chair by the window. I move over to the bed, give him some space to process all of it.
“Okay, let’s look at this rationally,” he says, lifting his eyes to me. “What does all this accomplish? What about Victory? Do you really want to put her through this?”
“Don’t you get it, Gray?” I say. “He has found me. I don’t know how, but he has. Maybe Simon Briggs was working for him. We don’t know. The point is that I die on my terms and hope to come back to my little girl. Or I die on his and that’s the end. He wins.”
“I’d never let that happen,” he says. “You know that.”
“He’ll wait. He’ll wait until the second our guard is down.”
“You give him too much credit,” he says, standing up and beginning to pace the room. “You’ve blown him up in your mind to be something that he isn’t. We don’t even know that he’s alive. Annie, this is crazy.”
“If it’s not him, it’s someone else who knows about Ophelia. I can’t have Victory touched by that, either. Gray, it’s time. We always said this is what we’d do if the past came back.”
“That was before,” he says, looking sadder than I’ve ever seen him. He sinks down onto the bed. “That was before we had a home and a family, a daughter-a life we built together. Annie, I can’t lose you.”
I walk over to him and kneel before him.
“Then let me go, Gray,” I say. “Let me die so we can be a family again.”
He releases a deep breath and closes his eyes for a second. I expect him to spring up and parade out a hundred more reasons this is the worst idea anyone ever had, how it’s insane and reckless and even unnecessary. But he surprises me then.
“Okay,” he says. “But we do it my way. My people help you disappear; my people on the other end take you someplace safe, protect you. We’ll send Victory away with Vivian, and while she’s gone, we’ll figure out who’s doing all this. If everything goes well, she never has to know about any of it. When you’re safe, when the threat is neutralized, we’ll find a way to bring you back.”
He drops down onto the floor in front of me and wraps me tightly in his arms. “Okay?” he asks.
It sounds too easy, as though he thinks it can all be settled in a few weeks. But I don’t say that. I’m just glad he’s not going to fight me.
For a second, I wonder if he’s humoring me. But then I realize that we have always planned this; that we always knew someday the past might come knocking and that I would need to leave Annie Powers behind. We’d both forgotten how tenuous our hold was on this life we’d built-until now.
“Okay.”
30
I stand on the edge of the sinkhole and look down into its murky depths. It is as black as tar and about as welcoming. My heart is an engine in my chest, revving up into my throat. All my nerve endings tingle with dread. Everything in me wants to flee, but I know I can’t do that now. Only my desire to protect Victory keeps me moving forward, climbing into the wetsuit my instructor provided. He’s lifting the tank up onto my back, and my legs nearly buckle beneath the weight of it. Annie Powers’s life is gone, as totally as if the ground gave way and she fell into the earth.
I have the regulator in my mouth and the mask over my eyes. I hear Janet Parker’s voice in my head: She was there, floating in the cold, dark water for three months. My baby. Alone in the dark, cold water. I have carried the sound of her keening with me ever since I heard her. But it wasn’t until I had a daughter of my own that I could truly understand her grief.
“Are you ready, Ophelia?”
I lift my hand to the half heart at my neck and finger the edge.
“I’m ready.”
He looks concerned, as though he can feel my fear, my pain. Maybe it’s etched on my face. Maybe he can hear it in my breathing.
As I extend my stride, step into the water, and slip beneath the surface, I see her waiting there-Ophelia, so young and fragile, hovering like an angel. Her skin is gray, her long hair pulsing in the current. She is so glad to see me; she takes me in her frigid arms. And in that moment I am whole.
I am Annie. I am Ophelia. I am Janet Parker and her daughter Melissa. I am dead and grieving. I am mother and daughter. The blackness swallows me.
PART TWO
dead again
Just remember till you’re home again
You belong to me.
FROM THE SONG
“YOU BELONG TO ME”
BY CHILTON PRICE
(1952)
31
Something awful happened today. I died. A terrible accident. Something went wrong during my open-water certification. She was prone to panicking, the girl who taught me in the pool will remember. She was afraid of the water. She wasn’t qualified for a dive like that.
Ella will recall our conversation at the mall when I joked about my baptism by fire. She’ll experience a moment of pointless self-blame when she’ll wonder if she might have stopped me.
Neither my body nor the body of the dive master will be recovered. They’ll find my street clothes, keys, and wallet in the dry bag in the backseat of my car near the entrance to the sinkhole where I began my dive. It will be parked beside an old Dodge minivan registered to Blake Woods from Odessa, Florida. The van will be cluttered with all manner of run-down dive gear-wetsuits with tears, BCDs with torn straps, regulators in need of repair. But Blake Woods does not exist. The address on his driver’s license is false; his dive-master identification card is a fake.
Eventually, as the rescue divers search the sinkhole, explore the long caves and narrow passages looking for our bodies, they’ll recover a fin, top of the line and brand-new, matching the type I bought from a local dive shop a few weeks ago. Shortly after this they will call off the search.
Why would someone terrified of the water take scuba-diving lessons? Who was the man posing as her instructor? Why would he take her for her open-water certificat
ion in a sinkhole? There will be lots of questions and no answers. But it happens all the time in Florida, to people far more experienced than I. People descend into the limestone caves and don’t come out again. Cave diving is the deadliest possible hobby. Not for beginners. Suspicious, the police will say. And senseless. So sad. Annie, why?
As I lie in the dark, the taste of blood metallic and bitter in my mouth, I wonder if finally, after all the false deaths I have died, I really am dead this time. Maybe this is what death is like, a long, dark wondering, an eternal sorting through the deeds of your life, trying to discern between dream and reality. I find myself pondering, if I’m dead, which of my lives was real. My life as Ophelia? Or my life as Annie?
I try to move but vomit instead. My body racks with it until I’m dry-heaving, blood and bile burning my throat. I am on a wet metal surface. I am freezing cold, starting to shiver uncontrollably. With the pain and nausea, I figure I’m probably alive. I imagine death would be somehow less physical.
The darkness around me is total, not a pinprick of light. I can’t see my hand in front of my face. The sound of my breathing echoes off metal above and around me. There’s nothing on my body that doesn’t hurt, as if I’ve been in a terrible car wreck, no bone unshaken. I try to orient myself, try to sort through what has happened to me and how I have come to wherever I am. Then I remember the boat. I remember Dax racing off in the Boston Whaler. I remember the men who died trying to protect me, men whose wives I’ve met at dinner parties and award ceremonies, all of them employed by Powers and Powers. I remember the shroud over my head and the blow to my skull.
I’m just getting used to the totality of the darkness around me when in floods the harshest white light. I’m as blind in its brightness as I was in the dark. Maybe it’s God, I think. But somehow I doubt I warrant a personal appearance. I feel He’d probably send a lackey to deal with me.
“Ophelia March.” The voice roars, seems to come from everywhere. It’s as painful to my ears as the light is to my eyes. I find myself in a fetal position, wrapping my head with my arms.
“Where is he, Ophelia?”
I can’t find my voice but manage to emit some type of guttural wail of pain and misery.
“Where is Marlowe Geary?”
At first I don’t think I’ve heard correctly. Then the question booms again.
I realize with a sinking dread that I have made a terrible mistake. It started to dawn on me on the ship when I was taken in my cabin. But now I truly understand how badly I have screwed up. I have shed my life and fled my daughter, believing in my deepest heart-or at least fearing-that Marlowe Geary has returned for me. I let Annie die so that Ophelia could face him once and for all. I understand suddenly and with a brilliant clarity that it hasn’t been Marlowe chasing me at all. It never has been.
Annie believed that Marlowe Geary was dead and buried in an unmarked grave somewhere in a New Mexico cemetery reserved for indigents, John Does, and the incarcerated whom no one claimed upon their deaths. She thought of him there in a plain pine box, under pounds of earth, and she was comforted. She believed the lies everyone told because she wanted to believe them. But Ophelia March knew better. And she has been chasing him. I understand this now, finally. All those times I woke up on buses or trains heading for parts unknown-she was trying to get back to him.
32
Detective Harrison was feeling like a man who’d escaped a terminal diagnosis; he was positively giddy with relief. Since Gray had paid off Harrison’s debtors and he’d enrolled himself in Gamblers Anonymous, he felt lighter than he had in years. The threatening phone calls ceased, and the terrifying photographs of his wife and child stopped arriving on his desk. He’d stopped puking up blood from his ulcer.
A year ago if anyone had told him he’d be in a twelve-step program, he’d have punched that person in the jaw. But the weekly confessions in the meeting room of a local church by the beach cleansed him. He could say the things he’d done (most of them, anyway), and he could listen to others who’d done much, much worse, who’d hit rock bottom so hard they barely got back up. He wasn’t alone. He wasn’t even the worst of the bunch.
He could make love to his wife again for the first time in months. He didn’t feel that awful clenching of guilt and fear in his stomach every time he looked into the face of his infant daughter, Emily. And more than all of this, he remembered what it was like to be a cop, a good cop, the only thing he had ever wanted to be. He approached his job now with the zeal of the converted. And indeed he felt baptized, renewed.
He was experiencing the euphoria of someone snatched from the consequences of his actions. And if he still had the itch to gamble, if he still felt a restless agitation at the sound of a game, any game, in progress-on the radio, on the station-house television-if he still hadn’t been quite able to delete his bookie’s number from his cell phone, he told himself these things could take a while.
In the meantime he had the biggest case of his career to occupy his attention, the one he’d decided would be his redemption as a police officer. Two grisly homicides connected by one woman who was lying about her identity. Of course, that was the part he had to keep to himself, as per his arrangement with Gray. So Harrison was working overtime to find another connection between Simon Briggs and Paul Brown. He knew he’d find it. He was a dog with a bone.
And then I died. When he heard the news and was called to investigate the scene of the diving accident, he enjoyed a secret smile inside. Not that he’d hated me or wished me ill-quite the opposite. In spite of everything, he’d liked me quite a bit. Even so, Detective Harrison didn’t grieve for me as he investigated my suspicious death. Somehow he knew better.
Like the good cop he wanted to be, he walked the grid around the sinkhole, searched my belongings and my car. But when he found the envelope I’d taken from Briggs’s car, he never entered it into evidence. He shoved it inside his jacket and then hid it beneath the seat of his own car without anyone seeing.
He dutifully interviewed my bereft family and friends.
“I don’t know why she would do it,” Ella wept to him at her kitchen table. “She was terrified of the water. I wish I’d tried to stop her. I was trying to be supportive.”
Detective Harrison offered her a comforting pat on the shoulder, thinking that, even upset, she was a very attractive woman.
“She was my friend, you know. My friend. That means something in this awful world. It means a lot.”
“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Singer. I really am.”
“Do you think they’ll find her body?” she asked, wiping her eyes. She was having trouble speaking between shuddering breaths. “I couldn’t stand it if they never found her.”
“I don’t know, ma’am. It’s hard to say with those caves. The divers haven’t found anything yet.”
“Doesn’t it seem like there’s nothing to it but pain and disappointment?” she asked him. “Sometimes doesn’t it seem that way?”
“What do you mean?” he asked gently, thinking she was too beautiful and rich to be so unhappy.
“I mean life, Detective. Sometimes it’s all too hard.”
She lost it then, folded her arms across the table and laid her head upon them and sobbed. My poor, dear friend. He sat with her, a hand on her back. He’d been there before so many, many times. He didn’t feel awkward or uncomfortable. He empathized, and he stayed until she was better.
Ella’s grief, her self-blame, the pain she was in-these were all palpable, completely sincere in his estimation. My husband, on the other hand, was not as convincing, though he looked drawn and tired when Detective Harrison paid him a visit in the days after my car was found.
“Why would she dive like that if she was so afraid of the water?” the detective asked Gray. “Everyone-her friend, even her instructor-says how afraid she was of the water. Scuba diving seems like an odd choice of hobby for someone who wasn’t even comfortable in the pool.”
Gray shook his head. “Annie was a stub
born woman. She got it into her head that she wanted to conquer her fear of the water, for Victory. She didn’t want Victory to see her giving in to her fear. When she got something into her head, there was no getting it out.”
The detective nodded. The whole interview was a charade, of course, both of them knowing that Harrison’s hands were tied by what had passed between them. This went unspoken, each of them playing his role.
Harrison looked around the house just to say he did, poking through the dark, empty rooms with Gray right behind him. What he was looking for, he wasn’t sure.
“Where’s your daughter?” Harrison asked as he was leaving.
Gray issued a sigh and rubbed his eyes. “I sent her away with her grandparents. They’re on a cruise to the Caribbean. I don’t want her to be touched by this yet. I don’t know how to tell her.”
It seemed like a reasonable thing to do. But Detective Harrison knew a liar when he saw one. Gray Powers was a man with a lot to hide, and the strain on him was obvious. But he was not a man grieving the loss of a wife. The death of a loved one hollows people out, leaves them with an empty, dazed look that’s hard to fake. People mourning a loss might weep inconsolably like Ella, or rage and scream, or they might sink into themselves, go blank. As their minds are scrambling to process the meaning of death, they act in all kinds of crazy and unpredictable ways. But in Detective Harrison’s opinion, Gray didn’t have that confused, unhinged quality he’d seen so many times before.
“Wasn’t there a maid?” asked the detective as he stepped out the front door.
“I gave her some time off while Victory is away.”
“I’d like to talk to her.”
“Of course,” said Gray. He disappeared for a minute, then returned with a number and address scribbled on a sticky note. “She’s staying with her sister.”
