by Lisa Unger
“You always love to go to Grandma’s,” I say, fastening the heart-shaped buttons on the back of the pink gingham dress she wears over her pink leggings. She holds up her hair for me.
“No I don’t,” she says stubbornly. “I like pizza and a video better.”
I can see the sad downturn of the corners of her mouth in the mirror across from us. I turn her around gently so that we are face-to-face. There’s nothing of Marlowe in her; her face is a mirror of my own.
“What’s wrong, Victory?” I ask her, almost whispering.
She drops her eyes to the floor. “Nothing,” she says, then leans into me and wraps her tiny arms around my neck. I wrap my arms around her and am about to ask her again, but then Gray’s at the door.
“How does a guy get in on that hug?” he asks.
Victory runs to him, her face bright now, no trace of the sadness I saw a moment ago. He lofts her into the air and then squeezes her. We smile at each other over Victory’s head as she giggles with delight. He puts her back down.
“Everybody ready? Dad just called. Vivian has the steaks on the grill.”
If he notices that Victory and I both lose our smiles, he doesn’t say anything.
The farce of it all sickens me. Sarah Harrison might as well be seated across from me at the long glass table where we have gathered for dinner. A wide orange sun is dropping toward the blue-pink horizon line over the Gulf. We feast on filet mignon and twice-baked potatoes, fat ears of corn. Drew and Gray knock back Coronas while Vivian and I drink chardonnay. Victory sips her milk from a plastic cup adorned with images of Hello Kitty. Anyone looking at us might feel a twinge of envy, the rich and happy family sharing a meal at their luxury home with a view of the ocean.
“Annie,” says Drew, breaking an awkward silence that has settled over the table once vague pleasantries and chatty questions for Victory have been exhausted. “You seem well.”
He is smiling at me in a way he never has before. There’s a satisfied benevolence to him, the king surveying his subjects. I thank him because it seems like the right thing to do in this context.
“I’m glad to see it,” he says. “It’s a blessing to be here as a family. It’s been a long journey to happiness-for all of us.”
“Yes,” says Vivian, looking at her plate. “A blessing.” She lifts her eyes to me then and takes my hand. I have the urge to snatch it away but I don’t. I smile at her and then over to Victory, who is sitting beside me, watching me intently.
“I have to admit,” Drew goes on, voice a little too loud, a little too bright, “when you first came to us, I didn’t think you were right for my son. You weren’t well, and I was afraid Gray was trying to rescue you in a way he could never rescue his mother.”
The words land like a fist on the table, everyone pauses mid-action-Vivian’s glass at her lips, my fork hovering over a tomato-to look at Drew. I’ve never heard him say anything like that; his candor makes heat rise to my cheeks.
“Dad,” says Gray with a frown, sliding forward in his chair. He throws a meaningful glance in Victory’s direction, and I can see the tension in his shoulders and his biceps.
“Let me finish,” says Drew sharply, lifting a hand.
I see then that Drew is drunk. He’s had at least four bottles of beer since we sat down at the table, and he has probably been drinking since before we arrived. There’s an unbecomingly loose, loquacious quality to him.
Gray casts me an uneasy look but leans back in his chair, still tense, still waiting. It’s not that he’s afraid to stand up to his father, just that even the smallest disagreement can turn into a battle. He prefers to bide his time.
“But you’re not like Gray’s mother,” says Drew. “There’s a mettle to you, Annie, that I never suspected. You make my son happy, and you’re a good mother to your daughter.”
A year ago I would have been weak with gratitude for this statement. Now I just want to put my fist through the rows of his perfect white teeth. My conversation with Sarah Harrison is bouncing around inside my head, and my heart rate is on the rise. It takes effort to keep the swelling tide of emotion off my face.
Vivian gets up from the table suddenly, pushing her chair back quickly, almost toppling it. She senses that the sky is about to open.
“Victory, let’s go upstairs and look at your dollhouse,” she says, moving toward the door leading inside. I expect Victory to bolt off after her, but she stays rooted.
“No,” says Victory sullenly. She takes hold of my hand. “I want to stay here.”
“Victory,” Vivian says so sternly that I’m startled by her tone, “let’s go.”
Something shifts inside me. “Don’t talk to her like that,” I find myself saying. “Ever.”
Then everyone turns to face me, as though I’m a marionette that has suddenly made a move of her own.
“I don’t want to play any of those games with you, Grandma,” says Victory. “I don’t like it.”
I turn to my daughter and think how much tougher, how much stronger, she already is than I have ever been.
“What kinds of games, Victory?” I ask her. She doesn’t answer me, but Victory and Vivian lock eyes. There’s a warning on Vivian’s face and fear on Victory’s. I feel the tightness of anger in my chest as I move my body between them.
“What kinds of games?” I ask her again.
That afternoon I did log on to Gray’s computer. And I discovered that Sarah Harrison has told me the truth about the connection between Powers and Powers and Grief Intervention Services. And since then my addled brain has been working overtime to fit together the pieces of the things that have happened to me. That look between Victory and Vivian, for some reason, causes everything to click into place.
“What is going on here?” asks Gray. He has moved forward again in his seat, looks as though he’s about to stand.
Victory shakes her head and gazes hard down at her knees. Her whole body is rigid; she has released my hand and grabbed onto both arms of the chair. I put my hand on her shoulder, lean into her, and whisper, “You don’t have to go anywhere you don’t want to go, Victory.” I watch the tension drain from her body.
Everyone is quiet a moment.
“The picture,” I say quietly, suddenly understanding. I feel the first rumblings of a volcanic rage, but somehow my voice is little more than a whisper. “You tied her up and took a picture of her. You told her it was a game.”
Victory looks at me with surprise, and then the tears start to fall. “Don’t hurt my mommy!” she yells suddenly, looking at Drew. There’s so much fear on her face my heart lurches. She grabs for my hand and starts to pull herself onto my lap. “I didn’t tell her! I didn’t tell!”
She is on me then, clinging and sobbing into my chest in a way she hasn’t since she was a toddler. I hold on to her tightly, bury my face in her hair.
“No one’s going to hurt me, Victory,” I whisper into her ear.
Gray is looking at his father, his face a mask of confused disappointment. “Dad?” he says. “What have you done?”
Drew takes a few deep breaths, seems to steel himself. “I did what I had to do for our family, so that we could all be together like this.”
Gray gets to his feet so fast that everything shakes. A piece of stemware falls to the floor and shatters, spraying wine and shards of glass at our ankles. No one moves to pick it up; everyone stays fixed, frozen. Gray’s face is red, a vein throbbing on his throat. I’ve never seen him so angry.
“What are you talking about, Dad?” Gray roars.
Drew is turning a shade of red to match, but he doesn’t say anything.
“Fucking answer me!”
Drew picks up his bottle of beer and takes a long, slow swallow. It’s clear that he doesn’t feel as though he needs to answer his son.
“Grief Intervention Services is a client of Powers and Powers, Inc.,” I say finally to Gray. I want to rage like him, to start picking up the china and glasses from the table and flingi
ng them just to watch things break and crash, but my daughter is clinging, hysterical in my arms. I feel as if I owe it to her to keep myself together. “I looked up the client list on our computer this afternoon. It’s there.”
Gray’s eyes rest on me and then move back to his father. I can see that he doesn’t know what to believe.
All eyes are on Drew now, who still has said nothing, just puffed up his chest and pulled back his shoulders. He is the picture of self-satisfied arrogance, the man assured of his righteousness.
“So what?” he says simply. “What does that prove?”
Gray’s face falls; all the rage seems to leave him. I remember the expression from my time in the psychiatric hospital years ago when he talked about his father, how powerless he’d felt against his father’s will, his father’s desires for him. How he’d lived his life trying to please a man who would never be pleased. We hadn’t talked about that in so long, always wrapped up in whatever drama I had going on. I could see that nothing had changed. Maybe Gray had betrayed himself in the same way I had, living a fake life for what seems to be the greater good. Maybe he never wanted to go back to work with his father; maybe he just thought he had to, to make a life for us.
“You spent your whole childhood trying to save your mother,” says Drew, picking up his fork and knife and going to work on his steak. “I didn’t want you to spend your adulthood trying to save someone else you couldn’t save. I didn’t want another child in my care growing up with an unstable mother. We did what we had to do. We helped Annie, but ultimately she had to save herself. Our methods were unorthodox, sure. But it had to be that way. Annie knows that.”
He’s so cool, so matter-of-fact, he could be talking about anything-a risky business venture or a volatile investment that paid out after all. But he’s talking about me, my life, my daughter. Gray and I both stare at Drew while he eats. Victory is still crying quietly in my arms. Vivian stands at the head of the table, her hands resting on the chair where she sat during the meal. The sun has dropped below the horizon, and there’s an orange-blue glow over the ocean. Such a beautiful place to live such an ugly life.
“You were haunted, Annie,” Vivian says, her voice soft and earnest. “He was always going to haunt you.” But no one seems to hear.
I’m watching my husband, and I can see him working the problem, going over in his mind the story I told him, remembering the accusations I launched against Drew and Vivian, the things he told me were all a dream. “Alan Parker, Grief Intervention Services, everything he told her,” says Gray, not yelling anymore, not enraged. Just…sad. “It was all true?”
Drew carefully cuts another piece of steak and puts it in his mouth, begins to slowly chew. Gray and I stare at him, stunned by his calm, by his indifference, all our shock and anger just a breeze through the branches of a great old oak.
“Look,” he says finally, resting his silverware with a clang on his plate. “Alan Parker took Annie where she needed to go, and Annie did the rest. Didn’t you, girl?”
Gray’s gaze keeps shifting back and forth between me and his father. “Are you telling me he was there? Marlowe Geary? That she killed him?” His voice is a hard edge, tight with emotion; his fists are clenched at his side. “No. No fucking way.”
A wide, slow smile spreads across Drew’s face. It is almost kind, but it never reaches his eyes. In the gloaming he’s a monster. I find myself recoiling from him.
“What do you think, Annie?” Drew asks, giving me a hideous wink, like we’re in together on some kind of joke. “Is Marlowe Geary dead? Finally?”
And suddenly I realize we are in on the joke together. Because only Drew and I understand that I had to be the one to kill Marlowe Geary. No tale of his demise, no repeated phrases or articles on the Internet were ever going to convince me he was dead. I had to kill him and watch him die. That was the only way I would ever truly be free of him.
All my desire to rage at Drew drains, and I am filled again by the familiar numbness that has allowed me to survive so much horror. I feel a shutting down of anger, of fear, and I am mercifully blank. But I find I can’t bear the sight of Drew and Vivian anymore. I stand up with Victory in my arms and move away from the table, heading for the door. There are a lot of questions, but I don’t want the answers. Not from Drew and Vivian.
“Annie, please try to understand,” says Vivian. I can see that fear again on her face, but I am already gone.
“I need to understand what you did, Dad,” I hear Gray say behind me. I can tell he’s trying to keep his tone level. “I need you to tell me the truth.”
“Leave it be, son,” answers Drew, his tone as unyielding as a brick wall. I wait in the foyer, listening, rocking back and forth with Victory, who is quiet now.
“I can’t do that.”
“Yes,” says Drew. “If you know what’s good for your family, you can. Your wife is unwell. In my opinion not well enough to be caring for that child. And we all know you are not Victory’s biological father. What would happen to that girl if her mother wound up in a rubber room somewhere?”
“What is that?” asks Gray. “Some kind of threat?”
No one was supposed to know that Victory is Marlowe’s child. Only Gray and I knew. And my father. I start to feel weak. I have to put Victory down and kneel beside her on the cold marble floor of Drew and Vivian’s house. I look at her face. If she has heard, she doesn’t give any sign, just leans against me and rubs her eyes.
“Can we go home?” she asks.
“We’re going. Let’s wait for Daddy.”
“Okay,” she says. “But can he hurry? I don’t want to be here anymore.”
“Me neither.”
I hear Drew’s voice booming then. “I don’t have to tell you the kind of connections I have, the people I know. Your job, your home, your wife, even your child are yours because I have allowed you to have them. A few phone calls from me and it all goes away.”
“Drew-” I hear Vivian, her voice pleading.
“What did you do?” I hear something crash and break. Victory and I hold on to each other. I want to go to the car, but I can’t leave Gray here by himself. We huddle against the storm.
“I did what I needed to do so that we could be a family, so that Victory could have a healthy mother, so that you didn’t spend the rest of your life trying to save someone who couldn’t be saved. Don’t you see that?”
I don’t hear Gray’s answer. But in the strangest way, I see Drew’s point. I guess I’m as sick as he is.
“It was happening again,” says Drew. “Those panic attacks that she had before Victory was born. It always started with that. Then the next thing we knew, she was gone, on a bus to God knows where. What if she took Victory with her? Or worse, left her somewhere? It was one thing when she was just a danger to herself-”
“You’re sick, Dad,” Gray interrupted him, his tone thick with disdain. “You can’t use people, manipulate and control them so that they become who you think they should be. It didn’t work with Mom, and it’s not going to work with me and my family. I came back here hoping that we could be a family, learn to love and accept each other for all our differences. But that’s never going to happen, is it?”
“I do love you, son,” says Drew, his voice sounding weak suddenly, and so sad.
“You don’t even know what love is, Dad. You never have.”
Then Gray’s footsteps are heavy and fast behind me. He kneels beside us and helps me to my feet, lifts Victory into his arms.
She lies against him like a rag doll, exhausted. “Can we go now?”
He looks at me with his stormy eyes. “I’m sorry, Annie,” he says. “I’m so sorry.”
“Let’s get out of here,” I say, putting my hand on his arm. I don’t want to talk anymore. I just want to get out of this house, for good.
“I should have believed you.”
“You had no reason to believe me, Gray,” I say, pulling him toward the door.
“That’s not
true,” he says. “I didn’t want to believe you.”
“Gray,” I say, as we walk out the door and head toward our car, “it’s okay. You can start believing me now.”
45
I walk through the rooms of our house and listen to the echoes of the life we lived here. The windows are open, the air is humid. I can hear the ocean and smell the salt. This is what I will miss most about this place, our proximity to the sea, the sand on our feet, the birds crying in the air, the sound of our wind chimes on the porch. But there’s a special kind of beauty to New York City, too. And in its way it is more my home than this place, no matter how beautiful, has ever been.
The few items of furniture that are coming with us are already on their way to be unloaded into a ridiculously expensive brownstone on the east side of Tompkins Square. It’s still a gritty neighborhood, to be sure. Nothing like the posh house we’re leaving, but it will be ours-our choice, our terms, our home. Everything else we’ll leave behind.
I walk from room to room, making sure that things are clean, that nothing we need has been forgotten. I feel a potent nostalgia I can’t explain. Gray and Victory have gone off together to do some errands-close a bank account, buy Victory her own carry-on suitcase for the trip tomorrow.
After I’ve been all through the house, I come to stand at the glass doors downstairs and stare at the Gulf until I sense someone behind me. I spin around to see Detective Harrison standing in my living room.
“The door was open,” he says apologetically.
He looks thin and pale but oddly solid-at peace in a way. I find myself grateful for him and for his wife, and I’m glad to see him now. I want to embrace him, but I don’t. I smile at him instead and hope I don’t seem cool, distant.
