Black Out: A Novel

by Lisa Unger

  Take the man for whom we moved down to Florida. He was an all right guy, sort of soft-spoken and not unkind to me during visits. But there was one problem: He was a convicted rapist and murderer on death row in the Florida State Prison. My mother had “met” him during a letter-writing campaign initiated by her church. The goal was to spread the word of the Lord to the lost souls on death row, to “save” them before they faced their earthly punishment for the wrongs they’d done. My mother, obviously, took the whole saving thing a little bit too far.

  I’ll never forget our first August in Florida. I didn’t even know it could get that hot; the humidity felt like wet gauze on my skin; it crawled into my lungs and expanded. Violent lightning storms lit the sky for hours, and the rain made rivers out of the street in front of our trailer park. And the palmetto bugs—they made New York City roaches look like ladybugs. The only thing that redeemed Florida for me was how the full moon hung over the swaying palm trees and how the air sometimes smelled of orange blossoms. But generally speaking, it was a hellhole. I hated it, and I hated my mother for moving us there.

  The Florida I live in now with Gray and Victory is different. This is the wealthy person’s Florida, of shiny convertibles and palatial homes, ocean views and white-sand beaches, margaritas and Jimmy Buffett. This is the Florida of central air and crisp cotton golf shirts over khakis, country-club days and fifty-foot yachts. To be honest, I hate it just as much. It’s so fake, so tacky and nouveau riche, so proud of its silicone-filled and bleached-blond Barbie women.

  Give me concrete and street noise any day. Give me Yellow Cabs and hot-dog stands. Give me legless, homeless guys pushing themselves on dollies through the subway cars, shaking their change jars with self-righteous aplomb.

  I am thinking about this as I sit on the floor by the bed and reach up under the box spring. I’ve cut out a large hole there. Inside, I keep things that Gray and my doctor would be very unhappy about. They just wouldn’t understand. I reach around and don’t feel anything at first. Maybe Gray found them, I think, panic threatening. Maybe he took them away to see how long it would be before I looked for them again. But then, with a wash of relief, I feel the smooth, cool surface of one of these things.

  “Mommy.” It’s Victory, whispering into her baby monitor. I can hear her, but she can’t hear me, and she gets that. “Mommy,” she says, louder. “Come to my room. There’s a strange man on our beach.”

  She hasn’t even finished the sentence and I’m already running. In my panic, the hall seems to lengthen and stretch as I make my way to her. But when I finally burst through the door, breathless and afraid, there’s no one on our stretch of sand. Out her window, there’s just the moody black-gray sky, and the green, whitecapped ocean.

  We live near the tip of a long beach, right before a state nature preserve. There are about five other houses within walking distance of ours, and three of those are empty for much of the year. They are weekend homes and winter homes. So essentially we’re alone here among the great blue herons and snowy egrets, the wild parrots and nesting sea turtles. It’s silent except for the Gulf and the gulls. People walk along the beach during tourist season, but very few linger here, as all the restaurants, bars, and hotels are a mile south.

  “Where, Victory?” I say too loudly. She’s gone back to playing with her dolls. They’re having a tea party. She looks up from her game, examines my expression because she doesn’t understand my tone. I try to keep the fear off my face, and I might have succeeded. She comes over to the window and offers a shrug.

  “Gone,” she says casually, and returns to her babies, sits herself back down on the floor.

  “What was he doing?” I ask her, my eyes scanning the tall grass and sea oats that separate our property from the beach. I don’t see any movement, but I imagine someone slithering toward our house. We wouldn’t see him until he reached the pool deck. We’ve been lax about security lately, lulled into a false sense of safety. I should have known better.

  “He was watching,” she says. My heart goes cold.

  “Watching the house, Victory?”

  She looks at me, cocks her head. “No. The birds. He was watching the birds.”

  Victory begins pouring little imaginary cups of tea. Esperanza is still humming in the kitchen. There is no one on the beach. The sun moves from behind the clouds and paints everything gold. I decide it’s time to call my shrink.

  4

  A couple of months after my mother and I moved to Florida and I had settled reluctantly into my new school, she started to act strangely. Her usual manic highs and despondent lows were replaced with a kind of even keel that felt odd, even a little spooky.

  The early changes were subtle. The first thing I noticed was that she’d stopped wearing makeup. She was a pretty woman, with good bone structure and long hair, silky and fine. Like her hair, her lashes and brows were blond, invisible without mascara and a brow pencil. When she didn’t wear makeup, she looked tired, washed out. She’d always been meticulous about her appearance. “Beauty is power,” she would tell me, though I’d never seen any evidence of this.

  We were in the kitchen on a Saturday morning. I was eating cereal and watching cartoons on the small black-and-white set we had sitting on the counter; she was getting ready for the lunch shift at the diner. The ancient air conditioner in the window was struggling against the August heat, and I could feel beads of sweat on my brow and lip in spite of its best efforts.

  I looked over at my mother, leaning against the counter, sipping coffee from a red mug, her bag over her shoulder. She stared blankly, zoning out, somewhere else.

  “Mom, aren’t you going to ‘put your face on’?” I said, nastily mimicking the chipper way she always said it.

  “No,” she said absently. “I’m not wearing makeup anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s cheap. Frank thinks it makes me look like a whore.”

  I felt a knot in my stomach at her words, though at the time I couldn’t have explained why.

  “He said that?”

  She nodded. “He said he couldn’t sleep at night knowing that I was walking around looking like that, that other men were leering at me, thinking they could have me at any price. He said I should display my face as God made it. And he’s right.”

  I didn’t know what to say. But even at sixteen—almost seventeen by then—I knew that it was so screwed up in so many ways that there was no way to address it.

  “Mom,” I said finally, “that’s bullshit.”

  “Watch your mouth, Ophelia,” she snapped, turning angry eyes on me. “I didn’t raise you to talk that way. When Frank comes home, there won’t be any talking like that.”

  She looked away from me after a moment and stared out the window as if she were expecting someone.

  “Mom, Frank’s on death row,” I said calmly. “He’s not coming home.”

  She turned and looked at me sharply. “Don’t say that.”

  “It’s true, Mom. You know it’s true.”

  “Ophelia, you don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, raising her voice. “There’s new evidence. Evidence that will prove there is no way Frank did the things they say he did. He’s innocent. God won’t let an innocent man die for crimes he didn’t commit.”

  Her tone had gone shrill, and there were tears in her eyes. She slammed her empty coffee cup on the counter and left without another word.

  We’ve talked about this a hundred times at least, my shrink and I. This first moment between my mother and me when I knew that something was wrong, really wrong.

  “And how were you feeling after she left that morning?”

  “Sick,” I say. “Scared.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she seemed…different. And I didn’t want Frank to ‘come home.’ I figured he was just a phase she was going through, that it would go bad like all her relationships, and we’d move back to New York.”

  “You were afraid of him?”


  It seems like a stupid question. “He was a convicted rapist and murderer,” I say slowly. My doctor gives a deferential nod but doesn’t say anything, waits for me to go on. When I don’t, he says, “Your mother thought he was innocent. Wasn’t it possible? Plenty of people have been convicted of crimes they didn’t commit.” He does this, plays devil’s advocate to encourage me to defend my position. I find it annoying rather than helpful.

  “My mother thought he was innocent, yes,” I say. I remember those awkward visits where they would put their hands against the glass that separated them until one of the guards barked at them to stop. I remember how he’d look at me, ask me about school. I remember his cool gaze and soft voice. Something about him made me want to run screaming. “There was something dead in his eyes,” I say. “Even when he smiled, there was something…missing. And then all these changes in my mother. If he had such an effect on her from behind bars, what could he do to her if he was living with us?”

  My doctor is silent for a moment.

  “What do you think you could have done at this point that might have changed the events that followed?” he asks finally.

  This is my thing. There was something about that morning in the trailer with my mother. I feel strongly that it was the last moment where things might have turned out differently. If I had chased after my mother and forced her to tell me what she was talking about. If I had told her that I felt sick and scared and that Frank was guilty and that he could not, should never, come live with us, she might have listened. I tell this to my shrink.

  “But do you really think she would have heard you, Annie?”

  “I guess I’ll never know.”

  He lets the words hang in the air. We’ve both heard them a hundred times. And somehow they never rest easier with me.

  “What did you do instead?” he asks.

  “I finished my cereal, watched some more television. Told myself that she was nuts, an idiot. I pushed it out of my head.”

  “You’re good at that.”

  “Pushing things out of my head? Oh, yes.”

  His office is uncomfortable. The chenille sofa is soft but cheap, seems to push me out rather than welcome me in. It’s far too cold in the refrigerated way that indoor spaces get too cold in Florida. The tip of my nose feels cold even though it’s blazing outside, and I can see the sunlight glinting off the warm green waters of the Intracoastal.

  I don’t lie on the couch but sit cross-legged in the corner; on my first visit he told me I could recline if it made me feel comfortable. I told him it wouldn’t. He sits across from me in a huge chair that he easily fills, a low cocktail table covered with art books—Picasso, Rembrandt, Georgia O’Keeffe—between us. The space is trying very hard to be a living room and not a doctor’s office. Everything is faux here—the table, the bookshelves, his desk all made of cheap wood veneer, the kind of stuff that comes in a box, just a pile of wood, a bag of screws, and a booklet of indecipherable instructions. It seems transient and not very comforting. I feel as if his furniture should be made of oak, something heavy and substantial. Outside his window should be a blustery, autumn New England day with leaves turning, maybe just the hint of snow. He should be wearing a sweater. Brown.

  He doesn’t take notes; he has never taped our sessions. I’ve been adamant about this. I don’t want a record of my thoughts anywhere. He’s okay with that, said we’d do whatever made me comfortable. But I’ve always wondered if he scribbles down his thoughts right after I leave. He always seems to have perfect recall of the things we’ve discussed.

  As much as I’ve revealed to him, I have kept a lot of secrets. I have been coming to him on and off for over a year, ever since Vivian first recommended him. (He’s Martha’s friend, she said. Martha? Oh, you remember Martha. The fund-raiser last August? Never mind. I hear he’s wonderful.) During our sessions I reveal the truth of my feelings but have altered the names of the players in my tale. There is much about me he can never know.

  “Annie,” he says now, “why are we back here?”

  I rub my eyes, hard, as though I can wipe all the tension away. “Because I feel him.”

  I look up at him and he has kind, warm eyes on me. I like how he looks, even without the brown sweater, an older man with white-gray hair and a face so tan and wrinkled it looks like an old catcher’s mitt…but not in a bad way. He wears chinos and a chambray shirt, canvas sandals. Not very shrinklike, more like your favorite uncle or a nice neighbor you enjoy chatting with at the mailbox.

  “You don’t feel him, Annie,” he says softly but firmly. “You think you do, but you don’t. You have to be careful of the language you use with yourself. Call this what it is. An episode, a panic attack, whatever. Don’t imagine you have some psychic feeling that a dead man has returned for you.”

  I nod my head. I know he’s right.

  “Why is it so hard?” I say. “It feels so real. So much worse than ever before.”

  “What’s the date today?” he asks. I think about it and tell him. I realize then what he’s getting at, and I shake my head.

  “That’s not it.”

  “Are you sure?”

  I don’t say anything then, because of course I’m not sure of that or really anything. Maybe he’s right. “But I don’t remember.”

  “Part of you remembers. Though your conscious mind refuses to recall certain events, the memory lives in you. It wants to be recognized, embraced, and released. It will use any opportunity to surface. When you’re strong enough to face them, I think all the memories will return. You’re stronger than you’ve been since I’ve known you, Annie. Maybe it’s time to face down some of these demons. Maybe that’s why these feelings are so intense this time.”

  Looking at him, I almost believe I can do it, peer into those murky spaces within myself, face and defeat whatever lives there.

  “He’s dead, Annie. But as long as you haven’t dealt with the memories of the things he has done to you, he’ll live on. We’ll always have to face these times when you think he’s returned for you. You’ll never be free.”

  It is a vague echo of my father’s words, and Gray’s words. And intellectually I know they’re all right. But my heart and my blood know something different, like the gazelle on the Serengeti, the mouse on the forest floor. I am the prey. I know my place in the food chain and must be ever vigilant to scent and shadow.

  5

  I am crouched in my cabin; I will be hidden in the corner by the door when it swings open. My breathing has slowed, and my legs are starting to ache from the position I’ve been holding for I don’t know how long. I can hear the thrum of the engine and nothing else. I start to wonder if maybe everything is all right. It’s conceivable that there might not even be another boat out there, I tell myself. Could just be a trick of the night, my own paranoid imagination, or some combination of those things. As I start to accept this possibility, there’s a knock at the door. Scares me so badly that my head jerks and I hit it on the wall behind me.

  “Annie.” A muffled male voice. “Are you in there?”

  I recognize the Australian accent; it’s the voice of one of the men who have been hired to help me. I open the door for him. His eyes fall immediately to the gun at my waist. He gives a quick nod of approval.

  “There’s a boat trailing us,” he tells me. He has sharp, bright eyes and is thick with muscle. I search my memory for his name. They all have these hard, tight names that sound like punches to the jaw. Dax, I think he told me. That’s right, Dax. “Might be a fishing vessel, poachers—or even pirates. We hailed them, and they didn’t respond.”

  His eyes scan the room. He walks over and checks the lock on the porthole, seems to satisfy himself that the room is as secure as it can be. He’s like that. They all are, these men, always checking the perimeter, scanning for vulnerability. I like that about them.

  “Just turn out the lights in here and lock the door. I’ll come get you when I know it’s safe.”

  “Ok
ay,” I say, trying to sound as solid and in control as he seems.

  He leaves, casting a sympathetic look behind him as he goes, and I lock the door after him. It seems as flimsy as cardboard. I turn off the lights and resume my crouch.

  6

  The day after I see my shrink, I’m feeling better. It might just be the residual effects of the pill Gray encouraged me to take last night so that I could sleep. Either way, as I sit with him in the sun-washed kitchen drinking coffee, the sense of foreboding is gone.

  “It helped you to see Dr. Brown?” Gray asks. It’s oddly off-putting to hear Gray use his name. I try so hard to keep these parts of myself separate. Here I’m Annie, Gray’s wife and Victory’s mom. There I’m a mental patient haunted by my traumatic past. I don’t want those two selves to touch.

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” I say with a dismissive, oh-it’s-nothing wave. “It’s just that time of year, he thinks.”

  Gray puts a hand on my shoulder. He is headed out of town for a few days. I don’t know where he is going or when he will be back. This is part of our life together.

  “Vivian can come stay with you. Or you guys could go there?” he says. He is careful to keep concern out of his voice and worry out of his eyes.

  “No, no,” I say lightly. “Really. It’s not necessary. I’ll call her if I need her.”

  I love Vivian, Gray’s stepmother. But I hate the way she looks at me sometimes, as if I’m a precious bauble in the grasp of a toddler, always just headed for the floor, always promising to shatter into a thousand pieces. I wonder if she thinks I’m a bad mother, if she worries for Victory. I know better than to ask questions for which I don’t want the answers.

  Gray and I chat awhile about a few mundane things, how the gardener is really awful and the lawn looks terrible but he’s too nice to fire, how the pipes are making a funny sound when the hot water runs and should I call a plumber, how Victory’s new preschool teacher seems kind. Then Gray gets up to leave. He takes me in his arms and holds me tight. I squeeze him hard and kiss his mouth. I don’t say, Be careful. I don’t say, Call when you can. I just say, “I love you. See you soon.” And then he’s gone.