by Lisa Unger
“Well, even so. You have a right to say what you want, Annie. Even if other people have legitimate and well-meaning reasons for asking something of you, it doesn’t mean you have to comply.”
I know he’s right, and I tell him so. “Anyway, they’re gone.”
“It’s something to keep in mind for next time. You have a right to say no, even if your reasons don’t seem logical to anyone else. Due to traumatic circumstances in your life, you have had breaks from reality when you were unfit to make judgments. But it has been nearly five years since one of these episodes has occurred. You have been dealing with the root cause of your illness, and you are well, even without your medication. You aren’t defined by those moments in your life; don’t allow your husband and in-laws to make that mistake, either.”
He’s right, of course, even with all he doesn’t know. The essential truths of our lives sometimes exist above day-to-day events. He thinks Gray found me in a bus station, that in a fit of altruism he took me to a hospital and, in an unlikely turn of events, fell in love with me during visits he made while I recovered. This is not very far from the truth, without being the whole truth.
“Gray fell in love with you while you were helpless and mentally unstable,” the doctor reminds me.
“So maybe he doesn’t want me to be strong?”
“Is that what you think, Annie?”
“I don’t know.”
Someone like Gray is at his finest when there’s a crisis to be handled. He is the man you want when the sky is falling. But when the sky is not falling, does he feel a little lost? I think about our family and all the things we are forced to conceal, all the secrets we keep.
Florida rests on a network of limestone mazes, a labyrinth of wet and dry caves and crevices referred to as a karst topography. A layer of quartz sand thinly mantles the underground landscape formed by the movement of water through rock over millions of years. It’s another world, filled with dark passages, populated by creatures that couldn’t exist on the earth’s surface. Sometimes I think of Florida’s secret places, its wet darkness, its silent corridors, and I feel right at home.
18
Most of us don’t live in the present tense. We dwell in a mental place where our regrets and grudges from our past compete with our fears about the future. Sometimes we barely notice what’s going on around us, we’re so busy time traveling. Before Victory was born, I could spend whole days trying to sort out the things that have happened to me, the terrible mistakes I’ve made. I marinated in my anger and self-loathing, cataloged all the different ways my parents failed me, cast myself as the victim and played the role like I was gunning for a gold statuette.
Motherhood changed that for me. Victory forced me into the moment. She demanded that I focus on her needs, that I live by her schedule. When I was with her—feeding her, changing her—just looking at her or playing with her, everything in the past and the future fell away. I was aware that we would be together like this for only a short time, that in a heartbeat she’d be walking away from me, living her own life. I didn’t want to waste a second thinking about what might have been, what might be. Love makes you present. So does mortal fear.
I am fully present as I race up the stairs to the bridge. I burst through the door and am confronted by the body of the captain who waved to me earlier. He has a bullet hole between his eyes and an expression of profound peace on his face. I step over him to get to the control panel and nearly lose my footing. The floor is slick with blood. Another body lies in a pile of itself by the door. I register all this but don’t have time to feel the full rush of horror the situation demands.
I stare at the knobs and switches before me. I have never been on the bridge of a ship like this one; I have no idea how to start the engine or even what to do next if I succeed. Outside, there is nothing but pitch black. It’s bitterly cold, my ragged breath visible on the air, but I’m sweating from stress. I start randomly pressing buttons and turning knobs, but after a few fruitless minutes I give up. I sit in the captain’s chair and take in the scene—the dead night, the dead ship, the dead men around me, the only person who could have helped me gone because I sent him away. My mind is racing through my limited options. Did I really send Dax away because I wanted to face down my enemy? Or did I do it because I wanted to surrender? I don’t know. But I do know I have to take responsibility for this desperate moment, at least partially. I am as guilty as anyone for how my life has turned out.
My fingers reach for the gold pendant at my neck. I feel the jagged edges of the half heart. When I left my family behind, I put it back on for the first time in five years. I did this to remind myself that he was right: I did belong to him. And until I claimed myself, I always would.
I am swallowed by the silence. I have never heard such quiet. I close my eyes and pray to a God I’m not sure exists. Then I hear a distant hum, a speedboat engine. Hope and dread compete for control over my chest. Either reinforcements have arrived or I am about to make my last stand. Only time will tell.
19
About a week after it hit the news that my mother had succeeded in her lobbying to getting Frank a new trial, a woman came by the trailer to see her. She knocked loudly on the door, and I opened it, expecting to see our landlord come to collect late rent—an all-too-familiar scenario. But standing there instead was a tiny woman with watery eyes and a quivering line for a mouth.
“I’m here to see Carla March,” she said. Her voice was timid, little more than a raspy murmur. But there was an odd resolve there, too, an unmistakable mettle to her bearing.
“She’s working,” I said. “She’ll be back in a few hours.”
“I’ll wait,” she said. Before I could say anything else, she moved over to one of the white plastic chairs we kept outside by the door. My mother had imagined us sitting out there in the evenings. But the humidity and the mosquitoes kept us inside beneath the A/C. The stranger sat herself firmly down, clasped her pocketbook in her lap, pulled her shoulders back, and stared off in the direction from which she’d arrived.
“I mean, like, four hours,” I said, wondering if she’d misunderstood. “Maybe more.”
“That’s fine, young lady,” she said without looking at me again, and pulled a Bible from her purse. Her hands were covered with dry and split patches of skin. Her skin was deeply lined, and there were the dark smudges of fatigue under her eyes. Still, she had a palpable aura of pride and righteousness in spite of the shabby condition of her apparel—a cotton floral-print skirt with the hem hanging, a white button-down blouse, yellowed at the neck and cuffs, white shoes covered in polish to hide the cracked and graying leather. She made me nervous; I didn’t want her waiting there.
“What do you want?” I asked her.
She turned her head toward me, said clearly, “I want to speak to your mother, and I’m not leaving until I do.” Her tone brooked no further questioning.
I went inside and watched television, did my homework, and got dinner started. All this time the woman waited outside, reading, her head nodding as if in agreement with some unseen person. I tried to call my mother, but the grouchy German man she worked for wouldn’t let her come to the phone.
“It’s not possible,” he barked at me, and hung up.
As the afternoon turned to evening, the woman waited. Finally I saw her rise from her seat as my mother approached the trailer slowly, smoking a cigarette. She was lost in thought, her eyes on the ground. She didn’t see the woman until she was nearly at the door, where she let the cigarette drop and stamped it out with her foot.
“Are you Carla March?” I heard the woman ask.
I opened the door and watched as the woman blocked my mother’s path and held something out to her.
“Who are you?” my mother asked sharply. “What do you want?” She looked tired; I could tell she’d had a hard day.
“My name is Janet Parker,” the woman said, squaring her shoulders. “This is a photograph of my daughter, Melissa.”
My mother’s face paled. “You need to get out of here right now,” she said softly. I saw her eyes dart around, checking to see if anyone was watching them. “You have no right to be here.”
Janet Parker didn’t give way and didn’t lower her hand. Finally my mother released an angry breath and snatched the photo. I could see that her fingers were shaking as she held it up, squinted at it in the dimming light of evening.
“My daughter was a good person who died a horrible death,” Janet Parker said as if she’d practiced the words a thousand times. “She didn’t deserve to die like that.”
My mother tried to push past her, but Janet wouldn’t let her, grabbed hold of her wrist.
“Frank Geary killed her,” she said, her voice climbing to a quaking yell. “He beat her, strangled her, and raped her as she died.” She paused a second, tried to compose herself. Her voice was hoarse as she went on. “Then he dumped her body in a sinkhole.”
She stopped again, her whole body starting to shake visibly. My mother seemed hypnotized by the woman, stared at her wide-eyed. Janet Parker took a deep, ragged breath. This time it was like a levy had burst; her voice came out in a wail. “And she was there, floating in the cold, dark water for three months. My baby. Alone in the dark, cold water.”
My mother let the photo drop to the ground and kept her eyes down as she wrested her arm away from Janet Parker and moved toward the door.
“You have a daughter!” the woman howled, throwing a pointed finger in my direction. “Look at her. Young and beautiful, with everything before her.”
I gaped at her as my mother pulled me from the doorway and took my place there.
“The only thing that gave me any peace at all was the knowledge that he’d die for what he did,” Janet Parker said, more quietly. “That he’ll burn in hell.” She wasn’t yelling anymore, but the pain in her voice was embarrassing. I felt like I should avert my eyes, but I couldn’t turn away from her.
“Frank Geary is an innocent man, wrongly convicted,” said my mother. She sounded weak and foolish, her righteousness shallow before the depths of Janet Parker’s abyss of grief and rage. “I’m sorry for your loss. But Frank didn’t kill your daughter.”
The woman lowered her head and took in a deep breath. “They found her purse in his house,” she said, her face flushed and wet with tears she didn’t bother to wipe away.
“That evidence was planted,” my mother said. “I’m sorry.”
My mother shut the door on Janet Parker then. The other woman ran to the door and began pounding on it with both fists.
“He killed her! He killed my little girl! My baby! My little girl!” Her voice took on the pitch and quality of a roar. She kept pounding and yelling, even as a crowd of people gathered around the trailer.
My mother locked herself in her room, and I sat paralyzed in the kitchen listening to Janet Parker’s terrible baying, which continued even as the police arrived and hauled her away. I never forgot the sound of her voice; years later it remains in my mind the very sound of grief and outrage. It chilled me then; I knew it was an omen.
After she was gone, my mother came out of her room.
“God,” she said with a harsh laugh. “What a crazy bitch.”
She left the trailer and returned a few minutes later with a six-pack from the convenience store across the street. She popped the lid on one and sat down in front of the television but didn’t turn it on. She sat staring, silent. I wondered if Janet Parker’s words were ringing in her ears, as they were in mine. The beer was gone in under ten minutes. She rose, got herself another, and sat back down. There was no such thing as one beer where my mother was concerned.
I left her to it, went to my room, and closed the door. As I lay in bed a while later, I heard her stumble from the trailer and knew she was on her way to the convenience store for more. My mother liked to drink. It was a mad dog she kept on a chain. When it got loose, it chewed through our lives.
I knew how it would go. She’d drink until she passed out tonight. Tomorrow she’d be hungover and mean. She’d fight it for a few more days, then start sneaking booze when she could. Soon we’d be back to where we were before she found Jesus and got sober the last time—with her stumbling in from wherever, enraged or maudlin, sickly sweet or violent, causing some kind of scene until she passed out on the floor or over the toilet. Eventually she’d lose her job. I could see we were in the wide, early circles of a downward spiral.
A few weeks later, my mother and Frank were married on either side of a sheet of bulletproof glass. As if things couldn’t be more ugly and uncomfortable, Frank forced Marlowe to stand in for him beside my mother, put the ring on her finger, and offer her a chaste kiss on the cheek. My boyfriend became my stepbrother before my eyes. I watched in horror as my mother and her new husband leaned their bodies against the glass that separated them until guards dragged Frank back to his cell.
On the bus my mother cried all the way home in the tatty, short wedding dress she wore under a raincoat. Marlowe had some kind of look on his face that I couldn’t read. I tried to take his hand so my mother wouldn’t see. He pushed me away cruelly. I went to the back of the bus to sit alone, hollowed out and numb. After a while my mother fell asleep and Marlowe moved back beside me. He took my hand and rested his head on my shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Everything’s going to be okay.”
I thought about my father and his false assurances and then how he’d left without a word. I thought about what my mother had told me about Marlowe, that he was a liar just like my dad. The bus smelled like cigarettes and vomit. I leaned my head against the windows and watched the orange groves roll by.
With the death-row wedding and Frank’s new trial starting just a week later, I became a pariah at school. I was no one before all that; I was quiet and flying under the radar, doing well but not well enough to attract attention. I wasn’t especially ugly or noticeably sexy, so no one even saw me. As the trial dragged on, though, people had somehow become confused by the media coverage and thought I was Frank’s daughter. Someone left a dead bird in my locker; someone tripped me in the hallway; someone flung spaghetti at me in the cafeteria. I wept in the bathroom, trying to wash the sauce out of my hair.
And then, just when I thought things couldn’t get worse, Frank was acquitted. My mother’s prayers had been answered. Her husband was coming home.
20
When I return from my appointment, the house has an aura of emptiness. There will be no mealtime negotiations (Eat three pieces of broccoli, Victory, and then we can have dessert), no bath-time adventures (the race between Mr. Duck and Mr. Frog continues), no quiet time in Victory’s room before she drifts off to sleep. All the comforting rituals of the day have been suspended.
As I pour myself a cup of coffee—not that I need any more caffeine—I hear Esperanza in the laundry room. I call her name, but she doesn’t answer. I decide to wait awhile before I tell her she can have the rest of the evening off. I don’t want to be alone, knocking around this house that never feels quite like home unless Victory is in it, too.
Gray has gone to the offices of Powers and Powers, Inc., in the city just forty minutes away—for what, I don’t know. I have been there myself only a couple of times. It’s a small space with an open floor of cubicles and a couple of conference rooms with long wooden tables and ergonomic swivel chairs, big flat-screen monitors, and state-of-the-art video-conferencing equipment. It’s like any other office where any other business is conducted—antiseptic, impersonal, the smell of bad coffee or burned microwave popcorn wafting from the break room. The printer jams, someone has to change the enormous bottle on top of the watercooler, people stick pictures of their kids on the sides of their computer monitors.
Gray’s work is not as Mission Impossible as it sounds. After the end of the Cold War, firms like this have begun to play a role in world warfare in a way that had always been reserved for the military. Powers and Powers, Inc., refer to them
selves as private security consultants, as Detective Harrison mentioned, and that’s accurate. But they have also sent their operatives to help suppress the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone, end the crisis in the former Yugoslavia, and support the rebuilding effort in Kosovo. At their best, privatized military companies provide targeted and specialized services formerly associated with government military forces. When working in conjunction with established and recognized states, they can be very effective. If, however, they operate without conscience—and there has been enough of this to make people worry—these companies, employing the most highly trained paramilitary personnel throughout the world, can have a destabilizing effect on established states.
Powers and Powers employs a staff of just under a thousand former Special Forces and elite law-enforcement personnel. Their services range from hostage negotiation to emergency response, from arms training to small tactical operations to private security. They hire out their services to governments, corporations, and individuals. There has been a lot of controversy about the industry, so Drew and Gray prefer to keep a low profile. Few who know us, in fact, know what they do. Even other tenants in their building don’t know the true nature of their work. And even I don’t have any knowledge of their specific operations at any given time. I find I don’t mind this. I guess I’m more comfortable than most with secrets and lies.
I take advantage of Gray’s trip to the office and go down to an Internet café on the beach, order a latte, and log in to an account I created a long time ago. Amid the slew of spam, there’s a message from Oscar. It reads, “What’s the problem, Annie?”
I’m surprised that he remembers me, though he assured me he would. I’m also a little frightened. Part of me was hoping that he’d no longer be operating.
I sit for a second, not sure how to answer his question. I look around me and spot a young girl in a wetsuit hanging open to reveal a bikini top. She’s tan and bleached blond, sipping an energy drink and surfing the Web. There’s an old man in a tank top, shorts, and flip-flops eyeing her over his coffee. You can tell he thinks he’s still got it. But he doesn’t.
