Black Out: A Novel

by Lisa Unger

  “I was in a bar in the East Village once, a place called Downtown Beirut. You know it?” Gray asked me one night at the hospital. Our relationship had improved by this time, but I didn’t answer. I almost never did. I don’t think he minded. He knew I was listening.

  “A real dump, the biggest dive you ever saw—what a shithole. I used to drink there a lot. Just find a corner and pound them back until I could barely get myself home to my apartment on First Avenue. It wasn’t every night that I’d get drunk like this, only when I couldn’t sleep, when it was all too much with me. My mother passed after I was discharged, a stroke. I blamed my dad. I blamed him for almost everything. Sometimes my anger felt like a physical pain in my chest. You ever felt like that?”

  Yes, I’d felt like that, for most of my life, in fact. But I didn’t say so. That night he’d brought flowers—daisies, if I remember correctly—and some doughnuts in a box. They both sat untouched on the table beside me.

  “Anyway, I was sitting there one night, well on my way to oblivion, when an old wreck of a guy, an aging biker covered with tats and a mess of long gray hair, pulled up a chair.”

  I heard him shift in his chair, crack his neck.

  “I told him I wasn’t looking for company. He told me he wasn’t looking for company, either. He was looking for his daughter. A friend we had in common told him I could help.”

  I turned to look at Gray. He was sitting in the same chair he’d been sitting in most nights for a month. His feet were up on the windowsill, his head back as if he were talking to the ceiling. He wore jeans and a black sweater, army-issue boots. His jacket, a beat-up old denim thing, was on the foot of my bed. He had a big scar on his neck; his hands were square and looked as hard as boulders.

  I think I saw him for the first time that night. Outside my window it was snowing, fat flakes glittering under the streetlamps, tapping at the window like cold fingers. I saw the strong line of his jaw, his full red lips, the snaking muscles of his shoulders and arms. He took his eyes from the ceiling and fixed me in their cool gray stare. I felt a little shock at their lightness; there was something spooky about his gaze.

  He knew he had my attention and kept talking. “The old guy said, ‘I’ve failed this girl in every way a father can fail his daughter. I left her for the wolves, you know. If I fail her now, nothing else in my life means much. I got some money if you got some time and need the work. My buddy said you have a talent for finding people who don’t want to be found.’”

  “My father,” I said, incredulous. Gray nodded.

  “I had the time and I needed the work,” he went on. “He asked me to fix Marlowe Geary and take care of you, whatever that meant.”

  “He paid you?”

  “At first, but after a while we became friends. It became more than a job to me.”

  “I know. You were looking to atone for your sins.”

  He shrugged. “That was part of it. Yes.”

  I see Gray pull off the highway before the downtown exits and into the slums that surround the city. I follow him through a neighborhood where the streetlamps are shot out and bulky forms hover in doorways and huddle on corners. Houses are dark, but the blue light of television screens flickers in windows. I stay back far, about one turn behind, following more on instinct sometimes than on being able to see his car. Where is he going? I know for sure Harrison doesn’t live here.

  The residential neighborhood yields to an industrial area, warehouses with gates drawn, the highway up above us now. I can see he’s headed to the underpass. I stop my car and watch through the overgrowth of an empty lot as he, too, comes to a stop. We both sit and wait.

  My cell phone rings then. I can see from the caller ID that it’s Detective Harrison. I watch the display blinking on the screen and wonder why he’d be calling me if he were meeting Gray. I don’t answer. After a minute I hear the beep that tells me he’s left a message. Keeping my eyes on Gray’s car, which is still idle, hidden partially in the dark, I access my messages.

  “More food for thought,” Harrison says. “How much do you really know about your husband?”

  As I sit in the dark and watch a white unmarked van pull up beside Gray’s car, I think, Good question.

  I was in that hospital for over two months before it was decided, by some criteria to which I was not privy, that I could leave. If the doctors who helped me knew who I really was or had any idea that I was wanted in three states, no one ever let on. It wasn’t until much later that I learned I was there by an arrangement Drew had made. A contact of his owned the private hospital.

  On the afternoon that Gray took me out of there, I still couldn’t remember much of what happened to me. The night Marlowe and I left the ranch was a dark blur, a series of disjointed images. I vaguely remembered going to my father for help. Everything else that came after was a black hole that pulled me apart, molecule by molecule, if I spent too long trying to think about it. The doctors diagnosed me as having experienced a fugue state, for lack of anything better to call it, brought on by the prolonged trauma of my terrible childhood and the event of my stepfather’s murder. They told me that I left myself behind that night when I got into that black sedan with Marlowe, that Ophelia ceased to exist and a new girl took her place.

  So who am I now? I remember wondering as Gray shouldered the bag filled with the things he bought for me and we walked through the automatic doors into the cold parking lot. Am I Annie Fowler or Ophelia March or someone else entirely? Two and a half years of my life were gone.

  I got into the black Suburban and wrapped my arms around myself against the cold. I was shivering, from cold, from fear. On the day I left Frank Geary’s horse ranch, I was seventeen, nearly eighteen. On the day I left the hospital with Gray, my twenty-first birthday was just three months away.

  Gray turned on the heat, and we sat for a while in the car. I was scared. I didn’t know who I was or what I was going to do with myself now. But I stayed quiet. I couldn’t afford to show any weakness.

  “I know a woman, a friend of my father’s,” he said after a few minutes. “I’m going to take you to her, and she’s going to help you pull your life together, okay?”

  “Where?”

  “Florida.”

  He was staring straight ahead, not looking at me. I watched a muscle work in his jaw. My body stiffened. I thought he was done with me. He’d saved me, and now he didn’t need me to feel better about himself. At some point during our visits, I’d stopped hating him, started seeing him for what he was, the first good man I’d ever known. And now I thought I was losing him.

  A few weeks earlier, Gray gave me a letter my father had written. It was to be our last communication for a long time. Ophelia was dead; there would be no phone calls or visits—in other words, not very different from when Ophelia lived. My father wrote how Gray had tracked me and Marlowe for two years, gave over his whole life to looking for me.

  “There’s a lot of things about that time he’ll need to tell you,” my father wrote. “But I think along the way he fell in love with you, Opie. Don’t hurt him too bad.”

  Sitting in the car with Gray, I hoped it was true. But I couldn’t think of one good reason Gray would love me. I was a mess of a girl with nothing to offer.

  “Where are you going?” I asked, examining my fingernails, bracing myself for his answer.

  “I’m coming with you,” he said quickly, looking ahead and gripping the wheel. Then he added softly, “If you want me to.”

  I felt relief flood through my body. I lifted my eyes to him, and he was looking at me.

  “Was that a smile?” he asked with a little laugh.

  “Maybe,” I said, letting it spread wide across my face. It almost hurt, it had been so long.

  “I’ve never seen you smile before,” he said, putting a hand on my cheek. His touch was surprisingly gentle. I put my hand to his, and we sat there like that for a minute. In that moment he was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen.

  “What
are you going to do down there?” I asked.

  “My father has a company that’s doing some good in the world. There’s a place for me there.”

  I couldn’t hide my surprise. “But you don’t really get along, do you?”

  He gave a slow, careful nod. I could see he’d given it some thought. “We’ve had a lot of really hard times—we might always have problems—but we’re working on it. He came through for me—for you.”

  On the radio David Bowie crooned sad and slow with Bing Crosby about the little drummer boy.

  “It just seems important now to put all that anger behind me,” he said suddenly. He moved closer to me. “To make a place, a home for you—for us. I mean, look at me, forty’s right around the corner, and I don’t even own a futon.”

  He kissed me then, and the warmth, the love of it, moved over me like a salve. It did seem important, critical, to make a safe place in the world.

  “There’s something you need to know, Gray.”

  “What’s that?” he said, pushing the hair away from my eyes.

  “I think I’m pregnant.”

  It should have been a bombshell, but—oddly—the words landed softly on both of us. He held my eyes. I couldn’t see what he was feeling. Those gray eyes have never revealed anything he hasn’t wanted them to.

  Out the window the parking lot was full of dirty cars, covered with salt and snow. I thought he’d hate me then, for loving Marlowe Geary as I had in spite of everything he’d been and everything he’d done to me, for carrying his child.

  “I’ve never been with anyone but him,” I said. I hated my voice for cracking then, and the tears that seemed to spring from a well in my middle. I closed my eyes in the silence that followed, shame burning my cheeks. Then I felt his hand on my shoulder. When I turned to him, he leaned in and kissed me again. I reached for him, clung to him. I would have drowned if not for him.

  “Let me take care of you,” he said. It sounded like a plea, a prayer he was making. I nodded into his shoulder. I didn’t have any words. Then he pulled away and started the car. He seemed a little awkward for a second, as if he were uncomfortable with the charge of emotion between us.

  “I won’t give her up,” I said, wrapping my arms around myself. I didn’t know the sex of my child, but I hated saying “it.”

  I saw his body stiffen. “I’d never suggest that. Never,” he almost whispered. He turned from the wheel and took my shoulders.

  “Listen to me,” he said, with so much passion that I released a little sob. “I’m going to take care of you.” He’d been so even, so unflappable up to this point, I hardly recognized the man beside me. Maybe he was drowning, too.

  “I’m going to make a home for you and for that baby.” He looked down at my belly. “Whatever it takes. I’ll do whatever it takes.”

  We drove for two days and finally wound up at Vivian’s place on the beach. She and Drew were just dating at the time, so I lived alone with her. Gray took an apartment nearby. He wanted me to have some time to get to know myself, to get to know him.

  “We’ll date,” he said. “Like normal people.”

  Vivian took me into her house and treated me like her daughter. She cooked for me and stayed up late listening to me talk. She offered me a sort of kindness that no one else ever had. As I got my GED and started taking classes at the local college, my belly grew bigger. Gray and I dated. It was the happiest time of my life.

  I suppose some people would have considered ending the pregnancy. But it didn’t even cross my mind. I’ve never once thought of Victory as Marlowe Geary’s daughter. She has always been mine and mine alone.

  I watch as Gray gets out of the car with a black duffel bag. He puts the bag on the ground and leans against the vehicle. I feel as though I have lost every ounce of moisture in my body. A heavy man emerges from the white van and walks slowly over to Gray. He wears a long black raincoat, which fans behind him in the wind. His head is enormous over wide shoulders. He looks the approximate size of a refrigerator.

  They shake hands, briefly. Even in the dark and with the distance, I recognize him. It’s Simon Briggs, the man who went to my father looking for Ophelia. They exchange a few words. I see Gray shake his head. I watch Briggs lift his palms. I can tell just from the way he’s standing that Gray is not happy. Finally Gray turns the bag over to him. They exchange a few more words. Then Simon Briggs turns and walks back toward his van.

  As Briggs reaches for the handle to open the door, I see Gray lift his hand from his pocket and raise a gun. I draw in a hard breath and grip the wheel. With a single, silent shot, Briggs’s head explodes in a red cloud and he crumbles to the ground. Gray walks over to the body and fires again, retrieves the duffel bag, and walks calmly back to the car and gets inside. His vehicle rumbles to life, and he drives away with as little hurry as if he’s just picked up a carton of milk at the convenience store and is heading home.

  I sit there for a minute, allowing what I’ve just seen to sink into my mind. I run through the possible reasons Gray might have shot Simon Briggs beneath an overpass and can only come up with one that makes sense: Gray had arranged to meet Briggs for a payoff but decided he’d be better off dead than rich. He wouldn’t have told me he planned to kill Briggs; he wouldn’t have incriminated me that way. I feel something like relief, and yet it doesn’t quite take. It’s the handshake that keeps me wondering. How much do you really know about your husband?

  Gray and I were married by the time Victory was born. I think I fell in love with him in the parking lot of the psychiatric hospital when it was clear that he accepted me for everything I was. He knew Ophelia March; he loved her. I knew he would take care of me, that with Gray I’d always be safe. Maybe that’s not really love, but it passed for that. His name is on Victory’s birth certificate; he’s her father in every way that counts. No one—not Drew, not Vivian—knows that Victory is Marlowe Geary’s child. We both agreed everyone would be better off never knowing, including Victory. But I’d be lying if I said it didn’t feel like a kind of betrayal.

  Maybe because of that, there were terrible black patches during the pregnancy where I was consumed by fear that Marlowe had returned for me and for his daughter. I wouldn’t take the medication I was supposed to because of the baby, so I was buffeted by my hormones and the rogue chemicals in my brain. There were blackouts and terrible migraines. Once I woke up on a Greyhound bus headed for New York City, with no idea how I’d gotten there. One of my fugue states, as the doctors called them, a sudden flight from my life. Where was Ophelia going? I wondered, as I got off the bus in Valdosta, Georgia, and called Gray. Did she know things Annie Fowler, soon to be Powers, had forgotten?

  After I disembarked from the Greyhound that night, I sat in a diner and waited for Gray to come get me. I was nothing but trouble. I don’t know why he loved me. On the way back to Florida in the Suburban, I asked him, “Why do you do this? Why do you always come for me?”

  “I do well in crisis mode,” he told me. “Besides, I didn’t chase you all over the country to let you go now.”

  It reminded me of all the things my father said I didn’t know about the years Gray trailed me and Marlowe. I’d never asked, mainly because I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to know. That night, less than a week before our wedding, when I was five months pregnant, suddenly I needed to know.

  “My father said that he paid you at first, and then you wouldn’t accept any more money.”

  He shrugged. “At a certain point, I wasn’t working for him any longer. I was looking for you.”

  “Why?”

  He just stared at the road ahead, and I wondered if he was going to answer me. I’d pieced some things together from newspapers, what I could bear to read.

  “I caught up with you for the first time in Amarillo, Texas,” he said finally. “There’d been a liquor-store robbery a few miles east of there a day before. The girl working the counter had been tortured and finally killed. I heard about it on the radio, thought
it might be Marlowe Geary. That’s what he did—tortured, killed, and robbed. He cut a bloody gash across the country, leaving at least nineteen young women dead.”

  I wanted to tell him that it couldn’t be true, though I’d read this much. I don’t think I could have witnessed these crimes and done nothing, but the truth was, I didn’t know for sure.

  “A few weeks earlier, a witness, a stock boy Geary left for dead in the back room, said he saw you. He was badly wounded, unable to help the girl Geary was torturing. All he could do was listen to her screams, thinking he was about to die himself. He said you were virtually catatonic, that you sat in a corner and rocked, gnawing on your cuticles. That Geary led you out when he was done. You went with him like a child.”

  I covered my face in shame. I hated to think of myself this way, weak and in a killer’s thrall, just like my mother.

  “Up till then I wasn’t sure. Your mother said you went with Geary willingly. But your father said when you came to New York that you weren’t right, you weren’t the girl he knew. He said it was like you were under some kind of spell. It makes sense, knowing what we know now about your mental state.”

  “I knew enough to go to my father.”

  He shrugged. “Even your subconscious was hoping he would save you.”

  “I was always hoping for that,” I said.

  “Well, he took his time, but he came through in the end. More or less.”

  “Less.”

  “Anyway, in Amarillo, after stopping at every shit motel in the area, I saw a car matching the description of the vehicle Geary was last seen driving. I sat and waited. After a few hours, Geary got into the vehicle and drove off. I should have called the cops right then, or taken him myself, but at that point all I was thinking about was you. I suppose I was obsessed, maybe not thinking clearly anymore.”