Black Out: A Novel

by Lisa Unger

  The thought filled him with dread. He couldn’t stand the idea that their savings account would be empty, that they’d go back to living paycheck to paycheck. That he’d always be worried about the next time the car broke down or the refrigerator started to leak. He wasn’t sure he could do it.

  “Sarah…” he started, but found he couldn’t finish.

  “Find a way to make things right, Ray.” She didn’t issue any threats or ultimatums; she didn’t ask him to leave the house. But he heard in her tone what she never said: Find a way to make things right, Ray, or I won’t ever be able to look at you the same way again.

  She must have seen the despair on his face, because she moved back over to him and placed a hand on his leg. He couldn’t even look at her.

  “Everybody makes mistakes, Ray,” she said, her voice very low and gentle. He’d heard her talk to the baby in this tone. “Everybody stumbles. It’s what you do then that makes or breaks your life. It’s what you do after you fall that’s the measure of who you are.”

  He left the room then. She called after him quietly, but he kept walking. He walked out onto his back porch and gazed up at the sky. He didn’t want to be in the same room with her. He couldn’t stand for her to see him cry.

  “What’s going on?” Harrison was snapped back to the present by Ella’s voice. She stood in the open doorway looking different somehow, a little angry maybe. She looked fit and strong dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt, sneakers on her feet. She didn’t seem primped and coiffed in the usual way. He found himself staring at her, trying to figure out why she looked so different. She frowned at him and then walked over to Esperanza.

  “Where’s Gray?” Ella said, taking her by the shoulders.

  “Gone,” Esperanza said, starting to weep again. Ella embraced her. “I don’t know where.”

  Ella glanced back over at Harrison. “What’s he doing here?”

  “This is none of your business, Mrs. Singer. Go home,” he said.

  She gave him a dark look, released Esperanza, and walked over to him, got in his face. “Don’t tell me that. First Annie disappears. Then Drew and Vivian take off with Victory. There’s a memorial service—pretty premature, if you ask me. The woman’s only been missing two weeks. Now Gray’s gone. Someone needs to tell me what’s going on. It is my business. These people are my friends.”

  “Go home, Mrs. Singer,” he said again, walking over toward the door and holding it open for her. He saw color rise on her neck and cheeks, but she didn’t move.

  “I can get you into his office upstairs,” she said after a beat. “Maybe you’ll find some of the answers you’re looking for up there.”

  He remembered the door with the keypad lock from his previous visits. “You know the code,” he said, not even bothering to keep the skepticism out of his voice.

  She nodded. “Ophelia let it slip.”

  “She let it slip?” he said, narrowing his eyes. “Seems unlikely.”

  “Maybe she just got a little careless around her friends,” she said with a shrug.

  He didn’t quite believe her, but he was out of luck and out of time.

  “Okay, so what is it?”

  “You tell me what’s happening and I’ll tell you the code.”

  He released a sigh and rolled his eyes. “You’re not helping her by slowing me down. You know that.”

  “Just tell me.”

  He was desperate enough to do it. He told her everything he knew, starting with my fake identity and my history with Marlowe Geary and ending with Alan Parker and Grief Intervention Services.

  “You think she’s alive?”

  “I do. And I think she needs some help. I just don’t know how to give it to her.”

  Ella gave him a nod; he thought she looked a little sad. “It’s VICTORY, with a five for the V and a zero for the O.”

  He took the stairs to the office with Ella right behind him and punched in the code. The door unlocked, and he pushed it open. The room was dark, and when he stepped inside, he realized something that caused his stomach to bottom out.

  “You called her Ophelia,” he said, turning around.

  “Sorry, Detective Harrison, nothing personal. You should have taken your money and disappeared.”

  She held something in her hand that he didn’t recognize until the prongs shot into his body and electricity started to rocket through him. A horrific scream escaped him; he barely recognized it as his own voice. The room around him spiraled as the pain seemed to ratchet higher and higher until he could hardly form a thought in his mind. Before everything went black, he remembered his wife coming up behind him on the porch and wrapping her arms around him as he wept. He remembered feeling a terrible mingling of deep shame in himself, gratitude for her love, and the fervent hope that he could be worthy of her again.

  “You can fix this, Ray,” she said, squeezing hard. “I know you can.”

  I drive up beside the old gate that blocks the drive to the horse farm. I am a wreck, sweating with fear and the urgency to do what Parker wants me to do—even though I’m not totally sure what that is. I pull the car over onto the shoulder near the thick tree cover. When I turn off the engine, I am swallowed by the sounds of the Florida night. The property is a huge yawning darkness, and for a second I don’t think I can bring myself to enter. But of course I have to go. My daughter needs me. It is that thought that impels me from the car and brings me to the locked gate.

  The lock seems old and rusted through, as though it hasn’t been used in years. This can’t be so, I know that. I pick up a rock and start banging on it hard, hoping it will fall to pieces as it would in the movies. But I can’t get it open. I’ll have to leave my car on the road and go around the gate, which is suitable only to keep vehicles from moving up the drive and not really designed to keep out intruders.

  The thought of walking that long, dark road alone is almost too much. I remember the gun then and return to the car for it. I open the glove box and find a .38 Special, just your standard revolver. It’ll do. With the gun heavy in my hand, I feel slightly better, not like a girl afraid of the dark. I feel like what I need to be: a woman intent on doing whatever it is she must to protect her child or die trying.

  I walk around the gate and begin heading toward the horse farm. The last time I walked this road, I was seventeen years old with nothing to lose. What I wouldn’t give now for some of the empty numbness I felt that night, that ignorance of consequences.

  I am washed over by memory as I make the trek. I remember Janet Parker’s car gliding past me in the dark. I remember the clicking of its cooling engine when I saw it a while later. I remember the smell of smoke, the percussion of the gunshot. I see the halo of blond hair soaked in blood, the first time I knew Marlowe was a killer. I hear his confessions beneath the New Mexico sky. Suddenly I am thinking of Gray.

  I never saw Briggs again after he made his offer that night in the motel room—or if I did, I don’t remember. I don’t think there was time for me to do what he asked. I think it was just another night or maybe two before Gray caught up with us. All I recall is suddenly seeing this mammoth form in the doorway of yet another miserable motel. I’d seen him before, I knew that much. But for some reason a deep relief mingled with my fear when I saw him standing there. He strode into the room, and it was a second before I saw the needle in his hand.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, jabbing the needle into my arm. I don’t think I even struggled. “Your father sent me for you.”

  “It’s just a sedative,” he said, and he was already floating away as the substance flooded through my veins. “I can’t have you shooting me again, can I?”

  The next thing I knew, I was bound in the back of his car. He burst through the driver’s door. I could see St. Francis Cathedral before I blacked out again.

  I know only Gray’s version of what happened that night. How he went back to the motel and waited in the dark for Marlowe to return. How he surprised Marlowe, as Briggs
had planned to do. How Gray had overpowered him in a fight, managed to knock him unconscious and bind him. His plan had been to take the car to the police station on the other side of the square, abandon it with Marlowe inside, return to the Suburban parked just a few blocks away, and make an anonymous call from a pay phone when we were far enough away.

  His mistake, as he saw it in hindsight, was twofold—not using the sedative he’d brought, because he thought Marlowe was out cold, and putting Marlowe into the backseat instead of into the trunk of the vehicle. Marlowe came to as Gray drove, got loose from his bindings, and attacked Gray. The struggle ended with Gray shooting Marlowe in the face and leaping from the car just before it dove over the side of the road into the Rio Grande Valley below.

  I have heard this story so many times. I have asked Gray to tell it until it has taken on a mythic quality, like a story from childhood. As I near the end of the drive and see the roof of the house through the trees, I wonder how much of what he’s told me was true. I don’t know. After my conversation with Alan Parker, everything seems suspect.

  When I step into the clearing where the house and the barn and the empty horse pen stand, I am surprised by the condition of the property. It is dilapidated in a way I hadn’t expected. I imagined it repaired after the fire, cared for by the women whom my mother supposedly sheltered during their crusade to save their husbands, lovers, and sons from death row. But two of the upstairs windows are blown out, and though it’s dark, I can see that there appears to be a hole in the roof. The front door hangs off its hinges, the porch has folded onto itself. I hear the mournful calling of an owl in the distance, along with a chorus of frogs. The barn stands intact, but the whole place has an air of desertion—the desertion of years.

  There’s an escalation of tension in my chest; the darkness all around me feels like it’s closing in. How have I come to be here? Is this really happening? Was Alan Parker a figment of my imagination? Out of sheer desperation, I start to yell.

  “Marlowe!”

  I call his name again and again, each time my voice disappearing into the thick, humid air. All the night songs cease, and everything listens to my calls, the desperate baying of a wounded animal. I drop to my knees in the dirt.

  I realize then that he’s not here. No one could live in this place, this dead, awful place, not even him. The despair that sweeps over me is so total I am physically weakened by it. I put my forehead to the ground.

  And then, kneeling there, my past and present one at last, I remember. I pull myself to my feet. I know where Marlowe is. Alan Parker is right; I have always known. He did need me to find Marlowe—because I am the only person on earth who knows where he might have been all these years. He has not been pursuing me. He has been waiting for me, just where I knew he would be.

  I walk into the trees. I remember the way as I move through the thick overgrowth, careless of lurking snakes, ignoring the mosquitoes that feed on my skin and hum in my ear. I’d run if I could, but my progress is slow, pushing aside branches and stepping in soft places where my ankles turn. It seems to take hours, but finally I hear the babbling of the creek ahead. I come to a stop at its banks, and I see it there: the trailer. There’s a light burning in the window.

  “With provisions you could live out here forever,” Marlowe told me a lifetime ago. I never imagined I would be here again, not like this.

  From the bank of the creek, I call his name. The sound of it fills the night. Silence is the only answer. I am about to call again when he emerges from the trees behind the trailer.

  Though he is just a shape in the darkness, I know him. He is not the man I remember. He approaches me, leaning heavily upon a cane and dragging the right side of his body. He moves slowly, as though every step causes him pain. When he draws closer, I can see that he is hideously disfigured, the left side of his face little more than an explosion of skin. I find myself recoiling, moving backward as he moves forward. Those eyes are the same black sinkholes in which I have drowned again and again.

  I realize that my entire body is quavering, every muscle tense, every nerve ending electrified. I can’t believe I am looking at him, that his flesh is solid, that he stands on the ground. For the past few years, he has been a specter, haunting every dark space inside my psyche. The realness of him, his physicality, now drains all his power.

  “Ophelia,” he says. His voice has an odd, warped quality, but I can still hear the music of my name—O-feel-ya. “You’re home.”

  I remember thinking he was the only home I’d ever know. How sad, how empty I must have been to think that. I know what a real home is now. I have one with Gray and Victory. I’ll do anything to go back there.

  “No,” I say, unable to take my eyes from his horrible face. It doesn’t even look like skin, more like melted wax. He is a mangled facsimile of the man in my memories. But, amazingly, I still feel his pull, remember how I wanted to please him, how badly I craved his love.

  “How did you survive?” I ask him, my voice just a whisper. “How did you come here?”

  Something awful was happening to his mouth, a terrible twisting of his face. He was smiling.

  “Back in New Mexico,” he says slowly, “someone found me by the side of the road, near death. I’d been shot in the face, but I still managed to get out of the car before it went off the road.” It seemed painful for him to speak; the words emerged long and slow. “I was taken to the hospital and treated as a John Doe. I was unrecognizable, claimed to have no memory of who I was or where I’d been. When I could move around again, I called your mother. She came for me and brought me back here, cared for me until she died last year.”

  I feel a surprising wave of shock and grief to know that my mother has died. In my heart I thought I’d find her here alive and well, still trying to save the condemned. I guess the abused and neglected child is always hoping for a reckoning, some restitution, an embrace that never comes. And then there’s the pain, the anger that she cared for Marlowe all these years after what he’d done to me.

  “How did she die?” I want to know.

  “Car accident,” he said with a shrug. “Drunk. Luckily, I had enough provisions to last me.”

  I’m struck that he doesn’t seem to care at all about her. I’m not sure why I’m surprised. Dr. Brown said once, “He was a psychopath, the worst kind of sociopath. They don’t love, Annie. They can’t.”

  I have no way to determine if what he says is true. For all I know, he killed her as he did so many others. Or maybe she’s not dead at all. I don’t know. There’s no time to think about that now.

  I can hear his labored breathing, feel his eyes on me. When I look at his face, he doesn’t even seem human. He is vacant. I take another step back from him. I have the thought that he’s not really as crippled as he seems, that maybe this is how he lures people now that his beauty is gone: pity. I imagine him living here on this property, alone, haunting its rooms, walking its woods. The thought of it chills me.

  “Who takes care of you now?” I want to know this for some reason—how he’s been living here on this decimated property, this wasteland of my memories. I wonder if someone helps him, if even as he is, he is still able to lure and manipulate and cause people to do his bidding.

  “I manage,” he says. “It’ll be easier now that you’re home. I’ve missed you so much, Ophelia.”

  His words seem hollow, like lines he’s rehearsed so often they’ve lost meaning. I don’t believe he has thought of me except in the most passing moments. It is I who have been obsessed with him. It is I who have thought of him day and night, plotted my way back to him. He is my sickness, eating me alive like Alan Parker’s cancer.

  “I’ve missed you so much,” he says again.

  He thinks I’ve come back for him. My hand tightens around the gun. Sweat is dripping down my back, and I can hear blood rushing in my ears. I realize that I’m terrified of him, as though he could somehow force me to stay, as though I could be caught like a fly in a web again, t
oo weak, too powerless to escape him.

  “No,” I say, looking into those dead eyes. “No.”

  “You belong to me, Ophelia,” he says quietly, moving closer, reaching out his hand.

  This has been the truth for so long. Since the day I met him, I have been clinging to him or running from him. I have allowed him to control my heart and my mind. I have loved him madly, and I have lived in terror of his return. And yes, I have hated him. Briggs’s words come back to me: Because you hate him, Ophelia. I saw it on your face in that diner. You think you love him, but you know how evil he is, that one day he’s going to kill you, too. That you’re going to be a body someone finds in a motel just like this one.

  Marlowe Geary did kill me, and I was his willing accomplice. Gray found my body in that New Mexico hotel room and brought me back to life. Now I am responsible for bringing myself back to wholeness, to heal myself so that I can be the mother my daughter deserves, the woman I deserve to be.

  I remember then that he’s Victory’s father, that because of who we were together, she exists in this world. The union that has made me weakest has produced the union that has made me strongest. It seems a raw truth, so odd that it’s almost funny. The universe has a sense of humor, a taste for irony. But this is a private joke I don’t share. He has no right to know her; he has nothing to do with her.

  “You belong to me, Ophelia.”

  “Not anymore.” And I find I have nothing more to say. There is not a moment of hesitation, of conscience now that he is injured and unarmed. I do exactly what I have come here to do, what Ophelia has been trying to do for years. I take the gun from my waist and open fire. I see his body jerk and shake with the impact of the bullets. I keep firing until it is empty. When I’m done, he’s on the ground, his arms and legs spread wide and so still, an oval of blood spreading around him. I walk over to his body and see his staring eyes. A river of blood flows from his mouth. I stand there watching for I don’t know how long, until I’m certain beyond any doubt that he is finally dead.