Lisa Unger: Black Out

“I’ll have someone look into it,” he says finally.

I realize I haven’t really participated in the conversation, though he doesn’t seem to have noticed. “Thanks,” I say.

“In the meantime,” he says after draining the rest of the beer, “tighten up around here. Keep the system armed, no doors or windows left open. No more phone calls to Ophelia’s father or anyone from her past. You’ve gotten careless by talking to him. That phone call you made last week might be the reason someone’s looking for her.”

“Okay,” I say, feeling contrite. I know he’s right.

He gets up to leave.

“Any word on Gray?” I ask.

“No news is good news,” he says, patting me on the shoulder in an uncommonly friendly gesture. I wonder if our relationship might be improving.

It stormed the day Frank’s son came. Of course it did. One of those storms that roll in from the coast and make a blue day turn black suddenly, as though someone drew a curtain. Wind kicks in and turns the leaves white side up. The barometric pressure plummets, and the sky starts to rumble. We were alone, me and Mom. She’d worked the morning shift, I’d had a half day at school because of some teachers’ conference. We sat on her bed and watched As the World Turns on the tiny black-and-white television that we’d moved in from the kitchen, eating fried-bologna sandwiches. This was a ritual we’d practiced as long as I could remember; I’d been watching the soaps with her for probably longer than that. Even now I’ll sometimes turn one on guiltily in the middle of the day and disappear for a little while, remembering what it was like to be close to my mother, to smell her perfume and hold her delicate white hand.

I heard the knock on the door before my mother did.

“Was that the door?” I asked.

“Uh-uh,” she said absently, eyes glued to the screen. “I don’t think so.”

I heard the knocking again. “I think it is.”

“Well, go check,” she said, patting me on the ass. “I’ve been on my feet all morning.”

I walked to the door and looked through the small window. He stood there, leaves and rain blowing around him, his hair tousled. He carried a large bag over one shoulder and had on a worn blue sweat jacket over T-shirt and jeans. Something about his face, his whole bearing, made my heart lurch. I’d never seen anyone so beautiful, the features of his face smooth and flawless as if he’d been blown from glass. I thought he’d turn and I’d see a pair of wings grow from his back. He lifted his hand to knock again but saw my face in the window.

“Frank said I should come!” he yelled over the wind. His eyes were so dark they seemed almost black from where he stood; his long hair was the same inky black, in deep contrast to the white of his skin.

“Why?” I asked him. Something about him was frightening, too. True beauty is like that, as terrifying as it is mesmerizing. I didn’t want him to come in. I wanted to lean my weight against the door and brace it against him.

“He says I should see Carla.” He adjusted the heavy bag on his shoulder. His hand was like a boulder, big and round with large, long fingers.

I looked at him, examined the thin line of his mouth, the square of his jaw. I couldn’t tell how old he was. “My mother,” I said.

He looked down at his feet, back at me. I felt the full weight of his gaze. “I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

My mother came up behind me. “Let him in,” she said to me, but didn’t reach for the door herself.

“Who is he?”

“He’s Frank’s boy,” she said, looking at me sheepishly, then at him.

“You knew he was coming?”

“I knew he might come,” she said, turning her face back to me but keeping her eyes on him, as though she couldn’t pull her gaze away.

“And?” I said, feeling my stomach clench.

“And now he might stay on here awhile.”

“Where?” I said. “There’s no room for him.”

She nodded over toward the couch. It was small and dirty, uncomfortable even to sit on, never mind sleep. “There. Just for a few nights. Don’t worry; I’m not going to give him your room.”

“Hello?” he called from outside. “It’s raining pretty hard.”

“Well?” my mother said.

I turned and looked at him through the window. Even then something deep inside me knew not to open the door, but I did. He brought the storm in with him, dripping on the floor and smelling like rain. He was tall, taller than he’d seemed standing outside. He didn’t have to slouch to come in through the door, but almost. He dropped his bag on the floor and it landed with a heavy thump.

My mother made him a fried-bologna sandwich, then another. I watched while he inhaled them as if he hadn’t eaten in days. He had a thick neck and broad, heavily muscled shoulders. He wrapped his free arm around the plate, gazing up every so often, as if he were afraid someone would come and take the food away from him.

“I’ve only got six months to emancipation,” he told us, making his childhood sound like a kind of slavery. But he didn’t look like a boy, as my mother had called him. At seventeen going on eighteen, he was more man than child, I suppose. There was something feral about him, something hungry and knowing.

I stood in the corner sullen, angry, but watching him with secret interest. The look on my mother’s face, vacant and eager to please, made me sick. This is how she acted around men.

“Then I’m going to join the Corps,” he said. “No one’s going to fuck with me after that.”

“Wow, the marines!” my mother gushed, twirling a strand of her hair. “Frank didn’t tell me.”

“How long are you planning on staying here?” I asked with naked annoyance.

He shrugged and gave my mom a hangdog look. It was so fake. Couldn’t she see that?

She patted his shoulder and gave me a warning glare over his head. “You can stay as long as you need to, Martin.”

“My name’s Marlowe,” he said quickly, angrily. I saw the ugly in him for a second, a dog baring his teeth. Then he softened, turned a sweet smile on my mother. “Please call me Marlowe.”

“Sure, honey,” she said, petting him again. “Marlowe. Do you want something else to eat?”

“Yes, please,” he said to her, and then he moved his eyes over to me.

My recall of Marlowe’s arrival has a funny, sepia-toned quality. I remember weird, hyperfocused details, like my mother’s cuticles, jagged from her endless gnawing at them, and that the tag on her shirt was turned out. I remember hearing the dramatic voices from the soap opera blaring from the other room. But it’s as though I’m remembering something I saw on a television screen, all of it happening behind a thick piece of glass. I don’t feel like I was a participant, but rather an impotent observer watching mute and helpless as things unfolded. It was another of those moments that I had dissected again and again with my shrink. Another place where I might have made a difference.

“Try to remember,” Dr. Brown says, “you were a child; your mother was the adult. You didn’t have any power. Your mother was responsible for inviting these men, her boyfriend and his son, into your lives.”

“I opened the door.”

“If you hadn’t, she would have.”

He was right. My mother was not a smart woman, not intelligent, not instinctual. She lived in her own little world. She never saw him coming.

The next night I force myself to go to Ella’s cocktail party. In spite of my efforts to isolate myself from the crowd and appear generally antisocial, an older woman clad entirely in white drifts over to me and asks me what I do. She looks as though someone sprayed her with shellac, so unmoving and stiff are the various parts of her-her flesh, her bobbed hair, the muscles in her face. She’s so thin I can see the tiny bones in her wrist.