Lisa Unger - Black Out

“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.