Lisa Unger - Black Out

My mother broke away from me then and ran. I chased after her, but she moved back through the front door before I could stop her. I heard her screaming, a terrible howl of protest, and I came up behind her just in time to see Frank’s chest exploding as Janet Parker shot him dead center. He spun and seemed to pause in midstride, as though he’d decided to walk away from her but changed his mind. Then he fell flat and hard onto the stairs and slid down like a plank.

I looked up at Janet Parker, and for the first time I saw her smile. Then she turned the barrel and stuck the gun into her own mouth and pulled the trigger. I saw an awful spray of red.

My mother was wailing as I pulled her away from Frank’s body, and as we moved through the door, two more windows burst upstairs. She threw herself to the ground outside and wept as the fire raged. I stood beside her staring. The world seemed to lose all its sound, the ground was gone from beneath my feet and I was spinning. Regret and fear cut a valley through me. What did we do? Oh, my God, what did we do? The things I’d seen had changed something within me, like one bright red sock in a white wash. Everything in my world was a different color now.

I saw him then, standing beside the barn, just another shadow in the darkness, licked by the orange light of the flames. He might have been laughing, he might have been crying. I don’t know-I couldn’t see his face. That was the thing about Marlowe, you could never see his face. I walked to him as if he’d called me. He’d cast and directed us all; we’d each played our roles for him perfectly. That was his gift.

I got into the passenger side of the Lincoln and watched him climb behind the wheel. He looked at me as he started the ignition, didn’t say a word as we started down the long, dark drive. My mother didn’t even raise her head from the ground. She never noticed I’d gone.

“Are you okay?” It’s Gray standing in our doorway.

I am sitting on the edge of our bed in the dark, staring at the wall as though my memories are playing on a screen there.

“I’m fine,” I tell him. “Just tired.”

I don’t want to share my memories with him; I’m not sure why.

“Look,” he says, “we’re going to find out what’s happening and put an end to it.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to go see Harrison, find out what he wants, and give it to him.”

He has come to sit beside me and is holding my hands in his. I’m surprised by what he’s saying. It sounds like a desperate move. It’s not like him. “Always operate from a position of strength”-that has been his motto as long as I’ve known him. It sounds to me now as if he’s waving a white flag.

“Whoever came to see your father, whoever was on the beach, whatever happened to your psychiatrist-these are unknowns. Maybe you were right, maybe it’s all part of the same problem. I don’t know. But Harrison is a threat we can deal with. Buy him off, he goes away. Who knows? Maybe everything else goes away, too.”

I feel a glimmer of hope, that maybe we just have to write a check and all of this disappears. I can go back to being Annie Powers and Ophelia can slip back into the darkness where she belongs. Maybe it’s really that easy.

“Okay,” I say.

“I’ll be home soon,” he says, kissing me softly on the mouth. I reach for him, pull him to me, and hold on tight. He leaves me, and I listen to him on the stairs and then watch as his car pulls from the drive. I get up quickly and grab my keys.

“I’m going to run out for a second,” I tell Esperanza as I pass by the family room on my way to the garage. “Gray’s gone, too.”

“It’s late,” she says.

“I won’t be long,” I say. “Victory’s sleeping.”

I don’t hear what she says as I leave. At the end of our street, I just catch a glimpse of Gray’s taillights as he makes a left. I’m following him. I don’t know why.

“He was gone most of the time,” Gray said of his father. “And when he was home, he was this brooding presence. Sullen, staring at the television or angry at my mother for something she’d bought or had done to the house while he was gone. I hovered around him, wanting and fearing his attention. Occasionally I’d get these quick pats on the back or we’d try to play catch or build a tree house, something that fathers and sons might do together. But it was never quite right. We always walked away feeling like we’d failed at something indefinable. We just couldn’t connect, not really. Not ever.”

He used to spend time talking to me like this, even when he thought I might not be able to hear him or that I didn’t care. He’d sit in my room at the psychiatric hospital in New Jersey where he’d admitted me as Annie Fowler and talk. I’d stare off into space, not responding. I wasn’t exactly catatonic, but I’d sort of lost my will to exist. I didn’t speak, barely ate, just stared at the window in my room watching the leaves fall from the trees, the clouds drift past. I didn’t know why he’d talk to me, a stranger, like this. What does he want from me? Why doesn’t he just leave me here?

“My mother was just so damned sad, all the time. She was clinically depressed, I realize now. But then, she was unsupported, didn’t even know she needed treatment. She never recovered from the loss of her daughter, my sister who I never knew. I suppose my father never recovered, either. Maybe that’s what happens to you when you’re born to parents who’ve lost a child. You just never fit somehow.”

He’d talk, sometimes for hours, as though he’d been holding it in all his life, waiting for some silence where he could safely release the words. Maybe, in a way, I was his first safe place, someone in no position to judge him for his sins and loss of faith.

“After high school I joined the navy. Everyone was pleased, proud. But I just wanted to get away from them. It seemed like the right thing to do. It was what my father did. I had no idea what I was doing, not really. Maybe I’m more like my mother than my father. I wasn’t cut out for the things that lay ahead.”

I found myself listening even though, during that time, I hated him. He was six feet of muscles and hard places, scars and dark looks. I found him ugly, too harsh around the eyes and mouth. He smelled strongly of Ivory soap and sometimes alcohol. I couldn’t decide whether he was the person who’d rescued me or destroyed me. He’d killed Marlowe, the first person I’d ever loved. He’d saved me from a killer, brought me to this hospital, and stayed with me, came every day with books and magazines, candy and little gifts that sat in an untouched pile in the closet by the bathroom.

He told me how a few years after the First Gulf War he was honorably discharged from the Navy SEALs. He left sick with rage and disillusionment with the military and the government. He was angry at his father for pushing him into a career he was never sure he wanted, angry at himself for not knowing any other way to live. He drifted from New York to Florida, drinking too much, doing some odd private-investigator work here and there.

“I’d done and seen some truly heinous things,” he told me. “They didn’t seem to have any meaning or purpose. Nothing good ever came from the bad, not that I could see. It was making me sick back then. I didn’t know what I was going to do with the rest of my life, how long I could carry all the baggage I had.”

I cooperated with my admittance to the hospital and with my name change because I knew I didn’t have any choice. It was that or prison. The truth is, I didn’t have anywhere else to go; I knew that neither of my parents would help me. But more than that, I was eager to be rid of Ophelia and the things she’d done-what I could remember, anyway. Gray and I were alike in that respect, coming to terms with past deeds that seemed right at the time but under the glare of reality revealed themselves as dead wrong.