Lisa Unger - Black Out

“When I found you, I thought maybe you were the one who makes all the wrong things right,” he said one night about a month after I’d been in the hospital. “I thought, if I can do right by her, maybe it gives meaning to everything else.”

“That’s bullshit,” I said, finally answering him. I didn’t want to be his penance. I didn’t want to be the one who made things right for him. “That’s not the way life works. There’s no balance sheet.”

“No?” he said, sitting up in the chair where he’d been slouching. “Then how do we move on from our mistakes?”

“We don’t get to move on, ” I said, resting my eyes on him for the first time.

He leaned his head back and gave a mirthless laugh. “So we just languish in regret until we die?”

“Maybe that’s what we deserve,” I said, turning away from him again.

He let a beat pass. Then, “I hope you’re wrong.”

Tonight I stay far enough away from Gray’s car that he can’t see me but close enough not to lose him. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. Someone like Gray instinctively knows when he’s being tailed. Maybe that’s because he’s usually doing the tailing. Takes one to know one. And, of course, if he sees my car in the rearview mirror, he’ll know right away that it’s me. I’m not sure how I’ll explain myself, since I have no idea what I’m doing.

He’s moving fast, crossing the causeway and pulling on to the highway. He’s not stopping at the police station. He’s headed into the city, which seems odd. I never thought to ask him how he knows where Harrison lives. He has his methods.

“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.