Lisa Unger - Black Out

He frowns and opens his mouth to deny it. I put up a hand. “I followed you. I saw you shoot him.”

He turns his head to the side and releases a long, slow breath.

“Because I couldn’t figure out who he was working for,” he says finally. “I found out where he was staying. I offered him a payoff in exchange for the name of his employer and for him to go back to whoever it was and say he couldn’t find you or that you were dead or whatever. When I gave him the money, he lied to me, said he was working for the police. So I killed him. I figured that it would send a message to whoever had hired him.” He finished with a shrug.

“How do you know he lied?”

“I know,” he says.

“Is he alive, Gray? Marlowe. Is he?”

He doesn’t answer, just fixes me with a stare. I can tell he wants to reach for me but there’s a high, hard wall between us.

“Is he alive?” I ask again.

Finally, “I don’t know, Annie. I just don’t know.”

I let the words move through me. Strange as it is, it feels good to hear him admit it, this thing I have known all along. I somehow feel stronger, saner, for knowing that my instincts haven’t failed me completely.

“What happened to Dr. Brown? Who was he?”

“He’s someone my father knows. He was a clinical psychiatrist who dealt with military and paramilitary posttraumatic stress patients. We thought he could help you.”

I don’t tell him what Detective Harrison has told me. I’m not sure why. Probably because I figure he’ll have an explanation for whatever I say. I don’t know whom to believe. Harrison isn’t exactly unimpeachable himself.

“What happened to him?”

“I don’t know, Annie. That’s the truth.”

That’s the truth. It’s a funny phrase. If you need to say it, it’s probably because every other thing out of your mouth has been a lie.

I see her then. She’s standing out on the deck, her hands pressed up against the window. She’s every bit as real as I am, which doesn’t mean much. I see her for what she is finally, just a girl who’s been lied to and betrayed by everyone she loves, someone who’s forever looking for a rescue that’s just not coming.

If there was ever any question about what I needed to do for her, it had been answered. Between Ray Harrison’s revelations and Vivian’s confessions, it’s all very clear. I understand Ophelia after all these years, why she has been afraid, so eager to flee the life that Annie Powers made. It has all been a façade, flimsy and insubstantial, waiting for one good wind to blow.

“Annie?” says Gray.

“Don’t call me that,” I say. “It’s not my name.”

Later I tuck Victory into her bed and lie down beside her. She clutches Claude in one arm, holds my hand with her free one. She’s drifty, eyelids droopy. I drink in the delicate lines of her profile, the soft pink of her skin, run my fingers through her silky hair. Sometimes it seems that all you do as a mother is say good-bye in tiny increments. The minute they leave your body, they just get further and further away, first crawling, then walking, then running. But tonight it’s even worse. Tonight I really am saying good-bye. Of course, she has no idea.

“Are you still mad?” she asks me, turning suddenly to meet my eyes.

I shake my head, “No. Everything’s fine. Sometimes grown-ups argue.”

She gives a small nod and a sleepy smile; she seems satisfied with this. She has always been such a reasonable child, always seeming to understand things beyond her years.

“I love you, baby,” I tell her. “More than anything.” It’s so important for her to know this now.

“I love you, too, Mommy.”

I watch as her little face finally relaxes, her breathing deepens. When I’m sure she’s asleep, I slip off her bed and leave the room quickly. If I stay any longer beside her, I’ll never have the strength to do what I know I must.

I find Gray waiting for me in the hallway. We have left our conversation dangling, and it will need to be finished tonight. I follow him to our bedroom and close the door behind me. I tell him everything, the return of my memories, the arrangements I have made with my old friend Oscar.

“Annie,” he says when I’m done, “listen to yourself. You met this guy in the psychiatric hospital?”

“It’s what he does, for companies like yours. He makes people disappear, gives them new identities, helps them to stage their deaths.”

Gray shoots me a skeptical look. “But he’s crazy?”

“No crazier than I am,” I say defensively. “He was just having a hard time. Depression. An occupational hazard.”

Gray sits down in the chair by the window. I move over to the bed, give him some space to process all of it.

“Okay, let’s look at this rationally,” he says, lifting his eyes to me. “What does all this accomplish? What about Victory? Do you really want to put her through this?”

“Don’t you get it, Gray?” I say. “He has found me. I don’t know how, but he has. Maybe Simon Briggs was working for him. We don’t know. The point is that I die on my terms and hope to come back to my little girl. Or I die on his and that’s the end. He wins.”

“I’d never let that happen,” he says. “You know that.”

“He’ll wait. He’ll wait until the second our guard is down.”

“You give him too much credit,” he says, standing up and beginning to pace the room. “You’ve blown him up in your mind to be something that he isn’t. We don’t even know that he’s alive. Annie, this is crazy.”

“If it’s not him, it’s someone else who knows about Ophelia. I can’t have Victory touched by that, either. Gray, it’s time. We always said this is what we’d do if the past came back.”

“That was before,” he says, looking sadder than I’ve ever seen him. He sinks down onto the bed. “That was before we had a home and a family, a daughter-a life we built together. Annie, I can’t lose you.”

I walk over to him and kneel before him.

“Then let me go, Gray,” I say. “Let me die so we can be a family again.”

He releases a deep breath and closes his eyes for a second. I expect him to spring up and parade out a hundred more reasons this is the worst idea anyone ever had, how it’s insane and reckless and even unnecessary. But he surprises me then.

“Okay,” he says. “But we do it my way. My people help you disappear; my people on the other end take you someplace safe, protect you. We’ll send Victory away with Vivian, and while she’s gone, we’ll figure out who’s doing all this. If everything goes well, she never has to know about any of it. When you’re safe, when the threat is neutralized, we’ll find a way to bring you back.”

He drops down onto the floor in front of me and wraps me tightly in his arms. “Okay?” he asks.

It sounds too easy, as though he thinks it can all be settled in a few weeks. But I don’t say that. I’m just glad he’s not going to fight me.

For a second, I wonder if he’s humoring me. But then I realize that we have always planned this; that we always knew someday the past might come knocking and that I would need to leave Annie Powers behind. We’d both forgotten how tenuous our hold was on this life we’d built-until now.

“Okay.”

I stand on the edge of the sinkhole and look down into its murky depths. It is as black as tar and about as welcoming. My heart is an engine in my chest, revving up into my throat. All my nerve endings tingle with dread. Everything in me wants to flee, but I know I can’t do that now. Only my desire to protect Victory keeps me moving forward, climbing into the wetsuit my instructor provided. He’s lifting the tank up onto my back, and my legs nearly buckle beneath the weight of it. Annie Powers’s life is gone, as totally as if the ground gave way and she fell into the earth.