Lisa Unger - Black Out

I have the regulator in my mouth and the mask over my eyes. I hear Janet Parker’s voice in my head: She was there, floating in the cold, dark water for three months. My baby. Alone in the dark, cold water. I have carried the sound of her keening with me ever since I heard her. But it wasn’t until I had a daughter of my own that I could truly understand her grief.

“Are you ready, Ophelia?”

I lift my hand to the half heart at my neck and finger the edge.

“I’m ready.”

He looks concerned, as though he can feel my fear, my pain. Maybe it’s etched on my face. Maybe he can hear it in my breathing.

As I extend my stride, step into the water, and slip beneath the surface, I see her waiting there-Ophelia, so young and fragile, hovering like an angel. Her skin is gray, her long hair pulsing in the current. She is so glad to see me; she takes me in her frigid arms. And in that moment I am whole.

I am Annie. I am Ophelia. I am Janet Parker and her daughter Melissa. I am dead and grieving. I am mother and daughter. The blackness swallows me.

Something awful happened today. I died. A terrible accident. Something went wrong during my open-water certification. She was prone to panicking, the girl who taught me in the pool will remember. She was afraid of the water. She wasn’t qualified for a dive like that.

Ella will recall our conversation at the mall when I joked about my baptism by fire. She’ll experience a moment of pointless self-blame when she’ll wonder if she might have stopped me.

Neither my body nor the body of the dive master will be recovered. They’ll find my street clothes, keys, and wallet in the dry bag in the backseat of my car near the entrance to the sinkhole where I began my dive. It will be parked beside an old Dodge minivan registered to Blake Woods from Odessa, Florida. The van will be cluttered with all manner of run-down dive gear-wetsuits with tears, BCDs with torn straps, regulators in need of repair. But Blake Woods does not exist. The address on his driver’s license is false; his dive-master identification card is a fake.

Eventually, as the rescue divers search the sinkhole, explore the long caves and narrow passages looking for our bodies, they’ll recover a fin, top of the line and brand-new, matching the type I bought from a local dive shop a few weeks ago. Shortly after this they will call off the search.

Why would someone terrified of the water take scuba-diving lessons? Who was the man posing as her instructor? Why would he take her for her open-water certification in a sinkhole? There will be lots of questions and no answers. But it happens all the time in Florida, to people far more experienced than I. People descend into the limestone caves and don’t come out again. Cave diving is the deadliest possible hobby. Not for beginners. Suspicious, the police will say. And senseless. So sad. Annie, why?

As I lie in the dark, the taste of blood metallic and bitter in my mouth, I wonder if finally, after all the false deaths I have died, I really am dead this time. Maybe this is what death is like, a long, dark wondering, an eternal sorting through the deeds of your life, trying to discern between dream and reality. I find myself pondering, if I’m dead, which of my lives was real. My life as Ophelia? Or my life as Annie?

I try to move but vomit instead. My body racks with it until I’m dry-heaving, blood and bile burning my throat. I am on a wet metal surface. I am freezing cold, starting to shiver uncontrollably. With the pain and nausea, I figure I’m probably alive. I imagine death would be somehow less physical.

The darkness around me is total, not a pinprick of light. I can’t see my hand in front of my face. The sound of my breathing echoes off metal above and around me. There’s nothing on my body that doesn’t hurt, as if I’ve been in a terrible car wreck, no bone unshaken. I try to orient myself, try to sort through what has happened to me and how I have come to wherever I am. Then I remember the boat. I remember Dax racing off in the Boston Whaler. I remember the men who died trying to protect me, men whose wives I’ve met at dinner parties and award ceremonies, all of them employed by Powers and Powers. I remember the shroud over my head and the blow to my skull.

I’m just getting used to the totality of the darkness around me when in floods the harshest white light. I’m as blind in its brightness as I was in the dark. Maybe it’s God, I think. But somehow I doubt I warrant a personal appearance. I feel He’d probably send a lackey to deal with me.

“Ophelia March.” The voice roars, seems to come from everywhere. It’s as painful to my ears as the light is to my eyes. I find myself in a fetal position, wrapping my head with my arms.

“Where is he, Ophelia?”

I can’t find my voice but manage to emit some type of guttural wail of pain and misery.

“Where is Marlowe Geary?”

At first I don’t think I’ve heard correctly. Then the question booms again.

I realize with a sinking dread that I have made a terrible mistake. It started to dawn on me on the ship when I was taken in my cabin. But now I truly understand how badly I have screwed up. I have shed my life and fled my daughter, believing in my deepest heart-or at least fearing-that Marlowe Geary has returned for me. I let Annie die so that Ophelia could face him once and for all. I understand suddenly and with a brilliant clarity that it hasn’t been Marlowe chasing me at all. It never has been.

Annie believed that Marlowe Geary was dead and buried in an unmarked grave somewhere in a New Mexico cemetery reserved for indigents, John Does, and the incarcerated whom no one claimed upon their deaths. She thought of him there in a plain pine box, under pounds of earth, and she was comforted. She believed the lies everyone told because she wanted to believe them. But Ophelia March knew better. And she has been chasing him. I understand this now, finally. All those times I woke up on buses or trains heading for parts unknown-she was trying to get back to him.

Detective Harrison was feeling like a man who’d escaped a terminal diagnosis; he was positively giddy with relief. Since Gray had paid off Harrison’s debtors and he’d enrolled himself in Gamblers Anonymous, he felt lighter than he had in years. The threatening phone calls ceased, and the terrifying photographs of his wife and child stopped arriving on his desk. He’d stopped puking up blood from his ulcer.

A year ago if anyone had told him he’d be in a twelve-step program, he’d have punched that person in the jaw. But the weekly confessions in the meeting room of a local church by the beach cleansed him. He could say the things he’d done (most of them, anyway), and he could listen to others who’d done much, much worse, who’d hit rock bottom so hard they barely got back up. He wasn’t alone. He wasn’t even the worst of the bunch.

He could make love to his wife again for the first time in months. He didn’t feel that awful clenching of guilt and fear in his stomach every time he looked into the face of his infant daughter, Emily. And more than all of this, he remembered what it was like to be a cop, a good cop, the only thing he had ever wanted to be. He approached his job now with the zeal of the converted. And indeed he felt baptized, renewed.

He was experiencing the euphoria of someone snatched from the consequences of his actions. And if he still had the itch to gamble, if he still felt a restless agitation at the sound of a game, any game, in progress-on the radio, on the station-house television-if he still hadn’t been quite able to delete his bookie’s number from his cell phone, he told himself these things could take a while.