Lisa Unger - Black Out

“No,” he said. “I’m going to make it look like I was killed. Everyone will think I’m dead, but I’ll be alive, in hiding.”

He sounded like a child then, a kid fantasizing about his life. We were kids; that’s what I always forget. When I think about Marlowe, he’s a titan, this powerhouse I turned myself over to for the various reasons that one does such a thing. But he wasn’t even twenty-one.

He put a hand on my leg. “I’ll have to stay away from you for a while-a few years, maybe. Without the body they’ll always be watching you, waiting for you to come to me or me to come for you. But when the time is right, I’ll find you and you’ll be waiting. That’s our karma, our bond.”

“Where will you go?” I asked, playing the game with him, knowing how fast he’d turn ugly if I didn’t.

He shrugged. “I can’t tell you. They’ll torture you to find me. You’re weak. You’ll give in.”

I started to cry then. I hid my face in the crook of my arm so he wouldn’t see, but I couldn’t keep my shoulders from shaking.

“Don’t worry, Ophelia,” he said, sitting up and wrapping his arms around me. His voice was sweet and soft. “I’ll come for you. I promise.”

But of course that wasn’t why I succumbed to the crushing sadness that lived in my chest. I knew in that moment that I would never be free from him. That for the rest of my life, he’d live under my skin, in my nightmares, just around the next corner.

“When it’s time for us to be together again,” he said, “I’ll leave my necklace somewhere for you to find. That’s how you’ll know I’ve come for you. That’ll be our signal.”

He was enjoying himself, the drama of it all, making me cry. It fed into his fantasy of who we were and what was happening to us. At the time I was as sick and delusional as he was, playing my role in his fantasy, casting myself as victim.

We sat there in silence for a time. My tears dried up, and I listened to a coyote howling at the moon somewhere far off in the distance. Then…

“There’s something I want you to know, Ophelia. I need someone to know.” His voice sounded thick and strange.

“What?”

He looked out into the vast flatness all around us for so long I thought he’d decided not to go on. I didn’t press. Inside, I cringed at what he might tell me.

“Those women,” he said with an odd laugh and a shake of his head. “They didn’t matter, you know. They were nothing to anyone.”

“Who?” I asked, even though my shoulders were so tense they ached, my fist clenched so hard I could feel my nails digging into my palms.

“The women my father brought home. Most of them, even their own parents had abandoned them. No one mourned them, not really.”

I thought of Janet Parker howling at our trailer door. “That’s not true,” I said.

“It is true,” he snapped, baring his teeth at me like the dog that he was.

I didn’t argue again. Just listened as he told me again how they were looking for a way out of their shit lives, looking for the punishment they knew they deserved. How death was mercy, how they were noticed more in their absence from the world than they were in their presence.

“Marlowe,” I said finally, when he’d gone silent. I tried to keep my voice soft the way he liked it. “What are you telling me?”

The night seemed to stretch, the seconds were hours as the coyotes sang in the distance.

“My father didn’t kill those women,” he said. His words lofted above us, looped, then floated off into the night sky. His skin was ghastly white, his eyes the dark empty holes in a dime-store mask. “Not all of them.”

“Who then?” I asked, though of course I knew the answer.

“I watched him kill her,” he said, not answering my question. “I never told you. She didn’t leave us. She didn’t run away. She burned the English muffin she was making for his breakfast. He slapped her so hard she staggered back and hit her head against the edge of the counter. There was, like, this horrible noise, some cross between a thud and a snap. The way she fell to the floor, so heavy, her neck at this terrible angle-she was dead before she hit the ground.”

He paused here, and I listened to his breathing, which seemed suddenly labored, though his face was expressionless, his eyes dry. “It didn’t seem real. It seemed like something I was watching on TV. My mother was stupid and weak, I remember her cowering around my father, living her life walking on eggshells. But I loved her, anyway. I didn’t want her to die.”

I was afraid to say anything. Afraid to move a muscle.

“Later I lied for him. I didn’t want him to go to jail. When the people she worked with sent the police, he told them she ran off. Withdrew some money from the bank and stole the car. They believed him. They believed me when I said I saw her leaving in the night. I told them she said, ‘Marlowe, honey, go back to sleep. I’m going to get some milk for your breakfast.’”

There’s a rustling somewhere near us. Some creature making its way over the desert floor, something small.

“I never forgave him, though. A few years later, he brought someone home. A pasty blonde-a quivering, nervous waste of bones.” He gave a disgusted laugh, kept looking off at that same spot in the distance. “There was no way I was going to allow him to replace her. I couldn’t have another mother, so he wasn’t going to have another whore.”

He went on then to tell me with no emotion whatsoever about the women he’d killed, somehow managing to paint himself as the victim, the little boy who missed his mother so much, who sought to avenge her. But I was only half listening. Inside, I was screaming.

Frank, in his guilt, helped Marlowe to hide his crimes and eventually took the blame for the murders-because he loved his son so much, Marlowe claimed. I had no way of knowing if what he said was true, but it didn’t much matter. I had disappeared from that place. On the sound of Marlowe’s voice, I had drifted up into the stars and floated high above our bodies. I looked down to see two people sitting on the lawn of a small white church, one of them talking quietly about murder, the other wishing for death.

I follow my father up the stairs and into his apartment. It is exactly the same as it was the last time I was here, except older and dirtier. It doesn’t seem like the cool, freewheeling bachelor pad it once did. It looks like the run-down apartment of an old man who doesn’t know how to take care of himself. His party days are behind him, and he never built anything-a home, a family-that endured.

I notice he has added a recliner and a large television set on a glass-and-chrome stand over by the window. The pool table has been pushed over to the far wall to accommodate these additions. There’s a sweating beer can on the floor by the chair, a rerun of Baywatch on the screen. All the lights are out. He has been sitting here in the dark watching television alone.

He shrugs when he sees me looking at the screen. “I used to date her,” he says, indicating the bleached blonde on the set.

“Dad,” I say, shaking my head. This seems to be the only word I can get out. He sits down in the recliner, stares blankly at the television. I go over and stand in front of him.

“Dad, no more lies,” I say. “I love you, but you’ve been a really terrible father.”

His body seems to sag with the weight of my words, and I think he might be crying. But I don’t have time to comfort him. “I need you to help me now. I need you to be a better grandfather than you were a dad.”

I take the picture from my pocket and hold it out for him to see. “Oh, Christ,” he says when he looks at it. “Oh, God.”