Lisa Unger - Black Out

Sarah had read something, some book about food, that made her think they should stop eating red meat. So there was a lot of stir-frying going on at the Harrison home, lots of tofu and fish and poultry being prepared with vegetables and brown rice. But somehow everything seemed to taste like soy sauce, no matter what the ingredients. The house was starting to reek of it. But Harrison never complained about his wife’s cooking; he always ate what she prepared and showered her with compliments. He appreciated that she cooked at all, that she made a point of having something ready for him when he came home, that she waited and ate with him most of the time, unless it was very late.

Even though he’d called and told her not to wait up, he found her on the couch when he walked through the front door. She was watching some movie with the sound down low, huddled under a blanket. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were tearing up a house on the screen, shooting at each other with big guns. He could see the blond crown of Sarah’s head and heard her sigh as he shut the door and rearmed the alarm system.

She sat up quickly, looking startled, as if she’d been dozing.

“What are you doing up?” he asked.

“I was up with the baby,” she said through a yawn. She lifted her long, graceful arms above her head in a stretch. “I thought I’d wait awhile and see if you came home.”

He came to sit beside her. He took her into his arms and felt the sleepy warmth of her body. She smelled of raspberries, something in her shampoo.

“I made a stir-fry. Want me to heat it up?” He noticed that there was something shaky about her voice.

“No thanks,” he said. “I ate. A big, juicy hamburger dripping with fat, with ketchup and mayonnaise.” He held out his hands to indicate the enormousness of the burger. “And fries, soaked in oil.”

She wrinkled her nose and made a sound of disgust. “If you only knew,” she said, patting him on the cheek. “Poison.”

“I’ll die happy,” he said, shedding his jacket.

His eyes fell upon it then. On the end table by the couch was a stack of their bank statements. The sight of it made his stomach bottom out. He turned to see her watching his face.

“I never look at these things, you know?” she said with a light laugh. She rubbed her temple, then wrapped her arms around her middle. She bit her lip the way she did before she was about to cry. “But I saw this interview on CNN. Some finance expert who said that women are disempowered in a marriage by being ignorant regarding their finances. It seemed obvious, but then I realized I don’t even know how much money we have in the bank.”

She took a deep breath. “And I thought, we have a daughter now and I don’t want her to see her mother as this helpless woman who doesn’t even know how to pay her bills online. If anything ever happened to you, I wouldn’t know anything about our money. And you’re a cop, you know. Something could happen.”

He kept his eyes on her face. He watched her eyes widen and rim with tears.

“Sarah-”

“We got married so young,” she said quickly, interrupting him. “I literally came right from my parents’ house into our marriage. Someone’s always taken care of me, Ray. But now there’s a person who needs me to take care of her.”

He started to talk again, but she lifted up her hand.

“I don’t understand all these huge withdrawals from our savings. And then this deposit,” she said, picking up the pile. He saw her handwriting and some highlighted entries. The papers quivered in her grasp. Over the baby monitor, he heard his daughter sigh and shift in her sleep. “Can you explain this to me, Ray?”

His mind raced through a hundred lies he could tell, a hundred different techniques he could use to manipulate her in this moment to make her feel bad or wrong for confronting him this way. This is what he was good at, after all, molding himself, his tone, his words, to make people do and say and think what he wanted. But he didn’t have the heart for any more lies, any more secrets. As he sat in their comfortable home and told her every wrong thing he’d done, wasn’t it also true that in some secret part of himself he was glad? Glad that, for better or worse, she would finally know all of him?

It looks as if the plane is landing in a sea of black, except for the tiniest strip of lights along what I’m hoping is the ground. The ride has been turbulent, and I’m not sure how much more my stomach can take as we hurtle downward. The plane pitches and lofts, and I’m wondering if it’s normal, if, after all this, the tiny plane I’m in is going to crash. What would happen to Victory then? I try not to think about it during the white-knuckle journey to the ground. But when we touch down, it’s surprisingly gentle.

“They said there will be someone to greet you,” the pilot says through the headphones. “Someone waiting.”

“Who?” I ask. “Who’s waiting?”

I see the pilot shrug. He doesn’t turn around. Again I have the thought that he doesn’t want to see my face, or maybe it’s that he doesn’t want me to see his. As it is, I couldn’t pick him out of a lineup.

“I don’t know,” he says, his tone flat and not inviting further questions.

When the engines are off, I thank him, exit the plane, and step into a humid Florida night. The tree frogs are singing and the mosquitoes start biting as soon as I strip off my coat, which I won’t need here. I can already feel beads of sweat make their debut on my forehead.

In the distance I see the dark, lean form of a man standing beside a vehicle. Its headlights are the only thing illuminating the blackness except for the light coming from the small control tower above us. I don’t see anyone up there.

I approach the vehicle for lack of any alternatives, and I realize that it’s the Angry Man.

“Do you know who I am?” he asks as I draw near.

I shake my head. The situation takes on a surreal quality. “I remember you,” I say. “But I don’t know your name.”

“My name’s Alan Parker, father of Melissa, husband of Janet.”

The words hit as though he’s thrown stones at me. I feel that the knowledge should illuminate what’s happening to me, but it doesn’t.

“Once upon a time,” he goes on, “my wife and I believed that Frank Geary murdered our daughter.”

He is dressed in dark pants and a heavy flannel shirt, with a jacket over that. It is far too hot for all those clothes, but he doesn’t appear uncomfortable. Instead he seems to hunch himself in as if bracing against the cold. And is he shivering just slightly? He seems out of place in this moment of my life, as though he has no business being there.

“Our rage was the driving force in our lives for years. It consumed us.” He releases a throaty cough, then pulls a pack of Marlboro reds from his pocket, lights one with a Zippo, and takes a long, deep drag. He has the look of a lifelong smoker, gray and drawn.

“You know, the thing was, I was a terrible father. Absent a lot, distant when I was around. I never so much as held my daughter or told her I loved her in all the years she was alive. I provided for her, sure, roof over her head, nice things, college. That’s what I knew how to do. That’s all I thought a father had to do. The point is, I never devoted much of myself to her until after she’d been taken from me. But I was a berserker in the crusade for justice against Frank Geary. I think Melissa would have been surprised by my devotion. I think she died believing I didn’t love her.”

I don’t know what to say to him. I’m not sure why he’s telling me this or what we’re doing here. But I listen because I don’t have any choice, and I figure as long as he’s talking, my daughter is safe. My whole body tingles with the desire to be moving, to be anywhere else but here.