Lisa Unger: Black Out

Then Gray’s footsteps are heavy and fast behind me. He kneels beside us and helps me to my feet, lifts Victory into his arms.

She lies against him like a rag doll, exhausted. “Can we go now?”

He looks at me with his stormy eyes. “I’m sorry, Annie,” he says. “I’m so sorry.”

“Let’s get out of here,” I say, putting my hand on his arm. I don’t want to talk anymore. I just want to get out of this house, for good.

“I should have believed you.”

“You had no reason to believe me, Gray,” I say, pulling him toward the door.

“That’s not true,” he says. “I didn’t want to believe you.”

“Gray,” I say, as we walk out the door and head toward our car, “it’s okay. You can start believing me now.”

I walk through the rooms of our house and listen to the echoes of the life we lived here. The windows are open, the air is humid. I can hear the ocean and smell the salt. This is what I will miss most about this place, our proximity to the sea, the sand on our feet, the birds crying in the air, the sound of our wind chimes on the porch. But there’s a special kind of beauty to New York City, too. And in its way it is more my home than this place, no matter how beautiful, has ever been.

The few items of furniture that are coming with us are already on their way to be unloaded into a ridiculously expensive brownstone on the east side of Tompkins Square. It’s still a gritty neighborhood, to be sure. Nothing like the posh house we’re leaving, but it will be ours-our choice, our terms, our home. Everything else we’ll leave behind.

I walk from room to room, making sure that things are clean, that nothing we need has been forgotten. I feel a potent nostalgia I can’t explain. Gray and Victory have gone off together to do some errands-close a bank account, buy Victory her own carry-on suitcase for the trip tomorrow.

After I’ve been all through the house, I come to stand at the glass doors downstairs and stare at the Gulf until I sense someone behind me. I spin around to see Detective Harrison standing in my living room.

“The door was open,” he says apologetically.

He looks thin and pale but oddly solid-at peace in a way. I find myself grateful for him and for his wife, and I’m glad to see him now. I want to embrace him, but I don’t. I smile at him instead and hope I don’t seem cool, distant.

“Coffee?” I ask.

“Please,” he says.

I pour him a cup but abstain myself. I’m jittery already from too much caffeine this morning, and I feel a headache coming on. I sit on the couch, but he prefers to stand.

“How’s your family?” I ask.

“We’re okay, you know?” he says with a nod. “I think we’re going to be okay. I’ve hung out my own shingle: Ray Harrison, Private Investigations. I’ve even managed to find a few people who don’t mind having a junkie with a criminal record investigating their cases.” He laughs a little, and it washes away some of the bitterness in his words.

“Anyway, I came to bring you this,” he says. He walks over and hands me a folded piece of paper. I unfold it and look at it for a second. It’s a check in the amount of the money he blackmailed from us.

I try to give it back. “Keep it,” I say. “Pay us back when you’re on your feet.”

He raises a hand. “No. This is right. I need to do the right thing by you. I promised my wife.”

I nod my understanding, put the check down beside me. We are silent for a minute, awkward, neither of us knowing what to say. Our relationship is so bizarre we have no template for polite conversation.

“There are things I can tell you,” he says. He’s doing that rocking business he does, has stuffed his hands in his pockets. “But maybe you don’t want to know. Maybe you just want to move forward with your life from here.”

I haven’t spoken to Drew or Vivian since the night we left their home. Gray has asked his father to buy out his interest in Powers and Powers, and Drew has agreed. Drew has refused to talk any further about his relationship to Grief Intervention Services, how he knew about Victory’s paternity, or to offer any explanation of the things that have happened to me. Gray has tried to find some explanations through avenues of his own but has come up against wall after wall. We have both decided that for the sake of our family, of protecting Victory, there are things we’ll just have to live with never knowing.

“I thought I was going to be in the dark for the rest of my life,” Harrison says, pacing the room. “But I had a visitor the other day to my new office.”

“Who?”

“An old friend of yours,” he says with a wry smile. “She’s no friend of mine, of course. But she brought me this.”

“Ella?” I ask eagerly. “ Where is she? The hurricane shutters are down on her house. She’s been gone for weeks. I haven’t had a call or an e-mail. We’re going to have to leave without saying good-bye.”

He gives a cryptic shake of his head. “I don’t know what her plans are. I’m sure you’ll hear from her, though, Annie. One of these days.”

As he takes another piece of paper from his pocket and gives it to me, my headache intensifies. This time it’s a picture, a blurry black-and-white photograph of two boys in fatigues, arms around each other’s shoulders, one smiling, one grim. It takes me a second to figure out who I’m looking at. For a second, I think one of the men is Gray. But then I recognize them-Drew Powers and Alan Parker, younger, thinner, barely resembling the men they became. Someone had scribbled in the corner, Bassac River, 1967, Vietnam.

“I don’t understand,” I say, feeling suddenly as though the ground has shifted beneath me. “What does this mean?”

“They served together on SEAL Team One in Vietnam. They’ve known each other most of their lives.”

I’m struggling with this information, trying to understand how everything fits together. But my head is aching so badly I can hardly concentrate.

“I have a theory,” he says. “Want to hear it?”

I don’t really, but I find myself giving a half nod.

“I think, years ago, when Alan Parker wanted revenge for the murder of his daughter, he came to Drew, his old war buddy. Drew had already founded Powers and Powers at that point, and it was a thriving private military firm. Based on some digging I’ve done, I think Drew hired out one of his men to Parker to track down Marlowe Geary-a man named Simon Briggs. Later, when Parker started Grief Intervention Services, Powers and Powers provided the muscle needed to help people face those who had injured them or their loved ones. Vigilantes, basically.”

I think about this. It makes sense somehow to me that they knew each other. I can see them, both controlling, arrogant men, thinking that what they did was motivated by love for their children, never understanding that love and control are two different things.

“Then it was just a coincidence that my father met with Gray and asked him to help me?” I say with a shake of my head. “No.”

Harrison hangs his head for a second. He seems to be debating whether to say what he wants to say. Then, “Your father, Teddy March, also known as Bear. He served on the same SEAL team in Vietnam.

I laugh at this. “No,” I say. “Not my father.”

But then I remember all the times he talked about the Navy SEALs, all his Vietnam stories. I thought they were lies. I never once believed him.

Detective Harrison has another photograph. In the picture I see my father, Drew, and some other men I don’t recognize sitting in a boat heading down a gray river surrounded by jungle. They are grim, intent, uncomfortable. My father is a boy with the stubble of a beard, a cigarette dangling from his lips. He is lithe, muscular, with dark eyes and square jaw. Drew looks like a heavier, less appealing version of my husband-like a young bulldog with a stern brow and mean eyes.