Lisa Unger: Black Out

“Why do you say that, Victory?”

In the rearview mirror, I see her shrug. She’s fingering the piping on her pink backpack now. “I don’t know,” she says, drawing out the words in that sweet way she has. “Esperanza said she was going to make cookies today. She might need help.”

“Oh,” I say, with relief. “And you don’t think I can help.”

“Well, sometimes when you help, the bottoms get black. They taste bad.”

I am a terrible cook. Everyone knows this about me.

“Well, I guess we’ll just have to wait until you get home so that you can help Esperanza,” I say.

She looks up at the mirror and offers a smile and a vigorous nod. “Okay,” she says. “Good.”

It is settled. I drop her off, chitchat with the other moms on the front porch. Before I walk back to the car, I look in the window to see Victory donning a red smock and settling in for finger painting. I feel a familiar twist in my heart; I feel this whenever I leave her someplace, even a place as safe and happy as this little school.

When I return home, Esperanza is gone. Probably off to run errands or to pick up whatever I forgot to get at the store the other day-I always forget something, even when I take a list. I can smell her famous chili simmering in the slow cooker; she probably went to get fresh tortillas from the Mexican grocery downtown. I nuke some leftover coffee from earlier and walk up to the second level. At the door to Gray’s office, I enter a code on the keypad over the knob and slip inside.

It’s dim; the plantation shutters are closed. This is a very manly room, all leather and oak, towering shelves of books, a huge globe on a stand in the corner, a samurai sword in a case on the wall. I stare at the sword a minute and think how not like Gray it is to have a weapon hanging on his wall like some kind of trophy. This is another affectation of Drew’s. The only things in this room that Gray chose for himself are the photos of Victory and me on his desk.

I sink into the roomy leather chair behind his desk and boot up his computer. I stare at the enormous screen as it goes through its various electronic songs and images. When it’s ready, I enter my code and open the Internet browser.

My doctor asked me to spend time trying to remember the things that I have locked away somewhere inside me, to explore those gaping blank spaces that constitute my past. I’ve decided that I am going to do that, just as soon as I’ve done this one last thing, my last tic to assure myself that everything is okay.

I enter his name in the powerful search engine to which we subscribe and spend the next two hours reading about his crimes, the pursuit of him, and his ultimate death. Then I open Gray’s case file, read the notes he took during an investigation that spanned two years and five states. I stare at crime-scene photos, drinking in the gore, the horror of it all. When I’m done, I feel an almost total sense of relief. I move over to the leather couch and lie down, close my eyes, and try to relax myself with deep breathing. But the harder I grasp for my memories, the more they slip away. I get frustrated and angry with myself quickly and decide instead to go for a run.

I run along the beach, passing the empty winter houses that look more like well-appointed bed-and-breakfast hotels than private homes. The sky is turning from an airy blue to gray, and far off I can hear the rumble of the storm that’s headed in this direction. The towering cumulous clouds are soft mountains of white and black against a silver sky, threatening and beautiful. I run hard and fast. I want pain and exhaustion. I want to collapse when I’m done, have a headache from the exertion.

After I pass the last house, I am on the nature preserve. The beach ahead of me is empty; to the east there are sea oats, tall grass swaying, all varieties of tall palms. Every few feet, small signs warn walkers to stay to the water’s edge and not venture into the sea grass, because birds and turtles nest in the protected patch of land. It’s hard to believe that there can be a place this empty, this private, in Florida the way it is today, so overdeveloped, condo buildings rising fast on the horizon as if they sprang fully formed from the earth. The locals joke that the building crane is the state bird. I cherish this quiet and emptiness about where we live, wondering how long it can last. At the tip of the island, exhausted and breathless, I turn back. I slow a bit, thinking I should pace myself to make the distance back to the house.

The Gulf is a relatively calm body of water, the warm, anemic waves a disappointment to anyone accustomed to the roaring of the Atlantic coastline. But today the waves come in high and strong, the water an eerie, churning gunmetal. The sky is ever darker, and I realize that I might not beat the storm home. It’s not wise to be the only thing on the beach when lightning threatens here. It’s far too early and too cool for this type of weather, I think. I pick up my pace again, though my body protests.

As the wind begins to assert itself, I see something lying on the beach that I don’t think was there on my way up. It’s far ahead of me still, a kind of large, formless black lump lying half in and half out of the water. A garbage bag, maybe. A mass of seaweed. A dead tarpon or grouper, both large gray fish. Something tells me to slow down, to stay away from it. But there’s no other route home, and I can hear the thunder louder now, see the clouds flashing. I press on.

The grass and sea oats have started to dance and whisper in the wind. The form ahead of me-I’ve just seen it shift. Could be the wind, but I don’t know. In spite of the encroaching storm, I slow my pace.

I move over to the side to give the thing a wide berth as I pass. I won’t stop to investigate as Victory would. She insists on throwing every stranded thing back into the sea or weeps inconsolably in my arms for those she cannot save. I don’t have that kind of heart anymore. We’re all washed ashore, thrashing, looking for our way home. “Every man for himself” is more my motto these days.

My heart lurches as I draw close enough to see that the form is a man, his back to me. His black clothes are soaked; he is draped in sea grass from shoulders to knees. I can see one of his hands, mottled with sand, dead white. I stop, look up and down the beach. Not a soul. The sky is nearly black now, the thunder closer. I should keep running; I know this. Move fast, get to a phone, call for help. But I slow to a walk, approach the man. I remember that I thought I saw him move in the distance. But that could have been the wind billowing his clothes. Still, I find myself thinking, Maybe he’s alive. Maybe I can save him.

“Hello,” I say loudly to the man who is most likely a corpse, washed in from sea. I don’t feel the fear that I should, just this ferocious curiosity. “Are you all right?”

That’s when I hear him groan, low and terrible. A slender, white bolt of lightning slices the sky some miles away. I move in quickly without thinking and put my hand on his cold, wet shoulder, turn him on his back. I see his face then, the face I always see, white and terrible, a deep gouge in his cheek, his mouth gaping, his eyes fixed and staring.

From deep inside his chest, he growls, “You belong to me.”

I wake up then on the couch, an afternoon storm raging outside, the rain coming down in slicing sheets. My chest is heaving, and I’m sweating.

“Mrs. Annie!” Esperanza’s knocking on the door. I get up and open it for her. She steps back and looks down at her feet when I do, as though she’s embarrassed. She’s a youngish-looking forty-something with a wide, pretty face, café au lait skin, and the kind of deep brown eyes that men drown in. She looks up at me with concern; she’s been witness to my waking from these types of dreams before. I’m the one who should be embarrassed. I must have cried out; that must be what brought her to the door. I don’t know, and I don’t ask. We both just pretend it didn’t happen.