Black Out (18 page)

He kissed me then, and the warmth, the love of it, moved over me like a salve. It
did
seem important, critical, to make a safe place in the world.

“There’s something you need to know, Gray.”

“What’s that?” he said, pushing the hair away from my eyes.

“I think I’m pregnant.”

It should have been a bombshell, but—oddly—the words landed softly on both of us. He held my eyes. I couldn’t see what he was feeling. Those gray eyes have never revealed anything he hasn’t wanted them to.

Out the window the parking lot was full of dirty cars, covered with salt and snow. I thought he’d hate me then, for loving Marlowe Geary as I had in spite of everything he’d been and everything he’d done to me, for carrying his child.

“I’ve never been with anyone but him,” I said. I hated my voice for cracking then, and the tears that seemed to spring from a well in my middle. I closed my eyes in the silence that followed, shame burning my cheeks. Then I felt his hand on my shoulder. When I turned to him, he leaned in and kissed me again. I reached for him, clung to him. I would have drowned if not for him.

“Let me take care of you,” he said. It sounded like a plea, a prayer he was making. I nodded into his shoulder. I didn’t have any words. Then he pulled away and started the car. He seemed a little awkward for a second, as if he were uncomfortable with the charge of emotion between us.

“I won’t give her up,” I said, wrapping my arms around myself. I didn’t know the sex of my child, but I hated saying “it.”

I saw his body stiffen. “I’d never suggest that. Never,” he almost whispered. He turned from the wheel and took my shoulders.

“Listen to me,” he said, with so much passion that I released a little sob. “I’m going to take care of you.” He’d been so even, so unflappable up to this point, I hardly recognized the man beside me. Maybe he was drowning, too.

“I’m going to make a home for you and for that baby.” He looked down at my belly. “Whatever it takes. I’ll do whatever it takes.”

We drove for two days and finally wound up at Vivian’s place on the beach. She and Drew were just dating at the time, so I lived alone with her. Gray took an apartment nearby. He wanted me to have some time to get to know myself, to get to know him.

“We’ll date,” he said. “Like normal people.”

Vivian took me into her house and treated me like her daughter. She cooked for me and stayed up late listening to me talk. She offered me a sort of kindness that no one else ever had. As I got my GED and started taking classes at the local college, my belly grew bigger. Gray and I dated. It was the happiest time of my life.

I suppose some people would have considered ending the pregnancy. But it didn’t even cross my mind. I’ve never once thought of Victory as Marlowe Geary’s daughter. She has always been mine and mine alone.

I watch as Gray gets out of the car with a black duffel bag. He puts the bag on the ground and leans against the vehicle. I feel as though I have lost every ounce of moisture in my body. A heavy man emerges from the white van and walks slowly over to Gray. He wears a long black raincoat, which fans behind him in the wind. His head is enormous over wide shoulders. He looks the approximate size of a refrigerator.

They shake hands, briefly. Even in the dark and with the distance, I recognize him. It’s Simon Briggs, the man who went to my father looking for Ophelia. They exchange a few words. I see Gray shake his head. I watch Briggs lift his palms. I can tell just from the way he’s standing that Gray is not happy. Finally Gray turns the bag over to him. They exchange a few more words. Then Simon Briggs turns and walks back toward his van.

As Briggs reaches for the handle to open the door, I see Gray lift his hand from his pocket and raise a gun. I draw in a hard breath and grip the wheel. With a single, silent shot, Briggs’s head explodes in a red cloud and he crumbles to the ground. Gray walks over to the body and fires again, retrieves the duffel bag, and walks calmly back to the car and gets inside. His vehicle rumbles to life, and he drives away with as little hurry as if he’s just picked up a carton of milk at the convenience store and is heading home.

I sit there for a minute, allowing what I’ve just seen to sink into my mind. I run through the possible reasons Gray might have shot Simon Briggs beneath an overpass and can only come up with one that makes sense: Gray had arranged to meet Briggs for a payoff but decided he’d be better off dead than rich. He wouldn’t have told me he planned to kill Briggs; he wouldn’t have incriminated me that way. I feel something like relief, and yet it doesn’t quite take. It’s the handshake that keeps me wondering.
How much do you really know about your husband?

Gray and I were married by the time Victory was born. I think I fell in love with him in the parking lot of the psychiatric hospital when it was clear that he accepted me for everything I was. He knew Ophelia March; he loved her. I knew he would take care of me, that with Gray I’d always be safe. Maybe that’s not really love, but it passed for that. His name is on Victory’s birth certificate; he’s her father in every way that counts. No one—not Drew, not Vivian—knows that Victory is Marlowe Geary’s child. We both agreed everyone would be better off never knowing, including Victory. But I’d be lying if I said it didn’t feel like a kind of betrayal.

Maybe because of that, there were terrible black patches during the pregnancy where I was consumed by fear that Marlowe had returned for me and for his daughter. I wouldn’t take the medication I was supposed to because of the baby, so I was buffeted by my hormones and the rogue chemicals in my brain. There were blackouts and terrible migraines. Once I woke up on a Greyhound bus headed for New York City, with no idea how I’d gotten there. One of my fugue states, as the doctors called them, a sudden flight from my life.
Where was Ophelia going?
I wondered, as I got off the bus in Valdosta, Georgia, and called Gray.
Did she know things Annie Fowler, soon to be Powers, had forgotten?

After I disembarked from the Greyhound that night, I sat in a diner and waited for Gray to come get me. I was nothing but trouble. I don’t know why he loved me. On the way back to Florida in the Suburban, I asked him, “Why do you do this? Why do you always come for me?”

“I do well in crisis mode,” he told me. “Besides, I didn’t chase you all over the country to let you go now.”

It reminded me of all the things my father said I didn’t know about the years Gray trailed me and Marlowe. I’d never asked, mainly because I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to know. That night, less than a week before our wedding, when I was five months pregnant, suddenly I
needed
to know.

“My father said that he paid you at first, and then you wouldn’t accept any more money.”

He shrugged. “At a certain point, I wasn’t working for him any longer. I was looking for you.”

“Why?”

He just stared at the road ahead, and I wondered if he was going to answer me. I’d pieced some things together from newspapers, what I could bear to read.

“I caught up with you for the first time in Amarillo, Texas,” he said finally. “There’d been a liquor-store robbery a few miles east of there a day before. The girl working the counter had been tortured and finally killed. I heard about it on the radio, thought it might be Marlowe Geary. That’s what he did—tortured, killed, and robbed. He cut a bloody gash across the country, leaving at least nineteen young women dead.”

I wanted to tell him that it couldn’t be true, though I’d read this much. I don’t think I could have witnessed these crimes and done nothing, but the truth was, I didn’t know for sure.

“A few weeks earlier, a witness, a stock boy Geary left for dead in the back room, said he saw you. He was badly wounded, unable to help the girl Geary was torturing. All he could do was listen to her screams, thinking he was about to die himself. He said you were virtually catatonic, that you sat in a corner and rocked, gnawing on your cuticles. That Geary led you out when he was done. You went with him like a child.”

I covered my face in shame. I hated to think of myself this way, weak and in a killer’s thrall, just like my mother.

“Up till then I wasn’t sure. Your mother said you went with Geary willingly. But your father said when you came to New York that you weren’t right, you weren’t the girl he knew. He said it was like you were under some kind of spell. It makes sense, knowing what we know now about your mental state.”

“I knew enough to go to my father.”

He shrugged. “Even your subconscious was hoping he would save you.”

“I was always hoping for that,” I said.

“Well, he took his time, but he came through in the end. More or less.”

“Less.”

“Anyway, in Amarillo, after stopping at every shit motel in the area, I saw a car matching the description of the vehicle Geary was last seen driving. I sat and waited. After a few hours, Geary got into the vehicle and drove off. I should have called the cops right then, or taken him myself, but at that point all I was thinking about was you. I suppose I was obsessed, maybe not thinking clearly anymore.”

Gray told me how he found me in the corner of the hotel room, just sitting there rocking. The television was on, and I stared at the screen. My arms were covered with bruises, my lip was split. I was so thin he could see my collarbone straining against the skin, the knobs of my elbows. For a second he wasn’t sure I was the girl in the photograph he carried in his pocket.

“I pulled you to your feet and was moving you to the door when Geary returned.”

He told me how he and Marlowe fought, tore the room apart.

“Marlowe knocked me unconscious with a lamp by the bed. When I came to, you were long gone. I didn’t catch up with you again until nearly a year later in New Mexico.”

“You’re leaving something out.”

“No.”

“I can handle it.”

He sighed. Then, “You shot me. In the shoulder. Though you were probably aiming to kill me and weren’t strong enough to handle the gun.”

I thought of the star-shaped scar on his shoulder. I closed my eyes and tried hard to remember shooting him. But there was nothing there.

“I don’t remember,” I said, looking out the window. I should have felt worse about it, but I couldn’t connect at all to the memory. I felt bad that he’d been shot, but I didn’t feel guilty. “I’m sorry.”

“I know,” he said. “It wasn’t you.”

He put his hand on my leg. And I rested my hand on his. Three days later we were married on the beach at Vivian’s house. I remembered Drew standing on the edge of it all like a gargoyle. Who could blame him? I’d tried to kill his son.

I lose Gray because I sit stunned in my car for too long. I don’t know what to do: try to catch up or just go home? I find myself driving back to the underpass where Simon Briggs is facedown on the concrete. In a moment of monumental stupidity, I exit my car and walk over to the body. There’s a terrible ringing in my ears as I reach him.

A dark pool of blood is growing from beneath him. His van is still running. And in a flash that feels like a blow to the head, I remember where I’ve seen him before. I lean against the van. Another bad motel somewhere out west. I had just come out of the shower, was wrapped in one of the tiny, cheap towels. He was sitting on the bed, smoking a big cigar. He was a dirty guy, stains on his clothes, something black under his nails. I saw a bit of wax in his outer ear. I’m sure he smelled, but the stench of his cigar covered it up.

“I’ve got no problem with you,” he said, as if continuing a conversation we’d already been having. “It’s him I need. Help me, I’ll give you ten percent and turn my back while you run.”

But that’s all I remember. The memory fades into nothing. Did I help him? Did I get away from him somehow? I look down at his body now. The stillness of death is unmistakable. My rational mind is screaming for me to get out of there. But something stronger compels me to move toward the cab of the van. Traffic races above me, the tires on asphalt sounding like whispering voices. The driver’s side door is wide open. On the passenger seat, a cardboard box of cheap cigars, a purple lighter in the shape of a naked woman’s body, an empty can of diet soda, a half-eaten Philly cheese steak. The inside of the vehicle reeks of onions, stale smoke, and body odor. The world will be a cleaner place without Simon Briggs.

Beneath the detritus I see a large, worn manila envelope bulging with its contents. I want it, but I don’t want to touch anything in the car. I snake my arm in carefully and grab the edge of the envelope with my fingertips without touching anything else. As I lift it carefully, the garbage littered on top of it falls to the floor of the van.

The envelope is thick and heavy, and I don’t pause to peer inside, just move quickly back to my car. I slide the envelope under the passenger seat, start the engine, and get out of there. As I pull back on to the highway to start toward home, I wonder why Gray didn’t search the van. He knew that Simon Briggs was looking for me, that Detective Harrison was all over me, but he left everything there for the police to find. It doesn’t make any sense.

My cell phone rings. It’s Detective Harrison again. This time I answer.

“What do you want, Detective? Is it money? Just tell me what you need to leave me alone and it’s yours.”

“Yesterday it was money. Today I’m not so sure.”

I’m driving too fast. I change lanes carelessly, and the Toyota behind me honks in protest. I lift a hand.

“Cell phones kill,” says the detective. “Did you know that you’re just as impaired driving while talking on one as you would be if you got behind the wheel drunk?”

I’ve given up talking. He’s one of
those
guys, the ones who won’t get to the point until they’re ready no matter what you say. He’s running an agenda; my presence in the conversation isn’t necessary.

“Let’s get together,” he says then.

“Really,” I say, angry now. “You know what? Fuck off, Detective.”

“No.
You
fuck off, Ophelia.” He leans on the name hard.

My stomach bottoms out. “Have you lost your mind?” I say. “Do you even know who you’re talking to? Or are you blackmailing so many people you’ve lost track?”