Black Out (33 page)

“Can we go home?” she asks.

“We’re going. Let’s wait for Daddy.”

“Okay,” she says. “But can he hurry? I don’t want to be here anymore.”

“Me neither.”

I hear Drew’s voice booming then. “I don’t have to tell you the kind of connections I have, the people I know. Your job, your home, your wife, even your child are yours because I have allowed you to have them. A few phone calls from me and it all goes away.”

“Drew—” I hear Vivian, her voice pleading.

“What did you do?”
I hear something crash and break. Victory and I hold on to each other. I want to go to the car, but I can’t leave Gray here by himself. We huddle against the storm.

“I did what I needed to do so that we could be a family, so that Victory could have a healthy mother, so that you didn’t spend the rest of your life trying to save someone who couldn’t be saved. Don’t you see that?”

I don’t hear Gray’s answer. But in the strangest way, I see Drew’s point. I guess I’m as sick as he is.

“It was happening again,” says Drew. “Those panic attacks that she had before Victory was born. It always started with that. Then the next thing we knew, she was gone, on a bus to God knows where. What if she took Victory with her? Or worse, left her somewhere? It was one thing when she was just a danger to herself—”

“You’re sick, Dad,” Gray interrupted him, his tone thick with disdain. “You can’t use people, manipulate and control them so that they become who you think they should be. It didn’t work with Mom, and it’s not going to work with me and my family. I came back here hoping that we could be a family, learn to love and accept each other for all our differences. But that’s never going to happen, is it?”

“I do love you, son,” says Drew, his voice sounding weak suddenly, and so sad.

“You don’t even know what love is, Dad. You never have.”

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.”

45

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.

“These men, these fathers, all searching for their kids,” says Harrison, drifting over toward the glass doors leading to the deck. “Alan Parker’s daughter murdered by Frank Geary, Teddy March’s daughter held in the thrall of Marlowe Geary, Drew Powers’s son far from the fold, estranged for years. They all had a common purpose, to do right by their kids in the ways that they could.”

I think about this, the deviousness and planning, the deception that it took to make all this happen.

“And how was it that both you and Melissa fell prey to the Gearys? Coincidence, maybe. Or maybe it was their karma, their bond? I don’t know, but it’s poetic in its way, isn’t it?”

That’s our karma, our bond.
Marlowe’s words come back to me.

Harrison goes on, “The only thing they didn’t plan for was Gray falling in love with you.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” I say, even though, on a cellular level, it does. “There are too many variables, so many coincidences. Did my father go to Drew for help, too? Is that how he connected to Gray? They used me to draw Gray in, knowing he couldn’t resist the idea of rescuing a lost girl?”

“Paul Broward—your Dr. Brown—he had a lot of experience with manipulating people’s psyches. You should know that better than anyone.”

My emotions—a terrible alchemy of impotent anger, disbelief, and fear—must be playing on my face, because suddenly Harrison seems to regret coming. He looks over toward the door, then back at me, and raises his palms.

“I’m sorry, Annie. You know what? It’s just a theory. I’m talking out of my ass.”

“What about Briggs?” I ask quickly, still turning his words over, still trying to punch holes in his theories.

“A longtime employee of Powers and Powers, that much I do know for a fact. Maybe Gray wasn’t aware of that. When he couldn’t figure out who Briggs worked for, he killed him fearing for your safety.”

I feel exhausted, and my head is pounding now, accompanied by a terrible ringing in my ears. I try to think about what all this might mean, that we’ve been under the control of these men, my father included, since before Gray and I ever met. It hurts too much to think about, and I feel myself powering down emotionally. I’m grateful.

“As for me, I made a nuisance of myself,” Harrison said. “And they laid waste to my life.”

I think about what Sarah Harrison told me, how Ella attacked Ray with a Taser. I’ve hardly known what to do with that information. I’ve wanted to confront her, but she’s gone. Who was she, this woman I called a friend? I can feel my chest constricting. Ever since the smoke inhalation, my lungs ache when I get upset. I struggle to slow my breathing. Harrison seems to sense my discomfort.

“Look,” he says, moving toward the front door, “maybe you should consider yourself lucky at this point, Annie. Move on, you know? My life is a train wreck. But you, you’ve exorcised your demons—you’ve won. You can walk away with your family and start over.”

I laugh. It sounds harsh and bitter as it bounces back to me. “You mean just forget all this? I think we’ve seen how that works out.”

“Not a denial, Annie,” he says. “A rebirth.”

I get up and walk to the back glass doors, watch the waves lick the shore. I take the salt air into my lungs and wonder if Detective Harrison might be right.

“Is it possible?” I ask him. “Is it possible to cast it all off and start again—the new and improved Annie? Or will it come creeping after me
again
one day when I least expect it?”

I listen to my voice echo in the empty room. Harrison doesn’t answer me.

I keep looking at the shoreline. I lose myself in thought for a moment and notice that my headache is lifting.

“Maybe it
is
possible,” I say, answering my own question.

“Annie?”

I turn around to see Gray standing behind me with an odd expression, something between amusement and worry. We are alone.

“Who are you talking to?” he asks.

The headache I had is gone, but it is replaced with a rush of panic. As I walk past him, he reaches for my arm, but I slip by. I lift the three pieces of paper from the couch, two receipts from the grocery store and a baby picture of Victory. Not a check, not old pictures of Vietnam.

I sweep the room again with my eyes, wondering if Detective Harrison will come out of the kitchen with a fresh cup of coffee. But no. I crumple the papers and shove them into my pocket. I walk to the front window and see that Gray’s car has blocked the driveway. I can’t bring myself to ask if another car was parked on the street when he arrived.

“Annie,” Gray says, walking over to me. His tone is more insistent now. “
Who
were you talking to?”

I find it difficult to answer; the words won’t come. I’m in a tunnel of dawning, swallowed by a stone-cold understanding of my own twisted psyche, a realization that Ray Harrison was exactly who I needed him to be.

“Do you remember Ray Harrison?” I ask, trying to keep my voice level. I find I can’t bring myself to meet his eyes. I lean against the window’s edge for support.

He looks confused for a minute, seems to search his memory for the name. Then, “The cop? The one who answered the 911 call—the one with all the questions?”

I nod slowly. “Did you ever see him again—after he came that morning?”

Gray frowns. “Me? No. Why would I?”

I hear blood rushing in my ears. “Did you ever give him any money?”

Gray releases a little laugh. “No,” he says, surprised. “Of course not.”

I walk over to the back of the house, look at the ocean and the white sand. The ground beneath me seems soft, unstable.

“Annie, what’s this about?”

“The night—” I begin, then stop. I was going to say
the night you killed Briggs
but I don’t want to say those words out loud. “When you said all threats had been neutralized, you meant Briggs.”

Gray is behind me, his hands on my shoulders now. “Why are we talking about this?”

“Just answer me,” I say quickly.

I hear him release a breath. “Yes, that’s what I meant.”

I lean against him, my back to his front. “What’s happened?” he whispers.

But I can’t bring myself to say the words. I can’t bring myself to tell him about the Ray Harrison I knew. Not now, not when my husband has started to believe in my sanity for maybe the first time.

“Annie,” Gray says, insistent now as he spins me around to face him, lifts my face to his. He looks frightened; it’s not an expression I’m used to seeing on him. “What’s going on? Who were you talking to when I came in?”

I force a smile, a bright and happy one, and I see his fear start to melt away, his eyes brighten.

“I don’t know,” I say lightly. “I must have been talking to myself.”