Black Out

1

When my mother named me Ophelia, she thought she was being literary. She didn’t realize she was being tragic. But then, I’m not sure she understood the concept of tragedy, the same way that people who are born into money don’t realize they’re rich, don’t even know there’s another way to live. She thought the name was beautiful, thought it sounded like a flower, knew it was from a famous story (play or novel, she wouldn’t have been able to tell you). I guess I should consider myself lucky, since her other choices were Lolita and Gypsy Rose. At least Ophelia had some dignity.

I’m thinking this as I push a cart through the produce aisle of my local supermarket, past rows of gleaming green apples and crisp blooms of lettuce, of fat, shiny oranges and taut, waxy red peppers. The overly familiar man in meats waves at me and gives me what I’m sure he thinks is a winning smile but which only serves to make my skin crawl. “Hi, honey,” he’ll say. Or “Hi, sweetie.” And I’ll wonder what it is about me that invites him to be so solicitous. I am certainly not an open or welcoming person; I can’t afford to be too friendly. Of course, I can’t afford to be too unfriendly, either. I look at my reflection in the metal siding of the meat case to confirm that I am aloof and unapproachable, but not strangely so. My reflection is warped and distorted by the various dings and scars in the metal.

“Hi there, darlin’,” he says with an elaborate sweep of his hand and a slight bow.

I give him a cool smile, more just an upturning of the corner of my mouth. He steps aside with a flourish to let me pass.

I have become the type of woman who would have intimidated my mother. Most days I pull my freshly washed, still-wet blond hair back severely into a ponytail at the base of my neck. The simplicity of this appeals to me. I wear plain, easy clothes-a pair of cropped chinos and an oversize white cotton blouse beneath a navy barn jacket. Nothing special, except that my bag and my shoes cost more than my mother might have made in two months. She would have noticed something like that. It would have made her act badly, turned her catty and mean. I don’t feel anything about this. It’s a fact, plain and simple, as facts tend to be. Well, some of them, anyway. But I still see her in my reflection, her peaches-and-cream skin, her high cheekbones, her deep brown eyes. I see her in my daughter, too.

“Annie? Hel-lo-oh?”

I’m back in produce, though, honestly, I don’t remember what caused me to drift back here. I am holding a shiny, ripe nectarine in my hand. I must have been gazing at it as if it were a crystal ball, trying to divine the future. I look up to see my neighbor Ella Singer watching me with equal parts amusement and concern. I’m not sure how long she has been trying to get my attention or how long I’ve been staring at the nectarine. We’re more than neighbors; we’re friends, too. Everyone here calls me Annie, even Gray, who knows better.

“Where were you?” she asks.

“Sorry,” I say, with a smile and a quick shake of my head. “Just out of it.”

“You okay?”

“Yeah. Good. Great.”

She nods, grabs a few nectarines of her own. “Where’s Vicky?”

All the women in our neighborhood, her teachers, her friends’ mothers, call my daughter Vicky. I don’t correct them, but it always makes me cringe internally. It’s not her name. I named her Victory because it meant something to me, and I hope in time it will mean something to her. True, I named her in a fit of overconfidence. But Gray understood my choice and agreed. We were both feeling overconfident that day. I’m still clinging to that feeling. Though recently, for reasons I can’t explain, it has begun to fade.

“She’s with Gray’s stepmom. Swimming lessons with Grandma,” I say, dropping the fruit into a clear plastic bag. The nectarines give off a fresh, sweet aroma. They are almost to the point of being overripe, fairly bursting with themselves. An old woman inches past, leaning heavily on an aluminum walker. Some mangled, Muzak version of “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” by the Police plays tinny and staticky from unseen speakers.

“That’s nice,” Ella says with a nod. “Time for a cappuccino?”

I look at my watch, as if calculating whether or not I can fit it into my busy schedule, even though we both know I have nothing else to do and Victory will be hours yet-between the swimming lessons and her favorite lunch and time with the neighborhood kids. They’re all bigger, older boys, but she commands them like a queen. And they love her for it.

“Sure,” I say. And Ella smiles.

“Great, meet you over there when you’re done.” She means the little spot by the beach where we always go.

“See you in a few.”

She pushes off. I like Ella a lot. She is so easy, so warm and open, so trusting and unfailingly kind; she makes me feel bad about myself, as though I’m some icy bitch. I smile and give her a small wave. My heart is doing a little dance. I think it’s just that I’ve had too much caffeine already and my heart is protesting the thought of more. Maybe I’ll just have some chamomile.

On my way to check out, I see a sullen teenage girl, standing beside her mother at the deli counter. She is so thin her hip bones jut out against her jeans. Her lips are moist and sparkling with pink gloss. She holds a cell phone to her ear and chews on the nail of her right thumb.

“Taylor, cut that out,” her mother says, pulling her daughter’s hand away from her mouth. They look at each other like rival gang members. I wonder if Victory and I will ever come to that place, that bloody rumble of adolescence. Somehow I doubt it. I am always afraid I won’t have the luxury of warring with my teenage daughter.

I step out to load the groceries into my car. I see Ella pulling out of the parking lot; she holds up her fingers indicating five minutes. She’s headed home to put away her groceries before we meet for coffee, and I’ll do the same since we both live just minutes from here. Then we don’t have to worry about the chicken going bad, the ice cream melting, those suburban concerns I appreciate so much for their simplicity and relative safety. But it’s as I slam my trunk that I feel it.

It’s as if the sun has dipped behind a thick cloud cover and the sky has gone charcoal. Only they haven’t. It is a bright, unseasonably cool, spring day in Florida. The parking lot is packed, populated by moms and nannies with their kids of all ages on spring break before Easter. I hear laughter, a gull calling; I smell the salt from the Gulf of Mexico. But inside I am quaking. There’s cool black ink in my veins.

I slip into my SUV and lock the door, grip the wheel, and try to calm myself. I’ve had these panics before. Usually they are isolated incidents, intense but brief like the summer storms here. In the last few days, though, they’ve come one after another, surprising me with their ferocity. False alarms, Gray calls them. I’ve always thought of them more as an early-warning system.

This one is deeper, blacker than I’m used to. I am truly afraid, sweating and going pale. My breathing starts to come ragged, and I glance in my rear-and sideview mirrors but see nothing out of the ordinary. The contrast makes me dizzy, almost angry at the day for being so clear, at the people in the parking lot living their lives so benignly.

After a while I pull out from the lot, still shaky, and drive carefully the short distance to our home. I pass through the residents’ side of the security gate with a wave to the watchman, cruise past ridiculously opulent homes nestled beneath clusters of tall palms with their barrel-tile roofs and colorful mailboxes shaped like manatees, dolphins, flamingos, or miniature versions of the larger house. Late-model luxury cars rest on stone-paved driveways.

As I pull up my drive, a neighbor is watering her flowers and lifts a friendly hand to me. I return the greeting and try to smile as I open the garage door with the remote on my rearview mirror. Afraid there’s an inane conversation in my immediate future, I close the garage door while I’m still in the car. I turn off the engine and sit for a minute; my heart slows its dance. I’m safe, I tell myself. This house is safe. The shaking starts to subside. My breathing steadies. I press a button on my dash and hear a dial tone.

“Call Grandma,” I say.

“Calling Grandma,” the car phone answers stiffly. Victory loves this, giggles uncontrollably every time she hears it.

After only one ring, a smooth male voice answers, “Hello.”

“It’s Annie,” I say, and I know my voice sounds wobbly. There’s a pause; he hears it, too. He is a man who misses nothing.

“Hi, Annie.” The ever-calm tones of my father-in-law, Drew. I imagine him sitting behind the oak desk of his home office, surrounded by all his degrees and military decorations, photos of his Navy SEAL buddies-eerie, grainy images of men too young, too happy to be holding guns. “They’re in the pool.”

“Everything’s all right?” I ask, hating the words as they tumble from my lips.

“Everything’s fine here,” he answers, solid and sure. I am soothed by the certainty and reassurance in his voice, as much as I hate to reveal any weakness in front of him.

“Is everything all right there?” he asks after a beat has passed. I try not to hear the note of contempt.

“Yes,” I say too quickly. Then I have to say it again, lighter, more slowly to balance it out. “Yes. Everything’s fine. Don’t bother them. I’ll be by around two for Victory.”

I end the call before he can ask any more questions, and I start unloading the groceries. As I’m putting things away, I turn on the television in the kitchen and am greeted by the image of a sad-looking, emaciated blonde. The caption beneath her photo reads, Woman’s body found in Central Florida; the sixth in a five-year period. In the background a slurry male voice with a thick Florida accent goes on about the lack of evidence, the similarities between cases. I turn it off quickly; this is the last thing I need to hear right now.

I try to shake off the uneasy feeling that seems to have settled in me and go about my day-meet Ella for coffee, run a few errands, then pick Victory up from Drew and Vivian’s. By the time I walk though the door at Vivian’s and greet my little girl, the black patch is mostly past. But it’s not forgotten. It follows me like a specter.

“Everything all right, dear?” Vivian asks as I lift my daughter onto my hip. (She’s too big to carry, Annie. You baby her, says Gray.) Victory leans her full weight against me in her fatigue, smelling of some magic mix of sunscreen, chlorine, and baby shampoo.

I turn around and try for a smile. “False alarm,” I say. We all know the lingo.

“You’re sure,” she says. I notice that she looks tired, puffy gray half-moons under her eyes. She wears a certain expression, a mingling of worry and love, that makes me want to weep in her arms. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Behind her I can see the Gulf lapping unenthusiastically against the shore. The whole back of her house is glass. An infinity pool outside seems to flow into the ocean beyond, but that’s a carefully constructed illusion. In this family we’re quite good at that.

“Mommy’s worried,” Victory says softly into my neck. “Don’t be worried.” She tightens her tiny arms around me, and I squeeze.

“Not worried, darling,” I say, feeling a tingle of guilt. “Just tired.”

I’m sure she doesn’t believe me. You can’t fool children, you know. You shouldn’t even bother trying; they just grow up doubting themselves.

“Did you call Gray?” says Vivian, her brow creased. She smells like lemon verbena. She puts a hand on my arm and rubs gently.

I offer her what I hope is a dismissive, self-deprecating smile. “No need.”

She looks at me skeptically but says nothing more, just places a kiss on my cheek, one on Victory’s, then squeezes us both with her expansive arms. As I pull away down the drive, I see Drew watching me from the upstairs window.

That afternoon while Victory is down for her nap, I sit on the lanai, looking out onto our own view of the ocean, and start to think about all the ways that I can die.

Gray is late coming home, and Victory is already sound asleep upstairs in her room. I am sitting on a leather sofa I didn’t choose and don’t actually like, watching the high, dancing flames in our fireplace as he walks through the front door. For a second he is just a long shadow in the foyer; he could be anyone. But then he steps into the light and he is my husband, looking strained and tired. He doesn’t know I’m watching him. When he sees me, though, he smiles and looks a little less world-weary.

“Hey,” I say, getting up and going to him.

“Hey.” His embrace is powerful and I sink into it, hold on to him tightly. There is no softness to him; the muscles on his body are hard and defined. In this place I am moored. The churning of my day comes to calm.

“Want a drink?” I ask as I shift away from him. He holds me for a second longer, tries to catch my eyes, then lets me go.

“What are you having?” he wants to know.

“Vodka on the rocks.”

“Sounds about right.”

I walk over to the bar that in the daylight looks out onto our back deck. At night all I can see is my reflection in the glass doors as I fill a square lowball with ice and pour cold vodka from the freezer. This is another feature I didn’t choose about our house, a wet bar stocked with liquor we rarely touch. There is so much about this place, a ridiculously extravagant wedding gift from my father-in-law, furnished and decorated by Vivian, that has nothing to do with me-or Gray. It is hard to ever be grateful enough for such a gift and impossible to complain about the various features that don’t appeal. Sometimes I feel like we live in a model home, everything shiny and perfect but just slightly off from what we would have chosen ourselves.

I walk back over to him, hand him his drink, and we sit together. I put my legs up on his lap, take my waiting glass from the table. The ice has melted, the vodka gone watery and tepid. I drink it anyway, too lazy to make myself another.

I have one of the glass doors open, and the unseasonably cold salt air drifts in, warmed by the fire. I see him glance over at it. I know he’s thinking that the door should be closed and locked, but he doesn’t say anything. I notice the deep crescent of a scar between his right eye and his temple. I realize that I barely see his scars anymore. In the beginning they made me wary of him, made him seem hard and distant. I wondered what kind of violence could leave so many marks on a man. But I know the answer now. And I know his heart.

“It’s happening again,” I say after a minute of us just sitting there staring at the flames. Somehow the words seem melodramatic even before I add, “Worse than it’s ever been.”

He barely reacts, but I see a muscle clench in his jaw beneath the shadow of black stubble. He stares at the fire, closes and opens his eyes slowly, and takes a breath. We’ve been here before.

He puts a hand on my arm, turns his eyes to mine. I can’t see their color in the dim light, but they’re steel gray, have been since the day he was born, hence his name.

“He’s dead,” he says. “Long dead.”

He’s always gentle with me, no matter how many times we’ve been through this. I curl my legs beneath me and move into the hollow of his arm.

“How do you know for sure?” I say. I’ve asked this question a thousand times, just to hear the answer.

“Because I killed him, Annie.” He turns my face up to his to show me how unflinchingly certain he is. “I watched him die.”

I start to cry then, because I know that he believes what he says to be true. And I want so badly to believe it, too.

“Do you need to start up the meds again?”

I don’t want that. He leans forward to put his drink on the table. I move back into him, and he wraps me up in his arms and lets me cry and cry until I feel all right again. There’s no telling how long this can take. But he’s always so patient.

2

I descend a narrow, rusting stairway and walk quickly down the long hall, steadying myself against the walls. The lighting is dim and flickering. I struggle to remember what my cabin number is-203, I think. There are five men on board other than the captain, and I don’t see any of them.

I reach my cabin and fumble with the lock for a second, then push into my room. A small berth nestles in the far corner. Beneath it is a drawer where I have stowed my things. I kneel and pull out my bag, unzip it, and fish inside until I find what I’m looking for-my gun. A sleek Glock nine-millimeter, flat black and cold. I check the magazine and take another from the bag, slip it into the pocket of my coat. The Glock goes into the waist of my jeans. I’ve drilled the reach-and-draw from that place about a million times; my arm will know what to do even if my brain freezes. Muscle memory.

I consider my options. Once again suicide tops the list for its ease and finality. Aggression comes a close second, which would just be a roundabout way toward the first option. Hide and wait comes in third. Make him work for it. Make him fight his way through the people charged with protecting me and then find me on this ship. Then be waiting for him with my gun when he does.

The thrumming in my chest has stilled, and I listen for the sounds that will signify that the fight has begun, but there’s only silence and the distant hum of engines. I’m not afraid at all-or else fear has become so much a part of me that it has come to feel like peace.

3

My father is a tattoo artist and a pathological liar. The latter is nearly the only thing I can count on, that, likely as not, every word out of his mouth is a lie. He truly can’t help it.

“How are you, Dad?” I’ll ask.

“Great,” he’ll say enthusiastically. “I’m packing.”

“Packing for what?” I’ll say, skeptical.

“I’m taking a Mediterranean cruise, heading out tomorrow.”

Or:

“Did I ever tell you I was a Navy SEAL?”

“Really, Dad?” I’ll go along, half listening. “When?”

“Served in Vietnam.”

“Wow. Tell me about it.”

“I can’t; too painful. I’d rather forget.”

That’s how it goes. It doesn’t even bother me anymore, partly because he usually doesn’t lie about anything important. Just weird stuff. Almost like hiccups, they seem to bubble up from within, unbidden, unstoppable. I generally play along, because in spite of all the lies there’s something true about him. Even though he was a lousy father, he loves me and I know it, always have.

When he comes to the phone, I can hear chatter in the background, the hummingbird buzz of the tattoo needle. His shop, Body Art, is located on Great Jones Street in NoHo. And though it’s a hole in the wall, barely five hundred square feet, people from all over the world travel there for my father’s skill. Rock stars, supermodels, even (it is rumored) rebelling young Saudi royals have been beneath my father’s needle. He’d told me this for years, but naturally I didn’t believe him. Finally he sent me a Village Voice article about him, and I realized he’d been telling the truth. How about that?

“Everything all right?” he asks, lowering his voice when he realizes it’s me.

“Great,” I say. “We’re doing great.”

He’s quiet for a moment, and I know he heard the lie in my voice. Takes one to know one. I listen to him breathing as he ponders what to say. I remember a lot of heavy silences over long-distance lines with my father, me desperate, him inadequate or unwilling to help. At last I say, “Tell me again, Dad.”

“Oh, honey,” he says after a slow exhale. “Come on. I thought you were past this.”

I sigh and listen to Victory chatting to her doll in the other room. “You’re so pretty,” she tells it. “On the outside and the inside. And you’re smart and strong.” She’s mimicking the things I’ve told her about herself, and it makes me smile.

“Opie, are you there?”

My father always thought my name was silly. He calls me “O” or “Opie” or sometimes just “Ope.” As if those aren’t silly things to call someone. I think he used them to annoy my mother. And they did, to no end. But those silly nicknames stuck, at least between us.

“Just tell me,” I say, trying to keep the edge out of my voice.

I close my eyes, and I can see my father’s face, brown and wrinkled from too much time in the sun on his Harley. When he was a younger man, he wore his hair in a long black mane down to the middle of his back. I’ve never seen the entirety of my father’s face, hidden as it has always been behind a thick black beard. The last time I saw him, years ago now, his hair and beard were well on their way to ash gray. He is forever dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, motorcycle boots. His voice sounds like cigarettes and whiskey.

“You were kids when you came here, you and him,” he says, because he knows that’s where I want him to start. “Right away I didn’t like him. Something not right about his eyes.” He issues an angry grunt. “I really didn’t like how you were mooning over him. It made me jealous. Even though you said otherwise, I knew you were in big trouble. But I let you down, kid. I’m still sorry about that.”

I just listen and remember.

“I should have taken care of the guy right then and there. Or called the police or something, but I didn’t. That was always one of my biggest flaws as a parent: I was always trying to be your friend.”

My father had multiple “flaws as a parent,” lying and abandonment chief among them. Trying to be my friend was not high on my list of things for which he should be sorry, but I don’t say this.

“I let you hide out at my place for a while. I didn’t know how bad things had gotten. I really didn’t.”

I hear the stuttering wail of a siren in the background. Someone comes into the room and coughs. I hear my father put his hand over the receiver and say something that sounds like, “Give me a minute, for fuck’s sake.”

“You’d never done a tattoo like that. Never before and never since,” I prompt impatiently.

“That’s right,” he says quickly. “I gave the bastard a tattoo. It was unique in all the world. His drawing, my bodywork.”

“It couldn’t be duplicated,” I say.

He releases a disdainful breath. “Not by anyone I know in the industry. And I know everyone. It was the kind of art I wanted to do for you. But you never wanted that.”

I never have. Life is hard enough, leaves enough scars-why voluntarily put your flesh under a needle? Piercing is another thing I’ve managed to avoid. I don’t get people who take pleasure in pain.

“Tell me about the tattoo.”

He sighs before going on, as if he regrets starting down this road with me. “I’ve never seen anything like it. That was part of the reason I wanted to do it. It was a nice piece. Stormy seas, breaking waves on these crags that jutted out of the water like shark teeth-lots of lines and shadows, lots of small hidden images within, even the shadow of a girl’s face. Your face, Opie. That’s how I know.”

He doesn’t have to describe it; I can see it so clearly in my mind’s eye. It’s an image that comes back to me again and again in my dreams, and sometimes when I’m awake.

“And when they showed you the picture, there was no mistaking it.”

There’s silence. “No, girl. There was no mistaking it.” Then, “He’s dead, Opie.”

“Call me Annie.”

I know he hates the name Annie even more than he does Ophelia. He thinks it’s common. But it’s no more common than his name, Teddy March. Everyone calls him “Bear.” Anyway, I’d give my right arm to be common.

“He’s dead, Annie. He’ll never hurt you again. Not you or anyone else. He didn’t kill you back then. You fought and won.” I like his words; I try to let them in and become my truth. Pathological liar or not, he has a kind of horse sense that always calms me.

“Don’t turn your life over to him now,” he goes on. “You’re hurting yourself and Victory-and that husband of yours. Move on, kid.”

These are my little rituals, the things I do and need to hear to comfort myself. In the past couple of years, knowing what I know, it has taken only one or two of these things to calm me, to assure myself that it is safe to live my life. But this time nothing’s working; I don’t know why. I feel like I’m seeing these signs that no one else is seeing: the dog running in circles because some vibration in the ground has told him that an earthquake is coming, a hundred crows landing on the lawn. I tell myself it’s not real, that it’s all in my head. Of course, there’s no worse place for it to be. Maybe I do need to talk to the doctor.

Esperanza, our maid and nanny, is unloading the dishwasher, putting the plates and bowls and silverware away with her usual quick and quiet efficiency. She’s got the television on, and again there’s that image of the now-dead woman on the screen. It’s as though nothing else is ever on the news. I find myself staring at the victim, her limp hair, her straining collarbone and tired eyes. Something about her expression in that image, maybe an old school portrait, makes her look as though she knew she was going to die badly, that her mutilated body would be found submerged in water. There’s a look of grim hopelessness about her.

“Terrible, no?” said Esperanza, when she sees me watching. She taps her temple. “People are sick.”

I nod. “Terrible,” I agree. I pull my eyes away from the screen with effort and leave the kitchen; as I climb the stairs, I hear Esperanza humming to herself.

Upstairs, Victory’s happily playing in her room. She’ll go on like this for a while before she needs some company or attention from me. For now she’s rapt in the world she’s created with her dolls, Claude and Isabel. Her babies, as she calls them.

In my bedroom I can hear her whispering to them on the baby monitor I still keep in her bedroom. The sound of her breathing at night is my sweet lullaby. I wonder when she’ll make me take it out of her room. How old will she be when she doesn’t want me to hear her every breath any longer? Mom, she’ll say, get a life.

When I was sixteen, my mother moved us from government housing on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to a trailer park in Florida so that she could be closer to a man with whom she’d become involved. They’d been having a white-hot correspondence for a number of months, involving thick letters written in red ink and the occasional collect telephone call where my mother cooed into the phone, holding the receiver to her mouth so intimately that I’d half expected her to start sucking on it. After some tearful proclamations and heartfelt promises between them, my mother and I packed our few belongings into the back of a brown Chevy Citation we bought for seven hundred dollars and headed south to begin our new life.

“We can live much better in Florida,” my mother told me with certainty. “Our money will go a lot farther. And it’s so pretty there.”

I watched the Lower East Side pass outside the car window and wondered how anything could be more beautiful than New York City. Sure, it can be cold and dangerous-a frightening place, a lonely one for all its crowds. But the grand architecture, the street noise, the energy of millions of people living their lives-you can never mistake yourself as being anywhere else when you’re there; there’s no mistaking that heartbeat. It’s unique in all the world. If one considers the great beauties in history-Cleopatra, the Mona Lisa, Ava Gardner-none of them were pretty in that cheap, cookie-cutter way that seems to pass for gorgeous these days. They were beautiful for what was unique about them from the inside out, for features that might have been ugly on anyone else. If you don’t know how to look at her, her hidden alleys and minuscule precious side streets, her aura of mischief, her throbbing nightlife, you might find yourself intimidated by New York City, even repulsed by her odors and sounds, you might even turn away from her because she’s too brash, too haughty. But it would be your loss.

I thought my father would put up more of a fight when my mother wanted to leave with me. But he seemed to agree that the move would do me good. I’d been getting into some trouble in school for insolence, tardiness, and absence. The city offered too much temptation to a young girl with too little parental supervision. In any case, my needs always came last in any decision-making process my parents employed. My mom was motivated only by male attention. My father could never love anything as much as he loved his art. I fit in there somewhere, I think. I’m not saying they didn’t love me.

“Don’t worry about it, kid. Florida’s a hop and a jump. We’ll be back and forth all the time,” my father told me as I sobbed into his chest.

He never once came to Florida to see me, though. And I didn’t see him again until I ran away almost two years later. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

So we moved into a trailer park, and my mother got a job as a waitress in a diner that was just a few blocks away, which was good because that Chevy overheated about three times on the drive to Florida and died altogether on our arrival.

“Well, everything happens for a reason,” my mother said with her usual depraved optimism as the car sputtered and went on to a better place. “At least whatever we need is walking distance. If there’s an emergency, we can take a cab. And I can take the bus to see Frank. Meanwhile, we’ll save on gas and insurance.” If there was ever anyone with less reason to look on the bright side, I wouldn’t want to meet her. Nothing ever worked out for my mother. And if there was any reason for the things that happened to her, it has never been made clear to me.

Take the man for whom we moved down to Florida. He was an all right guy, sort of soft-spoken and not unkind to me during visits. But there was one problem: He was a convicted rapist and murderer on death row in the Florida State Prison. My mother had “met” him during a letter-writing campaign initiated by her church. The goal was to spread the word of the Lord to the lost souls on death row, to “save” them before they faced their earthly punishment for the wrongs they’d done. My mother, obviously, took the whole saving thing a little bit too far.

I’ll never forget our first August in Florida. I didn’t even know it could get that hot; the humidity felt like wet gauze on my skin; it crawled into my lungs and expanded. Violent lightning storms lit the sky for hours, and the rain made rivers out of the street in front of our trailer park. And the palmetto bugs-they made New York City roaches look like ladybugs. The only thing that redeemed Florida for me was how the full moon hung over the swaying palm trees and how the air sometimes smelled of orange blossoms. But generally speaking, it was a hellhole. I hated it, and I hated my mother for moving us there.

The Florida I live in now with Gray and Victory is different. This is the wealthy person’s Florida, of shiny convertibles and palatial homes, ocean views and white-sand beaches, margaritas and Jimmy Buffett. This is the Florida of central air and crisp cotton golf shirts over khakis, country-club days and fifty-foot yachts. To be honest, I hate it just as much. It’s so fake, so tacky and nouveau riche, so proud of its silicone-filled and bleached-blond Barbie women.

Give me concrete and street noise any day. Give me Yellow Cabs and hot-dog stands. Give me legless, homeless guys pushing themselves on dollies through the subway cars, shaking their change jars with self-righteous aplomb.

I am thinking about this as I sit on the floor by the bed and reach up under the box spring. I’ve cut out a large hole there. Inside, I keep things that Gray and my doctor would be very unhappy about. They just wouldn’t understand. I reach around and don’t feel anything at first. Maybe Gray found them, I think, panic threatening. Maybe he took them away to see how long it would be before I looked for them again. But then, with a wash of relief, I feel the smooth, cool surface of one of these things.

“Mommy.” It’s Victory, whispering into her baby monitor. I can hear her, but she can’t hear me, and she gets that. “Mommy,” she says, louder. “Come to my room. There’s a strange man on our beach.”

She hasn’t even finished the sentence and I’m already running. In my panic, the hall seems to lengthen and stretch as I make my way to her. But when I finally burst through the door, breathless and afraid, there’s no one on our stretch of sand. Out her window, there’s just the moody black-gray sky, and the green, whitecapped ocean.

We live near the tip of a long beach, right before a state nature preserve. There are about five other houses within walking distance of ours, and three of those are empty for much of the year. They are weekend homes and winter homes. So essentially we’re alone here among the great blue herons and snowy egrets, the wild parrots and nesting sea turtles. It’s silent except for the Gulf and the gulls. People walk along the beach during tourist season, but very few linger here, as all the restaurants, bars, and hotels are a mile south.

“Where, Victory?” I say too loudly. She’s gone back to playing with her dolls. They’re having a tea party. She looks up from her game, examines my expression because she doesn’t understand my tone. I try to keep the fear off my face, and I might have succeeded. She comes over to the window and offers a shrug.

“Gone,” she says casually, and returns to her babies, sits herself back down on the floor.

“What was he doing?” I ask her, my eyes scanning the tall grass and sea oats that separate our property from the beach. I don’t see any movement, but I imagine someone slithering toward our house. We wouldn’t see him until he reached the pool deck. We’ve been lax about security lately, lulled into a false sense of safety. I should have known better.

“He was watching,” she says. My heart goes cold.

“Watching the house, Victory?”

She looks at me, cocks her head. “No. The birds. He was watching the birds.”

Victory begins pouring little imaginary cups of tea. Esperanza is still humming in the kitchen. There is no one on the beach. The sun moves from behind the clouds and paints everything gold. I decide it’s time to call my shrink.

4

A couple of months after my mother and I moved to Florida and I had settled reluctantly into my new school, she started to act strangely. Her usual manic highs and despondent lows were replaced with a kind of even keel that felt odd, even a little spooky.

The early changes were subtle. The first thing I noticed was that she’d stopped wearing makeup. She was a pretty woman, with good bone structure and long hair, silky and fine. Like her hair, her lashes and brows were blond, invisible without mascara and a brow pencil. When she didn’t wear makeup, she looked tired, washed out. She’d always been meticulous about her appearance. “Beauty is power,” she would tell me, though I’d never seen any evidence of this.

We were in the kitchen on a Saturday morning. I was eating cereal and watching cartoons on the small black-and-white set we had sitting on the counter; she was getting ready for the lunch shift at the diner. The ancient air conditioner in the window was struggling against the August heat, and I could feel beads of sweat on my brow and lip in spite of its best efforts.

I looked over at my mother, leaning against the counter, sipping coffee from a red mug, her bag over her shoulder. She stared blankly, zoning out, somewhere else.

“Mom, aren’t you going to ‘put your face on’?” I said, nastily mimicking the chipper way she always said it.

“No,” she said absently. “I’m not wearing makeup anymore.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s cheap. Frank thinks it makes me look like a whore.”

I felt a knot in my stomach at her words, though at the time I couldn’t have explained why.

“He said that?”

She nodded. “He said he couldn’t sleep at night knowing that I was walking around looking like that, that other men were leering at me, thinking they could have me at any price. He said I should display my face as God made it. And he’s right.”

I didn’t know what to say. But even at sixteen-almost seventeen by then-I knew that it was so screwed up in so many ways that there was no way to address it.

“Mom,” I said finally, “that’s bullshit.”

“Watch your mouth, Ophelia,” she snapped, turning angry eyes on me. “I didn’t raise you to talk that way. When Frank comes home, there won’t be any talking like that.”

She looked away from me after a moment and stared out the window as if she were expecting someone.

“Mom, Frank’s on death row,” I said calmly. “He’s not coming home.”

She turned and looked at me sharply. “Don’t say that.”

“It’s true, Mom. You know it’s true.”

“Ophelia, you don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, raising her voice. “There’s new evidence. Evidence that will prove there is no way Frank did the things they say he did. He’s innocent. God won’t let an innocent man die for crimes he didn’t commit.”

Her tone had gone shrill, and there were tears in her eyes. She slammed her empty coffee cup on the counter and left without another word.

We’ve talked about this a hundred times at least, my shrink and I. This first moment between my mother and me when I knew that something was wrong, really wrong.

“And how were you feeling after she left that morning?”

“Sick,” I say. “Scared.”

“Why?”

“Because she seemed…different. And I didn’t want Frank to ‘come home.’ I figured he was just a phase she was going through, that it would go bad like all her relationships, and we’d move back to New York.”

“You were afraid of him?”

It seems like a stupid question. “He was a convicted rapist and murderer,” I say slowly. My doctor gives a deferential nod but doesn’t say anything, waits for me to go on. When I don’t, he says, “Your mother thought he was innocent. Wasn’t it possible? Plenty of people have been convicted of crimes they didn’t commit.” He does this, plays devil’s advocate to encourage me to defend my position. I find it annoying rather than helpful.

“My mother thought he was innocent, yes,” I say. I remember those awkward visits where they would put their hands against the glass that separated them until one of the guards barked at them to stop. I remember how he’d look at me, ask me about school. I remember his cool gaze and soft voice. Something about him made me want to run screaming. “There was something dead in his eyes,” I say. “Even when he smiled, there was something…missing. And then all these changes in my mother. If he had such an effect on her from behind bars, what could he do to her if he was living with us?”

My doctor is silent for a moment.

“What do you think you could have done at this point that might have changed the events that followed?” he asks finally.

This is my thing. There was something about that morning in the trailer with my mother. I feel strongly that it was the last moment where things might have turned out differently. If I had chased after my mother and forced her to tell me what she was talking about. If I had told her that I felt sick and scared and that Frank was guilty and that he could not, should never, come live with us, she might have listened. I tell this to my shrink.

“But do you really think she would have heard you, Annie?”

“I guess I’ll never know.”

He lets the words hang in the air. We’ve both heard them a hundred times. And somehow they never rest easier with me.

“What did you do instead?” he asks.

“I finished my cereal, watched some more television. Told myself that she was nuts, an idiot. I pushed it out of my head.”

“You’re good at that.”

“Pushing things out of my head? Oh, yes.”

His office is uncomfortable. The chenille sofa is soft but cheap, seems to push me out rather than welcome me in. It’s far too cold in the refrigerated way that indoor spaces get too cold in Florida. The tip of my nose feels cold even though it’s blazing outside, and I can see the sunlight glinting off the warm green waters of the Intracoastal.

I don’t lie on the couch but sit cross-legged in the corner; on my first visit he told me I could recline if it made me feel comfortable. I told him it wouldn’t. He sits across from me in a huge chair that he easily fills, a low cocktail table covered with art books-Picasso, Rembrandt, Georgia O’Keeffe-between us. The space is trying very hard to be a living room and not a doctor’s office. Everything is faux here-the table, the bookshelves, his desk all made of cheap wood veneer, the kind of stuff that comes in a box, just a pile of wood, a bag of screws, and a booklet of indecipherable instructions. It seems transient and not very comforting. I feel as if his furniture should be made of oak, something heavy and substantial. Outside his window should be a blustery, autumn New England day with leaves turning, maybe just the hint of snow. He should be wearing a sweater. Brown.

He doesn’t take notes; he has never taped our sessions. I’ve been adamant about this. I don’t want a record of my thoughts anywhere. He’s okay with that, said we’d do whatever made me comfortable. But I’ve always wondered if he scribbles down his thoughts right after I leave. He always seems to have perfect recall of the things we’ve discussed.

As much as I’ve revealed to him, I have kept a lot of secrets. I have been coming to him on and off for over a year, ever since Vivian first recommended him. (He’s Martha’s friend, she said. Martha? Oh, you remember Martha. The fund-raiser last August? Never mind. I hear he’s wonderful.) During our sessions I reveal the truth of my feelings but have altered the names of the players in my tale. There is much about me he can never know.

“Annie,” he says now, “why are we back here?”

I rub my eyes, hard, as though I can wipe all the tension away. “Because I feel him.”

I look up at him and he has kind, warm eyes on me. I like how he looks, even without the brown sweater, an older man with white-gray hair and a face so tan and wrinkled it looks like an old catcher’s mitt…but not in a bad way. He wears chinos and a chambray shirt, canvas sandals. Not very shrinklike, more like your favorite uncle or a nice neighbor you enjoy chatting with at the mailbox.

“You don’t feel him, Annie,” he says softly but firmly. “You think you do, but you don’t. You have to be careful of the language you use with yourself. Call this what it is. An episode, a panic attack, whatever. Don’t imagine you have some psychic feeling that a dead man has returned for you.”

I nod my head. I know he’s right.

“Why is it so hard?” I say. “It feels so real. So much worse than ever before.”

“What’s the date today?” he asks. I think about it and tell him. I realize then what he’s getting at, and I shake my head.

“That’s not it.”

“Are you sure?”

I don’t say anything then, because of course I’m not sure of that or really anything. Maybe he’s right. “But I don’t remember.”

“Part of you remembers. Though your conscious mind refuses to recall certain events, the memory lives in you. It wants to be recognized, embraced, and released. It will use any opportunity to surface. When you’re strong enough to face them, I think all the memories will return. You’re stronger than you’ve been since I’ve known you, Annie. Maybe it’s time to face down some of these demons. Maybe that’s why these feelings are so intense this time.”

Looking at him, I almost believe I can do it, peer into those murky spaces within myself, face and defeat whatever lives there.

“He’s dead, Annie. But as long as you haven’t dealt with the memories of the things he has done to you, he’ll live on. We’ll always have to face these times when you think he’s returned for you. You’ll never be free.”

It is a vague echo of my father’s words, and Gray’s words. And intellectually I know they’re all right. But my heart and my blood know something different, like the gazelle on the Serengeti, the mouse on the forest floor. I am the prey. I know my place in the food chain and must be ever vigilant to scent and shadow.

5

I am crouched in my cabin; I will be hidden in the corner by the door when it swings open. My breathing has slowed, and my legs are starting to ache from the position I’ve been holding for I don’t know how long. I can hear the thrum of the engine and nothing else. I start to wonder if maybe everything is all right. It’s conceivable that there might not even be another boat out there, I tell myself. Could just be a trick of the night, my own paranoid imagination, or some combination of those things. As I start to accept this possibility, there’s a knock at the door. Scares me so badly that my head jerks and I hit it on the wall behind me.

“Annie.” A muffled male voice. “Are you in there?”

I recognize the Australian accent; it’s the voice of one of the men who have been hired to help me. I open the door for him. His eyes fall immediately to the gun at my waist. He gives a quick nod of approval.

“There’s a boat trailing us,” he tells me. He has sharp, bright eyes and is thick with muscle. I search my memory for his name. They all have these hard, tight names that sound like punches to the jaw. Dax, I think he told me. That’s right, Dax. “Might be a fishing vessel, poachers-or even pirates. We hailed them, and they didn’t respond.”

His eyes scan the room. He walks over and checks the lock on the porthole, seems to satisfy himself that the room is as secure as it can be. He’s like that. They all are, these men, always checking the perimeter, scanning for vulnerability. I like that about them.

“Just turn out the lights in here and lock the door. I’ll come get you when I know it’s safe.”

“Okay,” I say, trying to sound as solid and in control as he seems.

He leaves, casting a sympathetic look behind him as he goes, and I lock the door after him. It seems as flimsy as cardboard. I turn off the lights and resume my crouch.

6

The day after I see my shrink, I’m feeling better. It might just be the residual effects of the pill Gray encouraged me to take last night so that I could sleep. Either way, as I sit with him in the sun-washed kitchen drinking coffee, the sense of foreboding is gone.

“It helped you to see Dr. Brown?” Gray asks. It’s oddly off-putting to hear Gray use his name. I try so hard to keep these parts of myself separate. Here I’m Annie, Gray’s wife and Victory’s mom. There I’m a mental patient haunted by my traumatic past. I don’t want those two selves to touch.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I say with a dismissive, oh-it’s-nothing wave. “It’s just that time of year, he thinks.”

Gray puts a hand on my shoulder. He is headed out of town for a few days. I don’t know where he is going or when he will be back. This is part of our life together.

“Vivian can come stay with you. Or you guys could go there?” he says. He is careful to keep concern out of his voice and worry out of his eyes.

“No, no,” I say lightly. “Really. It’s not necessary. I’ll call her if I need her.”

I love Vivian, Gray’s stepmother. But I hate the way she looks at me sometimes, as if I’m a precious bauble in the grasp of a toddler, always just headed for the floor, always promising to shatter into a thousand pieces. I wonder if she thinks I’m a bad mother, if she worries for Victory. I know better than to ask questions for which I don’t want the answers.

Gray and I chat awhile about a few mundane things, how the gardener is really awful and the lawn looks terrible but he’s too nice to fire, how the pipes are making a funny sound when the hot water runs and should I call a plumber, how Victory’s new preschool teacher seems kind. Then Gray gets up to leave. He takes me in his arms and holds me tight. I squeeze him hard and kiss his mouth. I don’t say, Be careful. I don’t say, Call when you can. I just say, “I love you. See you soon.” And then he’s gone.

“I really don’t need to go to school today, Mommy,” says Victory from her car seat behind me. We’re driving along the road that edges the water. Her school is just ten minutes from the house. An old plantation home converted into a progressive preschool where lucky little girls and boys paint and sing and sculpt with clay, learn the alphabet and the numbers.

“Oh, no?” I say.

“No,” she says simply. She gives me a look in the rearview mirror; it’s her innocent, helpful look. “You might need me today.”

My heart sinks a bit. I am a bad mother. My four-year-old daughter has sensed my agitation and is worried about whether she can leave me or not.

“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.

“One half hour until you have to pick up Miss Victory,” she says quietly.

I nod and look at my watch. I resist the urge to snap at her, to say, You don’t think I know I have to pick up my daughter? She loves my daughter and takes care of us, while I nap on the couch in the afternoon. I can never muster anything but gratitude for her.

“Thank you, Esperanza.”

7

Impossibly, I have drifted off in my crouch behind the door. That’s the level and nature of my fatigue. I am not sure how long it has been since Dax came to tell me about the other boat. Might be minutes, might be hours. Through my porthole I can see that the sun has not risen, that there’s not even a hint of morning light in the sky.

My feet and legs are aching with that horrible tingle of having too much weight on them awkwardly for too long. I stand painfully and stretch, try to walk it off. As I make tight circles in my small cabin, trying to get blood flowing to my limbs, I have a growing sense of unease. Something’s wrong. It takes another minute of anxious pacing, but I realize eventually what’s bothering me: I can’t hear the engines anymore. The boat has come to a stop.

I’m not sure what this means, but suddenly I’m a fox in a trap; I’m stuck in the box of my cabin. When he finds me, I’ll have no place to hide. It’s almost as though he choreographed it that way, like some elaborate dance that we do, that we have always done. But for the first time since we’ve met, I won’t allow myself to be led, to be circled around and dipped at the finale. Tonight I’ll take the lead.

I open the door just a crack and peek out into the empty hallway. As I do this, I hear the boat power down, and everything falls into pitch black. There’s not even a pinprick of light, and I’m rendered blind. I draw my gun, step into the corridor, and put my back to the wall, then start edging my way toward the staircase that leads to the deck.

8

After an early and incredibly healthy dinner of fish sticks, macaroni and cheese, and a side of broccoli spears that no one eats, Esperanza, Victory, and I make chocolate chip cookies. Or Esperanza and Victory make cookies and I watch with rapt attention, sitting on a stool at the bar that separates the kitchen from the family room. It still thrills me to watch Victory walk and do things like hold the hand mixer from her stepstool. She’s such a little person that it’s already impossible to imagine she came from my body.

“I don’t think you put enough vanilla in there,” I say, trying to be helpful.

“Oh, Mommy,” says Victory with a sigh. I smile into my cup of chamomile tea. After the last couple of days, I’ve decided no more caffeine for me. I clearly don’t need any extra stimulation.

The sun is setting, painting the horizon purple and pink. I have pushed my dream as far away as it will go and focus on being present for this time with my daughter. When the cookies are ready, the three of us eat them together on the deck. I’ve built a fire in the chimenea, and we help Esperanza practice her English as the sun makes its final bow. When the air gets too cold, we all go inside.

“When does Daddy come home?” Victory asks as we head upstairs for her bath.

“Soon,” I tell her.

“Soon when?” she asks, dissatisfied with my answer.

“Soon,” I say, resting a hand on her hair.

She nods and looks a little sad. I feel bad that I can’t tell her more. But the truth is, I don’t know the answer to her question, and even if I did, I still wouldn’t be able to tell her where her daddy goes.

By the time she’s lathered up and playing with her bath toys, I’m off the hook; Victory has forgotten all about poor Gray. She’s far too wrapped up in the drama unfolding between Mr. Duck and Mr. Frog, who are in a heated debate about who is faster. I’m cheering for Mr. Frog when Esperanza comes in.

“Telephone for you, Mrs. Annie,” she says, coming to take my place beside the tub.

“Who is it?”

She shrugs and looks uncomfortable. She searches for the words in English, then finally gives up. “No sé. Pero pienso que es importante.”

“She says she doesn’t know but she thinks it’s important,” translates Victory, my little bilingual.

I nod and go to the phone. My heart is thudding as I walk down the hall to our bedroom. I am always afraid when the phone rings while Gray is away. I’m always waiting for the call. I remind myself that if anything were really wrong, they’d come in person.

“Hello.”

“Annie.” It’s my father. He sounds tense, urgent. He’s not supposed to call me. In fact, I’m not really supposed to call him, either. But every once in a while, like the other day, I can’t help it. In recent years we’ve become a little careless. Part of the overconfident phase I’ve been going through.

“Where are you calling from?”

“From a friend’s place.”

“What’s wrong?”

“There was someone looking for Ophelia today. He came by the shop, said he was a cop. But he wasn’t. A bald, beefy guy making a show of himself with a big gun in a holster.”

“Okay.” This is the hard part. I don’t know if he’s lying or not.

“Seriously,” he says into the silence. “No bullshit.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him that my daughter has been dead for over five years.”

“Okay.” This seems to be the only word I can manage. I realize that my whole body is tense, that I’m gripping the phone too hard.

“He didn’t believe me. He wasn’t just casting for information; he knew something. He got all friendly with me, said there was a reward, a big one, for any information about you. I went crazy on him, started to cry and shit about how you were dead and how dare he play these kinds of games with an old man. Then he left in a hurry.”

“But he wasn’t a cop.”

“No way. You can always tell a cop, even the bad ones. They think they got the law on their side. This guy was too dirty even to be a dirty cop.”

“Okay,” I repeat again, not wanting to say too much.

“Be careful,” he says, and hangs up.

I sit for a second with the phone in my hand. I’m not sure what to think about what he’s told me. Ophelia has been dead for so long. After so much time I’d come to believe that everyone had forgotten her except me. I hang up the phone and then pick it back up, punch in a number I know very well.

“Hello?” says Drew.

“Can you come by later? It’s Annie.”

“Sure,” he says after a second’s hesitation. “Something wrong?”

“I don’t know.”

Drew always looks at me as though I’m an unwelcome solicitor at his door asking for a donation to a charity in which he doesn’t believe. I don’t like the woman I see reflected in his gaze. She’s someone unworthy, not to be trusted. But maybe I’m just projecting, as my doctor might say.

He sits at our dining-room table, a bottle of Corona nearly disappearing in his big, thick hand. His brow furrows with deep lines as I tell him what my father told me. He is a heavier, harder version of Gray. He has the same storm-cloud eyes without any of the wisdom or kindness I see in his son’s.

“Could just be someone fishing,” he says with a shrug. He takes a long swallow of his beer, puts the bottle down heavily on the table. “Unfortunately, the circumstances of Ophelia’s death wouldn’t hold up to any real scrutiny. We never expected anyone to come looking.”

I feel a little jolt at hearing that name from him. I hate the way it sounds coming from his mouth, the way it bounces on the walls of this house.

“But there might be a few people who haven’t forgotten her,” he says when I don’t say anything. He rests his eyes on me, and I fight the urge to shift beneath his gaze. I hear the television playing in Esperanza’s room; she’s watching one of her novelas. I can tell by the staccato of Spanish and the strains of melodramatic music. (¡Ay, Dios! Esperanza will exclaim about one of the characters. She is so bad!) Outside, a strong wind bends our palms, whispering through the fronds. I wish I hadn’t called Drew.

“I’ll have someone look into it,” he says finally.

I realize I haven’t really participated in the conversation, though he doesn’t seem to have noticed. “Thanks,” I say.

“In the meantime,” he says after draining the rest of the beer, “tighten up around here. Keep the system armed, no doors or windows left open. No more phone calls to Ophelia’s father or anyone from her past. You’ve gotten careless by talking to him. That phone call you made last week might be the reason someone’s looking for her.”

“Okay,” I say, feeling contrite. I know he’s right.

He gets up to leave.

“Any word on Gray?” I ask.

“No news is good news,” he says, patting me on the shoulder in an uncommonly friendly gesture. I wonder if our relationship might be improving.

It stormed the day Frank’s son came. Of course it did. One of those storms that roll in from the coast and make a blue day turn black suddenly, as though someone drew a curtain. Wind kicks in and turns the leaves white side up. The barometric pressure plummets, and the sky starts to rumble. We were alone, me and Mom. She’d worked the morning shift, I’d had a half day at school because of some teachers’ conference. We sat on her bed and watched As the World Turns on the tiny black-and-white television that we’d moved in from the kitchen, eating fried-bologna sandwiches. This was a ritual we’d practiced as long as I could remember; I’d been watching the soaps with her for probably longer than that. Even now I’ll sometimes turn one on guiltily in the middle of the day and disappear for a little while, remembering what it was like to be close to my mother, to smell her perfume and hold her delicate white hand.

I heard the knock on the door before my mother did.

“Was that the door?” I asked.

“Uh-uh,” she said absently, eyes glued to the screen. “I don’t think so.”

I heard the knocking again. “I think it is.”

“Well, go check,” she said, patting me on the ass. “I’ve been on my feet all morning.”

I walked to the door and looked through the small window. He stood there, leaves and rain blowing around him, his hair tousled. He carried a large bag over one shoulder and had on a worn blue sweat jacket over T-shirt and jeans. Something about his face, his whole bearing, made my heart lurch. I’d never seen anyone so beautiful, the features of his face smooth and flawless as if he’d been blown from glass. I thought he’d turn and I’d see a pair of wings grow from his back. He lifted his hand to knock again but saw my face in the window.

“Frank said I should come!” he yelled over the wind. His eyes were so dark they seemed almost black from where he stood; his long hair was the same inky black, in deep contrast to the white of his skin.

“Why?” I asked him. Something about him was frightening, too. True beauty is like that, as terrifying as it is mesmerizing. I didn’t want him to come in. I wanted to lean my weight against the door and brace it against him.

“He says I should see Carla.” He adjusted the heavy bag on his shoulder. His hand was like a boulder, big and round with large, long fingers.

I looked at him, examined the thin line of his mouth, the square of his jaw. I couldn’t tell how old he was. “My mother,” I said.

He looked down at his feet, back at me. I felt the full weight of his gaze. “I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

My mother came up behind me. “Let him in,” she said to me, but didn’t reach for the door herself.

“Who is he?”

“He’s Frank’s boy,” she said, looking at me sheepishly, then at him.

“You knew he was coming?”

“I knew he might come,” she said, turning her face back to me but keeping her eyes on him, as though she couldn’t pull her gaze away.

“And?” I said, feeling my stomach clench.

“And now he might stay on here awhile.”

“Where?” I said. “There’s no room for him.”

She nodded over toward the couch. It was small and dirty, uncomfortable even to sit on, never mind sleep. “There. Just for a few nights. Don’t worry; I’m not going to give him your room.”

“Hello?” he called from outside. “It’s raining pretty hard.”

“Well?” my mother said.

I turned and looked at him through the window. Even then something deep inside me knew not to open the door, but I did. He brought the storm in with him, dripping on the floor and smelling like rain. He was tall, taller than he’d seemed standing outside. He didn’t have to slouch to come in through the door, but almost. He dropped his bag on the floor and it landed with a heavy thump.

My mother made him a fried-bologna sandwich, then another. I watched while he inhaled them as if he hadn’t eaten in days. He had a thick neck and broad, heavily muscled shoulders. He wrapped his free arm around the plate, gazing up every so often, as if he were afraid someone would come and take the food away from him.

“I’ve only got six months to emancipation,” he told us, making his childhood sound like a kind of slavery. But he didn’t look like a boy, as my mother had called him. At seventeen going on eighteen, he was more man than child, I suppose. There was something feral about him, something hungry and knowing.

I stood in the corner sullen, angry, but watching him with secret interest. The look on my mother’s face, vacant and eager to please, made me sick. This is how she acted around men.

“Then I’m going to join the Corps,” he said. “No one’s going to fuck with me after that.”

“Wow, the marines!” my mother gushed, twirling a strand of her hair. “Frank didn’t tell me.”

“How long are you planning on staying here?” I asked with naked annoyance.

He shrugged and gave my mom a hangdog look. It was so fake. Couldn’t she see that?

She patted his shoulder and gave me a warning glare over his head. “You can stay as long as you need to, Martin.”

“My name’s Marlowe,” he said quickly, angrily. I saw the ugly in him for a second, a dog baring his teeth. Then he softened, turned a sweet smile on my mother. “Please call me Marlowe.”

“Sure, honey,” she said, petting him again. “Marlowe. Do you want something else to eat?”

“Yes, please,” he said to her, and then he moved his eyes over to me.

My recall of Marlowe’s arrival has a funny, sepia-toned quality. I remember weird, hyperfocused details, like my mother’s cuticles, jagged from her endless gnawing at them, and that the tag on her shirt was turned out. I remember hearing the dramatic voices from the soap opera blaring from the other room. But it’s as though I’m remembering something I saw on a television screen, all of it happening behind a thick piece of glass. I don’t feel like I was a participant, but rather an impotent observer watching mute and helpless as things unfolded. It was another of those moments that I had dissected again and again with my shrink. Another place where I might have made a difference.

“Try to remember,” Dr. Brown says, “you were a child; your mother was the adult. You didn’t have any power. Your mother was responsible for inviting these men, her boyfriend and his son, into your lives.”

“I opened the door.”

“If you hadn’t, she would have.”

He was right. My mother was not a smart woman, not intelligent, not instinctual. She lived in her own little world. She never saw him coming.

9

The next night I force myself to go to Ella’s cocktail party. In spite of my efforts to isolate myself from the crowd and appear generally antisocial, an older woman clad entirely in white drifts over to me and asks me what I do. She looks as though someone sprayed her with shellac, so unmoving and stiff are the various parts of her-her flesh, her bobbed hair, the muscles in her face. She’s so thin I can see the tiny bones in her wrist.

“I’m a housewife and a mother,” I say without the sheepish tone in which I’ve heard so many women deliver this information. What I don’t say is that I’m a housewife who doesn’t do much cooking or cleaning. And that my daughter is in preschool most days. My life consists of these big blocks of free time while I wait for Victory to be done with the various activities in her busy little life. It’s dangerous for someone like me; I should really think about getting a job. The devil would find work for idle hands, my mother used to say when she was in one of her Jesus moods. Or, in my case, work for idle minds.

“That’s wonderful,” the woman in white says with a smile, real or fake, who can tell? “It’s the most important job in the world.” Everything about her is perfectly manicured: her fingernails are square and pink, her lips lined and glossed, her eyebrows plucked into high arches. A huge diamond glints on her hand. She is painstakingly casual in a flowing linen skirt and top, leather thongs on her feet.

The conversation falters, mainly because I don’t participate, and she moves away, raising her glass and muttering an excuse. I’ve come alone to this party because I promised Gray I would attend just to “get out of the house and be with people other than Victory,” but I’d rather be home with her and Esperanza watching The Incredibles on DVD for the hundredth time.

I lean on the fence that edges the pool deck and look out onto the black stretch that ends in the Gulf. I can’t see the water because of the elaborate lighting and landscaping on the property, but I can hear it and smell the salt in the humid air. My mind is full of thoughts I’m trying not to have-my black patch, my dream, Gray, the man looking for Ophelia. I shouldn’t be here. I’m not cocktail-party material even on my best days. I endure things that other people find entertaining.

My eyes fall on a girl standing alone a few feet away. She’s leaning on the fence like I am and lost in thought looking out into the night. She must have felt my eyes on her, because she turns to look at me. I recognize her then, but I can’t place her. I suddenly feel a terrible need to remember who she is; my heart starts to beat a little faster with the urgency I feel. She’s pretty and far too thin, wearing just a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, a ratty old pair of sneakers. She’s not the type to be at one of Ella’s cocktail parties-too young, not enough money. I wonder if she’s the new maid Ella’s been complaining about. We’re staring at each other, neither one of us looking away. Finally she smiles. But it’s not a friendly smile; in it I see some combination of malice and pity. My gut lurches a bit. I look away quickly.

“Has anyone ever told you that you’re not a very social person?” Ella says, coming up behind me. I jump slightly, and she laughs, surprised. “You need another drink,” she says, patting my back. “You’re too tense.”

“Who’s that girl?” I say, looking back over in the stranger’s direction. But she’s gone.

“Who?” Ella asks, following my eyes.

I scan the crowd. I don’t see her among Ella’s well-dressed guests.

“She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. Pretty, young, too thin?” I’m still looking for her. In fact, I feel almost desperate to see her again.

“If she’s here, we should kick her out,” says Ella, mock jealous.

“Your new maid?” I say, hopeful.

“No, she’s off tonight.”

I can feel Ella’s attention shift from curious to concerned.

“You okay?” she asks after another moment.

“Yeah,” I say, smiling a bright fake smile. “I just thought she looked familiar.”

She gives me another rub on the shoulder, then returns my smile. “When’s Gray coming back? You’re lost without him at these things.”

“At the end of next week,” I say vaguely. I’m still looking over her shoulder.

“I never realized insurance executives had to travel so much,” she says. I snap back to the conversation and listen for signs of skepticism in her voice. But there’s just her usual light and musing tone, the wide-open expression on her face.

“Client risk assessment, large claim investigations,” I say with a shrug, as if this should explain it. She nods.

“Still,” she says, “he leaves you alone too much.”

She’s not looking at me. She’s looking out into the night. I can’t tell if she’s just making conversation.

“You’re one to talk,” I say with a smile. “You’re gone as often as he is.”

“True. But my trips are important,” she says. “Shopping in New York City, detoxing at Canyon Ranch, sunning in Fiji.”

“Hmm,” I say. She laughs.

“Where is he this time?”

“Cleveland,” I answer.

“See? What could possibly be important in Cleveland?” she says.

We both laugh. I wonder whether she’d be laughing if she knew how easily lies come to me.

“Can I get you a refill?” she asks, pointing to my empty glass after a minute of us both staring into the night. “Seems like you could really use one, girl.”

“No thanks,” I say. “I’m going to sneak out of here and walk home down the beach.”

She knows better than to argue that I should stay, have another drink. She’s right; I’m lost without Gray at these things. I don’t know how to do Friday-evening cocktail parties, make small talk with neighbors and strangers, network, mingle, whatever it is one is supposed to do. There’s too much going on in my head for that sort of thing.

Even though I know I shouldn’t, even though this is not the type of behavior Drew would see as “tightening up,” after we say good night, I slip out the back gate, walk down a paved path lined with palms and recessed lighting that leads to the beach. I give one last look back at Ella’s gathering, but there’s no sign of the girl I saw.

Marlowe slept on the couch, his feet hanging over the edge, the sound of his deep breathing filling the whole place. Not for days, as my mother promised, but for weeks, with no sign of any intention to leave. I hated him and was fascinated by him in equal measure. He didn’t go to school, had dropped out and gotten his GED, he claimed. He spent his days writing and sketching in a collection of battered, mottled notebooks. But somehow he always had money, bought groceries, little gifts for my mother. He’d cooked dinner for us a couple of times, which basically sent my mother into convulsions over him. She raved about his pork chops and Rice-a-Roni like he was Julia Child; she was overcome by his consideration and sweetness. Meanwhile, the fact that I’d cooked dinner five days out of seven (the other two days we had pizza or fried-bologna sandwiches) for I don’t know how long had never even been acknowledged. It made me furious, and I raged about it.

“You’re just jealous,” my mother said, patting my shoulder. “He’s sweet. And we’re all he has right now. Try to be nice.”

God, she was pathetic. She’d do anything for a man-even a teenage boy-who showed her the smallest amount of attention. And there was nothing sweet about him, as far as I could see. The act he put on for my mother, he didn’t bother to use on me. For me Marlowe saved furtive looks-menace or desire, I couldn’t tell. But those eyes, those looks kept me up nights thinking about him, listening to him breathe out on the couch.

I was in a constant state of anxiety-worry about my mother, fear about this killer who might be coming to live with us, hatred for his son who was crashing on our couch, and yes, some secret fascination with Marlowe, too.

He awakened something within my body that was thrilling and unfamiliar. I was spastic around him, clumsy and prone to emotional outbursts or awkward laughter. I hated myself, couldn’t seem to get a grip when he was in the room. The half smile he wore when we were together told me he knew it.

At night our trailer park came alive with sound: singing frogs competing with television sets and rock music, our neighbors yelling and fighting, later stumbling in drunk and noisy, slamming doors. I would lie awake some nights just listening, wondering why I had been exiled to this life. I knew enough to know that I didn’t belong among these poor and angry people, living such ugly lives. But that knowledge wasn’t enough to lift me out.

“Get me out of here, Dad,” I pleaded during one of our weekly telephone conversations. It was a Sunday night; my mother was working late. I cradled the phone to my ear and kept my back to Marlowe, whose presence in our trailer seemed as eternal and unpleasant as the roach problem. He was always there. Watching. Listening.

“Just hang in there, Opie,” my father said calmly on the other line. “It’s all going to work out. You’ll see.”

“Okay,” I said miserably, believing he was alluding to some master plan he was concocting to rescue me, something he couldn’t discuss over the phone.

I was still young enough to hope that he was going to show up one day and demand custody of me. I didn’t understand back then that though my father loved me, he wasn’t really father material. He didn’t have the strength, the selflessness it takes to be a real parent. Neither one of them did. But my mom at least wanted me with her-some of the time, anyway.

The conversation ended, and I went into my room to cry into my pillow.

“He’s not coming for you, you know.”

I turned, startled and embarrassed to see Marlowe standing there in the narrow doorway. He leaned against the frame, hands in the pockets of his faded, dirty jeans. He wasn’t smiling; his expression was grim.

“I mean, I’m sorry,” he said, looking down at his feet and then back up at me. “I can see you’re clinging to that. But he’s not coming.” His voice was bass and throaty. There was an odd accent to his words, not quite a southern twang. Florida cracker, my mother told me, all their family born and raised in this hot, miserable swamp of a state.

“Shut up,” I said. “What do you know about anything?”

My voice shook; his words were a blow to the solar plexus, the pain spreading, taking my breath. In my deepest heart, I was afraid that he was right-and I hated him for it.

“If he was going to come, he’d have come by now. He has money, right? And time? As long as I’ve been here, he’s never even once called you. It’s always you calling him. How long have you been waiting for him to come?”

“Shut up!” The words just burst from me in an angry scream, a belch of rage. I got up and pushed past him, ran out of the trailer into the night.

I ran clumsily, crying, until I got a pain in my side and came to a stop at the ancient strangler fig that stood at the end of the park. I put my hand against its textured bark and rested, trying to catch my breath. The wide canopy of the tree sheltered me. The carpet of fallen and rotting leaves at its base was wet and stinking. Behind it was a teeming forest of palms and ferns, pond cypress and loblolly pine, surrounding a stream. I knew that the wooded area was rife with snakes and citrus rats, a terrible sampling of insects and spiders. Part of me wanted to enter its cover and be consumed by it. It seemed wild and barely contained, like most of Florida, as if it were only waiting for us to stop moving and clearing and digging, manicuring and trimming, for even just a minute, so that the lush greenness of this place could swallow all our silly structures, take back its rightful place on the earth. I sank between the thick roots of the tree and wept against its bark, ignoring the damp that seeped through my jeans, the mosquitoes making a meal out of my blood.

“Crying is not going to lift you out of this shithole.”

He’d followed me.

“If you want to get out of this place, this life,” he said as he swept his arm toward the trailer park behind him, “you’re going to have to do it yourself.”

I looked up at him, wiped my eyes on the sleeve of my shirt. He moved closer until he was standing right in front of me, our feet nearly touching. He offered me his hand.

The strangler fig, native to Florida, begins its life as an epiphyte, a plant that grows on another living plant. Its seeds make a home in the cracks and crevices in the bark of a host tree. At first the strangler grows slowly, insinuating itself gradually into the systems of the other tree. Over time, the strangler begins to cover the trunk of the original tree, forcing it to compete with the strangler for light, air, and water. Eventually the host tree dies. But the strangler doesn’t die with it. By that time the strangler has planted its own roots, grown its own branches, formed an intricate latticework of living tree around the host’s withered and hollow shell.

I gave Marlowe my hand, let my fingers entwine with his, let him hoist me off the wet ground.

I walk up the beach from Ella’s. I can see the lights from my own house just ahead, not more than two or three hundred feet away. I see that Victory’s bedroom light is off, and I smile to myself, wondering how Esperanza always convinces her to go to sleep without any fuss. I generally wind up lying on the floor of her bedroom, chatting with her quietly as the colored fish from her rotating night-light swim on the walls and ceiling.

“Aren’t you tired, Victory?” I’ll ask her.

“No, Mommy. I’m not,” she’ll say, then fall asleep a few minutes later.

The problem is, I love that time. I don’t mind staying with her until she falls asleep. And she knows it. I’ve rocked her and nursed her to sleep since she was a baby. They tell you not to do that, that then you’ll have to do it for longer than you want, that they’ll never learn to “self-comfort.” But I always figure the day will come when I’ll ache for those moments. And I figure if you don’t have a half hour to be with your child as she goes to sleep, if you think she’s better off crying alone in her bed so you can be sure of who’s in charge, then maybe you shouldn’t have kids. I’m thinking about this when I hear it.

“Ophelia.”

I stop, startled, and spin around to see the empty beach. The word, my name, cuts through me. My eyes scan the beach. The grass and sea oats rustle slightly in the wind, just as they did in my dream. There is no one ahead of me or behind me. My heart is jackhammering in my throat. The voice was low and male, more like a growl. I take a deep breath and start a light jog.

“Ophelia.” I stop and turn again. Except my father on the phone the other day, no one has called me by my real name in years. Even Drew used it with a kind of distance, referring to someone who was long gone. No one else in this life even knows about that name.

That’s when I see it-the long, bulky shape of a man rising from the grass. I can’t discern a thing about him, not his face, not the color of his jacket; he is a black shadow emerging from other black shadows like a plume of smoke. We stand there that way for a moment. The whole world is on an ugly, pitching tilt.

My mind grasps at the situation. Is this real? Another dream? The terrible twilight between the actual and the imagined?

I decide to figure it out later and break into a dead sprint for home. I don’t even look back to see if he has given chase. I just think about getting home to Victory.

With my lungs aching in my chest, I race up the wooden walkway that leads to my house and crash through the rear gate. I pause there and see the black form moving slowly toward me still far behind, just a shade, silent and ephemeral. There is no urgency to his progress.

“Ophelia.” I hear it on the wind. The word doesn’t seem to come from anywhere at all. At the back door, I fumble with the keys, my hands clumsy with adrenaline. I look behind me, but I don’t see him. When I finally get the door open, I slam and lock it after me, activate the house security system with shaking fingers. I think about bringing down the hurricane shutters, but Esperanza comes up behind me and I turn to look at her.

“Mrs. Annie! What’s wrong?” Her face is a mask of alarm; she must have heard the door slam. She wraps her robe about her pajamas, glances first at me and then through the glass panes in the door.

“There was someone out there. On the beach,” I say in a fierce whisper. I turn off the lights and look outside, scanning the darkness. Esperanza watches me with an expression somewhere between pity and fear.

“Mrs. Annie,” she asks carefully, “are you sure?”

“I’m sure, Esperanza,” I answer, though now, in the safety of the house, I’m not. Everything’s already fading away as if it never happened. The truth is, I can’t be sure. Too much bad history with myself.

She looks again out the window. Then her eyes go wide. She backs away from the door and turns to me, incredulous. “There’s someone.”

I see the form at the end of our walkway to the beach. He is just standing there. A terrible tide of fear battles with an odd relief that it isn’t just my mind playing tricks on me again.

“Is everything else locked?” I ask her. I feel suddenly solid and sure of what to do next. You can keep the earthly threats at bay with locks and security systems…at least for a while.

She nods vigorously, not looking away from the figure.

“You’re sure?”

She nods again. Then, “I’ll check.” She scurries off and I hear her tugging on doors and checking windows. I move to the kitchen, keeping my eyes on the form through the window, reach for the phone, and dial Drew, my heart a running engine in my ears. I tell him what’s happened.

“He’s still there now?” Drew asks sharply.

“Yes. Esperanza sees him, too.” I feel like I have to add this for credibility.

“Don’t call the police. I’ll be right there.” The line goes dead.

I stand there still watching as I put the phone down.

Esperanza returns, holding her cell phone. “I called the police,” she says, looking out the window. My heart sinks. I want to tell her that she shouldn’t have done that, but I don’t. It would seem suspicious. I’ll just have to play it out.

I look back at our visitor. He is so still. He radiates an aura of calm, the predator so sure of his prey that there’s no need for frenzy. When I hear the distant whine of sirens, he seems to sink into the blackness from which he emerged. And he is gone.

Tonight is the five-year anniversary of his alleged death. The doctor is right: Though I remember nothing about the events of that night, something that lies dormant in my memory resurrects itself as regularly as seasons. Both a terrible dread and a terrible longing dwell side by side within me. I’ve been here before, this is true. But not like this.

The clinically depressed and functionally mentally ill do a little dance, a kind of two-step with their meds. I need them; I don’t really need them. I need them; I don’t really need them. Cha-cha-cha. After you’ve been on them for a while and the chemicals in your brain have normalized somewhat, you’ll read an article about the dangers of long-term use of the particular medication you’re taking, or you’ll just start to feel like maybe all those times when you couldn’t get out of bed for three weeks were simply a lack of self-discipline. You convince yourself that you’re not as creative, productive, mentally sharp as you are when you’re off them. So maybe you miss a dose, then two. The next thing you know, you’re off them altogether. Again.

Of course, some people don’t really need to be on medication long-term. Maybe they took something to get them through a bad patch-the death of a loved one, a divorce, even a nervous breakdown. Maybe some irresponsible doctor suggested an antidepressant for a general malaise that could have been addressed by taking a hard look at their lives. When those types of people choose not to take the medication that has been prescribed, it’s not such a big deal. But for some people it’s quite the opposite. I guess I’m not sure which of those people I am. I do know this much: If Esperanza hadn’t seen the man I’d seen, I’d have no way to be certain if he’d actually been there or not.

In my life I have suffered periods when, due to cumulative and acute trauma, I have dissociated from reality and essentially disappeared, figuratively and literally. I have seen a number of doctors and received as many diagnoses for these “episodes”-one called them fugues, another psychotic breaks. One doctor believed I was bipolar. None of the diagnoses have agreed with the others or quite fit the nature of my episodes, and I suppose I don’t really know what’s wrong with me, clinically speaking.

I have suffered dreams that seemed like reality and endured realities that might have been dreams. I have found myself on buses headed for parts unknown, on park benches in unfamiliar cities, with no idea how I arrived there. I have lost huge pieces of my life; there are black, gaping holes in my memory that have swallowed months, even years. I have not had these episodes since Victory’s birth, but I know they are always waiting on the periphery of my life, like vultures circling a limping coyote in the desert.

I watch the cops on the beach using their flashlights to look for the man or some trace of the man who followed me home. I sit on the couch with Victory on my lap. She has curled herself up into a little ball and, half asleep now after being awakened by the sirens and the men at the door, is sucking on the ear of her stuffed puppy. I hold her tight; she is my anchor in the world. Ella sits on the other couch, looking anxious and gnawing on the cuticle of her thumb.

“I just can’t believe this,” she says absently. She looks over at me. “You seem so calm.”

Esperanza’s call had resulted in three screaming cruisers and a couple of plainclothes officers showing up, attracting the attention of all the neighbors. It’s a quiet beach town, not much going on usually; this was making everyone’s night. Most of the neighbors had called or come by to see if everything was all right. Ella had left her husband to tend to the stragglers at their party while she came down to be with us.

“It was probably nothing,” I say lightly. “Some vagrant.”

Drew throws me a look from the chair by the window. He’s tense and not hiding it well, with a white-knuckled grip on the chair arm. Vivian stands behind him looking out into the night, frowning with worry.

“I told you not to call the fucking cops,” he’d whispered harshly on his arrival. He took me into his arms so that everyone in the room thought he was embracing me. He smelled of cigars. “What were you thinking?”

“It was Esperanza.”

He pushed a disdainful breath out of his nose. “And I told you two to hire an illegal. They don’t call the police.”

He’d released me and given me a disapproving scowl, reminding me how much I actually dislike him. Drew is a cold mountain of a man, as distant as the summit of Everest and about as easy to reach. Even if you got there, you’d want to leave right away.

“Annie,” Ella says, looking at me gravely, “someone followed you home. It’s something.”

One of the plainclothes officers walks in through the open door leading from the pool deck. We’ve already been through how I couldn’t identify the man, haven’t noticed anyone following me at any other time, and have no history with a lover, old boyfriend, or stalker. Of course, I do have a history-just not one I can share.

“To be honest, Mrs. Powers, there’s really not much we can do,” he says, closing the door behind him. I find myself liking him for some reason. He has a quiet air and seems like a careful person, observant and slow to react.

“I do see tracks leading from the beach; a smaller set leads up to the door to your house. They’re yours, I’m assuming. The larger set stops at the edge of your property. Technically, whoever followed you didn’t set foot on your land. And even if he had, we wouldn’t be making molds and tracking down boot manufacturers unless…”

“Unless he’d killed me,” I say, feeling Drew’s eyes on me. Wouldn’t that have made his day?

The cop clears his throat, runs a tan hand through salt-and-pepper hair. “That’s right. Honestly, I probably wouldn’t be here at all except that there’s been a rash of break-ins over the last few weeks. Usually the uniformed officers would have come to take a report.”

“That’s great,” says Ella. “That’s just great.” She has the sense of entitlement that pampered, wealthy people have, but not in that awful way. Just naïve. “How is she supposed to sleep at night?”

I look at her. I want to tell her I haven’t slept in years.

“This house has a good security system,” he says. “Keep the doors locked, and you might think about getting a dog.”

“A dog?” says Ella. “That’s your advice?”

I give the cop an apologetic look.

Drew stays silent. Vivian walks over and sits beside me, rests a hand on my leg. I examine her face for signs of judgment and disapproval. But I just see compassion and worry. And the shade of something else I can’t quite put my finger on.

“Mrs. Powers,” says the cop. Everyone’s looking at me. He has asked me something that, lost in thought, I didn’t hear. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sorry,” I say, rubbing the bridge of my nose with my free hand. “Sure of what?”

He lets a beat pass. “That you have no idea who might have reason to follow you.”

“Yes, of course,” I say.

His expression tells me he doesn’t believe me. He has picked up on something; he glances over at Drew, then back at me. I feel my shoulders go stiff at the tension in the room.

“All right,” says Ella, rising. “She said she’s sure. If there’s nothing else you can do, you might as well just go and let her get some rest.”

I focus on Victory, who has somehow, in spite of all the talking, drifted fully asleep in my arms. I listen to her deep, restful breathing.

He places a card on the coffee table, throws another glance at Drew. “If you need anything tonight, Mrs. Powers, give me a call. I’m on all night.”

“Thanks,” I say. “You’ve been a big help. Really.”

He looks at me uncertainly. If I sound sarcastic, I don’t mean to.

After the police have left, I put my daughter in her bed and convince Ella to go home.

“Did you call Gray?” Ella asks as we stand on my front porch, waiting for her husband to pick her up.

“Yes,” I lie.

“Is he coming home?”

“He says he’ll try,” I say with a shrug.

She doesn’t seem to like my answer but reserves comment. She takes me in her arms and holds me tight. “Anything? You call. I mean it. Anything.”

“I will,” I promise.

I watch her glide down the stairs as her husband pulls up. He gives a wave from the street but doesn’t get out of the car; he always holds himself aloof, gives me odd looks. He doesn’t seem to like me very much, and I’m not sure why. Maybe he senses that I hold most of myself back, too. Maybe it makes me seem untrustworthy. As much as I try to blend in, I guess I don’t.

I can’t convince Drew to leave. Vivian is going home, and he intends to sleep on the couch until morning. He couldn’t care less about me; it’s Victory he’s worried about. I’m sure they’d try to take her home with them if they thought I’d let them.

“It’s not necessary, Drew.” I might as well be talking to a gargoyle.

“It’s his pleasure,” says Vivian, pulling her bag over her shoulder. “Give the old watchdog something to do. Unless you, Victory, and Esperanza want to come home with us?”

“No. We’re okay,” I say. She pulls me into a hug.

“Don’t let Drew get to you,” she whispers. “He does care about you, in spite of how it seems. More than you know.”

I nod and wonder what good that kind of caring is to anyone. She leaves, and I stand at the door with my hand on the knob for a second. I feel Drew’s eyes on me.

“This could be a shitstorm.”

I turn to face him. From where he’s standing, I can just see the dark bulk of him, not the features of his face.

“Was it him, Drew?” I ask. The house sighs as the air-conditioning kicks on, and I feel its cold breath on my neck.

Drew crosses his arms across his chest. “He’s dead. You know that.”

“Then who? Who knows that name?”

“Someone’s fucking with you, girl. We’ll find out who. Don’t worry.” His words are benevolent, but his tone doesn’t quite make it. He doesn’t move closer or step into the light.

“Okay,” I say.

“Get some sleep.”

In the dim light of my bedroom, I get down on my knees and reach into the hole in my box spring. I search around until I find what I’m looking for, a small velvet box. I open it. Inside is a gold necklace, half of a heart.

There are some other, more useful items in my box spring as well: a Glock nine-millimeter and some ammunition, a Canadian passport with my picture and someone else’s name, twenty thousand dollars in cash in four neat bundles of five thousand each. There’s also a small black notebook containing vital pieces of information, among them the account number and PIN for a bank account where I’ve saved a bit of money, and the name and contact information for a man who promised me a long time ago that he’d help me disappear-for good, if necessary.

10

The morning hasn’t yet dawned when I hear Gray come in downstairs. I’ve spent the night in a kind of vigil, watching the beach from my window, waiting for the form to rise again from the grass. But no, there has been nothing like that. A couple took a midnight dip in the ocean, made out on the shore, then slowly strolled up the beach, arms wrapped around each other. Someone-a young man or a boyishly shaped woman, I couldn’t tell-took a jog at 4 A.M.; I watched the loping figure pass the house and then return twenty minutes later. I suppose I should be pleased, feel some sense of relief. But these mundane occurrences are something of a disappointment to me.

I listen to the low rumble of Gray’s conversation with his father. I imagine Drew filling him in on the evening’s events, imagine his superior tone and the lightly condescending roll of his eyes. Then I hear Gray taking stairs two at a time. He slows and opens the door quietly, expecting me to be asleep.

“What happened?” he asks when he sees me sitting in the chair. The sight of him makes me angry and relieved at the same time. Something about the way he looks right now-or maybe it’s just the night and all that’s taken place, or how this terrible anniversary is also, coincidentally the anniversary of the day we met-makes me remember the first time I saw him.

“He’s back for me,” I say. I’m not sure I really believe this; I’m testing out the words on the air. He steps into our room, closes the door behind him, and turns on the light. I hear the door open and shut downstairs; Drew’s SUV rumbles to life in the driveway, then drifts off.

“Annie,” he says quietly.

“It’s different this time. I can’t explain how. It’s different.”

He sits on the bed. I can see the purple shadow of a shiner under his right eye. His bottom lip is split and swollen. He doesn’t need any more scars. His body is a minefield of injured and broken places, places that have been cut and ruptured and never healed quite right. We’re compatible that way, except that my skin is flawless. It’s my psyche that’s a minefield.

I tell him what happened on the beach. He listens with his eyes on me; I can’t read his expression. He taps his foot quickly on the floor as I talk, something he does when he’s stressed or working a solution to a problem. When I’m done, he’s quiet for a while, as though he’s searching for the words he needs. He asks a few questions: Did I see his face? What was he wearing? Was it very windy?

“Did Drew tell you about the phone call from my father?” I ask when he gets up and walks over to the doors leading to our balcony. He’s looking at the beach; the clouds have parted, and the beach is washed in gauzy silver moonlight.

He nods. “Maybe that’s what has you so spooked, Annie. Maybe that’s what’s different about this time.” He extends his hand to me, and I join him by the doors. He points out the window.

“Look how much light there is out there. Look at that couple walking on the beach.”

There’s a young girl in a sweater and jeans, holding the hand of a tall, thin young man. They walk slowly, arms swinging.

“With so much light, you would have been able to see something about him.”

“There was someone there,” I say quickly. “Esperanza saw him. The police saw his footprints.”

“I don’t doubt there was someone. But it wasn’t Marlowe Geary.” He turns to me, touches my face. “Isn’t it possible that you saw someone, became frightened, and your mind did the rest?”

I don’t answer immediately. Then, “He called me Ophelia.”

He walks away from me, lies down on the bed with a sharp exhale of breath. I stay by the door watching him.

Gray is not a handsome man, not in the classical sense. Though there’s something in the way he carries himself that makes a girl forget he’s not easy on the eyes. He is older than I am by twelve years. There’s a hard silence to him, a shell you’re not sure you want to crack. There was no reason for me to fall in love with him. In fact, the circumstances of our meeting were not conducive to the start of a relationship. The first time I met Gray, he handcuffed me and threw me in the back of his car. He wasn’t sure what to do with me, and he couldn’t leave me as he found me, or so he would tell me later. I was a mess of a girl, nearly starved and half crazy with fear and grief. Anyone else in his position might have just left me to fend for myself. He could have turned me over to the police or dropped me at a hospital. But he didn’t.

“I loved you before I even knew I loved you,” he told me once.

“Then why the handcuffs?”

“I loved you, but I didn’t trust you. You can’t trust a beaten dog. Not until it learns to trust you.”

“That’s not a very flattering analogy.” Though I suppose that’s what I was then, a dog so badly beaten that I wouldn’t have known the difference between a hand poised to strike and one poised to caress.

He touched me in that way he had, to soften his words, a gentle stroke on the back of my head that ends in him tracing my jaw and then resting his hand on my cheek. “Sorry.”

There was no reason for us ever to be together and every reason for us never to see each other again after he got me the help I needed and then made Ophelia disappear completely. I fell in love with him because he was the only upright person I had ever known. He was the first safe place I found in my life. Because he came every day to be with me, even if I couldn’t talk or didn’t want to, even when I ranted and hated him and threw him out. He always came back.

I try to remember that now as I watch his chest rise and fall. I sit back down in the chair. After a minute I wonder if he’s fallen asleep. Sometimes he is so exhausted after he’s been away that he falls asleep during arguments or while making love. I try not to take it personally.

“Annie,” he says finally with a sigh. He sits up and comes over to me, kneels before me on the floor. He takes my hands in his and puts them to his mouth for a second. Then, “Whatever is going on, I swear to you, Marlowe Geary is dead.”

Over the last few hours, sitting in my vigil, I had convinced myself that Marlowe didn’t die that night, that Gray has lied to me all these years. I thought of at least five ways he might have survived. My twisted imagination spun a web around me, and I was sure of all of this, positive. But now, with Gray to ground me, I’m more inclined to believe that my mind is playing tricks on me-again. Maybe Drew’s right; someone knows my secrets and is trying to get to me. Or maybe, as Gray seems to think, it was just a stranger on the beach and my mind did the rest.

“Okay?” he asks when I don’t say anything. I put my hand to his face, trace the bruise under his eye, place my finger gently on his broken lip. There are deep wrinkles around his mouth, but somehow they don’t make him look old, just rugged and wise. I love him, I truly do. And I know he loves me. I can see it in the stormy depths of his eyes. My first safe place.

“He said, ‘Ophelia,’” I tell him again.

“Are you sure?”

I’m not certain now. I was deep in thought at the time. It was windy. Maybe I should go back on the medication, endure the dull fog that falls over my life, the mental lethargy. At least I know what’s real. That’s something, isn’t it?

“I don’t know,” I say.

“We’re going to find out what’s happening,” he says. “We’ll find out who went to see your father, who was on the beach.” He pats the mattress. “Don’t do anything stupid in the meantime.”

I look at him blankly.

“You don’t think I know, Annie, what you have under the bed?”

I feel a wash of shame. I don’t say anything.

“I know it makes you feel safe. I understand. Just stay cool.”

I slide down onto the floor with him and let him enfold me. I want to remember what it feels like to be held by him. I don’t want to forget when I’m gone.

11

“I know what you two are up to,” my mother hissed. She’d cornered me in the bathroom, come up behind me and put her mouth up close to my ear. “I see the way you look at each other.”

There was venom in her; it was her jealousy. I’d seen this face before.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, examining my teeth in the mirror over the sink, not looking at her. She grabbed my arm and pulled me in close to her.

“It’s practically incest,” she said. I could feel her hot breath in my ear. “He’s going to be your stepbrother.”

My mother and Frank planned to have a jailhouse wedding. Disgusting. The thought of it made me ill. She was squeezing my arm so hard it brought tears to my eyes. But I would rather she’d pulled my arm out of its socket than let her see me cry. I blinked my eyes hard and turned my face from her.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I repeated.

Her eyes were two angry, black points. When she was mad, her pretty face turned into an ugly grimace of bared yellowed teeth and furrowed brow. I could smell the coffee on her breath, the bleach on her waitress uniform.

“I won’t have my daughter acting like a whore,” she said to me.

Even then I knew she didn’t care about my chastity or my morality. She wasn’t afraid that her sixteen-year-old daughter was in too deep with someone who clearly had major problems. She just couldn’t stand it when someone paid attention to me instead of her. It made her feel old.

I forced my face to go blank and my body to go limp in her grasp while she hurled a few Bible passages at me. She never got them quite right, usually wound up tongue-tied and sounding foolish. When she didn’t get a reaction from me, she released me in disgust and stalked off.

“You’ll reap what you sow, little girl,” she said loudly as she left me. I heard her storm and bang through the trailer and then finally exit with a slam of the door that was too weak to make much of a noise.

We all reap what we sow, don’t we?

I was so ripe for him. There were so many empty spaces within me that he could fill; it’s nothing short of a miracle that I didn’t disappear altogether.

“She’s jealous, Ophelia,” Marlowe said, coming up behind me. I always loved the way he said my name. I’d gone through phases with it, hating it, loving it, hating it again when I was introduced to Hamlet in my honors English class. When Marlowe said my name, it took on a new life. O-feeel-ya. The O was short and sharp. He drew out the eee like he was caressing it with his tongue. The final syllable was soft and breathy, like a sigh.

I saw his face in the mirror beside my own. He rubbed my shoulders and then wrapped his arms around me. I hid my eyes from him, too. I’ve never wanted anyone to see me cry; I can’t bare the vulnerability of it.

“I hate her,” I said. And I meant it, but only in the way that every teenage girl hates her mother.

When I raised my eyes from my hands again, he was still watching me in the mirror, a lopsided smile on his face. I could see that my anger at my mother pleased him and I was soothed by this.

“I wish she was dead,” I said, the words feeling forced and uncomfortable. But when his smile widened, I basked in the warmth of his approval.

When the rage of adolescence is contained by rules and boundaries, banked by the assurance of strong and present parents, it burns white hot but burns out fast. When it’s allowed to run unchecked, it turns everything to ash.

A few days after her bathroom sermon, my mother made me accompany her to choose her wedding dress. We took the bus to a strip mall off the highway and picked through racks of used gowns in various states of disrepair-this one stained with red wine, that one with the hem ripped out. She was sweet and happy on this day, excited in this girlish way she had. If she remembered that just a few days earlier she’d bruised my arm and called me a whore, accused me of sleeping with my soon-to-be stepbrother, she didn’t let on. She wanted to be happy that day; she didn’t want to think about me.

What do you think of this one, Ophelia? Oh, look! Frank would love this one.

I sat in the shabby dressing room and watched as she twirled in front of the mirror, losing herself in a fantasy of the life before her. She had hard miles on her but she was still beautiful. Her hair had lost most of its estrogenic glow, and her skin looked papery, lined around the mouth and eyes. But she had true beauty, not just the prettiness that fades with age. Looking at her that day, I thought she could have had any man once, she could have been anyone, but instead she was this, this desperate woman in a used bridal gown getting ready to marry a convicted murderer. It was as if before she was born, God hung a sign on her that read, KICK ME. And every single person and circumstance she’d run into had obliged.

“Do you have to look at me like that?” she asked.

I snapped out of the trance I was in and caught sight of myself in the mirror, slouched and sullen, staring at her blackly.

“Mom,” I said, sitting up, “are you really going to do this?”

She walked over to me and sat in the chair beside me. She rubbed her forehead with one hand.

“Why can’t you be happy for me, Ophelia?” she asked in a whisper. “I just want us to have a normal life, you know? We deserve that. Don’t we?”

She reached down and pulled a tissue from her purse, dabbed at tears I hadn’t seen.

“Mom,” I said. She looked so tired and sad.

“Please, Ophelia,” she said, dropping the tissue into her lap and grabbing my hands. “Please. I love him.”

She loved him. How sad. Frank Edward Geary, my mother’s death-row sweetheart, had been convicted of raping and murdering three women in Central Florida between March 1979 and August 1981. He was suspected for the murders of several others as well. There was just no evidence to link him conclusively to those crimes. The women he killed were all pretty and blond, petite and fine-featured. They all had a brittleness to their bearing, as though if you looked at them closely, you’d see them quivering like Chihuahuas. They each bore a striking resemblance to my mother.

“What did you say to her?” my shrink prodded, though we’ve been through this before. It was another of those moments that were caught on a loop in my mind. These various markers on the way to the point of no return.

“I told her that I was happy for her. That I’d try to be more optimistic.”

“But that’s not how you felt.”

“No,” I said flatly. “That’s not how I felt.”

“So why did you tell her that?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

He looked down at his hands. This was not an acceptable answer in his office. I’m not ready to discuss it or I need to think about that-those were okay. I don’t know was a cop-out.

After a minute, “I really did want her to be happy. And I didn’t want her to start shrieking about the new evidence that was going to set him free. That God wouldn’t let an innocent man die for crimes he didn’t commit. I didn’t want to hear about her prayers and about the private investigator she’d paid for while we ate fried-bologna sandwiches and leftover food she snuck home from the restaurant. I guess for an afternoon I just wanted to visit that fantasy she seemed to be living in. Christ. Maybe I wanted to be happy.”

He let a beat pass, let the words float around the room and come back to my ears.

“That’s good, Annie,” he said. “That’s really good.”

I wake up hearing my shrink’s voice in my ears. I am dreaming of my sessions lately, this bizarre mingling of the past events of my life and composites of conversations I’ve had with the doctor. I’m not sure why. I suppose he would say that it’s my subconscious mind working overtime.

Gray is sleeping deeply beside me. He’ll sleep like this until the middle of the day, his exhaustion is so total. There’s no telling the last time he slept in a bed, or slept at all. I slip on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt and quietly head down the hall. She hasn’t made a sound, but I know that my daughter is awake. She’s always waiting for me in the morning; it’s our time.

We usually walk down to the beach. We started doing this as soon as she was able to walk, and I would let her toddle as far and as fast as she could. I’d let her run from me to give her a taste of freedom. On the beach she was safe. She could never leave my sight, any fall was a soft one, and what she found here she could keep. The windowsills and shelves of her room were lined with her treasures: dried pieces of coral, all sizes and shapes of shells, sea glass, and ice-cream-colored rocks.

Today there is heavy rain, and after last night the beach doesn’t seem very safe. I pad down the hallway and slip into her room. I can see the crown of her head and the subtle rise and fall of the blankets. I try for stealth, just in case she is still asleep after all. I won’t wake her if she is. But as I draw close, she pulls the covers away and jumps up.

“Boo!” she yells, smiling and pleased with herself.

I feign surprise, then scoop her up and smother her with kisses.

“Shhhh,” I say as she laughs the helpless giggle of the tickled. “Daddy’s sleeping.”

“Daddy’s home?” She is wiggling out of my arms and then off like a bolt down the hall. I’m always thrown over for Gray. He’s the celebrity parent. I’m just the everyday slog who wipes up puke, burns the cookies, and combs tangles out of hair. He’s the rough-and-tumble, hide-and-seek, carry-me, read-it-again barrel of fun. I can’t get to her before she’s leaping onto our bed and Gray is issuing a groan as she lands full weight on his chest. Then she disappears beneath the covers, shrieking with delight.

After a few minutes of Victory love-torturing poor, exhausted Gray, I convince her to let him sleep and come downstairs for breakfast. Only toaster waffles will do this morning. We sit together at the table and eat our waffles with peanut butter and jelly. Outside, the rain has stopped and the thick gray cloud cover has parted to reveal a fresh blue sky. The wind is wild. My eyes rest on the place where my visitor stood last night, and I’m only half listening as Victory tells me about the girl who wouldn’t share red during finger painting and the little boy who won’t come to school without his blankie. The events of last night seem not to have affected her in the least.

We bundle up and head outside. The golden sun has emerged, making the beach seem like our place again. At the edge of our path, Victory breaks into a run toward the ocean and expects me to give chase. But something in the sand by the gate has caught my eye, a glint of gold. I bend down and pick it up. It’s a gold necklace, half of a heart.

I’d seen girls at school-those girls with their silky hair and adult bodies, the girls whose boyfriends drove shiny sports cars and walked them to class, brought them roses on Valentine’s Day-wearing necklaces like that. Now I can see how cheap they were, how tacky and common. But back then I always felt a twinge whenever I noticed one hanging around some girl’s slender neck, something akin to jealousy without being quite that. Really, it was more of a sad wondering what it was like to feel a part of something, to be the cherished half of a whole, not to have to beg and act out for attention. It was more of an ache, an awareness of this empty place inside me.

After that night under the strangler fig, I fell hard in love with Marlowe in a way that’s possible only once in your life. I was on fire and burned beyond recognition. I am ashamed of it now, the way I loved him. More than that, I am ashamed of how vividly I remember that love. Even now, when the barometric pressure drops before a thunderstorm and the sky turns that deadly black, I think of the summer he arrived in my life when there were violent, torrential downpours every afternoon. I remember what it was like to love without boundaries, without reason. As adults we learn not to love like that. But when we’re young, we don’t know better than to give ourselves over to it. The falling is so sweet that we never even wonder where we’ll land.

Sometimes I can’t recall what I had to eat yesterday, but that time with Marlowe lives in the cells of my body, even though I’ve tried to forget, even with every horror that followed. I have forgotten so much, but not that. And I remember understanding on some level, even in the throes of it, that it could never last-just like those storms that turn the streets into rushing rivers and whip up dangerous tornadoes but can only sustain themselves for a brief time.

I absorbed each moment like a person going blind, trying to soak up all the color, all the little details: the way he smelled of Ivory soap and charcoal, the way the stubble on his face was sharp against my mouth. The way the wind howled against the thin walls of our trailer, how the rain pounded on the roof, but how we were safe inside, my mother at work or off to visit Frank.

It was my birthday; I’d turned seventeen. My mother made pancakes before she went to work that morning and placed a candle on my stack. Together, she and Marlowe sang to me. My mother gave me a shirt I’d admired during a trip we’d taken to Macy’s, a tiny pink sparkling makeup bag containing a bottle of nail polish, a tube of lipstick, and fifteen dollars, and a card that read, To my beautiful daughter. I think it had a picture of a fairy princess on it. She was sweet that day, a loving mother. I remember that, remember feeling giddy with her attention.

She left after breakfast, giving me a quick hug and a kiss, promising pizza for dinner and a real birthday cake.

“What’s your birthday wish, Ophelia?” he asked me when we were alone, as I cleared the table of our dishes. The question, his grave tone in asking it, put me on guard. He had bizarre, ugly mood swings; I’d grown to fear them already. Not because he’d ever hurt me, but because they took him someplace I couldn’t follow. His gaze would go empty, his body slack. He might disappear like that for hours, then return to me as though he were waking from a nap. I was too naïve to understand that this was not normal. That’s what I tell myself, anyway.

“To be with you,” I said, because I knew that was the answer he wanted. I remember that the sunlight had a way of coming in golden at that time of day. It made the place seem less dingy than normal.

“Forever?” he asked, reaching out his hand. I took it, and he pulled me onto his lap. He held on to me hard, buried his face in my neck. I wrapped my arms around him.

“Forever,” I whispered in his ear, drawing in the scent of him. And I meant it as only a teenage girl could mean it, with a fairy tale in my heart.

He released me and took a small black box from his pocket. I snatched it from him quickly with a squeal of delight that made him laugh. I opened it and saw the gold half heart glinting back at me. He pulled back the collar of his shirt and showed me the other half around his neck.

“You belong to me,” he said as he hung the pendant around my neck. It sounded so strange for a moment, it moved through me like a chill. But when I turned to look at him, he was smiling. No one had ever said anything like that to me. It was a drug-I couldn’t get enough.

I told my shrink about this. I hadn’t told anyone else; I have been ashamed of the way I loved him, of the things I allowed myself to do to keep that love. Just like my mother. Worse.

The doctor said, in that soothing manner of his, “It’s not how we feel about someone that makes us love them, Annie, it’s how they make us feel about ourselves. For the first time in your life, you were the center of someone’s attention, the primary object of someone’s love. Not waiting for a sliver of truth to shine through all your father’s lies or for your mother to put your needs before her need to be with a man. You were the one. At least that’s how he made you feel.”

I heard the truth in that but thought it was a kind of clinical way to look at love. Isn’t it more than that? Isn’t it more than just two people holding up mirrors to each other? I asked him this much.

“In a healthy relationship, yes, there’s much more to it. There’s support, respect, attraction, passion. There’s admiration for the other person, his character and qualities.” Then the doctor asked, “What did you love about him? Tell me about him.”

But when I thought of him, he was a phantom slipping away into the shady corners of my memory. The adult, the woman who had survived him, couldn’t remember what the girl in her had loved.

The cheap necklace glints in my hand. I remember how a tacky piece of jewelry, for a while and for the very first time, made me feel loved. And I hear the echo of a voice, the voice I heard last night on the beach:

When the time is right, I’ll find you and you’ll be waiting. That’s our karma, our bond, Ophelia. I’ll leave my necklace somewhere for you to find. That’s how you’ll know I’ve come for you.

When and under what circumstances Marlowe spoke these words to me, I can’t recall, but they are ringing in my ears now, drowning out the sound of the surf.

“What’s wrong, Mommy?” Victory has come back and is looking at me with an uncertain, worried expression. I’m in space; I’ve already stuffed the necklace in my pocket.

“Nothing, sweetie,” I say, resting my hand on her head.

“You look scared,” she says. She is small, her hair a golden flurry about her in the strong wind.

“No,” I answer, forcing a smile. “Race?”

She takes off in a run, shrieking. I chase her to the water, let her beat me there. When I catch her, I pick her up and spin her in a wide circle, then pull her body to mine and squeeze her tight before releasing her. She takes off again. All the while I pretend I don’t know that my time is up.

12

I am thinking about my daughter as I edge my way along the hall. She is my shield and my weapon. Everything I have done and will do is to keep her safe, so that I can return to her. I force myself to breathe against the adrenaline thumping. Fear has always been my disadvantage. It makes me clumsy and sloppy. I have made so many mistakes acting out of fear.

Now that the engine is off, the ship has started to pitch in the high seas, and my stomach churns. I pause at the bottom of the staircase that leads up to the deck. I can hear the wind and the waves slapping the side of the ship. I strain to hear the sound of voices, but there’s nothing, just my own breathing, ragged and too fast in my ears.

I make my way up the stairs, my back pressed against the wall. My palm is so sweaty that I’m afraid I’ll drop my gun. I grab on to it tightly as I step onto the deck. I am struck by the cold and the smell of salt. The sea is a black roil. The deck is empty to the bow and to the stern; the light on the bridge has gone dark, like all the other lights.

Suddenly I am paralyzed. I can’t go back to the cabin, but I don’t want to move outside. I don’t know what to do. I close my eyes for a second and will myself to calm, to steady my breath. The water calls to me; I feel its terrible pull.

13

There wasn’t much to Detective Ray Harrison. At least there didn’t seem to be at first blush. He was a man you’d pass in the grocery store and wouldn’t glance at twice-medium height, medium build, passable looks. He’d hold the door for you, you’d thank him and never think of him again. But watching from an upstairs window as Detective Harrison approaches the house, my heart is an engine in my chest. The gold necklace in my pocket is burning my thigh. I go downstairs to greet him before Esperanza can get to the door and let him in.

I remember his face from last night; he’d seemed nice. Kind and without artifice. I’d liked him. But there’s something else I see in him as I open the door that I don’t like: suspicion. Today he’s a wolf at my door.

“Detective Harrison,” I say, offering my best fake smile. “Are you checking in on us?” I keep my body in the door frame, careful not to welcome him in with my words or gestures.

He smiles back at me, squints his eyes. I notice a few things about him: His watch is an old Timex on a flexible metal band, his breath smells faintly of onion, his nails are chewed to the quick. “Everything all right here last night after we left?”

“Fine,” I say with a light laugh and a wave of my hand. “I think Esperanza overreacted a little by calling the police.”

He keeps that slow, careful nod going, his eyes looking past me into the house. “You seemed pretty freaked out yourself,” he says.

Freaked out. It strikes me as an odd turn of phrase, unprofessional and ever so slightly disrespectful.

“It was just the moment,” I say. “Today in the sun, it all seems a little silly, to tell you the truth. I’m kind of embarrassed about the whole thing-you all showing up like that. I almost wish there had been a real reason for the cavalry to come riding in.” I’m talking too much.

“That’s what we’re here for,” says the detective.

An uncomfortable beat passes. “I was wondering, though,” he says, “if I could ask you a few more questions.”

“Regarding?”

“Can I come in?”

I have a hard grip on the door; I can hear the blood rushing in my ears. “I don’t know what else we have to discuss,” I say. “I told you everything that happened last night.”

“It’ll just take a minute, Mrs. Powers.” His tone has shifted from friendly and chatty to slightly more serious. He has stopped nodding and smiling and has fixed me with his gaze.

I find myself moving aside to let him in, in spite of knowing that this is a mistake. But I don’t want to seem like I have anything to hide. So I force another smile and offer him a glass of water, which he declines. He seems to look around and take inventory as I escort him into the living room.

“If you don’t mind my asking, what kind of work do you and your husband do?” he says as he makes himself comfortable on the couch. Everything I liked about him last night is gone. I don’t see the kindness and the empathy I imagined in him. His eyes seem narrow and watchful now. There’s an unpleasant smugness emerging.

I have the feeling it’s a mistake to lie, but I do it anyway. Force of habit. “I’m a stay-at-home mom, and Gray is an insurance investigator.”

He turns up the corners of his mouth. “But that’s not really the truth, is it, Annie? Can I call you Annie?”

I don’t answer, just keep my eyes on him.

“Your husband and his father own a company, Powers and Powers, Inc. Isn’t that right?”

I give him a shrug. “It’s in the interest of our safety that no one around here is aware of that.”

“I understand. Can’t be too careful in his business.”

“Detective, what does this have to do with anything?” I ask. I have stayed standing by the archway that leads into our living room. I lean against the wall and keep my arms wrapped around my middle.

“It could be relevant. Your intruder last night might have something to do with your husband’s work.” He takes out a small notebook, flips through its pages. “They call themselves security consultants, but it’s a little more than that, right?”

“It’s a privatized military company,” says Gray, entering the room. He has been sleeping, but he doesn’t look it. He’s alert and on guard. The detective is clearly startled, like he expected me to be alone here. He rises quickly and offers Gray his hand.

“Detective Ray Harrison,” he says. “I answered the 911 call last night.”

Gray leans in and gives his hand a brief, powerful shake. “Thanks for taking care of things,” says Gray, his voice flat and cool.

My husband pins the detective with a hard, unyielding gaze, and Harrison seems to shrink back a bit. I notice that he looks past Gray, as if interested in something on the wall. We all stand in an awkward silence for a second, in which Gray crosses his arms and offers neither question nor statement, just a scowl of assessment directed at Harrison.

Finally the detective clears his throat and says, “When I learned the nature of your business, I wondered if it had something to do with the man who followed your wife.”

The detective is looking toward the door now. He hasn’t seated himself again, stands with his hands in his pockets. He does a little rocking thing, heel to toe, toe to heel. That Cheshire-cat look he had is long gone. He’s a coward, I think. The kind of bully who would corner the skinny kid on a playground, then lift his palms and widen his eyes in mock innocence when the teacher comes.

“I really doubt that has anything to do with it,” says Gray with a patient smile. “Most of the work I do is overseas. And in the unlikely event that someone developed a personal vendetta against me, I promise you we’d have more to worry about than someone lurking on the edge of our property.”

The two men engage in a brief staring contest until the detective averts his eyes and brings them to rest on me.

“Well, it was just a thought,” he says. He has a lot more to say, but he won’t say it now. “Sorry to have bothered you.”

Harrison walks toward the door, and Gray follows.

“There was just one other thing,” he says as Gray opens the door for him. “I noticed that Mrs. Powers was born in Kentucky. But I swear I hear New York in your accent, ma’am.”

Noticed where? I wonder. Did he check me out after he left here last night, look at my driving record or something?

“I was born in Kentucky but moved to New York with my family when I was a child.”

Kentucky, land of lenient birth-records release policies. Just a little easily obtained information-birth date, mother’s maiden name-and you’re on your way to a brand-new life. If he keeps asking questions and checks on my answers, these lies won’t hold. But he just gives me a half smile and a long look.

“We’ll keep you posted on the area break-ins and if we learn anything more about who might have followed you on the beach last night,” he says as he moves down the stairs. “Have a good one.”

We wave as he drives off. Gray has taken my hand and is holding it tight. I look at him, and he’s watching the detective’s SUV.

Detective Ray Harrison, on the day he began to suspect that I wasn’t who I was pretending to be, was in a bit of a mess. He wasn’t a corrupt man, not totally. Nor was he an especially honorable one. He was a man who’d made some bad choices, taken a few back alleys, and found himself dangerously close to rock bottom. One wouldn’t have known it to look at him. He drove a late-model Ford Explorer, had never missed a payment on his mortgage, had never in his career taken a sick day. But there was debt. A lot of it. In fact, he was drowning in it. He went to bed and woke up thinking about it, could barely look his wife in the eye lately. It was making him sick; he was vomiting up blood from his ulcer. But it wasn’t the kind of debt you could get help with; he didn’t owe money to Citibank or Discover. The detective had a gambling problem. The problem was that he lost, often and extravagantly. The day before Esperanza’s 911 call, a man to whom he owed money sent the detective a picture of his wife at the mall as she buckled their nine-month-old daughter into her car seat. On the back his debtor had scrawled, Where’s my fucking money?

That’s the hole he was in when he had a hunch about me, a vague idea that I might be hiding something. So he started doing a little poking around, not really going out of his way. A totally blank credit report was the first red flag. A driver’s license granted just five years ago was the second. Finally a birth certificate issued in Kentucky when he was certain he’d heard just the hint of New York in my accent.

Detective Harrison was the kind of man who noticed how much things were worth: our house on the beach, the ring on my finger, the secret I had to keep. He did a little calculating and decided to take a gamble, as he was wont to do.

I don’t know any of this as Gray and I watch him cruise away from the house. His visit is just another bad omen.

14

When I try to visualize Marlowe as he was when we were young, I can’t quite pin him down. The memory writhes and fades away; I can see the white of his skin, the jet of his eyes, the square of his hand, but the whole picture is nebulous and changing, as though I’m watching him underwater.

He is lost to me. Part of that has to do with my blotchy memories. There’s so much that exists in a black box inside me. But part of it has to do with him. Because, like all manipulators, Marlowe was a shape-shifter. He was always exactly what he needed to be to control me-loving or distant, kind or cruel. Maybe I never even saw the real Marlowe. Maybe the doctor was right about love after all, at least this particular brand.

At first Marlowe wouldn’t talk much about his father. If I brought Frank up, he’d change the subject. Or he’d talk about him vaguely in the past tense, the way a person mentions a distant relative he remembers from his childhood. He’d make random comments such as, My father liked the smell of orange blossoms. My father had a red hat like that. Or, My father gave me a baseball bat for my fifth birthday. His memories seemed to visit him in vivid snapshots, bright and two-dimensional. The first time I pressed for more, he went to that dark place. We were talking on my bed, sharing a cigarette I’d lifted from my mother’s purse.

“Didn’t you know what he was doing?” I asked. I took a shallow drag, tried not to cough, and then handed it to him.

“Of course not,” he said. “I was just a kid.”

“How could you not have known?” I asked, staring at my cuticles, which were gnawed and dry just like my mother’s. “You weren’t that young.”

He didn’t answer me, and finally I turned my eyes back to him. It was the strangest thing. He was leaning against the wall, the smoke forgotten in his hand, arms akimbo. He stared at nothing, eyes glazed as though he were daydreaming.

“Marlowe.”

I took the cigarette from him and put it out in the soda can we’d been using as an ashtray, where it extinguished with a sharp hiss. I grabbed him by the shoulders and gave him a gentle shake, thinking he might be horsing around. But he fell softly to his side on the bed, head coming to rest against an old stuffed bear that I’d had since I was a little girl. He stayed like that nearly an hour, as I whispered and yelled, soothed and cajoled, stroked and shook, pleaded and wept. I was about to dial 911 when he returned to himself, drained and dazed.

“What happened?” he asked me, I suppose taking in my tear-streaked cheeks and frightened expression. He was a person waking from a deep sleep, rubbing his eyes and issuing a yawn.

“You, like, checked out,” I said, weary with relief to hear him talking again.

“Oh,” he said with a shrug. “It happens sometimes. Like a seizure or something.”

“It was scary,” I said. “Really scary.”

“It’s nothing,” he said sharply. I didn’t press.

Slowly the grim picture of his life with Frank started to emerge. They went to parks, to churches, and to grocery stores, he told me, in a black beater Eldorado that was always breaking down. Frank Geary was the sad and oh-so-handsome widower, lonely and hardworking, with a good job and a nice house. Marlowe was the beautiful teenage boy without a mother. Together, Marlowe told me, they were the perfect lure for a certain type of woman.

“It was more than just how they looked,” he said. “It wasn’t just the color of their hair or eyes; it wasn’t just their physical bearing. They were like dogs aching for a beating. My father sought the ones that wanted to be punished on some level. In a way he was looking for the ones who were looking for him. He saw it in them. And after a while I saw it, too. I knew the ones that would wind up coming home with us before he did.”

And the women were all the same: on the wrong side of forty, pretty once but fading fast, too thin, never married, aching for the things their friends and sisters had acquired with relative ease. Somehow it just never worked out: This one beat her, that one ran out with her next-door neighbor, the other went to prison for check forgery. They all had a laundry list of failed relationships, histories of abuse and addiction. They were waitresses and topless dancers, convenience-store clerks and motel maids. Frank Geary listened to their sad histories, let them cry on his shoulder, maybe cried a little himself about how much he missed his wife, how hard it was to raise a boy on his own.

According to Marlowe, the seduction usually took only an afternoon. If they didn’t leave the house before dinnertime, they left in the trunk of the Eldorado the next morning. More than three for certain, Marlowe remembered. He wasn’t sure how many more. At the time, of course, he had no idea what was going on, he claimed. He never saw or heard anything that frightened him, right up until the day the police came and took Frank away. I still wondered how he couldn’t have known. What did he think happened to those women who stayed the night and whom he never saw again? But I knew better than to force the issue.

During the years between Frank’s arrest and Marlowe’s appearance on our doorstep, he was shuttled from relative to relative and then finally into foster care. It never occurred to me to wonder why he’d never found a home, why he’d never been in one place more than a few months. I just figured that’s how it was when your father was in prison and your mother was dead. In the housing projects where we’d lived in New York, I’d known enough foster kids to understand that it was difficult to find a place where you were safe and wanted, nearly impossible to find a real home where you could stay, where you were loved.

“Nobody wants the son of a convicted rapist and murderer around their children,” he told me one night. “Not even if he’s part of your own family.”

But I imagine it was more than just that. There was an unsettling quiet to Marlowe, an eerie watchfulness, even back then. At the time this strangeness, as much as it frightened me, also intrigued me.

In the early weeks after Frank’s arrest, Marlowe claimed he didn’t believe the things they said about his father. But over time, away from Frank’s influence, he started to remember things from years back. Once he found a collection of women’s purses in his father’s closet, once a woman’s shoe-a cheap black sandal with a broken heel-under the porch. One morning before dawn, he saw his father put a bundle wrapped in a white sheet into the truck of his car. Old clothes for Goodwill, he told his son.

“These things would come back on me like nightmares,” he told me. “I’d be lying in some strange bed, scared and alone, and I’d remember things I’d seen when I was young. Maybe I was too young to understand them at the time; maybe I needed to be away from him to understand what he was. I don’t know.”

Marlowe started to wonder about the mother that supposedly ran off on them, left them all alone. Though Frank called himself a widower, he’d told Marlowe that his mother had rejected both of them, ran off in the night with some mechanic. Still, Marlowe kept a photo of her in his wallet; it was creased and soft with age. She was a delicate-featured blonde in a flowered sundress, standing under a tree as leaves wafted down around her. She looked at something off frame, her pinkie in the corner of her mouth. He carried this picture with him all the time, even though his father had beaten him once for doing so.

It only occurred to me later that he spoke about these things with very little emotion, that he seemed to have a center forged from ice. I found his tragedy romantic. He was a wounded bird I’d found. I nursed an adolescent fantasy that I could heal him and comfort him.

Meanwhile, of course, my mother nursed her own fantasy. Every six weeks she took a bus to the Florida State Prison, where she got to spend time with her fiancé separated by a sheet of bulletproof glass. She had never held, kissed, or even touched the hand of the man she planned to marry-and possibly never would. She wore this fact like a badge of courage. “But bars and armed guards can’t keep people from loving each other. They can’t stop the Lord’s will,” she’d say.

She spent her free time lobbying for a new trial for Frank. She wrote letters, contacted law firms that specialized in pro bono death-row appeals. The private investigator she hired had told her that Frank Geary’s arresting officer had a career fraught with allegations of excessive force and coerced confessions, that one of his recent arrests and convictions had been overturned. This seemed to give her hope, even though Frank had never confessed to any of the murders; he maintained his innocence all along-even in the face of damning eyewitness testimony.

Apparently when the Eldorado died on him for the last time, Frank was forced to take the contents of his trunk and carry them down the length of a deserted Florida back road. It was dark, and he wouldn’t have seen the woman watching from the window of her house, set back from the road. He might not even have seen the old house at all as he passed by with the load over his shoulders, heading to a sinkhole known to local cave divers as “Little Blue.”

“She was an old woman,” my mother said. “It was dark. She didn’t know what she saw. Frank wasn’t the only man driving an Eldorado in Florida that night.”

The witness had died of a stroke since Frank’s trial. My mother took this as proof that she’d wronged Frank.

“The Lord struck her down for ruining a man’s life,” she said with quiet conviction.

Even the hard physical evidence didn’t discourage my mother: the blood and the blond hair in his trunk, the dead woman’s wallet containing her driver’s license, partially burned in a rusted metal drum in his backyard, fingerprints in his house matching two of the women he was suspected of murdering.

“Cops plant evidence all the time,” she’d say. “And that cop who arrested him? He was dirty. The pressure was on. They needed an arrest, and Frank was the perfect scapegoat.”

I’d stopped arguing with her, but when she sent me to the post office with letters going to the governor, death-row lawyers, and death-penalty activist groups, I threw them in the trash. Even though I didn’t really believe in God, I prayed every night that Frank Geary would die in the electric chair before he had a chance to slip a ring on my mother’s finger beneath the gaze of armed corrections officers in a prison chapel, or see me in the hideous pink dress my mother had bought me to wear as her bridesmaid.

15

While my eyes are closed and I’m paralyzed with fear, I feel the gun snatched from my hand. My lids spring open and I’m face-to-face with Dax.

“What about my instructions eluded you?” he asks in a harsh whisper. He grabs me by the arm and moves me toward the stern.

“Where are we going?” I ask him.

“We have to get off this ship,” he says.

It’s then I notice that his clothes are covered with blood. When he turns around to look at me, I see that his face is smeared with it.

“Off the ship? And go where?” I look out into the angry waters. There’s nothing but black.

“There are islands. There,” he says, and points off into the darkness. I don’t see what he sees. I look around for the other boat I saw in the distance, but now it’s gone, or at least its lights are off and it’s disappeared in the black. I don’t understand what’s happening, but I am emptied out by fear, as if that’s all there is to me. I stop moving, force him to stop with me.

“Where are the other men?”

He doesn’t answer me. He climbs down a ladder at the stern to a platform where a Boston Whaler sits waiting, tied off on one of the cleats. It bucks and pitches like a mechanical bull. It’s so tiny I feel sick just looking at it.

“You must be joking,” I say from the top of the ladder. “Are you trying to get us both killed?”

He looks up at me, reaches up his hand. “Everyone else on this boat is dead,” he says. “We have vastly underestimated our opponent. Leave with me or die here tonight.”

“I don’t understand,” I say stubbornly. A fog seems to have settled in my brain; the whole situation has taken on the cast of dream, of nonreality.

“Dead,” he says loudly, startling me into the moment. “As in not breathing. Ever. Again.”

His words are a punch in the jaw; I’m reeling from the impact. Four other men, all trained paramilitary professionals like Gray, dead. I look back at the boat, where everything is still dark, where there is no movement or sound. It’s a ghost ship. Panic starts to undermine my sanity.

“Who did this?” I ask.

Dax starts moving back up the ladder. “I don’t know,” he answers, not looking at me. “There was a team. Well trained. They thought I was dead, so they left me where I lay.” The wind is kicking up, and he has raised his voice so I can hear him. The water is slapping angrily against the boat, the Whaler knocking against the stern. “I figured they’d come after you next; I thought I’d find you missing or dead. The boat they arrived on? It’s gone.”

“Then let’s get this one moving again.” These waters must be full of sharks. That little boat looks like an hors d’oeuvre tray. Suddenly dying out there seems less attractive than it did before.

He climbs back onto the deck, runs his hands through his hair in a gesture of frustration. “The engine’s dead,” he says flatly. “Whoever has done this disabled the boat. They left you on it. Leads me to believe they’ll be back or that they’ve rigged the boat to explode when they’re far enough away. We need to go. Now.”

“No,” I say.

Dax is looking at me hard. He might have been a handsome guy once, but his eyes tell me something about the things he’s done and seen. His skin is creased and weather-worn; his mouth is a thin, tight line, a mouth that looks as though it has never smiled. He puts his hand on my arm again. I wonder if he’s going to try to muscle me onto the Whaler.

“I want my gun back,” I say, bracing myself.

He squints at me. Then after a second’s hesitation, he takes the gun from his waist and hands it over. “Let’s go,” he says, pulling me back toward the ladder.

“You go,” I say. “I can’t. I need this to end tonight. One way or another. I can’t just keep going and going. I get in this Whaler and then what? We hang out on some island until the sun comes up? Or we drive until the boat runs out of gas? We’re sitting ducks then, too.”

“We’ve been out of contact for over an hour. Another team will come for us before either of those things happens,” he says. He’s yelling now out of frustration, not just so I can hear him. His eyes are scanning the horizon as if he’s already looking for the lights of another ship.

“When they do, bring them back,” I say. I sound calm and sure, not at all how I feel.

“Don’t be an idiot,” he says, tightening his grip. He looks at me with some combination of concern and disdain. “You’re so far out of your league you don’t even know what you’re playing at.”

“You work for me, right?” I ask. He nods. “Then you’re fired.”

He shakes his head in disbelief but releases my arm and doesn’t move to stop me as I run back toward the stairway that leads to the helm. Before I step inside, I hear the engine of the Whaler and turn to see the white of the boat get swallowed by the night. My heart sinks as it disappears. I wonder how big a mistake I’ve just made and what it’s going to cost me.

16

When Victory was first born, I was terrified of her. She was this tiny, swaddled bundle, her small head nearly disappearing in her newborn cap. She wasn’t one of those screaming babies who want the whole world to know they’re here to stay. She was still and quiet, almost observant. When I looked into the deep brown of her eyes, I wasn’t sure what I saw there; she seemed tired and a bit shocked, maybe even disappointed. It didn’t seem as though she’d made her decision whether to stick around or not. Her breathing seemed too shallow, her limbs impossibly delicate. I felt as if she could disappear at any moment. Several times a night, I would startle from sleep and slip over to her bassinet, not to see if she was still breathing but to see if she was still there.

Victory always appeared relieved in Gray’s care, though she seemed even tinier against the wide expanse of his chest. I imagined her issuing a faint sigh and turning up the corners of her mouth just slightly. Sometimes when I was nursing her and she had her wide, watchful eyes on my face, I could swear she was thinking, Are you sure you know what you’re doing here? Are you really qualified for this? With Gray she seemed utterly peaceful, as if she knew that in his thick, capable arms she was totally safe. With me she wasn’t so sure.

I used to dream that she’d be taken from me. In those first heady weeks, the sleep I got was riven with nightmares. I dreamed that the nurses came to the delivery room and shuttled her off, with me screaming after her. I dreamed I brought her to the pediatrician for her first visit and they refused to let me leave with her, citing my obvious lack of competence. I would wake up breathless, shame and rage racing through me like a white-water current.

When I first started going out of the house with her, I was afraid that I would accidentally leave her somewhere, that I would absentmindedly walk off and forget her in the grocery store or at the bank. I imagined in vivid detail tripping and losing my grip on the stroller and watching helplessly as it careened into oncoming traffic, or botching the fastening on the front carrier and being unable to catch her as she fell from it. In other words, I was a basket case most of the time.

“Every new mother has these kinds of feelings,” my shrink would tell me. “It’s a normal response to the massive and unfamiliar responsibilities in your life. Victory relies on you totally for her survival. That’s an awesome realization. Then, of course, there’s your lack of a good role model. Though obviously your mother didn’t do everything wrong. You survived, after all.”

“Just barely,” I said. I always felt this childish wash of anger with anything less than his total indictment of my mother. Especially in conversations that centered on Victory.

“Well,” he said, with a deferential nod, “yes. But consider this: Just because your mother didn’t love you enough doesn’t mean you start with a deficit of love for Victory.”

I didn’t follow, and my expression must have communicated that.

“I’m saying that you don’t need to make up for what your mother didn’t give her little girl-you-by overcompensating with Victory. That doesn’t make you a better mother. A child needs a whole and healthy mother, someone separated from her to a certain degree. Otherwise, when she naturally starts to move away, she will feel as though she’s taking something from you. She’ll feel that you need her too much. It will cause her pain, guilt, impede her emotional development. Does that make sense to you?”

I made the appropriate affirming noises, but I didn’t see how a mother could love her child too much. Seemed like only a man could imply such a thing.

That afternoon, after the detective’s visit, while Victory is still in school and Gray has gone off to do whatever it is he does in a crisis situation, I move my stash to a locker at the bus station in the downtown area.

It’s a small and seedy place about a block away from the police department. A homeless man drinks from something wrapped in brown paper and watches me from the bench where he reclines. I feel his eyes on the back of my neck as I shove my bag into the locker and take the small, orange-capped key. Feeling conspicuous and a bit silly, I wonder what well-intentioned or aboveboard reason someone might have for stowing belongings in a bus-station locker. As I walk back to my car, the homeless guy’s still looking at me. He’s wiry, dirty in a red-and-white checked shirt and jeans, beat-up old sneakers.

I don’t judge him. Once, I woke up to find myself lying on a public bench, unwashed, disoriented; I wonder if this man, like me, is mentally ill. But he doesn’t seem afraid or unstable. If anything, he seems comfortable, resigned. I wonder what he’s thinking about me and my obviously guilty errand as I drive off. But I don’t suppose he’s in any position to judge me, either.

I stop at the gas station on the way back to the house. The only thing more depressing or suspect than a public locker is a gas-station pay phone. Maybe because they remind me of all the miserable calls I made to my father from just such a phone. They make me think of teenage runaways huddled against the rain, succumbing finally to desperation and fear, calling their parents and begging to come home. Or adulterers sneaking off to call their lovers. Only under such bad conditions would one find it necessary or desirable to huddle in the little metal shell, press her mouth and ear against the filthy receiver.

Paying with cash, I buy a calling card from the clerk and then walk over to the phone. I call the number I have memorized.

“Leave a message,” answers a low male voice. “No names. No numbers. If I don’t know who you are, you shouldn’t be calling me.”

His voice brings back memories of a sunny common room, the smell of institutionally prepared food in the air, the jangling and cheering of a television game show, the volume down low. We played Go Fish in our pajamas every day for a month, drawn to each other I suppose because we were the only patients connected to reality at all. Everyone around us drooled and stared, issued the occasional scream, or called out a name.

His name was Oscar, or so he told me. He was depressed, he claimed, suicidal. He’d thought about taking a leap off the Verrazano, but he thought about it too long and the cops came and pulled him back over the railing. “You make enough people disappear and the world doesn’t even seem real anymore. Nothing matters.”

“What do you mean, disappear?” I asked, not sure I really wanted to know.

He cleared his throat, glanced around. He reminded me oddly of that stock image of Albert Einstein, though much younger, with crazy hair everywhere, thick and spiky like pipe cleaners, and bright, clear eyes.

“You’d be amazed how many people want or need to walk away from their lives.”

Like me, I thought, looking at the cards in my hand. “Really?” I said.

“I’m the one they call,” he whispered, leaning in close. He tapped his chest. “I arrange the details.”

“I see,” I said politely.

“Oh,” he said, suddenly indignant. He let his cards tip, and I saw his hand. “You don’t believe me. Because we’re in here.” He swept his arm around the room, at the zombies in repose.

“Well, let me tell you something,” he went on when I didn’t answer. “You got to be someone or know someone to be in this place. They don’t let just anyone in here.”

I stayed silent, remembering how Gray had told me his father knew the doctor who ran this posh and privately funded hospital, that favors were called in. This is a place mainly for former military personnel, lots of Special Forces guys, Gray had said. Guys suffering posttraumatic stress disorder and the like.

“Which leads me to ask, little miss,” said Oscar. “Just who the fuck are you?”

“I’m no one,” I answered.

He gave a soft grunt. “Aren’t we all?”

“Queen of hearts,” I challenged.

“Go fish.” I’d seen the card when he inadvertently revealed his hand earlier. But I drew from the pile between us, anyway. I figured the fact that we were both cheating made us even.

I just say the one-word code Oscar gave me, years ago now, on the night he checked out of the hospital. “Maybe you never need it,” he said. “Maybe you and me never see each other again. But hey, just in case.”

“Vanish,” I say, and hang up.

It seems improbable that he’ll remember me, but I don’t have any choice other than to follow the instructions he gave me back then. Or maybe he was crazy, as crazy as I am, and this call will come to nothing. In any case, as I drive away, I feel light-headed, sick to my stomach that I’ve even taken things this far. I have a kind of vertigo as I lean over the edge of my life and look down. I will just tip over and be gone.

17

Everything that happened next happened so fast that I remember it like a landscape passing outside the window of a moving train. Believe it or not, my mother succeeded in getting Frank a new trial. The young death-row appeals lawyer she found was hot to make a name for himself; a high-profile case like Frank’s was exactly what he needed. After a few phone calls back and forth, and my mother scurrying off to the post office with newspaper clippings and the research compiled by the private investigator, he agreed to bring Frank’s case before a judge.

Between the dirty arresting officer and new testimony from the deceased eyewitness’s ophthalmologist, who claimed that the old woman’s vision was so poor she wouldn’t have been able to see much of anything at night, this lawyer was able to convince a judge that Frank deserved a new trial.

I came home one day to find my mother on the steps of our trailer surrounded by reporters. They flitted around her like moths to light, asking their questions. She looked beautiful and regal; no one would have guessed she was a waitress with a ninth-grade education. She spoke with the authority of someone who’d done her research on the legal system, mimicking all the right phrases, certain of her convictions. I stood in the back of the crowd and listened to my mother crow about her crusade, her faith, her belief in Frank Geary’s innocence. I felt dizzy as I determined from their questions that a new trial would begin in a month.

I pushed my way through the crowd and past my mother, shaking her off as she tried to introduce me to reporters, not hearing the questions they shouted.

“What’s the matter with you?” she complained when she entered the trailer. “Everyone will be looking at us now. We have to show our support for Frank.”

I was speechless. I felt like my chest and my head were going to explode with the sheer force of my anger and disbelief. How could this be happening?

“I told you, Ophelia,” she said triumphantly. “I told you the Lord wouldn’t let an innocent man die.” She was behaving as if he’d already been acquitted and was moving home.

In a desperate rush, I told her all the things that Marlowe had told me, about the purses and the shoe under the porch. She scoffed, pulling her shoulders back and sticking out her chin.

“Marlowe’s testimony was thrown out of court, Ophelia. Do you know why? Because he’s a compulsive liar, just like your father. A child psychologist testified that Marlowe’s statements were unreliable. No one ever found those purses or that shoe.”

“Mom!” I yelled. “He’s a rapist and a murderer. He is going to kill you.”

She slapped me so hard I saw stars in front of my eyes. I stood there for a second, my face burning, my eyes filling with tears. My mother took a step back, closed her eyes, and rubbed her forehead with both hands.

“Ophelia, I swear,” she said in a gasp through her fingers. “You bring out the worst in me.”

I left with her yelling after me and went straight to the pay phone outside the gas station across the street from our trailer park. I was sure this would be the thing that convinced my father to come get me.

“I need to speak to my dad,” I told the woman at the tattoo parlor who accepted my collect call. I think her name was Tawny.

“Ophelia, honey,” she said, sounding strained. “He’s gone.” Something about the way she said it made my throat go dry.

“Gone where?” I asked, trying to keep the shake out of my voice. “When will he be back?”

“Honey, I thought he would have told you.”

“Told me what?” My voice broke then, and I couldn’t hold back my tears or the sob that lodged in my throat. There was a long silence on the line as I wept, cradling the phone in my hand.

“He got himself a new Harley,” she said gently. “He’s taken off on a road trip to California. We don’t know when he’ll be back. It might be a month or more.”

Marlowe’s words hit home then. He’s not coming for you, he’d said.

“I don’t have any way to reach him,” she said. “But if he calls to check in, I’ll tell him you need him.”

I hung up then without another word. I remember holding on to the phone booth for support, feeling as though someone had punched a hole through my center, where a cold wind blew through. I don’t know how long I stood there, crying hot, angry tears.

Drew and Vivian are at the house when I get back, sitting in the kitchen with Gray, drinking coffee and looking grim. They all turn to look at me when I walk through the door from the garage. The small television on the kitchen counter is on, with the volume down. I see the face of the murdered woman again; she looks so sad in the photograph they chose. Couldn’t they have found a picture where she looked happier? I don’t know why it should bother me, but it does.

“What is this?” I say with a fake laugh. “An intervention?” They must know what I’ve done. I check the coffeepot to see if it’s still warm, and I pour myself a cup. I keep my eyes on the black liquid in my mug as I turn around.

“We’re just worried about you, Annie,” says Vivian. “You seem…frayed.”

“I’m fine,” I say, looking up at them.

“Where were you just now?” Gray asks, standing and walking over to me.

“Out. Driving. Thinking,” I answer. I am washed over by annoyance and anger; I’m sick of being treated like a mental patient. It has been more than four years since my last episode. I know why they’re concerned-they’re alarmed by my recent black patch because I haven’t had one of those in Victory’s lifetime. But I don’t answer to any of these people.

When Gray takes me into his arms, my anger fades and is replaced with guilt for lying, for doing what I did. I’m suddenly unsure of myself, of this flight response I’m having to the threats I perceive in my world. The worry on their faces reminds me that it could be real or all of it could be imagined.

“We were wondering if we could have Victory for the weekend, Annie,” says Vivian from the table. She is a big, strong woman, but beautiful and feminine, with a neat steel gray bob, flawlessly smooth skin, and square pink fingernails. She’s always in silk and denim. “It will give you and Gray some time to yourselves.”

I don’t say anything but my anger and annoyance creep back. There’s always this implication that I need time away from Victory. Or is it that they think she needs time away from me, her crazy mother? If I protest, it makes me seem selfish or unstable or both.

“Just tonight and tomorrow night,” says Vivian soothingly. “We’ll take her to school on Monday morning, and you can pick her up Monday afternoon.”

Drew says nothing, just sips his coffee and looks out the window. He never says anything unless absolutely necessary. He lets Vivian do all the talking for him. Gray says his real mother wasn’t strong like Vivian, that the life Drew led was hard on her, that she suffered. She spent some time in hospitals, I think, though Gray’s memories are a touch vague. What he does remember pains him-more than he says, I suspect.

He remembers bringing her glasses of water and small blue pills while she lay in bed, the shades drawn. He remembers listening to her cry at night after she thought he was asleep. There were long absences, when it was just Gray and his father. Your mother needs some rest, son. She’s not well.

I’ve seen pictures of his mother looking thin and unhappy, dwarfed beneath Drew’s possessive arm. In some of the old photographs, there’s a little girl, blond and cherubic like Victory, a sister who died before Gray was born. It was an accident Drew has never been able to discuss, Gray tells me. She drowned somehow…in a pool, in the bathtub or the ocean, Gray doesn’t know. It is an absolutely taboo subject, never once discussed between father and son as long as I’ve known them. The thought of this drowned child, the forgotten girl whose name I don’t even know, makes me shudder. I hate the water.

“I need some time with you,” Gray whispers in my ear. I look over at Drew, who still stares out the window as if he has nothing to do with this. But I know that this is coming from him; Vivian and Gray are his foot soldiers. There have been other conversations like this-about the beautiful house that I never wanted to live in, about the wonderful preschool I thought Victory was too young to attend, about the luxurious family vacations that I didn’t want to take.

I feel trapped, like I have no choice but to agree. There’s no space for me to say no, no way. I don’t want to be away from my child right now, not even for two nights. It will make me seem clinging and desperate in this context.

“It would mean a lot to us, Annie,” Vivian says.

That’s the other thing they do: make it seem like I’m doing them a favor, that if I refuse, then I’d be denying them something after everything they’ve done for me. I move away from Gray under the guise of getting some cream from the refrigerator.

“Sure, Vivian,” I say. “Of course.”

I know they treasure my daughter and that Victory loves every minute she spends with them. She’ll be thrilled, won’t even throw a second glance back at me and Gray. I take my coffee and go up to her room to pack a bag without another word. I can feel all their eyes on me as I leave the room.

After a minute Gray follows me up the stairs.

“Why are you doing this?” I ask when he has entered Victory’s room and closed the door. We are surrounded by smiling dolls and plush animals. The walls are painted blue with clouds, stars on the ceiling. The space is a happy clutter of all manner of toys, a tiny white table with four chairs, stacks of books and games. This is my favorite room in the house, the place I made for my daughter.

“Honestly?” he says, sitting down on Victory’s bed, atop the comforter that is a riot of orange, yellow, and pink flowers.

“I’m concerned. I want her gone for a couple of days while I figure out what’s going on. Don’t you agree?”

I give him a grudging nod and sit beside him.

“And I meant what I said.” He puts a hand on my leg and rubs gently. “We haven’t had a day to ourselves in months. I need some time with you.”

“We have live-in help,” I say. “We have all the time alone we want.”

I let him pull me into an embrace and I rest slack against his chest. I don’t like it when he aligns with Drew and Vivian against me. They all seem so strong, so certain. I am flotsam in their current.

“You do whatever he wants,” I say. I feel him tighten up. It’s an old argument, a sore spot for both of us. Bringing it up is an invitation to rumble.

“That’s not true,” he says stiffly. “And you know it.”

“It is true,” I say as he releases me.

“This is not about my father.” His tone holds a familiar controlled anger, the tone he always has when we fight about Drew, as if there’s a well of rage he would never dare acknowledge.

“Whose idea was it?” I ask. “To get Victory out of the way for a few days so you could figure out what’s going on?”

He walks over to the bookshelf and lifts a snow globe up to the light. He stares into the orb at the pre-9/11 skyline of New York City. He is all hard angles, a dark tower against the sherbet-colored plush of toys and downy blankets. His silence is my answer.

Gray’s working with his father represents a kind of cease-fire. After a troubled adolescence and many years of estrangement in adulthood, Gray and his father have finally come to a demilitarized zone in their relationship. I think Gray likes it there; he doesn’t want to go back to war. I understand this, but I resent it, too. We fight again and again about it, with no resolution.

“You know, I’m not crazy,” I say, apropos of nothing, after a few minutes of silence, each of us isolated by our private, angry thoughts. I just feel I have to assert this.

“I know that,” he says, returning to sit beside me again. He has a look on his face that reminds me he’s seen me at my worst. Sometimes I think those memories prevent him from seeing how far I’ve come. I worry that I’ll always be the crazy girl he found and rescued. Maybe part of him wants me to be that.

“The doctor says I’m stronger than I’ve been since he’s known me.”

“It’s true,” says Gray. “This is not about your mental health. There are real threats we have to assess. Victory is safer with my father than she is with Esperanza, right?”

He’s right, I know he is. Why do I feel bound and gagged by his logic? Why does every nerve in my body tingle at the thought of being separated from Victory right now? But I go along. Of course I do.

Gray and I finish packing Victory’s little pink suitcase, and we go with Vivian and Drew to pick her up at school. She is predictably delighted. Disney is in her future. She kisses us each carelessly and hops into the car seat in the back of Drew and Vivian’s SUV. I see her tiny hand lift above the car seat in a wave good-bye. And they’re gone. I fight the urge to run after the car.

“Why didn’t you just say no?” asks my shrink later that afternoon.

“Because they were right. I am frayed.”

The problem here is that I can’t really tell him about the intruder on my property, the visit paid to my father, the cop and his questions. There’s too much about me that he doesn’t know, that I used to be someone else. That the person I used to be is guilty of some grave mistakes. He thinks I’m Annie Powers, formerly Annie Fowler. He thinks my husband is an insurance investigator. He knows about my dreams, the black patch, my history of fugue and disassociation, my choice to stop taking medication. He knows that I’ve been well and stable since Victory’s birth. He knows a version of my past wherein names have been changed to protect the guilty, myself included. But he’s ignorant of some crucial details and the very real recent threats. I think he must be aware of this, that he knows he’s helping me only as much as I’ll allow.

“Well, even so. You have a right to say what you want, Annie. Even if other people have legitimate and well-meaning reasons for asking something of you, it doesn’t mean you have to comply.”

I know he’s right, and I tell him so. “Anyway, they’re gone.”

“It’s something to keep in mind for next time. You have a right to say no, even if your reasons don’t seem logical to anyone else. Due to traumatic circumstances in your life, you have had breaks from reality when you were unfit to make judgments. But it has been nearly five years since one of these episodes has occurred. You have been dealing with the root cause of your illness, and you are well, even without your medication. You aren’t defined by those moments in your life; don’t allow your husband and in-laws to make that mistake, either.”

He’s right, of course, even with all he doesn’t know. The essential truths of our lives sometimes exist above day-to-day events. He thinks Gray found me in a bus station, that in a fit of altruism he took me to a hospital and, in an unlikely turn of events, fell in love with me during visits he made while I recovered. This is not very far from the truth, without being the whole truth.

“Gray fell in love with you while you were helpless and mentally unstable,” the doctor reminds me.

“So maybe he doesn’t want me to be strong?”

“Is that what you think, Annie?”

“I don’t know.”

Someone like Gray is at his finest when there’s a crisis to be handled. He is the man you want when the sky is falling. But when the sky is not falling, does he feel a little lost? I think about our family and all the things we are forced to conceal, all the secrets we keep.

Florida rests on a network of limestone mazes, a labyrinth of wet and dry caves and crevices referred to as a karst topography. A layer of quartz sand thinly mantles the underground landscape formed by the movement of water through rock over millions of years. It’s another world, filled with dark passages, populated by creatures that couldn’t exist on the earth’s surface. Sometimes I think of Florida’s secret places, its wet darkness, its silent corridors, and I feel right at home.

18

Most of us don’t live in the present tense. We dwell in a mental place where our regrets and grudges from our past compete with our fears about the future. Sometimes we barely notice what’s going on around us, we’re so busy time traveling. Before Victory was born, I could spend whole days trying to sort out the things that have happened to me, the terrible mistakes I’ve made. I marinated in my anger and self-loathing, cataloged all the different ways my parents failed me, cast myself as the victim and played the role like I was gunning for a gold statuette.

Motherhood changed that for me. Victory forced me into the moment. She demanded that I focus on her needs, that I live by her schedule. When I was with her-feeding her, changing her-just looking at her or playing with her, everything in the past and the future fell away. I was aware that we would be together like this for only a short time, that in a heartbeat she’d be walking away from me, living her own life. I didn’t want to waste a second thinking about what might have been, what might be. Love makes you present. So does mortal fear.

I am fully present as I race up the stairs to the bridge. I burst through the door and am confronted by the body of the captain who waved to me earlier. He has a bullet hole between his eyes and an expression of profound peace on his face. I step over him to get to the control panel and nearly lose my footing. The floor is slick with blood. Another body lies in a pile of itself by the door. I register all this but don’t have time to feel the full rush of horror the situation demands.

I stare at the knobs and switches before me. I have never been on the bridge of a ship like this one; I have no idea how to start the engine or even what to do next if I succeed. Outside, there is nothing but pitch black. It’s bitterly cold, my ragged breath visible on the air, but I’m sweating from stress. I start randomly pressing buttons and turning knobs, but after a few fruitless minutes I give up. I sit in the captain’s chair and take in the scene-the dead night, the dead ship, the dead men around me, the only person who could have helped me gone because I sent him away. My mind is racing through my limited options. Did I really send Dax away because I wanted to face down my enemy? Or did I do it because I wanted to surrender? I don’t know. But I do know I have to take responsibility for this desperate moment, at least partially. I am as guilty as anyone for how my life has turned out.

My fingers reach for the gold pendant at my neck. I feel the jagged edges of the half heart. When I left my family behind, I put it back on for the first time in five years. I did this to remind myself that he was right: I did belong to him. And until I claimed myself, I always would.

I am swallowed by the silence. I have never heard such quiet. I close my eyes and pray to a God I’m not sure exists. Then I hear a distant hum, a speedboat engine. Hope and dread compete for control over my chest. Either reinforcements have arrived or I am about to make my last stand. Only time will tell.

19

About a week after it hit the news that my mother had succeeded in her lobbying to getting Frank a new trial, a woman came by the trailer to see her. She knocked loudly on the door, and I opened it, expecting to see our landlord come to collect late rent-an all-too-familiar scenario. But standing there instead was a tiny woman with watery eyes and a quivering line for a mouth.

“I’m here to see Carla March,” she said. Her voice was timid, little more than a raspy murmur. But there was an odd resolve there, too, an unmistakable mettle to her bearing.

“She’s working,” I said. “She’ll be back in a few hours.”

“I’ll wait,” she said. Before I could say anything else, she moved over to one of the white plastic chairs we kept outside by the door. My mother had imagined us sitting out there in the evenings. But the humidity and the mosquitoes kept us inside beneath the A/C. The stranger sat herself firmly down, clasped her pocketbook in her lap, pulled her shoulders back, and stared off in the direction from which she’d arrived.

“I mean, like, four hours,” I said, wondering if she’d misunderstood. “Maybe more.”

“That’s fine, young lady,” she said without looking at me again, and pulled a Bible from her purse. Her hands were covered with dry and split patches of skin. Her skin was deeply lined, and there were the dark smudges of fatigue under her eyes. Still, she had a palpable aura of pride and righteousness in spite of the shabby condition of her apparel-a cotton floral-print skirt with the hem hanging, a white button-down blouse, yellowed at the neck and cuffs, white shoes covered in polish to hide the cracked and graying leather. She made me nervous; I didn’t want her waiting there.

“What do you want?” I asked her.

She turned her head toward me, said clearly, “I want to speak to your mother, and I’m not leaving until I do.” Her tone brooked no further questioning.

I went inside and watched television, did my homework, and got dinner started. All this time the woman waited outside, reading, her head nodding as if in agreement with some unseen person. I tried to call my mother, but the grouchy German man she worked for wouldn’t let her come to the phone.

“It’s not possible,” he barked at me, and hung up.

As the afternoon turned to evening, the woman waited. Finally I saw her rise from her seat as my mother approached the trailer slowly, smoking a cigarette. She was lost in thought, her eyes on the ground. She didn’t see the woman until she was nearly at the door, where she let the cigarette drop and stamped it out with her foot.

“Are you Carla March?” I heard the woman ask.

I opened the door and watched as the woman blocked my mother’s path and held something out to her.

“Who are you?” my mother asked sharply. “What do you want?” She looked tired; I could tell she’d had a hard day.

“My name is Janet Parker,” the woman said, squaring her shoulders. “This is a photograph of my daughter, Melissa.”

My mother’s face paled. “You need to get out of here right now,” she said softly. I saw her eyes dart around, checking to see if anyone was watching them. “You have no right to be here.”

Janet Parker didn’t give way and didn’t lower her hand. Finally my mother released an angry breath and snatched the photo. I could see that her fingers were shaking as she held it up, squinted at it in the dimming light of evening.

“My daughter was a good person who died a horrible death,” Janet Parker said as if she’d practiced the words a thousand times. “She didn’t deserve to die like that.”

My mother tried to push past her, but Janet wouldn’t let her, grabbed hold of her wrist.

“Frank Geary killed her,” she said, her voice climbing to a quaking yell. “He beat her, strangled her, and raped her as she died.” She paused a second, tried to compose herself. Her voice was hoarse as she went on. “Then he dumped her body in a sinkhole.”

She stopped again, her whole body starting to shake visibly. My mother seemed hypnotized by the woman, stared at her wide-eyed. Janet Parker took a deep, ragged breath. This time it was like a levy had burst; her voice came out in a wail. “And she was there, floating in the cold, dark water for three months. My baby. Alone in the dark, cold water.”

My mother let the photo drop to the ground and kept her eyes down as she wrested her arm away from Janet Parker and moved toward the door.

“You have a daughter!” the woman howled, throwing a pointed finger in my direction. “Look at her. Young and beautiful, with everything before her.”

I gaped at her as my mother pulled me from the doorway and took my place there.

“The only thing that gave me any peace at all was the knowledge that he’d die for what he did,” Janet Parker said, more quietly. “That he’ll burn in hell.” She wasn’t yelling anymore, but the pain in her voice was embarrassing. I felt like I should avert my eyes, but I couldn’t turn away from her.

“Frank Geary is an innocent man, wrongly convicted,” said my mother. She sounded weak and foolish, her righteousness shallow before the depths of Janet Parker’s abyss of grief and rage. “I’m sorry for your loss. But Frank didn’t kill your daughter.”

The woman lowered her head and took in a deep breath. “They found her purse in his house,” she said, her face flushed and wet with tears she didn’t bother to wipe away.

“That evidence was planted,” my mother said. “I’m sorry.”

My mother shut the door on Janet Parker then. The other woman ran to the door and began pounding on it with both fists.

“He killed her! He killed my little girl! My baby! My little girl!” Her voice took on the pitch and quality of a roar. She kept pounding and yelling, even as a crowd of people gathered around the trailer.

My mother locked herself in her room, and I sat paralyzed in the kitchen listening to Janet Parker’s terrible baying, which continued even as the police arrived and hauled her away. I never forgot the sound of her voice; years later it remains in my mind the very sound of grief and outrage. It chilled me then; I knew it was an omen.

After she was gone, my mother came out of her room.

“God,” she said with a harsh laugh. “What a crazy bitch.”

She left the trailer and returned a few minutes later with a six-pack from the convenience store across the street. She popped the lid on one and sat down in front of the television but didn’t turn it on. She sat staring, silent. I wondered if Janet Parker’s words were ringing in her ears, as they were in mine. The beer was gone in under ten minutes. She rose, got herself another, and sat back down. There was no such thing as one beer where my mother was concerned.

I left her to it, went to my room, and closed the door. As I lay in bed a while later, I heard her stumble from the trailer and knew she was on her way to the convenience store for more. My mother liked to drink. It was a mad dog she kept on a chain. When it got loose, it chewed through our lives.

I knew how it would go. She’d drink until she passed out tonight. Tomorrow she’d be hungover and mean. She’d fight it for a few more days, then start sneaking booze when she could. Soon we’d be back to where we were before she found Jesus and got sober the last time-with her stumbling in from wherever, enraged or maudlin, sickly sweet or violent, causing some kind of scene until she passed out on the floor or over the toilet. Eventually she’d lose her job. I could see we were in the wide, early circles of a downward spiral.

A few weeks later, my mother and Frank were married on either side of a sheet of bulletproof glass. As if things couldn’t be more ugly and uncomfortable, Frank forced Marlowe to stand in for him beside my mother, put the ring on her finger, and offer her a chaste kiss on the cheek. My boyfriend became my stepbrother before my eyes. I watched in horror as my mother and her new husband leaned their bodies against the glass that separated them until guards dragged Frank back to his cell.

On the bus my mother cried all the way home in the tatty, short wedding dress she wore under a raincoat. Marlowe had some kind of look on his face that I couldn’t read. I tried to take his hand so my mother wouldn’t see. He pushed me away cruelly. I went to the back of the bus to sit alone, hollowed out and numb. After a while my mother fell asleep and Marlowe moved back beside me. He took my hand and rested his head on my shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

I thought about my father and his false assurances and then how he’d left without a word. I thought about what my mother had told me about Marlowe, that he was a liar just like my dad. The bus smelled like cigarettes and vomit. I leaned my head against the windows and watched the orange groves roll by.

With the death-row wedding and Frank’s new trial starting just a week later, I became a pariah at school. I was no one before all that; I was quiet and flying under the radar, doing well but not well enough to attract attention. I wasn’t especially ugly or noticeably sexy, so no one even saw me. As the trial dragged on, though, people had somehow become confused by the media coverage and thought I was Frank’s daughter. Someone left a dead bird in my locker; someone tripped me in the hallway; someone flung spaghetti at me in the cafeteria. I wept in the bathroom, trying to wash the sauce out of my hair.

And then, just when I thought things couldn’t get worse, Frank was acquitted. My mother’s prayers had been answered. Her husband was coming home.

20

When I return from my appointment, the house has an aura of emptiness. There will be no mealtime negotiations (Eat three pieces of broccoli, Victory, and then we can have dessert), no bath-time adventures (the race between Mr. Duck and Mr. Frog continues), no quiet time in Victory’s room before she drifts off to sleep. All the comforting rituals of the day have been suspended.

As I pour myself a cup of coffee-not that I need any more caffeine-I hear Esperanza in the laundry room. I call her name, but she doesn’t answer. I decide to wait awhile before I tell her she can have the rest of the evening off. I don’t want to be alone, knocking around this house that never feels quite like home unless Victory is in it, too.

Gray has gone to the offices of Powers and Powers, Inc., in the city just forty minutes away-for what, I don’t know. I have been there myself only a couple of times. It’s a small space with an open floor of cubicles and a couple of conference rooms with long wooden tables and ergonomic swivel chairs, big flat-screen monitors, and state-of-the-art video-conferencing equipment. It’s like any other office where any other business is conducted-antiseptic, impersonal, the smell of bad coffee or burned microwave popcorn wafting from the break room. The printer jams, someone has to change the enormous bottle on top of the watercooler, people stick pictures of their kids on the sides of their computer monitors.

Gray’s work is not as Mission Impossible as it sounds. After the end of the Cold War, firms like this have begun to play a role in world warfare in a way that had always been reserved for the military. Powers and Powers, Inc., refer to themselves as private security consultants, as Detective Harrison mentioned, and that’s accurate. But they have also sent their operatives to help suppress the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone, end the crisis in the former Yugoslavia, and support the rebuilding effort in Kosovo. At their best, privatized military companies provide targeted and specialized services formerly associated with government military forces. When working in conjunction with established and recognized states, they can be very effective. If, however, they operate without conscience-and there has been enough of this to make people worry-these companies, employing the most highly trained paramilitary personnel throughout the world, can have a destabilizing effect on established states.

Powers and Powers employs a staff of just under a thousand former Special Forces and elite law-enforcement personnel. Their services range from hostage negotiation to emergency response, from arms training to small tactical operations to private security. They hire out their services to governments, corporations, and individuals. There has been a lot of controversy about the industry, so Drew and Gray prefer to keep a low profile. Few who know us, in fact, know what they do. Even other tenants in their building don’t know the true nature of their work. And even I don’t have any knowledge of their specific operations at any given time. I find I don’t mind this. I guess I’m more comfortable than most with secrets and lies.

I take advantage of Gray’s trip to the office and go down to an Internet café on the beach, order a latte, and log in to an account I created a long time ago. Amid the slew of spam, there’s a message from Oscar. It reads, “What’s the problem, Annie?”

I’m surprised that he remembers me, though he assured me he would. I’m also a little frightened. Part of me was hoping that he’d no longer be operating.

I sit for a second, not sure how to answer his question. I look around me and spot a young girl in a wetsuit hanging open to reveal a bikini top. She’s tan and bleached blond, sipping an energy drink and surfing the Web. There’s an old man in a tank top, shorts, and flip-flops eyeing her over his coffee. You can tell he thinks he’s still got it. But he doesn’t.

“I have reason to believe the past is about to catch up with me,” I write. “I need an escape hatch.”

I send the message and wait, sip on my latte. It’s weak and foamy; I wish for New York City coffee, coffee that’s like a punch in the face. There’s a television mounted in the corner of the café tuned to CNN. On the screen: a gallery of murdered women and a caption that reads, COPYCAT? The sound is down, and white closed captions scroll across the screen. “…similar to the murders that took place nearly ten years ago, less than fifty miles from here. But the man accused and convicted of those crimes was killed when…” I look away, my heart racing for some reason, a deafening rushing sound in my ears. I don’t want to see any more.

I check the e-mail in-box. There’s already a message waiting.

“I’ll consider myself on standby,” it reads. “In the meantime start telling people you’re taking up a new hobby. Tell people you want your scuba certification. When you’re sure you’re ready, you know what to do. Don’t be hasty. This is for keeps.”

I finish my coffee and reflect on his words. Sitting in the café watching the old man try his game with the surfer chick, everything takes on a nebulous unreality, as though I’m waking from one of my dreams. I remind myself that nothing is done yet. I’m still okay. I’m still Annie Powers.

After a while I leave the café and walk toward my car. I have a terrible headache behind my right eye. As I put the key in the lock, I see the girl I noticed at Ella’s party. She’s standing over by the entrance to the café I didn’t see her when I first came out. She’s leaning against the masonry wall, staring at me with that same expression, looking more unkempt than I remembered but still waifishly pretty. As I move toward her, she turns and starts to walk away quickly. I follow.

“Hey,” I call after her, though why I am following her or what I’ll say when I catch up to her, I have no idea. I just feel this desperation to know her name. She takes a left, is out of sight, and I pick up my pace almost to a run. But when I make the turn, she’s gone. I look up and down the street. She’s nowhere to be seen. My heart is pounding as though I’ve just run a marathon; a familiar panic is blooming in my chest. I get back to my car, shut and lock the door. My airways are constricting, and there’s a dance of white spots before my eyes. It’s a full-blown panic attack. I try to breathe my way through it, like my shrink has taught me. I turn on the car and blast the A/C; the air is hot at first, then chill. I start to calm down. I catch sight of myself in the rearview mirror. My face is a mask of terror.

“What is wrong with you?” I say aloud. “Pull yourself together.”

After a while, when I can breathe again and the inner quake has subsided, I drive home. My headache has reached operatic proportions.

Gray is waiting for me at the kitchen table when I return home.

“Where’d you go?” he asks with false lightness.

I’m sure he knows I moved the things under our bed. I sense he’s worried about me and what I might do. What I love about him is that he always gives me my space, gives me the benefit of the doubt.

“To the store,” I say, putting a plastic grocery bag filled with things I didn’t need on the counter-moisturizer, shampoo, nail polish. He gets up and comes over to me. He sifts through the bag, and I know he’s not fooled by my pointless purchases. He takes my hand.

“Sit down a second,” he says, indicating a chair.

As I take a seat, he slides a poor-quality photograph printed from a color printer onto the table in front of me. The man in it has a pocked, fleshy face, with a bent nose and dead, mean eyes.

“Do you know who this is?” he asks.

My headache is so bad now it’s making me sick to my stomach. Something black starts to spread across the inside of my brain.

I rub my head. “No,” I say.

“Are you sure?”

I look again, but I feel like I can’t focus on the face. “I don’t think so.”

He sits down next to me and rests his eyes on the photograph, taps it with his finger.

“I went to the office and called your father from a secure line. I got a description of the guy who came to see him. Turns out he also left a name and phone number. The name is a fake, of course. The number is just a pager. But the name, Buddy Starr, is on a list of aliases for a guy called Simon Briggs. He’s a bounty hunter. Not as in bail bondsman, more like a private contractor. He’s the guy you hire when you want to find someone and aren’t necessarily worried in what condition. His list of criminal associations is long and colorful.”

“Why would he be looking for Ophelia?” I ask. The sun streaming in through the windows is way too bright. I cover my eyes.

“That’s what we need to find out,” he says. “The point is, though, that he’s likely working for someone.”

I stare at the picture, then close and rub my eyes again.

“Hey, you okay?” Gray says after a minute. “You look pale.” He puts his hand on my arm.

“I just have a headache.” I feel his gaze, but I don’t meet his eyes.

“Maybe you’ve seen this guy before and you don’t remember?”

“No,” I say, not wanting to admit that it’s not only possible but even likely, given my reaction to the photo. I put my head down in my arms. They come on hard and fast like this for me. If it gets any worse, I could be lying in a cocoon of pain for hours.

“I don’t know,” I admit.

I let Gray lead me upstairs. He puts me into bed and closes the shades. I hear him take my migraine medication from the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, run water into the glass by the sink. When he returns to me, I sit up and swallow the pills. He’s very good at taking care of me.

That afternoon Detective Harrison finally got lucky. A few telephone calls to the records office in the Kentucky town where Annie Fowler was born yielded a faxed copy of her death certificate. She and her infant son had been killed in a road accident when she was just twenty-one years old.

“A real tragedy,” the records clerk told him, over the phone. “She went to school with my son.”

“That’s terrible. How sad,” he said, trying to keep the excitement out of his voice. “Do you mind telling me what she looked like?”

“Red hair and freckles, sweet-faced, petite-maybe not even five foot two, and a little on the plump side. A lovely girl, though. Just really…pretty.” Nothing like the Annie Fowler he knew.

“I come from a small town myself,” the detective told her, though that wasn’t quite the case. It was just a way he had to lube people up, get them talking. “I know how hard a tragedy like this can be for everyone.”

“It’s true. It’s true,” the clerk said, sounding wistful and as though she were tearing up. “Her parents have never been the same.” Then, “I am curious, sir. What’s your interest?”

“I can’t say much, ma’am,” mimicking her polite tone. “But I have reason to believe that someone might have used her information to create a false identity.” He paused when he heard the clerk gasp. “Since her death have you had any queries at your office for her birth certificate?”

In fact, there had been. A young man came to the records office just a few months after Annie Fowler’s death, claimed that he’d been adopted, was searching for his birth family. He thought Annie might be his sister.

“He was distraught when I told him about her death. But I was acquainted with her parents. If there had been a baby given up for adoption, I’d have known it. Anyway, he asked for copies of her birth and death certificates. I wasn’t sure why he wanted them, but he had the required information and money to pay the fee.”

“Do you remember his name?”

“No, I surely don’t. But I might have it somewhere. Can I call you back?”

“I’d appreciate it.”

That afternoon Detective Harrison didn’t know that the real Annie Fowler had died just a few months before Ophelia March was killed in a car accident in New Mexico. He didn’t know who I was or what I was hiding, but he knew who I wasn’t. And he felt, as all gamblers do just before they lose it all, that he was about to have the biggest win of his life.

21

During the awkward dinner the four of us shared on Frank’s first night home, my mother doted, Marlowe stared at the table, and I watched Frank with a kind of numb horror as he piled food onto his plate and ate with gusto.

“We’re a real family now,” my mother said as she sat beside Frank around the cramped Formica table in our trailer.

“That’s right,” Frank said, patting my mother on the arm. She nuzzled up to him like a house cat.

I was too depressed even to be a smart-ass about it. All I could do was stare at Frank’s hands and think about Janet Parker’s mournful wailing, about the way her daughter had died. I’d never once believed that Frank was innocent. His trial had hinged on the charges against the investigating officer, the suppression of evidence that officer claimed to have found at Frank’s house, and the testimony of the ophthalmologist who the prosecutor claimed had been paid off. Basically, Frank got lucky. And the hands he’d used to murder an unknown number of women were now placing mashed potatoes on my plate.

Frank was a tall, quiet man with narrow blue eyes and long, slender fingers. His blond hair was going white, and his thin lips disappeared into the flesh of his face. He spoke softly, almost in a raspy whisper. I felt him watch me as I ate.

“I see a lot of your mother in you, girl,” he said, finally breaking the silence that hung over the table. His words sounded like a warning, and I felt the hairs rise on my arms. My mother shot me a black look. I made a mental note to draw as little attention to myself as possible.

Outside our trailer there were a few protesters, family members of Frank’s victims. In subdued but persistent voices, they chanted, “Murderer, murderer, murderer.” We all pretended not to hear.

“We’ll be leaving here by week’s end,” said Frank, getting up from his seat and walking over to the window. With those ghoulish fingers, he pushed the curtain back, releasing a heavy sigh as he looked out. The chanting grew louder.

I remember thinking, If he were innocent, he’d be angry. He’d be railing against the injustice of those people chanting outside his door. But he seemed simply annoyed, perhaps even disgusted, as though he looked down on their grief and their rage. They were emotions he didn’t understand. He turned and saw me staring. His eyes were flat, empty, rimmed by dark circles. They made me think of the sinkhole where Melissa Parker’s body had floated. There was nothing in his gaze that I recognized.

The state paid Frank some restitution money, about ten thousand dollars. And he’d used that and some other money he had to put a down payment on a horse ranch in the middle of Nowhere, Florida. True to his word, a week after he was released, we were living there. It happened so fast I didn’t even have time to protest. All we brought from the trailer were our clothes. Everything else he declared as junk to be left behind.

Our new house sat back on twenty acres of property, fully a half mile from the road. We were completely isolated from our neighbors, flanked by orange groves to the east and a dairy to the west, a half-hour drive from the nearest town. As we rode up the long drive for the first time, my only thought was that I could scream until my head popped off and no one would hear me.

I awoke my first morning there in my new room; outside my window, sunlight glinted on the dewy grass. I could hear the soft, slow clopping of the horses’ hooves as they milled about their pen, could hear them snuffling and neighing as if in quiet conversation. It would have been the nicest place I’d ever lived if I hadn’t been so sad and so afraid of the man sleeping in my mother’s bed.

Frank’s presence in our lives was a blanket of snow-everything grew white and silent. Including my mother, who seemed brittle and frozen, following blankly in his thrall. She worked the ranch like a hired hand, cooked and cleaned as I’d never seen her do. She hardly looked at me, except to assign me chores. She touched me only when she took my hand as we said grace before meals.

As for me, I just was numb, on autopilot. I dressed myself carefully in baggy, formless clothes so as not to attract any attention from Frank. I went to my new school during the day and, when I got home, did the work I was assigned around the ranch. I tried futilely to reach my father every night. My desire to rage and fight with my mother was drained by my fear of Frank. It was as if he emitted a noxious energy that sucked the life from all of us.

I thought Marlowe and I would be gone before I was living under the same roof with Frank Geary. But Marlowe’s promises of rescue seemed to have evaporated. Something about Frank’s presence changed him, too; he became as unnatural as his father. There was no trace of the passion he’d claimed to have for me, except the dark looks he gave me when he thought no one was watching. I trailed him, trying to steal moments alone with him. But he avoided me until one night I awoke to find him standing in my room.

I sat up in my bed, my center flooding with hope. “Marlowe.”

He didn’t answer me.

“What’s wrong with you?” I asked when he stayed in the corner of my room, unmoving. After a long minute, my hope evaporated; a dark flower of fear bloomed in its place. I wondered how long he’d stood there watching as I slept, and why.

“He can’t know there was ever anything between us,” he said finally, moving into the light where I could see him.

“I thought we were leaving,” I said. I kept my voice flat and unemotional. I didn’t want him to know my heart-how afraid I was, how much I needed him.

“We can’t,” he said quietly. “He’ll find us. And when he does, he’ll kill you. I’m not allowed to love anything.”

I was too desperate to hear the sickness in his words. I heard only that he was letting me down, like everyone else. “You promised me,” I said, my voice sounding childish even to my own ears.

“That was before,” he said tightly. “I never thought he’d be released.”

I’d seen the way Marlowe followed his father around, looking at him with begging eyes, waiting for scraps of attention. “You don’t want to leave him,” I said.

“You don’t understand,” he said. He came and sat on the edge of my bed. “No one leaves him.”

Marlowe had seemed so strong, so much wiser than anyone I’d known. Now I could see he was just a scared kid, just like me.

“You’ll be eighteen in seven months,” he said weakly. “You can legally leave then. I’ll be eighteen next month, and I’m going to join the marines. He won’t be able to get to me there.”

I was washed over by hopelessness, and I turned to weep into my pillow. He didn’t move to comfort me, just sat there as I cried. I thought there was no end to the well of sadness within me. I thought I didn’t have enough tears.

Then, “There might be a way, Ophelia. I just don’t know if you’re strong enough.”

Something in his tone chilled me, even as I felt a little lift. “What are you talking about?” I said into my pillow.

“It’s the only way,” he said, moving into me. He rubbed my back with the flat of his hand. It was the first time he’d touched me in weeks. I sat up and moved into his arms, let him hold me. It felt so good to be close to him again, to be close to anyone.

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said. He bent down and kissed me. My body lit up for him. He slipped beneath the covers with me, his hands roaming my skin. My mother had been wrong about me: I’d never made love to Marlowe. I was still a virgin then. We only engaged in these heavy petting sessions. Now I see I was such a child, so starved for affection. I just wanted the physical closeness of another person; this felt like love to me. After a few minutes, when I was hot and aching and alive with my need for him, he pulled away.

“Forget it,” he said. “You’re not ready. You’re too young.”

He got out of the bed and went back to the window. “This time next month, I’ll be gone,” he said.

“I’m not too young,” I said. I curled myself up into a ball and hugged my knees to my chest. “Don’t leave me here.”

He came back to the bed. I lifted a finger and traced the lines of his mouth.

“I’ll do anything,” I said.

“Say it,” he said.

“I belong to you.”

“Annie!”

I awake to find Gray holding me by the shoulders. “It’s okay. Wake up.”

I am drenched in sweat, my heart thudding. Mercifully, the pounding in my head has subsided. But I feel weak, as if I’ve just run a hundred miles.

“What happened?” I ask, disoriented. I can’t tell if it’s day or night.

“You were dreaming,” he says. He pushes a few damp strands of hair away from my eyes. “What were you dreaming about?”

I try to shake the fog from my brain, to grasp at the faded images from my dream that are already slipping away. I move away from Gray and turn on the light.

“I think I’m remembering,” I tell him. He looks at me with some odd mixture of hope and fear.

“What? What do you remember?”

“I don’t know,” I say after a minute. Suddenly I don’t want to tell him what I saw in my dream. I don’t want to say what I think I may have done.

“Tell me.”

I close my eyes and rest against him. “Gray, do you ever wonder what it would be like to be married to someone normal?”

He laughs a little. “I’d die from boredom.”

“Seriously.”

“You’re normal,” he says, pulling back a little so that he can look into my face. “You’re fine.”

I wonder how he can say that, if he really believes it to be true. I find I can’t hold his eyes; I lean against him again so that I don’t have to look away.

“She can never know who I’ve been and the things I’ve done,” I say into his shoulder. “I can never let Ophelia touch her. You know that, Gray.”

“Ophelia was never the problem.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I know,” he says. “I know.”

22

When people think of Florida, they think of oranges and pink flamingos, palm trees and beaches, the blue-green ocean. They think of Disney and margaritas. Florida is light and fluffy, kitschy, a place for the family vacation. And it is all that, of course. But it has a feral heart, a teeming center that would rage out of control if not for the concrete and rebar that keeps it caged. There are vast untamed places: shadowy mangroves, deep sinkholes, miles of caverns and caves, acres of living swamps. There is a part of Florida that will recover itself when it gets its chance. Its wet, murky fingers will reach out and close us into its fist. This is how I feel about my life.

I walk through the mall with Ella. Anyone looking at us as we wander through the shops would see two women with time and money to burn. They might assume that the worst of our problems is a cheating husband or a kid with ADD. As I examine an obscenely expensive handbag at Gucci, I hear a shotgun blast ringing in my ears. I smell smoke. I see Frank Geary’s chest exploding and watch as he falls backward down a flight of stairs. I hear my mother screaming. I don’t know where these bloody images have come from, if they are memory or dream.

“You seem distracted,” Ella says as we sit down to drink espresso in the food court. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah,” I say lightly. I keep seeing Simon Briggs in my mind’s eye. He’s the headache I can’t shake. His face, so rough and ugly, is familiar without being recognizable. There are so many things like this that I can’t quite remember-people, events slipping through my fingers like sand. “I’m just…not sleeping much.”

“Well,” she says knowingly, “you’re probably still freaked out by that incident on the beach. That would keep me up at night.”

Freaked out. There’s that phrase again.

“I guess so,” I say vaguely. We both take a sip of coffee.

I let a beat pass. Then, “I’m going to get my scuba-diving certification.”

Ella peers at me over her little cup. “I thought you hated the water.”

“I do,” I say, taking another sip of the black, bitter coffee. “But, you know, I have a daughter now. I want her to see me work to conquer my fears.”

She gives a careful nod. She’s very diplomatic, slow to judge. I like this about her.

“Maybe you should start with swimming lessons,” she suggests delicately. “You know, in a pool?”

“Baptism by fire,” I say with a smile.

She looks at me uncertainly. “Oo-kaay,” she says slowly, drawing out the word.

“Well,” I say, putting down my cup with a delicate clink in its saucer. “The lessons start off in the pool.”

“Good,” she says brightly. “You know what? I’m proud of you. That’s great.”

Her cell phone rings, and she looks at me apologetically as she answers it. I can tell by the shift in her tone that it’s her husband. Her voice gets softer. She turns her head away from me. I stare at the other shoppers, think of Gray off trying to figure out who might be looking for me. I think of Victory off with her grandparents. I’m counting the hours until I can pick her up at school tomorrow. I’m just here killing time. I should be home meditating, trying to remember who Simon Briggs might have been to me. But I suppose part of me doesn’t want to remember. That’s what my shrink believes, anyway.

“I have to go,” Ella says, snapping her phone closed. She looks strained.

“Everything all right?” I ask gently.

“Yeah,” she says with a fake laugh and a weak flutter of her hand. We’re both such liars. I hope she’s lying about less awful things, for her sake.

“What about your Prada loafers?” I ask.

“They’ll wait,” she says. “You coming?”

I shake my head quickly, down the rest of my espresso, and stand up. “I want to pick up a few things for Victory.”

“Okay,” she says, tucking her bag under her arm. “Sorry.”

I wave her off. “Don’t worry about it.”

She looks pale, a little red around the eyes. She never talks about her husband or their relationship except in the broadest strokes. He works so hard, she’ll say. He travels so much. He’s very protective. She seems stiff and nervous in his presence. Occasionally our visits are cut short by calls like the one she just received. I know better than to pry. I like to let people keep their façades intact. That way they’re less likely to come poking around at mine.

She rushes off, and I watch until I can’t see her anymore. I wish I could be a better friend to Ella. But I can’t.

When I turn back to grab my purse and shopping bags, I’m face-to-face with Detective Ray Harrison. My stomach bottoms out at the look in his eyes. He looks hungry.

“Let’s talk, Annie.”

“Are you following me?” I say. My voice raises an octave, though I didn’t intend it, and a woman at the next table turns to stare at me.

“Don’t make a scene,” he says with a smile. “You can’t afford to make a scene.”

I smile at him and let him take my arm. I pick up my bags from the floor, and we walk toward the exit.

“That purse you bought. It cost more than my wife’s food budget for an entire month.”

There’s some mixture of astonishment and reprimand in his voice. I don’t say anything. “The mercenary business must be booming,” he says.

He means Gray and Drew’s company, though mercenary is not a word they use in the industry. And indeed, since September 11, business is booming.

“One of the hardest things about being a cop,” he says when we’re outside, “is watching the criminals live better than you do.” We’re walking through the rows of cars. I’m not sure where we’re going, and finally I come to a stop. I’m not walking into the deserted part of the lot with this man, cop or no cop.

“What do you want?” I ask him.

He looks around us. The lot is crowded, plenty of activity. People walking, pushing kids in strollers, pulling in and out in their late-model cars. He lets go of my arm and puts his hand in his pocket, starts that rocking thing he does. I’m not even sure he’s aware of it.

He keeps that fake smile on his face. People walking by might think we’re neighbors who bumped into each other at the mall, that we’re having a friendly chat. I know then that his interest in me is not professional, not legal. If it were, he would have put his handcuffs on me and we’d be in the cruiser heading into the station. This alternative is not necessarily good news.

“I mean, I spend my whole life working hard, providing for my family, paying taxes, saving for retirement. Every vacation, every new appliance we need, every repair on the house-we budget and save, you know? And then I walk into some perp’s garage and I’m looking at a Hummer. Or I go into his crib and there’s a flat-screen and audio system that could pay for a year of private school for my kid. I think, here’s a person with no respect for the law, for human life, and he’s living large. I tell you, it eats at me sometimes. It really does.”

There’s something whiny about his righteous indignation. I get where he’s coming from, but it doesn’t seem quite sincere.

“What do you want?” I repeat.

“Let me tell you a little bit about Annie Fowler. She was born in a small town in Kentucky, where she lived her entire life until she and her infant son were killed by a drunk driver just a few years back. She was a good girl, sweet and pretty. She played by the rules, but still she was mowed down by some asshole with no respect for anyone or anything. That’s what I’m talking about. That’s what kills me, you know?”

I notice something about him that I hadn’t before. Over his right ear, there’s a shock of white hair about an inch thick. It’s so striking, the light of it against the rest of his brown locks, that I can’t believe I didn’t see it earlier. Somehow it makes him seem more menacing; I am oddly unnerved by it.

“And then,” he continues, “she’s violated again-by yet another person with no regard for the living or the dead. Someone steals her identity. Someone trying to escape the past takes her Social Security number and uses it to start over. What was this person trying to escape? I wonder. Or who? Must be pretty bad, whatever it was.”

“You’re making a mistake,” I tell him. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

He takes a pair of sunglasses from the pocket of his shirt and puts them on.

“Mrs. Powers,” he says with that same fake smile; it’s starting to look as though it will split his face in half. “Can I call you Annie? Annie, you’re looking a little pale. I won’t keep you. I’m sure you want to get back to your family.”

He turns and starts to walk away. Then he stops and comes back. I can tell he’s played this scene out in his mind a hundred times, rehearsed it for maximum effect.

“You know, Annie, we all have our secret lives, the parts of ourselves we’d rather not share. I understand that. I truly do. The question is, how much are those secrets worth? How much are we willing to pay to keep them buried? I’ll let you think about it.”

He leaves me standing there, watching him walk off. He doesn’t look back, just gets into his Explorer parked nearby and slowly drives away.

When a ship gets lost at sea, it might never be found. If its engine dies and it goes adrift, it could move through the vastness of the ocean and never come to shore, never be seen by another craft or from the air. Even if you hire the kind of people who are able to recover a runaway vessel, even if you have an idea of when it was lost, along with an understanding of the day’s tides and currents-even then you might never find it. Most people can’t wrap their heads around the idea that the oceans of the world are so vast and that something so solid could be so permanently lost yet still out there, still floating around, just never to be seen again by human eyes. But that’s how large the world is. Things disappear and are never found simply because there’s too much ground to cover. People, too.

The idea of shifting off your skin and walking away in a new one is foreign to most people, the stuff of fiction. But it can be done with relative ease. A driver’s license, passport, even a Social Security card-all can be obtained with a birth certificate. Birth certificates can be had just by filling out a form and paying a fee at any local records office. You can use this document to get pretty much anything else you need to establish a new identity. Then it’s just a matter of flying below the radar. It’s better not to work or get pulled over for speeding. And if you’re far enough away from people who have known you, you can drift about in the world and never be found again, just like a ship lost at sea. The world is that big.

Ophelia March died on a dry, cool New Mexico night. In a stolen black ’67 Mustang, she and Marlowe Geary drove off the edge of the Taos High Road into the Rio Grande Valley below. She was presumed dead, though her body was not recovered. Or so the official reports go.

But Ophelia wasn’t in that Mustang. She was handcuffed and drugged in the back of a black Suburban parked off the public square in Santa Fe, in the shadow of St. Francis Cathedral. About two hours after the Mustang burst into flames on impact, a man, beaten and dirty and smelling like smoke, got into the driver’s seat of the Suburban and took her away. Ophelia March was dead. Annie Fowler had just been reborn.

I am thinking of that night as I stand in the parking lot of the mall, my shopping bags at my feet. I’m sick with fear. But is there also the glimmer of relief in my heart? Am I also a little glad that Ophelia still lives, and that one way or another she might have to pay for the things she has done? There are plenty of people who believe that Ophelia was Marlowe’s victim, his captive toward the end. But I know it was more complicated than that. I feel those black fingers tugging at me. I am as afraid of Ophelia as I am of Marlowe.

The only thing I like about Gray’s office is that it’s filled with books. Big, thick books bound in leather, with gilt-edged pages, texts on war and military theory, encyclopedic tomes on world history, classic literature, poetry. But it’s not a library collected after a lifetime of reading. It is a library that has been purchased for show-Drew’s idea of which books should line the shelves of a military man’s office. He has a similar collection in his own office. Most of the books have never even been opened, eyes have never rested on their words, fingers have never caressed their pages. They are as untouched and virginal as nuns.

I scan the covers: Sun-tzu, Machiavelli, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Byron, Shelley. Anyone sitting in my husband’s office would think him a great reader. He’s not. My husband opens a book, he falls asleep.

Curled on the leather couch, I recount my meeting with Detective Harrison for Gray. His face is a knot of concern.

“He doesn’t know anything,” he says after I’m done. “If he did, he’d have used your name.”

“He knows I’m not Annie Fowler.”

Gray nods his assent. “But his interest is not legal. He didn’t come to you as a cop. He didn’t bring you in for questioning. He’s corrupt. And that’s a good thing. We pay him off, he goes away.”

Gray’s sitting behind his desk, capping and uncapping a pen, swiveling his chair slightly from side to side. I don’t say anything. I don’t think it’s going to be that simple.

“Anyway,” he says, “there’s no connection whatsoever between Annie Fowler and Ophelia March. Nothing links them. He could dig into Annie Fowler until her bones shake in the ground and he’s not going to find Ophelia.”

I wonder whom he’s trying to convince.

“So it’s a coincidence, then, that there’s someone looking for Ophelia in New York and this cop down in Florida is asking questions about Annie Fowler. That someone followed me on the beach.”

I can’t read his expression. He’s the one who doesn’t believe in coincidence.

“I don’t see a connection,” he says finally. I wonder, if he’s just in denial, stubbornly refusing to see what’s right in front us. It’s not like him. “I really don’t see one.”

But there’s always a connection, isn’t there? Sometimes it’s just deep beneath the surface, like Florida’s network of caves, dark and echoing, winding silent and treacherous under our feet.

I came home after school one afternoon and found my mother weeping in her bedroom. I stood in her doorway, watching. We were downwind from the stable that day, so the air held just the lightest scent of horse manure. She looked so tiny lying there, so frail on the white sheets beneath the large wooden cross hanging over the bed. The room was spare and plain, like all the rooms in the house. There was just the bed on a frame, two nightstands, and a dresser, all made from pine.

“We use what we need.” That was Frank’s mantra. He didn’t like any flourish, any decoration. “That’s the Lord’s way.”

I was glad to see she was living with as much despair as I was. It wasn’t that I wanted her to be unhappy. I was just relieved to see she felt anything at all. She’d been acting like a zombie for the eight weeks we’d been there, steadily losing weight. Every day she seemed a little weaker, had less color in her cheeks. It was as if Frank were slowly draining the life from her and one day she’d collapse into a pile of ash before my eyes.

I could smell alcohol, mingling with the horse odor. I watched her until she sensed me standing there. She sat up with a start.

“Oh, Ophelia. You scared the life out of me.”

Frank’s truck hadn’t been in the drive, so I knew he wasn’t home. I went over and sat beside her on the bed. She pulled me to her. She wrapped her arms around me from behind, and we lay as we used to when I was a child, before I knew how many different ways a person could fail as a mother.

“What’s wrong, Mom?” I asked. “Why are you crying?”

She didn’t answer right away. Then, “Ophelia, he’s so…so cold. I think I’ve made an awful mistake bringing us here.”

I sat up quickly and turned to face her. “Then let’s go.”

She rolled her eyes and pulled her mouth into an annoyed grimace. “Go where, Ophelia?”

“Anywhere.”

She sat up and wrapped her arms around her knees. “He can’t be with me, you know?”

“Mom,” I said, feeling my face go hot with anger and embarrassment. I didn’t want to hear about her sexual problems with Frank Geary. I just wanted her unhappiness to spur her into action. But she was like a cow in the road; no matter how undesirable or dangerous her location, she’d stay rooted until someone came at her with a stick. I knew this about her.

“He can’t…you know, perform,” she went on, as if she were thinking aloud, as if I weren’t even in the room. “There’s something wrong with him. Something really, really wrong.”

“Let’s leave, Mom,” I said again, grabbing her hands. “We can go back to New York.”

She released a heavy sigh. “We don’t have a car, any money. How are we going to leave?”

I just stared at her.

“How can we leave, Ophelia?” she asked again. I realized that it wasn’t a rhetorical question; she was really asking me how to leave. She wanted me to save her. I hated her then, for her weakness, for her stupidity. I’d hated that she’d handed all her power over to Frank Geary and that we were trapped on a horse farm in the middle of nowhere, with no money and no means of leaving if we chose. I hated my father for disappearing and leaving me to this fate. I felt the rage rise up in my chest, and I made a silent promise to myself never to be powerless like my mother.

“Ophelia,” she said, covering her eyes. “Don’t look at me like that.”

I left her without another word. She called after me, but then I heard Frank’s truck pulling up the drive. A moment later the water was running in the bathroom, and I knew she was brushing her teeth so he wouldn’t smell the booze on her. She’d probably taken the whiskey from Frank’s secret stash I saw in the barn. There were always two or three bottles of Jack in a crate near the back under a pile of flannel blankets. Twice I’d found Frank passed out in the barn, a bottle nearly drained, cigarette butts in an ashtray beside him. Dangerous behavior in a barn filled with hay.

Later that night I found Marlowe sitting on the floor of the stable smoking a cigarette. We hadn’t spoken since that night in my room when he’d suggested unthinkable things to me. Instead we’d been circling each other ever since. I was simultaneously drawn to him and repelled by what he’d whispered to me that night. His eighteenth birthday was just a week away, and then he’d be gone. I’d be all alone here.

I sat down beside him, and he offered me a drag, which I took.

“He met someone today,” he said as I exhaled smoke. “A woman at the feed store. It won’t be long.”

I took in the lean lines of him, the hair in front of his eyes, his arm draped over one bent knee.

“He started chatting her up, flirting with her in that way he has,” he said when I didn’t respond.

I had a hard time imagining Frank “flirting” with anyone. He was as gray and stiff as an old piece of wood. The air was still and thick with humidity. I felt a sheen of perspiration rise on my forehead, a bead drip down my back.

“It’s like an appetite. It rises up in him. He can’t control it.”

He had an odd half smile on his face as he stubbed out the cigarette, started fingering the butt, rolling it between his thumb and forefinger so that tiny brown pieces of tobacco left there drifted onto his leg. The smell of burned tar settled in my sinuses.

“He’ll start out slow at first, but then it will escalate. Before long it’ll be your mother.”

An anxious dread moved through me, made my fingers and the back of my neck tingle. I stared out through the open doors of the barn. I could see the house from where I sat. A light glowed in my mother’s window.

“No,” I said, but it was more like a prayer than a denial. Even though I’d never seen a hint of violence in Frank, I thought I could feel the truth in what Marlowe said. It wouldn’t be long before terrible things started happening; it seemed electric in the air.

“After her it will be you.” He’d dropped his voice to a whisper, peered at me through the strands of hair that hung in front of his eyes.

I pulled my legs in tight to my chest and held them there.

“Why do you think he keeps your mother so isolated? He doesn’t even let her go to the grocery store,” Marlowe asked. “No one here even knows she exists.”

If he noticed that I’d only said one word since I joined him, it didn’t seem to bother him. I traced circles in the dirt on the ground.

“When you’re missed at school, it’ll be weeks before they send someone to look for you,” he went on. “Then he’ll tell them your mother left him, took you with her. He’ll tell them he doesn’t know where you’ve gone.”

“My father will come looking for me,” I said lamely.

“Eventually,” he said with a shrug. “Maybe. But what good will it do you? You’ll already be dead.”

One of the things I liked about the horse ranch was the sky at night. I never knew there were so many stars. I gazed up at them through the open door and wished I were as high and far away as that.

“Do you see how he was manipulating you?” the doctor asks. “How he used your fear, your alienation from your parents to spin a web around you?”

I nodded, chewed on my fingernails, something I did in our sessions only when we talked about the past.

“You were seventeen years old. Literally abandoned by your father, emotionally abandoned by your mother, living with a man you believed to be a serial rapist and murderer who was about to start killing again-who might even kill you. You were afraid and very vulnerable.”

I nodded grudgingly. Ophelia was afraid, but she was also desperate, starving for love and acceptance.

“What could you have done at that point that you didn’t do?” he wants to know.

We do this, go round and round, rehashing the past. Thinking of alternatives for Ophelia and shooting them down like bottles on a shelf. The doctor thinks I’m too hard on her. He thinks she was just a kid. But he doesn’t know the whole story-and neither do I, for that matter. I wonder if I’m not hard enough.

“I could have gone to the police.”

He gives a slow, careful nod. “Your stepfather was an innocent man in the eyes of the law. You had no evidence that he’d done anything wrong or planned to. What do you think the police could have done for you?”

I look at anything else but him-the degrees hanging on his wall, the view outside his window, the glass paperweight on his desk, its facets taking in light and casting rainbow points on the wall. “I’m not sure.”

He sighs and shifts in his seat. Behind him, outside his window, the sun is setting in a riot of color-purple, orange, pink-over the Intracoastal Waterway.

“So what did you do?”

“I don’t remember.”

He lifts his chin up, puts his hand to his face, and starts rubbing at his jaw. The stubble there and the dry, hard skin on his hands makes an irritating scratching sound. He regards me carefully, seems to think twice before deciding to say, “You’re not being honest with me, Annie.”

“I don’t remember,” I say quickly. “You know that.”

“I’m starting to get the feeling that there’s a great deal you’re not sharing with me. I’m afraid it’s affecting how much good I can do.”

I give a slow shake of my head and purse my lips. There’s a moment-no, a millisecond-when I think maybe, just maybe, I’ll come clean, tell him everything. But the moment passes in silence.

He looks at his watch and stands up. This means our session is over. “I can’t help you if you won’t face the truth. Okay?”

“Okay,” I say, getting up and walking to the door. I think we’re coming to the end of our relationship. He doesn’t know Ophelia; he doesn’t even know her name. I have kept that from him. I wonder if he thinks I’m making the whole thing up, if he’s just humoring me and taking my money.

“See you next week?”

“Yes. Next week,” I say with a nod. I stop at the door, turn to look at him. He’s a nice man and a good doctor. I know he has tried his best to help me. “Did I tell you I’m considering scuba-diving lessons?”

“I thought you were afraid of the water,” he says with a surprised smile.

“You’re the one who’s always on me about facing down my fears. I thought this might be a good first step.”

“Is it helping?”

“It’s too soon to tell.”

“Take care of yourself, Annie,” he says. This is what he says after every session, but I wonder if I detect an extra bit of concern, a final note of farewell.

The corridor outside the doctor’s office is empty, and I wait in the silence for the elevator. I listen to the electronic beep as the elevator passes each floor on its way to me. I never see anyone in this corridor; no one ever comes and goes from the other office suites. It has never seemed odd before, but today it does. The quiet is total, as though there is no one else behind the other doors.

Maybe I never noticed before because I am always lost in thought when I leave the doctor, but this time I feel a strange unease as I wait for the elevator that seems to take forever. It has paused two floors down and not continued its ascent. I wait for a minute longer, then decide to take the stairs, but when I try the door to the staircase, it’s locked. I guess I don’t have any choice but to wait for the sluggish elevator.

I hear something then, I’m not sure what. It might have been a shout or something falling to the floor. Then there are voices lifted in argument, just a few words, and then it is silent so suddenly again that I’m not sure that’s what I heard at all. It’s then that I find myself walking back down the hall toward the doctor’s office.

Of course the elevator picks this moment to arrive. I listen to the doors open and close as I enter the waiting room and knock lightly on the door to the doctor’s office. There’s no answer, but I’m certain he’s there-I don’t think there’s another exit. I wonder if he’s in the bathroom. I put my ear to the door, wait a second, but I don’t hear voices inside. I knock again. As I do, the door pushes open slightly, and I help it along.

“Doctor,” I say, “is everything all right?”

It takes a beat for the scene to register in my head. The doctor is slumped over his desk, blood pooling on its surface and dripping over the side onto the floor beneath. On the window I can see a high ghastly arc of blood against the sunset.

“Doctor,” I say as I move toward him. My voice sounds like it’s coming from the end of a long tunnel. “Paul?”

I approach the body, battling the urge to run in the other direction. I put my hand on his neck. But there’s no pulse. His skin is still warm, but he is dead.

I try to draw a breath into my lungs, but panic is constricting my airways. My flight response is in high gear; it’s all I can do not to break into a sprint. Then I notice that the door to the bathroom is ajar; the light is on inside. I think I see a flicker of movement, but I’m not certain.

My brain has stopped working; adrenaline kicking, my body takes over. I move toward the exit, keeping my eyes on the thin rectangle of light shining through the opening in the bathroom door. I am not thinking about the poor doctor and the awful way he has died or about who might still be hiding in the bathroom. I am just thinking about getting out of here as fast as possible. I can’t help the doctor, and I can’t afford another run-in with the police.

I start moving backward, my eyes still on the bathroom door. As I do, it starts to open. I find myself paralyzed; I can’t move. I stand and watch it swing wide. She is pale and grim, the young woman I have seen at Ella’s party and standing outside the Internet café. She is soaked in blood. There’s a knife in her hand. Her chest is heaving with the deep, shuttering breaths she is drawing and releasing. We stare at each other for a moment. And then I recognize her. It’s Ophelia.

23

It’s nearly dark when I wake up in my car in the parking lot of my doctor’s office. The sun has disappeared below the horizon line, and the sky is glowing a deep blue-black. My peripheral vision is almost gone from the migraine I have coming on. I am struggling to orient myself, to separate reality from fantasy. I see her face again, her blood-drenched clothes. I see my doctor slumped over his desk, blood draining from him onto the floor.

I don’t feel the appropriate level of terror, I’m just stunned, numb. I look at my watch; it has been only forty minutes since my session with the doctor ended, which seems impossible given what’s happened. There’s a large bloodstain, still wet but drying quickly, on my jacket. I shrug out of it, crumble it into a ball. I don’t want to look at the blood. Then my cell phone, balancing on the dash, starts ringing. I answer.

“Hi, Annie.”

I already recognize the voice-it’s Detective Harrison. I don’t say anything.

“Just wondering if you’ve had any time to think things over.”

“Why are you doing this to me?” I ask him. My voice sounds hysterical, even to my own ears. I am shaking as I put the key in the ignition and start the car. “Did you do this?”

There’s a pause on the other end, as if he’s registering the pitch and tone of my words.

“Annie, what’s wrong?” he asks me. He sounds legitimately concerned. “Where are you?”

“Why are you doing this?” I say again. It must be Harrison. He has done this somehow. He knows about me and is trying to drive me insane. “For money? You can have whatever you want.”

“Take it easy,” he says. His tone is calm and soothing; he must be used to talking to hysterical people. “What’s going on?”

There’s something in his voice that reminds me why I liked him that first night. Even though he’s trying to destroy my life, it’s almost as though he would put that on hold to be a cop for me in this moment. I’m half considering telling him about the doctor, but since I’m not a hundred percent sure that he’s dead and that it wasn’t me who killed him, I decide against it. I’d be admitting that I’m either mentally ill or a murderer, probably both.

“What happened, Annie?” he says, more firmly this time.

But his voice sounds tinny and distant. I end the call and throw the phone on the seat beside me. I drive out of the parking lot, heading for home.

The small causeway that leads to our island is not heavily trafficked in the evening. I pull over and grab the jacket from the passenger seat, race to the railing, and toss it over. I watch for a moment as it drifts into the water, then quickly get back to the car and start driving again, too fast. The sight of a cruiser hiding in a speed trap encourages me to slow down, to take the rest of the drive at the speed limit.

I wave at the guard as I pull through the gateway to our neighborhood. Lights glow in windows, televisions flicker, and there are a couple of kids still playing in the street even though it’s fully dark now. Everything is so quiet, so normal. I do not belong here. I realize more than ever that I never have.

I park the car in the drive and walk, though I want to run, into the house. As I shut the door, I hear Gray in the kitchen making dinner.

“You’re late,” he calls with a smile in his voice when he hears me enter.

There are candles lit on the table and lobsters in a huge pot on the stove. When he turns to look at me, his smile fades, he goes a little pale. My legs buckle when he reaches me, and I sink into him.

“What happened?” he asks. His frightened expression tells me how bad I look. “What the hell happened?”

I awoke in the middle of the night with a start to the sound of the horses. They were restless in their stalls, agitated and making noise. I’d heard them act like that twice since we’d been there. Once a Florida panther had been spotted the next day on a neighbor’s property. The second time we never figured why they’d been anxious. I slipped from beneath the covers of my bed and walked over to the window. The doors to the barn stood open. Frank’s truck sat idling, the hatch wide, waiting like a mouth. A full yellow moon cast a strange glow.

I moved to the side of the window and peered through the curtains. I’m not sure how long I stood there, but finally Frank emerged from the dark interior of the barn. In his arms he carried a large bundle wrapped in horse blankets. He leaned back against the weight of it and then dropped it awkwardly into the truck. He closed the hatch quietly, glancing up at the windows of the house. He looked stricken, like a man grieving a terrible loss. Then he got into the driver’s seat of the truck and rolled out of sight.

I stood rooted, my whole body shaking. I thought of all the things Marlowe had told me. Part of me hadn’t really believed him…the collection of purses, the shoe under the porch, his recent dire predictions that Frank’s “appetites” couldn’t be kept at bay much longer.

I saw Marlowe leave the barn then, a garbage bag in his hand. He pulled the doors closed behind him and locked them with the key. As he did this, he turned and looked up at my window. Maybe he could sense my eyes on him. I was certain he couldn’t see me where I stood. But something in his face told me that he knew I was there.

I got back into my bed quickly, wrapped myself up in the covers, and closed my eyes. I measured my breathing, made it deep and steady. After a minute I heard Marlowe creaking on the stairs. The floorboards outside my door groaned beneath his weight, and I heard the knob on my door start to turn. I tried to control the quaking of my body, to fight the urge to scream as I heard the door open just a little. The seconds dragged on as I waited to hear him come in or to speak my name. But he didn’t. After a moment I heard him walk away and go back down the stairs.

When I thought it was safe, I raced to my mother’s room. I was sure I’d see an empty bed. But when I burst through her door, she was sleeping soundly, undisturbed by the events that had just transpired. I thought of waking her, telling her what I’d seen, but I didn’t. I just went back to my bed, lay there wide-eyed and listening to the night. Frank didn’t return until just before dawn.

24

It is several hours later when Gray and I return to the doctor’s office. I have told him everything that’s happened. We’ve gone over and over every detail a thousand times. He has made me shower, and while I stood with the scalding water beating down on my skin, scrubbing myself so hard that my skin turned raw and red, Gray disposed of my clothes. I’m not even sure why; it makes me wonder if he thinks I may have actually killed my doctor. I haven’t asked him if this is what he thinks.

We pull in to the lot, which is empty now. I expected to see a swarm of police vehicles and ambulances, some news vans. I expected to see Detective Harrison waiting for me. Instead there’s only a sea of blacktop edged by the Intracoastal. The tall streetlamps cast an eerie amber glow as Gray stops the car. My stomach is churning. There are still some lights burning in the windows of the office building. A night guard sits at the reception desk reading a paperback.

“Wait here,” Gray says, putting a hand on my leg.

“No,” I say, unbuckling my seat belt. “I’m coming.”

He doesn’t argue, waits as I get out of the car and then drops his arm around me as I come to stand beside him. We walk toward the building. I’m keeping my migraine at bay with the medicine I’ve taken, but it’s waiting for me like a predator in the brush.

“It’s okay,” he tells me.

The old bulldog of a guard looks at us with sullen boredom over the edge of his novel. He has dull eyes and a thin mouth that disappears into the flesh of his face.

“I had a doctor’s appointment earlier,” I tell him. “I left my cell phone.”

“It’ll have to wait till tomorrow,” he says. “The building’s closed.”

“It’s important,” I tell him.

“Sorry.”

A hundred-dollar bill from Gray changes his mind. From the looks of him, I think he would have done it for fifty. He gives us a disinterested nod and heaves his body out of the chair, which groans its relief. He slides an enormous ring of keys off the desktop, and we take the elevator up to the seventh floor.

“Was this elevator broken earlier?” I ask.

He shrugs. “Not that I’m aware.”

I am sweating, becoming more and more tense as the elevator climbs. Gray is armed, his hand tucked beneath his jacket, resting on the butt of his gun. He is at his best, cool and in control. When we arrive, the hallway is dark, lit only by fire-exit lights.

I walk us toward the doctor’s door, which is shut and locked. Something’s off; I’m not certain yet what it is. The guard seems oblivious to our tension.

“Are you sure this is it?” he asks as he unlocks the door and swings it open. That’s when I realize that the nameplate on the doctor’s door is gone. The waiting room is empty. No chairs, no silk plants, no magazine racks. We walk through to the office. It’s vacant. The desk, the bookshelves, the Murano glass vase on the table by the window, the cheap, uncomfortable furniture-all gone. Gray walks the perimeter of the room, runs his finger over the windowsill. His eyes scan the empty space. I see his brow wrinkle into a frown, then his eyes come to rest on me.

I walk to the bathroom door and push it open. I’m confronted by my own reflection in the mirror on the far wall. I look haggard, afraid.

“Are we on the seventh floor?” I ask. I look around-even the knobs and lighting fixtures are gone. There’s nothing to connect this place to the office I’ve been visiting for years. I check at the walls for shadows where I know photographs and degrees were hanging, but there are no telltale marks or stray picture hangers. There is no blood on the window.

“Yes, ma’am,” the guard says, casting a suspicious glance. “I thought maybe you knew something I didn’t. It was my understanding that this floor has been vacant for months, waiting on renovations. Some real-estate agency moving in here.”

I don’t know what to say. I blink back tears of frustration, put my hand to my forehead so neither of them can see my face. I am afraid and ashamed in equal measure.

“You sure you got the right building?” the guard asks gently.

I nod, not trusting my voice.

“You have a building directory downstairs?” asks Gray.

“Believe so,” the guard says. He looks uncomfortable now, shifting from foot to foot and avoiding eye contact. I’ve seen people act like this before. A kind of mystified embarrassment comes over people when they encounter someone who might be entirely off her rocker.

He keeps his distance as we walk down the hallway and get into the elevator. My mind is racing through options: wrong floor, wrong office, wrong building. The doctor’s dead; someone hid his body and cleaned out his office. Or someone, as Drew so eloquently put it, is fucking with me. I can see from the look on Gray’s face that he’s running the same catalog of possibilities in his mind. He’s holding my hand tightly, as if he thinks I’m going to make a run for it.

At the desk the guard gives Gray the building directory. I notice that the pages on the clipboard are crisp and new. On the list, Dr. Paul Brown, Ph.D., is nowhere to be found.

“This looks like a brand-new directory. When was it printed?” asks Gray.

The guard shrugs. “Does look new,” he admits, peering over Gray’s shoulder. “Maybe he moved his office. I don’t know.”

“Do you know him?” I ask. “Dr. Brown?”

He shakes his head. “But I’m just the night guy. Come on after most people have gone home for the day. I don’t really know anyone in the building.”

The guard is looking at me with pity now. He takes a piece of scrap paper from the drawer, writes down a name and a number.

“Nobody moved anything out of here in the last few hours?” I ask, trying not to sound as desperate and hysterical as I feel. I force my face into a mask of calm. I have learned in moments like this to keep the surface still even though the depths are raging. Animals hide fear and illness; they cannot afford weakness in the wild.

“No, no. Nothing like that tonight,” he says, handing me the paper. “This is the daytime building manager. He’d know better about all of this.”

Gray thanks him, and we leave. We walk in silence to the car, neither of us knowing what to say. We get inside and just sit for a minute. I examine the dashboard, since there’s nowhere else to rest my eyes. I can’t bring myself to look at Gray.

“I didn’t imagine the doctor-or what happened tonight,” I say.

“I know,” says Gray a little too quickly. I wonder if he’s humoring me. He puts a hand on my leg. When I find the strength to meet his eyes, I see his love for me, his compassion. This causes the tension in my shoulders to relax, my breathing to come easier.

“I saw her,” I say, remembering the moment and feeling a shudder move through my body. “I saw Ophelia.”

Worry is etched now in all the lines on his face. “You saw someone,” he says. “In the terror of the moment, your mind played a trick on you.”

“I’ve seen her before, at a cocktail party and on the street. I just didn’t recognize her.”

He moves his hand from my leg to my arm and squeezes firmly. “What are you saying, Annie? You are Ophelia. She’s not a separate person from you.”

“I know that,” I snap. What am I saying?

“Then what are you telling me?”

I take in a deep breath. “Nothing. I don’t know.”

“There was no dust on the windowsill,” he says, changing the subject. He doesn’t want to talk about Ophelia. He wants to deal with the facts, with the empirical evidence, not ghosts and hallucinations. “If it had been sitting empty for weeks, there would be dust.”

“Really?” I say, feeling hope release some of the tightness in my chest. “What does that mean?”

“It could mean that something happened there tonight, and between then and now someone cleaned and took the furniture out.” Gray releases a long breath. Does he believe this, or is he just saying it to make me feel better? I don’t know, and I don’t ask.

Anyway, I do know what he’s thinking. He wishes I’d let him meet the doctor. But I never have. I’ve needed my present happy home life never to mingle with the nightmare of my past. But maybe that was part of my folly, to ever believe that I might separate the parts of myself like that, that I could keep the person I was from poisoning the person I am…especially when my present self is a fictional character I have created to escape my own heart, my own past, my own deeds.

You belong to me. But it’s not Marlowe’s voice I hear this time. It’s Ophelia’s.

25

They waited on the road rain or shine, blistering heat or lightning storms, with posters featuring pictures of their daughters, sisters, mothers, chanting, “Murderer. Murderer. Murderer.” They were careful to stay on the public road. For the most part, they were orderly and nonviolent. Even so, the police could have caused the group, which called itself the Families of Frank Geary’s Victims, to disperse-but they didn’t. There wasn’t much sympathy for Frank among the citizens or law enforcement in our new hometown.

I saw them when I left for school in the morning and usually when I came home. They seemed to work in shifts, the same ten or fifteen people taking turns on the road in front of our property. Twice I saw Janet Parker, appearing shrunken and even more haggard than she had when I first met her at our trailer. Her grief and pain were wasting her; she was slowly disappearing. Every time I saw her, I thought about her daughter floating in the water where Frank had left her.

There was one man, the father of one of Frank’s victims, who was so sick with rage that he looked like he’d stuck his finger in a socket every time he laid eyes on Frank. He’d go from this slack, tired-looking man to someone whose whole body was rigid and red with fury. He’d scream and hurl obscenities.

The morning after I’d watched Frank place the unidentified bundle in the trunk of his car, the Angry Man (as I’d come to think of him) tried to throw a rock at us before the others in his group stopped him. He collapsed, wailing, into the arms of a woman.

“These people need to move on,” my mother said that morning, annoyed by their grief and suffering. She was driving me to school, and Marlowe was along for the ride. “Frank’s not even in the car. Why would he be throwing rocks at us?”

“He wants revenge,” said Marlowe from the backseat. We locked eyes in the rearview mirror.

“He wants it from the wrong man,” said my mother. If she remembered her confession to me about Frank, about his strangeness, she showed no sign. I hadn’t even bothered to tell her what I saw the night before; she wouldn’t have believed me, and I didn’t want her to tell Frank. Fear was a stone I carried in my chest, so heavy I could barely stand upright. I thought of her in her used wedding dress, how she’d pranced about like Cinderella at the ball, thinking no one could see the frayed edges or the cigarette burn in the lace. The story of her life.

At school that day, I just sort of drifted from class to class, not participating, not hearing anything that was said to me. I had the feeling that I’d stepped out of normal life, that my circumstances so separated me from everyone around me that I could no longer communicate in this world. I wonder if this is when I started “dissociating,” as they say. Nothing seemed real to me, everything took on a kind of foggy quality. The change in me must have been apparent. People who had harassed and taunted me because of Frank were suddenly giving me a wide berth. My social-studies teacher asked me to stay after class and inquired about my home life. Is everything okay? I don’t know you that well, Ophelia, I admit, but you don’t seem like yourself. He’d placed a call to my mother, he told me, to tell her my grades were in a precipitous drop from my prior school records, but she hadn’t called back. The honors English teacher from your former school wrote to say what a talented writer you were, how remarkably well read you were for someone your age. We’ve seen no evidence of any of that here, Ophelia. How can we help? He seemed so sincerely worried that I didn’t have the heart to tell him no one at all cared about me or my grades.

That is another of those moments I reflect upon. This teacher was throwing me a lifeline, and if I had grabbed at it, maybe things wouldn’t have continued on their deadly trajectory. But I was too far gone by then, too alienated from the world around me to know a way out when I saw it.

As I stepped off the school bus that afternoon, I crossed the street to avoid the protesters. To their credit, they generally left me alone. They must have recognized me as the victim I was, as helplessly cast in this miserable production as they were. They threw alternately pitying and suspicious looks in my direction as I came and went each school day. That day I saw Janet Parker watching me. She held a cup of coffee, raised it slowly to her lips. I glanced away from her, and as I did, I noticed Marlowe standing beside her. It looked like he was whispering something in her ear. I turned away quickly, cast my eyes to the ground, and walked through the gate to make the long trek to our house.

Gray Powers is not a man who is often wrong. With a name like that, it seems almost impossible that he could ever be mistaken about anything. He should be jumping into telephone booths, slipping into superhero garb, and saving the day-which is actually not that far from what he does. But he was wrong about Detective Ray Harrison. Gray had sized him up as a small-town cop, corrupt and not that bright, looking for a big payday. He’s the one who always says that the worst mistake you can make in a fight is to underestimate your opponent. And it’s true.

I go through the motions even though my head is reeling from the events of the night before. I put on a big show for Victory, who races toward me when she sees me waiting for her after school. I squeeze her hard and hold on until she squirms and giggles, and says, “Mommy, you’re squishing me!”

In the car she regales me with stories of princesses and castles, giant cartoon characters, endless junk food, and the big bed in her room at Drew and Vivian’s suite. As I listen, I push back images of Simon Briggs, the dark shadow on the beach, my slain psychiatrist. I want to be present for my daughter’s joy. But I can’t. I’m sure she senses it, as her enthusiasm wanes and her tale peters out.

Probably about the same time I was driving Victory back home, Detective Harrison was making connections Gray didn’t think he’d be able to make. There was something to link Annie Fowler and Ophelia March. It should have been obvious, since it was Gray. The articles I searched online to ease myself out of the black patches were among the same ones that Detective Harrison found when he researched Gray Powers. Of course there was the slew of articles about Gray’s military career as a decorated Navy SEAL, the articles about Powers and Powers and the rise of privatized military companies. After scrolling though page after page, Detective Harrison found an old item, an article from the Albuquerque Journal. The headline read: INVESTIGATOR HUNTS, KILLS CRIME-SPREE KILLER MARLOWE GEARY: Ophelia March, believed to be Geary’s captive or his accomplice, also killed. He might otherwise have glanced over the article except for the picture of Ophelia, which he quickly recognized. It was all there for him to see, my ugly past.

Maybe it’s the disappearance (death? murder?) of my (imaginary?) shrink or the fact that I can feel Harrison’s breath on my neck. Or maybe it’s as my doctor believed, that I’m stronger than I’ve ever been, that I’m ready to face the things I have packed away. Whatever the reason, the flashes of memory I’ve had, the dreamlike images, begin to coalesce. The blanks start to fill in.

It’s not as dramatic as I believed it would be, this return of my past. I envisioned being bowled over by it, taking to my bed, feeling helpless to do anything as the memories trampled me like runaway horses. But it is more like watching the rerun of a black-and-white horror film I saw as a child. The images are familiar, but too grainy and drained of power to be truly frightening.

After I put Victory to bed her first night back home, I start to remember. I tuck her beneath her sky blue sheets and sit with her as she drifts off, watching the delicate rise and fall of her chest. As I get up quietly and slip from her room, she says sleepily, “I want my baby.” I find Claude on the floor and put him beside her, but she is already sound asleep again. As I leave the room, I hear Janet Parker’s voice and there’s a terrible ringing in my ears. Once I’m back in my bedroom, I’m swept away, traveling back to a place I haven’t visited in a lifetime.

I watched Marlowe leave the house that night. He had his headphones on, and he walked out the front door and disappeared into the trees. As usual, Frank was gone and my mother was in a stupor in front of the television. Don’t you wonder where Frank goes at night? Marlowe had asked. He’s hunting. I easily slipped out after him. In the dark, I saw his form move quickly through the woods, and I followed. I could smell the acrid scent of his cigarette smoke hanging in the air.

He walked for so long and he was so fast that I didn’t think I’d be able to keep up. By the time he came to a stop, I was breathless and sweating. My legs had been lashed by the overgrowth. The mosquitoes were in a feeding frenzy at my ankles and my neck.

He came to a creek that ran through the property and waded across. Through the trees I could see a trailer, a rusted-out old thing up on concrete blocks, not much smaller than the one I’d lived in with my mother. He opened the door and went inside. I saw a light come on. I stood in the darkness, waiting, not sure whether to follow or to go back home. As I was about to walk over to the trailer, he emerged again. He came back to the creek and squatted there, looked into the water as though gazing at his own reflection. I approached him.

At first I thought he was laughing, laughing at me for following him. It was only as I drew closer that I realized he was crying. His whole body was shivering with it. I didn’t know what to do. I stood and watched him for I don’t know how long, listening to the sound of his weeping, an owl calling up above us, tree frogs singing all around.

“Marlowe,” I said finally, softly.

He didn’t jump at the sound of my voice, and I assumed he couldn’t hear me, that he had the Cure or the Smiths blasting in his ears.

“We have to get out of here,” he said, his voice a choked whisper. “It’s started again. You saw. I know you did.”

I had the strong urge to turn and run from him, even though I’d followed him out there. Or was I just a fish on a line, he the fisherman reeling me in-too foolish, too naïve to feel the hook in my cheek?

“You helped him,” I said. His back was still to me. “Who was it?”

He stood and spun around then, came and grabbed me by the shoulders. “Does it fucking matter who it was?” he hissed. “Do you understand now?”

I saw him then, saw what he was. This is why I can’t forgive Ophelia. She knew.

“I’m ready,” I told him. And his face changed again. It was as white as the thin slice of moon.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.” And I was.

He brought me into the trailer. There was a kitchen and a small bedroom. A bathroom that didn’t work, of course. No electricity or running water. The lights were all battery-operated. I recognized the bedding, the pots and dishes from our old trailer. The table was piled high with Marlowe’s books and notebooks.

“What is this place?”

“I found it walking one night when we first came. Abandoned, gone to shit. I’ve been fixing it up, staying out here sometimes. You could live out here, you know. If you have provisions, you could live out here forever. He doesn’t know about it. No one does.”

He took me by the hand and led me to the bed, turning out the little plastic lights as we went. In the darkness we lay close. I couldn’t see his face anymore. I was grateful that the darkness was so total. I could only hear the sound of his voice, feel the warmth of his body next to mine. We talked about what we would do. It didn’t seem real. It was all a dream.

When I come back to myself sitting on the edge of my bed, my daughter sleeping down the hall, an hour has passed. I feel shaken and weak. I’m not sure I want to remember the things I have forgotten. But I know that the memories will come now, unbidden, the dead rising.

26

In music a fugue is a movement in which different voices combine to state or develop a single theme. These voices mingle and weave together, each tone complementing the other, creating a multilayered but unified part of the composition. In psychology the term refers to a dissociative state characterized by a sudden departure from one’s life, bouts of amnesia or confusion regarding one’s identity, significant distress, generally the result of a major emotional or physical trauma. I have no musical ability whatsoever, but I’m painfully familiar with fugue. Or so I’m told.

Yet this is not a fugue, this most recent flight from my life. For the first time maybe, I am sure of who I am and what I must do. This has been a purposeful escape to protect my daughter from mistakes that I have made, to protect her from the woman I have been. If I can’t do that, then she’s better off without me.

The boat is pitching horribly now, and I cling to the rail on the wall as I make my way back to my cabin. The wind is wailing, and I think of Dax on his little boat and wonder how he is faring in the big waters and if he’ll survive, if he’ll come back for me. My stomach is in full mutiny, and I hold back vomit as I move through the door, pull it closed behind me, and resume my crouch in the small triangle of space that will be created when the door swings open. I listen to the wind and the churning water.

It isn’t long before I hear the thrum of a powerful boat engine, then footfalls on the deck above me. I take the gun from my waist and am comforted by its heft. I am aware of a tremendous sense of relief, something akin to the euphoria that sweeps over me when a migraine has passed, the wonderful lightness that follows the cessation of pain. It feels good to be Ophelia again, to face the things that Annie never could. My memories have come back to me; I remember it all. I am not proud, but I am whole, at last.

It was Gray who gave me the name Annie Fowler. It was someone from his company who created the documents I needed-driver’s license, passport, Social Security card-to move about the world as someone else. But I made Annie what Ophelia always wanted to be-a wife and mother with a big house and a beautiful child, a husband who cherished her-someone totally different from who her mother had been. Annie had a past unmarred by shame and regret; she was not haunted by the things she had done or the things that had been done to her. I became Annie-rich and pampered, dependent on Gray for strength, dependent on Victory for a feeling of purpose. Like everyone else in her life, I abandoned Ophelia, left her to die in a fiery blaze.

As the heavy footfalls draw closer, I am grateful that Ophelia has returned. She is so many things that Annie was not. She is temperamental where Annie was cool. She is angry where Annie was numb. And unlike Annie, the loving wife and doting mother, princess of suburbia, Ophelia March is a stone-cold killer.

They’re kicking open doors now; there’s more than one man on this boat, and they’re searching the cabins one by one. I don’t know how many men or how many cabins they have to go before they get to mine. But I’m ready.

When they kick my door open and enter the room, I wait for the door to swing back before opening fire. There are two men, both wearing black paramilitary gear-mask, vests, boots. I get one of them in the shoulder, and he issues a terrible scream. The other one takes a round in the vest and is knocked back hard against the wall with a groan. I break from the room but am surprised in the hallway by two more men. They disarm me quickly and bind my arms, slip a heavy hood over my head. It happens so fast I’m in darkness before I even know what hit me. I hear a dull thud, then see a flash of white. Before I lose consciousness, I have enough time to wonder if there’s more to what is happening here than I have imagined. I see my daughter’s face, then nothing.

It’s not terribly hard to take a life. Or anyway, not as hard as you’d imagine. There are those who would tell you I was not in my right mind, that I had dissociated from reality, from myself, on the night I made this discovery. But I’m not so sure. In my memories I am quite willing. Of course, all I did was leave the gate open. But that was enough, wasn’t it?

I don’t remember feeling anything, less than a week later after the night out in the woods, as I walked the drive on the horse farm to open that gate. I was basically sleepwalking.

Marlowe told me to wait until the house was quiet, to get to the gate before midnight. I wasn’t afraid of the long road or the errand before me. And as I let the gate swing open before I walked back to the stable, where I was supposed to meet Marlowe, I didn’t feel any anticipation or excitement or dread-I just felt empty. Even when a black sedan passed me with its lights off, slow and deadly like a shark through dark water, I observed it with detachment.

All the lights in and around the house were off, and a heavy quiet blanketed the night; even my soft footfalls seemed to echo. In the stable the horses were restless in their stalls again. I heard them shuffling, exhaling loud breaths from their nostrils. But Marlowe was nowhere in sight. The black sedan, a Lincoln I recognized as belonging to one of the protesters, was parked to the side of the barn, its engine clicking as it cooled.

Something about that sound brought me into the reality of what we were about to do. I felt as though I’d been startled awake. That’s when I noticed a flickering orange glow in the windows that had been dark just moments before. The scent of burning wood began to fill the air. I started running toward the house, my legs feeling impossibly slow and heavy, the house seeming so far away. As I burst through the door, the air was already thick with smoke.

“Mom!” I yelled, grabbing the banister and racing up the stairs. I covered my mouth and nose with my arm, but the smoke was insidious, burning my eyes, clawing at the back of my throat. By the time I got to the top landing, I was coughing and light-headed.

I found my mother alone in her bed, passed out cold, oblivious to the fire raging through the house. I don’t know what I thought would happen to her in all this, but I couldn’t leave her to die. I shook her but couldn’t rouse her. Finally I dragged her until she stumbled from the bed, leaning her full weight on me.

“What’s happening?” she muttered.

“There’s a fire!” I yelled, struggling to get to the door. “Where’s Frank?”

But she didn’t seem to hear. “Ophelia,” she slurred, “let me sleep.”

I dragged her into the hall, where through the smoke I saw two figures on the staircase, one long and lean, the other smaller by far but holding a gun. The taller was Frank, halfway up the stairs, probably headed up to get my mother. Where he’d been, I had no idea. But he’d stopped and turned to face the figure behind him. As I moved closer, I recognized. There was a wild look to Janet Parker, desperate and so, so sad. She doesn’t care what happens to her, I thought. Her whole body was rigid, as though it took the strength of all her muscles to hold that gun steady.

“You’re making a mistake, ma’am,” Frank said soothingly. He had one hand lifted as if to deflect the shot. His eyes fell on us.

The scene seemed to sober my mother a bit. “What’s happening?” she said, groggy and confused. “Frank, what’s going on?”

“You let my wife and her daughter leave the house,” he said to Janet Parker. “They’re innocent here.”

I heard a crash come from behind us, and the shattering of glass. My mother let go a little scream.

“Let them leave,” Frank said again. “They’ve got nothing to do with any of this.”

Janet Parker nodded at us, barely seeing us, and I grabbed my mother’s arm, dragged her toward the staircase.

“What are you doing?” my mother yelled as we moved past Frank down the stairs. My mother reached for Frank, and he clasped her to him, then pushed her away.

“Go,” he told her.

I saw then that they truly loved each other, and it shocked me. I’d seen them as these sick, damaged people who had formed an insane union. It never occurred to me that they’d actually cared for each other.

“The only peace I had was knowing you’d burn in hell for what you done!” Janet Parker yelled when we reached the bottom of the stairs. These were almost exactly the words she’d said at the trailer park.

“I didn’t kill your child, ma’am. I’ve never killed anyone. I swear it.” He sounded so sincere I almost believed him.

“Frank!” my mother shouted as I dragged her out the door and away from the house. I could see the flames coming out of the roof now, and as we watched, my bedroom window blew out, raining glass onto the ground below. I stood staring, disbelieving my own eyes. The house was burning. Where was Marlowe?

My mother broke away from me then and ran. I chased after her, but she moved back through the front door before I could stop her. I heard her screaming, a terrible howl of protest, and I came up behind her just in time to see Frank’s chest exploding as Janet Parker shot him dead center. He spun and seemed to pause in midstride, as though he’d decided to walk away from her but changed his mind. Then he fell flat and hard onto the stairs and slid down like a plank.

I looked up at Janet Parker, and for the first time I saw her smile. Then she turned the barrel and stuck the gun into her own mouth and pulled the trigger. I saw an awful spray of red.

My mother was wailing as I pulled her away from Frank’s body, and as we moved through the door, two more windows burst upstairs. She threw herself to the ground outside and wept as the fire raged. I stood beside her staring. The world seemed to lose all its sound, the ground was gone from beneath my feet and I was spinning. Regret and fear cut a valley through me. What did we do? Oh, my God, what did we do? The things I’d seen had changed something within me, like one bright red sock in a white wash. Everything in my world was a different color now.

I saw him then, standing beside the barn, just another shadow in the darkness, licked by the orange light of the flames. He might have been laughing, he might have been crying. I don’t know-I couldn’t see his face. That was the thing about Marlowe, you could never see his face. I walked to him as if he’d called me. He’d cast and directed us all; we’d each played our roles for him perfectly. That was his gift.

I got into the passenger side of the Lincoln and watched him climb behind the wheel. He looked at me as he started the ignition, didn’t say a word as we started down the long, dark drive. My mother didn’t even raise her head from the ground. She never noticed I’d gone.

“Are you okay?” It’s Gray standing in our doorway.

I am sitting on the edge of our bed in the dark, staring at the wall as though my memories are playing on a screen there.

“I’m fine,” I tell him. “Just tired.”

I don’t want to share my memories with him; I’m not sure why.

“Look,” he says, “we’re going to find out what’s happening and put an end to it.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to go see Harrison, find out what he wants, and give it to him.”

He has come to sit beside me and is holding my hands in his. I’m surprised by what he’s saying. It sounds like a desperate move. It’s not like him. “Always operate from a position of strength”-that has been his motto as long as I’ve known him. It sounds to me now as if he’s waving a white flag.

“Whoever came to see your father, whoever was on the beach, whatever happened to your psychiatrist-these are unknowns. Maybe you were right, maybe it’s all part of the same problem. I don’t know. But Harrison is a threat we can deal with. Buy him off, he goes away. Who knows? Maybe everything else goes away, too.”

I feel a glimmer of hope, that maybe we just have to write a check and all of this disappears. I can go back to being Annie Powers and Ophelia can slip back into the darkness where she belongs. Maybe it’s really that easy.

“Okay,” I say.

“I’ll be home soon,” he says, kissing me softly on the mouth. I reach for him, pull him to me, and hold on tight. He leaves me, and I listen to him on the stairs and then watch as his car pulls from the drive. I get up quickly and grab my keys.

“I’m going to run out for a second,” I tell Esperanza as I pass by the family room on my way to the garage. “Gray’s gone, too.”

“It’s late,” she says.

“I won’t be long,” I say. “Victory’s sleeping.”

I don’t hear what she says as I leave. At the end of our street, I just catch a glimpse of Gray’s taillights as he makes a left. I’m following him. I don’t know why.

27

“He was gone most of the time,” Gray said of his father. “And when he was home, he was this brooding presence. Sullen, staring at the television or angry at my mother for something she’d bought or had done to the house while he was gone. I hovered around him, wanting and fearing his attention. Occasionally I’d get these quick pats on the back or we’d try to play catch or build a tree house, something that fathers and sons might do together. But it was never quite right. We always walked away feeling like we’d failed at something indefinable. We just couldn’t connect, not really. Not ever.”

He used to spend time talking to me like this, even when he thought I might not be able to hear him or that I didn’t care. He’d sit in my room at the psychiatric hospital in New Jersey where he’d admitted me as Annie Fowler and talk. I’d stare off into space, not responding. I wasn’t exactly catatonic, but I’d sort of lost my will to exist. I didn’t speak, barely ate, just stared at the window in my room watching the leaves fall from the trees, the clouds drift past. I didn’t know why he’d talk to me, a stranger, like this. What does he want from me? Why doesn’t he just leave me here?

“My mother was just so damned sad, all the time. She was clinically depressed, I realize now. But then, she was unsupported, didn’t even know she needed treatment. She never recovered from the loss of her daughter, my sister who I never knew. I suppose my father never recovered, either. Maybe that’s what happens to you when you’re born to parents who’ve lost a child. You just never fit somehow.”

He’d talk, sometimes for hours, as though he’d been holding it in all his life, waiting for some silence where he could safely release the words. Maybe, in a way, I was his first safe place, someone in no position to judge him for his sins and loss of faith.

“After high school I joined the navy. Everyone was pleased, proud. But I just wanted to get away from them. It seemed like the right thing to do. It was what my father did. I had no idea what I was doing, not really. Maybe I’m more like my mother than my father. I wasn’t cut out for the things that lay ahead.”

I found myself listening even though, during that time, I hated him. He was six feet of muscles and hard places, scars and dark looks. I found him ugly, too harsh around the eyes and mouth. He smelled strongly of Ivory soap and sometimes alcohol. I couldn’t decide whether he was the person who’d rescued me or destroyed me. He’d killed Marlowe, the first person I’d ever loved. He’d saved me from a killer, brought me to this hospital, and stayed with me, came every day with books and magazines, candy and little gifts that sat in an untouched pile in the closet by the bathroom.

He told me how a few years after the First Gulf War he was honorably discharged from the Navy SEALs. He left sick with rage and disillusionment with the military and the government. He was angry at his father for pushing him into a career he was never sure he wanted, angry at himself for not knowing any other way to live. He drifted from New York to Florida, drinking too much, doing some odd private-investigator work here and there.

“I’d done and seen some truly heinous things,” he told me. “They didn’t seem to have any meaning or purpose. Nothing good ever came from the bad, not that I could see. It was making me sick back then. I didn’t know what I was going to do with the rest of my life, how long I could carry all the baggage I had.”

I cooperated with my admittance to the hospital and with my name change because I knew I didn’t have any choice. It was that or prison. The truth is, I didn’t have anywhere else to go; I knew that neither of my parents would help me. But more than that, I was eager to be rid of Ophelia and the things she’d done-what I could remember, anyway. Gray and I were alike in that respect, coming to terms with past deeds that seemed right at the time but under the glare of reality revealed themselves as dead wrong.

“When I found you, I thought maybe you were the one who makes all the wrong things right,” he said one night about a month after I’d been in the hospital. “I thought, if I can do right by her, maybe it gives meaning to everything else.”

“That’s bullshit,” I said, finally answering him. I didn’t want to be his penance. I didn’t want to be the one who made things right for him. “That’s not the way life works. There’s no balance sheet.”

“No?” he said, sitting up in the chair where he’d been slouching. “Then how do we move on from our mistakes?”

“We don’t get to move on,” I said, resting my eyes on him for the first time.

He leaned his head back and gave a mirthless laugh. “So we just languish in regret until we die?”

“Maybe that’s what we deserve,” I said, turning away from him again.

He let a beat pass. Then, “I hope you’re wrong.”

Tonight I stay far enough away from Gray’s car that he can’t see me but close enough not to lose him. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. Someone like Gray instinctively knows when he’s being tailed. Maybe that’s because he’s usually doing the tailing. Takes one to know one. And, of course, if he sees my car in the rearview mirror, he’ll know right away that it’s me. I’m not sure how I’ll explain myself, since I have no idea what I’m doing.

He’s moving fast, crossing the causeway and pulling on to the highway. He’s not stopping at the police station. He’s headed into the city, which seems odd. I never thought to ask him how he knows where Harrison lives. He has his methods.

“I was in a bar in the East Village once, a place called Downtown Beirut. You know it?” Gray asked me one night at the hospital. Our relationship had improved by this time, but I didn’t answer. I almost never did. I don’t think he minded. He knew I was listening.

“A real dump, the biggest dive you ever saw-what a shithole. I used to drink there a lot. Just find a corner and pound them back until I could barely get myself home to my apartment on First Avenue. It wasn’t every night that I’d get drunk like this, only when I couldn’t sleep, when it was all too much with me. My mother passed after I was discharged, a stroke. I blamed my dad. I blamed him for almost everything. Sometimes my anger felt like a physical pain in my chest. You ever felt like that?”

Yes, I’d felt like that, for most of my life, in fact. But I didn’t say so. That night he’d brought flowers-daisies, if I remember correctly-and some doughnuts in a box. They both sat untouched on the table beside me.

“Anyway, I was sitting there one night, well on my way to oblivion, when an old wreck of a guy, an aging biker covered with tats and a mess of long gray hair, pulled up a chair.”

I heard him shift in his chair, crack his neck.

“I told him I wasn’t looking for company. He told me he wasn’t looking for company, either. He was looking for his daughter. A friend we had in common told him I could help.”

I turned to look at Gray. He was sitting in the same chair he’d been sitting in most nights for a month. His feet were up on the windowsill, his head back as if he were talking to the ceiling. He wore jeans and a black sweater, army-issue boots. His jacket, a beat-up old denim thing, was on the foot of my bed. He had a big scar on his neck; his hands were square and looked as hard as boulders.

I think I saw him for the first time that night. Outside my window it was snowing, fat flakes glittering under the streetlamps, tapping at the window like cold fingers. I saw the strong line of his jaw, his full red lips, the snaking muscles of his shoulders and arms. He took his eyes from the ceiling and fixed me in their cool gray stare. I felt a little shock at their lightness; there was something spooky about his gaze.

He knew he had my attention and kept talking. “The old guy said, ‘I’ve failed this girl in every way a father can fail his daughter. I left her for the wolves, you know. If I fail her now, nothing else in my life means much. I got some money if you got some time and need the work. My buddy said you have a talent for finding people who don’t want to be found.’”

“My father,” I said, incredulous. Gray nodded.

“I had the time and I needed the work,” he went on. “He asked me to fix Marlowe Geary and take care of you, whatever that meant.”

“He paid you?”

“At first, but after a while we became friends. It became more than a job to me.”

“I know. You were looking to atone for your sins.”

He shrugged. “That was part of it. Yes.”

I see Gray pull off the highway before the downtown exits and into the slums that surround the city. I follow him through a neighborhood where the streetlamps are shot out and bulky forms hover in doorways and huddle on corners. Houses are dark, but the blue light of television screens flickers in windows. I stay back far, about one turn behind, following more on instinct sometimes than on being able to see his car. Where is he going? I know for sure Harrison doesn’t live here.

The residential neighborhood yields to an industrial area, warehouses with gates drawn, the highway up above us now. I can see he’s headed to the underpass. I stop my car and watch through the overgrowth of an empty lot as he, too, comes to a stop. We both sit and wait.

My cell phone rings then. I can see from the caller ID that it’s Detective Harrison. I watch the display blinking on the screen and wonder why he’d be calling me if he were meeting Gray. I don’t answer. After a minute I hear the beep that tells me he’s left a message. Keeping my eyes on Gray’s car, which is still idle, hidden partially in the dark, I access my messages.

“More food for thought,” Harrison says. “How much do you really know about your husband?”

As I sit in the dark and watch a white unmarked van pull up beside Gray’s car, I think, Good question.

I was in that hospital for over two months before it was decided, by some criteria to which I was not privy, that I could leave. If the doctors who helped me knew who I really was or had any idea that I was wanted in three states, no one ever let on. It wasn’t until much later that I learned I was there by an arrangement Drew had made. A contact of his owned the private hospital.

On the afternoon that Gray took me out of there, I still couldn’t remember much of what happened to me. The night Marlowe and I left the ranch was a dark blur, a series of disjointed images. I vaguely remembered going to my father for help. Everything else that came after was a black hole that pulled me apart, molecule by molecule, if I spent too long trying to think about it. The doctors diagnosed me as having experienced a fugue state, for lack of anything better to call it, brought on by the prolonged trauma of my terrible childhood and the event of my stepfather’s murder. They told me that I left myself behind that night when I got into that black sedan with Marlowe, that Ophelia ceased to exist and a new girl took her place.

So who am I now? I remember wondering as Gray shouldered the bag filled with the things he bought for me and we walked through the automatic doors into the cold parking lot. Am I Annie Fowler or Ophelia March or someone else entirely? Two and a half years of my life were gone.

I got into the black Suburban and wrapped my arms around myself against the cold. I was shivering, from cold, from fear. On the day I left Frank Geary’s horse ranch, I was seventeen, nearly eighteen. On the day I left the hospital with Gray, my twenty-first birthday was just three months away.

Gray turned on the heat, and we sat for a while in the car. I was scared. I didn’t know who I was or what I was going to do with myself now. But I stayed quiet. I couldn’t afford to show any weakness.

“I know a woman, a friend of my father’s,” he said after a few minutes. “I’m going to take you to her, and she’s going to help you pull your life together, okay?”

“Where?”

“Florida.”

He was staring straight ahead, not looking at me. I watched a muscle work in his jaw. My body stiffened. I thought he was done with me. He’d saved me, and now he didn’t need me to feel better about himself. At some point during our visits, I’d stopped hating him, started seeing him for what he was, the first good man I’d ever known. And now I thought I was losing him.

A few weeks earlier, Gray gave me a letter my father had written. It was to be our last communication for a long time. Ophelia was dead; there would be no phone calls or visits-in other words, not very different from when Ophelia lived. My father wrote how Gray had tracked me and Marlowe for two years, gave over his whole life to looking for me.

“There’s a lot of things about that time he’ll need to tell you,” my father wrote. “But I think along the way he fell in love with you, Opie. Don’t hurt him too bad.”

Sitting in the car with Gray, I hoped it was true. But I couldn’t think of one good reason Gray would love me. I was a mess of a girl with nothing to offer.

“Where are you going?” I asked, examining my fingernails, bracing myself for his answer.

“I’m coming with you,” he said quickly, looking ahead and gripping the wheel. Then he added softly, “If you want me to.”

I felt relief flood through my body. I lifted my eyes to him, and he was looking at me.

“Was that a smile?” he asked with a little laugh.

“Maybe,” I said, letting it spread wide across my face. It almost hurt, it had been so long.

“I’ve never seen you smile before,” he said, putting a hand on my cheek. His touch was surprisingly gentle. I put my hand to his, and we sat there like that for a minute. In that moment he was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen.

“What are you going to do down there?” I asked.

“My father has a company that’s doing some good in the world. There’s a place for me there.”

I couldn’t hide my surprise. “But you don’t really get along, do you?”

He gave a slow, careful nod. I could see he’d given it some thought. “We’ve had a lot of really hard times-we might always have problems-but we’re working on it. He came through for me-for you.”

On the radio David Bowie crooned sad and slow with Bing Crosby about the little drummer boy.

“It just seems important now to put all that anger behind me,” he said suddenly. He moved closer to me. “To make a place, a home for you-for us. I mean, look at me, forty’s right around the corner, and I don’t even own a futon.”

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?”

He doesn’t even play the game, just tells me where to meet him, a rest stop about twenty miles south of where I am. I have no intention of meeting him. I’d have to be insane to do that.

“I have to get home,” I tell him. “I’ll be missed. I have a family, Detective.”

He issues a nasty little laugh. “Let me tell you something: You don’t have anything unless I say you do.”

He ends the call. I hold the dead phone in my hand. Desperation and panic are eating an acid hole in my center. I try Gray on his cell phone and don’t get an answer. I hang up without leaving a message. After driving a few more miles, my mind racing through my various options, I exit the highway and make a turn, get back on, and head south. I’ll meet him, I tell myself. I’ll give him what he wants. Then he’ll go away. Just like Gray said. Why Gray didn’t go to see him, why he wound up killing Simon Briggs instead, I don’t know. There’s no time to think about it. I just need to finish this and get home.

As far as I know, my mother still lives on Frank Geary’s horse ranch in Central Florida. She believes I’m dead. I know from my father that she blames me for everything that happened to Frank, to her. She has turned the farm into a safe house for women in love with death-row inmates. She helps them lobby for new trials, conducts letter-writing campaigns for the examination of old evidence with new technology, comforts them when the worst happens. She even has a website, freetheinnocent.org.

A couple of years ago, I saw her on a talk show, defending herself against the families of murder victims. She looked old and worn, all her prettiness gone. I felt nothing when I saw her, except a slight nausea that she could have devoted so much time and feeling to this cause when she never showed a fraction of that love or concern for her own daughter. She wears a picture of Frank in a locket around her neck.

“He was an innocent man who died for crimes he didn’t commit,” she kept repeating. She made a weird rocking motion, seemed edgy and unstable. Even the other people on stage-a woman dating a death-row inmate, a death-row appeals lawyer, the wife of a man wrongly convicted and executed-stared at her, leaned their bodies away in an effort to distance themselves.

The show itself was sensational garbage, designed to create conflict among the participants. Families of victims were grouped on the other side of the stage-the mother of an abducted and murdered girl, the husband of a woman who was raped and murdered in their home, the sister of a young man who was the victim of a serial killer. Things started out well enough but naturally devolved into bitter tears and screaming matches. The audience jeered.

Eventually the questions turned to me and Marlowe. I watched with rapt attention, though I knew I shouldn’t. I just couldn’t turn it off.

“Do you think it’s something genetic or something learned?” the host asked my mother, a barely concealed look of disgust on his face. “How do you explain your daughter’s involvement with murderer Marlowe Geary?”

“I believe Marlowe Geary was innocent of the crimes he was accused of committing, just as his father was,” she said, jutting her chin out and blinking her eyes oddly. “He never had a trial. He was tried and convicted in the media.”

“The evidence is overwhelming,” said the host, a gray-haired man with a chiseled, heavily made-up face.

“Evidence lies,” she said, staring directly at the camera. “We all know that.”

About a year after Frank died, new DNA technology proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that he had killed at least two of the women he went to jail for initially-a local waitress named Lauren Miter and Sadie Atkins, a motel maid. Their families never stopped lobbying to prove Frank’s guilt and finally succeeded. I knew it must have been cold comfort, but maybe that’s better than nothing. I wondered about Janet Parker. She didn’t need technology to prove that Frank had killed her daughter. Her body knew, and the knowledge wasted her.

I have often wondered about the other women, a suspected thirteen in all. Women who went missing in a twenty-mile radius around the Geary home whose bodies were never found. What happened to them? Did they all die at the hands of Frank Geary?

“You didn’t answer my question,” the host said when the audience quieted down. “How do you explain your daughter’s involvement with Marlowe Geary?”

“I won’t speak ill of the dead. But my stepson was a good, good boy. I knew him to be gentle and kind. Ophelia was a very troubled young girl, headstrong and unhappy.”

“So what are you saying?” asked the host, incredulous.

“If he did anything wrong, she might have been the corrupting influence,” my mother said, widening her eyes and looking straight at the camera again.

I was stunned by the injustice of her words, the absolute delusional world she lived in. But still I couldn’t turn off the television. In the oddest way, it was good to see my mother, a comfort to hear her voice. We love our parents so much, even when we hate them, even when they abuse and betray us. We want so badly to be loved in return. If they only knew their power.

The show ended with a solitary man onstage, a representative from an organization dedicated to counseling the victims of violent crime and their families. He was a small, frail-looking man with a silky drift of strawberry-blond hair and sparkling green jewels for eyes. His voice wobbled slightly as he spoke in vagaries about how victims have to face down their fears rather than wallow in them. The techniques of his organization, he said, were “experimental and controversial but highly effective.”

“When we’re victimized or when we lose someone to violence, it changes the way we see the world. It opens a hole in the perception of our lives, and it seems like every bad thing, every monster, can enter through that opening. Facing the fear that’s left after you or someone you love has been victimized is the hardest thing you’ll do. But if you don’t do it, the fear will kill you slowly, like the most insidious cancer, cell by cell.”

He wouldn’t be specific about the organization’s techniques but offered a website: nomorefear.biz. I jotted it down, but when I visited it later, there was only an error page.

For three days following, my mother’s words ate a hole in my gut. I couldn’t eat or sleep, unable to rid myself of the sight of her, used up and unstable, blaming me for Marlowe’s crimes. I made a few more attempts to visit the website, but it was down every time.

For some reason I’m thinking about this as I pull off at the rest stop. The air is charged with bad possibilities as I drive down the access road and the highway disappears from my rearview mirror. I see Harrison’s SUV parked beyond the restrooms, in the farthest corner of the lot. I wonder if there’s anyplace more desolate and menacing than an empty rest stop in the middle of the night.

I come to a halt at a distance from his vehicle. I’m not going to pull up to him. I’m not going to approach his car. I’m going to stay inside with the doors locked. If he wants to talk, he’ll have to come to me. I sit and wait, expecting him to call me on my cell phone. A minute passes, then five. Finally I find his number on my phone and call him. His voice mail picks up.

“Hi, you’ve reached Ray.” His voice is bright and chipper, like a high-school cheerleader’s. “Leave a message and I’ll get right back to you.”

I have a low opinion of Detective Harrison, and it’s getting lower. He’s taunting me, waiting to see what I’ll do. Eventually, I can’t take it anymore. I pull up alongside his vehicle. He’s sitting there, smoking a cigarette. He turns as I come to a stop. He rolls down his window.

“I wasn’t sure how desperate you were,” he says. “Now I am.”

“Spare me the foreplay,” I say. “Just get to the point.” The smell of his cigarette makes me want to smoke, even though I haven’t in years.

He gives me that neighborly, “I’m nobody” smile he seems to have perfected. I see that his whole nice-guy aura is a persona he cultivates to put people at ease, to relax them. Like his voice-mail message, for example-friendly, disarming, not stern and professional, not likely to scare away the skittish.

“I read that you watched while Marlowe Geary killed those girls. That witnesses saw you watching, doing nothing. What does that feel like?”

I don’t answer him, just take the blow. I did ask him to get to the point. I guess the point is that he knows everything.

“How do you live with yourself?” he wants to know. Now I hate him. I find myself wishing that it was him and not Simon Briggs under that bridge. Or maybe both of them. I hate the way anger causes a mutiny of the body, the dry mouth, the trembling hands.

“You’re awfully self-righteous for a dirty cop,” I say.

He pulls his face into a mock grimace. “Ouch.”

I rub my eyes hard, but it’s no use, the pain in my head is ratcheting up.

“So you go from Marlowe Geary to Gray Powers. From killer to cop, or whatever he is. Actually, they’re not so different, are they? They just kill for different reasons, kill different kinds of people. I wonder what this says about you.”

But I’m not listening to him. I’m watching a young girl approach us. She is emaciated and pale as death today. Her hair is dirty and hanging limply. Her arms are covered with bruises. She walks slowly, almost dazed, but she’s looking right at me. Detective Harrison turns to follow my gaze, puts his hand inside his jacket.

“What are you looking at?” he asks.

I know he can’t see her. She is shaking her head at me in disapproval. She thinks I’m weak, foolish. If it were up to her, Detective Harrison would already be dead.

“I’m starting to wonder about you, Ophelia. I’m concerned about your stability.”

There’s a ringing in my ears now. I close my eyes, and when I open them again, she’s gone.

“I have money,” I say. “A lot of it. Just tell me what you want.”

“It’s not about money anymore,” he says with a dramatic sigh. “At least it’s not about your money anymore. Let’s just say this: Ophelia March is not forgotten. Not forgiven, not forgotten. And do you know how many enemies your husband has? How many people would like to see him suffer? Do you have any idea about Powers and Powers, the things they’ve done?”

I have no idea what he’s talking about, and more than that, my head is going to implode. I feel his eyes on me, and when I meet them, I’m surprised to see the man I saw that first night, the one I liked.

“You know what?” he says, incredulous. “I don’t think you do know what I’m talking about. I really don’t. Because when I look at your face, I don’t see the person I read about. What’s wrong with you? How did you let your life wind up like this?”

I close my eyes again and rest my head back. The pressure of the seat against the base of my skull feels good. I have a millisecond of relief.

We’re both still sitting in our cars, speaking through the open windows. The streak of white hair over his ear looks silver in the moonlight. “You’re one to talk,” I say. “Look at you. Blackmail? You don’t seem like the type.”

He shrugs. “Like you, I’ve made some bad calls.”

“So why don’t we just help each other out? I give you what you need to make a clean start; you leave me and my family alone.”

I sound cool and practical, just as Gray would sound in this situation, I imagine. And I do feel calmer than I have in hours. I watch Ophelia. She’s standing right beside Harrison now on the other side of his window. I can see her breath fogging the glass. He’s staring straight ahead, oblivious to her.

“Let me think about it,” he says. Suddenly he seems tired and sad, as if he’s taken on an enterprise he no longer has the will or the strength to finish. He puts his hand to his eyes and rubs hard. He’s conflicted, I think. Part of him wants to be the good cop, the hero. He hasn’t lost that part of himself. It hurts him to be so corrupt, to do such an obviously wrong thing. That’s why he delivered his self-righteous speech at the mall, to make it all okay for himself.

Ophelia turns and walks away, slowly fading like a fog that’s passing. I can hear her laughing. The headache and the ringing in my ears start to fade.

“I was seeing a doctor,” I tell him.

“Yeah?” he says, glancing over at me. “Good. You need one.”

“He disappeared.”

“What do you mean?”

“His office, everything in it, was just gone the last time I went there.” I leave out the part about his horrifically bloody murder. I don’t feel like getting into all that.

He cocks his head to the side, gives me a quizzical look. “Why are you telling me this?”

“I was just wondering. Would you have a way of finding out if he was ever actually there? Or if he is who he told me he was?”

He looks at me with something like concern on his face. He’s trying to decide how crazy I really am.

“What was his name?” he asks, his tone surprisingly gentle. Detective Harrison is a complicated man.

“Dr. Paul Brown.”

He writes it down in a little book he takes from his dash. He asks for the address, and I give it to him.

“I’ll look into it,” he tells me. “In the meantime, are you sure you’re safe at home?”

“What is that supposed to mean?” I remember the question he asked on my voice mail: How much do you really know about your husband?

That wolfish smile again. “Sometimes the people we know least of all are sleeping in our beds.”

“You must be thinking about your wife,” I snap. “What does she know about you? Not much, I bet.”

He doesn’t like that-too close to center. His face takes on that dark expression, the one that frightens me. He starts the engine of his car. “I’ll be in touch.”

“Wait,” I say, sorry for my smart mouth. “Who else is looking for me?”

He rolls up his window and pulls away, leaving me alone to watch his car merge onto the highway and disappear. I wonder if he’s trying to unnerve me, make me think there are other people after me, that my husband is not who I believe him to be so that I’m more vulnerable to his blackmail. Or maybe he’s just a sadist. Or maybe he’s telling me the truth. I look for Ophelia in the darkness, but she’s gone.

I return to the house. It’s dark, quiet. Esperanza has gone to bed. I peek in on Victory, and she’s sound asleep with Claude under one arm. The colored fish from her night-light dance around the room. Gray is not back from his deadly errand. And I wonder where he is, what he’ll tell me about his night when he gets home. I consider calling my father but decide it would be reckless and pointless. I go to the bedroom, close the door, and wait-for Gray, for Marlowe, for Ophelia, whoever comes first.

As I wait, the memories start their parade. I can’t stop them. I lie down on the bed, the sheer force of their relentless march exhausting me. The articles say I watched as Marlowe tortured innocent girls, that I stood by and did nothing as he murdered them-convenience-store clerks, gas-station attendants, hotel maids. It’s true, without being the whole truth.

We traveled at night, stealing a new car every few days from roadside diners and rest stops along the highway. We stole mostly old junkers with empty soda cans on the floor and plastic Jesuses on the dash, pictures of toddlers tucked in the visor, piles of cigarette butts in the ashtrays. Each car had its particular aroma: cigars or vomit, bad perfume or sex. As Marlowe drove, I rummaged through the glove boxes, trying to figure out whose day we’d ruined, whether they had insurance and would be able to afford another car.

By the end of the second week, what little money we had was nearly gone; we’d had nothing but soda and vending-machine junk for days. We were hungry, our bodies starving for nutrients, and I was starting to feel desperate. We’d spent two nights in the car. When I managed to sleep, my dreams were wild, chaotic, punctuated by my mother screaming and the sound of gunfire, the smell of burning wood. The rest of the time, I moved through a kind of haze of fatigue, hunger, and fear. This is a nightmare, I’d tell myself. It isn’t happening.

I’d been in a kind of half sleep when we pulled up at the gas station. The clock on the dash read 2 A.M. I knew we didn’t have any money. I thought he was stopping to use the restroom. Then he pulled a gun from the duffel bag.

“We need money,” Marlowe said.

I stared at the gun. Its shape seemed natural in his hand. “What are you going to do?” I said with a laugh. “Rob the place?”

Marlowe rolled his eyes. “We’re fugitives,” he said sharply. “We’re wanted for murder. Robbing a gas station is nothing.”

I felt like he’d slapped me in the face. “We didn’t kill anyone,” I said. “Janet Parker killed Frank.”

“You let her onto the property, Ophelia,” he said nastily. “That makes you an accomplice.”

I shook my head. “No.”

“Yes,” he said, pulling something from the duffel bag. He handed it to me. It was a Florida newspaper. RUNAWAYS WANTED FOR QUESTIONING IN CONNECTION TO THE MURDER OF FRANK GEARY, the headline read.

“No,” I said again. The reality of our situation, of what I’d done, was settling into my body. Marlowe moved to get out of the car, but I grabbed his arm. “We’ll go to my father in New York. He’ll help us. We don’t need to do this.”

“We’re not going to make it to New York,” he said, pushing my hand away. “We’re out of gas. What do you think will happen then?”

“We’ll steal another car.”

He swept his hand around the empty gas-station lot. “Do you see another car?” he spit. “In a mile we’ll be stranded by the side of the road.”

I let go of a sob that had been dwelling in my chest. “I did what you told me to do!” I screamed through a sudden wash of tears. “I saw you talking to her! You planned everything with her! I just did what you told me to do!” It felt good to scream and sob, to release all my anger and fear.

Marlowe got very quiet in response. He lowered his voice to a whisper and moved his face in so close to mine that I could smell his rancid breath.

“I did this for you, Ophelia, to save you from Frank,” he said. “You wanted me to rescue you, to take you away? Well, I did that. All of this has been for you, you ungrateful little bitch.”

He had his hair back in a ponytail, and long strands were escaping. The dark circles under his eyes made him seem ghoulish. I turned away from him, my gut churning with fear and guilt and shame.

“Do you want me to go to jail? Do you want to go to jail?”

“No,” I managed, all my anger exhausted.

“Then fill the tank, get in the driver’s seat, and shut your fucking mouth,” he said. “Keep the engine running.”

He got out of the car then, and I watched him stride toward the building. I pulled the car over to the pump and did as I was told, keeping my eyes averted from the store. I didn’t want to see him hold a gun to someone. I didn’t want to see the fear on that person’s face. And I didn’t want to be the person who was waiting outside while he did that. When the tank was full, I got back into the car. As I sat there, “New Year’s Day” by U2 played on the radio; I sang along, with the harsh lights above me revealing all the ugliness of my situation. I almost put the car in gear and drove. It was another of those moments when if I’d acted differently, things might not have broken apart the way they did. I was still me in that second. I could still have saved Ophelia. But I didn’t.

I never thought to wonder why Marlowe didn’t bother to cover his face, or why he didn’t consider it an issue that I waited in plain sight with the car under the lights. When the shots rang out, I felt the vibrations in my bones. I sat there for a second, gripping the wheel, and felt any hope I had for my life drain from my body. Even then I could have run, gone to the police and taken my chances. Instead I got out of the car and walked through the glass doors of the gas station’s store.

Marlowe was behind the counter, taking money from the register. All I could see was the top of her head, her long golden hair soaking up the pooling black blood on the white linoleum floor.

“What happened?”

“Go back to the car,” he said quietly, not looking at me. “Now.”

I did as I was told. I sat in the driver’s seat for a long time. More than an hour. He came out finally, carrying bags filled with food-Twinkies, cans of pop, candy bars. When he got into the driver’s seat, nudging me back over to the passenger side, he presented me with a Snickers bar, my favorite, and that wide, charming smile that used to thrill me. “I’m sorry I yelled at you,” he said sweetly, leaning in and kissing me gently on the cheek. I clung to him, my lifeline, my only hope, even as my mind screamed, What did he do in there? “I know you’re scared. I am, too. We’ll go to your dad.”

“What did you do, Marlowe?” I finally managed to whisper into his hair. I felt his body go stiff, and he pulled away from me quickly.

“Everything I’ve done, I’ve done for you,” he said, turning on the ignition.

I’d fallen into a hole, a slick-walled abyss, and there was no way for me to climb out of the darkness that was closing in around me. I look back on this as the moment when I started to fear him more than I loved him, when the part of me that still wanted to survive started to hate him. But I was too lost to know the difference.

“No one else will ever love you like I do,” he said darkly as we pulled onto the highway.

I’m not sure how many more women and girls there were. I remember flash details-garishly red lipstick, a turquoise barrette, a flower tattoo, sparkling pink nail polish badly applied. I hear a nervous giggle, a cry of terrible pain. These things stay with me.

When Gray comes home, I’ve moved out onto the balcony to listen to the Gulf, trying to remember more. He comes outside and sits next to me. For a second, my past and present mingle.

“I think our problems have been eliminated,” he says. He doesn’t reach for me or turn to face me. He is just a dark figure beside me, staring out at the sea.

“What happened?” I ask, dreading his answer. He doesn’t respond right away. Then, “Let’s just say I took care of it.”

“Gray.”

“Trust me.”

I think of my conversation with Ray Harrison at the rest stop, how tired and discouraged he seemed. Maybe he felt sorry for me. Maybe he decided to take what Gray offered and walk away. Or maybe he was planning to work other angles as well.

“Did Harrison tell you there are other people looking for me?”

He shifts lower in his seat, puts his feet up on the railing. “There’s no one else looking for you.”

“He told me there was.”

“When?”

I release a sigh, knowing he’s not going to be happy. “I saw him tonight. He called me and asked me to meet him. I did.”

“That was stupid, Annie.”

We sit in silence. I want to tell him that I saw him kill Simon Briggs. But I don’t. I’m afraid. Afraid that he did it, afraid of why he shook Briggs’s hand. I’m also afraid he didn’t do it, that I imagined the whole thing. I’m suddenly very cold, though the night air is mild and slightly humid. I walk back into our bedroom. Gray follows, takes me by the shoulders, and spins me around.

“We’re okay,” he says. “Trust me. All the threats have been neutralized.”

This is the language he uses when he’s afraid, these passive military phrases: Threats have been neutralized. Our problems have been solved. But I don’t see fear when I look at him. His eyes are flat, cool; his mouth is pulled into a grim, tight line. In the dim light of the room, the scars on his face look darker, nastier.

“What about Briggs?” I ask. I’m hoping here that he’ll say something true, something that grounds me. I want him to tell me he killed Briggs. But he doesn’t.

“He won’t be a problem,” Gray says quietly.

I feel the slightest flicker of fear at his words. I walk toward the bed. He doesn’t move to follow me. I remember that he thought Briggs was working for someone. Even if he’d killed Briggs, wouldn’t that person still be looking, and wouldn’t Briggs’s death be a red flag that he’d gotten close? Suddenly I recall the envelope that I stuffed under the seat of my car. I never looked inside.

“What were you thinking, Annie?” says Gray. “Where did you meet him?”

“At a rest stop by the highway. He said, ‘Ophelia March is not forgotten. Not forgiven, not forgotten.’”

“He’s wrong. It’s over.”

“What about the person who followed me on the beach? The necklace I found in the sand?”

“You said yourself you’re not sure what you heard, who that might have been. It could have been anyone, or even Briggs trying to unnerve you. And there must be a million of those necklaces around, Annie.”

Can it be this easy to explain away?

“Trust me, Annie. We’re okay.” He kisses me softly on the lips and pulls me into a tight embrace. I can feel his relief, his love for me. I do know my husband-I don’t care what Harrison thinks.

I want so badly to believe Gray that I actually start to. When he releases me and looks into my eyes, his face comes into focus and the room around me starts to seem like my bedroom again, not a place where I’ll be sleeping until I flee my life. I don’t care whether Gray has killed Briggs or not. I know he’ll never tell me if he did. For a minute I can believe that Detective Harrison won’t come sniffing around again, that the person on the beach was Briggs or some teenager playing a prank. I’ll walk with Victory on the beach tomorrow and then take her to school just like any other day. In a week all of this will be a fading memory, like the car accident you just narrowly avoided that leaves you shaken and glad to have survived.

Gray’s hands start roaming my body, and I come alive inside. My relief and the strength of his body, the warmth of his skin against mine, awake a deep hunger. His lips are on my neck and then my collarbone as he peels away my shirt and goes to work on my jeans. I am tearing at his clothes as he pushes me gently onto the bed. When he’s inside me, he wraps his arms around me so that I can feel every inch of his body against mine. He whispers my name over and over, soft and slow, like a mantra. “Annie. Annie. Annie.” Somewhere beneath the heat of my desire, I find myself wishing he’d call me by my real name. I wish he’d call me Ophelia. Even though I’m making love to my husband, I feel suddenly so lonely.

Afterward, as he’s drifting off to sleep, he whispers, “I can’t lose you, Annie. Stay with me.” I don’t know why he would say that. Does he sense that Annie is coming apart and drifting away? I ask him what he means, but he’s already sleeping.

I close my eyes. When I open them again, Ophelia is sitting in the chair by the fireplace. She’s laughing.

28

There are questions I’ve asked myself a number of times over the past few years: Can you shift yourself off and start again? If you’ve done unthinkable things, can you cast them away like unflattering garments, change your ensemble, and become someone else? What of the relief of punishment, the wash of atonement, the salve of forgiveness? I thought I was free. I was confident that I’d started over with the birth of my daughter. In motherhood, in the surrender of self, I became someone new. The ugly parts of myself and my other life were forgotten, literally. The blackouts, the strange flights-all of that ended when she was born. I couldn’t be that person anymore. I had to be someone worthy, able to protect and care for the tiny life in my charge.

But I suppose I should have known that Ophelia would return. The doctor always said as much. You cannot hide from yourself forever. The terrible migraines and nightmares, he said, were a sign that my subconscious was working hard to suppress the memories my conscious mind couldn’t handle. Ultimately the shadow wants to be known, and she’ll do what she must to be acknowledged.

The next few days pass without incident, and I lull myself into thinking that everything has gone back to normal. I walk on the beach with Victory, take her to school and pick her up, we watch videos together in the evenings. Drew and Vivian have gone on a short trip, so I don’t have them hovering over my life-Drew with his dark, suspicious glances; Vivian with her concerned, motherly expressions. We are a small, happy family: me, Victory, Gray, and even Esperanza, whom none of us can imagine living without. Even when Gray and I bicker over whether Victory is too pampered, too spoiled (she is, of course, but so what?), it’s heaven in its normalcy. I am giddy with relief. Detective Harrison has stopped coming around. Ophelia is gone. Marlowe, too. No more dark forms lurking on the beach. No more pale, fragile-looking girls walking toward me in the night.

But they are not forgotten. No, never that. So I begin the scuba-diving lessons I told my escape artist (as I have come to think of him) I would. Just in case. Just as a precaution.

I am terrified of the water, the leaden quiet of it, the suffocating weight of it. I feel the first cut of panic even as I wade into the shallow end of a pool, as though it might start to rise and take me over, swallow me with its terrible silence. The brighter the sun, the clearer and bluer the water, the worse it is. It seems like a deceiver then, so inviting, so refreshing. You might forget how deadly it is, how it can effortlessly suck the life from you. When I watch Victory flitting through the water of Vivian’s pool or in the ocean, I envy her confidence and her complete comfort, even as I suppress a scream every time she disappears beneath the surface for more than a second or two.

“Don’t worry, Mommy!” she’ll call as she comes up for air, knowing instinctively of my fear even though I’ve never said a word, have worked very hard not to telegraph my dread to her. Somehow she knows.

I wasn’t always afraid. I remember going to Rockaway Beach with my father when I was little, five or six. He would take me into the cold, salty water, and together we would jump the waves. My mother stayed on shore waving to us in her red bikini. I remember swallowing gallons of ocean water, my stomach churning with it. My eyes burned. But I loved it, loved being with my dad, hearing his loud, whooping laughter. Even wiping out was its own kind of fun, those few seconds beneath the blue-gray swirl of the Atlantic, the relief of planting my feet again and taking in air, feeling the tide pull the ground out from beneath me, currents of sand running through my toes. When we were both waterlogged, we’d run back to my mother. I’d have goose bumps, even though the sun was hot. And my mother waited with a towel, wrapped me up tight and dried my hair. I remember feeling safe in the water, feeling like it was friendly, a place to have fun. I have to believe that it was Janet Parker who caused me to fear it with the images she evoked. They expanded and found a home in my mind. After the words she spoke, I could never swim again. Strange how powerful she was, as if she’d issued a curse and changed me.

The dive instructor I have chosen is very patient with me. She’s a pretty young redhead who I think is used to dealing with children. She talks to me in soothing tones, coaxes me into the water with bland assurances, holds my hand when necessary. The dive equipment, the buoyancy control device, the regulator and tank are somehow comforting in spite of their weight and awkwardness. It’s as if I’ve brought a little of the land with me. Once I learn how to control my buoyancy and measure my breathing, after just two mornings, I find I can float effortlessly in the deep end of the pool. It feels like flying. I’m still afraid, but I’m starting to have it under control.

“You should be proud of yourself,” she tells me when I’ve completed the classroom-and-pool portion of my instruction. “Most people with so much fear could never do what you’ve done. You’re ready for your open-water certification.”

I thank her and tell her I’ll be doing my open water with another dive master, an old friend. She tells me to come back if I ever need a refresher. I shake her hand and wonder what she’ll say to investigators if I die.

She was so frightened of the water, I imagine her telling them. Prone to panic.

Everyone knows that panic kills, especially at seventy-five feet deep.

In the parking lot after my last lesson, I see Detective Harrison’s Ford Explorer parked next to my car. I notice that it’s dirty, the bottom covered with mud as though he has been off-roading. My insides drop with disappointment and fear. I was starting to think we’d heard the last of him. I walk over to his window. He rolls it down, and a wave of cool, smoky air drifts out.

“Hello, Annie.”

I don’t answer him. He takes a photograph from the passenger seat of his car and hands it to me.

“Do you know this man?”

It’s a picture of Simon Briggs, his face pale and stiff, eyes closed. Dead. I think of the envelope I am still carrying around in my car. I haven’t looked at it, in an effort to preserve the false sense of security I’ve been nursing over the last few days.

“No,” I say.

He gives me a sideways look, a kind of lazy smile. He knows I’m lying. I don’t know how.

“Okay,” he says. “How about this guy?”

He shows me another photograph. It’s a mug shot of a middle-aged man with pleasantly gray hair and a mustache. He has a kind face. It’s the man I know as Dr. Paul Brown.

“Your doctor, right?”

I nod.

“His real name is Paul Broward. He was wanted in three states-New York, California, and Florida-for insurance fraud, malpractice, and operating without a license. It was revoked for sexual assault of a patient.”

The information takes a second to sink in. The detective and I engage in a staring contest until I eventually lower my eyes.

“‘Was’ wanted?” I say finally.

“His body was found by fishermen in the Everglades yesterday. Or parts of it, anyway. Enough to identify.”

I feel a roil of shame and sadness. I hadn’t really believed he was dead, had almost convinced myself I’d imagined everything that night that felt like so long ago. Whatever he was, he had helped me. I didn’t want to think of him dying that way. And then I had to ask myself, did Ophelia kill him? Did I kill him? Gray destroyed the bloody clothes I wore home that night. I look down at my own hands. They don’t seem capable.

“You sure know how to pick ’em, Annie.”

I have decided not to reply to any more of his antagonistic statements.

“So,” he says when I don’t answer, “I have two dead bodies and one live woman lying about her identity connected to them both. I ask myself, what is it about you that encourages people to turn up dead?”

“I don’t know that other man,” I say, gesturing toward the first photo.

“Then why did he have your picture in his car?”

And why did Gray shake his hand and then shoot him in the head? Why did he leave the car there to be discovered by the police? Too many questions, no good answers.

“I have no idea,” I say. I want to walk away from him, to get into my car and drive. But something keeps me rooted. In a weird way, Detective Harrison has become the only person I’m clear about. I wish I could tell him what I saw, show him the envelope, ask him what else he knows about my doctor. But of course I can’t do any of that.

Instead I say, “My husband paid you off, right?”

“Yeah,” he says with a shrug. “But I still have a job to do.”

“What makes you think I won’t report you to Internal Affairs or something?”

He gives me a pitying look. “The way I see it, Annie, we’ve got each other by the balls. You squeeze, I’ll squeeze harder. Makes us even, doesn’t it?”

He has a point.

“Look,” he says. He seems suddenly sincere, concerned. “I think you’re in big trouble, and not just with the law. Maybe the police are the least of your problems.”

My heart starts to thrum. I know he’s right. Ever since that first panic attack in the grocery store’s parking lot, I have known that Annie Powers was not long for this world.

“A guy like Briggs, he’s just the hired help. He’s dead, but there will be someone else right behind him. Someone wants to find Ophelia March, and it ain’t because an aunt she didn’t know about left her some money.”

“And you know who that is?” I find myself moving closer to him involuntarily. My hand is resting on the window edge.

“No,” he says, shaking his head.

“You said-” I start.

“I lied. I was just trying to scare you.”

I walk away from him then, go back to my car. He rolls down the passenger window of his car. I notice the shock of white hair again.

“Start by asking yourself this question,” he calls after me. “Who referred you to that doctor? How did you find him? Whoever it was should be considered suspect.”

I don’t answer him as I get into the driver’s seat and start the engine.

“Are you too stupid to know when someone is trying to help you?” he asks.

“For a price, right?”

“Everything has a price, Annie. This is a material world. You should know that better than anyone.”

I shut the door, back out of my parking space. Before I pull out of the lot, I turn and look behind me at the detective. He points to his eye, then points to me. I’m watching you, he’s telling me. He probably didn’t mean for it to be comforting but, oddly, it is.

29

When Victory and I show up at Vivian’s unannounced later that afternoon, I see a flash of something on her face that I’ve never seen before. It happens when our eyes connect through the thick glass of her front door. It’s just the ghost of an expression, and in another state of mind I might not even have noticed it. It’s fear. Vivian is the strongest woman I’ve ever known, and when I see that look on her face, my heart goes cold.

“What a surprise,” she says with a bright, warm smile, swinging open the door. But it’s too late; the secret has passed between us. I walk through the door with Victory in my arms. She immediately reaches for her grandmother, and I hand her over, stand back as Victory bear-hugs her and then begins to chirp happily about her day. Vivian makes all the appropriate confirming noises and exclamations as we walk to the kitchen. I sit quietly, sipping a glass of water as Vivian makes a grilled cheese sandwich and cuts it into tiny squares the way Victory likes it. I stare out the double glass doors at the glittering blue waters of the infinity pool, thinking all variety of dark thoughts as the most important females in my life chatter, light and happy, like two budgies.

After her snack Victory runs off to the elaborate playroom they keep for her here, and Vivian sits down at the table across from me. She folds her arms on the table in front of her and waits. I tell her everything.

When I’m done, I look at her and see that she has hung her head. She raises her eyes to me after a moment, and they are filled with tears.

“Annie, I’m so sorry.”

I lean forward. “Why, Vivian? Why are you sorry?”

“Oh, God,” she says. That look is back, but it’s here to stay. Then, “Annie, there was no body. Marlowe Geary’s body was never recovered.”

“No body,” I repeat, just to hear the words again.

“It seemed like the only way at the time, Annie. He had to have died in that crash. He couldn’t have survived. But we didn’t think you could heal if you’d known they’d never recovered the body.”

I examine Vivian’s face, the pretty crinkles around her pleading eyes, the soft flesh of her cheeks flushed red with her distress. She is suddenly unfamiliar, this woman whom I have come to love more than my own mother. In a way I don’t really blame her for deceiving me all these years. I can understand why she did it; I can even believe she did it to protect me. But I’m angry just the same. I keep my distance, wrap my arms around my body against the clenching in my stomach. I look at the flowers on the table, bright pink and white tulips bowing gracefully over the lip of the vase. I try not to think about all the times I’d confessed my fear that Marlowe Geary might still be alive. I try not to think about how many times she, Drew, Gray, and my father had lied to me, made me feel like I was crazy, assuring me about this body they all knew was never found.

“Why are you telling me this now, Vivian?” I ask her when I trust my voice again. “What’s changed?”

She doesn’t seem to hear me. She just keeps talking.

“You were haunted by him,” she says. “I knew you were in pain. I thought, in time, all that pain would just go away. But then I started to wonder if part of you, maybe the part that couldn’t remember so much, was still connected to him. That doctor, he was supposed to help you.”

“Dr. Brown?” I say. “He knew who I was? He knew about my past?”

She shifts her eyes away and doesn’t answer.

“You brought me to him,” I say, remembering my first visit, how she drove me there, waited until I was done. “You said he’d helped a friend of yours.”

“I know,” she agrees, nodding solemnly. “That’s what they told me to say.”

“Who?”

“He knew everything about your past. He was supposed to help you come to terms in your own way, in your own time.”

He always knew when I was lying or leaving something out. There was never anyone in his waiting room. He never took any notes about our sessions but had perfect recall. All these things come back to me. Why didn’t I see any of it before?

“Who told you to say that?” I ask again when it was clear she wasn’t going to answer me.

“When you were stronger, I wanted Gray to tell you that Marlowe’s body was still missing. I thought you needed to know. But he didn’t want that. He just wanted to protect you. That’s all he’s ever wanted. You know that, don’t you?”

She takes my hand and holds it tight, looks at me with an urgency that makes me uncomfortable, that fills me with fear. But I don’t pull away from her.

“What are you trying to tell me, Vivian?” I lean in close to her and squeeze her hands. “Please just tell me.”

Her eyes lift to something behind me, and I spin around in my seat to see Drew standing in the doorway. He looks like a thunderhead, brow furrowed, eyes dark, neck red.

“Viv, you shouldn’t have,” he says sternly.

Vivian sits up straight and squares her shoulders at him, sticks out her chin. “It’s time. This is wrong. She needs to know.”

“She never needed to know,” Drew says. “Geary’s dead. Body or no body. No one’s ever heard from him again,” he says to me, his eyebrows making one angry line.

They exchange a look. I can see it was an old fight between them, words spoken so many times they don’t need speaking again. There is more Vivian wanted to say, but I know she’ll never say it now that Drew is here.

“No one’s ever heard from Ophelia March again, either, and yet here I sit.”

They both turn their gazes to me. Vivian looks so sad suddenly. Drew’s expression I can’t read.

“Who’s Ophelia?” We are interrupted by Victory. She’s staring at me with wide eyes.

“She’s no one, darling,” I say, reaching down to touch her face. “She’s just a character in a book.” I rise and lift my daughter into my arms. She must have wandered in while we were speaking. I’m not sure how long she’s been there or what she heard. All my questions will go unanswered now. It doesn’t matter anyway-they’re both liars.

I grab Victory’s jacket and book bag from the table. Vivian and Drew both move to stop me, then catch themselves. They won’t make a scene in front of their granddaughter. At least they have more respect for her than they do for me.

“Are we leaving?” Victory asks.

“Yes,” I say. I can feel her examine my face because she didn’t understand my tone. I look at her and give her a smile, which she returns uncertainly. I walk out the door without another word, jog down the steps, and go to our car. Victory calls behind us, “Bye, Grandma! Bye, Grandpa!”

Vivian and Drew stand by the door, waving stiffly to my daughter.

“Are you mad at them?” she asks as I buckle her into her car seat. Adrenaline is making me clumsy and hyperfocused, and I’m fumbling with the task of fastening the straps around my daughter. When I don’t answer, she asks the question again. I don’t want to lie, but I don’t want to play Twenty Questions, either. I don’t say anything, just kiss her on the cheek and ruffle her hair. I close her door and move to the driver’s seat, all the while feeling the heat of Drew’s and Vivian’s eyes.

“You are mad,” Victory says as we pull out of the driveway. “My teacher says that it’s okay to be mad but that you should always talk about your feelings, Mommy.”

“That’s good advice, Victory. But sometimes things are a little more complicated than that.”

She gives me a nod of grave understanding, and I wonder what kind of lesson I am teaching her today. Nothing good, I’m pretty sure.

As I drive off, my anger subsides and the adrenaline flood in my body finds a lower level. With Drew and Vivian disappearing in my rearview mirror, I am aware of a kind of relief. Gray talks about how before an operation there’s a terrible tension that fades once the first shot is fired. All the wondering about how things will go down and if he’ll survive evaporates, and he becomes pure action. Today I finally know what he means.

Gray is waiting at home when we get there. He jumps up from the couch as we walk in the door. Victory runs to him, and he picks her up and hugs her hard. She giggles in a way that makes my heart clench, a kind of sweet, girly little noise that is uniquely hers.

“How’s my girl?” he asks.

“Mommy’s mad at Grandma and Grandpa,” she tells him seriously.

“That’s all right. Sometimes we get angry with the people we love,” he says, depositing her on the floor and looking at my face. His eyes tell me that he’s already talked to Drew and Vivian.

“Hey, guess what? Esperanza’s waiting for you upstairs. She’s got a surprise for you.”

Victory doesn’t need to be told twice. I watch as she runs off. I hear her little shoes pounding up the stairs.

We stand looking at each other for a minute. I can’t read his expression.

“Why did you kill Simon Briggs?” I ask after I don’t know how long. The room is darkening as the sun fades from the sky. I can hear the lapping of the waves against the shore. I hear Victory laughing upstairs. There are black beans cooking in the kitchen.

He frowns and opens his mouth to deny it. I put up a hand. “I followed you. I saw you shoot him.”

He turns his head to the side and releases a long, slow breath.

“Because I couldn’t figure out who he was working for,” he says finally. “I found out where he was staying. I offered him a payoff in exchange for the name of his employer and for him to go back to whoever it was and say he couldn’t find you or that you were dead or whatever. When I gave him the money, he lied to me, said he was working for the police. So I killed him. I figured that it would send a message to whoever had hired him.” He finished with a shrug.

“How do you know he lied?”

“I know,” he says.

“Is he alive, Gray? Marlowe. Is he?”

He doesn’t answer, just fixes me with a stare. I can tell he wants to reach for me but there’s a high, hard wall between us.

“Is he alive?” I ask again.

Finally, “I don’t know, Annie. I just don’t know.”

I let the words move through me. Strange as it is, it feels good to hear him admit it, this thing I have known all along. I somehow feel stronger, saner, for knowing that my instincts haven’t failed me completely.

“What happened to Dr. Brown? Who was he?”

“He’s someone my father knows. He was a clinical psychiatrist who dealt with military and paramilitary posttraumatic stress patients. We thought he could help you.”

I don’t tell him what Detective Harrison has told me. I’m not sure why. Probably because I figure he’ll have an explanation for whatever I say. I don’t know whom to believe. Harrison isn’t exactly unimpeachable himself.

“What happened to him?”

“I don’t know, Annie. That’s the truth.”

That’s the truth. It’s a funny phrase. If you need to say it, it’s probably because every other thing out of your mouth has been a lie.

I see her then. She’s standing out on the deck, her hands pressed up against the window. She’s every bit as real as I am, which doesn’t mean much. I see her for what she is finally, just a girl who’s been lied to and betrayed by everyone she loves, someone who’s forever looking for a rescue that’s just not coming.

If there was ever any question about what I needed to do for her, it had been answered. Between Ray Harrison’s revelations and Vivian’s confessions, it’s all very clear. I understand Ophelia after all these years, why she has been afraid, so eager to flee the life that Annie Powers made. It has all been a façade, flimsy and insubstantial, waiting for one good wind to blow.

“Annie?” says Gray.

“Don’t call me that,” I say. “It’s not my name.”

Later I tuck Victory into her bed and lie down beside her. She clutches Claude in one arm, holds my hand with her free one. She’s drifty, eyelids droopy. I drink in the delicate lines of her profile, the soft pink of her skin, run my fingers through her silky hair. Sometimes it seems that all you do as a mother is say good-bye in tiny increments. The minute they leave your body, they just get further and further away, first crawling, then walking, then running. But tonight it’s even worse. Tonight I really am saying good-bye. Of course, she has no idea.

“Are you still mad?” she asks me, turning suddenly to meet my eyes.

I shake my head, “No. Everything’s fine. Sometimes grown-ups argue.”

She gives a small nod and a sleepy smile; she seems satisfied with this. She has always been such a reasonable child, always seeming to understand things beyond her years.

“I love you, baby,” I tell her. “More than anything.” It’s so important for her to know this now.

“I love you, too, Mommy.”

I watch as her little face finally relaxes, her breathing deepens. When I’m sure she’s asleep, I slip off her bed and leave the room quickly. If I stay any longer beside her, I’ll never have the strength to do what I know I must.

I find Gray waiting for me in the hallway. We have left our conversation dangling, and it will need to be finished tonight. I follow him to our bedroom and close the door behind me. I tell him everything, the return of my memories, the arrangements I have made with my old friend Oscar.

“Annie,” he says when I’m done, “listen to yourself. You met this guy in the psychiatric hospital?”

“It’s what he does, for companies like yours. He makes people disappear, gives them new identities, helps them to stage their deaths.”

Gray shoots me a skeptical look. “But he’s crazy?”

“No crazier than I am,” I say defensively. “He was just having a hard time. Depression. An occupational hazard.”

Gray sits down in the chair by the window. I move over to the bed, give him some space to process all of it.

“Okay, let’s look at this rationally,” he says, lifting his eyes to me. “What does all this accomplish? What about Victory? Do you really want to put her through this?”

“Don’t you get it, Gray?” I say. “He has found me. I don’t know how, but he has. Maybe Simon Briggs was working for him. We don’t know. The point is that I die on my terms and hope to come back to my little girl. Or I die on his and that’s the end. He wins.”

“I’d never let that happen,” he says. “You know that.”

“He’ll wait. He’ll wait until the second our guard is down.”

“You give him too much credit,” he says, standing up and beginning to pace the room. “You’ve blown him up in your mind to be something that he isn’t. We don’t even know that he’s alive. Annie, this is crazy.”

“If it’s not him, it’s someone else who knows about Ophelia. I can’t have Victory touched by that, either. Gray, it’s time. We always said this is what we’d do if the past came back.”

“That was before,” he says, looking sadder than I’ve ever seen him. He sinks down onto the bed. “That was before we had a home and a family, a daughter-a life we built together. Annie, I can’t lose you.”

I walk over to him and kneel before him.

“Then let me go, Gray,” I say. “Let me die so we can be a family again.”

He releases a deep breath and closes his eyes for a second. I expect him to spring up and parade out a hundred more reasons this is the worst idea anyone ever had, how it’s insane and reckless and even unnecessary. But he surprises me then.

“Okay,” he says. “But we do it my way. My people help you disappear; my people on the other end take you someplace safe, protect you. We’ll send Victory away with Vivian, and while she’s gone, we’ll figure out who’s doing all this. If everything goes well, she never has to know about any of it. When you’re safe, when the threat is neutralized, we’ll find a way to bring you back.”

He drops down onto the floor in front of me and wraps me tightly in his arms. “Okay?” he asks.

It sounds too easy, as though he thinks it can all be settled in a few weeks. But I don’t say that. I’m just glad he’s not going to fight me.

For a second, I wonder if he’s humoring me. But then I realize that we have always planned this; that we always knew someday the past might come knocking and that I would need to leave Annie Powers behind. We’d both forgotten how tenuous our hold was on this life we’d built-until now.

“Okay.”

30

I stand on the edge of the sinkhole and look down into its murky depths. It is as black as tar and about as welcoming. My heart is an engine in my chest, revving up into my throat. All my nerve endings tingle with dread. Everything in me wants to flee, but I know I can’t do that now. Only my desire to protect Victory keeps me moving forward, climbing into the wetsuit my instructor provided. He’s lifting the tank up onto my back, and my legs nearly buckle beneath the weight of it. Annie Powers’s life is gone, as totally as if the ground gave way and she fell into the earth.

I have the regulator in my mouth and the mask over my eyes. I hear Janet Parker’s voice in my head: She was there, floating in the cold, dark water for three months. My baby. Alone in the dark, cold water. I have carried the sound of her keening with me ever since I heard her. But it wasn’t until I had a daughter of my own that I could truly understand her grief.

“Are you ready, Ophelia?”

I lift my hand to the half heart at my neck and finger the edge.

“I’m ready.”

He looks concerned, as though he can feel my fear, my pain. Maybe it’s etched on my face. Maybe he can hear it in my breathing.

As I extend my stride, step into the water, and slip beneath the surface, I see her waiting there-Ophelia, so young and fragile, hovering like an angel. Her skin is gray, her long hair pulsing in the current. She is so glad to see me; she takes me in her frigid arms. And in that moment I am whole.

I am Annie. I am Ophelia. I am Janet Parker and her daughter Melissa. I am dead and grieving. I am mother and daughter. The blackness swallows me.