Black Out_A Novel

36

In spite of the fact that Simon Briggs had checked in to the dilapidated Sunshine Motel less than forty-eight hours prior to his death, his space was already as filthy a mess as his car. Less than twenty-four hours after my disappearance and presumed death, Detective Harrison stood in the middle of Room 206 and surveyed the area. Fast-food wrappers were strewn across the carpet like flowers on a meadow, two pizza boxes gaped greasy and empty on the bed, beer cans lined up like soldiers in crooked rows on the windowsills. There was a litter of candy wrappers by the toilet, atop the latest issue of the Economist.

Detective Harrison hated a mess; just the thought of Briggs made him want to take a shower. But for someone so sloppy, Briggs was surprisingly professional with his collection of articles, his copious notes about me in my various incarnations, his lack of phone usage at the motel or any information that might identify his employer. Amid the detritus of the motel room, Harrison found the empty packaging of a disposable cell phone. The phone itself was nowhere to be found in the room, in the car, or on Briggs’s person. He trashed it, thought Harrison, or someone took it. Briggs probably didn’t realize that with the packaging the police might be able to subpoena the call records under new federal regulations. This would, however, be a major pain in the ass and could take weeks. Detective Harrison knew on an instinctive level that he didn’t have weeks, that he might not even have days, if he cared what happened to me.

He put on a pair of gloves and sifted through the wastepaper basket near the front door. He could feel the watchful eyes of the woman who headed the CSI team. She probably was wondering how badly he was going to screw up their scene.

“Relax, Claire,” he said without looking at her. “I’m being careful.”

“It’s your case, Detective,” she said. “You botch it, it’s your problem.”

He ignored her as he inspected the contents of the basket. Toward the bottom he found a piece of paper that had been crumbled into a tight ball. He noticed it because of the quality of the paper, a heavy, expensive piece of stock. He unfurled it carefully, smoothed it out on the carpet. There was a doodle, a stick figure holding what appeared to be a gun, some scribbling that looked like someone trying to get a pen to work, and a telephone number that Briggs had tried to black out with a marker but was still legible. Embossed in blue at the top of the page was a company name, Grief Intervention Services, and a website address, nomorefear.biz.

“Find something?” Claire asked.

“Just more garbage,” he said, crumpling the paper back up.

“That’s what you usually find in a trash can,” she said. She laughed at her own joke, and he gave her a smile he didn’t feel.

When she turned away from him, he stuck the paper in his pocket, pretended to pick through the waste can for a few more minutes.


After he’d finished with the room and left the technicians to do their trace-evidence collection, Detective Harrison turned his attention to the helpful young Indian couple who owned and operated the motel. The husband was a reed of a man with thick glasses, an unfortunately large nose, and a diminutive chin. The wife was a vision in a kind of abbreviated hot pink–and-gold sari, which she wore over jeans, more of a fashion statement, he thought, than any compulsion to dress in traditional garb. With huge, almond-shaped eyes framed by long, dark lashes and a pleasing hourglass shape to her body, she caused the detective to look at her more than a few times out of the corner of his eye—in the most respectful possible way, of course. He noticed beauty, even though he’d never been unfaithful to his wife. He allowed himself the appreciation of lovely women.

The husband smiled a wide, goofy smile at Harrison. The wife frowned. She was nervous, upset by the presence of the police. The husband acted like it was the most exciting thing that had happened to him in months. They were totally wired in the technical sense, all their records computerized and a system of surveillance cameras that backed up to a hard drive. Briggs checked in to the motel as Buddy Starr about forty-eight hours before his body was found; he’d paid in cash and provided a New York State driver’s license that the hotel owners had diligently scanned into their system. He had not made any calls or used the Internet connection in his room.

The couple also ran an Indian restaurant attached to the hotel. The aroma of tandoori chicken and curry permeated the air, making Harrison’s stomach grumble as he sat in the office behind the reception area and scrolled through days of surveillance from the camera that monitored the landing outside Briggs’s door. It didn’t take him long to find what he was looking for, but when he found it—the dark, powerful figure of a man moving across the landing toward Room 206—it raised more questions than it answered. The man moved like a soldier, cautious but confident, was mindful of the security camera, keeping his face carefully averted from the lens. He didn’t need to jimmy the lock; he had a key card and let himself in easily. He was in the room for less than ten minutes and left as he entered, quietly and carrying nothing.

Though it would never hold up in court, Harrison recognized Gray right away by his bearing and his stride, by the intimidating musculature of his shoulders. Men noticed the size and build of other men more than they’d admit; it was how they identified their place in the pack. Harrison remembered those shoulders, remembered thinking how bad it would feel to be on the beating end of those fists.

According to the time imprint on the image, Gray had arrived at the hotel less than an hour after Briggs’s estimated time of death, with the key card to his room.

“Find anything?” the young hotel owner asked, coming up behind the detective.

“Leave him alone,” said his wife from her perch at the front desk. “Let him do his job so they can all get out of here.”

The man ignored her, still had that wide smile on his face. He seemed to find the whole thing very exciting, even though it couldn’t be good for business to have a room cordoned off by crime-scene tape and a CSI truck in your parking lot. These days, though, everyone thought they were living in a reality television show. People seemed to have trouble differentiating between what was really happening and what was happening on television. Harrison had noticed in the last few years that suddenly all crime, even the most violent, and its solving had become “cool.” For the hotel owner, the fact that a man staying in his hotel had been gunned down was not tragic or frightening, it was a subject of interest, something he’d e-mail his friends and family about, stay up late speculating on.

“Possibly,” said Harrison. “Is there some way I can get a copy of this surveillance footage, between the hours of nine-ten and nine-thirty P.M.?”

The young man nodded vigorously.

“I’ll make an MPEG, copy it onto a thumb drive for you. You just plug the drive into the USB port on your computer, and you can access the file that way. You can return the drive when you’ve downloaded it onto your computer, okay?”

“Great,” said the detective, having no idea what an MPEG was, or a thumb drive for that matter. “That’s great. Thanks.”

“So what’d you see?” the owner asked, still smiling, tapping a staccato on the keyboard in front of him. “You probably can’t tell me. That’s okay, you don’t have to tell me. I just think it’s so cool to be a detective. I really wanted to be a cop, you know, but my parents had other ideas. I still think about it—all the time. But Miranda, my wife, doesn’t like the idea any more than my parents—”

He went on, but Harrison wasn’t listening. He was thinking about the footage of Gray entering Briggs’s room right after Briggs’s murder. What is this worth? That’s the question he found himself asking a lot. Where does this have the most value? Does it help my case, my career? How much would Gray Powers pay to make this go away? Then he came back to himself and flushed with shame; that was an old way of thinking. This now was about me, about helping Annie Powers—or whatever my name was. But if he could do that and still help himself, wasn’t that even better?


I don’t know how long it was after we’d left my father’s place that I met Simon Briggs; it might have been six months or more. All the days and months during that period run together, and I have no markers for the passage of time. I know now that I’d had a total psychotic break and that even though much of my memory has returned, many of the day-to-day events are never coming back. I can’t say I’m sorry. But there must have been moments of lucidity, because when some of these memories return, they are painfully vivid.

The night I first saw Briggs, I was sitting in a diner with Marlowe. We’d both altered our appearances. I’d dyed my hair an awful black. With my pale skin, I looked like a ghoul. Marlowe had shaved his hair and had grown a goatee and mustache. He looked like a vampire skinhead. You’d think at this point we wouldn’t have been able to eat in public. In the movies a killer eats at a truck stop and his picture is posted behind the counter or randomly pops up on the television screen. Someone notices him, and the chase is on. But in the real world, people are oblivious, living in their own little heads. They barely see what’s going on around them, and when they do, they rarely believe their own eyes.

Marlowe went to the bathroom, and while I waited, staring into the depths of my coffee cup, a man walked past me too close and dropped a napkin onto the table. I turned to see his wide, heavy frame and the back of his bald head as he walked out the door.

I unfolded the napkin. There was a note: Bad things are about to happen to Marlowe Geary. Save yourself, if you still can.

I crushed the note in my hand and dropped it on the floor, adrenaline flooding my body.

“What’s wrong?” asked Marlowe when he returned and sat across from me.

I shook my head. “Nothing. I’m tired.”

“You’re always tired,” he said.

“Maybe it’s the company I keep,” I said, the words escaping before I could catch them. He looked at me, surprised. Then he leaned his face close to mine over the table. “Watch yourself.” His voice was tight with menace. There was a trail of brutally murdered women behind us, his tone said to me, and I could easily be next.

I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. The bathroom was filthy, dirt gritty on the tile floor, graffiti scratched on the stalls, and it smelled of urine. I was unrecognizable to myself with my jet-black hair and pallid complexion; my reflection was frightening.

How can I explain myself? How can I explain my relationship to Marlowe Geary, who I loved and hated, feared and clung to? I can’t, not then, not now. Save yourself, if you still can.

When I walked back out, Marlowe had already left the restaurant. I knew he was outside waiting for me in the car. That’s how sure he was of me. There were two uniformed officers sitting at the counter. They hadn’t been there when I entered the bathroom, but now they sat, both drinking coffee from white ceramic mugs. Their radios chattered; large revolvers hung at their hips. Their shirts were bulky with the Kevlar they wore beneath. I think we were in Pennsylvania at the time. I remember that the uniforms were brown, light shirts with dark jackets and pants. One of them laughed at something the other said.

Everything around me slowed and warped as I approached the counter where they sat. Save yourself, if you still can. I imagined walking right up to them and turning myself in. Marlowe would have been able to get away. I would tell them he’d left me here, that he’d let me go, and they’d arrest me. They’d take me into the station in the back of their car. Maybe they’d call my father. He’d come get me. I’d finally tell him I wasn’t all right and that he needed to take care of me. And he would, this time he would.

But I didn’t stop. I walked right by the two men. Neither of them noticed me as I walked out the door into the cold night. Marlowe was waiting for me outside the door. I slipped into the car, a stolen Cadillac. The heat was cranking.

“Cops are so unbelievably stupid, man,” he said with a laugh, as he peeled out of the lot.

Save yourself, if you still can. I couldn’t.


I have abandoned and betrayed myself so many times, given so much over for any poor facsimile of love. I have never been true to Ophelia; I have locked her in a cage deep within myself, depriving her of light and air, and kept her from growing up. I have denied her. I have killed her. I have done all this because I judged her and found her unworthy. Of all the people who have wronged Ophelia, I am the worst offender. But now I have had to reclaim her and do right by her to save my daughter.

The irony of this is not lost on me as I walk quickly on wet concrete. I pass the glaring windows of a music store. The glowing album covers, lit from behind, feature the faces of too-thin, carefully grungy pop stars and cast a yellow light at my feet. People who buy and sell music albums are living in a different world from me; their lives seem frivolous and foreign. I wait on the corner in the rain as cars and taxis race past me. I can see my father’s shop across the street, and it’s all I can do not to race into traffic to get there. The shop is closed, but I can see the blue flickering light of a television screen in the windows above.

New York City. How did I get here? The truth is, I don’t quite know. Already I doubt my memories of the sinkhole, the ship and the man named Dax, the metal room and the Angry Man. But the picture of Victory in my pocket and the necklace I’m wearing make me think some of it might be close to the truth.

I woke up on a commuter train pulling into Grand Central Station. I was wearing fresh clothes I’ve never seen before and a long black raincoat. Leather boots. People around me chatted on cell phones, stared blankly at small handheld screens, headphones plugged into their ears. I gazed at my reflection in the window beside me, saw that my hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail at the base of my neck. I had dark circles under my eyes.

At the train station, I was swept into a current of people moving determinedly toward wherever they were going. I saw a bank of pay phones and wondered whom I could call now. I want desperately to call Gray or Vivian, but I can’t do that. There’s too much at stake, and I don’t know whom to trust.

The traffic clears now, and I cross the street. I stand in the vestibule and press the buzzer to my father’s apartment. I press it five, six times, hard, hoping to express my urgency this way. Finally I hear heavy boots on the stairs.

“Hold on, for crying out loud!” my father barks. “French, if that’s you, I’m going to beat your ass.”

An old man who looks like a badly aged version of my father bangs into view. It takes me a second to accept that it is him. He sees me then and stops in his tracks, leans a hand against the wall and closes his eyes.

“Dad,” I say, and my voice sounds scratchy and uncertain. He looks awful, ragged and overtired. His clothes are rumpled and hanging off him a bit, as though he’s lost a lot of weight recently and hasn’t bothered to replace them.

He reaches for the door, swings it open, and pulls me into a bear hug. He has never done that. Never. Even though it’s awkward to be embraced by him, this one thing almost makes up for all the ways he has screwed up as a father. I breathe in his scent of booze and cigarettes. It has been almost seven years since I’ve seen him.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said. “You’re supposed to be dead, Ophelia. Again.”



37

“I think I’m going to die out here.”

Marlowe said this matter-of-factly, as though he couldn’t care less. The thought of his death was something I couldn’t handle. It filled me with a perfect storm of hope and terror. We were in New Mexico, somewhere between Taos and Santa Fe. From the road he’d seen an old church, a tiny white adobe building, glowing like a beacon. He’d pulled over without a word, stepped out of the car, and starting walking toward it. I followed him, taking in the scent of sage and juniper that was heavy in the air.

The building was dark, the wood and wrought-iron doors locked tight. I looked in the window and saw the flickering rows of votive candles inside twinkling like fireflies. He lay down on the small patch of grass inside the fence around the church, and I came to sit beside him. He folded his arms behind his head and took a long, deep breath, released it slowly. The desert air was cool, the sky above alive with stars. I was a city girl. I didn’t even know there were that many stars in the heavens.

“If it looks like we’re going to get caught, I’m going to die.”

I let the words hang in the air for a few breaths.

“You’re going to kill yourself?” I asked.

He shook his head, turned those dark eyes on me, and I looked away. I couldn’t stand to look at his face anymore. Every time I did, I heard screaming, saw a river of blood.

“No,” he said. “I’m going to make it look like I was killed. Everyone will think I’m dead, but I’ll be alive, in hiding.”

He sounded like a child then, a kid fantasizing about his life. We were kids; that’s what I always forget. When I think about Marlowe, he’s a titan, this powerhouse I turned myself over to for the various reasons that one does such a thing. But he wasn’t even twenty-one.

He put a hand on my leg. “I’ll have to stay away from you for a while—a few years, maybe. Without the body they’ll always be watching you, waiting for you to come to me or me to come for you. But when the time is right, I’ll find you and you’ll be waiting. That’s our karma, our bond.”

“Where will you go?” I asked, playing the game with him, knowing how fast he’d turn ugly if I didn’t.

He shrugged. “I can’t tell you. They’ll torture you to find me. You’re weak. You’ll give in.”

I started to cry then. I hid my face in the crook of my arm so he wouldn’t see, but I couldn’t keep my shoulders from shaking.

“Don’t worry, Ophelia,” he said, sitting up and wrapping his arms around me. His voice was sweet and soft. “I’ll come for you. I promise.”

But of course that wasn’t why I succumbed to the crushing sadness that lived in my chest. I knew in that moment that I would never be free from him. That for the rest of my life, he’d live under my skin, in my nightmares, just around the next corner.

“When it’s time for us to be together again,” he said, “I’ll leave my necklace somewhere for you to find. That’s how you’ll know I’ve come for you. That’ll be our signal.”

He was enjoying himself, the drama of it all, making me cry. It fed into his fantasy of who we were and what was happening to us. At the time I was as sick and delusional as he was, playing my role in his fantasy, casting myself as victim.

We sat there in silence for a time. My tears dried up, and I listened to a coyote howling at the moon somewhere far off in the distance. Then…

“There’s something I want you to know, Ophelia. I need someone to know.” His voice sounded thick and strange.

“What?”

He looked out into the vast flatness all around us for so long I thought he’d decided not to go on. I didn’t press. Inside, I cringed at what he might tell me.

“Those women,” he said with an odd laugh and a shake of his head. “They didn’t matter, you know. They were nothing to anyone.”

“Who?” I asked, even though my shoulders were so tense they ached, my fist clenched so hard I could feel my nails digging into my palms.

“The women my father brought home. Most of them, even their own parents had abandoned them. No one mourned them, not really.”

I thought of Janet Parker howling at our trailer door. “That’s not true,” I said.

“It is true,” he snapped, baring his teeth at me like the dog that he was.

I didn’t argue again. Just listened as he told me again how they were looking for a way out of their shit lives, looking for the punishment they knew they deserved. How death was mercy, how they were noticed more in their absence from the world than they were in their presence.

“Marlowe,” I said finally, when he’d gone silent. I tried to keep my voice soft the way he liked it. “What are you telling me?”

The night seemed to stretch, the seconds were hours as the coyotes sang in the distance.

“My father didn’t kill those women,” he said. His words lofted above us, looped, then floated off into the night sky. His skin was ghastly white, his eyes the dark empty holes in a dime-store mask. “Not all of them.”

“Who then?” I asked, though of course I knew the answer.

“I watched him kill her,” he said, not answering my question. “I never told you. She didn’t leave us. She didn’t run away. She burned the English muffin she was making for his breakfast. He slapped her so hard she staggered back and hit her head against the edge of the counter. There was, like, this horrible noise, some cross between a thud and a snap. The way she fell to the floor, so heavy, her neck at this terrible angle—she was dead before she hit the ground.”

He paused here, and I listened to his breathing, which seemed suddenly labored, though his face was expressionless, his eyes dry. “It didn’t seem real. It seemed like something I was watching on TV. My mother was stupid and weak, I remember her cowering around my father, living her life walking on eggshells. But I loved her, anyway. I didn’t want her to die.”

I was afraid to say anything. Afraid to move a muscle.

“Later I lied for him. I didn’t want him to go to jail. When the people she worked with sent the police, he told them she ran off. Withdrew some money from the bank and stole the car. They believed him. They believed me when I said I saw her leaving in the night. I told them she said, ‘Marlowe, honey, go back to sleep. I’m going to get some milk for your breakfast.’”

There’s a rustling somewhere near us. Some creature making its way over the desert floor, something small.

“I never forgave him, though. A few years later, he brought someone home. A pasty blonde—a quivering, nervous waste of bones.” He gave a disgusted laugh, kept looking off at that same spot in the distance. “There was no way I was going to allow him to replace her. I couldn’t have another mother, so he wasn’t going to have another whore.”

He went on then to tell me with no emotion whatsoever about the women he’d killed, somehow managing to paint himself as the victim, the little boy who missed his mother so much, who sought to avenge her. But I was only half listening. Inside, I was screaming.

Frank, in his guilt, helped Marlowe to hide his crimes and eventually took the blame for the murders—because he loved his son so much, Marlowe claimed. I had no way of knowing if what he said was true, but it didn’t much matter. I had disappeared from that place. On the sound of Marlowe’s voice, I had drifted up into the stars and floated high above our bodies. I looked down to see two people sitting on the lawn of a small white church, one of them talking quietly about murder, the other wishing for death.


I follow my father up the stairs and into his apartment. It is exactly the same as it was the last time I was here, except older and dirtier. It doesn’t seem like the cool, freewheeling bachelor pad it once did. It looks like the run-down apartment of an old man who doesn’t know how to take care of himself. His party days are behind him, and he never built anything—a home, a family—that endured.

I notice he has added a recliner and a large television set on a glass-and-chrome stand over by the window. The pool table has been pushed over to the far wall to accommodate these additions. There’s a sweating beer can on the floor by the chair, a rerun of Baywatch on the screen. All the lights are out. He has been sitting here in the dark watching television alone.

He shrugs when he sees me looking at the screen. “I used to date her,” he says, indicating the bleached blonde on the set.

“Dad,” I say, shaking my head. This seems to be the only word I can get out. He sits down in the recliner, stares blankly at the television. I go over and stand in front of him.

“Dad, no more lies,” I say. “I love you, but you’ve been a really terrible father.”

His body seems to sag with the weight of my words, and I think he might be crying. But I don’t have time to comfort him. “I need you to help me now. I need you to be a better grandfather than you were a dad.”

I take the picture from my pocket and hold it out for him to see. “Oh, Christ,” he says when he looks at it. “Oh, God.”

“Marlowe Geary is still alive. Someone’s looking for him, they have Victory, and I need to lead them to Marlowe or they’re going to hurt her.” As the words tumble out of my mouth, I hear how crazy they sound. I suddenly feel very bad for Victory. This is her rescue team: a beat-up old pathological liar and a nutcase mother.

In a mad rush, the rest of it pours out of me, everything that’s happened since the dark figure on the beach. “Somewhere inside me, I know where he is,” I tell him finally. “I just don’t have access to that information yet.”

“Opie,” he responds gently, “no offense, but are you sure you haven’t lost your mind?”

I think about this for a second. “No, Dad,” I admit. “I’m not sure at all.”

Looking at me from beneath raised eyebrows, he says, “What do you need me to do?”



38

Less than a week after my disappearance, my memorial service was held at a small chapel by the beach. Neighbors, friends, colleagues crowded into the space. It was a hot day, and the air-conditioning was not up to the task. People were sweating, fanning themselves, shedding tears as Gray gave a heartfelt eulogy about how he’d loved me, how I’d changed his life and made him a better person. He said I’d left all the best parts of myself behind in Victory, our daughter.

Detective Harrison stayed in the back and watched the crowd. Conspicuous by their absence were Vivian, Drew, and Victory. It’s a show, he thought. No one would have a memorial service for a woman who was still classified as missing unless he was invested in making it appear to someone that she was dead. Gray seemed sunken and hollowed out; to everyone else he seemed like a man suffering with terrible grief. To Harrison he seemed like a man struggling under the burden of terrible lies.

A woman sat in the front of the chapel and wept with abandon. He recognized her even from behind. It was Ella, beautifully coiffed in her grief, of course—hair swept in a perfect chignon, impeccably dressed in a simple black sheath, her nails done.

After the service Harrison stood off to the side in the trees watching people leave. He watched for someone alone, someone who seemed out of place. He guessed that most of the men were colleagues of Gray’s—they all had that paramilitary look to them, built and secretive, ever aware of their surroundings. He recognized some of the older people as neighbors he’d seen the night of the intruder on the beach. He didn’t see anyone who aroused his interest.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Ella said, approaching him. “You weren’t her friend.”

Her breath smelled lightly of alcohol. He regarded her, sized her up. She was handling things badly, seemed unsteady on her feet. Her eyes were rimmed with red.

“Do you have someone to drive you home?” he asked gently.

“None of these people were her friends,” she said too loudly. People turned to stare as they moved toward their cars. “I’ve never seen any of them in my life.”

He put a hand on her arm. “Let me take you home, Mrs. Singer.”

“I have my own car, thank you,” she said primly.

“You can get it later,” he said, more firmly.

She surprised him by not arguing. “I mean, who are these people?” she said, lowering her voice to a whisper, leaning her weight against him as he led her to his Explorer.

“Where is her daughter? Where are Drew and Vivian? I asked Gray. He told me that it was none of my business.” She paused and shook her head. “Something’s just not right.”

He opened the door for her, and she climbed inside with a little help. He got in on the other side, turned on the engine, and pulled in to the line of cars exiting the parking lot of the chapel. The blue sky was going gray; heavy dark clouds were moving in from the sea.

“Someone killed her, didn’t they?” she said, looking out the window.

“Why would you say something like that?” he asked her.

She shrugged. “The man on the beach that night. Since then, she wasn’t the same. She seemed—I don’t know—not herself. Maybe she was afraid of someone? I don’t know.”

“Did she ever talk to you about her past?” he asked, pulling in to our neighborhood. The line at the gate was long, with people heading back to our house for the reception. Ella pointed the way to her house and shook her head slowly.

“You know what? No. I knew that Annie was raised in Central Florida and that both her parents were dead. She didn’t have any family at all except for Gray and Victory. She never talked about her past. I had the sense she didn’t want anyone asking, either. So I never did.”

He didn’t have the heart to tell her that Annie wasn’t even my real name, that most things I’d told her about myself were lies.

“How’d she get along with her in-laws?” he asked instead.

“She loved Vivian. But Drew…bad blood there, if you ask me.”

“Oh?”

“He hated her, or so she thought. He didn’t think she was good enough for Gray. She didn’t talk much about that, either. So I didn’t press.”

“What did you talk about?”

She let a beat pass. “Shoes,” she said, then let go a peal of hysterical laughter that ended in a sob. He thought she was going to lose it. But she pulled herself together relatively quickly. After a moment she wiped her tears away, careful not to smear her mascara. “I was a terrible friend, wasn’t I? I didn’t know anything about Annie.”

He pulled in to her driveway. “You accepted her for who she was in the present, Mrs. Singer. We only know about people what they want to show us. You respected her privacy and shared good times with her. I think that makes you an excellent friend. I really do.”

Detective Harrison was a wise man; I would have told her the same thing.

She took a tissue from her clutch and wiped her nose. “Thanks,” she said, nodding. “She did that for me, too.”

They sat like that for a minute in her drive. The wind was blowing the high palm fronds around, and they whispered, gossiping about all they knew and wouldn’t tell. The sky had gone from blue to gray to black and was ready to erupt.

“That night on the beach?” Ella said, leaning forward and looking up at the sky. Harrison noticed her beauty again, the delicate line of her jaw, the regal length of her neck.

“What about it?”

“At the party she thought she saw someone that she recognized. A young girl, wearing jeans and a T-shirt.”

“Who was it?”

She gave him a quick shrug. “No idea. I knew everyone there that night, even all the servers who have worked for me before. She seemed really unsettled by it and left pretty soon after that.”

“So what are you saying?”

“I’m saying there was no one at my house who looked like that, no one under forty, and certainly no one wearing jeans and a T-shirt.”

He remembered the night at the rest stop. He remembered how my gaze kept moving behind him as though I’d been watching someone or something. He’d seen fear on my face that night, so clearly that it had caused him to reach for his gun. “You think Annie imagined her?”

She looked surprised for a second, as though the thought hadn’t occurred to her. Then, “I don’t know. She had an expression on her face that stayed with me. I think I’d seen it before in flashes, but not like that. She looked haunted. I think she was, in some ways.” She smiled nervously, ran a self-conscious hand along her jaw. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this. It doesn’t help you any, does it?”

“You were right to tell me,” he said. “You never know what helps.” After a pause he added, “Did she ever mention her doctor to you?”

She shook her head. “No. What kind of doctor?”

“How about an organization called Grief Intervention Services?”

She raised her eyebrows, thought about it for a second. “No,” she said, bringing her hand to rub her temple. He’d seen Volkswagens that were smaller than the ring on her finger. “I never heard her mention anything like that.”

“Did you get the sense that she was someone who would take off? You know, just run away from her life? Did she seem like she might be capable of that?”

She shook her head vigorously, without hesitation. “No way. Not without Victory. She worships that little girl.” Then, “That’s not what you think, is it? That she just took off?”

“I’m just trying to be thorough. Without a body, we need to examine every possibility.”

“Well, that’s not a possibility. She wouldn’t leave without her daughter.”

“Okay,” he said, giving her a smile he thought she needed. “You’ve been a big help. You really have.”

She offered him a grateful look. “So is this a murder investigation? You showing up at the memorial like that? Isn’t that what they do on television?”

“I’m just trying to be thorough,” he said again, purposely vague.

She nodded, seemed to think about saying something else but then thanked him for the ride instead. Then she dashed from the car to the house as a heavy rain started to fall. He watched until she let herself in the front door and shut it behind her.

Harrison drove up the street and parked near my house. As he watched the mourners come and go, he thought about me, about Marlowe Geary, and all the desperate things people become for love. He began to realize as the rain turned to hail, causing people to dash from car to house or house to car, covering their heads with their jackets or purses, that if he wanted to know what had happened to me, he was going to have to go back to go forward.

image
I tell my father how I dropped into the earth, followed my “dive master” through a long, narrow limestone tunnel for what seemed like hours, and emerged from another sinkhole. There a man whose name I never learned and whose face I barely saw was waiting for me in a Jeep Grand Cherokee. I stripped out of my wetsuit, dried off, and put on the clothes he had for me. I checked the contents of the bag he’d retrieved from my locker with the key I gave to Gray. I lay down on the floor of the backseat and stayed there, uncomfortable and gripped by self-doubt, as we drove for hours. I drifted off, only to be jerked awake by some bump in the road, or by the thought that I’d left my daughter behind and that in a few hours everyone who knew would think I had drowned in a diving accident.

By nightfall I had boarded a cargo ship in the Port of Miami, headed for Mexico, where I was supposed to stay until Gray came for me.

“Whoever it is,” my father says. “They found you pretty fast.”

“It’s true,” I say. I can’t seem to stop moving. I’m pacing the small room, my whole body electric with tension, this physical pain I’ll have until I can get to Victory. Every mother knows that feeling in her body when her child cries. It’s as if every nerve ending, every cell, aches until you can hold and comfort your child. I felt that now, but with a kind of terrified desperation underlying it.

“Something not right about that,” my father says. I can’t help but stare at him, his skin gray-white, his beard ragged, deep lines around eyes that seem sunken in his face. His long gray hair, pulled back with a rubber band, looks dry and brittle. I wonder if he’s sick, but I can’t stand to ask that question now. I don’t want to know the answer.

“I mean,” he goes on, “who knew where you were going? Who knew you were on the ship?”

“No one knew—except Gray and the people from his company who were tasked with protecting me and getting me safely to my destination.”

“Then how did that guy—the one you called the Angry Man—how did he find you like that? In a boat in the middle of the sea?”

I don’t know the answer. “They must have been watching or following me?”

“Possible,” he says, cocking his head. He seems to be considering something, but he doesn’t say anything else.

It’s something that never occurred to me, how the Angry Man found me there so quickly. I wasn’t even surprised when I saw the other boat that night. It was almost as though I’d been waiting for it, so sure was I that Marlowe had returned for me.

“I need a computer,” I tell my father.

“In the shop.”

He leads me downstairs, and I sit behind the reception desk and surf the Web, trying to find the identity of the Angry Man. I search for the Families of the Victims of Frank Geary and begin sifting through the entries I find. Meanwhile, I have this sense of a ticking clock, a tightness in my chest. I wonder where the Angry Man is now and how he’s tracking my progress. I know enough about Gray’s work to know that the technology is so advanced now that he or whomever is charged with following me could be blocks or even miles away and still have complete audio and visual surveillance. Still, it seems questionable that they’ve given me such a wide berth, such latitude. But maybe they know that they’ve got me by a chain connected to my own heart. I’ll do what they want; I don’t think there’s any question about that.

But of all the places they could have left me, why did they leave me here? They must have known I’d come to my father. Was there some reason they wanted me to?

I look for images of the man I saw, hoping to find a name attached. But I find the same old articles I’ve read a hundred times before, maybe a thousand times. I stare at the screen and resist the urge to take it and throw it on the floor, to stomp on it screaming in my rage and frustration.

My father comes over and lays a large book on the desk in front of me. The computer screen casts it in an eerie blue glow. The book is turned to an eight-by-ten shot of Marlowe’s tattoo. The sight of it sends a cold shock through me. I have seen this image again and again in my dreams, in my dark imaginings. But to see the photograph of it on his skin reminds me that he was just a man, flesh and bone, not a monster from a nightmare I had. He is real and possibly still alive.

I stare at the dark lines of the tattoo. I see a churning ocean crashing over jutting rocks; I see my face hidden within the image. There’s a wolf etched in the face of one of the rocks. Two birds circle above it all. It is as beautiful and as detailed as I have seen it in my memory. In my dreams of it, it pulses and moves, the ocean crashes, the birds cry mournfully. But on the page it’s flat and dead, like some map to Marlowe’s mind.

“Why are you showing me this?” I ask.

“Look closely,” he says, tapping the picture with his finger.

After a few seconds of staring, I see. If you didn’t examine it closely, you’d never notice it. In the lines that form the crags of the rocks lies a hidden image: the barn at Frank’s horse farm.



39

Deep in the dark, wild swamps of Florida amid the lush black-green foliage and through the still, teeming waters, wild orchids grow. Over the last century, orchid hunters, breeders, and poachers have donned their waders and raped the swamplands of these delicate flowers, filling trucks with the once-plentiful plants and shipping them for huge profits all over the world. Now they are so rare in the wild that environmentalists are struggling to rescue the waning populations, and the search for wild orchids is ever more desperate. Most legendary among them is the elusive ghost orchid. Snow white with delicately furled petals, the leafless epiphyte never touches the earth and seems to float like a specter, hence its name. In the history of Florida, people have lied and stolen, fought and died in their quest for the ghost orchid, which flowers only once a year.

Detective Harrison always liked the idea of this, the idea of men who risked their lives in pursuit of the single fragile object of their passion. At the best of times, Harrison considered himself to be one of these men. Through the hinterland of lies, in the decaying marsh of murder, he searched for the fresh white thing that was pure, elevated above the murk, drawing its nourishment from the air.

Like the orchid hunters, he didn’t mind the trek through the dark and shadowy spaces, his goal moving him toward places where, less motivated, others wouldn’t dare to go. He could sit at his computer until his eyes stung and his head ached; he could make a hundred fruitless calls, drive hundreds of miles, talk to dozens of surly, uncooperative lackeys, and never think of giving up. It just never occurred to him that he might not find what he was looking for.

He felt like a hunter the evening after my memorial service and his conversation with Ella. He was alone in his office in the station house. Everyone else on the detectives’ floor had gone home for the evening. Somewhere he could hear a phone ringing, and somewhere else a radio played some hip-hop crap he couldn’t name. Someone was working out in the gym upstairs; he could hear the weights landing heavily on the floor above him.

He didn’t have much to go on. He had a website address, the name of a murdered shrink operating without a license, the meticulous notes and collection of articles from a dead bounty hunter, a missing woman with a false identity who also happened to be the ex-girlfriend (or captive, depending on whom you talked to) of a serial killer. Then, of course, there was her husband, a former military man, now owner of a privatized military company, who for some reason had visited Simon Briggs’s motel room just an hour after Briggs’s murder.

Harrison had made the call to his wife, Sarah, telling her not to expect him and to lock up the house for the night and that he’d see her in the morning. Then he popped up his Internet browser and began the long, lonely slog through the marsh, searching for his ghost orchid.

He loved the Internet, loved the way you could follow a piece of information down a rabbit hole and chase it through tunnels and around bends and come up for air in a place you’d never have imagined when you started.

He started with the website nomorefear.biz. There wasn’t much to it, just a black screen with a simple quote: “No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.” When he clicked on the sentence, he was taken to another page, featuring the image of a man embracing a weeping woman and a paragraph:

Maybe you’ve lost someone to violence, or perhaps you have been the victim of a violent crime. Either way, your life has been altered and a hole has been punched open in your world. Through it comes the most malignant, destructive monster of all: FEAR. More vicious than any violent criminal, more evil than the deeds of any killer, fear will rob you of what’s left of your life. There’s only one way out of the haunted forest: You must go through. You must face what you most fear. We can show you how.
There was a number to call, and he was surprised to see that the area code was local. He cast about for a street address but didn’t find anything listed in the online Yellow Pages or in the reverse directory and soon realized that the number he had was a cellular line. He dialed the number from his cell phone, which had a blocked ID; voice mail picked up before there was even a ring tone.

“Congratulations. You’ve taken the first step. Leave your name and number here, and someone will get back to you. If you’re not ready to do that, you’re not ready for this.”

“Hi,” he said, trying to make his voice sound shaky and tentative. “I’m Ray, and I’m interested in learning more about your program.” He ended the call with an odd feeling in the base of his stomach.

After searching for more information on the organization and finding nothing, he shot an e-mail to Mike Keene, a friend of his who worked at the FBI, to see if there was anything on the radar about Grief Intervention Services. Then a couple more hours of coffee, eyestrain, aching shoulders, walking down virtual corridors and opening doors, looking for people who don’t want to be found. Around midnight his concept of himself as an orchid hunter was less appealing, less romantic.

He remembered the thoughts he had outside my memorial service, that he’d need to go back to go forward. So he entered the name Frank Geary. As he scrolled through old news articles about Frank’s trial, conviction, and sentence to death row, about my mother’s crusade, his new trial and release, then subsequent murder at the hands of Janet Parker, Harrison thought what a nightmare my life must have been.

The trail lead him to an old South Florida Sun-Sentinel piece about new DNA evidence proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that Frank Geary was guilty of at least two of the murders of which he’d been originally accused.

The article went on to say that other DNA evidence added a new wrinkle, that it was possible Marlowe Geary might have either colluded in or been responsible for several of the other murders. Evidence collected during Marlowe Geary’s cross-country killing spree matched evidence collected at the scenes of murders attributed to Frank Geary.

There was a quote from Alan Parker, husband of Janet Parker and father of victim Melissa Parker: “The new evidence is disturbing. One wants justice in a case like this. One wants to face the person who killed his daughter.”

Harrison read on that Alan Parker was the founder of the Families of the Victims of Frank Geary, the group that lobbied to have the evidence in these murders reexamined as new technology became available.

The phone rang then, startling him. He jerked his arm and knocked his empty mug off the desk as he reached for the phone. It landed with a thud on the floor but didn’t break. The display screen on his phone flashed blue and read, UNAVAILABLE.

He answered. “Hello?”

But there was nothing but static on the line. “Hello,” he said again. He started to feel his heart thump; he hadn’t thought of what he’d say if the Grief Intervention people called back.

“Harrison.” A thick, male voice on the line. “It’s Mike Keene. Just got your e-mail.”

Harrison felt a cool rush of relief. He looked at the clock, nearly 1:00 A.M. “Working late?” he said.

“Yeah, always,” Mike said. “You, too?”

“Yeah,” he said, rubbing his eyes. They exchanged a few pleasantries, polite questions about wives and kids. Then, “So…Grief Intervention Services?”

“It sounded familiar, so I did a little digging around. They’re incorporated in the state of Florida. But their address is a P.O. box.”

“Who’s the founding member?” Harrison asked, writing down the address Mike gave him.

He heard Mike tapping on a computer keyboard. “Someone by the name of Alan Parker. He founded the organization about five years ago. They’re listed as grief counselors. No complaints against them in the years they’ve been operating. No profit, either. They’re not on anyone’s watch list—officially.”

“Officially?”

“Well, a couple of years ago, there was an incident in South Florida. A man who’d been accused of molesting two boys while coaching a school soccer team and served some time for it—six years—was murdered in his home. Brutally murdered, castrated, skull bashed in…you know, overkill.”

“So the cops looked to the victims and their families,” guessed Harrison.

“That’s right. But there was no evidence to link anyone to the scene. So no one was ever charged. It came to light, however, that the father of one of the victims was in touch with Grief Intervention Services about six months before his son’s molester was released. The father said he needed counseling to deal with his rage and fear for his son’s safety. There was no evidence to the contrary.”

“So…”

“The weird thing about the crime was that the break-in was a textbook military entry, that the victim was bound and gagged in the way military personnel are trained to subdue an enemy. So there was this precise entry and apprehension of the victim, followed by this out-of-control rage killing. It was just bizarre.” Mike paused, and Harrison could hear him chewing on something. The chewing went on for longer than Harrison thought polite.

“I don’t understand. There’s some kind of military connection to Grief Intervention Services?” Harrison prodded finally.

“Hmm,” Mike said, mouth still full. “Sorry, I haven’t eaten all day. Alan Parker was a former Navy SEAL. One of his daughters was the victim of a serial killer by the name of Frank Geary. He and his wife, Janet Parker, founded an organization called the Families of the Victims of Frank Geary, after Geary was released in what many considered to be a travesty of justice. Then Janet Parker lost it and killed Frank Geary, burned down his house.”

Harrison could almost smell the scent on the wind.

“The organization disbanded, but Alan Parker kept lobbying for evidence retesting,” Mike went on. “Eventually it came to light that it might have been Marlowe Geary, Frank’s son, who killed Parker’s daughter. Parker disappeared for a while after that, then reappeared as the founder of GIS.

“Given his military background and his wife’s murder of Frank Geary, police were concerned that GIS was some kind of vigilante organization, so the FBI was informed. There was a cursory investigation that yielded no evidence to support any wrongdoing and was quickly dropped.”

Suddenly Detective Harrison pushed through the last of the fecund overgrowth and moved into a clearing where bright fingers of sun shone through the canopy of trees. Illuminated by the rays, the ghost orchid floated there, white and quivering, where it had been waiting all along.


I see a girl. She is lying beneath a field of stars. She is wishing, wishing she were high above the earth, an explosion from a millennium ago, that she were as white and untouchable as that. A young man lies beside her. He is pure beauty, his features finely wrought, his body sculpted from marble. His eyes are supernovas; nothing escapes them. They are lovers, yes. She loves him. But in a truer sense, she is his prisoner. The thing that binds her is this terrible void she has inside, a sick fear that he is the only home she will ever know. And this is enough.

They leave the safety of the New Mexico church, climb into their stolen car, and drive on an empty dark road that winds through mountains. She rests her tired head against the glass and listens to the hum of the engine, the rush of tires on asphalt, the song on the radio, “Crazy,” sung by Patsy Cline. I’m crazy for lovin’ you.

She becomes aware of something in the distance: Far behind them she can see the orange eyes of the headlights from another car. She can see them in the sideview mirror. If he notices, he doesn’t seem concerned. But that’s only because he doesn’t know what she knows. He doesn’t know about the man who dropped the note on their table.

Save yourself, if you still can.

With his recent ugly confessions worming their way through her brain, she finds, beyond all hope, that she can. And in the small way she is still able, she does. She says nothing.

image
I do not remember shooting Gray. This memory has, thankfully, never returned to me. In fact, I don’t remember Texas at all. But I do remember the next time I saw Briggs, even though I didn’t know his name at the time.

Another awful hotel, off another highway, still in New Mexico. I emerged from the shower and found him sitting on the edge of the bed, smoking a cigar. Marlowe had left over an hour before; where he went and how long he’d be gone, I had no way of knowing. But I’d wait for him. He knew that.

“You didn’t tell him about the note,” the man said, releasing a series of noxious gray circles from the O of his mouth. “I’m surprised. And pleased.”

I stood in the doorway, trying to decide whether he was real or not. I’d had “visits” prior to this from my mother, my father, and one of the girls Marlowe had killed. The girl had a barrette with tiny silk roses glued along its length; you could tell she really liked it, the way she kept lifting her hand to touch its surface, hoping to draw your eye. But I was distracted by the gaping red wound in her throat. She asked me, as she bled upon the bed, how I could let him do this to her. But when I closed my eyes and opened them again, she was gone. Since then I had stopped trusting my eyes and ears when it came to people appearing in my motel room.

“Someone has paid me a lot of money to find Geary before the police do,” he said, looking at the wall in front of him. “And they’re going to pay me a whole lot more when I hand him over.”

He turned and looked at me. His brow was heavy, his eyes deeply set, like two caves beneath a canopy of rock. His nose was a broken crag of flesh and cartilage. He had thick, full, candy-colored lips and girlishly long lashes. I wanted to look away, but I was fascinated by the pocked landscape of his face.

“The thing is, I need him alive. And I’ll be honest, I’m a lover, not a fighter. I need a clean catch, no blood or mess. He’s a big guy, stronger than me, in better shape,” he said, patting his huge gut and giving a little cough for emphasis. “I’ll have to surprise him or take him while he sleeps. This is where you come in, if you decide to help me. And I’ll make the decision easy for you.”

He took out a big gun and rested it tenderly on his lap. “You help me and I help you. I’ll give you a cut of my earnings, and I’ll help you run. You don’t help me?” he said with a shrug and a quick cock of his head. “I’ll still get Geary. And I’ll turn you over to the police. You’ll spend the rest of your life in prison.”

He blew a big cloud of smoke my way, then seemed to really examine me for the first time.

“What are you doing with yourself, anyway, huh?” he went on. “Are you crazy or what? You don’t look like you’re all there, Ophelia. That’s why I’m willing to help you. No one wants you to get hurt—any worse than you’ve been hurt already.”

I tightened the towel around myself, edged closer to the wall. I couldn’t think of how to respond.

“I’ll be waiting, watching,” he said, and got up with a groan from the bed and took the DO NOT DISTURB sign from the door and laid it on the table. “All I need you to do is unlock the door and hang this sign outside when he falls asleep. Then go in the bathroom and lie down in the tub. I’ll knock when it’s safe to come out.” With his free hand, he took a thick packet of cash from his pocket. “I’ll give you this, and I’ll drop you off at a bus station.”

“What makes you think I’ll do any of this?” I asked him finally. “What keeps me from telling him and then leaving that sign on the door, having him surprise you?”

“She speaks,” he said with a slow smile. He took a big drag on his cigar. “Because you hate him, Ophelia. I saw it on your face in that diner. You think you love him, but you know how evil he is, that one day he’s going to kill you, too. That you’re going to be a body someone finds in a motel just like this one.”

I felt a shudder move through me.

“Or the police are going to catch up with you at some point, some hotel clerk who’s not high on methamphetamine is going to recognize you and make a call. And there’s someone else tailing you, too.”

“Who?”

“I have no idea, but there’s someone else out there looking for you. I don’t know who he is or what he wants. It doesn’t matter. What I’m saying is, time’s up. You don’t help me, the next person to walk through that door or one just like it may not give you a choice at all.”

My whole body was shivering now.

“Put on some clothes,” he told me, moving toward the door. “You’ll catch a cold.” Before he left, he looked back and said, “Christ, kid, where are your parents?”


“She’s going to be okay,” my father says, bringing me back to the present. There was something grave about his tone, something off.

I turn to look at him. He is driving fast on the Long Island Expressway, headed for a small private airport where he says he has a friend with a plane who owes him a favor. He made a quick call at some point back at the shop that I didn’t hear, and the next thing I knew, we were on our way. I didn’t even know he had a car. Unbelievably, it’s a rather nice late-model Lincoln Town Car. There’s a lot I don’t know about my father, I guess.

“A guy I know, we used to ride together when we were kids,” he explained as we got ready to leave. “He went straight, got a job. Now he’s this big-time real-estate developer. He said anytime I need the plane day or night, it’s mine.”

“That’s a pretty big favor,” I said, skeptically.

“Trust me, it’s nothing compared to what I did for him.”

“Spare me the details.” I’m not in the mood for one of my father’s crazy stories. I don’t even know if there will be a plane waiting for us when we get to this supposed airport on Long Island. But I have no choice. My stomach is an acid brew; the image of my daughter bound and gagged is seared in my mind.

I look over at my father now. I can see he’s itching to tell me his story, but he manages to keep his mouth shut. I lean my head against the window and watch the trees whip past us. I wonder about the other cars on the road, envy them their mundane journeys—to a late shift or home from one, back from a party or a date. I never got to live a life like that, not really. Even my normal life as Annie was undercut by all my lies. You can hide from the things you’ve done, tamp them down, make them disappear from your day-to-day, but they’re always with you. I know that now, too late. You cannot cage the demons—they just rattle and scream and thrash until you can’t ignore them any longer. You must face them eventually. They demand it.

We pull off the highway and drive along a dark, empty access road. I see a field of hangars with small planes parked in neat rows. Off in the distance, there’s a small tower, then a line of lights that I imagine is a runway. I am relieved that there’s really an airport.

“He said that one of the gates would be open,” my father says, slowing down.

And so it is.

“How did you know I wasn’t really dead?” I ask my father as he turns off the road and drives through the open gate. I’m not sure why the question comes to me at the moment. Seems like there are other things to discuss. I can see lights up ahead, the figure of a man moving back and forth between a small craft and a hangar.

“Gray sent someone to let me know. Some kid. He gave me a note, explained everything that’s been happening. I guess he didn’t want me hearing about it some other way.”

It’s like Gray to cover all the bases that way. I wish he were here now, but at the same time it’s right that I’m on my own. My father comes to a stop, and we sit for a minute in the dark. The man by the plane quits what he’s doing to look at us.

My father stares straight ahead for a second, then lowers his head and releases a long, slow breath. We both know he’s not coming with me. I don’t know the reasons, but I know he’s not capable of going any further. He has always done only what he was able to do. Maybe that’s true of all of us. Maybe it’s just that when it’s your parents, their shortfalls are so much more heartbreaking.

“Look, kid,” he says, and then stops. I hope he’s not going to launch into some monologue about how he’s failed as a father and how sorry he is. I don’t have time, and I don’t want to hear it. We sit in silence while he seems to be striking up the courage to say something.

“It doesn’t have to be like this, you know?” he says finally. “How about we just call the cops?”

“They have my daughter.”

“Ophelia—” he says, then stops again. Whatever he wanted to say he has changed his mind. “I know. You’re right. Go get your girl. But be careful.”

I watch his face, the muscle working in his jaw, a vein throbbing at his temple. As ever, I am not privy to what kind of battle he’s fighting inside himself.

“I love you, Opie. Always have,” he says, not looking at me.

“I know that, Dad.” And I do. I really do.

There’s no embrace, no tearful good-bye, no words of wisdom or encouragement. I leave the car, and within fifteen minutes I’m in a Cirrus Design SR20 aircraft on my way back—of all places—to Frank’s ranch, where this journey began.

I sit in the rear of the plane, strapped into the harness with headphones around my ears. The pilot, a stocky guy with a crew cut, greeted me and gave me some safety instructions, but he has not said another word since he helped me strap in. He doesn’t seem interested in me or what my story is; he is a man who is paid to do what he was told and not ask questions. I noticed that he barely glanced at my face, as if he didn’t want to be able to identify it later.

The noise from the engines is oddly hypnotic, restful in its relentlessness. As the plane rockets down the runway and lifts into the air, I think about Victory.

I delivered her naturally, no drugs. I wanted to be present for her entry into this world, wanted to feel her pass through me. Those crashing waves of consciousness-altering pain, I allowed them to carry me to another place within myself. I let them take me moaning and sighing to motherhood. I felt my daughter move through my body and begin her life. Our eyes locked when I put her on my breast, and we knew each other. We’d known each other all along.

I’d never seen Gray cry before. But he did as he held her in his arms for the first time. In that moment she was his daughter. The fact that she had Marlowe’s blood running through her veins never occurred to him or me. She belonged to us. And even more than that, she belonged to herself. I could see her purity, her innocence, all the possibilities before her. She would be defined by our family, not by the evil deeds of Marlowe and his father. I swore to myself that she’d never be touched by them or by Ophelia and her shameful past.

“What do you want to name her?” Gray asked.

“I want to call her Victory,” I said, because the moment of her birth was a victory for all of us. I felt that Ophelia, Marlowe, Frank, and my mother were all far behind me now. I was Annie Powers, Gray’s wife, and, most important, I was Victory’s mother. I had thrown off my ugly past, forgotten it both literally and figuratively. My whole body was shaking from the effort of childbirth, the surge of hormones and emotion rattling through my frame.

“Victory,” he said with a wide smile. He was mesmerized by her, staring at her tiny face. “She’s perfect.”

He sat beside me with our daughter in his arms. “Victory,” he said again. And it was her name.

I’m trying to recapture the feeling I had that day, the power I felt in the knowledge that I was Victory’s mother, the certainty I had in my heart that I could protect her from every awful thing in my past. But the feeling is gone. As the plane takes off and the world below me gets smaller and smaller, I think that the path of my life has always been like this—an ugly, frightening maze. No matter how hard and fast I run, no matter how badly I want to escape its passages, ultimately they lead back to where I started.