Black Out_A Novel

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.

image
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.