Black Out (14 page)

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.