Black Out

as he found me, or so he would tell me later. I was a mess of a girl, nearly starved and half crazy with fear and grief. Anyone else in his position might have just left me to fend for myself. He could have turned me over to the police or dropped me at a hospital. But he didn’t.

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

“Then why the handcuffs?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Are you sure?”

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

“I don’t know,” I say.

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

I look at him blankly.

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

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

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

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

11

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We all reap what we sow, don’t we?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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