Black Out

she didn’t want to think about me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But that’s not how you felt.”

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

“So why did you tell her that?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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