The witness had died of a stroke since Frank’s trial. My mother took this as proof that she’d wronged Frank.
“The Lord struck her down for ruining a man’s life,” she said with quiet conviction.
Even the hard physical evidence didn’t discourage my mother: the blood and the blond hair in his trunk, the dead woman’s wallet containing her driver’s license, partially burned in a rusted metal drum in his backyard, fingerprints in his house matching two of the women he was suspected of murdering.
“Cops plant evidence all the time,” she’d say. “And that cop who arrested him? He was dirty. The pressure was on. They needed an arrest, and Frank was the perfect scapegoat.”
I’d stopped arguing with her, but when she sent me to the post office with letters going to the governor, death-row lawyers, and death-penalty activist groups, I threw them in the trash. Even though I didn’t really believe in God, I prayed every night that Frank Geary would die in the electric chair before he had a chance to slip a ring on my mother’s finger beneath the gaze of armed corrections officers in a prison chapel, or see me in the hideous pink dress my mother had bought me to wear as her bridesmaid.
15
While my eyes are closed and I’m paralyzed with fear, I feel the gun snatched from my hand. My lids spring open and I’m face-to-face with Dax.
“
“Where are we going?” I ask him.
“We have to get off this ship,” he says.
It’s then I notice that his clothes are covered with blood. When he turns around to look at me, I see that his face is smeared with it.
“Off the ship? And go where?” I look out into the angry waters. There’s nothing but black.
“There are islands. There,” he says, and points off into the darkness. I don’t see what he sees. I look around for the other boat I saw in the distance, but now it’s gone, or at least its lights are off and it’s disappeared in the black. I don’t understand what’s happening, but I am emptied out by fear, as if that’s all there is to me. I stop moving, force him to stop with me.
“Where are the other men?”
He doesn’t answer me. He climbs down a ladder at the stern to a platform where a Boston Whaler sits waiting, tied off on one of the cleats. It bucks and pitches like a mechanical bull. It’s so tiny I feel sick just looking at it.
“You must be joking,” I say from the top of the ladder. “Are you trying to get us both killed?”
He looks up at me, reaches up his hand. “Everyone else on this boat is dead,” he says. “We have vastly underestimated our opponent. Leave with me or die here tonight.”
“I don’t understand,” I say stubbornly. A fog seems to have settled in my brain; the whole situation has taken on the cast of dream, of nonreality.
“Dead,” he says loudly, startling me into the moment. “As in not breathing. Ever. Again.”
His words are a punch in the jaw; I’m reeling from the impact. Four other men, all trained paramilitary professionals like Gray, dead. I look back at the boat, where everything is still dark, where there is no movement or sound. It’s a ghost ship. Panic starts to undermine my sanity.
“Who did this?” I ask.
Dax starts moving back up the ladder. “I don’t know,” he answers, not looking at me. “There was a team. Well trained. They thought I was dead, so they left me where I lay.” The wind is kicking up, and he has raised his voice so I can hear him. The water is slapping angrily against the boat, the Whaler knocking against the stern. “I figured they’d come after you next; I thought I’d find you missing or dead. The boat they arrived on? It’s gone.”
“Then let’s get this one moving again.” These waters must be full of sharks. That little boat looks like an hors d’oeuvre tray. Suddenly dying out there seems less attractive than it did before.
He climbs back onto the deck, runs his hands through his hair in a gesture of frustration. “The engine’s dead,” he says flatly. “Whoever has done this disabled the boat. They left you on it. Leads me to believe they’ll be back or that they’ve rigged the boat to explode when they’re far enough away. We need to go. Now.”
“No,” I say.
Dax is looking at me hard. He might have been a handsome guy once, but his eyes tell me something about the things he’s done and seen. His skin is creased and weather-worn; his mouth is a thin, tight line, a mouth that looks as though it has never smiled. He puts his hand on my arm again. I wonder if he’s going to try to muscle me onto the Whaler.
“I want my gun back,” I say, bracing myself.
He squints at me. Then after a second’s hesitation, he takes the gun from his waist and hands it over. “Let’s go,” he says, pulling me back toward the ladder.
“You go,” I say. “I can’t. I need this to end tonight. One way or another. I can’t just keep going and going. I get in this Whaler and then what? We hang out on some island until the sun comes up? Or we drive until the boat runs out of gas? We’re sitting ducks then, too.”
“We’ve been out of contact for over an hour. Another team will come for us before either of those things happens,” he says. He’s yelling now out of frustration, not just so I can hear him. His eyes are scanning the horizon as if he’s already looking for the lights of another ship.
“When they do, bring them back,” I say. I sound calm and sure, not at all how I feel.
“Don’t be an idiot,” he says, tightening his grip. He looks at me with some combination of concern and disdain. “You’re so far out of your league you don’t even know what you’re playing at.”
“You work for me, right?” I ask. He nods. “Then you’re fired.”
He shakes his head in disbelief but releases my arm and doesn’t move to stop me as I run back toward the stairway that leads to the helm. Before I step inside, I hear the engine of the Whaler and turn to see the white of the boat get swallowed by the night. My heart sinks as it disappears. I wonder how big a mistake I’ve just made and what it’s going to cost me.
16
When Victory was first born, I was terrified of her. She was this tiny, swaddled bundle, her small head nearly disappearing in her newborn cap. She wasn’t one of those screaming babies who want the whole world to know they’re here to stay. She was still and quiet, almost observant. When I looked into the deep brown of her eyes, I wasn’t sure what I saw there; she seemed tired and a bit shocked, maybe even disappointed. It didn’t seem as though she’d made her decision whether to stick around or not. Her breathing seemed too shallow, her limbs impossibly delicate. I felt as if she could disappear at any moment. Several times a night, I would startle from sleep and slip over to her bassinet, not to see if she was still breathing but to see if she was still there.
Victory always appeared relieved in Gray’s care, though she seemed even tinier against the wide expanse of his chest. I imagined her issuing a faint sigh and turning up the corners of her mouth just slightly. Sometimes when I was nursing her and she had her wide, watchful eyes on my face, I could swear she was thinking, Are you sure you know what you’re doing here? Are you really qualified for this? With Gray she seemed utterly peaceful, as if she knew that in his thick, capable arms she was totally safe. With me she wasn’t so sure.
I used to dream that she’d be taken from me. In those first heady weeks, the sleep I got was riven with nightmares. I dreamed that the nurses came to the delivery room and shuttled her off, with me screaming after her. I dreamed I brought her to the pediatrician for her first visit and they refused to let me leave with her, citing my obvious lack of competence. I would wake up breathless, shame and rage racing through me like a white-water current.
When I first started going out of the house with her, I was afraid that I would accidentally leave her somewhere, that I would absentmindedly walk off and forget her in the grocery store or at the bank. I imagined in
