months. I need some time with you.”
“We have live-in help,” I say. “We have all the time alone we want.”
I let him pull me into an embrace and I rest slack against his chest. I don’t like it when he aligns with Drew and Vivian against me. They all seem so strong, so certain. I am flotsam in their current.
“You do whatever he wants,” I say. I feel him tighten up. It’s an old argument, a sore spot for both of us. Bringing it up is an invitation to rumble.
“That’s not true,” he says stiffly. “And you know it.”
“It
“This is not about my father.” His tone holds a familiar controlled anger, the tone he always has when we fight about Drew, as if there’s a well of rage he would never dare acknowledge.
“Whose idea was it?” I ask. “To get Victory out of the way for a few days so you could figure out what’s going on?”
He walks over to the bookshelf and lifts a snow globe up to the light. He stares into the orb at the pre-9/11 skyline of New York City. He is all hard angles, a dark tower against the sherbet-colored plush of toys and downy blankets. His silence is my answer.
Gray’s working with his father represents a kind of cease-fire. After a troubled adolescence and many years of estrangement in adulthood, Gray and his father have finally come to a demilitarized zone in their relationship. I think Gray likes it there; he doesn’t want to go back to war. I understand this, but I resent it, too. We fight again and again about it, with no resolution.
“You know, I’m not crazy,” I say, apropos of nothing, after a few minutes of silence, each of us isolated by our private, angry thoughts. I just feel I have to assert this.
“I know that,” he says, returning to sit beside me again. He has a look on his face that reminds me he’s seen me at my worst. Sometimes I think those memories prevent him from seeing how far I’ve come. I worry that I’ll always be the crazy girl he found and rescued. Maybe part of him wants me to be that.
“The doctor says I’m stronger than I’ve been since he’s known me.”
“It’s true,” says Gray. “This is not about your mental health. There are real threats we have to assess. Victory is safer with my father than she is with Esperanza, right?”
He’s right, I know he is. Why do I feel bound and gagged by his logic? Why does every nerve in my body tingle at the thought of being separated from Victory right now? But I go along. Of course I do.
Gray and I finish packing Victory’s little pink suitcase, and we go with Vivian and Drew to pick her up at school. She is predictably delighted. Disney is in her future. She kisses us each carelessly and hops into the car seat in the back of Drew and Vivian’s SUV. I see her tiny hand lift above the car seat in a wave good-bye. And they’re gone. I fight the urge to run after the car.
“Why didn’t you just say no?” asks my shrink later that afternoon.
“Because they were right. I am frayed.”
The problem here is that I can’t really tell him about the intruder on my property, the visit paid to my father, the cop and his questions. There’s too much about me that he doesn’t know, that I used to be someone else. That the person I used to be is guilty of some grave mistakes. He thinks I’m Annie Powers, formerly Annie Fowler. He thinks my husband is an insurance investigator. He knows about my dreams, the black patch, my history of fugue and disassociation, my choice to stop taking medication. He knows that I’ve been well and stable since Victory’s birth. He knows a version of my past wherein names have been changed to protect the guilty, myself included. But he’s ignorant of some crucial details and the very real recent threats. I think he must be aware of this, that he knows he’s helping me only as much as I’ll allow.
“Well, even so. You have a right to say what you want, Annie. Even if other people have legitimate and well- meaning reasons for asking something of you, it doesn’t mean you have to comply.”
I know he’s right, and I tell him so. “Anyway, they’re gone.”
“It’s something to keep in mind for next time. You have a right to say no, even if your reasons don’t seem logical to anyone else. Due to traumatic circumstances in your life, you have had breaks from reality when you were unfit to make judgments. But it has been nearly five years since one of these episodes has occurred. You have been dealing with the root cause of your illness, and you are well, even without your medication. You aren’t defined by those moments in your life; don’t allow your husband and in-laws to make that mistake, either.”
He’s right, of course, even with all he doesn’t know. The essential truths of our lives sometimes exist above day-to-day events. He thinks Gray found me in a bus station, that in a fit of altruism he took me to a hospital and, in an unlikely turn of events, fell in love with me during visits he made while I recovered. This is not very far from the truth, without being the whole truth.
“Gray fell in love with you while you were helpless and mentally unstable,” the doctor reminds me.
“So maybe he doesn’t want me to be strong?”
“Is that what you think, Annie?”
“I don’t know.”
Someone like Gray is at his finest when there’s a crisis to be handled. He is the man you want when the sky is falling. But when the sky is not falling, does he feel a little lost? I think about our family and all the things we are forced to conceal, all the secrets we keep.
Florida rests on a network of limestone mazes, a labyrinth of wet and dry caves and crevices referred to as a karst topography. A layer of quartz sand thinly mantles the underground landscape formed by the movement of water through rock over millions of years. It’s another world, filled with dark passages, populated by creatures that couldn’t exist on the earth’s surface. Sometimes I think of Florida’s secret places, its wet darkness, its silent corridors, and I feel right at home.
18
Most of us don’t live in the present tense. We dwell in a mental place where our regrets and grudges from our past compete with our fears about the future. Sometimes we barely notice what’s going on around us, we’re so busy time traveling. Before Victory was born, I could spend whole days trying to sort out the things that have happened to me, the terrible mistakes I’ve made. I marinated in my anger and self-loathing, cataloged all the different ways my parents failed me, cast myself as the victim and played the role like I was gunning for a gold statuette.
Motherhood changed that for me. Victory forced me into the moment. She demanded that I focus on her needs, that I live by her schedule. When I was with her-feeding her, changing her-just looking at her or playing with her, everything in the past and the future fell away. I was aware that we would be together like this for only a short time, that in a heartbeat she’d be walking away from me, living her own life. I didn’t want to waste a second thinking about what might have been, what might be. Love makes you present. So does mortal fear.
I am fully present as I race up the stairs to the bridge. I burst through the door and am confronted by the body of the captain who waved to me earlier. He has a bullet hole between his eyes and an expression of profound peace on his face. I step over him to get to the control panel and nearly lose my footing. The floor is slick with blood. Another body lies in a pile of itself by the door. I register all this but don’t have time to feel the full rush of horror the situation demands.
I stare at the knobs and switches before me. I have never been on the bridge of a ship like this one; I have no idea how to start the engine or even what to do next if I succeed. Outside, there is nothing but pitch black. It’s bitterly cold, my ragged breath visible on the air, but I’m sweating from stress. I start randomly pressing buttons and turning knobs, but after a few fruitless minutes I give up. I sit in the captain’s chair and take in the scene-the dead night, the dead ship, the dead men around me, the only person who could have helped me gone because I sent him away. My mind is racing through my limited options. Did I really send Dax away because I wanted to face down my enemy? Or did I do it because I wanted to surrender? I don’t know. But I do know I have to take responsibility for this desperate moment, at least partially. I am as guilty as anyone for how my life has turned out.
My fingers reach for the gold pendant at my neck. I feel the jagged edges of the half heart. When I left my
