Black Out

“Can I call you Annie? Annie, you’re looking a little pale. I won’t keep you. I’m sure you want to get back to your family.”

He turns and starts to walk away. Then he stops and comes back. I can tell he’s played this scene out in his mind a hundred times, rehearsed it for maximum effect.

“You know, Annie, we all have our secret lives, the parts of ourselves we’d rather not share. I understand that. I truly do. The question is, how much are those secrets worth? How much are we willing to pay to keep them buried? I’ll let you think about it.”

He leaves me standing there, watching him walk off. He doesn’t look back, just gets into his Explorer parked nearby and slowly drives away.

When a ship gets lost at sea, it might never be found. If its engine dies and it goes adrift, it could move through the vastness of the ocean and never come to shore, never be seen by another craft or from the air. Even if you hire the kind of people who are able to recover a runaway vessel, even if you have an idea of when it was lost, along with an understanding of the day’s tides and currents-even then you might never find it. Most people can’t wrap their heads around the idea that the oceans of the world are so vast and that something so solid could be so permanently lost yet still out there, still floating around, just never to be seen again by human eyes. But that’s how large the world is. Things disappear and are never found simply because there’s too much ground to cover. People, too.

The idea of shifting off your skin and walking away in a new one is foreign to most people, the stuff of fiction. But it can be done with relative ease. A driver’s license, passport, even a Social Security card-all can be obtained with a birth certificate. Birth certificates can be had just by filling out a form and paying a fee at any local records office. You can use this document to get pretty much anything else you need to establish a new identity. Then it’s just a matter of flying below the radar. It’s better not to work or get pulled over for speeding. And if you’re far enough away from people who have known you, you can drift about in the world and never be found again, just like a ship lost at sea. The world is that big.

Ophelia March died on a dry, cool New Mexico night. In a stolen black ’67 Mustang, she and Marlowe Geary drove off the edge of the Taos High Road into the Rio Grande Valley below. She was presumed dead, though her body was not recovered. Or so the official reports go.

But Ophelia wasn’t in that Mustang. She was handcuffed and drugged in the back of a black Suburban parked off the public square in Santa Fe, in the shadow of St. Francis Cathedral. About two hours after the Mustang burst into flames on impact, a man, beaten and dirty and smelling like smoke, got into the driver’s seat of the Suburban and took her away. Ophelia March was dead. Annie Fowler had just been reborn.

I am thinking of that night as I stand in the parking lot of the mall, my shopping bags at my feet. I’m sick with fear. But is there also the glimmer of relief in my heart? Am I also a little glad that Ophelia still lives, and that one way or another she might have to pay for the things she has done? There are plenty of people who believe that Ophelia was Marlowe’s victim, his captive toward the end. But I know it was more complicated than that. I feel those black fingers tugging at me. I am as afraid of Ophelia as I am of Marlowe.

The only thing I like about Gray’s office is that it’s filled with books. Big, thick books bound in leather, with gilt- edged pages, texts on war and military theory, encyclopedic tomes on world history, classic literature, poetry. But it’s not a library collected after a lifetime of reading. It is a library that has been purchased for show-Drew’s idea of which books should line the shelves of a military man’s office. He has a similar collection in his own office. Most of the books have never even been opened, eyes have never rested on their words, fingers have never caressed their pages. They are as untouched and virginal as nuns.

I scan the covers: Sun-tzu, Machiavelli, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Byron, Shelley. Anyone sitting in my husband’s office would think him a great reader. He’s not. My husband opens a book, he falls asleep.

Curled on the leather couch, I recount my meeting with Detective Harrison for Gray. His face is a knot of concern.

“He doesn’t know anything,” he says after I’m done. “If he did, he’d have used your name.”

“He knows I’m not Annie Fowler.”

Gray nods his assent. “But his interest is not legal. He didn’t come to you as a cop. He didn’t bring you in for questioning. He’s corrupt. And that’s a good thing. We pay him off, he goes away.”

Gray’s sitting behind his desk, capping and uncapping a pen, swiveling his chair slightly from side to side. I don’t say anything. I don’t think it’s going to be that simple.

“Anyway,” he says, “there’s no connection whatsoever between Annie Fowler and Ophelia March. Nothing links them. He could dig into Annie Fowler until her bones shake in the ground and he’s not going to find Ophelia.”

I wonder whom he’s trying to convince.

“So it’s a coincidence, then, that there’s someone looking for Ophelia in New York and this cop down in Florida is asking questions about Annie Fowler. That someone followed me on the beach.”

I can’t read his expression. He’s the one who doesn’t believe in coincidence.

“I don’t see a connection,” he says finally. I wonder, if he’s just in denial, stubbornly refusing to see what’s right in front us. It’s not like him. “I really don’t see one.”

But there’s always a connection, isn’t there? Sometimes it’s just deep beneath the surface, like Florida’s network of caves, dark and echoing, winding silent and treacherous under our feet.

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?”