taking to my bed, feeling helpless to do anything as the memories trampled me like runaway horses. But it is more like watching the rerun of a black-and-white horror film I saw as a child. The images are familiar, but too grainy and drained of power to be truly frightening.
After I put Victory to bed her first night back home, I start to remember. I tuck her beneath her sky blue sheets and sit with her as she drifts off, watching the delicate rise and fall of her chest. As I get up quietly and slip from her room, she says sleepily, “I want my baby.” I find Claude on the floor and put him beside her, but she is already sound asleep again. As I leave the room, I hear Janet Parker’s voice and there’s a terrible ringing in my ears. Once I’m back in my bedroom, I’m swept away, traveling back to a place I haven’t visited in a lifetime.
I watched Marlowe leave the house that night. He had his headphones on, and he walked out the front door and disappeared into the trees. As usual, Frank was gone and my mother was in a stupor in front of the television. Don’t you wonder where Frank goes at night? Marlowe had asked.
He walked for so long and he was so fast that I didn’t think I’d be able to keep up. By the time he came to a stop, I was breathless and sweating. My legs had been lashed by the overgrowth. The mosquitoes were in a feeding frenzy at my ankles and my neck.
He came to a creek that ran through the property and waded across. Through the trees I could see a trailer, a rusted-out old thing up on concrete blocks, not much smaller than the one I’d lived in with my mother. He opened the door and went inside. I saw a light come on. I stood in the darkness, waiting, not sure whether to follow or to go back home. As I was about to walk over to the trailer, he emerged again. He came back to the creek and squatted there, looked into the water as though gazing at his own reflection. I approached him.
At first I thought he was laughing, laughing at me for following him. It was only as I drew closer that I realized he was crying. His whole body was shivering with it. I didn’t know what to do. I stood and watched him for I don’t know how long, listening to the sound of his weeping, an owl calling up above us, tree frogs singing all around.
“Marlowe,” I said finally, softly.
He didn’t jump at the sound of my voice, and I assumed he couldn’t hear me, that he had the Cure or the Smiths blasting in his ears.
“We have to get out of here,” he said, his voice a choked whisper. “It’s started again. You saw. I know you did.”
I had the strong urge to turn and run from him, even though I’d followed him out there. Or was I just a fish on a line, he the fisherman reeling me in-too foolish, too naive to feel the hook in my cheek?
“You helped him,” I said. His back was still to me. “Who was it?”
He stood and spun around then, came and grabbed me by the shoulders. “Does it fucking matter who it was?” he hissed. “Do you understand now?”
I saw him then, saw what he was. This is why I can’t forgive Ophelia. She knew.
“I’m ready,” I told him. And his face changed again. It was as white as the thin slice of moon.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.” And I was.
He brought me into the trailer. There was a kitchen and a small bedroom. A bathroom that didn’t work, of course. No electricity or running water. The lights were all battery-operated. I recognized the bedding, the pots and dishes from our old trailer. The table was piled high with Marlowe’s books and notebooks.
“What is this place?”
“I found it walking one night when we first came. Abandoned, gone to shit. I’ve been fixing it up, staying out here sometimes. You could live out here, you know. If you have provisions, you could live out here forever. He doesn’t know about it. No one does.”
He took me by the hand and led me to the bed, turning out the little plastic lights as we went. In the darkness we lay close. I couldn’t see his face anymore. I was grateful that the darkness was so total. I could only hear the sound of his voice, feel the warmth of his body next to mine. We talked about what we would do. It didn’t seem real. It was all a dream.
When I come back to myself sitting on the edge of my bed, my daughter sleeping down the hall, an hour has passed. I feel shaken and weak. I’m not sure I want to remember the things I have forgotten. But I know that the memories will come now, unbidden, the dead rising.
26
In music a fugue is a movement in which different voices combine to state or develop a single theme. These voices mingle and weave together, each tone complementing the other, creating a multilayered but unified part of the composition. In psychology the term refers to a dissociative state characterized by a sudden departure from one’s life, bouts of amnesia or confusion regarding one’s identity, significant distress, generally the result of a major emotional or physical trauma. I have no musical ability whatsoever, but I’m painfully familiar with fugue. Or so I’m told.
Yet this is not a fugue, this most recent flight from my life. For the first time maybe, I am sure of who I am and what I must do. This has been a purposeful escape to protect my daughter from mistakes that I have made, to protect her from the woman I have been. If I can’t do that, then she’s better off without me.
The boat is pitching horribly now, and I cling to the rail on the wall as I make my way back to my cabin. The wind is wailing, and I think of Dax on his little boat and wonder how he is faring in the big waters and if he’ll survive, if he’ll come back for me. My stomach is in full mutiny, and I hold back vomit as I move through the door, pull it closed behind me, and resume my crouch in the small triangle of space that will be created when the door swings open. I listen to the wind and the churning water.
It isn’t long before I hear the thrum of a powerful boat engine, then footfalls on the deck above me. I take the gun from my waist and am comforted by its heft. I am aware of a tremendous sense of relief, something akin to the euphoria that sweeps over me when a migraine has passed, the wonderful lightness that follows the cessation of pain. It feels good to be Ophelia again, to face the things that Annie never could. My memories have come back to me; I remember it all. I am not proud, but I am whole, at last.
It was Gray who gave me the name Annie Fowler. It was someone from his company who created the documents I needed-driver’s license, passport, Social Security card-to move about the world as someone else. But I made Annie what Ophelia always wanted to be-a wife and mother with a big house and a beautiful child, a husband who cherished her-someone totally different from who her mother had been. Annie had a past unmarred by shame and regret; she was not haunted by the things she had done or the things that had been done to her. I became Annie-rich and pampered, dependent on Gray for strength, dependent on Victory for a feeling of purpose. Like everyone else in her life, I abandoned Ophelia, left her to die in a fiery blaze.
As the heavy footfalls draw closer, I am grateful that Ophelia has returned. She is so many things that Annie was not. She is temperamental where Annie was cool. She is angry where Annie was numb. And unlike Annie, the loving wife and doting mother, princess of suburbia, Ophelia March is a stone-cold killer.
They’re kicking open doors now; there’s more than one man on this boat, and they’re searching the cabins one by one. I don’t know how many men or how many cabins they have to go before they get to mine. But I’m ready.
When they kick my door open and enter the room, I wait for the door to swing back before opening fire. There are two men, both wearing black paramilitary gear-mask, vests, boots. I get one of them in the shoulder, and he issues a terrible scream. The other one takes a round in the vest and is knocked back hard against the wall with a groan. I break from the room but am surprised in the hallway by two more men. They disarm me quickly and bind my arms, slip a heavy hood over my head. It happens so fast I’m in darkness before I even know what hit me. I hear a dull thud, then see a flash of white. Before I lose consciousness, I have enough time to wonder if there’s more to what is happening here than I have imagined. I see my daughter’s face, then nothing.
