“Listen to me,” he said, with so much passion that I released a little sob. “I’m going to take care of you.” He’d been so even, so unflappable up to this point, I hardly recognized the man beside me. Maybe he was drowning, too.
“I’m going to make a home for you and for that baby.” He looked down at my belly. “Whatever it takes. I’ll do whatever it takes.”
We drove for two days and finally wound up at Vivian’s place on the beach. She and Drew were just dating at the time, so I lived alone with her. Gray took an apartment nearby. He wanted me to have some time to get to know myself, to get to know him.
“We’ll date,” he said. “Like normal people.”
Vivian took me into her house and treated me like her daughter. She cooked for me and stayed up late listening to me talk. She offered me a sort of kindness that no one else ever had. As I got my GED and started taking classes at the local college, my belly grew bigger. Gray and I dated. It was the happiest time of my life.
I suppose some people would have considered ending the pregnancy. But it didn’t even cross my mind. I’ve never once thought of Victory as Marlowe Geary’s daughter. She has always been mine and mine alone.
I watch as Gray gets out of the car with a black duffel bag. He puts the bag on the ground and leans against the vehicle. I feel as though I have lost every ounce of moisture in my body. A heavy man emerges from the white van and walks slowly over to Gray. He wears a long black raincoat, which fans behind him in the wind. His head is enormous over wide shoulders. He looks the approximate size of a refrigerator.
They shake hands, briefly. Even in the dark and with the distance, I recognize him. It’s Simon Briggs, the man who went to my father looking for Ophelia. They exchange a few words. I see Gray shake his head. I watch Briggs lift his palms. I can tell just from the way he’s standing that Gray is not happy. Finally Gray turns the bag over to him. They exchange a few more words. Then Simon Briggs turns and walks back toward his van.
As Briggs reaches for the handle to open the door, I see Gray lift his hand from his pocket and raise a gun. I draw in a hard breath and grip the wheel. With a single, silent shot, Briggs’s head explodes in a red cloud and he crumbles to the ground. Gray walks over to the body and fires again, retrieves the duffel bag, and walks calmly back to the car and gets inside. His vehicle rumbles to life, and he drives away with as little hurry as if he’s just picked up a carton of milk at the convenience store and is heading home.
I sit there for a minute, allowing what I’ve just seen to sink into my mind. I run through the possible reasons Gray might have shot Simon Briggs beneath an overpass and can only come up with one that makes sense: Gray had arranged to meet Briggs for a payoff but decided he’d be better off dead than rich. He wouldn’t have told me he planned to kill Briggs; he wouldn’t have incriminated me that way. I feel something like relief, and yet it doesn’t quite take. It’s the handshake that keeps me wondering. How much do you really know about your husband?
Gray and I were married by the time Victory was born. I think I fell in love with him in the parking lot of the psychiatric hospital when it was clear that he accepted me for everything I was. He knew Ophelia March; he loved her. I knew he would take care of me, that with Gray I’d always be safe. Maybe that’s not really love, but it passed for that. His name is on Victory’s birth certificate; he’s her father in every way that counts. No one-not Drew, not Vivian-knows that Victory is Marlowe Geary’s child. We both agreed everyone would be better off never knowing, including Victory. But I’d be lying if I said it didn’t feel like a kind of betrayal.
Maybe because of that, there were terrible black patches during the pregnancy where I was consumed by fear that Marlowe had returned for me and for his daughter. I wouldn’t take the medication I was supposed to because of the baby, so I was buffeted by my hormones and the rogue chemicals in my brain. There were blackouts and terrible migraines. Once I woke up on a Greyhound bus headed for New York City, with no idea how I’d gotten there. One of my fugue states, as the doctors called them, a sudden flight from my life.
After I disembarked from the Greyhound that night, I sat in a diner and waited for Gray to come get me. I was nothing but trouble. I don’t know why he loved me. On the way back to Florida in the Suburban, I asked him, “Why do you do this? Why do you always come for me?”
“I do well in crisis mode,” he told me. “Besides, I didn’t chase you all over the country to let you go now.”
It reminded me of all the things my father said I didn’t know about the years Gray trailed me and Marlowe. I’d never asked, mainly because I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to know. That night, less than a week before our wedding, when I was five months pregnant, suddenly I needed to know.
“My father said that he paid you at first, and then you wouldn’t accept any more money.”
He shrugged. “At a certain point, I wasn’t working for him any longer. I was looking for you.”
“Why?”
He just stared at the road ahead, and I wondered if he was going to answer me. I’d pieced some things together from newspapers, what I could bear to read.
“I caught up with you for the first time in Amarillo, Texas,” he said finally. “There’d been a liquor-store robbery a few miles east of there a day before. The girl working the counter had been tortured and finally killed. I heard about it on the radio, thought it might be Marlowe Geary. That’s what he did-tortured, killed, and robbed. He cut a bloody gash across the country, leaving at least nineteen young women dead.”
I wanted to tell him that it couldn’t be true, though I’d read this much. I don’t think I could have witnessed these crimes and done nothing, but the truth was, I didn’t know for sure.
“A few weeks earlier, a witness, a stock boy Geary left for dead in the back room, said he saw you. He was badly wounded, unable to help the girl Geary was torturing. All he could do was listen to her screams, thinking he was about to die himself. He said you were virtually catatonic, that you sat in a corner and rocked, gnawing on your cuticles. That Geary led you out when he was done. You went with him like a child.”
I covered my face in shame. I hated to think of myself this way, weak and in a killer’s thrall, just like my mother.
“Up till then I wasn’t sure. Your mother said you went with Geary willingly. But your father said when you came to New York that you weren’t right, you weren’t the girl he knew. He said it was like you were under some kind of spell. It makes sense, knowing what we know now about your mental state.”
“I knew enough to go to my father.”
He shrugged. “Even your subconscious was hoping he would save you.”
“I was always hoping for that,” I said.
“Well, he took his time, but he came through in the end. More or less.”
“Less.”
“Anyway, in Amarillo, after stopping at every shit motel in the area, I saw a car matching the description of the vehicle Geary was last seen driving. I sat and waited. After a few hours, Geary got into the vehicle and drove off. I should have called the cops right then, or taken him myself, but at that point all I was thinking about was you. I suppose I was obsessed, maybe not thinking clearly anymore.”
Gray told me how he found me in the corner of the hotel room, just sitting there rocking. The television was on, and I stared at the screen. My arms were covered with bruises, my lip was split. I was so thin he could see my collarbone straining against the skin, the knobs of my elbows. For a second he wasn’t sure I was the girl in the photograph he carried in his pocket.
“I pulled you to your feet and was moving you to the door when Geary returned.”
He told me how he and Marlowe fought, tore the room apart.
“Marlowe knocked me unconscious with a lamp by the bed. When I came to, you were long gone. I didn’t catch up with you again until nearly a year later in New Mexico.”
“You’re leaving something out.”
“No.”
“I can handle it.”
He sighed. Then, “You shot me. In the shoulder. Though you were probably aiming to kill me and weren’t strong enough to handle the gun.”
I thought of the star-shaped scar on his shoulder. I closed my eyes and tried hard to remember shooting him. But there was nothing there.
“I don’t remember,” I said, looking out the window. I should have felt worse about it, but I couldn’t connect at
