Black Out

ship, Dax, my abduction, my father, my flight to Florida, the Angry Man, my confrontation with Marlowe. He listens, stays silent and focused on me. He lets everything tumble out of me without interruption.

“Where’s Victory?” I say suddenly. “I don’t understand. How did you get her back?”

“Annie-” says Gray, laying a hand on my head. But I’ve already interrupted him with another question.

“When did you realize she was gone?”

“Annie-”

“Is she all right?” I ask, sitting up with effort. “I mean really all right. He wouldn’t have hurt her, I don’t think. Are Drew and Vivian okay?”

“Everyone’s fine,” he says, getting up and sitting beside me on the bed, gently pushing me back against the pillows.

“You must have been so worried,” I say, taking in the lines on his face, the circles under his eyes. “I’m so sorry.”

“Annie, please,” he says then, in a tone that causes me to stop talking. “You have to listen to me.”

I am gripping the sheet hard, and I’m suddenly aware that my whole body is rigid, as though I’m bracing myself for a fall. The expression on Gray’s face-furrowed brow, thin line of a mouth, eyes averted-tells me something is very wrong. I can’t even bring myself to ask what it is.

He takes a deep breath, then, “Victory was never gone, Annie, never in danger. I sent her on a cruise with Drew and Vivian. She’s been with them all this time.”

“No,” I say, feeling my chest tighten. I need desperately for him to understand and believe me. “Listen. Drew and Vivian were in on this. They helped Alan Parker. I think they believed they were helping me. But Parker took it too far. Then I had to save them by leading him to Marlowe.”

Gray puts his head down and rubs his eyes before putting both hands on my shoulders and looking straight at me. “No, Annie. Nothing like that happened.”

“Yes,” I say, getting angry now. “It did. Drew and Vivian kept this from you because they knew you’d never be a part of it.”

He shakes his head slowly, keeping my gaze. “No,” he says gently.

“Explain then how all those men died on that ship. And Dax-the one who tried to save me-what happened to him?”

He shakes his head again, seems at a loss for words. There’s something like panic living in my chest. I hear a nurse laugh out in the hallway, and I am suddenly aware of the beeping and humming of a hundred machines designed to monitor and maintain life. Somewhere else on the floor, big-band music is playing, soft and tinny. My breathing feels ragged in my throat.

“I saw them.”

He takes my hand and looks at it, plays with the ring on my finger. “You never met the ship in Miami. You disappeared after the dive. You slipped the man who was supposed to take you to the boat.”

I hear his words, but I can’t believe he’s saying them. He doesn’t believe me.

“And no one named Dax has ever worked for me, Annie.”

My heart monitor is beeping fast-107, 108, 109. I hold out my arms so he can see the black-and-blue marks on my body from my struggle on the ship.

“How did I get all these marks?”

He rubs my arms tenderly. “I don’t know, honey. I don’t know what happened to you out there. But you never made it to the ship that was waiting for you. I’ve been frantic looking for you since you got away from your escort. Finally I got a call from the police in the jurisdiction of Frank Geary’s farmhouse. They found you unconscious from smoke inhalation in the barn. The whole place was on fire. It’s been deserted for years. Locals think it’s haunted. Some kids out there on a dare saw it burning and called the police.”

“Burning.”

“You set it on fire.”

“No,” I say. “I killed Marlowe Geary. And then-” And then what? I find I don’t remember. I remember a flash of white before my eyes as Marlowe lay bleeding.

“Did they find his body?” I ask. “He was disfigured, injured. He walked with a cane.”

“No, Annie. You were alone there. There was no body.”

“But he wasn’t at the farm,” I say quickly. “He was in a trailer far out in the woods. No one else in the world knew about it but me. That’s why they needed me. Don’t you see?”

Gray looks stricken, grips my hand. “It’s okay, Annie.”

“Alan Parker must have arranged for his body to be removed,” I say. I realize then, because of the sad, frightened look on Gray’s face, that everything I’m saying sounds like the ravings of a madwoman.

“You don’t believe me,” I say, feeling the crushing weight of despair.

He puts his hand on my hair and rubs the back of my neck, brings his face close to mine. I wrap my arms around the wide expanse of his shoulders.

“I believe that you believe it,” he whispers. I hold on to him, rest my head against him.

“My father,” I say, trying again but sounding desperate. “He’s the one who figured out where Marlowe was hiding.”

He holds on to me tighter. “Your father said someone broke in to his tattoo shop and went through his albums of old tattoos. He found the book with the photograph of Marlowe’s tattoo open on the desk. He called me right away.”

“No,” I say. I pull away from Gray and force him to look into my face. “He helped me get back to Florida. A friend of his had a private plane.”

Gray doesn’t say anything. He just hangs his head again. And I start to weep.

“Why are you doing this to me?” I ask him. I feel so weak suddenly, so dizzy. My chest and throat ache with each sob. Gray reaches for me, and I cling to him.

“It’s okay, Annie,” he says, those words coiling around me like a snake. “It’s going to be okay.”

A psychotic break, the doctor says, brought on by the return of all the traumatic memories of my past-a reaction to the desire to merge the two parts of myself, the light and the dark, and maybe even a thirst for revenge against the person who laid waste to my childhood and to my life. All of it a fantasy my unhealthy mind created to make itself whole again. Where was I during the weeks I was missing? How did I get myself to that farm in the middle of Florida? No one knows.

My new doctor-a pretty blonde with a slight British accent and pouty lips-says she thinks that the germ for this fantasy took root when I saw my mother on television and heard about Grief Intervention Services. Something about their message of facing my fears resonated deeply, and I concocted an elaborate scenario in which I could do just that-flee the false life I’d constructed, pursue the man who I’d always believed was pursuing me, face him down and kill him. This fantasy lay dormant, a kind of psychological escape hatch-the items I kept in my box spring, the contact information for Oscar, my touchstones. My doctor thinks that it was the recent murder so heavily covered in the news, a murder that took place just miles from Frank Geary’s horse farm, that caused my recent spate of panic attacks. And when I learned from Vivian that they’d lied about Marlowe’s body, this knowledge set off the final chain reaction in my brain.

“The death of Annie Powers, leading to a journey and a battle where you had to fight your way back to Marlowe and destroy him to save your daughter,” she says in the quiet, thoughtful manner she has. “Only in this way did you believe you could reclaim Ophelia, save her from Marlowe as no one else was able. Only once you’d done this could you save your daughter.”

She is excited by her own theory; I can tell by the way she leans forward and looks at me with bright, wide eyes. “You never believed he was dead. We don’t, you know, we can’t really unless we see a body. That’s why we have funerals, to convince ourselves that death is real, that people have truly gone. Our instincts tell us that people can’t die; they can’t just be here one moment and then gone the next. Your family convinced you against your instincts. When you learned about their lies, you were sure that you’d been right all along. Marlowe’s threats from long ago lived in your subconscious. This was the trigger that brought on the whole episode.”

I don’t argue with her. I know that arguing only makes me seem insane.

“My guess is that even though this has been a traumatic event for you, you feel better than you have in years.