Black Out

Am I right?”

She is right. The ugliness that Marlowe brought into my life has been cleansed. I may have let him into my mother’s house, allowed him to slash through everything like a straight razor, but in the end I stood and defeated him. He is-finally-dead.

“It’s interesting, though, that he was injured, disfigured when you confronted him,” she says, musing. “It’s as if his influence over you had already started to weaken. All you had to do was deliver the final blow.”

I nod, slowly, thoughtfully. “I think you’re right.”

If she detects a lack of sincerity in my voice, she doesn’t say so. She scribbles something in her pad. I can tell she finds me an interesting case.

How easily it’s all explained away. Simon Briggs: He was a predator who discovered somehow that Ophelia still lived. He didn’t work for anyone else, and he needed money. He’d come back to blackmail us, knowing we had to keep my identity a secret. Who killed him? Of course we know it was Gray. As far as the police are concerned, it could have been any of a number of his enemies or dissatisfied clients. When you live a life like Briggs’s, there’s almost no other way to die than beneath a bridge with a bullet in your brain.

What about poor Dr. Brown? Authorities were just about to catch up with the unlicensed doctor. He was facing fines and jail time. He packed up his office and fled. He’d done it before, in New York and California. What I saw? Well…we can’t put much stock in that, can we? And who might have killed him? An angry patient, maybe-who knows what kind of associations a man like that might have?

The stalker on the beach could have been Briggs laying the groundwork for his blackmail by unsettling me. Or perhaps it was just my imagination. I saw an innocent stranger walking in the grass, and my sick brain did the rest. The necklace I claimed to have found. No one ever saw it but me, and it is gone. The other half heart, which I kept all these years, is also gone from its velvet box under my mattress. This leads my doctor and everyone else to believe that I never found another necklace on the beach.

“It was a symbol for you, an important one,” the doctor explains. “You were halved by Marlowe, separated from your true self. By thinking you’d found the other part of your necklace, you were committing yourself to a journey back to wholeness.”

My doctor is very pleased with this theory.

But my mother did in fact die just over a year ago in a drunk-driving accident for which she was responsible. So how was it that, in my fantasy, Marlowe relayed this information? I must have heard about it somehow, possibly read it on the Internet and, unable to accept it, pushed it deep down into my psyche. It resurfaced with all the other demons during my last episode.

And, finally, Grief Intervention Services, what about them? Just a grief-and victim-counseling organization known for such controversial techniques as hypnosis, immersion therapy, and other unconventional practices like forcing victims to return to the scene of their trauma, visiting their assailants in prison, watching executions- certainly not involving abduction, torture, murder, and such. And yes, it was founded and run until recently by Alan Parker, father of Melissa, husband of Janet. But he’s been living out of the country for several years, battling cancer, far too unwell to travel. Another piece of information I must have absorbed during my obsessive Internet searches and filed away for inclusion in the daddy of all psychotic episodes.

The good news is that my new doctor does not think I’m truly mentally ill-as in chronically or permanently. She doesn’t feel I have a chemical imbalance, something that will need to be treated with medication for the rest of my life. She believes that I am suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder that started the night I watched Janet Parker kill Frank Geary. The horrors I witnessed during my time with Marlowe deepened my trauma. The adoption of a false identity and my desire to be rid of Ophelia only made things worse. She believes that if I had turned myself over to the police, faced whatever punishment might have been doled out, sought therapy, and tried to move forward in my life as Ophelia March-I would have suffered less in the aftermath.

Of course I agree. I agree with everything they say. I do what I must to survive in my life as it is. I adapt, as I always have.

Because I’m so agreeable, I’m allowed to go home to my family. I will not face arson charges for Frank Geary’s farm. Technically, it belonged to me, anyway. This is one of the reasons my new doctor thinks I burned it down- because it was the last link to Frank and Marlowe Geary.

“Fire is very cleansing,” she says. She’s right. I am glad that the farm’s a pile of ash. I hope someone levels the whole place and builds a mall on it.

I have agreed to let the county sell the property and keep the proceeds. In exchange, they will not bring any charges against me. It has all been very cordial.

Likewise, Ophelia March will not be charged for her association to Marlowe Geary’s crimes. Because we crossed so many state lines and Marlowe committed multiple murders, it is a federal matter. So far no one at the FBI or the federal prosecutor’s office is sufficiently motivated to bring charges against me. I am widely regarded as a victim, not as an accomplice. I am generally pitied, not reviled. So far the information about Ophelia’s survival has managed not to make headline news. For this I am grateful, though I wonder if it is only a matter of time.

And somehow, with Drew and Gray’s connections, the identity theft of the real Annie has gone away as well. It’s all quite seamless.

I return to the quiet, empty days of my life. Ella comes every morning to be with me after Victory has gone to school. I talk to her about everything. She listens in a way that Gray cannot. He feels a certain anxiety, a need to fix and control, to comfort and soothe, especially regarding events he believes happened only in my mind. This is not what I need. I need an ear, someone to hear and understand that the things that happened have meaning and significance to me-whether they happened in my head or not. Ella seems to understand this. She is a patient and interested listener, not unlike my doctor.

“Do I call you Annie or Ophelia?” Ella wants to know this morning as we enjoy coffee on the pool deck. We lie on bright beach towels spread over the wide, comfortable lounge chairs. The air is warm with a light breeze. Over whispering waves, gulls screech, fighting in the air over a fish one of them has caught. I have been home for three weeks.

“I think Annie, you know?” I say. I have given this some thought, of course. “I decided I’m going to change my name to Annie Ophelia Powers. I’m not that girl anymore. But she’s still a part of who I am.”

She nods her understanding. “You know what, Annie?” she says, giving me a smile. “You seem well. Better than you’ve ever been. More solid, centered.”

“Whole,” I say.

“Yes.”

Marlowe Geary is dead. I shot him and watched as the life drained from him. Finally, I rescued Ophelia. She is safe. She has a home and a family who loves her. I don’t say any of this. There’s no point.

We sit in silence for a while, sipping coffee. In the kitchen I hear the new maid and nanny, a young woman named Brigit drop a glass; it shatters on the tile. She is someone Gray hired when Esperanza quit. She is cool where Esperanza was warm, thin where Esperanza was curvaceous, quiet where Esperanza was exuberant. She’s not bad, just different. I’ve wanted to call Esperanza, but apparently she has gone back to Mexico to care for her dying mother; there is no phone in her home there. She promised Gray to come back after her mother’s passing. I am afraid that she has left because of me. Victory misses her very much, and so do I. But in a way my daughter and I are closer for her absence.

I go in to see if Brigit is okay. She is, just flustered and apologetic. I try to put her at ease and think again how much we miss Esperanza.

When I return, Ella is reading the paper.

“Did you hear what happened to the police detective who was here that night?” she says.

“Ray Harrison?”

“Yeah.”

I don’t know if she knows about how he blackmailed us, and I can’t decide whether I should get into all that with her. I haven’t thought about him in a while. I remember our last encounter outside the pool where I took my diving lessons, how his conversation led me to Vivian, who told me about Marlowe’s body. She claims that she never said anything about Dr. Brown or made any cryptic statements like, “That’s what they told me to say.” She was fooled by him like everybody else, she claims. Needless to say, our relationship has cooled. She is nervous and