Black Out

stand up to his father, just that even the smallest disagreement can turn into a battle. He prefers to bide his time.

“But you’re not like Gray’s mother,” says Drew. “There’s a mettle to you, Annie, that I never suspected. You make my son happy, and you’re a good mother to your daughter.”

A year ago I would have been weak with gratitude for this statement. Now I just want to put my fist through the rows of his perfect white teeth. My conversation with Sarah Harrison is bouncing around inside my head, and my heart rate is on the rise. It takes effort to keep the swelling tide of emotion off my face.

Vivian gets up from the table suddenly, pushing her chair back quickly, almost toppling it. She senses that the sky is about to open.

“Victory, let’s go upstairs and look at your dollhouse,” she says, moving toward the door leading inside. I expect Victory to bolt off after her, but she stays rooted.

“No,” says Victory sullenly. She takes hold of my hand. “I want to stay here.”

“Victory,” Vivian says so sternly that I’m startled by her tone, “let’s go.”

Something shifts inside me. “Don’t talk to her like that,” I find myself saying. “Ever.”

Then everyone turns to face me, as though I’m a marionette that has suddenly made a move of her own.

“I don’t want to play any of those games with you, Grandma,” says Victory. “I don’t like it.”

I turn to my daughter and think how much tougher, how much stronger, she already is than I have ever been.

“What kinds of games, Victory?” I ask her. She doesn’t answer me, but Victory and Vivian lock eyes. There’s a warning on Vivian’s face and fear on Victory’s. I feel the tightness of anger in my chest as I move my body between them.

“What kinds of games?” I ask her again.

That afternoon I did log on to Gray’s computer. And I discovered that Sarah Harrison has told me the truth about the connection between Powers and Powers and Grief Intervention Services. And since then my addled brain has been working overtime to fit together the pieces of the things that have happened to me. That look between Victory and Vivian, for some reason, causes everything to click into place.

“What is going on here?” asks Gray. He has moved forward again in his seat, looks as though he’s about to stand.

Victory shakes her head and gazes hard down at her knees. Her whole body is rigid; she has released my hand and grabbed onto both arms of the chair. I put my hand on her shoulder, lean into her, and whisper, “You don’t have to go anywhere you don’t want to go, Victory.” I watch the tension drain from her body.

Everyone is quiet a moment.

“The picture,” I say quietly, suddenly understanding. I feel the first rumblings of a volcanic rage, but somehow my voice is little more than a whisper. “You tied her up and took a picture of her. You told her it was a game.”

Victory looks at me with surprise, and then the tears start to fall. “Don’t hurt my mommy!” she yells suddenly, looking at Drew. There’s so much fear on her face my heart lurches. She grabs for my hand and starts to pull herself onto my lap. “I didn’t tell her! I didn’t tell!”

She is on me then, clinging and sobbing into my chest in a way she hasn’t since she was a toddler. I hold on to her tightly, bury my face in her hair.

“No one’s going to hurt me, Victory,” I whisper into her ear.

Gray is looking at his father, his face a mask of confused disappointment. “Dad?” he says. “What have you done?”

Drew takes a few deep breaths, seems to steel himself. “I did what I had to do for our family, so that we could all be together like this.”

Gray gets to his feet so fast that everything shakes. A piece of stemware falls to the floor and shatters, spraying wine and shards of glass at our ankles. No one moves to pick it up; everyone stays fixed, frozen. Gray’s face is red, a vein throbbing on his throat. I’ve never seen him so angry.

“What are you talking about, Dad?” Gray roars.

Drew is turning a shade of red to match, but he doesn’t say anything.

“Fucking answer me!”

Drew picks up his bottle of beer and takes a long, slow swallow. It’s clear that he doesn’t feel as though he needs to answer his son.

“Grief Intervention Services is a client of Powers and Powers, Inc.,” I say finally to Gray. I want to rage like him, to start picking up the china and glasses from the table and flinging them just to watch things break and crash, but my daughter is clinging, hysterical in my arms. I feel as if I owe it to her to keep myself together. “I looked up the client list on our computer this afternoon. It’s there.”

Gray’s eyes rest on me and then move back to his father. I can see that he doesn’t know what to believe.

All eyes are on Drew now, who still has said nothing, just puffed up his chest and pulled back his shoulders. He is the picture of self-satisfied arrogance, the man assured of his righteousness.

“So what?” he says simply. “What does that prove?”

Gray’s face falls; all the rage seems to leave him. I remember the expression from my time in the psychiatric hospital years ago when he talked about his father, how powerless he’d felt against his father’s will, his father’s desires for him. How he’d lived his life trying to please a man who would never be pleased. We hadn’t talked about that in so long, always wrapped up in whatever drama I had going on. I could see that nothing had changed. Maybe Gray had betrayed himself in the same way I had, living a fake life for what seems to be the greater good. Maybe he never wanted to go back to work with his father; maybe he just thought he had to, to make a life for us.

“You spent your whole childhood trying to save your mother,” says Drew, picking up his fork and knife and going to work on his steak. “I didn’t want you to spend your adulthood trying to save someone else you couldn’t save. I didn’t want another child in my care growing up with an unstable mother. We did what we had to do. We helped Annie, but ultimately she had to save herself. Our methods were unorthodox, sure. But it had to be that way. Annie knows that.”

He’s so cool, so matter-of-fact, he could be talking about anything-a risky business venture or a volatile investment that paid out after all. But he’s talking about me, my life, my daughter. Gray and I both stare at Drew while he eats. Victory is still crying quietly in my arms. Vivian stands at the head of the table, her hands resting on the chair where she sat during the meal. The sun has dropped below the horizon, and there’s an orange-blue glow over the ocean. Such a beautiful place to live such an ugly life.

“You were haunted, Annie,” Vivian says, her voice soft and earnest. “He was always going to haunt you.” But no one seems to hear.

I’m watching my husband, and I can see him working the problem, going over in his mind the story I told him, remembering the accusations I launched against Drew and Vivian, the things he told me were all a dream. “Alan Parker, Grief Intervention Services, everything he told her,” says Gray, not yelling anymore, not enraged. Just…sad. “It was all true?”

Drew carefully cuts another piece of steak and puts it in his mouth, begins to slowly chew. Gray and I stare at him, stunned by his calm, by his indifference, all our shock and anger just a breeze through the branches of a great old oak.

“Look,” he says finally, resting his silverware with a clang on his plate. “Alan Parker took Annie where she needed to go, and Annie did the rest. Didn’t you, girl?”

Gray’s gaze keeps shifting back and forth between me and his father. “Are you telling me he was there? Marlowe Geary? That she killed him?” His voice is a hard edge, tight with emotion; his fists are clenched at his side. “No. No fucking way.”

A wide, slow smile spreads across Drew’s face. It is almost kind, but it never reaches his eyes. In the gloaming he’s a monster. I find myself recoiling from him.

“What do you think, Annie?” Drew asks, giving me a hideous wink, like we’re in together on some kind of joke. “Is Marlowe Geary dead? Finally?”

And suddenly I realize we are in on the joke together. Because only Drew and I understand that I had to be the one to kill Marlowe Geary. No tale of his demise, no repeated phrases or articles on the Internet were ever going to convince me he was dead. I had to kill him and watch him die. That was the only way I would ever truly be free of him.

All my desire to rage at Drew drains, and I am filled again by the familiar numbness that has allowed me to