survive so much horror. I feel a shutting down of anger, of fear, and I am mercifully blank. But I find I can’t bear the sight of Drew and Vivian anymore. I stand up with Victory in my arms and move away from the table, heading for the door. There are a lot of questions, but I don’t want the answers. Not from Drew and Vivian.
“Annie, please try to understand,” says Vivian. I can see that fear again on her face, but I am already gone.
“I need to understand what you did, Dad,” I hear Gray say behind me. I can tell he’s trying to keep his tone level. “I need you to tell me the truth.”
“Leave it be, son,” answers Drew, his tone as unyielding as a brick wall. I wait in the foyer, listening, rocking back and forth with Victory, who is quiet now.
“I can’t do that.”
“Yes,” says Drew. “If you know what’s good for your family, you can. Your wife is unwell. In my opinion not well enough to be caring for that child. And we all know you are not Victory’s biological father. What would happen to that girl if her mother wound up in a rubber room somewhere?”
“What is that?” asks Gray. “Some kind of threat?”
No one was supposed to know that Victory is Marlowe’s child. Only Gray and I knew. And my father. I start to feel weak. I have to put Victory down and kneel beside her on the cold marble floor of Drew and Vivian’s house. I look at her face. If she has heard, she doesn’t give any sign, just leans against me and rubs her eyes.
“Can we go home?” she asks.
“We’re going. Let’s wait for Daddy.”
“Okay,” she says. “But can he hurry? I don’t want to be here anymore.”
“Me neither.”
I hear Drew’s voice booming then. “I don’t have to tell you the kind of connections I have, the people I know. Your job, your home, your wife, even your child are yours because I have allowed you to have them. A few phone calls from me and it all goes away.”
“Drew-” I hear Vivian, her voice pleading.
“What did you do?” I hear something crash and break. Victory and I hold on to each other. I want to go to the car, but I can’t leave Gray here by himself. We huddle against the storm.
“I did what I needed to do so that we could be a family, so that Victory could have a healthy mother, so that you didn’t spend the rest of your life trying to save someone who couldn’t be saved. Don’t you see that?”
I don’t hear Gray’s answer. But in the strangest way, I see Drew’s point. I guess I’m as sick as he is.
“It was happening again,” says Drew. “Those panic attacks that she had before Victory was born. It always started with that. Then the next thing we knew, she was gone, on a bus to God knows where. What if she took Victory with her? Or worse, left her somewhere? It was one thing when she was just a danger to herself-”
“You’re sick, Dad,” Gray interrupted him, his tone thick with disdain. “You can’t use people, manipulate and control them so that they become who you think they should be. It didn’t work with Mom, and it’s not going to work with me and my family. I came back here hoping that we could be a family, learn to love and accept each other for all our differences. But that’s never going to happen, is it?”
“I do love you, son,” says Drew, his voice sounding weak suddenly, and so sad.
“You don’t even know what love is, Dad. You never have.”
Then Gray’s footsteps are heavy and fast behind me. He kneels beside us and helps me to my feet, lifts Victory into his arms.
She lies against him like a rag doll, exhausted. “Can we go now?”
He looks at me with his stormy eyes. “I’m sorry, Annie,” he says. “I’m so sorry.”
“Let’s get out of here,” I say, putting my hand on his arm. I don’t want to talk anymore. I just want to get out of this house, for good.
“I should have believed you.”
“You had no reason to believe me, Gray,” I say, pulling him toward the door.
“That’s not true,” he says. “I didn’t want to believe you.”
“Gray,” I say, as we walk out the door and head toward our car, “it’s okay. You can start believing me now.”
45
I walk through the rooms of our house and listen to the echoes of the life we lived here. The windows are open, the air is humid. I can hear the ocean and smell the salt. This is what I will miss most about this place, our proximity to the sea, the sand on our feet, the birds crying in the air, the sound of our wind chimes on the porch. But there’s a special kind of beauty to New York City, too. And in its way it is more my home than this place, no matter how beautiful, has ever been.
The few items of furniture that are coming with us are already on their way to be unloaded into a ridiculously expensive brownstone on the east side of Tompkins Square. It’s still a gritty neighborhood, to be sure. Nothing like the posh house we’re leaving, but it will be ours-our choice, our terms, our home. Everything else we’ll leave behind.
I walk from room to room, making sure that things are clean, that nothing we need has been forgotten. I feel a potent nostalgia I can’t explain. Gray and Victory have gone off together to do some errands-close a bank account, buy Victory her own carry-on suitcase for the trip tomorrow.
After I’ve been all through the house, I come to stand at the glass doors downstairs and stare at the Gulf until I sense someone behind me. I spin around to see Detective Harrison standing in my living room.
“The door was open,” he says apologetically.
He looks thin and pale but oddly solid-at peace in a way. I find myself grateful for him and for his wife, and I’m glad to see him now. I want to embrace him, but I don’t. I smile at him instead and hope I don’t seem cool, distant.
“Coffee?” I ask.
“Please,” he says.
I pour him a cup but abstain myself. I’m jittery already from too much caffeine this morning, and I feel a headache coming on. I sit on the couch, but he prefers to stand.
“How’s your family?” I ask.
“We’re okay, you know?” he says with a nod. “I think we’re going to be okay. I’ve hung out my own shingle: Ray Harrison, Private Investigations. I’ve even managed to find a few people who don’t mind having a junkie with a criminal record investigating their cases.” He laughs a little, and it washes away some of the bitterness in his words.
“Anyway, I came to bring you this,” he says. He walks over and hands me a folded piece of paper. I unfold it and look at it for a second. It’s a check in the amount of the money he blackmailed from us.
I try to give it back. “Keep it,” I say. “Pay us back when you’re on your feet.”
He raises a hand. “No. This is right. I need to do the right thing by you. I promised my wife.”
I nod my understanding, put the check down beside me. We are silent for a minute, awkward, neither of us knowing what to say. Our relationship is so bizarre we have no template for polite conversation.
“There are things I can tell you,” he says. He’s doing that rocking business he does, has stuffed his hands in his pockets. “But maybe you don’t want to know. Maybe you just want to move forward with your life from here.”
I haven’t spoken to Drew or Vivian since the night we left their home. Gray has asked his father to buy out his interest in Powers and Powers, and Drew has agreed. Drew has refused to talk any further about his relationship to Grief Intervention Services, how he knew about Victory’s paternity, or to offer any explanation of the things that have happened to me. Gray has tried to find some explanations through avenues of his own but has come up against wall after wall. We have both decided that for the sake of our family, of protecting Victory, there are things we’ll just have to live with never knowing.
“I thought I was going to be in the dark for the rest of my life,” Harrison says, pacing the room. “But I had a visitor the other day to my new office.”
“Who?”
