Frank’s presence in our lives was a blanket of snow-everything grew white and silent. Including my mother, who seemed brittle and frozen, following blankly in his thrall. She worked the ranch like a hired hand, cooked and cleaned as I’d never seen her do. She hardly looked at me, except to assign me chores. She touched me only when she took my hand as we said grace before meals.
As for me, I just was numb, on autopilot. I dressed myself carefully in baggy, formless clothes so as not to attract any attention from Frank. I went to my new school during the day and, when I got home, did the work I was assigned around the ranch. I tried futilely to reach my father every night. My desire to rage and fight with my mother was drained by my fear of Frank. It was as if he emitted a noxious energy that sucked the life from all of us.
I thought Marlowe and I would be gone before I was living under the same roof with Frank Geary. But Marlowe’s promises of rescue seemed to have evaporated. Something about Frank’s presence changed him, too; he became as unnatural as his father. There was no trace of the passion he’d claimed to have for me, except the dark looks he gave me when he thought no one was watching. I trailed him, trying to steal moments alone with him. But he avoided me until one night I awoke to find him standing in my room.
I sat up in my bed, my center flooding with hope. “Marlowe.”
He didn’t answer me.
“What’s wrong with you?” I asked when he stayed in the corner of my room, unmoving. After a long minute, my hope evaporated; a dark flower of fear bloomed in its place. I wondered how long he’d stood there watching as I slept, and why.
“He can’t know there was ever anything between us,” he said finally, moving into the light where I could see him.
“I thought we were leaving,” I said. I kept my voice flat and unemotional. I didn’t want him to know my heart-how afraid I was, how much I needed him.
“We can’t,” he said quietly. “He’ll find us. And when he does, he’ll kill you. I’m not allowed to love anything.”
I was too desperate to hear the sickness in his words. I heard only that he was letting me down, like everyone else. “You promised me,” I said, my voice sounding childish even to my own ears.
“That was before,” he said tightly. “I never thought he’d be released.”
I’d seen the way Marlowe followed his father around, looking at him with begging eyes, waiting for scraps of attention. “You don’t want to leave him,” I said.
“You don’t understand,” he said. He came and sat on the edge of my bed. “No one leaves him.”
Marlowe had seemed so strong, so much wiser than anyone I’d known. Now I could see he was just a scared kid, just like me.
“You’ll be eighteen in seven months,” he said weakly. “You can legally leave then. I’ll be eighteen next month, and I’m going to join the marines. He won’t be able to get to me there.”
I was washed over by hopelessness, and I turned to weep into my pillow. He didn’t move to comfort me, just sat there as I cried. I thought there was no end to the well of sadness within me. I thought I didn’t have enough tears.
Then, “There might be a way, Ophelia. I just don’t know if you’re strong enough.”
Something in his tone chilled me, even as I felt a little lift. “What are you talking about?” I said into my pillow.
“It’s the only way,” he said, moving into me. He rubbed my back with the flat of his hand. It was the first time he’d touched me in weeks. I sat up and moved into his arms, let him hold me. It felt so good to be close to him again, to be close to anyone.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said. He bent down and kissed me. My body lit up for him. He slipped beneath the covers with me, his hands roaming my skin. My mother had been wrong about me: I’d never made love to Marlowe. I was still a virgin then. We only engaged in these heavy petting sessions. Now I see I was such a child, so starved for affection. I just wanted the physical closeness of another person; this felt like love to me. After a few minutes, when I was hot and aching and alive with my need for him, he pulled away.
“Forget it,” he said. “You’re not ready. You’re too young.”
He got out of the bed and went back to the window. “This time next month, I’ll be gone,” he said.
“I’m not too young,” I said. I curled myself up into a ball and hugged my knees to my chest. “Don’t leave me here.”
He came back to the bed. I lifted a finger and traced the lines of his mouth.
“I’ll do anything,” I said.
“Say it,” he said.
“I belong to you.”
“Annie!”
I awake to find Gray holding me by the shoulders. “It’s okay. Wake up.”
I am drenched in sweat, my heart thudding. Mercifully, the pounding in my head has subsided. But I feel weak, as if I’ve just run a hundred miles.
“What happened?” I ask, disoriented. I can’t tell if it’s day or night.
“You were dreaming,” he says. He pushes a few damp strands of hair away from my eyes. “What were you dreaming about?”
I try to shake the fog from my brain, to grasp at the faded images from my dream that are already slipping away. I move away from Gray and turn on the light.
“I think I’m remembering,” I tell him. He looks at me with some odd mixture of hope and fear.
“What? What do you remember?”
“I don’t know,” I say after a minute. Suddenly I don’t want to tell him what I saw in my dream. I don’t want to say what I think I may have done.
“Tell me.”
I close my eyes and rest against him. “Gray, do you ever wonder what it would be like to be married to someone normal?”
He laughs a little. “I’d die from boredom.”
“Seriously.”
“You’re normal,” he says, pulling back a little so that he can look into my face. “You’re fine.”
I wonder how he can say that, if he really believes it to be true. I find I can’t hold his eyes; I lean against him again so that I don’t have to look away.
“She can never know who I’ve been and the things I’ve done,” I say into his shoulder. “I can never let Ophelia touch her. You know that, Gray.”
“Ophelia was never the problem.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I know,” he says. “I know.”
22
When people think of Florida, they think of oranges and pink flamingos, palm trees and beaches, the blue-green ocean. They think of Disney and margaritas. Florida is light and fluffy, kitschy, a place for the family vacation. And it is all that, of course. But it has a feral heart, a teeming center that would rage out of control if not for the concrete and rebar that keeps it caged. There are vast untamed places: shadowy mangroves, deep sinkholes, miles of caverns and caves, acres of living swamps. There is a part of Florida that will recover itself when it gets its chance. Its wet, murky fingers will reach out and close us into its fist. This is how I feel about my life.
I walk through the mall with Ella. Anyone looking at us as we wander through the shops would see two women with time and money to burn. They might assume that the worst of our problems is a cheating husband or a kid with ADD. As I examine an obscenely expensive handbag at Gucci, I hear a shotgun blast ringing in my ears. I smell smoke. I see Frank Geary’s chest exploding and watch as he falls backward down a flight of stairs. I hear my mother screaming. I don’t know where these bloody images have come from, if they are memory or dream.
“You seem distracted,” Ella says as we sit down to drink espresso in the food court. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah,” I say lightly. I keep seeing Simon Briggs in my mind’s eye. He’s the headache I can’t shake. His face, so rough and ugly, is familiar without being recognizable. There are so many things like this that I can’t quite remember-people, events slipping through my fingers like sand. “I’m just…not sleeping much.”