Black Out by Lisa Unger Page B

and he’s watching the detective’s SUV.

    Detective Ray Harrison, on the day he began to suspect that I wasn’t who I was pretending to be, was in a bit of a mess. He wasn’t a corrupt man, not totally. Nor was he an especially honorable one. He was a man who’d made some bad choices, taken a few back alleys, and found himself dangerously close to rock bottom. One wouldn’t have known it to look at him. He drove a late-model Ford Explorer, had never missed a payment on his mortgage, had never in his career taken a sick day. But there was debt. A lot of it. In fact, he was drowning in it. He went to bed and woke up thinking about it, could barely look his wife in the eye lately. It was making him sick; he was vomiting up blood from his ulcer. But it wasn’t the kind of debt you could get help with; he didn’t owe money to Citibank or Discover. The detective had a gambling problem. The problem was that he lost, often and extravagantly. The day before Esperanza’s 911 call, a man to whom he owed money sent the detective a picture of his wife at the mall as she buckled their nine-month-old daughter into her car seat. On the back his debtor had scrawled,
Where’s my fucking money?
    That’s the hole he was in when he had a hunch about me, a vague idea that I might be hiding something. So he started doing a little poking around, not really going out of his way. A totally blank credit report was the first red flag. A driver’s license granted just five years ago was the second. Finally a birth certificate issued in Kentucky when he was certain he’d heard just the hint of New York in my accent.
    Detective Harrison was the kind of man who noticed how much things were worth: our house on the beach, the ring on my finger, the secret I had to keep. He did a little calculating and decided to take a gamble, as he was wont to do.
    I don’t know any of this as Gray and I watch him cruise away from the house. His visit is just another bad omen.

14
    When I try to visualize Marlowe as he was when we were young, I can’t quite pin him down. The memory writhes and fades away; I can see the white of his skin, the jet of his eyes, the square of his hand, but the whole picture is nebulous and changing, as though I’m watching him underwater.
    He is lost to me. Part of that has to do with my blotchy memories. There’s so much that exists in a black box inside me. But part of it has to do with him. Because, like all manipulators, Marlowe was a shape-shifter. He was always exactly what he needed to be to control me—loving or distant, kind or cruel. Maybe I never even saw the real Marlowe. Maybe the doctor was right about love after all, at least this particular brand.
    At first Marlowe wouldn’t talk much about his father. If I brought Frank up, he’d change the subject. Or he’d talk about him vaguely in the past tense, the way a person mentions a distant relative he remembers from his childhood. He’d make random comments such as,
My father liked the smell of orange blossoms. My father had a red hat like that.
Or,
My father gave me a baseball bat for my fifth birthday.
His memories seemed to visit him in vivid snapshots, bright and two-dimensional. The first time I pressed for more, he went to that dark place. We were talking on my bed, sharing a cigarette I’d lifted from my mother’s purse.
    “Didn’t you know what he was doing?” I asked. I took a shallow drag, tried not to cough, and then handed it to him.
    “Of course not,” he said. “I was just a kid.”
    “How could you not have known?” I asked, staring at my cuticles, which were gnawed and dry just like my mother’s. “You weren’t
that
young.”
    He didn’t answer me, and finally I turned my eyes back to him. It was the strangest thing. He was leaning against the wall, the smoke forgotten in his hand, arms akimbo. He stared at nothing, eyes glazed as though he were daydreaming.
    “Marlowe.”
    I took the cigarette from him and put it out in the soda