Black Out (34 page)

Epilogue

Victory and I walk up Eleventh Street from our brownstone on Tompkins Square Park, heading for school. It is a crisp fall day in New York City, the sky a crayon drawing of blue air and puffy white clouds. Cabdrivers lean on their horns, birds sing in the trees lining the streets, children yell on the playground as we approach. Victory is chattering about how much she likes her new shoes and book bag. She wonders, “Do you have snack and naptime at your new school, too?” I tell her, “No, enjoy it while you can.” Naptime is one of the many casualties of adulthood.

I leave her at the bright green doors and watch as she runs down a happily muraled hallway to her teacher, a lovely older woman with graying hair, café au lait skin, and the lilt of a Jamaican accent. She has the warmest smile for my daughter.

“Victory!” Miss Flora exclaims. “I
love
your shoes!”

“Thank you!” says Victory, shooting a pleased glance back my way. I don’t feel the terrible twinge I used to feel when I leave my daughter. Not yet a year after we have left Florida, I feel like we own this life we live in New York. I won’t be dying again until it’s my time for good. Hopefully, I have a while.

I continue down Eleventh and turn left on University Place, on my way to class at NYU. I blend in easily with the crowd of tourists and shoppers and students, New Yorkers of every size and color and style. I am home here in a way that I have never been in Florida. I love the cold air and the changing leaves, the smell of the vendors’ honey-roasted nuts, the rumble of the subway beneath my feet.

We have left Gray behind in the brownstone, affectionately referred to as the money pit. We bought it cheap by New York City standards, but we’ll be renovating indefinitely, tearing it apart inside to re-create it, to make it ours. This is something with which I’m quite familiar. In the meantime Gray is using the top floor as the office for his private-investigation firm. He already has a few clients. I’ll be happy if his desk doesn’t fall through the ceiling onto our bed below.

I enter the white building on University Place and wait for the elevator. I had to fight hard to get into this school, but good test scores, a compelling essay, and a little bit of begging made up for a blotchy transcript, a GED, and a degree from a Florida community college. I am studying for my master’s in psychology. I’m also conducting an internship with the Ophelia Foundation (believe it or not), which is dedicated to helping young girls who have experienced abuse, abandonment, and trauma. I find the work healing in ways I couldn’t begin to explain. With all my vast experience, I consider myself uniquely qualified for this profession.

I move with the throng into the large classroom and find a seat toward the back. I take my notebook and my new pen, a gift from Gray, out of my bag. Today we’ll be discussing trauma and the various ways in which the personality seeks to defend and heal itself. The other day my professor made an interesting comment: “No one ever talks about issues like dissociative identity disorder, fugue, or psychotic breaks in anything but the most negative light. No one ever talks about how the personality does this type of thing to protect itself, to save itself, or how powerful and effective it is.”

I must say I agree. I have a therapist now, one with whom I’m actually honest, and we’ve been over the events of my life again and again—rehashing without judgment the things I’ve done, the things that have been done to me, and how I ultimately saved myself. We’ve talked about all the players, the archetypes both real and imagined, and the roles they have played in my illness and recovery. The Terrible Mother. The Absent Father. The Rescuer. The Destroyer. The Lost Girl.

The truth is that I may never be fully able to discern between the actual events—or people—in my recent life and the dreams created by my psyche to heal itself. Sometimes I’m not sure it matters. Take Ella, for example: Other than Gray, she’s the only true friend I’ve ever had. Though, naturally, her sudden and total disappearance from my life makes her suspect. I suppose it’s possible that, like Ray Harrison, she was a person I met, someone I knew in passing, and that the fuller relationship we shared was something created in my mind, a fantasy established to fulfill some deep need in my psyche. It’s equally possible that she was someone who worked for Drew, someone hired to keep tabs on me; this is what Gray believes, though he has no evidence or knowledge to support his theory. Sometimes I search my memory for clues that might have indicated that my friendship was a fantasy—like the white shock of hair my imaginary Ray Harrison had, or the searing headaches that were the inevitable backdrop to my encounters with him. But there’s nothing like that. Whatever the case, Ella Singer was friend enough that I feel her loss deeply. And that means something in this world. It means a lot.

I am less hard on myself these days. I try to treat myself the way I treat my daughter—with patience and understanding. I strive to treat my memories of the girl I was in the same way. Ophelia was a damaged young woman who did what she had to for survival. I see a version of her every day at the clinic—with her head hung, her arms wrapped around her middle, her eyes dull. I see her cut herself, starve herself, slit her wrists, poison herself with drugs and alcohol. I know that Victory is not in danger of becoming one of these lost girls. We have taught her to know and value herself, to respect and protect herself. I hope to be better at teaching by example.

I look around the large classroom, watch the other students tap furiously on laptop computers or chat with their friends before class begins. A girl flirts with the guy behind her while another girl looks on with unmasked envy. Two young men talk heatedly in the corner, one of them gesticulating wildly, the other listening with his hand on his chin. They all seem so put together, so well dressed and healthy. I imagine their idyllic childhoods, their close relationships with parents and siblings. I realize that this is just a fantasy. No one knows the dark places inside others; no one knows what pain, however horrifying or banal, has been visited upon them.

Last month I claimed my mother’s ashes. She’d been cremated and stored with her belongings at the county morgue. We took her ashes to Rockaway Beach last Sunday and scattered them as the sun rose. I picked this place because it is the setting for the only happy memories I have with both of my parents. I like to think that she remembered those times, too, that sometimes, maybe when she was alone in bed at night, she missed me. I know I have missed her. I loved my mother. And, in her way, I believe she loved me, too.

I still haven’t talked to my father. After we moved into town, I went to see him, to confront him about what he knows, what his role was in the things that happened to me. But the shop is closed. His landlady says she gets a rent check every month from his bank. She let me into his apartment while she waited at the door. I walked around, looking for some clue as to where he might have gone. But there’s nothing—it’s exactly the same as it was that night, except his clothes are gone. I walk by his building once a week or so, check to see if she’s heard from him. I have a hole in my heart where my father should be. I’ve been chasing him all my life; I guess I won’t stop now. Gray thinks he’s our last, best link to the truth. But I know that even when he returns, he’ll do what he’s always done. He’ll lie.

I know he wanted to help me, to save me from Marlowe, to save me from myself. He did what he could do. I guess he finally did come for me in his way. But then he left again. Maybe that’s all he knows.

The instructor enters through a door near the front of the classroom. It’s a large room, more like a theater really, with a podium and microphone and many rows of seats grading upward. He is a tall, lean man with a chaos of ink black hair and ice blue eyes. His voice is deep and booming; he hardly needs the microphone. His class is called The Secret Life of Trauma, and it is packed, most of the seats taken. He teaches his students about things with which I am intimately familiar: the defenses created by the personality to survive the unthinkable. I’m my own best case study.

Today he has a slide show, some artwork created by trauma patients. He asks one of the students to bring down the lights. Before the room goes dark, out of the corner of my eye, I see her. She sits down the aisle from me, the girl who waited for a rescue that never came, who finally rose to save herself. I see her finally as Janet Parker saw her, a beautiful young woman with everything before her. There’s a light to her, something powerful that radiates from within, something that none of the horrors of her existence could extinguish. Just before she fades away with the dimming lights, she turns to look at me and smiles, at peace. At last.

Author’s Notes

Fiction writers dwell most comfortably in the land of their imagination. But we frequently need to venture forth to learn a thing or two about the real world. I have had the good fortune to find some very accomplished and fascinating people who have taken time out of their busy lives to make my fictional world more viable.

Raoul Berke, Ph.D., very kindly pointed out a mistake I made in an earlier novel and was rewarded by my hounding him for information on various forms of mental illness. My thanks for his interesting insights and observations on fugue states, dissociative identity disorder, and psychotic breaks.

K. C. Poulin, CEO, and Craig Dundry, vice president of special projects at Critical Intervention Services in Clearwater, Florida, spent an afternoon with me and shared their tremendous wealth of knowledge on privatized military companies. I can’t thank them enough for their generosity, openness, sense of humor, and amazing expertise. Fair warning: You haven’t heard the last of me!

Mike Emanuel, renowned Florida cave diver, took the time to answer a ridiculous number of questions about Florida’s underwater caves and the sport of cave diving. His website (
www.mejeme.com
) features some remarkable pictures that provided me with insight and inspiration. And it’s a good thing, because you couldn’t pay me to go down there.

Marion Chartoff and her husband, Kevin Butler, both extraordinary attorneys and dear friends, offered their expert knowledge on death-row appeal cases.

As always my good friend Special Agent Paul Bouffard with the Environmental Protection Agency has been my source for all things legal and illegal. He never gets tired of answering my questions—or, if he does, he hides it very well.

The following books were very important in the writing of this novel:

The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit
(Routledge, 1996) by Donald Kalsched is in turns moving, disturbing, and illuminating.

Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry
(Cornell University Press, 2004) by P. W. Singer is the best resource I found on privatized military companies and their role in modern warfare.

Naturally, I take responsibility for any and all mistakes I have made and liberties I may have taken for the sake of fiction.

Acknowledgments

There are a number of people without whom I couldn’t do what I do. I am truly blessed by their presence in my life, and I’ll take this opportunity to thank them for all the myriad ways they bolster and support me.

I thank my lucky stars for my husband, Jeffrey. Without his love and support, I wouldn’t be where I am or who I am today. I would also slowly starve to death because, at some point since the birth of our daughter, I have lost the ability to prepare food. My daughter, Ocean Rae, has brought a light into my life and shone it into places that I didn’t even know were dark. I am a better writer and a better person since she arrived. Together, Jeffrey and Ocean are the rock-solid foundation of my life.

I would be lost without my agent, Elaine Markson. Every year I try to find a new way to say what she has meant to me personally and professionally. She has helped me achieve the only dream I’ve ever had of my life, pulled me from a burning building (figuratively speaking), advised, edited, supported, encouraged, and just generally been the best possible agent and friend a person could have. Her assistant, Gary Johnson, is absolutely my lifeline every single day. I couldn’t begin to list all the things he does for me. Thanks, G.

My wonderful and brilliant editor, Sally Kim, has truly found her calling and her gift. With every novel, I have a greater appreciation for her tremendous talent and her high-octane enthusiasm. She is a truly special person and an extraordinary editor—wise, insightful, gentle, and an absolute tiger when it comes to championing her authors. I am a better writer because she is my editor.

I’ve said it before, but it needs repeating: a publisher like Crown/Shaye Areheart Books is every writer’s dream. I can’t imagine a more wonderful, supportive, and loving home. My heartfelt thanks to Jenny Frost, Shaye Areheart, Philip Patrick, Jill Flaxman, Whitney Cookman, David Tran, Jacqui LeBow, Andy Augusto, Kira Walton, Donna Passannante, Shawn Nicholls, Christine Aronson, Katie Wainwright, Linda Kaplan, Karin Schulze, and Anne Berry…to name just a few. Of course, I can’t say enough about the sales reps who have tirelessly sold my work all over the country. I hear about them and their endless efforts on my behalf every time I visit with booksellers. Every one of these people has brought their unique skills and talents to bear on my work, and I can’t thank them enough.

My family and friends cheer me through the great days and drag me through the bad ones. My mom and dad, Virginia and Joseph Miscione, my brother, Joe, and his wife, Tara, are tireless promoters and cheerleaders. My friend Heather Mikesell has read every word I have written since we met. I count on her insights and her eagle-eye editing. My oldest friends Marion Chartoff and Tara Popick each offer their own special brand of wisdom, support, and humor. I am grateful to them for more reasons than I can count here.

About the Author

Lisa Unger is the
New York Times
and
San Francisco Chronicle
bestselling author of
Beautiful Lies
and
Sliver of Truth.
Her novels have been published in twenty-six countries, receiving rave reviews and appearing on bestseller lists around the world.

Lisa was born in Connecticut and lived in Holland and England with her family before returning to the United States. She is a graduate of the New School for Social Research, Eugene Lang College. She now lives in Florida with her husband and daughter and is at work on her next novel.