I’ll never forget our first August in Florida. I didn’t even know it could get that hot; the humidity felt like wet gauze on my skin; it crawled into my lungs and expanded. Violent lightning storms lit the sky for hours, and the rain made rivers out of the street in front of our trailer park. And the palmetto bugs-they made New York City roaches look like ladybugs. The only thing that redeemed Florida for me was how the full moon hung over the swaying palm trees and how the air sometimes smelled of orange blossoms. But generally speaking, it was a hellhole. I hated it, and I hated my mother for moving us there.
The Florida I live in now with Gray and Victory is different. This is the wealthy person’s Florida, of shiny convertibles and palatial homes, ocean views and white-sand beaches, margaritas and Jimmy Buffett. This is the Florida of central air and crisp cotton golf shirts over khakis, country-club days and fifty-foot yachts. To be honest, I hate it jus
A couple of months after my mother and I moved to Florida and I had settled reluctantly into my new school, she started to act strangely. Her usual manic highs and despondent lows were replaced with a kind of even keel that felt odd, even a little spooky.The early changes were subtle. The first thing I noticed was that she’d stopped wearing makeup. She was a pretty woman, with good bone structure and long hair, silky and fine. Like her hair, her lashes and brows were blond, invisible without mascara and a brow pencil. When she didn’t wear makeup, she looked tired, washed out. She’d always been meticulous about her appearance. “Beauty is power,” she would tell me, though I’d never seen any evidence of this.We were in the kitchen on a Saturday morning. I was eating cereal and watching cartoons on the small black-and-white set we had sitting on the counter; she was getting ready for the lunch shift at the diner. The ancient air
I don’t lie on the couch but sit cross-legged in the corner; on my first visit he told me I could recline if it made me feel comfortable. I told him it wouldn’t. He sits across from me in a huge chair that he easily fills, a low cocktail table covered with art books-Picasso, Rembrandt, Georgia O’Keeffe-between us. The space is trying very hard to be a living room and not a doctor’s office. Everything is faux here-the table, the bookshelves, his desk all made of cheap wood veneer, the kind of stuff that comes in a box, just a pile of wood, a bag of screws, and a booklet of indecipherable instructions. It seems transient and not very comforting. I feel as if his furniture should be made of oak, something heavy and substantial. Outside his window should be a blustery, autumn New England day with leaves turning, maybe just the hint of snow. He should be wearing a sweater. Brown.He doesn’t take notes; he has never taped our sessions. I’ve been
The day after I see my shrink, I’m feeling better. It might just be the residual effects of the pill Gray encouraged me to take last night so that I could sleep. Either way, as I sit with him in the sun-washed kitchen drinking coffee, the sense of foreboding is gone.“It helped you to see Dr. Brown?” Gray asks. It’s oddly off-putting to hear Gray use his name. I try so hard to keep these parts of myself separate. Here I’m Annie, Gray’s wife and Victory’s mom. There I’m a mental patient haunted by my traumatic past. I don’t want those two selves to touch.“Yeah, I’m fine,” I say with a dismissive, oh-it’s-nothing wave. “It’s just that time of year, he thinks.”Gray puts a hand on my shoulder. He is headed out of town for a few days. I don’t know where he is going or when he will be back. This is part of our life together.“Vivian can come stay with y
I enter his name in the powerful search engine to which we subscribe and spend the next two hours reading about his crimes, the pursuit of him, and his ultimate death. Then I open Gray’s case file, read the notes he took during an investigation that spanned two years and five states. I stare at crime-scene photos, drinking in the gore, the horror of it all. When I’m done, I feel an almost total sense of relief. I move over to the leather couch and lie down, close my eyes, and try to relax myself with deep breathing. But the harder I grasp for my memories, the more they slip away. I get frustrated and angry with myself quickly and decide instead to go for a run.* * *I run along the beach, passing the empty winter houses that look more like well-appointed bed-and-breakfast hotels than private homes. The sky is turning from an airy blue to gray, and far off I can hear the rumble of the storm that’s headed in this direction. The towering cum
Impossibly, I have drifted off in my crouch behind the door. That’s the level and nature of my fatigue. I am not sure how long it has been since Dax came to tell me about the other boat. Might be minutes, might be hours. Through my porthole I can see that the sun has not risen, that there’s not even a hint of morning light in the sky.My feet and legs are aching with that horrible tingle of having too much weight on them awkwardly for too long. I stand painfully and stretch, try to walk it off. As I make tight circles in my small cabin, trying to get blood flowing to my limbs, I have a growing sense of unease. Something’s wrong. It takes another minute of anxious pacing, but I realize eventually what’s bothering me: I can’t hear the engines anymore. The boat has come to a stop.I’m not sure what this means, but suddenly I’m a fox in a trap; I’m stuck in the box of my cabin. When he finds me, I’ll have no place to hi
“No way. You can always tell a cop, even the bad ones. They think they got the law on their side. This guy was too dirty even to be a dirty cop.”“Okay,” I repeat again, not wanting to say too much.“Be careful,” he says, and hangs up.I sit for a second with the phone in my hand. I’m not sure what to think about what he’s told me. Lolita has been dead for so long. After so much time I’d come to believe that everyone had forgotten her except me. I hang up the phone and then pick it back up, punch in a number I know very well.“Hello?” says Drew.“Can you come by later? It’s Annie.”“Sure,” he says after a second’s hesitation. “Something wrong?"“I don’t know.”Drew always looks at me as though I’m an unwelcome solicitor at his door asking for a donation to a charity in which he doesn’t believ
He looked down at his feet, back at me. I felt the full weight of his gaze. “I don’t have anywhere else to go.”My mother came up behind me. “Let him in,” she said to me, but didn’t reach for the door herself.“Who is he?”“He’s Frank’s boy,” she said, looking at me sheepishly, then at him.“You knew he was coming?”“I knew he might come,” she said, turning her face back to me but keeping her eyes on him, as though she couldn’t pull her gaze away.“And?” I said, feeling my stomach clench.“And now he might stay on here awhile."“Where?” I said. “There’s no room for him.”She nodded over toward the couch. It was small and dirty, uncomfortable even to sit on, never mind sleep. “There. Just for a few nights. Don’t worry; I’m not going to give him your room.&r
I lean on the fence that edges the pool deck and look out onto the black stretch that ends in the Gulf. I can’t see the water because of the elaborate lighting and landscaping on the property, but I can hear it and smell the salt in the humid air. My mind is full of thoughts I’m trying not to have-my black patch, my dreams, Gray, the man looking for Lolita. I shouldn’t be here. I’m not cocktail-party material even on my best days. I endure things that other people find entertaining.My eyes fall on a girl standing alone a few feet away. She’s leaning on the fence like I am and lost in thought looking out into the night. She must have felt my eyes on her, because she turns to look at me. I recognize her then, but I can’t place her. I suddenly feel a terrible need to remember who she is; my heart starts to beat a little faster with the urgency I feel. She’s pretty and far too thin, wearing just a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, a rat