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WHAT EVER IT TAKES
They told me that I left myself behind that night when I got into that black sedan with Marlowe, that Lolita ceased to exist and a new girl took her place.
So who am I now? I remember wondering as Gray shouldered the bag filled with the things he bought for me and we walked through the automatic doors into the cold parking lot. Am I Annie Fowler or Lolita March or someone else entirely? Two and a half years of my life were gone.
I got into the black Suburban and wrapped my arms around myself against the cold. I was shivering, from cold, from fear. On the day I left Frank Geary’s horse ranch, I was seventeen, nearly eighteen. On the day I left the hospital with Gray, my twenty-first birthday was just three months away.
Gray turned on the heat, and we sat for a while in the car. I was scared. I didn’t know who I was or what I was going to do with myself now. But I stayed quiet. I couldn’t afford to show any weakness.
“I know a
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We drove for two days and finally wound up at Vivian’s place on the beach. She and Drew were just dating at the time, so I lived alone with her. Gray took an apartment nearby. He wanted me to have some time to get to know myself, to get to know him.“We’ll date,” he said. “Like normal people.”Vivian took me into her house and treated me like her daughter. She cooked for me and stayed up late listening to me talk. She offered me a sort of kindness that no one else ever had. As I got my GED and started taking classes at the local college, my belly grew bigger. Gray and I dated. It was the happiest time of my life.I suppose some people would have considered ending the pregnancy. But it didn’t even cross my mind. I’ve never once thought of Victory as Marlowe Geary’s daughter. She has always been mine and mine alone.* * *I watch as Gray gets out of the car with a black duffel bag. He puts t
THE VENGEFUL LUNA BRIGGS' DEAD
I wanted to tell him that it couldn’t be true, though I’d read this much. I don’t think I could have witnessed these crimes and done nothing, but the truth was, I didn’t know for sure.“A few weeks earlier, a witness, a stock boy Geary left for dead in the back room, said he saw you. He was badly wounded, unable to help the girl Geary was torturing. All he could do was listen to her screams, thinking he was about to die himself. He said you were virtually catatonic, that you sat in a corner and rocked, gnawing on your cuticles. That Geary led you out when he was done. You went with him like a child.”I covered my face in shame. I hated to think of myself this way, weak and in a killer’s thrall, just like my mother.“Up till then I wasn’t sure. Your mother said you went with Geary willingly. But your father said when you came to New York that you weren’t right, you weren’t the girl he knew. He said
THE VENGEFUL LUNA THE IRRESPONSIBLES
The envelope is thick and heavy, and I don’t pause to peer inside, just move quickly back to my car. I slide the envelope under the passenger seat, start the engine, and get out of there. As I pull back on to the highway to start toward home, I wonder why Gray didn’t search the van. He knew that Simon Briggs was looking for me, that Detective Harrison was all over me, but he left everything there for the police to find. It doesn’t make any sense.My cell phone rings. It’s Detective Harrison again. This time I answer.“What do you want, Detective? Is it money? Just tell me what you need to leave me alone and it’s yours.”“Yesterday it was money. Today I’m not so sure.”I’m driving too fast. I change lanes carelessly, and the Toyota behind me honks in protest. I lift a hand.“Cell phones kill,” says the detective. “Did you know that you’re just as im
THE VENGEFUL LUNA THE ENTITLED
I have often wondered about the other women, a suspected thirteen in all. Women who went missing in a twenty-mile radius around the Geary home whose bodies were never found. What happened to them? Did they all die at the hands of Frank Geary?“You didn’t answer my question,” the host said when the audience quieted down. “How do you explain your daughter’s involvement with Marlowe Geary?”“I won’t speak ill of the dead. But my stepson was a good, good boy. I knew him to be gentle and kind. Lolita was a very troubled young girl, headstrong and unhappy.”“So what are you saying?” asked the host, incredulous.“If he did anything wrong, she might have been the corrupting influence,” my mother said, widening her eyes and looking straight at the camera again.I was stunned by the injustice of her words, the absolute delusional world she lived in. But still I couldn’t turn
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“What are you looking at?” he asks.I know he can’t see her. She is shaking her head at me in disapproval. She thinks I’m weak, foolish. If it were up to her, Detective Harrison would already be dead.“I’m starting to wonder about you, Lolita. I’m concerned about your stability.”There’s a ringing in my ears now. I close my eyes, and when I open them again, she’s gone.“I have money,” I say. “A lot of it. Just tell me what you want.”“It’s not about money anymore,” he says with a dramatic sigh. “At least it’s not about your money anymore. Let’s just say this: Lolita March is not forgotten. Not forgiven, not forgotten.And do you know how many enemies your husband has? How many people would like to see him suffer? Do you have any idea about Powers and Powers, the things they’ve done?”I have no idea what h
THE VENGEFUL LUNA FOR YOU INDEED
By the end of the second week, what little money we had was nearly gone; we’d had nothing but soda and vending machine junk for days. We were hungry, our bodies starving for nutrients, and I was starting to feel desperate. We’d spent two nights in the car. When I managed to sleep, my dreams were wild, chaotic, punctuated by my mother screaming and the sound of gunfire, the smell of burning wood. The rest of the time, I moved through a kind of haze of fatigue, hunger, and fear. This is a nightmare, I’d tell myself. It isn’t happening.I’d been in a kind of half sleep when we pulled up at the gas station. The clock on the dash read 2 A.M. I knew we didn’t have any money. I thought he was stopping to use the restroom. Then he pulled a gun from the duffel bag.“We need money,” Marlowe said.I stared at the gun. Its shape seemed natural in his hand. “What are you going to do?” I said with a laugh. &ldq
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I’d fallen into a hole, a slick-walled abyss, and there was no way for me to climb out of the darkness that was closing in around me. I look back on this as the moment when I started to fear him more than I loved him, when the part of me that still wanted to survive started to hate him. But I was too lost to know the difference.“No one else will ever love you like I do,” he said darkly as we pulled onto the highway.I’m not sure how many more women and girls there were. I remember flash details-garishly red lipstick, a turquoise barrette, a flower tattoo, sparkling pink nail polish badly applied. I hear a nervous giggle, a cry of terrible pain. These things stay with me.* * *When Gray comes home, I’ve moved out onto the balcony to listen to the Gulf, trying to remember more. He comes outside and sits next to me. For a second, my past and present mingle.“I think our problems have been eliminated,” he say
THE VENGEFUL LUNA FREEDOM DREAM
There are questions I’ve asked myself a number of times over the past few years: Can you shift yourself off and start again? If you’ve done unthinkable things, can you cast them away like unflattering garments, change your ensemble, and become someone else? What of the relief of punishment, the wash of atonement, the salve of forgiveness?I thought I was free. I was confident that I’d started over with the birth of my daughter. In motherhood, in the surrender of self, I became someone new. The ugly parts of myself and my other life were forgotten, literally. The blackouts, the strange flights - all of that ended when she was born. I couldn’t be that person anymore. I had to be someone worthy, able to protect and care for the tiny life in my charge.But I suppose I should have known that Lolita would return. The doctor always said as much. You cannot hide from yourself forever. The terrible migraines and nightmares, he said, were a sign that my s
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