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WHERE IT BEGAN
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2022-08-15 21:00:00My father stares straight ahead for a second, then lowers his head and releases a long, slow breath. We both know he’s not coming with me. I don’t know the reasons, but I know he’s not capable of going any further. He has always done only what he was able to do. Maybe that’s true of all of us. Maybe it’s just that when it’s your parents, their shortfalls are so much more heartbreaking.
“Look, kid,” he says, and then stops. I hope he’s not going to launch into some monologue about how he’s failed as a father and how sorry he is. I don’t have time, and I don’t want to hear it. We sit in silence while he seems to be striking up the courage to say something.
“It doesn’t have to be like this, you know?” he says finally. “How about we just call the cops?”
“They have my daughter.”
“Lolita...” he says, then stops again. Whatever he wanted
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“Our rage was the driving force in our lives for years. It consumed us.” He releases a throaty cough, then pulls a pack of Marlboro reds from his pocket, lights one with a Zippo, and takes a long, deep drag. He has the look of a lifelong smoker, gray and drawn.“You know, the thing was, I was a terrible father. Absent a lot, distant when I was around. I never so much as held my daughter or told her I loved her in all the years she was alive. I provided for her, sure, roof over her head, nice things, college. That’s what I knew how to do. That’s all I thought a father had to do. The point is, I never devoted much of myself to her until after she’d been taken from me. But I was a berserker in the crusade for justice against Frank Geary. I think Melissa would have been surprised by my devotion. I think she died believing I didn’t love her.”I don’t know what to say to him. I’m not sure why he’s telling me t
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I notice how still he is. There was so much anxiety and adrenaline living inside me that I couldn’t keep myself from fidgeting, shifting my weight from foot to foot, pacing a few steps away, then back toward him. But he is fixed and solid. He keeps his hands in his pockets, his eyes locked on some spot off in the distance. All there is to him is his raspy voice and the story he tells.“When I went into remission, I started an organization called Grief Intervention Services with some friends of mine to help other victims and families of victims face their fear and heal.”I draw in a sharp breath as I remember. “Your website. I visited it after I heard about you on television.”He nods. “The website captured your IP address. It was only a matter of days before we traced it to Gray Powers. It was only a little while longer before we connected him to you. Just one visit confirmed that you were Lolita March.”I stare a
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I feel that adrenaline pump again as my heart starts to thud.“What are you talking about?”“It’s all up to you now, Lolita.”“I don’t understand,” I say, moving closer to him. My voice has taken on the quality of a plea. “Where are we? Where’s my daughter?”I’ve never felt so frightened or so desperate, but he just moves away from the car. I see he is going to leave me here. “The keys are in the ignition. There’s a gun in the glove box. At the end of the road, you make a right. You’ll know where you are once you’re driving.”He starts walking away from me then, moving toward the trees that surround the airfield. “You need to be strong now, Lolita. Stronger than you’ve ever been. For yourself, for your daughter, for me.”“You never needed me to lead you to Marlowe,” I call after him. “You knew where he was
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She must have seen the despair on his face, because she moved back over to him and placed a hand on his leg. He couldn’t even look at her.“Everybody makes mistakes, Ray,” she said, her voice very low and gentle. He’d heard her talk to the baby in this tone. “Everybody stumbles. It’s what you do then that makes or breaks your life. It’s what you do after you fall that’s the measure of who you are.”He left the room then. She called after him quietly, but he kept walking. He walked out onto his back porch and gazed up at the sky. He didn’t want to be in the same room with her. He couldn’t stand for her to see him cry.“What’s going on?” Harrison was snapped back to the present by Ella’s voice. She stood in the open doorway looking different somehow, a little angry maybe. She looked fit and strong dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt, sneakers on her feet. She didn’t se
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Briggs’s words come back to me: Because you hate him, Lolita. I saw it on your face in that diner. You think you love him, but you know how evil he is, that one day he’s going to kill you, too. That you’re going to be a body someone finds in a motel just like this one.Marlowe Geary did kill me, and I was his willing accomplice. Gray found my body in that New Mexico hotel room and brought me back to life. Now I am responsible for bringing myself back to wholeness, to heal myself so that I can be the mother my daughter deserves, the woman I deserve to be.I remember then that he’s Victory’s father, that because of who we were together, she exists in this world. The union that has made me weakest has produced the union that has made me strongest. It seems a raw truth, so odd that it’s almost funny. The universe has a sense of humor, a taste for irony. But this is a private joke I don’t share. He has no right to know her; he has n
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The farce of it all sickens me. Sarah Harrison might as well be seated across from me at the long glass table where we have gathered for dinner. A wide orange sun is dropping toward the blue-pink horizon line over the Gulf. We feast on filet mignon and twice-baked potatoes, fat ears of corn. Drew and Gray knock back Coronas while Vivian and I drink chardonnay. Victory sips her milk from a plastic cup adorned with images of Hello Kitty. Anyone looking at us might feel a twinge of envy, the rich and happy family sharing a meal at their luxury home with a view of the ocean.“Annie,” says Drew, breaking an awkward silence that has settled over the table once vague pleasantries and chatty questions for Victory have been exhausted. “You seem well.”He is smiling at me in a way he never has before. There’s a satisfied benevolence to him, the king surveying his subjects. I thank him because it seems like the right thing to do in this context
