Black Out by Lisa Unger Page A

rest.
    “Okay?” he asks when I don’t say anything. I put my hand to his face, trace the bruise under his eye, place my finger gently on his broken lip. There are deep wrinkles around his mouth, but somehow they don’t make him look old, just rugged and wise. I love him, I truly do. And I know he loves me. I can see it in the stormy depths of his eyes. My first safe place.
    “He said, ‘Ophelia,’” I tell him again.
    “Are you sure?”
    I’m not certain now. I was deep in thought at the time. It
was
windy. Maybe I should go back on the medication, endure the dull fog that falls over my life, the mental lethargy. At least I know what’s real. That’s something, isn’t it?
    “I don’t know,” I say.
    “We’re going to find out what’s happening,” he says. “We’ll find out who went to see your father, who was on the beach.” He pats the mattress. “Don’t do anything stupid in the meantime.”
    I look at him blankly.
    “You don’t think I know, Annie, what you have under the bed?”
    I feel a wash of shame. I don’t say anything.
    “I know it makes you feel safe. I understand. Just stay cool.”
    I slide down onto the floor with him and let him enfold me. I want to remember what it feels like to be held by him. I don’t want to forget when I’m gone.

11
    “I know what you two are up to,” my mother hissed. She’d cornered me in the bathroom, come up behind me and put her mouth up close to my ear. “I see the way you look at each other.”
    There was venom in her; it was her jealousy. I’d seen this face before.
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, examining my teeth in the mirror over the sink, not looking at her. She grabbed my arm and pulled me in close to her.
    “It’s practically incest,” she said. I could feel her hot breath in my ear. “He’s going to be your stepbrother.”
    My mother and Frank planned to have a jailhouse wedding. Disgusting. The thought of it made me ill. She was squeezing my arm so hard it brought tears to my eyes. But I would rather she’d pulled my arm out of its socket than let her see me cry. I blinked my eyes hard and turned my face from her.
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I repeated.
    Her eyes were two angry, black points. When she was mad, her pretty face turned into an ugly grimace of bared yellowed teeth and furrowed brow. I could smell the coffee on her breath, the bleach on her waitress uniform.
    “I won’t have
my
daughter acting like a
whore,
” she said to me.
    Even then I knew she didn’t care about my chastity or my morality. She wasn’t afraid that her sixteen-year-old daughter was in too deep with someone who clearly had major problems. She just couldn’t stand it when someone paid attention to me instead of her. It made her feel old.
    I forced my face to go blank and my body to go limp in her grasp while she hurled a few Bible passages at me. She never got them quite right, usually wound up tongue-tied and sounding foolish. When she didn’t get a reaction from me, she released me in disgust and stalked off.
    “You’ll reap what you sow, little girl,” she said loudly as she left me. I heard her storm and bang through the trailer and then finally exit with a slam of the door that was too weak to make much of a noise.
    We all reap what we sow, don’t we?
    I was so ripe for him. There were so many empty spaces within me that he could fill; it’s nothing short of a miracle that I didn’t disappear altogether.
    “She’s jealous, Ophelia,” Marlowe said, coming up behind me. I always loved the way he said my name. I’d gone through phases with it, hating it, loving it, hating it again when I was introduced to
Hamlet
in my honors English class. When Marlowe said my name, it took on a new life.
O–feeel-ya.
The
O
was short and sharp. He drew out the
eee
like he was caressing it with his tongue. The final syllable was soft and breathy, like a sigh.
    I saw his face in the mirror beside my