Black Out by Lisa Unger Page B

own. He rubbed my shoulders and then wrapped his arms around me. I hid my eyes from him, too. I’ve never wanted anyone to see me cry; I can’t bare the vulnerability of it.
    “I hate her,” I said. And I meant it, but only in the way that every teenage girl hates her mother.
    When I raised my eyes from my hands again, he was still watching me in the mirror, a lopsided smile on his face. I could see that my anger at my mother pleased him and I was soothed by this.
    “I wish she was dead,” I said, the words feeling forced and uncomfortable. But when his smile widened, I basked in the warmth of his approval.
    When the rage of adolescence is contained by rules and boundaries, banked by the assurance of strong and present parents, it burns white hot but burns out fast. When it’s allowed to run unchecked, it turns everything to ash.
     
    A few days after her bathroom sermon, my mother made me accompany her to choose her wedding dress. We took the bus to a strip mall off the highway and picked through racks of used gowns in various states of disrepair—this one stained with red wine, that one with the hem ripped out. She was sweet and happy on this day, excited in this girlish way she had. If she remembered that just a few days earlier she’d bruised my arm and called me a whore, accused me of sleeping with my soon-to-be stepbrother, she didn’t let on. She wanted to be happy that day; she didn’t want to think about me.
    What do you think of this one, Ophelia? Oh, look! Frank would love this one.
    I sat in the shabby dressing room and watched as she twirled in front of the mirror, losing herself in a fantasy of the life before her. She had hard miles on her but she was still beautiful. Her hair had lost most of its estrogenic glow, and her skin looked papery, lined around the mouth and eyes. But she had true beauty, not just the prettiness that fades with age. Looking at her that day, I thought she could have had
any
man once, she could have been
anyone,
but instead she was
this,
this desperate woman in a used bridal gown getting ready to marry a convicted murderer. It was as if before she was born, God hung a sign on her that read, KICK ME. And every single person and circumstance she’d run into had obliged.
    “Do you have to look at me like that?” she asked.
    I snapped out of the trance I was in and caught sight of myself in the mirror, slouched and sullen, staring at her blackly.
    “Mom,” I said, sitting up, “are you really going to do this?”
    She walked over to me and sat in the chair beside me. She rubbed her forehead with one hand.
    “Why can’t you be happy for me, Ophelia?” she asked in a whisper. “I just want us to have a normal life, you know? We deserve that. Don’t we?”
    She reached down and pulled a tissue from her purse, dabbed at tears I hadn’t seen.
    “Mom,” I said. She looked so tired and sad.
    “Please, Ophelia,” she said, dropping the tissue into her lap and grabbing my hands. “Please. I love him.”
    She loved him. How sad. Frank Edward Geary, my mother’s death-row sweetheart, had been convicted of raping and murdering three women in Central Florida between March 1979 and August 1981. He was suspected for the murders of several others as well. There was just no evidence to link him conclusively to those crimes. The women he killed were all pretty and blond, petite and fine-featured. They all had a brittleness to their bearing, as though if you looked at them closely, you’d see them quivering like Chihuahuas. They each bore a striking resemblance to my mother.
     
    “What did you say to her?” my shrink prodded, though we’ve been through this before. It was another of those moments that were caught on a loop in my mind. These various markers on the way to the point of no return.
    “I told her that I
was
happy for her. That I’d try to be more optimistic.”
    “But that’s not how you felt.”
    “No,” I said flatly. “That’s not how I felt.”
    “So