She left after breakfast, giving me a quick hug and a kiss, promising pizza for dinner and a real birthday cake.
“What’s your birthday wish, Ophelia?” he asked me when we were alone, as I cleared the table of our dishes. The question, his grave tone in asking it, put me on guard. He had bizarre, ugly mood swings; I’d grown to fear them already. Not because he’d ever hurt me, but because they took him someplace I couldn’t follow. His gaze would go empty, his body slack. He might disappear like that for hours, then return to me as though he were waking from a nap. I was too naïve to understand that this was not normal. That’s what I tell myself, anyway.
“To be with you,” I said, because I knew that was the answer he wanted. I remember that the sunlight had a way of coming in golden at that time of day. It made the place seem less dingy than normal.
“Forever?” he asked, reaching out his hand. I took it, and he pulled me onto his lap. He held on to me hard, buried his face in my neck. I wrapped my arms around him.
“Forever,” I whispered in his ear, drawing in the scent of him. And I meant it as only a teenage girl could mean it, with a fairy tale in my heart.
He released me and took a small black box from his pocket. I snatched it from him quickly with a squeal of delight that made him laugh. I opened it and saw the gold half heart glinting back at me. He pulled back the collar of his shirt and showed me the other half around his neck.
“You belong to me,” he said as he hung the pendant around my neck. It sounded so strange for a moment, it moved through me like a chill. But when I turned to look at him, he was smiling. No one had ever said anything like that to me. It was a drug—I couldn’t get enough.
I told my shrink about this. I hadn’t told anyone else; I have been ashamed of the way I loved him, of the things I allowed myself to do to keep that love. Just like my mother. Worse.
The doctor said, in that soothing manner of his, “It’s not how we feel about someone that makes us love them, Annie, it’s how they make us feel about ourselves. For the first time in your life, you were the center of someone’s attention, the primary object of someone’s love. Not waiting for a sliver of truth to shine through all your father’s lies or for your mother to put your needs before her need to be with a man. You were the one. At least that’s how he made you feel.”
I heard the truth in that but thought it was a kind of clinical way to look at love. Isn’t it more than that? Isn’t it more than just two people holding up mirrors to each other? I asked him this much.
“In a healthy relationship, yes, there’s much more to it. There’s support, respect, attraction, passion. There’s admiration for the other person, his character and qualities.” Then the doctor asked, “What did you love about him? Tell me about him.”
But when I thought of him, he was a phantom slipping away into the shady corners of my memory. The adult, the woman who had survived him, couldn’t remember what the girl in her had loved.
The cheap necklace glints in my hand. I remember how a tacky piece of jewelry, for a while and for the very first time, made me feel loved. And I hear the echo of a voice, the voice I heard last night on the beach:
When the time is right, I’ll find you and you’ll be waiting. That’s our karma, our bond, Ophelia. I’ll leave my necklace somewhere for you to find. That’s how you’ll know I’ve come for you.
When and under what circumstances Marlowe spoke these words to me, I can’t recall, but they are ringing in my ears now, drowning out the sound of the surf.
“What’s wrong, Mommy?” Victory has come back and is looking at me with an uncertain, worried expression. I’m in space; I’ve already stuffed the necklace in my pocket.
“Nothing, sweetie,” I say, resting my hand on her head.
“You look scared,” she says. She is small, her hair a golden flurry about her in the strong wind.