identity, he convinces you that he’s the only one who could ever love someone so wretched. The love he first gave you is a high you remember, and like a junkie you keep doing the drug, waiting for that first rush again. But it never comes. Unfortunately, though, it’s too late. You’re hooked.”
“He loved me,” I say pathetically.
My doctor gives a sad, slow shake of his head. “Ophelia, he was a psychopath. They don’t love.”
“No wonder they took your license away.” My words come back at me sharp and hateful. “You’re a goddamn quack.” The truth can make us turn ugly like that.
He smiles patiently, gives a gentle cluck of his tongue. “Temper, temper.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
He lifts a hand. “That’s all right. You’re under a little stress. I understand.”
“I can’t tell him what he wants to know.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“I don’t know where he is,” I say, my voice climbing an octave.
“You do know. Somewhere inside, you know.”
I am startled awake. The doctor, my dead doctor, is not here in the room with me. I am alone, clutching the now torn and wrinkled picture of my daughter. It looks as though I have clenched and clawed at the image, trying to climb through to save her. I smooth it out now.
“Victory,” I say out loud, just to taste her name. I have done this to her. The things we fear the most are always visited upon us; it’s the way of the universe. I rock with her picture, hating Marlowe Geary, hating the Angry Man, and hating myself most of all.
Of course my dream doctor is right. Marlowe was a sociopath and a killer like his father. And no, of course he never loved me. But that didn’t stop me from loving him, from giving myself over the way only an abused and neglected teenage girl can give herself over, like a virgin on an altar, gratefully willing to be sacrificed. He manipulated and used me, but I laid myself down for him. Every time he killed and I did nothing, something vital within me died, until I was little more than a walking corpse.
Now, strangely, I am resurrected in this place. I am neither the girl I was nor the woman I became. I am both of them.
I think of all those flights from my life, my fugue states. I wonder where Ophelia was going, what she knew that Annie didn’t. I suspect now that she was going to find him. I remembered what Vivian said during our last conversation: You were haunted by him…. Part of you, maybe the part that couldn’t remember so much, was still connected to him.
The question is, why? Was she trying to go back to him, wanting to be with him again? Was she that desperate, that stupid, that miserably in love? I don’t know the answer. But I am sure of one thing: Ophelia knows where Marlowe is. I just have to get her to tell me.
“Can you hear me?” I yell into the air.
The silence seems to hum, but it’s just the fluorescent light burning above my head, flickering almost imperceptibly. They’ve shut off the spotlight they’ve been shining on me—I see it mounted in the far corner of the room. I’m glad they’ve given up on that technique. In the other corner, there’s a security camera, a red light blinking beneath its lens.
“Where is my daughter?” I yell, louder this time, looking at the camera. More silence, and then I hear the buzz of a speaker.
“I don’t want to hurt her, Ophelia,” says the Angry Man, his voice, broken by static, sounding far away, as though he’s calling on an old overseas line. “I know what it is to lose a child. I don’t wish that on anyone. Not even on you.”
“Don’t hurt her,” I say quickly, feeling my chest tighten. “I’ll find him.”
The static from the speaker seems to fill the room. I should have demanded to hear her voice first before I agreed to help him. But I’m too desperate for those kinds of tricks.
“You remember?” he says finally. “You’ll lead me to him?”
“I’ll do anything you want,” I say, sounding as beaten as I am. “Just don’t hurt her. Don’t hurt my baby.”
I realize then that I’m weeping again. I’m so beyond shame that I don’t even bother to wipe the tears from my eyes.
35
When Marlowe and I finally got to New York City, to my father’s shop near the Village, I was a fly in a