Black Out Read Online Free Page B

church. The goal was to spread the word of the Lord to the lost souls on death row, to “save” them before they faced their earthly punishment for the wrongs they’d done. My mother, obviously, took the whole saving thing a little bit too far.
    I’ll never forget our first August in Florida. I didn’t even know it could get that hot; the humidity felt like wet gauze on my skin; it crawled into my lungs and expanded. Violent lightning storms lit the sky for hours, and the rain made rivers out of the street in front of our trailer park. And the palmetto bugs—they made New York City roaches look like ladybugs. The only thing that redeemed Florida for me was how the full moon hung over the swaying palm trees and how the air sometimes smelled of orange blossoms. But generally speaking, it was a hellhole. I hated it, and I hated my mother for moving us there.
    The Florida I live in now with Gray and Victory is different. This is the wealthy person’s Florida, of shiny convertibles and palatial homes, ocean views and white-sand beaches, margaritas and Jimmy Buffett. This is the Florida of central air and crisp cotton golf shirts over khakis, country-club days and fifty-foot yachts. To be honest, I hate it just as much. It’s so fake, so tacky and nouveau riche, so proud of its silicone-filled and bleached-blond Barbie women.
    Give me concrete and street noise any day. Give me Yellow Cabs and hot-dog stands. Give me legless, homeless guys pushing themselves on dollies through the subway cars, shaking their change jars with self-righteous aplomb.
    I am thinking about this as I sit on the floor by the bed and reach up under the box spring. I’ve cut out a large hole there. Inside, I keep things that Gray and my doctor would be very unhappy about. They just wouldn’t understand. I reach around and don’t feel anything at first. Maybe Gray found them, I think, panic threatening. Maybe he took them away to see how long it would be before I looked for them again. But then, with a wash of relief, I feel the smooth, cool surface of one of these things.
    “Mommy.” It’s Victory, whispering into her baby monitor. I can hear her, but she can’t hear me, and she gets that. “Mommy,” she says, louder. “Come to my room. There’s a
strange
man on our beach.”
    She hasn’t even finished the sentence and I’m already running. In my panic, the hall seems to lengthen and stretch as I make my way to her. But when I finally burst through the door, breathless and afraid, there’s no one on our stretch of sand. Out her window, there’s just the moody black-gray sky, and the green, whitecapped ocean.
    We live near the tip of a long beach, right before a state nature preserve. There are about five other houses within walking distance of ours, and three of those are empty for much of the year. They are weekend homes and winter homes. So essentially we’re alone here among the great blue herons and snowy egrets, the wild parrots and nesting sea turtles. It’s silent except for the Gulf and the gulls. People walk along the beach during tourist season, but very few linger here, as all the restaurants, bars, and hotels are a mile south.
    “Where, Victory?” I say too loudly. She’s gone back to playing with her dolls. They’re having a tea party. She looks up from her game, examines my expression because she doesn’t understand my tone. I try to keep the fear off my face, and I might have succeeded. She comes over to the window and offers a shrug.
    “Gone,” she says casually, and returns to her babies, sits herself back down on the floor.
    “What was he doing?” I ask her, my eyes scanning the tall grass and sea oats that separate our property from the beach. I don’t see any movement, but I imagine someone slithering toward our house. We wouldn’t see him until he reached the pool deck. We’ve been lax about security lately, lulled into a false sense of safety. I should have known better.
    “He was watching,” she