Whisper to Me (13 page)

“I think you might be crazy,” I said.

“Wiser minds than yours would agree,” she said. “Next one: procrustean.”

“Bed.”

“Pan.”

“Echo.”

She frowned. “Echo?”

“In one version, Pan wanted her, and she said no, and so he had his followers tear her apart. But the earth loved her, so it kept her voice in the stones and the trees and the caves. To cut a long story short.”

“Wow,” she said. “You taught me something. Doesn’t happen often. I was going for pipes, or Dionysus.” She looked at me funny.

“What is it?”

“I
knew
I recognized you, that first time. You go the library, right?”

“Ye-e-e-s. You?”

She did a comical big-eyes thing. “Are you serious? No. But I pick up books for school sometimes. Books are expensive shit. Anyway, you’re a big reader, huh?”

“Yes. I mean, I was.”

“Risperidone stop you reading?”

I nodded.

“Told you, you have to get off that stuff. Yeah, I saw you, I remember now, you had a load of books … about murder or something?”

“Yeah.”

“Light reading.”

“It was … you know what, forget it.” It had made so much sense at the time—the idea that the voice was a victim of the Houdini Killer, a remnant left behind. If I said it now it would just sound
insane
.

“Well, anyway, I like you,” she said. “You’re okay.”

“Okay?”

“Yeah.” She reached into a front pocket of her skinny jeans and handed me another card. Her dark eyes were warm on mine, like black asphalt heated by the sun. “E-mail me if you want to hang out.”

I glanced down at the card. It had a silhouette of a girl sitting on a chair, legs wide. Under her, embraced by her legs, was:

CAM GIRL. GLAMOUR. PRIVATE PARTIES.

INSTA: @jerseygirl95

There was no phone number, just an e-mail address: jerseygirl95@_____.com

I looked up at her.

“She’s a ******* whore,” said the voice, but not loud, as if it were coming from the other side of the parking lot, by the Dumpster and the trees, shimmering in the heat.

“Oh yeah,” she said. “I forgot to mention, I’m a glamour model. Or, you know, aspiring. It would drive my dad
crazy
if he knew. Which is a big part of why I do it.”

So, you see, it wasn’t just you I lied to.

I checked out Paris’s Instagram feed—I know how to do that; I’m not a total Luddite. It was basically photos of her in bikinis and underwear, sometimes modeling things that had obviously been sent to her free, and I was surprised to see that she had 39K followers.

Paris liked to take her clothes off, clearly, but she was smart. Or maybe I should say,
and
she was smart. To avoid any implication of contradiction.

She loved books. She loved knowing stuff. She was a college student.

I liked her.

The voice did
not
like her. It called her “that ******* whore” and other stuff that was even worse. But it didn’t say much when she was around, and it didn’t threaten me about seeing her; it didn’t say much ever those days, and when it did it was kind of dulled, as if coming from the other side of a window. Looking back, I think that was not just the risperidone working, it was also because the voice knew that Paris was offering a different way of dealing with things, one that didn’t involve drugs. The voice
hated
the drugs, because they muffled it, suffocated it, a pillow over a mouth.

EDIT:
I
hated them. The voice is me. I understand that now. Even you probably do, just from reading this. But I didn’t then of course.

I guess it was maybe a week after I saw her at the hospital that I e-mailed Paris. I hadn’t seen you much—even though Dr. Rezwari kept telling me to get to know you. It wasn’t easy. You were working most of the time, or you were hanging out with Shane. You would wave to me, but I didn’t feel like you were interested in me or anything; in fact I was convinced I had offended you by being cold when we spoke, and not accepting your offer of a ride.

So I just lay in bed or sat in the kitchen or whatever. I’d just spent a whole day sitting in Dad’s study watching millipedes crawl all over a log, and my brain was mush. I had the impression that I was locked out of my own body, floating somewhere above it.

I wanted to
feel
stuff again.

I set up an address: echo@_____.com

And I e-mailed Paris one word:

HELP.

It was a Thursday. The day when the voice support group met. I think unconsciously I knew that. Paris e-mailed me back exactly fifty-seven minutes later. When you are watching millipedes crawl, you are very conscious of the passage of time. Her e-mail said:

CALL ME. 800-555-5555

I took out my cell and dialed the number.

“Jerseygirl95 here, I’m wet and in front of my camera and—”

“It’s me, Cass.”

“I know. I was just ******* with you.”

“Oh.”

“Sorry. Tell me. What’s up?”

“The drugs.”

“Yeah, I thought so.” The kindness in her voice made me almost want to cry. Dr. Rezwari wasn’t kind. I mean, she wasn’t some kind of monster. But she didn’t really
care
. You could tell. I could tell.

“You said there was a guy, a—”

“Already done. Dr. Lewis doesn’t think you’re ready for group, but he’ll meet you before. Massey Bowling Alley, six p.m.”

I looked at my watch. Two hours. “Okay,” I said. I must have sounded pretty bummed because Paris said:

“Come see me now. I’m close to there.” She gave me the address of her condo.

“You’re sure?”

“Yes! Come hang out. Meet my roomie.”

I wrote a note for Dad. It took me a while to think what to put in it. I couldn’t say I was meeting a friend; he knew I didn’t have any friends, and I didn’t think he would be cool with me hanging out with someone I’d met at the mental hospital. He and I had been living together like two people made of bone china, scared to bump into each other.

In the end I wrote:

    
Gone to see a movie. Love you. Cass.

Most likely he wouldn’t be back from the restaurant before me anyway. I left the house. I passed your apartment, but of course you and Shane were working. I walked the whole way—Oakwood is a small place, as you know, and Paris didn’t live far away.

Her condo was just back from the boardwalk; a fifties building like a pink iced cake, with white balconies like wings. I rang the bell, and she buzzed me up.

When I got to the door, another girl opened it. She had red hair, but I thought it was probably dyed—it was a really bright color. There was a tattoo on her arm of a kind of pinup woman from the forties or something, and she was wearing a vintage dress and her hair was swept up with bobby pins.

“I’m Julie,” she said. “Paris is in the kitchen, making cookies.”

I must have looked surprised.

“She bakes,” said Julie. “I know. Go figure.”

“I’m Cass,” I said. “Um, hi.”

“Nice to meet you, Cass. Go on through—I’m heading out. I have a team meet.” She picked up a pair of roller skates by the door and slung them over her shoulder.

“You do roller derby?” I asked.

“Yep.”

I’d watched a movie about roller derby with Mom once. So I knew a tiny bit about it. “What’s your, like, player name?”

“Player name?” She raised an eyebrow.

I felt stupid then. “I don’t know what you call it … but don’t you have, like, crazy names that you put on your shirts and stuff?”

“I was messing with you. I knew what you meant. And, yes, I do. One Thousand Mega Joules. ’Cause I’m Julie, and I study—”

“Physics?”

Julie smiled. She wasn’t pretty—her face was a little blunt—but her smile was like the sun when it hits the ocean on a gray still day, and even though the water is flat, matte, it flashes. “Close. Chemistry.” She turned to face back into the apartment. “Hey, Par, this one is smart.”

“I told you,” said Paris’s voice, from an unseen corner of the condo.

“Kitchen’s on the left,” said Julie. “See you soon, I hope.” Then she whisked out. She was someone with her dial always turned to full, Julie. She still is.

I followed the sound of Paris’s voice, across a smooth wood floor. There was a small hall that went straight into the main living room. Floor-to-ceiling windows looked over the beach and ocean, like you were sailing over it. Just to the left, I could see the first pier jutting out over the wide expanse of sand, the Ferris wheel slowly turning. There were a couple of armchairs like you see in magazines—curved metal bases, leather stretched over them. A coffee table made of polished driftwood. It did
not
look like a student’s condo.

I turned left and into the small kitchen. Paris banged the oven door shut. “I’m baking cookies,” she said. “For the occasion. They’ll be ready in a half hour.”

“Wow,” I said. I was worried about cookies and my allergy, but I didn’t want to put a downer on things.

“I know. I will make someone a fine wife one day.”

I smiled. “Someone eligible, I hope,” I said.

“Oh, Mother!” she exclaimed, in a surprisingly good British accent. “He hath two hundred a year, and a good house.” She did a curtsy. “I ****** love those old books. Austen and stuff.”

“Me too.” I would have said more. I would have said that I
had
loved Austen anyway, or I would have asked her if she knew that Jane from the library was actually Jane Austin, but I was wiped out from the walk. I just waved vaguely at the living room and reached out for the countertop to stabilize myself, and Paris looked stricken.

“Sorry! Sorry! Go sit down.” She ushered me ahead of her.

I sat on one of the armchairs. It kind of cradled me.

Paris sat opposite me; hooked her leg over the side of her chair. She fidgeted for a second, then leaned over and grabbed a piece of purple paper from a pile on the end table. She started folding it—some kind of origami.

When it was done, she held it up in front of her, and it obviously passed inspection because she smiled.

“What’s that?” I said. My best guess was some kind of bird—pointed head, arched wings.

“Crane,” said Paris.

“Cool. You like origami?”

She shook her head. “Not really.”

“So …”

“Oh,” she said. “It’s this thing. The thousand cranes? You have to make a thousand of them, and when you do, you get one wish. It’s like this old Japanese—I don’t know what you would call it—folk tale or belief or meditation or some kind of mix of all of them.”

“A
thousand
?”

“Yeah. If it were easy, it wouldn’t be worth a wish.”

“I guess not. So how many have you made?”

“Two hundred and sixty,” she said. She glanced at the purple crane in her hand. “Two hundred and sixty-one.” Abruptly, she got up from the chair—a motion like a spring uncoiling, quick and elastic. “Come look,” she said.

Paris led the way to a door at the other end of the room. She opened it and flicked a switch—bright electric light burst into being, illuminating a room that was obviously hers. Mess of clothes on the floor, a king-size bed nearly disappearing under books and magazines and plates of food—just a kind of tunnel to climb under the covers like a rabbit.

And all over the shelves on the walls, in among the beer glasses and photos and teddy bears, standing on every available surface: cranes. Paris pointed up and I looked; there was a string from the light shade to the wall, and on it more cranes were hanging. It seemed like more than two hundred and sixty. They were all colors—mostly white, but also red and green and blue and silver and gold.

“Whenever I get the chance, I make one,” she said. “Should hit a thousand in … I don’t know. A year, maybe?”

“Serious commitment.”

“I know. Worthy of an Austen heroine, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

I imagined a thousand cranes, in all colors, filling the room. It was going to be beautiful. I could understand why someone would want to do that.

She picked up a small white crane and pressed it into my hands. “This was the first one I made,” she said. “See how it’s not folded so crisply?”

I looked down at it. I nodded. It was a little misshapen.

She took it back and put it down, gently, on the bookshelf where it had been.

“What will you do with your wish?” I asked.

“If I said, it wouldn’t come true,” she said seriously.

“Oh. Yeah, of course.”

She smiled, and for a second I was dazzled by her smile: it was so warm, so beautiful, so totally unguarded, as if it for no single second occurred to her to think about what anyone else thought of her; very few people smile like that. “A lot of people would have laughed at me there. Probably even Julie, even though she would feel bad about it afterward. But not you.”

“Why would I laugh?”

“Because it’s stupid, believing in wishes. Childish. Crazy, even.”

“I hear a voice that isn’t there,” I said.

She laughed. “Touché.”

A pause.

“Are you okay, Cassie?”

“Huh?” I said. I felt like the world had blinked—a fraction of a second gone, some gap in the film, a shudder. It was disconcerting. I was leaning against the wall of the room now, and I felt light-headed. What happened?

“You look pale,” said Paris.

I closed my eyes. And when I did I saw a bowling alley, a bowling alley of my imagination, yawning open in front of me, front wall peeling up, to reveal the lanes stretching back like tongues into darkness, the pins standing up like teeth.

“Uh … I think I’m just nervous,” I said, when I opened my eyes. “About the … you know. The meeting.” My heart was beating wildly.

Her eyes grew.

I mean, of course they didn’t grow. But they seemed to. “Oh, ****,” she said. “Of course you are.” She reached into a cupboard and took out a bottle with a white label—vodka. She handed it to me. “Here. Take a gulp of that. Liquid courage.”