Whisper to Me (18 page)

“No.”

“Please.”

And then …

And then I WOULD LIKE YOU TO TAKE A MOMENT TO APPRECIATE THE MAGNITUDE OF THIS:

“Okay,” said the voice. “But not a chapter. Ten pages.”

“Fine,” I said. “Thank you. Thank you so much.”

THE VOICE: silence.

Unimportant lowercase spoiler:

Dad’s bacon was awesome. So were his pancakes. His bacon and pancakes are
always
awesome. This is, to be honest, a good reason on its own to forgive me, and to forgive him.

You do
not
want to miss out on his breakfasts.

        
4.    SCHEDULE. Allot a regular time at which the voice can speak to you. Refuse to engage if the voice tries to speak at any other time.

I was surprised by how well this one worked.

This is what I did:

Every time the voice came to me, I followed a script in my head, like a telesales operative.

Here’s an example from the shore:

EXT. DAY. A SOUTH NEW JERSEY BEACH. THE SUN IS HIGH IN THE SKY. THERE IS THE BARNACLED AND SEAWEED-FESTOONED PILLAR OF A PIER TO THE LEFT OF OUR HEROINE, WHO IS STRIPPING OFF HER T-SHIRT AND JEANS TO REVEAL A SWIMSUIT. IT IS THE FIRST TIME SHE HAS BEEN DOWN TO THE BEACH SINCE SHE FOUND A HUMAN FOOT THERE. IT IS ANOTHER WARM DAY, THOUGH THERE ARE CLOUDS GATHERING IN THE SKY, AND LATER IT WILL RAIN. THE SEAGULLS ARE CALLING, CALLING, CALLING THE GIRL’S NAME.

TAUNTING HER.

SHE IS IGNORING THEM. WHAT SHE FINDS HARDER TO IGNORE IS THE VOICE. THE VOICE BELONGS TO A MIDDLE-AGED WOMAN WITH AN INDETERMINATE NEW JERSEY ACCENT.

A DOG RACES PAST, CHASING A FRISBEE; A SMALL YAPPY DOG, IT THROWS ITSELF INTO THE AIR, SPARKLING WATER FALLING FROM IT, AND TIME SEEMS TO STAND STILL, THE DOG HANGING AT THE TOP OF ITS LEAP, JAWS CLOSING ON THE FRISBEE.

I never meant to swim, of course. It was a tactic. Not something the Doc taught me either.

But hey: if your father runs a restaurant, one thing you learn is how to negotiate.

So:

Same script, on repeat. My lines, every time the voice said anything to me:

Oh, hi!

Every time:

I would prefer you to speak to me only after six p.m.

And it must have worked, because a few days after that, Dad came home for dinner and it was only then I realized I hadn’t heard the voice all day. In fact, I had read like ten chapters of
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
and I hadn’t even thought about it.

“Hey, honey,” said Dad. “Why are you smiling?”

“No reason,” I said.

“Well, it’s good to see.” He held up a bag. “I’m making meatballs. And …” He hesitated. Then he held up another bag, this one clear and blue. “And … I got a movie. I mean, if you want. It’s no big deal. The girl at the store said you would like it. I mean, she thought you might—”

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, maybe.”

Dad blinked at me for a second. Almost every night he was suggesting TV or a movie or going out somewhere, and every night I said no. “Oh. Oh, that’s great, honey.” He turned around and headed to the kitchen, and a very small part of me noticed him wiping his eye with his sleeve like he had shed a tear, and
all the rest of me
refused to notice this at all because it would mean consciously realizing how much he loved me, and that was something so painful it might create a supernova right here on a New Jersey street, suck the whole solar system into it, turn it to atoms.

Even now, my fingers are white as I type.

But where was I?

Oh yes, the DVDs.

See, before the voice, box sets used to be a big part of our lives, mine and Dad’s. We didn’t talk about much, me and my dad, but we did talk about Tony Soprano and Walter White.

After the voice: there was basically nothing. I mean, Dad was into collecting millipedes. I liked books. There was really nothing we shared. We lived in different parts of the house.

But that night, we shared the meatballs that Dad made—they were awesome; please bear this in mind along with the bacon and the pancakes—and then some nut-free chocolate ice cream. Dad told me stories about work, and I told him how I had started a book that day, and he wiped his eye again so I shut up.

But then he told a joke, a lame joke about one of his regulars and I …

I …

I
smirked
.

Everything about that night is bright lacquered in my memory; I could almost reach out and touch it all. It was a crappy old plastic-covered table in a small kitchen in New Jersey with green cabinets from, like, the seventies, but I felt like I was in a palace. The halogen strip light in the ceiling was bathing us. I felt like the whole world was full of light.

I reached out for more ice cream.

“Seriously?” said the voice. “With your ass?”

I lowered the spoon very slowly. I checked my G-Shock. 8:10 p.m.

“I’ve missed you,” I said. I chose my words very carefully, knowing they would go for the voice and Dad both.

Dad smiled. “I’ve missed you too, Cassington.” That was an old nickname he hardly ever used anymore.

THE VOICE: silence.

“I’ve been looking forward to speaking to you all day,” I said.

Dad got all embarrassed then and gruff and alpha male. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, me too.”

THE VOICE: “No more ice cream. You barely fit into your jeans. You could be pretty, if you looked after yourself better. If you weren’t so—”

“Thank you,” I said.

THE VOICE: silence.

DAD: silence.

I started clearing away the dinner stuff. “Can we watch a movie tonight?” I asked.

Dad looked puzzled. “I told you I got one, Cass. So, yeah.”

But of course I wasn’t asking him. I kept listening as I washed the dishes. We didn’t have a dishwasher. Mom used to say, we do have a dishwasher, and it’s me. But it wasn’t her anymore. It was me.

THE VOICE: silence.

“Can we have popcorn too?” I asked.

“Sure, honey.”

THE VOICE: “No popcorn. Just the movie. And don’t enjoy it too much. I’ll be watching.”

“I’m okay actually, thanks, Dad. Just realized I’m too full.”

“Sure.”

We went into the living room. Dad slotted the DVD into the player. The girl in the store was right; it was pretty good. I curled up on the sofa and Dad put his arm out and I leaned against him.

It was nice.

Then, like an hour into it, something happened in the movie that made me laugh.

“Bite your tongue,” said the voice.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Dad peered at me. “You don’t have to apologize for laughing, Cass.”

“Bite it,” said the voice.

And I did it; I mean, I was negotiating, I was scheduling and being polite and all that stuff, but the voice still scared me. And it had let me have this time with Dad.

I bit my tongue.

“Harder.”

I tasted salt blood, rushing into my mouth.

“Enough,” said the voice.

“Can we watch the rest?” I asked.

“Of course,” said Dad. “It’s like ten. It’s not late.”

“No,” said the voice.

I sighed. “I’m super tired actually, Dad. Tomorrow night?”

“Sure,” said Dad.

“Maybe,” said the voice.

Hell, that was a victory in my book. We got up and turned out the lights and powered down the TV. Dad went into the bug room, and I followed him in. He lifted the first lid and started taking little pots of food from a drawer beneath the wooden workbench. Artificial light glowed all around us; blue UV.

“Here,” he said, when he saw that I was there too. He handed me a stick insect.

I held up my hand and looked at the thing. It was trembling, I swear, its long body very stiff. I wanted to stroke it and tell it I wasn’t going to hurt it, but it was an insect; what would the point have been? I turned my hand to get a better look at it.

The stick insect fell—tumbled to the ground.

Dad whirled. “For ****’s sake, Cass!” he shouted. He bent down and picked up the stick insect carefully. He examined it and then reached out with his other hand and gripped my arm, tight enough to hurt.

“How can you be so ******* clumsy?” he said. “How come everything you touch turns to—”

He stopped himself, like he’d been taken over by some possessing spirit and had just gotten control of his mouth again. That was what Dad’s tempers were always like—like he was under the influence of something that needed to be exorcised.

He stared at me.

He saw the tears running down my cheeks.

“Oh Jesus, Cass, oh, I didn’t mean …”

I twisted out of his grip and ran for the stairs.

“Cass, I wasn’t talking about—”

“Wow,” said the voice as my foot hit the first step. “Your dad really hates you, huh?”

So.

A half victory, I guess.

        
5.    FREEDOM. Challenge the power of the voice and establish dominance over it.

This did
not
work very well.

Actually, you were there for part of this one.

Paris called; she wanted to hang out. We’d spoken on the phone a few times but hadn’t seen much of each other since she took me to meet Dr. Lewis. Dad was going to be home soon so I told her I couldn’t go to her condo, but she could come over to the house.

When she turned up, I was waiting on the porch. Paris was wearing torn fishnet tights with a fifties flowered summer dress. She looked crazy and beautiful. As she walked across the yard, you were just parking your pickup—she turned and looked at you as you went to the apartment stairs.

“Who’s the hot guy?” she asked, when she joined me on the porch.

I glanced at the apartment. “Him?” I had not thought of you as someone who would be conventionally thought of as hot. I also, at this point, was maybe not quite aware of my own interest in you. Although maybe that’s a lie; maybe I was. Because I remember thinking something very strange when Paris asked about you.

I mean, hearing a voice is extreme. But often, even when we’re supposedly sane, our own thoughts can be foreign to us.

The alien, strange thought that went through my mind at that moment, and I wish I could say it was the voice but it wasn’t, was:

He’s mine, bitch.
Like … like we were she-lions or something. Weird how quickly we revert to being animals.

But I waved a hand in what I hoped was a casual manner as we went up the stairs to my room. “He’s one of the summer workers,” I said. “From the piers. Dad rents the apartment over the garage.”

“Sweet,” said Paris. “So you get to check out Mr. Guns there whenever you like.”

I shrugged, trying to appear more relaxed than I really was. “They’re usually working.”

“There’s more than one of them?”

“Two.”

She licked her lips. “Hmm. And is the other one hot too?”

“I guess.”

“Then I shall be a frequent visitor to this abode, methinks.”

“******,” said the voice. “Filthy ******.”

I flushed. “After six p.m.,” I said.

“I can come after six p.m.?” said Paris.

I’d been talking to the voice. “Oh. Uh, yeah. Any day.”

“Cool.”

I sat down on the bed.

Paris was a bit freaked out by my room, I think. She gazed around at the shelves and the walls.

“It’s very … clean,” she said finally.

“Yeah. The voice makes me do that.”

“Really?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Tell the voice my condo could use a good housekeeper.”

“Very funny.”

She picked up a shell from the chest of drawers; it was one that I’d found with Mom, on one of our walks on the beach. “How’s it going with the Doc?”

“Good, I think.”

“You’re reconciling with the voice? Making schedules, all that ****?”

“Yep.”

“And what about the source? Any progress there?” she asked.

“The source?”

“Yeah. The … What did you call it when you asked me? The trauma?”

I knew what she was doing. She was reminding me that she’d told, hinting at reciprocity. Basically saying that I should tell her, in turn.

“No, nothing,” I lied. “There’s nothing.”

“Hmm,” said Paris.

We hung out for a while—I played her some music; we ate some nut-free brownies that Dad had made. “Wow,” said Paris. “These are amazing. Your dad’s single, right?”

“Don’t even think about it.”

“Joking, Cass, joking.”

I showed her Dad’s bug room, and her eyes went wide as she looked at all the brightly colored millipedes and stick insects and beetles. “They’re gross, but they’re kind of beautiful at the same time,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“A bit like you,” she said.

I punched her arm.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s have another brownie.”