Whisper Me This

by Kerry Anne King

  My heart slams against my chest.

  That small, twisted shame I felt watching drool trail down Dad’s chin while he slept resurfaces. I’m not supposed to see this. It’s sacrilege of a sort. My father has made this mess. He left the file cabinet unlocked. The safe open. The closet unlocked.

  I put my hands on either side of my head and squeeze them together. This is not my father’s behavior. He doesn’t do this. He wouldn’t do this. That dementia word comes crawling back into my brain, a snake of a word this time, poisonous.

  I can’t think of any other explanation for a calm, methodical man to be burning papers in a fireplace, scattering files around like this. I want to sink to the floor in the middle of the scattered files and wail like a frightened child, but I can’t. There’s too much to do. And I am the only person anywhere around to do it.

  I begin cleaning up the mess, all the while asking myself what he might have been looking for. The safe contains passports, both his and Mom’s. Stocks and bonds. A copy of their will, which noticeably is lacking any mention of an advance directive. Nothing of any particular interest, like gold or expensive jewelry or some terrible secret.

  The files strewn all over the floor are client income taxes, mostly. Mom’s old medical records. A year of utility bills and car repairs and home maintenance. Receipts. Nothing that would indicate a reason to start burning things.

  An overwhelming sense of exhaustion creeps over me as I contemplate trying to guess where these files are supposed to go under Dad’s careful organizational system. And then I realize that it doesn’t matter, and I just shove them in any which way, using the Maisey Organizational System, which consists pretty much of “I know it’s in there somewhere.”

  If his mind has deserted him, he won’t know or care. If he comes home okay, he can fix it himself.

  Curious now, trying to track the unusual workings of my father’s mind, I pick my way through the muddy mess in the living room and crouch down by the fireplace. I saw a movie once where some guilty soul had burned papers, and the words were still visible. No such luck here. The papers are too blackened for me to read any words. A manila folder lying on the hearth looks like a thousand other folders. Beige and noncommittal.

  What makes it stand out from all the other beige folders on the face of the planet is my name. There’s a sticky label, printed, that says Maisey.

  I have a folder at home labeled Elle. Per the Maisey Organizational System, it has all things Elle in it. Her birth certificate. Social Security card. Vaccination records. Certificates of excellence from school. A funny picture of her with her hair all disheveled, cuddled under a blanket and sitting on the heat vent, one of her favorite places to be.

  Mom doesn’t organize things the way I do, by which I mean to say she actually organizes them. Social Security cards will be in a file so labeled. Vaccination records will be under vaccination records, probably with a separate folder for each family member. I can’t imagine what would be in a folder with my name on it, unless it’s childhood drawings or school papers.

  The folder feels empty, but I open it anyway. All I find is a tiny little sticky note that reads, Shred this.

  A hollow space opens in my chest where my heart is supposed to be. This—whatever this is—is about me. My mother had Maisey secrets and told my father to destroy them.

  I blaze a trail back to Dad’s office. The shredder under the desk is jammed with a wad of paper stuck so tightly that I can’t pull it free. Unplugging the electrical cord to prevent any accidental shredding of my fingers, I anchor the base between my feet and tug with both hands. No dice.

  There are scissors in the desk, and I use those to saw away at the paper, cutting and tearing it free just above the shredder blades. I’m holding eleven half-sheets, their bottoms mangled, the top halves legible. Eight of them are my mother’s old medical records. The tops of the pages hold only demographic data: her address, date of birth, allergies, medications. Whatever she saw the doctor for is missing, and I move on.

  Page nine is a different kind of paper, smaller, the sort that comes on one of those refrigerator magnet to-do list pads. It’s pink and has a butterfly and flower on the right. A cute little header says, Life Is Short, Do It Now.

  A list is written in my mother’s decisive script. Half of the page is missing, presumably lodged in the shredder. The part I can read says:

  Don’t forget to shred this when you’re done.

  1. The medical records

  2. Birth certificates

  I’ll never know what was meant to be number three.

  Page ten is a different type of paper yet again. Loose-leaf, college-ruled. At the middle of the page, neatly centered, my mother has written in bold black ink:

  Shred this first.

  Chapter Eight

  My heart is in my throat, interfering with my breathing. My hands are shaking as I shuffle to page eleven, where my mother has written these words:

  My poor Walter. You deserve answers to all your questions. I wish, for both our sakes, that I could give them to you. I think it would be comforting for you to know the truth. But I don’t think you could keep the secret, and it must never be told.

  And yet, the closer I come to death, the more difficult it is to keep silent. I want to talk about my past. I need to talk about it. Memories are bursting me at the seams.

  Maybe if I write it all out here, that will help. Maybe if I write it as if I am telling it to you, after all, that will grant me some absolution for my sins. I am convincing myself, here, that it is safe to write what is hidden. If it’s not safe, it seems a risk I must take because guilt and remorse and regret are gnawing away at my insides just as surely as that treacherous vessel in my brain is eroding under the pressure of my own blood.

  Justice of a sort. What Maisey might call karma, although I’ve never believed . . .

  And there it ends. No page twelve. No clue as to what she might feel remorseful about.

  A quaking starts in my belly and spreads into a full-body tremble. My thighs feel as substantial as jelly in an earthquake, and no amount of willpower from me will steady them. In my empty chest, a dark fear blossoms, and with it, a memory, sudden and stark.

  Me, exploring my parents’ closet, and my mother’s rage at catching me there. I feel the sharp sting of a belt whipping across my buttocks and the backs of my thighs. Rebellious tears burning my eyes against my will. Mom yelling at me.

  I have small gaps in my memory. I’ve forgotten events before. Usually they come back to me gently, sliding into place as if they’ve never been away. Sometimes memories get temporarily buried under other things, but then life shifts, and they surface as a small reminder, no more.

  This memory is not like that. It is neither subtle nor quiet; it enters my awareness with all the violence of a detonation, blowing my world sky high. It breaches an emotional dam at the center of me, allowing words and images, sensations and emotions to tumble around and around, all mixed up together.

  My breath rasps in my throat. My heart threatens to beat its way out of my rib cage.

  Did I have a friend over? I have a sense of not having conducted my exploration alone.

  Marley. My God. How could I have forgotten?

  Marley was my constant companion, more real to me than my actual schoolmates. We read books and played games, and on that fateful day, explored the no-fly zone of my parents’ closet.

  That day was the end of Marley. Not because of the beating, but because I heard my mother weeping.

  “This Marley business has to end,” she’d sobbed, clinging to my father. “I can’t endure it. I can’t.”

  What had we done that was so terrible? Played princesses in the closet. Dressed up in what must have been Mom’s wedding dress. Uncovered an old suitcase . . .

  Oh my God. The suitcase. The two pink blankets. That picture.

  The short hallway between me and my parents’ room feels like a mile at least. I run, bumping into the wall with my shoul
der, fumbling with the door knob.

  A wall of smell assaults me as the door swings open. The bed is unmade, covers tossed back in a rumpled mess. A blue bed protector pad covers the sheet, and a trash can by the bed overflows with more. I try to picture my mother lying here, unconscious, my father bathing her, changing her. My mind recoils, and I press both hands over my nose and mouth, holding my breath, fighting my gag reflex.

  Trying not to look at the bed, I make a dash for the walk-in closet. When I enter, I pull the door closed behind me. The closet smells spicy and secret—cedar and another unnamable fragrance made up of Mom’s perfume and Dad’s cologne—but my mother’s illness has also invaded here. There’s a big open box still half-full of bed protector pads. Two sets of brand-new sheets, still in the plastic, with a note in her handwriting that says, You may need these.

  Later, I tell myself. I will deal with all this later.

  The suitcase still occupies its accustomed place in a back corner. I fall on my knees in front of it, my heart beating in my throat. My trembling fingers fumble with the latches, and I hold my breath as I open the lid.

  The pink blankets are still there, but they are wadded up, no longer perfectly and precisely folded. The picture of a young girl wearing my mother’s face, holding two babies wrapped in pink blankets, is missing.

  All these years I have forgotten about this picture. Now it seems like the most important thing in the world, a priority beyond restoring order to this house or figuring out what to do about my parents. Retracing my steps to the study, I dump out the shredder basket on the floor. Mostly the papers are standard white paper. The remnants of the to-do list are jammed around the shredder teeth.

  And mixed in with the ordinary paper, thicker pieces of a photograph.

  Sorting these out from the others, I carry them to Dad’s desk and sit down, forcing my blurring eyes to focus as I reassemble the picture. I expect it to take forever, but it’s easier than a jigsaw puzzle, and the strips line up with little effort.

  My memory has proved accurate. Two pink bundles. Two babies.

  Logic, Maisey. Don’t jump to conclusions. There could be any number of explanations. Maybe she’s holding someone else’s babies. Sure, Dad shredded the picture, but he’s not rational. It doesn’t have to mean anything.

  I go back to the filing cabinet and search it, methodically, one file at a time, looking for my birth certificate.

  It’s not there.

  Memory shows me my father, burning papers. If the fireplace was his recourse when the paper shredder failed him, my birth certificate is likely ashes, along with the rest of whatever my mother was writing.

  But why?

  Hoping that some pieces of this mystery have escaped the flames, I use the ridiculously inadequate decorative shovel hanging on the hearth to scoop the ashes out of the fireplace and into a trash can. Maybe, just maybe, there are some intact bits of paper that will tell me a story.

  There’s nothing, though.

  By the time the fireplace is emptied, the hearth swept, the ashes dumped outside in the trash bin, my body is exhausted, but my brain is possessed by an almost frantic energy. I try to sit for a minute, but I can’t rest, and I move on to cleaning the rest of the house. I vacuum the carpet in the living room, scrub the kitchen floor clean of my mother’s blood, and dispose of her beloved cast iron frying pan, still holding what once might have been pork chops.

  A call up to the hospital to check on my parents lets me know that Dad is sedated and sleeping. Mom is the same, no better, no worse. “Get some rest,” the nurse says. “You need to take care of yourself.”

  I check in on Elle. She’s sprawled on her back, one arm above her head, palm open, the way she used to sleep when she was a baby. She stirs, as if she feels me watching her, but then settles back into her sleep. I’d had a thought of crawling into the bed beside her, but she has expanded into the entire space and I don’t want to wake her.

  Which leaves me with a choice between the bed in my parents’ room and the couch. I’ve already stripped the bed, thrown my mother’s pillow in the trash, and put the laundry in the machine. But the thought of trying to sleep in the bed where she lay unconscious and maybe dying for three long days brings a bitter taste of nausea into the back of my throat.

  Couch it is. I lie down and drop almost instantly into sleep.

  Some noise startles me awake. I’ve been sweating. My clothes feel simultaneously stiff and clammy. My mouth tastes disgusting, and my lips are cemented together. When I pull them apart, a little piece of skin rips away, and I can taste the salt of blood when I touch the stinging spot with my sandpaper tongue.

  It’s still light outside the living room window, but the shadows are long and slanted. Late evening, then. I should get up. Check on Elle. Have a shower. Try to scrounge up something for us to eat.

  Disoriented and still only half awake, I sit up and swing my feet onto the floor. My right ankle brushes against something soft protruding from under the couch. I bend down to investigate and come up with my mother’s knitting bag.

  Nothing fancy, just a soft fabric bag, faded by years and multiple washings to a dull, nondescript graying green. Surely some essence of my mother clings to it. She never could just sit, and all my memories of family movie night or entertaining visitors are infused with the soft click of her needles.

  This, finally, is a talisman for the mother I know. The normal mother, who goes to church every Sunday and runs the PTA and organizes everything. Not the mother who has secret fractures of multiple bones, who tells my father to shred things and keeps a secret journal, who hides pink blankets in her closet.

  But even the humble knitting bag goes all wrong. I hug it to my heart, wanting to bring her closer to me, and feel a dull weight swing against my ribs. Maybe a book, I tell myself. A lot of people carry a novel around with their knitting. Mom never did, but that’s the sort of habit that could easily change. Curious, I set the bag in my lap and feel my way past several skeins of yarn until my fingers run into something that is most definitely not a book.

  Smooth. Cold. Metallic.

  This can’t possibly be what I think it is. An odd-shaped flashlight, maybe. A novelty item.

  But when I bring it up into the light, there is absolutely no doubt that I am holding a handgun.

  It’s black. Sleek.

  Lethal.

  And completely incongruous.

  Violence in any form was forbidden both in and out of our house. Even during my high school years, Mom banned me from watching thriller-type movies or TV cop shows. I snuck detective novels, even Agatha Christie, into the house under stacks of textbooks and hid them under my mattress, the way some kids hide cigarettes or porn. When I was fifteen, she grounded me from hanging out with my best friend for a month after we snuck into a theater to watch Pulp Fiction.

  Now that I have Elle, I don’t blame Mom for the Pulp Fiction bit. I want to shelter my daughter from all the darkness in the world, in movies as well as in real life. The point is, I’ve never seen a gun in person. I’ve certainly never held or fired one. I don’t know if this specimen is loaded. What if Elle finds it? Elle wouldn’t play with a gun, surely, but there are those stories of people accidentally discharging guns. What if Dad finds it in a state of mental derangement and accidentally shoots somebody?

  My heart is trying to beat a hole through my rib cage.

  I sit there on the couch with the gun in my clammy hands, pointing the dangerous end away from me.

  I can’t think what to do. I could put it away somewhere. Tuck it into the bottom of Mom’s cedar chest. The top shelf of the closet. But I can’t stop thinking about the crazy way Dad was tearing at the restraints in the hospital. I can’t stop the what if thought of Elle getting shot. I’ve seen enough movies to know I can’t just drop it into a shrubbery or something. A kid might find it. Or a criminal.

  The phone number the fireman gave me is still crumpled in the pocket of my jeans. I pull it out and look at it.
Tony Medina. I try to summon a memory of him from high school, but again come up blank. He seemed nice enough. If he’s lived in Colville all this time and works for the ambulance and fire department, surely he’s not a lunatic or a serial killer or something.

  I haven’t stayed in contact with anybody from home, other than Greg. I don’t even know who might still live here, and I certainly don’t know who else I could call.

  Before I have time to be frozen by my usual indecision, I grab my cell phone and try to dial.

  The thing is dead. I’ve forgotten to charge it, despite Greg’s instructions. I stare at it, blankly, my thought processes about as active as slugs in a tub of salt.

  Clearly I need to get my shit together before I’m functional enough to even call for help.

  Very carefully, holding my breath in case the thing accidentally goes off, I tuck the gun into my purse. Taking purse and gun into the bathroom with me for safekeeping, I take a shower. Brush my teeth. Lubricate my eyes with eye drops.

  Out of both ideas and excuses, I pick up my parents’ landline phone.

  It’s 8:00 at night. I hope that’s not too late to call. Part of me—a big part—is hoping the call will go to voicemail. I’ll hang up. Maybe I’ll leave a message. Maybe I won’t.

  “Hey, who’s this?” It’s a woman’s voice, and there’s a hint of laughter in it that negates the apparent rudeness of her greeting. There’s the sound of TV in the background. Voices, music.

  Still. It’s a woman. I feel my face heating and know if I look in the mirror I’ll be red with shame. I’ve called a desirable man to help me, and he has a girlfriend. Or a wife. Of course he does. What was I thinking?

  My thumb hovers over the End Call button, but her voice stops me. “Wait. Don’t hang up. Shit. I bet this is some sort of work call. You’re looking for Tony, right? I can get him. Especially if this is about work stuff. Do not hang up. I repeat, do not hang up your phone. I shall produce Tony momentarily. Wave of the wand and shazam!”