Whisper Me This

by Kerry Anne King

  “Ah, Maisey,” he says, and opens his arms to me.

  It’s not the time to tell him what I know. To ask questions, to express my betrayal. That one small gesture from him turns me into a frightened, wounded child, and I fall on my knees and wrap my arms around him, resting my head against his chest.

  For a long time he holds me there, stroking my hair. I melt against him, my ear pressed against his chest, listening to his heartbeat, letting myself believe that he is strong, that he will take care of me.

  “I need to go home. Please, Maisey. Take me home.” He looks lost, more like a frightened child than an old man, despite the lines carved into his face and his thinning hair.

  “We need to talk to the doctor first.”

  Both of his hands go up to the sides of his head, as if it hurts him, and he squeezes. “Can’t think. Need to think. She made a list.”

  “Dad.”

  His bloodshot eyes focus in on me. His hands clamp around mine so tightly, I gasp with the pain of my rings digging into my flesh.

  “Where is she, Maisey? What did they do with her?”

  I think he’s already forgotten, and now I have to say the words. “She died, Daddy. I got mad at her, and then she died.”

  Please. Please listen to me. Please be here for me. Please understand what I need. And then maybe you can tell me all about this massive fairy-tale life you and Mom concocted. Maybe you can explain the why and wherefore.

  My knees ache from contact with the hard floor. My body feels like it’s been worked over by a meat hammer. Everything hurts, from the roots of my hair down to the tip of my baby toenail.

  “She wanted to die,” he whispers, easing up on my hands. “But where is she? Where have they put her?”

  “I don’t know. It just happened. I asked her about Marley, and then she died.”

  His body stills. His hands go slack. I think he’s heard me, that he’s going to answer, that despite his grief and confusion maybe he will tell me the truth. But then his jaw wobbles. Tears fill his eyes and drip down over his cheeks.

  “Where’s Leah?” he whispers. “What have they done with her?”

  “Hey,” another voice says from behind me. “I heard. How are you holding up?”

  Dr. Margoni rests a cool hand on my shoulder. “How are your knees? Let me get you a chair.”

  “Maisey,” Dad says, again. “Where is your mother?”

  “Daddy, I’ve told you. Please don’t make me tell you again.”

  “Going in circles?” Dr. Margoni asks. She sets a visitor’s chair down beside Dad and extends a hand to help me to my feet.

  “It’s like that Groundhog Day movie, only worse.”

  “I like Groundhog Day,” Dad says. “What’s his name, that actor? And Andie. She’s wonderful. Leah gets jealous, how much I like Andie. Hey, even an old man still has eyes.”

  “Bill Murray,” Dr. Margoni says. “The part with the puddle. I like that. I stepped in a puddle on my way here. Would have been nice to know it was there.”

  “Happy endings,” Dad says. “The ending is good.”

  Not this ending, I want to tell him. This ending really sucks. But he already looks sad, and I can’t tell him about Mom again.

  Dr. Margoni seems to read my mind. “This isn’t the end yet,” she says, softly. “We’re at the messy middle.”

  Boy howdy, does she have that right. She has no idea how messy.

  “So you do have a decision to make,” she says, after we’re all quiet for a minute, reminding me that I am now the responsible adult in the family. There will be plenty of decisions. God, I hadn’t even thought about the funeral. Maybe if my long-lost sister were here, she’d help me plan it.

  Dr. Margoni isn’t thinking about the funeral. “What are you going to do when your dad is ready to discharge from the hospital?”

  “What? Oh. I hadn’t even thought that far.”

  Dad has slipped away from us altogether, eyes closed, chin on his chest.

  “I’m going to keep him another day. Per Medicare, if he’s admitted for three days running, we can transfer him directly into another facility.”

  No, no, no. I can’t have heard her right. “You mean a nursing home?”

  “I was thinking more of assisted living. He’d have more privacy and autonomy than in a nursing home. I know it’s hard,” she goes on. “But he can’t stay here. He’s certainly not able to care for himself at home. Even if his altered mental state is just due to grief and being off his medications, it would be pretty hard for him to manage on his own.”

  A memory comes to me, of Dad staying up with me one long night when I had an ear infection. The doctor’s office was closed, and Mom was not about to incur an emergency room bill. She dosed me with Tylenol and sent me to bed. It was Dad who heard me sobbing with pain at midnight and came to comfort me. All that long night, he sat on my bed with my feverish head in his lap, stroking my hair, distracting me with funny stories, feeding me more Tylenol every four hours around the clock.

  “He’ll get better, though, right? This is just grief and shock and not taking his meds.”

  “Possibly,” Dr. Margoni says, but there is too much hesitation in the way she shapes the word. “It’s hard to tell. Sometimes it takes weeks for an elderly person to bounce back from an illness.”

  Dad jerks awake, startling my heart into a gallop. “Leah,” he says. “We need to tell Maisey. You can’t—” And then his eyes fall on me. “Oh dear. Oh hell. Do you know?”

  Where is he in time, and which question is he asking? The aneurism in my mother’s brain? Her past life? Marley?

  “Yes, I know,” I say. “I know everything. It’s okay.” I keep patting his hand, my heart free-falling over and over, no safety net to catch it. It’s not okay. He’s not okay. Some things time cannot fix.

  “I told her we should tell you,” he says. “Over and over, I told her, ‘Just call her, Leah. Or let me call her. Let her come to say good-bye.’”

  “I was here, Daddy. I was with her when she died.”

  “I need to see her. Take me.”

  He presses against the chair arms with his hands and leans forward. His whole body is vibrating, though, and this time when he tries to stand, he only clears a couple of inches from the chair before he falls back. It doesn’t stop him. He tries again.

  A vivid image of my mother the way I left her makes me hold him back.

  “Not a good idea. Not now.”

  “It might help him,” Dr. Margoni says, very gently. “To see her body. It might help him retain the finality and let her go.”

  I shake my head, but I can’t say anything. If I open my mouth, I’m going to vomit, and I clamp my lips tight together and drag deep breaths in through my nose, trying to settle the stormy seas in my belly.

  “Let me see if they’ve got her cleaned up,” Dr. Margoni says. She squeezes my shoulder, gently, and leaves the room.

  Dad tries to get up, and again I press him back.

  “We’ll go in a minute, okay? Just hang on. We’ll go see her.”

  It seems longer than a minute before Dr. Margoni shows back up, this time with a wheelchair. “Let’s take a ride,” she says. Her calm, professional compassion helps me calm my own body. The two of us help Dad up onto his shaky feet and into the chair. But the reluctance to go back to that war zone of a room, to confront the body of my mother—after I defied her wishes and tried to make her live, after the things I said to her and knowing the lies she told me—is overpowering.

  I sink into Dad’s chair, still warm with his body heat. “Maybe I’ll wait here.”

  “You might find it helpful to see her one more time,” Dr. Margoni says. “Otherwise you’re going to be stuck with that last visual.”

  I press my hands against my eyes, making black spots dance, but I still can’t shut it out.

  “I need you,” Dad says, stretching out a tremulous hand. “Be with me, Maisey.”

  Which does it, of course. I’ve lost my
mother and my entire framework for reality. He’s lost the woman whose secrets he’s kept for almost forty years, whoever she was. So I get up and follow the wheelchair down the hall. We go to a different room, for which I’m grateful. It’s a corner room with windows on two walls, letting in sunlight and the reminder that outside there are blue skies and timeless mountains.

  Mom lies in a hospital bed, a sheet pulled up over her chest, her hands folded over it. She wears a clean hospital gown. Her hair is neatly combed, her face washed, the horrible tube removed from her mouth. Except for the color of her skin, which is all kinds of wrong, she almost looks like she’s sleeping.

  Still, I hang back at the door while Dr. Margoni rolls Dad up to the bed.

  “Leah,” he whispers, touching her hand. “Oh, Leah. It should have been me.”

  I’m braced for an emotional storm, but it doesn’t come. He just sits there, almost as still as she is. When he pushes himself up to standing, Dr. Margoni doesn’t stop him. Dad smooths Mom’s hair, touches her cheek, leans down to kiss her lips.

  “Soon,” he whispers. “It won’t be long.” He lets out a long, tremulous sigh that leaves him smaller, older, frailer, if such a thing is possible, then falls back into the chair.

  Dr. Margoni looks at me, eyebrows raised in a question.

  The answer is no. No, no, a thousand times no. Mom looks peaceful enough from where I’m standing, but closer-up death will get me with a bitch slap. I don’t want to smell it on her. Don’t want to touch her skin now that the soul is gone. Don’t want to risk her eyes snapping open, her finger rising to point at me, her dead lips opening to croak, “You are in so much trouble, Maisey Dawn.”

  I don’t need her to put any more guilt on me.

  So I stay where I am, feet planted, spine stiffened by stubbornness and fear. The tears betray me, though, running down my cheeks, warm and alive where the rest of me feels as cold and dead as my mother looks.

  Dr. Margoni crosses the room, takes my right hand, and uncurls the fingers I’ve clenched into a fist. She tugs at me, gently, and my feet obey, taking me to the bed, to my mother.

  Her skin is as cold as I expected when I touch her hand, and her face looks subtly different, like one of those wax museum figures. I shiver at the idea that maybe she’ll start to melt if I touch her.

  “Just tell her good-bye.”

  I don’t want to tell her good-bye. I’m not ready to let her go. Not yet, not like this. But I feel compelled to tell her something, and I lean down and press my cheek against her cold one. I mean to tell her I love her. That I’m sorry my last words to her were angry. But what comes whispering out of my lips is not at all what I thought I wanted to say. Not angry words this time, but lost and bereft, with the bewilderment of a child.

  “What happened to my sister?”

  Leah’s Journal

  And here we are. The pivot point where this story turns, the balance point of my sins, the advent of the man who spread a shadow over the rest of my life.

  I don’t want to talk about him. I don’t want to invoke his name. It feels like summoning the devil.

  Here I sit. Five minutes after writing those first lines, my hands are shaking. Heart racing. I want to burn this page, tear it into tiny pieces, scribble out the ink, and I haven’t even written down his name.

  My rational mind tells me you won’t see this, Walter. He won’t see this. Nobody will see it, and contrary to what my imagination is wanting to tell me, he has no magical powers that would let him see what I’m writing here.

  He is not a devil or a god. He is not all-knowing or all-powerful.

  Alexander Garrison. The father of my children. Nickname: Boots.

  There, I’ve done it. The world is still standing. Wouldn’t it be ironic if confronting my fear and my past was the thing that ruptured my aneurism? But it hasn’t. And I shall go on.

  “Boots” sounds like a diminutive, doesn’t it? Something you would name a cat or a hamster.

  There was nothing diminutive about him. He was nobody’s pet anything, not even his mother’s. He was always dangerous, and there lay half of the attraction. That hair, red-gold masses of it down onto his shoulders. Green eyes. That in itself would have been enough to make all of us girls swoon, but then there was the music. Put a guitar in his hands, and he was elevated from swoon-worthy to a young god.

  I was invisible to him at first. Four years younger and hiding in the shadows at school. A little too smart for my own good. A little too poor, a little too adrift.

  He noticed me first at a homecoming dance. I was fifteen and in tenth grade. He was nineteen and in the graduating class. I’d borrowed a dress from a friend. Saved up money to buy department store makeup. I had my first date, with another invisible kid like me. God help me, I can’t even remember his name. Can barely remember his face.

  Boots swaggered in late, a rebel. Always a rebel. Everybody else all dressed up, tuxedos and ball gowns, and him in a black T-shirt, faded Levi’s, and those shiny leather cowboy boots, the ones that gave him his nickname.

  I’d seen him before, of course, in the hallways at school, had heard whispers and rumors.

  But that night, I was awestruck. I’ll admit it. I coveted the way he walked, those boots clumping down as if he owned the floor they walked on. The bold way his gaze cut through the crowd. The way his chin tilted, the slight smirk of superiority that said he knew damn well he was better than the rest of us.

  That night, those eyes fell on me, standing alone by the snacks table.

  I wish to God I had been standing elsewhere. I wish I had been smarter or been less vulnerable or had a parent who might have intervened in what was to come. But what is the point of wishing? What is done is done, and there is no going back.

  Writing this, today, I feel the weight of that stare, as if he can see me still from so many years and so many miles away. I can’t help feeling that he knows I am writing this. His eyes say that I’ve broken my promise, and now he has license to break his. He can’t possibly know, of course. I am just a coward, caught in a hard place between death and a memory. Would you think less of me if I told you that death seems the friendlier option?

  I have grown weak, it seems. This is too much for me tonight. Tomorrow I will gather the shreds of my courage to go on, but for now I will say only this. His gaze fell on me. And young fool that I was, I welcomed it. Welcomed him. Offered him a cigarette from the pack I’d stolen out of Mom’s purse, even though I didn’t smoke. The appearance of coolness was everything.

  So I offered up a smoke, and he offered up . . .

  Tomorrow, tomorrow. I’ll write it tomorrow. I am a coward still, after all these years.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I tell Elle that I’m just running next door to see if I can borrow a couple of eggs for a late breakfast, but what I’m really planning to do is pump Mrs. Carlton for information.

  Elle has super sensors when it comes to evasion and doesn’t let me get away with it.

  “I’ll come with you,” she says.

  “Wait here. I’ll only be a second.”

  “Mom—”

  “Elle, for once, listen to me. She’s not the fun sort of neighbor. Stay here. I’ll be right back.”

  I close the door firmly between us. The air is cold. Rain slants down out of a gray sky. I should go back into the house for a coat, but then I’ll have to fight Elle all over again.

  Ducking my head, I race across the wet lawn, fat drops of water bouncing off my head. The steps of the Carltons’ porch are sagging. Spiderwebs wrap around the support posts.

  The paint on the front door, once a definitive mallard green, is faded and peeling, and when I knock, a flake comes loose and drifts down toward my toes. A straw broom leans up against the door, but judging from the little drift of dirt and debris lodged against it, sweeping hasn’t happened in a while.

  “Is she a witch?” Elle asks, behind me.

  I swing around, bumping my elbow on the doorframe. “I t
old you to stay in the house.”

  “But what if you never come back? Like if she puts you in the oven or something?” She keeps her tone light, but her hand creeps into mine the way it used to when she was a little girl.

  Memory strikes. Mom reading “Hansel and Gretel.” Marley afraid of the witch, wondering whether Mrs. Carlton has a big enough oven to roast a little girl in. Not really Marley, I remind myself. I only imagined her.

  Before I can detach Elle and send her back, the door swings open, loosening an assault of bleach fumes out onto the porch.

  Edna Carlton has been old as long as I can remember, but the walker is new. The tight gray bun, spiked with black hairpins, is the same, as are the glimpses of pink scalp on the top of her head. Her eyes, black and clever like a crow’s, are as bright and sharp as ever. I feel awkward and about ten years old; it’s all I can do to keep from shuffling my feet and twirling the hem of my T-shirt around my fingers.

  “Mrs. Carlton. Hi. Good morning.”

  “Maisey Dawn. It’s been long enough. A woman should visit her aging parents, I always say. Might have prevented this current disaster, in fact.” Her eyes shift to Elle. “Well, well, well. Almost grown up already. She favors you more than her father, I think.”

  “Listen, Mrs. Carlton, I just came over to tell you that my mother . . . passed . . . yesterday.” I hate the word even as I say it. What does passed even mean? Some sort of entrance exam to the next life?

  It’s impossible to read the expression on the old woman’s face as she takes in this news. She tilts her head to one side. “And where’s your father? Jailed for murder? Oh yes. I heard the cops talking. Terrible thing. Unbelievable.”

  Elle’s fingers tighten around mine, and I squeeze hard, half comfort, half warning not to engage. “Dad’s in the hospital; he was severely dehydrated and ill. Listen, we can’t stay long. I was wondering—”

  “If I’d help plan the funeral. Of course. Your mother was a wonderful, God-fearing woman, and she should have a wonderful send-off. You won’t have a clue who her friends are or who should be part of the service. I’m so glad you at least had the sense to ask me.”