Whisper Me This

by Kerry Anne King

  More guilt. Mrs. Carlton is right, of course. I don’t know who to ask. I’m not even sure what a church funeral looks like.

  “Well, are you coming in? Heat’s not getting any cheaper,” Mrs. Carlton says, interrupting my thoughts. I take one last breath of cool, rain-fresh air and enter the house, Elle right behind me. Bleach fumes set my eyes to watering and sear the lining of my nose. Sauna-level heat intensifies its effects, making a bleach-nebulizer that burns my lungs. Elle sneezes, loudly, and earns a glare from Mrs. Carlton, who produces a tissue from one of her pockets and tucks it into my daughter’s reluctant hand.

  “Come and sit a spell.” Mrs. Carlton turns her back and shuffles down the hall.

  Elle holds the tissue with the tips of her thumb and forefinger, ewww written all over her face, and I gesture maniacally for her to just put it in her pocket.

  Oblivious to Elle’s antics, or at least I hope so anyway, Edna stays on course and doesn’t turn around. She doesn’t seem to lean on the walker, and as we follow her down the spotless hallway, I catch her picking the thing up and carrying it for a step or two before remembering that she’s supposed to lean on it, not use it as a fashion accessory.

  The sitting room hasn’t changed at all since my childhood. The blinds are closed tight to keep the sun from fading either the carpet or furniture. Same stiff old couch and chairs, same dull beige lampshades, all still covered in plastic to keep off the dirt.

  Elle and I lower ourselves gingerly onto the sofa, planting our feet to keep from sliding forward off the slick surface.

  “I used to babysit your mother,” Mrs. Carlton says to Elle. Her voice is grinding and harsh, out of keeping with a tiny frame so aerodynamic that she seems to hover above the armchair, still gripping the walker to keep herself from drifting away. I keep sneaking glimpses to see if her butt is touching the chair.

  “I remember.”

  Mrs. Carlton wasn’t my mother’s first choice of babysitter, but she couldn’t argue with the convenience of having childcare right next door, or with the price, which was free. There were days, mostly during tax season, when both of my parents stayed late at the office. On those days, when the school bus dropped me off, I would do my homework at Mrs. Carlton’s kitchen table, while her venomous gossip poured over me and gave me insights a kid definitely didn’t need into the behaviors of all the neighbors.

  I remember tasteless dinners, and the misery of washing dishes afterward and never getting them clean enough to satisfy.

  “It won’t hurt you,” Mom said when I complained. “Life isn’t all fun and games, Maisey.”

  “You were just a bitty thing when your folks moved in,” Mrs. Carlton is saying now. “Maybe three and so precocious. Watchful, you were. All big eyes. You had a way of hiding in plain sight. You’d be sitting right there, and all the adults would forget about you. Freakish for a child that age, I always thought.”

  My ears perk up. This is exactly the direction I want this conversation to go. If anybody knows the secrets my parents have been keeping, it will be Edna Carlton.

  “Life is truly a vale of tears. Your mother was far too young. How old was she, now? She can’t have been more than twenty when she moved in here with your father. When I asked if her mother knew she’d moved in with an older man, she just about tore a strip off my hide. Total spitfire, I tell you. Informed me that she was of an age, thank you very much, and that who she’d married was none of her mother’s business and certainly none of mine. Then she slammed her door in my face, and it was two weeks before she consented to speak with me again, and then only because she was in need of a babysitter.”

  “She’d been sick,” I say, as soon as I can squeeze a few words into the torrent. “I don’t suppose they told you.”

  “Hmmmph.” Edna actually says this, pronouncing all the phonetics. I’ve always thought when I saw hmmmph in books that it was an exaggeration of a sigh or a hmmm. Nope. There’s actual spittle involved; an errant ray of sunlight sneaking in past the closed blinds highlights the tiny drops and turns them into rainbows.

  “What are you looking at, Maisey? You always were the strange child, staring off into nothing like you could see the dead wandering about. Can you?”

  Startled out of my musing on rainbows and spittle, I stare at her, blankly looking for the right answer to her question.

  “Can I what?”

  “See dead people.”

  I blink back a vision of my mother’s dead body as I saw it before she was cleaned up and made presentable. If she were to haunt me, she would come to me like that, vengeful and trailing IV tubes and EKG wires. I wish I’d let her go peacefully. I wish I could go back to that instant and make a different decision. Regret sits like a boulder where my stomach used to be.

  “She means like ghosts,” Elle says, helpfully, scuffing her feet in the perfect carpet and then catching herself as she starts to slide forward off the slick plastic. “Obviously you can see dead people.”

  “Right.” I scrub my sleeve over my eyes and swallow to steady my throat. “No. I don’t see ghosts. I was probably daydreaming. I did that.”

  “Looks like you still do.”

  My right hand curls into a fist, and I force it flat and slide it under my butt where it will behave itself. I will remain calm. I will remain calm. I will not rise to her bait.

  “Did you notice anything different with my parents in the last few months?” I ask, steering the conversation toward what I really want to know.

  “Besides the part where he hit her over the head and let her lie there for three days without calling for help? If I hadn’t come over to check on her, the poor dear would have died right there in her bed.”

  “She had an aneurism. She fell.”

  “Or maybe he pushed her.”

  And that’s it. My tolerance is done. I don’t care that she’s an old woman. I don’t care that my father isn’t technically my father. I don’t care that I’d planned to try to weasel information out of her about my childhood and my parents and whether she knows anything about Marley.

  I’m on my feet, the air crackling around me like I’m about to burst into flames.

  “Give me one reason to believe my father would hurt her. Just one.”

  Edna cowers back away from me, both hands raised in front of her face as if she thinks I’ll actually hit her. She’s tiny and ancient and bitter. Shame infiltrates my rage, but I don’t back down. Not yet.

  “Well?”

  “I was just theorizing,” she quavers. “It’s the way of men.”

  “Not all men. Not this one.” Another childhood memory rises from the depths, summoned by her words. Edna had a husband once. He’s long dead, but I remember him as lean, stringy, and oddly yellow. I asked my mother about the color of his skin, the yellowed whites of his eyes.

  “Too much beer,” she’d said, and that was all. At that age I’d imagined the beer actually settling into his skin and eyes and wondered why it didn’t turn him brown. Now, seeing her hunched up and trembling in the face of my anger, I wonder if the story she’s manufactured for my parents is born out of one of her own.

  I make an effort to soften my voice. “Did you hear anything, see anything? Was he shouting at her?”

  “You want to know the truth? I’ll tell you. She shouted at him. I heard yelling a couple of times, so loud it came into my house through closed windows. Not to speak ill of the dead.”

  “What was she saying?”

  Edna settles her face into calm propriety, folding her hands in her lap. “I am not an eavesdropper.”

  Right. And birds don’t fly.

  On the rare occasions I heard my parents fight, it was always because Dad refused to follow some directive or other. Despite his quiet nature and his abhorrence of fuss and emotional outbursts, if he didn’t agree on something, he would tell her. He went along with her on most things, but every now and then, she’d run up against a streak of iron in him that would not budge or bend. And then the sparks wou
ld fly until she accepted the inevitable and either found a way around him or acknowledged that he was right.

  Maybe it’s dementia, but the out-of-character things Dad has been doing—burning papers, not calling an ambulance—could also be the result of my mother’s planning. Dad would have fought her at first and then would have given in because what else are you going to do when the woman you love is about to die? And once Dad makes a promise, he keeps it.

  “Could you hear what they were fighting about?”

  “Mostly I couldn’t make out the words. But the one time I just happened to be standing on the lawn, and I heard him say, ‘God damn it, Leah, don’t you make me do this!’ Just like every abusing lowlife scum ever says, blaming the woman for his behavior. And then she said, ‘And when I’m dead, then how are you going to feel?’”

  My stomach twists and twists, putting my own spin on these words rather than the one Mrs. Carlton has manufactured out of her own perspective. I can picture my father, pushed to the breaking point. Mom hammering away at him with a combination of logic and manipulation, with that final, masterful thrust of guilt to finish him off.

  “Well,” I say, “I suppose you told this to the cops? That’s why they believe he’s been beating her. Did you ever see her injured? Did she have a black eye?”

  “I’m not stupid,” Mrs. Carlton retorts, confirming my suspicions in the way her blue-veined arms unconsciously hug her rib cage. “Men hit where the bruises don’t show.”

  I initiate a silent count to ten, trying to rein in my temper, but I’ve forgotten about Elle.

  She bounces up off the couch and unexpectedly turns on me, rather than on Mrs. Carlton. “Seriously, Mom? You’re going to just let her say this shit? Grandpa would never hit Grandma. Right? Tell her!”

  “Elle—”

  “What? This is all so stupid! And they think Grandpa’s crazy.” She bursts into tears and runs out of the room. In the stunned silence that follows in her wake, the slamming of the door is loud and clear.

  “Well. I never,” Edna exclaims, but there’s no venom in her words.

  “Excuse me. I’ll check in later about the funeral,” I manage, and then I’m down the hall, out the door, and after my daughter. I catch up to her before she makes it across the lawn.

  “Elle.” I grab hold of her arm, but she jerks it out of my grip.

  Tears track down her cheeks. “How could you let her say all of that . . . shit? She’s a horrible old woman. I hate her!”

  “Elle. Elle!”

  Back ramrod straight, she marches up the steps and into the house. I follow, all the way down the hall to my old bedroom, where she flings herself facedown on the bed in an abandon of dramatic misery.

  Memory of the thousand and one times I pulled a similar move almost makes me smile, despite my own heartbreak and confusion. It never helped me when Mom followed and tried to talk me out of a fit of despair, so instead I just sit there and stroke Elle’s hair.

  She allows this, which is a good sign, and after a few minutes she asks, “You don’t really believe that bullshit?” Her voice is garbled by the pillow, but I’m skilled at deciphering.

  “I don’t believe it. No.”

  “Then how could you let her?” She rolls over and stares up at me, flushed and tearstained and utterly beautiful in her outrage.

  The decision to tell her sort of makes itself. One minute I’m trying to think up an evasive half-truth and the next my mouth is moving.

  “I was gathering intel. Like a spy. So I wanted her to keep talking.”

  “What kind of intel?” Curiosity has trumped her grief. I recognize the tone of her voice. I consider, for the umpteenth time, sending her home to her father. And then I figure, what the hell? She already knows half of it and will put the rest of the pieces together all by herself if I don’t bring her in.

  So I tell her about what I found at the bank. About the fact that my father is apparently not my father. By the time I’m done, she’s sitting up cross-legged in bed, looking like she’s never shed a tear in her life. Her eyes glow with enthusiasm and curiosity.

  “We have to find out,” she says, bouncing a little on the mattress.

  “Grandpa is not exactly a good source of information right now.”

  “Google,” she says, off the bed and rummaging in her backpack. “What was your sister’s name again?”

  “Marley.”

  “Last name.”

  “Garrison. I hardly think we can just type in a couple of names and presto, magically find people who have probably been dead for years.”

  Elle plops back down with her iPad in her lap. “I can see why they wouldn’t tell you about your father. I mean, if Grandma left him, then there’s a reason for that, right? And I can see why she wouldn’t want to talk about that. But why wouldn’t she tell you about your very own sister?”

  This is a very good question. Elle is not content with asking questions; she’s already on a hunt for answers.

  “Do we even have wireless? Oh, never mind, there it is. WalterandLeah. Not exactly imaginative. What’s the password?”

  “A12345.”

  She stares at me. “You’re kidding.”

  “It’s been that ever since they first got wireless. Neither one of them are—were—big on creativity. I told you.”

  “All the neighbors are probably getting a free ride on their wireless,” she says, tapping away.

  “Especially Mrs. Carlton.”

  Elle giggles. “Probably using their wireless to watch porn.”

  “Elle!” My reprimand is spoiled by laughter of my own. The concept is so ludicrous.

  “Holy shazam,” Elle whispers, staring at the screen. “I mean, I thought we’d find something. But this?”

  “What? Show me!”

  I climb up on the bed beside her, and she turns the tablet so I can see, not some sad old obituary for a baby, but an advertisement for a country and western band called Forsaken. Three men with guitars and a woman holding a violin. The picture was taken in front of a crumbling barn, a red sunset vivid in the background. The effect is apocalyptic and unsettling.

  “What does this have to do with anything?”

  Elle stabs her finger at the woman with the violin. “Meet Marley Garrison.”

  “Oh, come on, Elle. That’s just way too easy. How many Marley Garrisons are there in the world?”

  “She lives in Washington. In a place called . . . Finley. Where’s Finley?”

  “Right outside of Pasco. This is insane, Elle.”

  “Wait. Let’s make her bigger so we can see if she looks like you.” She moves her fingers apart and Apple does its magic, enlarging the woman’s face. “Whoa. That’s freaky.”

  “What? Let me see.”

  Elle has the tablet up close to her face, squinting at it with one eye and then the other. “This Marley person looks more like Grandma than you do. She could be Grandma. Well, if Grandma wasn’t dead, I mean.”

  The word dead splatters over me like a bucket of ice water over the head, breaking through the numbness of my shock and raising a terrible, empty ache at the center of my chest where my heart is no longer beating. I can’t get a breath either in or out, and for one eternal moment I think maybe I’m going to die here and now.

  Heat comes rushing back in, and with it breath whooshes into my lungs. My heart makes up for lost time, running way too fast.

  “Look,” Elle says, turning the screen. She’s magnified the photo of the woman so that her face fills the screen. I feel like I’m looking at a ghost.

  This is my mother’s face. The same lips, the same cheekbones—even the way the hair swirls up and off her forehead in a smooth wave. The hair is blonde and curly, not dark and smooth, but a perm and some bleach could pull that off easily enough.

  What haunts me most is seeing my eyes in my mother’s face, wearing an expression that could never be mine. They are the same wide-set, blue-green eyes that look at me out of the mirror every day. But where m
ine always seem to be asking questions, hers have all the answers.

  The screen wavers in front of me, and I realize my hands are shaking. I close my eyes to break the spell, to shut out this face, and immediately see the child version, the imaginary friend Marley of my childhood. I can’t begin to understand what happened here. How my over-responsible, zealous, helicopter parent of a mother could have somehow forgotten a child.

  Waves of dizziness wash over me, and Elle barely rescues the tablet from a plunge to the floor. I fall back on the bed, staring up at the ceiling.

  “We have to go see her,” Elle says. “We can listen to the band. And then you can talk to her after.”

  My lips are numb, and my voice sounds foreign to my own ears. “We can’t go anywhere right now, Elle Belle. We have Grandma’s funeral to plan. And we have to figure out what to do about Grandpa.”

  “We don’t have to go anywhere. They’ll be here. Well, almost here. Kettle Falls at the Northern Ales on, let’s see, Friday night. Family friendly, it says, so don’t even think about not taking me with you.”

  “Elle. We can’t go.”

  I say it with conviction, but I’m torn. Marley. After all these years. The possibility of seeing her, of connecting, of doing something about those ragged threads of incomplete memories that keep snagging my current reality and tugging me backward is deeply alluring.

  “Why can’t we go?” Elle demands.

  “Because Grandma. People don’t go to concerts right after somebody dies.”

  “I don’t see why not.” Her face retreats out of my field of vision, leaving me alone with the ceiling. There is a tiny spider up there, moving around on spider business. I let my gaze fixate on him, one small black speck in an expanse of white, or almost white. It comes to me that if Dad goes into a nursing home, I’ll need to sell this house to pay for it. And then I get sucked into wondering how I can possibly navigate everything that needs doing here while still maintaining my apartment in Kansas City. I can’t afford to fly back and forth. I’ve already maxed out my credit card to pay for this trip. I can’t afford to take more time off.

  The truth is, the time I’ve already taken is going to make it pretty near impossible to cover my bills this month. I live way too close to my margins. The temp agency I’m currently working for doesn’t provide benefits, so I’m not getting vacation pay. My only savings resides in the account where Greg deposits child support, a fund that I dip into only when Elle needs something I can’t otherwise provide. A familiar web of worry and indecision grounds me in my accustomed reality. The worry points are different, but the feeling is the same. I’m still me, even if my mother is not who I always thought she was. This is strangely comforting. My breath eases, my heart slows. My eyelids grow heavy, and I am sorely tempted to drift off into sleep. Elle, oblivious, keeps up a running commentary, her fingers still moving.