Whisper Me This

by Kerry Anne King

  Ritual completed, guilt and retribution program firmly reinstalled, Tony pulls himself out of the flashback. He knows the drill. Focus on what is. The feel of the floor beneath his feet. The gunpowder smell of the shooting range. The ongoing blitz of rapid-fire shots. He drags air in and out of his lungs in steadying breaths.

  Only then does he open his eyes, fix on his target, and begin to shoot. As usual, his bullets hit the target in tightly clustered groups at head and heart. He’s a deadly shot. And this is why he does not, cannot, will not carry a gun or have one in the house. Why he couldn’t take the gun away for Maisey.

  He is not to be trusted with women any more than he should be trusted with guns.

  On the way out, he secures his weapon in the locker he rents for that purpose and then says, casually, to Brent behind the desk, “I hear Leah Addington passed. Know anything about the funeral?”

  “Wondered where she was,” Brent says. “Damn. She was just getting good. Hope nothing bad went down?”

  “Some kind of stroke or something,” Tony says. “May she rest in peace.”

  Following a hunch that a woman with a gun like that, loaded and ready, might want to know how to shoot it, he’d asked the question. He’d like to ask how long she’d been coming to the range but knows better than to show curiosity. Still, he’s earned a couple of important pieces of intel. Leah Addington has not been shooting guns for her entire life, and Brent has reason to believe her death might be from something other than natural causes.

  Tony isn’t sure if he should tell Maisey—what would be the point? She was obviously shaken up by the fact that her mother even had a gun. What he wants to know is why a woman like Leah had a gun in the first place.

  “Her daughter and granddaughter are at the house,” Tony says. “Any reason to believe they’re in danger?”

  “Nothing specific. Look, since she’s dead, I’ll tell you this. She came in here a few months back and asked if someone could teach her how to shoot. Determined little woman. Didn’t talk much. Certainly didn’t look like the gun-owning type. But something had made her twitchy. Asked questions about shooting to kill.”

  “Thanks. I’ll keep an eye out, then.”

  He wonders, though, as he walks out to his car. What kind of threat could appear out of the blue to spook a woman like Leah? Briefly he weighs the possibility that Walter is the danger, but just as quickly discards this. You can tell a lot about a man by the way his daughter treats him.

  Tony will have to keep an eye on the family, just in case. A wave of pleasure sneaks up on him at the idea of spending time with Maisey. It’s tempting to entertain it, to justify it, to tell himself it will do no harm. But he doesn’t believe this. Not really.

  A real relationship is a thing he cannot allow. He will help her as if she was one of his sisters, but that will be the end of it.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Dad sits in a chair, looking mindlessly toward the window, clearly lost inside himself. When we arrive his gaze comes around to us, but there’s no light in his eyes. Elle hugs him, installs herself on the edge of his chair, and begins the sort of chatter only a twelve-year-old girl is capable of. Every word draws him back to us, away from whatever mindless zone he’s been drifting through.

  When an aide brings in a dinner tray and sets it up for him, he actually eats most of it. Every time his hands forget what they’re doing, Elle reminds him.

  It’s the dessert that does us in.

  He takes one bite of hospital apple pie and makes a face. “What is this supposed to be?”

  “Pie,” Elle says, poking at the rubbery crust and crunchy apple pieces with the fork. “At least, I think it’s pie.”

  “That’s not a pie,” he protests. “We’ll get Leah to make you a real one, just as soon as I get out of here.”

  My mom’s pies are legendary. With his words I taste an intoxicating bite of salty, tender crust, tart but buttery sweet apple, cinnamon, and brown sugar. It melts in my mouth but sticks in my throat.

  There will be no more pies. Not one. Not like that. Nobody else, anywhere in the world, makes pies the way my mother made them.

  Dad sees it. I watch the knowing steal a little more of the strength from his face, as if the very bones of his cheeks and jaw are being eaten away by my mother’s absence.

  “I’ll make you a pie, Grandpa,” Elle says into the suffocating silence that follows his words.

  His eyes travel toward her voice, hover, and then find me.

  “I want to go home,” he says, for all the world like a lost child.

  I have to tell him that I live in Kansas and don’t have room for him. I have to tell him I’ll be selling the house. That there is no home to go to.

  But the words are a giant, prickly cactus lodged in my throat. My heart hurts, in a truly physical way, an ache that frightens me with its intensity.

  A long silence falls. Tears track down his cheeks, but he doesn’t weep, and the silent agony does further damage to my own heart. I cannot begin to comfort his grief; it’s too massive for me to even touch.

  Elle feels no such limitation. She settles herself into his lap, wraps her arms around his neck, and leans her head against his chest. “I love you, Grandpa,” she says, and the words shake loose both his pain and my own, so that before I even know it’s hit me, I’m bent over at the waist, torn apart by weeping I can no longer hold back.

  I cross the space between us and kneel in front of his chair, burying my face in his knees. His weeping and mine make a rhythm, two pieces of a whole. The third and final piece is missing, will always be missing, but in that moment we begin to heal around that loss, bringing Elle in to complete the circle.

  Little by little the intensity of my grief eases. My sobs soften and slow. I hear my father’s breath following this same pattern, and soon I am aware only of our breathing—mine, Elle’s, and my father’s.

  I push myself back and sit on the floor, wiping my face with my sleeve and looking around for much-needed tissues. Dad’s arms are around Elle, his cheek resting on the top of her head. His face is wet, his eyes red. She, too, is smudged by tears, and if my heart was not so newly emptied, I would feel a fresh pang at the weight of knowledge and maturity I see there.

  Too late I wonder if I should have sheltered her from this. Greg would have. My mother would have. But then I feel the warm tug of connection between her heart and mine, mine and Dad’s, and for the first time in my life it occurs to me that maybe my own weird way of being in the world is right after all.

  I’m mulling all of this when the door opens and Dr. Margoni comes in. Her eyes roam over the three of us, and there is no judgment in her expression. If anything, her expression softens, and she offers a gentle smile and also a hand.

  “You look like you may be stuck,” she says.

  Her fingers are slim and cool, but she is strong. I let her help me back up onto my feet. My body feels different, as if something has shifted. A different center of gravity that makes me feel not weighted, exactly, but grounded. As if I’m not about to fly away next time a puff of wind or emotion hits me.

  “So,” she says, once I’m on my feet and have found my way first to the tissues and then to the sink to wash my hands. She passes the box of tissues to Elle, who quietly dries her eyes, and to Dad, who honks his nose loudly, clears his throat, and shifts restlessly in the chair.

  “Walter, your blood work is much better. Your blood sugars are better controlled. The dehydration is resolved. Your blood pressure has come down. How are you feeling?”

  “I feel like my wife just died.” There’s no bitterness or irony in his tone, just flat acceptance of the fact.

  Dr. Margoni nods. “Of course. In a way, that is good and exactly as it should be. That means your emotions are working. Do you know what day it is today?”

  She leads him through a catalogue of basic reality. Where and when we are. Which president is currently in the White House. She makes him copy a drawing, pick up and fold a
piece of paper, repeat the names of three objects.

  Today, he knows some of the answers. He gets the month right, but not the day. He knows he’s in a hospital, but not which one. He picks up a piece of paper as instructed, but forgets to fold it. When she asks him to count backward from one hundred by sevens, he refuses to even try.

  For me, this would make total sense. I can only do backward sevens if I have a calculator. But Dad’s always been a whizz at math, especially calculations. We did a contest between his brain and my calculator once. He won.

  I watch his face as he realizes he’s getting more and more things wrong, and by the end of the ordeal his hands are shaking.

  Dr. Margoni looks grave as she writes a note on her clipboard. Then she sets it aside and gives an assessing look that lights on every one of us. “So, there is no reason to keep you here any longer, and the question becomes this: What next?”

  This is the place where I need to dive in with my plan for him to go into supported living.

  I can’t do it.

  Speaking the words is a physical impossibility, and I realize, in one shaft of illumination, that my life is never just going back to how it was. Whether Walter is my father in blood or not, he has been my father for as long as I can remember. He’s already lost my mother. I won’t be a part of him losing everything else.

  “He comes home,” I say.

  Dr. Margoni looks up at me, startled, her brows rising into smooth arches of question. “With you? To Kansas City?”

  I shake my head. “No. To his house. Here.”

  “I don’t understand,” she says, and then, “Let me clarify. I understand that he wants to go home, and that you want that for him. But he’s going to need a lot of help, at least for a while.”

  I look at my father and try to picture him as one of those forsaken-looking old people in a wheelchair, dozing in front of the TV in a nursing home. As much as I try to tell myself that they’re not really forsaken, that assisted living is not a nursing home, that maybe he’d be happier hanging out with a group of old people instead of mourning at home, it seems impossible.

  But then, the idea of Mom being dead is equally impossible.

  Dad doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t need to. His request to come home is still ringing in my ears. He looks small and unmoored and defenseless. A page from one of my childhood books flashes into my head, a Dr. Seuss extravaganza of gratitude not to be an abandoned sock, mistakenly left behind in a dark cave.

  Dad looks like the picture of that abandoned sock. Limp. Forgotten. Doomed to disintegrate and unravel, thread by slow, lonely thread, without my mother. Without his home.

  Greg and my mother have always said I need to start thinking with my head instead of my heart. My head is ready to supply all sorts of reasons why Dad can’t come home. My heart is whispering something else altogether. I didn’t do what my mother wanted and needed for me to do. If I make the same mistake with my father, I won’t be able to live with the regret.

  “I’m taking him home. We’ll figure something out.”

  Dr. Margoni beams a smile at me that lights up all my own dark and dusty corners. “You should know that if you take him home now, and then decide you can’t handle it, it may be harder to find him a placement,” Dr. Margoni says. “But he can go home today, if you’re sure that’s what you want to do.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Let me go write the orders. A nurse will be in to sign you out in a little bit.”

  As soon as Dr. Margoni is out the door, Elle rushes across the room and squeezes me breathless with a giant bear hug. “This is why I love you,” she says. Then laughs and squeezes me again. “Well, one of the reasons. How long can we stay?”

  “I hadn’t thought,” Dad says, very quietly. “This will disrupt your life too much.”

  “Not much of a life to disrupt,” I tell him, realizing as I say it that this is true. My job is disposable. My apartment contract is up next month. I’m not dating anybody, and none of my friends will miss me much. More importantly, I won’t miss them. Apart from being a mother to Elle, I’ve been skimming the surface of the Life Pool.

  And now my skimmer has been confiscated. I don’t have a life jacket. I’m being dunked unceremoniously into the deep end, and I sure as certain had better learn how to swim.

  Leah’s Journal

  Boots. He is all the reasons why I wanted Maisey to marry Greg, who is all the things I didn’t know to look for. How would I have known? You taught me what a good man is, Walter. Responsible, polite. Successful. Kind.

  Boots was none of these things. His contempt for society and authority was so thick, you could spread it with a butter knife. What was he still doing in school at nineteen? I’ve asked myself this question. The answer, I’d guess, is that he found it fun to torment the teachers in the same way he liked to torment small creatures. Besides, he had a school full of girls who had stars in their eyes every time they looked at him and boys who tried to emulate him.

  He was a god in school. In the real world he was only a wannabe god, and that makes for a dangerous man.

  That night at the dance, he swaggered in late, in his leather jacket and Levi’s. His eyes swept over the gym, the couples dancing, the little knot of girls chattering, the teachers who were supervising, and for some reason, landed on me. My date was elsewhere. Hiding in the bathroom or bailed out the side door, maybe. I wasn’t exactly at odds with the other girls, but not friends, either, which left me very much alone.

  Easy prey. I see that now.

  But when he crossed the room to me, when those glorious eyes zeroed in on mine, I was exalted. Boots had singled out me. Chosen to talk to me. I don’t even remember what he first said. My heart was flooded with the wonder of his attention, my brain misfiring in all directions.

  And when he patted his pocket and said, “Shit. I left my smokes at home,” I was in a position to help him out. My intention was to give him a cigarette. That would be enough from a lowly mortal girl like me.

  But he smiled as if I were suddenly the most beautiful girl in the room.

  “Well, come on then,” he said. And right then and there, he grabbed my hand. Just like that. In front of teachers and students, at the snacks table, he claimed me.

  Me.

  He led me outside in the warm dark, back around behind the school, my hand encased in his. We smoked a cigarette together. He was free with his hands, touching my hair, my shoulder, slipping an arm around my waist. He didn’t kiss me. Not yet. I would have let him, I was already so far gone, but he was smarter than that.

  He led me back into the gym and sealed the deal by dancing with me. My social status climbed through the roof in a single evening. Before the night was over, I’d been invited to parties by people who had previously ignored my existence.

  I was in love. And he was—who knows what he was. Of all the girls at his disposal, why me? What did he see in me that made him choose me? I wondered then. I wonder now. I suppose it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that he did and that I was happy to be chosen.

  And that, dear Walter, is the first of my many sins.

  Chapter Sixteen

  When we get him home, Dad wanders through all the rooms like a visitant ghost, insubstantial and looking for something that no longer exists. He stares at the fireplace, all cleaned up now and emptied of ashes. He shuffles into the kitchen and looks at the place where Mom fell, running his fingers over the edge of the island where she hit her head. I fill a glass with water and hand it to him. He accepts it, but doesn’t drink, looking from the glass to me and back again as if he doesn’t know what it’s for or what to do with it.

  He lurches into movement again, this time into his study. He sits at his desk and carefully sets down the glass, but his hand is shaking, and water sloshes over the edge and forms a puddle that he doesn’t seem to see. He opens and closes the center drawer without touching anything. Gets up and opens the closet that holds the file cabinets. I’ve locked them ba
ck up, and he rattles the drawers but seems content just to know they are secured.

  Wordless, he brushes past me. Down the hall to the bedroom he has always shared with Mom. At the doorway he hesitates, draws in a ragged breath, and sways like a tree in the wind. Elle and I both launch ourselves toward him, ready to break his fall, but he steadies before we reach him. One low, wretched sound strangles in his throat as he walks to the bed, pulls back the covers, and climbs in without bothering to take off his shoes.

  I can’t help noticing that he’s chosen Mom’s side, not his own, or the way he turns and buries his face in her pillow. Feeling like an intruder all at once, I back out and close the door behind me. Elle’s eyes are glassy with tears.

  “Is he okay?” she whispers.

  My best answer is a shrug. “He’s just . . . lost, I think. Has no idea how to be without her.”

  I remember feeling that way myself when I first moved away from home. As fiercely as I craved my independence, my right to be myself and create the margins of my own life, my mother’s competent fingers had been in every corner, every piece of my personal pie. Existence on my own had loomed like an uncharted wilderness. My salvation, then as now, was the country known as Elle.

  “We need a plan,” I tell her. “Get a pen.”

  She scampers off in search of pen and paper. Elle loves lists. I don’t need them, but there’s still something comforting about writing things down in black and white. Of course, her lists are given to great detail, and mine are random jottings, but we’ve been making these documents together since she learned to print her first words.

  When I arrive at the kitchen table, she’s already there. In front of her, geometrically arranged, is a notepad and a pen, two glasses of water, a calendar she’s unearthed from somewhere, and both of our phones. Phones are useful during these planning sessions, since they hold our calendars, our address books, and all the other apps that make life both easier and more complicated all at once.