by Lou Aronica
Of course, she knew her parents didn’t have a great marriage. That was pretty hard to miss. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen them hold hands or kiss, and sometimes they were unnecessarily harsh with each other. But she hadn’t expected them just to give up. That’s not what people did if they really cared about their families.
And for her father to pretend that everything was going to be fine when any idiot knew that it wouldn’t was just plain insulting. At least her mother had the decency to show that she was upset. Dad walked around like he’d been whacked on the head with a sledgehammer, but whenever he saw her, he smiled and talked to her about what they were going to do together the next weekend. What was with him? He hadn’t even put on this much of a show when she was sick.
Watching him drive away that Sunday afternoon was one of the saddest experiences of her entire life. She started crying as soon as his car disappeared and her mother held her for what seemed like hours, letting her get as much of it out of her system as she could. Eventually they went inside and played Scattergories in the den while they ate Girl Scout cookies for dinner. Later that night, when Becky asked her to explain what had happened, her mother told her straight out that she and her father had been having serious problems for a long time. She didn’t try to pretend that she didn’t know what led to the breakup the way her father did. At least her mom took her seriously.
By the time Dad called that night, Becky’s anger with him was over the top.
“Hey, babe, was the rest of your day okay?” he said.
What did he think? “It was okay.”
“It’s almost bedtime, right?”
“Yeah, I guess I’ll be going up in a few minutes.”
There was a long pause on the phone then, and Becky wondered what her father was doing. Was he just planning to sit there like this? Was this his idea of being with her? Finally, he said, “Wanna do a story?”
“A story?”
“You know, we can do a story on the phone like we did that time I was away on business.”
Becky couldn’t believe he would even try to suggest this. “I don’t want to do a story, Dad.”
There was another pause and then her father said, “Okay. We can wait until next weekend.”
Becky felt her throat tightening. “Not next weekend, either.”
“What do you mean?” His voice seemed a little shaky when he said this, like maybe she had gotten through to him a little.
“I don’t want to do Tamarisk stories anymore.” Becky said. She could feel her own voice wavering, but she got the words out.
“Babe, I know things feel very confusing right now, but . . .”
“. . . Dad, stop. Don’t treat me like a little kid. I’m not a little kid.”
Her father’s voice was quiet when he responded. “I know you’re not, babe.”
“I’m done with Tamarisk, Dad.”
Another long delay. “If that’s the way you feel right now, it’s okay.”
Becky gripped the telephone tighter. “That’s the way I feel, period.” She felt her eyes watering and she knew she was going to have a tough time keeping things together. “Listen, I have to get to bed.”
“Okay, babe, you go. I love you.”
“Yeah, love you, too, Dad.”
Becky started crying again as soon as she got off the phone. And when she lay down in her bed and thought about what she had said to her father about Tamarisk, she cried some more. But she wasn’t going to change her mind. Everything was different now. That meant that Tamarisk had to go.
Now, on the fourth anniversary of that terrible day, her father was still acting like everything was okay— even though it was so obvious that he wasn’t okay, that he hadn’t really been okay since he left.
“So why do you think he didn’t say anything?” Lonnie said.
“He probably doesn’t want me to think about it. He probably thinks he’s protecting me or something. Can you believe that?”
“Have you ever talked about it?”
“Yeah, of course we’ve talked about it. I mean, it’s kind of hard to make believe it didn’t happen for four whole years. But he never gets into it with me. He never tells me what he’s really feeling. He never tells me his side of the story. And, you know, I always thought we were pretty good at talking before this. But he’s like Ghost Dad or something now. He’s there but he’s not really there, you know what I mean?”
“No idea.”
“That’s because you’ve been living the world’s easiest life for the last fourteen years. Have you even gotten a pimple yet?”
“We aren’t talking about my pimples—and yes, I have gotten some—we’re talking about your father.”
The phone felt heavy in Becky’s hand. “I don’t want to talk about my father anymore.”
“Sounds like he’s not the only one avoiding the subject.”
“Give me a break, okay? You know I have an especially hard time on this day. My mom is off on a hot date with her new husband and my dad is a zombie. Is there really anything more to say?”
“No, I guess that really says it all.”
Becky suddenly felt very tired. “Amazingly, it does. Look, I’m gonna go to bed. This day is definitely through for me.”
“I could probably sneak out of the house if you need me to.”
Imagining Lonnie slinking down from the roof of her house gave Becky the closest thing to a smile she’d had in hours. “We’ll save that for a real crisis. I’ll survive tonight.”
“Are you sure?”
Becky closed her eyes. When she did, she caught the expression on her father’s face when she’d turned to get out of the car earlier. She’d missed it before. He seemed like he was waiting for something.
“Yeah, I’m sure. I always do.”
3
The whispers were quiet. The shouting less enraged than usual. Gage settled into this moment of temporary equilibrium. Moments such as these always passed quickly. The equilibrium never lasted. Not everyone was fit for the universe as it was. Unfortunately, Gage couldn’t remake the universe. That was far beyond his capacities. All Gage could do was gift and imagine.
One whisper rose above the others. It was familiar in some ways, but with a different timbre. Gage had not centered on this particular voice before. It was a weary voice. One that had suffered a shattering experience. It was the voice of age on youth.
Gage concentrated on the voice more carefully. There was more to her story. Significantly more. A sense of disconnection. This story had ended before it properly began.
With astonishment, Gage realized that this voice was the direct product of an earlier gift. That happened exceedingly infrequently. Never before in this way. In the face of this extraordinary embellishment of a gift, however, there were dangers. Profound dangers. This voice—in fact the provenance of this voice—was in significant trouble. Mortal trouble.
The whisperer stopped whispering. Too much pain. Too much repression. It did not have enough resources to continue the story, though continuing the story mattered more to her than anything else.
Gage gifted the whisperer. At the very least, this would provide a semblance of serenity. Maybe more. Maybe a way to reconnect with the source, a way to continue the story.
When the opportunity arose, Gage would gift with the bridge. The two would need to cross it on their own, though. They would need to find their own way to harmonize their whispers.
Until then, Gage would continue to listen.
These stories held so much promise.
Lisa liked going to bars. Since Chris liked Lisa, considered her his dearest friend, he went to bars with her. For him, places of this sort had outlived their usefulness when he graduated college. Did he really need someone else to pour a drink for him? It wasn’t as if his glass of Cabernet was being prepared in any way. If he could choose from a wider selection of wine, he would never choose the one he was drinking now, if he could choose the music, he would certainly choose
something less overplayed, and a chair with a back would have been nice. Lisa enjoyed going to these places, though, for reasons she’d never made clear in all the years they’d known each other. Therefore, they went.
“I really think it’s possible I could make my mother’s death look like an accident,” she said wistfully.
“You think that, but the crime scene investigators would get you.”
She slumped dramatically. “You’re probably right. Damned technological breakthroughs.”
“Besides, I don’t think her calling you three times a day is justification for murder.”
Lisa threw her hands above her head. “That’s because you don’t have to take the phone calls. Try listening every day to a twenty-minute summation of last night’s TV shows. Try listening to her petty complaints about her friend Millie over and over and over again. Try listening to her word-by-word recollections of the conversations she has with the produce guy at Stop & Shop. You wouldn’t rush to judgment so quickly then.”
Lisa made an elaborate show of draining her glass—she was drinking Cosmopolitans tonight—and putting it back down on the tabletop.
Chris laughed. “Your mother calls me ‘Honey.’ She can do no wrong as far as I’m concerned.”
“I need a new best friend.”
Lisa signaled the waiter for another drink. She put both elbows on the table and leaned toward him. This pose made her look easily twenty years younger, especially in the dim light of the bar. Chris often wondered what Lisa had been like as a college student. She seemed perpetually in her late thirties, even though they’d met when they were in their mid-twenties.
“What’s new at work?”
Chris sighed automatically. “A woman on my staff who’s on pregnancy leave called yesterday to tell me she’s decided to be a stay-at-home mother, a guy came into my office today to tell me he’s being sexually harassed, and management has decided to limit salary increases to two percent this year. Have I told you lately how much I love being an administrator?”
“You should’ve taken that spot in Rhode Island.”
“It was the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“It was the right job.”
“In the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“The job in Westport, then.”
“It was a start-up. The risks were too big.”
Lisa patted his hand. “You do know that their stock has gone through the roof, don’t you?”
Chris pulled his hand away and gestured with it. “Yes, I know their stock has gone through the roof. Unfortunately, my crystal ball was in the shop the day they offered me the job, so I couldn’t see a year into the future.”
Lisa shook her head, glanced around the room, and pretended to concentrate on the song playing through the sound system. Chris simply focused on his only-adequate wine.
When Lisa’s new drink arrived, she clinked her glass against his, drawing his attention. “So you never get a chance just to wriggle anymore?”
“Wriggling” was Lisa’s pet name for genetic engineering, which Chris had done for fifteen years before being kicked upstairs two years ago. “I haven’t wriggled in centuries. Nope, a Ph.D. in Botany is really only good for one thing these days: budget reviews.”
“You didn’t have to take the promotion, you know.”
“I shouldn’t have taken the promotion. But I did. That ship has sailed. Let’s not have this conversation for the second time in five minutes.”
“Hey, at least you can get a promotion in your job. I’m stuck in the same spot until I retire.”
Chris smirked. “Yeah, tough spot. You sold two multimillion-dollar homes last month, right? As long as you continue to cater to high-end, recession-proof clientele, you get promotions all the time.”
“But no sexual harassment cases.”
“You could always start one.”
Lisa snorted. “You haven’t been down to the offices lately. The only thing I could start is an asexual harassment case.”
Chris laughed in spite of himself. “Speaking of sex, what’s the latest with Ben?”
“I think he’s in Melbourne tonight. Either that or Taiwan. He touches back down on this continent sometime next week. I think he has a drive-by past Connecticut scheduled before the end of the spring.”
“It’s the perfect relationship.”
Lisa rolled her eyes. “Yeah, perfect. We’ve been together for nearly three years and I think we’ve spent less than a hundred days in the same place.”
“And you never fight and the sex is great.”
“True on both counts.”
“What’s the downside?”
“The downside?” Lisa looked around the room and leaned forward farther, as though she was about to impart a state secret. “I think I love him.”
This was a surprise. In all the years they’d been friends, Chris had never heard Lisa say she was in love with anyone. “Really?”
“I’m probably just kidding myself. But I miss him more all the time. I’ve been making him stay on the phone with me longer and longer lately.”
“Like mother, like daughter.”
Lisa reached across and punched Chris on the arm. “That was totally unfair.”
Chris rubbed his arm. “So what are you going to do about these . . . feelings?”
“What can I do about them?”
“Tell him?”
“And screw up what we have? I don’t think so. No, not a chance.” She looked at Chris as though he had three heads. “So I assume since you haven’t said a word about Patty that your date with her went the way your dates usually go.”
Chris cringed at the mention of the latest woman Lisa had fixed him up with. She’d been doing this since a few months after the divorce. Lisa seemed to have an endless supply of women for him to meet and an equally large supply of optimism about blind dating in spite of Chris’s gruesome track record. “I’m afraid so.”
“What’d you do wrong this time?”
Chris pretended to be offended. “Why do you automatically assume it’s me screwing up these blind dates?”
“Are you actually asking me that question?”
Chris knew not to pursue this. “She seemed really nice. She likes books, she likes sushi, and she has beautiful eyes. I thought things were going pretty well for a while there.”
“Until . . .”
“Until I got sad.”
“You got sad? Amazingly, I haven’t heard this one before.”
“There was the thing with the anniversary.”
“Ah yes, the day that will live in infamy.”
Chris shot Lisa a look to say that this wasn’t something to screw around about, and she threw up her hands as if to acknowledge that she’d slipped.
“We should just remember next year not to do something like that around this time,” Chris said. “I’m not very good with it.”
“Sweetie, you have to get past it at some point.”
“I am past it. That doesn’t mean I can’t mark it in some way.”
Lisa nodded very slowly. Chris wasn’t sure if this meant she was acknowledging his point or reproaching him. “How was Becky when you saw her that night?”
Chris shrugged. “Who knows? I might be the last person on the planet capable of answering that question.”
“Teenagers are tough.”
“It wasn’t going to be like this with us.”
“Actually, it probably was. From everything I’ve heard, it doesn’t matter what your relationship is like with your kid before she becomes a teenager. Once she’s there, all the wires get crossed. I know what you mean, though. You guys clicked.”
“Excellent use of the past tense.”
Lisa reached out for his hand again, but this time she squeezed it. Chris squeezed back and made a moment’s eye contact with her. How many times had she propped him up over the years, when Becky was sick, when things had started to break down with Polly, when he moved out? There really was no substitute
for old friends.
“You know, for some reason I still think about that fantasy world you guys created,” Lisa said. “What a great way to spend time with your kid. Sometimes, I’ll be showing a house, and I’ll walk into some kid’s room and it makes me think of the two of you telling stories together. That was an amazing thing.”
It was unquestionably an amazing thing. The inspiration for it might have been the rightest moment Chris had ever experienced. It was a week after Becky’s first chemotherapy treatment and the five-year-old had been visibly frightened and confused. She had trouble sleeping and he had already spent several nights up with her trying to find some way to comfort her, some way to ease her mind. Chris had never believed Becky was going to die—his failure to “take her illness seriously enough” was in fact one of the things he and Polly had been fighting about at that point—but he couldn’t think of any way to imbue his daughter with the same confidence.
On their fourth night up together, Chris sat against Becky’s headboard with her head on his chest, their usual position. They hadn’t spoken for at least a quarter of an hour, but Becky was no closer to sleep than she had been when her shuffling in her room had woken him up an hour or so earlier. He hated that this was so scary and disorienting for her. He wished he could simply tell her she was going to be okay and that she would believe this. Her body was telling something different, though.
