Whisper to Me

by Nick Lake

  “Cass?” you called.

  “Yeah.”

  “You locked out?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Come up. We’re watching a movie. Some trash about a shark fighting an octopus. It’s awesome.”

  I thought for a second. At least the voice would go, if I was with you.

  I climbed the steps, and you opened the door wide for me.

  “You okay?” you asked.

  I nodded. “I got locked out.”

  “But you’ve been crying.”

  “I was upset about being locked out.”

  You gave me a sympathetic look mingled with doubt. “Well, I’m sure your dad will be back soon,” you said.

  That’s the problem, I thought. But I didn’t say anything. You ushered me in. You’d turned it into a dump, the two of you. Pizza boxes everywhere, stacked like Jenga. Beer cans, take-out menus. Clothes hanging from furniture to dry, or maybe just to hang there, I don’t know.

  “It’s a mess,” you said. “Sorry.”

  I shrugged. “Not my apartment. But don’t let Dad see it.”

  “He doesn’t come up here.”

  “He might.”

  Shane, who was standing in the door to the living room, made an exaggerated scared face. “We’d better clean tomorrow,” he said.

  “I can do it,” I said.

  You frowned at me. “You want to clean our apartment?”

  “I like cleaning,” I said. Also I didn’t like my bedroom, I mean the voice was always so loud there, and it had been better in the apartment. There were less memories there. Fewer memories. Damn autocorrect, underlining my words in green. “I can do it when you’re at work, the two of you.”

  “Seriously, Cass, it’s gross, you can’t—”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “I say let her,” said Shane. “We can pay you in beer.”

  “I don’t drink.”

  “Pizza.”

  “My dad owns a pizza restaurant.”

  “Money.”

  I thought for a second. “No. Books. Bring me books from the library. I’ll keep this place clean. Okay?”

  You looked at me. “You can’t get books from the library?”

  “No.”

  You seemed confused by this. Of course now you understand why. “Uh, deal,” you said.

  We went into the living room and watched the movie. It was stupid and also, as you’d said, awesome. I was sitting next to you on the couch. I could feel you, feel your leg next to mine, even though there was four inches of air between our skin, and clothes. It was still like we were touching, like our bodies were magnets, held close to each other—something in our molecules vibrating; buzzing.

  There was a crunch of tires on gravel.

  “Oh no,” I said. “Dad.”

  I jumped up; ran to the door and pulled it open, started down the steps. I was on the bottom one when Dad looked up, his hand on the door of the Dodge as he closed it. He looked at me silently. Then he walked toward the door of the house. I thought: Maybe he’s going to go easy on me. Maybe he’s going to give me a break.

  I followed him, and he stayed silent as he held the door for me, just like you had done an hour before with the door to the apartment, but also so very differently.

  “Dad—”

  “No, Cass. Don’t ******* even. What were you doing?”

  “I forgot my key and—”

  “You went out? At night? When you have a ****** mental illness and there’s a ****** guy killing ****** women in this town?”

  “I—”

  “I don’t care. And you went up there? When we’ve had a RULE, Cass, a goddamn RULE, since you were twelve ******* years old, that you don’t go in the apartment when it’s boys renting. What were you thinking?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  He put his hand out and clasped it around my arm, tight enough to make me gasp. “On THIS ******* day of all days? THIS day? Did you even remember it was the anniversary? You have to be ****** kidding me. You don’t leave this ****** house again after sunset, do you hear me?”

  “Yes.”

  He shook his head. “Upstairs,” he said.

  I started up the stairs. “Are you having fun now?” said the voice.

  That night, I lay on my bed and imagined that I was a bird, flying above Oakwood. Same view as on the Ferris wheel. Looking down on the sudden small beauty of the town, embracing it with the outstretch of my wings, untethered from the ground.

  Floating.

  Inhuman trajectory and lift: carried higher by updraft of warm air, no effort at all, wings arched above me. The houses and streets dwindling, forming into fractal patterns, dissolving into distant abstractions of light; the dark mass of the ocean.

  Floating on the air. Freed from all movement and decay, freed from the voice, blessed with a new perspective. The place where birds live: the same world but different, in the mirror of the sky, inverse to us as death is to life, hovering in the spaces where our roofs and cars and towers aren’t; in the gaps; in the blue brightness; a kind of heaven.

  DR. LEWIS: So things have regressed.

  ME: (nods)

  DR. LEWIS: But you deployed the strategies we talked about. The welcoming. Scheduling.

  ME: Yes.

  DR. LEWIS: And things improved?

  ME: Yes.

  DR. LEWIS: But now they’re worse again.

  ME: (nods)

  DR. LEWIS: Has anything happened? Anything that might have triggered a return of the trauma?

  ME: (Thinks about the restaurant. Blood. Dad getting home and finding me in the apartment. Tiles. Me forgetting Mom’s day.) No.

  DR. LEWIS: What does the seventh of August mean to you?

  ME: (looks up sharply, breathes hard) What?

  DR. LEWIS: The seventh of August. It’s a date. What does it mean to you?

  ME: Are you … What the … I …

  DR. LEWIS: It’s the day your mother died, I think?

  ME: How do you …

  DR. LEWIS: The Internet.

  ME: Oh.

  DR. LEWIS: It’s also two days ago.

  ME: Yes.

  DR. LEWIS: Do you think that might have something to do with your regression?

  ME: (cries)

  DR. LEWIS: Here. (He hands over a box of tissues.)

  THE VOICE: Are you crying again, you ******* pathetic piece of ****? All of this is your fault. You did it. I died, and you did nothing to—

  DR. LEWIS: You said the voice was a woman’s. An adult woman’s?

  ME: (nods)

  DR. LEWIS: You have any theories about that?

  ME: (shrugs) It might be the voice of one of the … one of the prostitutes that was killed. Wanting me to, you know, solve the murder.

  ME: (Watches, carefully. Having said this fake-casually. Wanting to see what he makes of it.)

  DR. LEWIS: Right.

  ME: It adds up, huh? A woman. Speaking after I find the foot … wanting revenge. Wanting justice. Maybe that’s where I come in. To … to get him. To make him pay.

  DR. LEWIS: Maybe.

  ME: You think I’m crazy, don’t you?

  DR. LEWIS: I certainly don’t think that.

  ME: But you think I’m deluded.

  DR. LEWIS: No, I think you’re … hiding from certain things.

  ME: Hiding from what?

  DR. LEWIS: You say your role is to find the killer. What have you done to further that goal?

  ME: Um.

  DR. LEWIS: Anything? Any progress at all?

  ME: I read some books. About him. About other serial killers.

  DR. LEWIS: (significant pause)

  ME: Okay, so I have been busy with other things.

  DR. LEWIS: Busy? Did you get a job?

  ME: (pause) No.

  DR. LEWIS: I have a theory. Do you want to know what it is?

  ME: No, but I have a feeling you’re going to tell me anyway.

  DR. LEWIS: My theory is that this notion of yours, a
bout the voice being one of the murdered women … it’s a distraction. Pure and simple. That’s why you’ve done nothing about it. So let’s think about other adult women. Other women the voice could represent.

  ME: Like who?

  DR. LEWIS: Your mother was an adult woman.

  THE VOICE: TEAR OUT YOUR ******** EYES, YOU ******.

  ME: (head reeling, roiling, a receptacle for liquid, set spinning, detached from my body and sliding around on a smooth

  tiled

  floor—my mind revolving, finding no purchase on the slippery

  tiles,

  and that’s really what it feels like; like my body is gone and I’m just a head, with eyes that for some reason are seeing a static image of the Doc sitting on his chair, the blank walls, the coffee dispenser and the cookies on the table, while my head itself is rolling uncontrollably, unstoppably, on that

  tiled

  floor)

  THE VOICE:(SCREAMING INCOHERENTLY, A KLAXON OF ANGER AND CURSING AND JUST, JUST, JUST AWFULNESS)

  I put my hands over my eyes and my head between my knees. I took deep, long breaths. There is an expression—my mind was spinning. Usually it’s just an expression. But that was what was actually happening. My mind was a whirligig; I felt sick.

  DR. LEWIS: Cass?

  I looked up. I wanted this feeling to stop, I wanted to never feel like this again. “What are you … I mean … ,” I said.

  Dr. Lewis was looking scared, and at the same time—not pleased, but like something he had been suspecting had been confirmed. “The voice is very angry with you, is that right?” he said.

  “Tear out your throat,” said the voice. “Tear it out, right now.”

  “Oh God,” I said. “Help me.”

  “I’m trying to, Cassie,” said the Doc. “It may not feel like it, but I’m trying.”

  “It’s not my mother!” I said. “The voice is not my mother!”

  “Okay, okay. Take a deep breath.” He paused while I panted, trying to get my heartbeat under control. “We often find that people, especially younger people, respond to trauma with anger. Perhaps they feel angry with a person who abused them. Perhaps they feel angry with someone for dying. But they are taught to hold that anger in, that it is inappropriate to express it. So they turn it on themselves. The voice begins to punish them.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying maybe you are angry with your mother for dying. Maybe the voice is an expression of that.”

  “I’m not angry with my mother.”

  “Not consciously, no, but it’s possible that—”

  THE VOICE: It’s you. It’s your fault. It’s all you.

  I stood up, quickly. My plastic chair fell, landed on its side, the thin metal legs sticking out like it was a wounded animal.

  “It’s ME,” I shouted. “It’s ME, okay? I’m not angry with my mom for dying. I’m angry with me. It was MY FAULT, okay? Don’t you understand? I KILLED HER.”

  I killed her.

  Me.

  Stupid, disgusting me.

  In my memory there’s a jump cut.

  One moment I’m standing there screaming, and then, without seeming to cross the intervening space, without seeming to operate as a body in a physical universe, requiring time to move from one point to another, the next moment the doctor has his arms around me and is holding me.

  Holding me.

  Do you know something?

  It was the first time someone had held me for three years. Dad had never, Dad had never, Dad had never—

  My thoughts were a storm. A maelstrom. A whirlpool. Charybdis.

  My dad never—

  It was me—

  I KILLED HER.

  My breath was hitching in my chest; I was not a body but just lungs and a mind, a pounding heart. I was broken into pieces, like Echo, like Orpheus, torn into my constituent organs and pieces.

  Sparagmos.

  I was all over the floor, scattered.

  “It’s going to be okay,” said Dr. Lewis, over and over again. “This is a breakthrough. This is a breakthrough.”

  But it didn’t feel like a breakthrough.

  It felt like a break.

  Like I was broken.

  “I have to go,” I said. My whole being felt like a slept-on hand; tingling, filled with pain.

  “I don’t think that’s wise. I think you need—”

  “I have to go.”

  “You shouldn’t be alone at this point,” he said. “This is a very sensitive time. Perhaps your dad could pick you up?” He was standing back from me now, one pace, his hands on my arms. The parts of me that had fallen all over the floor had started to knit back together again.

  “Are you ******* kidding me?” I asked.

  “He’s at work?”

  “No! He knows I killed her! Don’t you see? He knows. That’s why he hates me.”

  “You think your father hates you?”

  “No.”

  “Good, because—”

  “I know he hates me.”

  “Cass …”

  “It was my fault. Why are you not understanding that? He knows it, the same as me.”

  He shook his head. His gray hair rippled. “I know you feel like that, but—”

  “But it’s true. Now let me go.”

  He withdrew his hands, quickly, like I was burning. “At least call Paris,” he said. “Have her come be with you.”

  I opened my mouth to say something angry, then stopped. “Yeah, okay,” I said. I took out my cell and dialed. It rang for a long time, and I was about to hang up when Paris answered.

  “Hey,” she said flatly. Distantly. At any other time I would have wondered what was wrong.

  “It’s Cass.”

  “I know.” Her voice still not quite there. Absent, somehow coming from someone or somewhere else. A ventriloquist’s dummy, talking to me.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Nothing. Just had a bad time doing a party, that’s all.”

  I realized I hadn’t even asked her what was wrong; but she’d answered anyway; she’d assumed I’d asked. That was how much of a selfish asshole I was.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  A sound like a shrug made of air. “It happens,” she said.

  “Did they hurt you?”

  “No, Cass. No. Not … physically.”

  “Good. I know Julie worries that—”

  “I’m fine, Cass.”

  “Good. That’s good. But I mean, are you sure? Because you sound kind of—”

  “Look just ****** leave it, okay, Cass?” Her voice had a sudden coldness in it I had never heard before, like the coldness of stone; sharp-edged, mineral, angry but distant at the same time. Somehow … not human. It’s hard for me to describe. All the time I’d known her I’d never seen her as someone with … issues, you know? Despite what she said about her drugs and her therapy and whatever, she seemed so together.

  That was the first time I saw another shape underneath her, the contours of a troubled mind.

  A pause.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have called but … but, Paris, I need you,” I said, all in a rush. “Please, I really—”

  I heard her snap into the real world. Like a penknife closing. “Where are you, Cass?”

  “At the bowling—”

  “Ten minutes. I’ll be there in ten minutes.” She hung up.

  I turned to Dr. Lewis. “She’s coming. I’ll wait for her outside.”

  Dwight the cop opened the door as I walked unsteadily toward it—he was always the first to arrive. Dr. Lewis looked torn for a moment, but then finally he nodded. I guess he had heard Paris’s side of the conversation, so he knew I wasn’t lying.

  “Hey, Cass,” said Dwight. “You joining group today?”

  “Not today, Dwight,” said the Doc.

  “Hey, ****, you okay, Cass?”

  “Yes. No. I don’t know. I think I … realized something. About
myself.”

  Dwight nodded slowly. His big, kind eyes were full of sympathy. “That’s good, Cass,” he said. He always used your name when he was talking to you. I think it was a trick he learned from the cops. “I mean, it doesn’t feel good now. But it’s good.”

  I nodded at him. I couldn’t talk.

  “I’ll see you next week,” he said. He was wearing a T-shirt that said NJPD SOFTBALL on it, under a crest.

  I nodded again. Then I walked out of the hall and through the bowling alley, past the glowing lanes, the iridescent balls. And out onto the dusk-lit street. It was raining, softly, the droplets hanging in the air, almost seeming to rise up from the concrete; a cold steam, everywhere.

  I started by leaning against the outside wall of the bowling alley, but my legs wouldn’t hold me up.

  I slumped down until I was sitting on the damp ground. It soaked through my pants, numbed my butt. I wished the mist would numb me all over.

  Around me, the street shimmered. The mattress store on the other side, the 7-Eleven. The cheap hotel with the flashing sign: VACANCIES.

  That was how I felt.

  Like a vacancy.

  At the same time, there was another scene superimposed on the street, bleeding into it. It was the restaurant, Donato’s. The bar counter was over the bowling alley, the pizza oven was behind me; the tables with their red-and-white-checkered cloths were covering the street, the

  tiles

  were gleaming where concrete and asphalt should be. Ghost figures came and went; waiters, customers. Dad wasn’t there—Dad was in New York, talking to a new tomato supplier, one who flew the tomatoes over from Tuscany. Mom and I were holding the fort, as he put it, running the Sunday night shift—I was taking orders and she was hosting, greeting people as they came in.

  Dad didn’t like leaving us alone. That was one of the worst things, one of the ways his fear and his foreboding ended up getting confirmed, ended up bricking him into the personality he started out with already.

  He’d bought Mom a gun. A small pistol, two shots—a Derringer. I don’t think it was legal, but he got it from some gun fair somewhere. The idea of it was that you hid it in a sock or something. Only she didn’t like it, didn’t like carrying it, and she didn’t have it on her that day.