Whisper to Me

by Nick Lake

  She left it in the restaurant safe, where she always left it.

  Anyway. She was so beautiful. Dark hair pinned up, spilling out in wavy strands, a gray dress, no makeup. Everyone who came in was captivated by her; you could see it. I wanted to look like her one day. To move like her. To smile like her.

  Then I was shaking Parmesan over a woman’s amatriciana and I heard my mother gasp—you know how you recognize your parents’ voices even when they don’t say anything?

  I turned around, and there were two guys standing just inside the door. They both wore ski masks. They were both big. One of them was holding a shotgun and the other a baseball bat. It happened so fast. Faster than your reading this. Faster than my typing it, and I type fast. I took an online course.

  “Empty the register,” said shotgun guy to Mom. She moved over to it, moved strangely, jerkily. She pressed the key to make it open but nothing happened; she must have gotten it wrong; her hands were shaking. She banged it with the side of her hand and the tray shot out. She started pulling out money. The guy closest to her, the one with the baseball bat, held out a bag—an ordinary plastic bag from a supermarket—and she stuffed the cash into it.

  The other guy handed another bag to the diner closest to him. “Pass it around. Watches. Wallets,” he said.

  Everyone in the restaurant took off their watches, took out their wallets.

  “And jewelry,” said the guy.

  Women started removing their earrings. Mom too. They were emeralds surrounded by diamonds, the only nice jewelry she owned; Dad bought them from Tiffany’s for their ten-year anniversary. She nearly ripped them out of her ears and handed them over to the guy who had taken the cash.

  Pretty soon the bag came back to the guys.

  They turned, began to leave, took their eyes off Mom for a second.

  Mom hit the button under the cash register, the panic button that Dad had insisted on installing, an alarm with a link to the local PD. I don’t know why she did it.

  Correction: I do know why she did it. Because times were tough, that’s why. And the restaurant was barely breaking even. We couldn’t afford to lose that money.

  The alarm started blaring. The two men stopped, and their heads twisted to look at Mom. They didn’t even say anything; they didn’t shout or curse or anything like that—the one with the baseball bat just took a step toward her, and swung.

  The bat struck the rear side of her head with a sound like an ax burying itself in a wooden log. She dropped instantly, as if a magician had removed her legs. She sprawled on the tiles. I started screaming then; I don’t remember this, but it was in a lot of witness statements. I screamed and screamed and screamed. One of the cops we spoke to afterward said a diner had described it as the worst sound he had ever heard. Said he hadn’t known a human being could make that noise.

  The two guys left, running.

  I moved, suddenly able to move.

  Mom was lying on the white tiles. There was a halo of dark red blood around her head; her hair was matted. I knelt beside her—her eyes were open and staring, the eyeballs twitching, saccadic, as if she were reading something I couldn’t see, something hanging in the air above her. I could see blood trickling from her nose. I couldn’t see what had happened to the back of her head.

  Apparently at this point I was screaming “Mom” over and over. I remember hearing someone dial 911 and ask for an ambulance.

  And that’s when I did it. I didn’t realize. I swear I didn’t realize. I just wanted to hold her, I just wanted to make her okay. I lifted her up into a hug, and I held her tight, calling in her ear, calling for her to come back to me.

  I lifted her head off the ground.

  Do you see?

  I lifted her head off the ground.

  Because I wanted to hold her.

  She died of a massive subdural hematoma. That means her brain bled all over itself, drowned itself.

  I know this because I looked up brain injuries, afterward.

  That was where I learned that the last thing, the last thing you do, if someone suffers a head trauma, is to move them. It can disturb the bleed. Make it worse. Hell, I may even have started the bleed.

  I never said anything to Dad. I mean, he knew already. He was a goddamn Navy SEAL. He knows all about injuries.

  So we both knew I killed her. We just never said anything about it.

  They never caught the two guys either. Dad searched for a while. He used his contacts—his cop buddies from the restaurant. But nothing ever came up.

  Probably a good thing. If he’d found them, I’d have lost both my parents. He’d have ended up in prison.

  There was a voice, and the street by the bowling alley began to reform itself around me, patchily. A scrap of concrete, a parking meter, the 7-Eleven, slowly reappearing out of the fog. A Polaroid, developing.

  “—ambulance?” said the voice.

  I looked up. There was a middle-aged woman standing over me, kind looking, with a fake Louis Vuitton purse and a long red coat. She looked like a housewife out to meet her lover. That may even have been what she was doing.

  “Excuse me?” I said. I was coming to the realization that I was lying on the damp ground. It had stopped raining. But no more than a few minutes could possibly have elapsed—it was no darker than it had been when I left the bowling alley. The sky was still ablaze with the setting sun.

  “Do you need an ambulance? Are you epileptic? Diabetic?”

  I seized on this excuse for my weird behavior; anything is better than saying you hear a voice and someone has just pointed out that it is probably you internalizing your own mother, because you feel guilty about making her die.

  “Just … need some sugar,” I said.

  I must not have looked like a meth head or a bum, because the woman nodded and ran across the road to the 7-Eleven. She came back with a candy bar, which she handed to me. “Here,” she said.

  At that moment I didn’t think about my allergy at all; it was like it had been rinsed from my mind, washed away by the storm of memories. I just tore open the bar and ate it. Chocolate. With some kind of crunchy filling.

  “Thanks,” I said. I sat up, to show that I had more energy now. “Thank you so much. I’ll be fine.” I smiled, as best as I could.

  “If you’re sure …”

  “I’m sure. Thank you though. Please, let me …” I started to take out my wallet. I kept it in my back pocket, with a chain to my belt loops.

  “No, no,” she said. “On me. I’m just glad you’re okay.”

  I saw the crucifix around her neck now—a true Good Samaritan. “Thanks again,” I said.

  She nodded and walked off. I took a long breath. Paris, where are you? I thought.

  Then my long breath caught in my chest, like my body had closed around it, vice-hard. I coughed. I coughed some more. I pursed my lips. My mouth was fizzing, tingling, electricity running through it. I felt my lips swelling. My tongue. My bronchioles were going to swell too, till I would no longer be able to take in any oxygen.

  Till I would die.

  Yep.

  Just my luck.

  Peanuts.

  Paris parked and opened the door of her surprisingly ordinary sedan—a Prius I think—just as I was injecting myself with my EpiPen, counting down the elephants.

  “What the—”

  “Shh,” I said. I finished counting. “—six elephants, seven elephants, eight elephants, nine elephants, ten elephants.”

  “Elephants?” said Paris, in a hysterical tone. Like she was freaking out but hard. She was fully human now, the stony tone gone from her voice, and I almost forgot about how she had been on the phone earlier; I had other stuff on my mind.

  I was a terrible friend.

  Anyway.

  I took another deep breath. Better. No hitching in the chest. I took another.

  Okay.

  My airways were clearing. The epinephrine was doing its job. My mouth was still sore though.

  �
�You count to ten,” I said, as I massaged my thigh. “Because the spring keeps squeezing the drug through the needle. If you don’t wait, you lose some of the injection. They teach you to count elephants, because it makes sure.”

  “What the **** happened?”

  “A good Samaritan,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  I shook my head. “Long story.” I picked up my bag from the sidewalk—the shoulder bag I carried everywhere. It was green and had red writing embroidered onto it:

  ALLERGIC TO PEANUTS!

  CASSANDRA DI MATTEO

  76 OCEAN DRIVE OAKWOOD

  Mom had sewn it herself, and it was the lamest and least cool thing in the world, but I still carried it with me at all times and would have fought anyone who tried to take it from me, bare fists. I opened the bag and handed Paris my spare EpiPen. “Here: if I start struggling to breathe, give me that. Meanwhile, call an ambulance.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes, now. Make sure it’s a paramedic ambulance. Tell them I’m having an anaphylaxis and have injected myself with 0.3 of epinephrine. At …”—I checked my watch—“at about twenty past seven.”

  Paris made the call, then she sat down beside me. “This is why you called?”

  “What? Oh. No. I called because … You know what, I can’t … I can’t.”

  “Sure,” said Paris. “Sure. Let’s just get you better.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I said. “But they’ll want to keep me overnight.”

  We waited in silence for a moment.

  “Want me to come with you?” asked Paris.

  “Please.”

  “And your dad. You want me to call him?”

  “Um … yes. Please. Wait.”

  “Yeah?”

  “We need a story. I need a story.” I thought for a moment. “Okay, so I was at your place. You made cookies. I ate one. Then we left to get sodas, and I had a delayed reaction. It can take two hours.”

  “I don’t live very near here.”

  “He doesn’t know that.”

  “And won’t he be pissed with me for making you the cookies?”

  “No. He’ll be pissed with me for not checking. I’ll say they were chocolate; that I wanted to be polite. Or something. He’ll probably never let me leave the house again; he’ll think I’m totally irresponsible. But hey.”

  “You can’t tell him the truth? Whatever that is?”

  “No.”

  Paris frowned at me. “He doesn’t know about Dr. Lewis, does he?”

  “No.”

  “Jeez, Cass. Way to set yourself up for a fall. Wait. Does your psych know?”

  Silence from me.

  “Jeez, Cass.”

  Paris dialed the number I gave her. It was a short conversation. What I could hear of it sounded like this:

  PARIS: Hi, Mr… . Oh. Actually, I don’t know Cass’s last name. Hi, Mr. Cass’s Dad.

  DAD: Kccccchhhhhhh.

  PARIS: No, no! No, she’s okay. I mean, she’s not okay. I mean … ****. She’s had a reaction. To nuts, you know? She stabbed herself with the thing …

  DAD: Kccccchhhhhhh

  PARIS: (nodding) The EpiPen, yeah. Yes, she’s breathing fine. No, it’s totally my fault. I insisted she eat a cookie. I didn’t realize.

  DAD: Kccccchhhhhhh Kccccchhhhhhh Kccccchhhhhhh

  PARIS: Oh, no, yeah, no, she did tell me. But I didn’t know how serious it was. (Raising her hands and eyebrows at me, like, I’m trying!)

  DAD: Kccccchhhhhhh

  PARIS: Anyway, I’ve called an ambulance. We’re going to City.

  DAD: Kccccchhhhhhh Kccccchhhhhhh

  PARIS: I will.

  She hung up.

  “Wow,” she said to me. “That guy’s tense. Anyone would think I was telling him that his daughter had suffered a potentially life-threatening allergic reaction.”

  I rolled my eyes at her, and she laughed.

  “Seriously,” I said, “is he pissed?”

  “Hard to tell. He’s jacked up though.”

  “Super,” I said.

  Paris started laughing again. I loved her for it.

  Remember that:

  I loved her.

  Not like you, not romantically, but I loved her.

  The ambulance came, and Paris rode in it with me all the way to the hospital. She was having the best time, now that I was clearly going to be all right. She flirted with Ben, the younger paramedic, and thought the banks of instruments were the coolest; she had never been in an ambulance before, she said.

  Ben stuck tabs to the top of my chest and a clip to the end of my index finger. Then he watched my heartbeat on the screen. “107,” he said. “Saturation 100.”

  “Good,” said the guy I think was called Peter. He was older, with a mustache. “Looks like you won’t need to be intubated,” he said to me.

  “Hooray,” I said.

  “I’m watching your heart on TV,” said Paris, eyeing the jagged peaks and troughs of my pulse. “It’s awesome.”

  “Your friend is a little strange,” said Ben, smiling.

  “People have commented,” I said.

  “Wouldn’t you say that was a beautiful heartbeat?” said Paris. “Wouldn’t you say Cass has a beautiful heartbeat?”

  “Uh, yeah,” said Ben.

  Paris nodded, sagely. “She does,” she said, as if it had been his idea, as if she was agreeing with him.

  Ben started filling in a chart. “You on any medications?” he asked.

  I glanced at Paris. “Yes,” I lied. I knew my dad might see the chart, or someone might say something.

  “Which ones?”

  “Risperidone. Paroxetine.”

  I saw his face change. Or maybe I imagined that I did. But I think it did. I mean: I had just shifted in front of his eyes into a different person, like a movie morphing trick. I had gone from:

  Reasonably cute but maybe a bit plump teenage girl → mental patient.

  He wrote something down on his chart.

  He didn’t say anything after that. Nor did Paris. I think she sensed how he had swerved too, how his opinion of me had changed, and she was angry with him. Angry on my behalf.

  And I loved her even more for that.

  When we got to the hospital Dad was waiting outside and he spoke briefly to Paris, but he wasn’t even looking at her, so she waved to me and kind of subtracted herself from the scene, backed away, until she was gone. And Dad and I went into the building with the paramedics.

  DAD: Are you trying to get yourself killed?

  ME: No!

  DAD: You know about food someone else has prepared. You know this stuff, Cass.

  ME: I do.

  DAD: Clearly you don’t!

  ME: (silent)

  DAD: I have to work, Cass. I have to ******* work. I have to know you’re going to be okay when I’m at the restaurant.

  ME: You do know that. You can know that.

  THE VOICE: You will never be okay. You will always be worthless.

  ME: Not now.

  DAD: Not now? Are you serious? Evidently I can’t leave you on your own! If you’re not with boys, you’re having a ******* anaphylaxis, Cass! I can’t ****** worry about you like this, it’s ******* kill me.

  PEDIATRICIAN: Sir? This is a public ward. Could you lower your voice, sir?

  So now you know.

  Now you know about my mom, about how she died.

  I don’t …

  I mean …

  I guess I don’t need to tell you much about how it made me feel. You know all about parents dying. You get it. I mean, I didn’t know that night that your mom died, but I knew something had happened to her. And you told me later of course.

  For a long time after the restaurant—this is even before I looked it up and found that I shouldn’t have moved her head—I felt a whole range of different things, different emotions, no single feeling that could be identified as “grief.”

  I laughed at inappropriate ****. I laughed at the funeral, b
ecause we walked into the chapel and there was this little old lady at the back at this, like, raised mixing-desk thing, all knobs and lights and sliders to control the sound on the mikes at the front of the church, and I just started giggling hysterically because she looked like an octogenarian DJ, in a DJ booth.

  My dad glared at me, then.

  I felt okay for long periods, I forgot my mom was dead, and then it would hit me like a tidal wave, literally nearly knock me off my feet, the realization, the stupid simple realization, that she was gone and would never come back and we’d never make brownies again with peanut-free chocolate and lick the spoon.

  I did that thing; I’m sure you did it too. That thing where I would go into my room and I’d see an album and I’d think, the last time I played that album my mom was still alive; I’d wear a T-shirt and I’d think, the last time I wore this T-shirt my mom was still alive; I’d pick up a book and—

  You get the picture.

  It sucked. I mean, you know all about it, right? One night I dreamed she was still alive and it was all a big mistake and she bent down low to fold me in her arms and then I woke up and—

  Well. You know. I thought I might never stop crying that morning, like an ocean would come flooding out of me and I would disappear, just turn into a puddle on the floor, like some mutant in one of those comic book movies.

  I dreamed about the robbers too. Daydreamed also. Fantasized about finding them and torturing them, choking the lives out of them. Making them feel a fraction of the pain I was feeling.

  Every day, for like a month, I thought, This is the day the cops will find them.

  But they didn’t, and they didn’t, and then … it was a year later, and the robbers were just gone. Like Keyser Söze, you know? Into the sea mist. Evaporated. Like they were never there.

  The police kept saying they had leads, that it was only a matter of time, but I didn’t believe them anymore. And time slipped by. Breakfasts, TV, books, school, assignments. All the stuff that just keeps chipping away, keeps happening to you, and that you have to engage with.