Whisper to Me

by Nick Lake

  Dad came back downstairs, put on a thin jacket, and pocketed his keys from the monkey’s little tray. Then he went out. “Remember: stay here,” he said.

  “Sure, Dad.”

  Ten minutes later there was another knock at the door.

  “I know your dad’s angry, but you want to ride to work with me?” you said. “We can talk about stuff. I have an idea I think we could—”

  “Yes,” I said.

  I grabbed my keys and closed the door behind me.

  You started the engine and pulled out, took Ocean and then Maple, driving to the center of town. As we drove, you turned to me. “Get anywhere with Julie?” you asked.

  I rocked my hand; an equivocal gesture. “Maybe. She thinks it was a Jeep. One of the V8 sport models.”

  “An SRT8?” you asked.

  I looked at you, surprised. I hadn’t figured you for a car head. “Yeah. You know cars?”

  You shook your head. “Nah. My dad is into them.”

  “Mine too.” There were always magazines on our coffee table. Muscle Car. American Auto.

  You smiled. “Something we have in common, then.”

  You made a couple of turns, getting closer to the center. We pulled up at a stop sign. “Could be enough,” you said, almost to yourself.

  “Huh?”

  “The model. Gives us something to go on.”

  “For what?”

  You did like a bear with me wave of your hand. “I’ll tell you. I want to show you something first.”

  “It had better not be your genitals,” I said.

  You laughed, surprised. I liked to hear you laugh. Then I felt guilty because Paris was dead and here I was flirting with you. I shut up after that, and you stopped talking too—I think the same thought had crossed your mind.

  Soon we had arrived at the closest thing Oakwood has to a main drag, the little grocery stores and liquor stores and toy stores. A few restaurants with outside seating.

  You turned onto an alleyway, passed a bar with a neon sign showing a woman kneeling on a table, a cowboy hat on her head, swinging a lasso in one hand and holding a beer in the other. The sign was off.

  Beyond the bar, there was a long, low warehouse—a redbrick building with steel roll-up doors. You parked in front of the doors and made an expansive gesture at them. “Welcome to the nerve center,” you said.

  Then you got out of the pickup and went to the steel door. You entered a code on a padlock; snapped it open. You rolled the door up and came back to the truck. Then you drove us both in.

  “Wow,” I said.

  We were in a vast space; you wouldn’t have known from the street how big it was. It must have covered most of the block. There was only one floor, so the ceiling was high. Corrugated-iron roof, punctuated in places by plastic windows. From these, shafts of sunlight cut down, illuminating random piles of goods, as if to highlight treasure. Motes of dust swirled in the light, little grains of darkness; inverse constellations.

  And piled up, in hills, in mountains, all over the floor were bags of stuffed toys. Thousands, maybe even millions of them. Okay, not millions. But thousands.

  You went to that place every day; I guess it didn’t impress you anymore. But the first time I saw it … it was something else. It’s weird: people think of the everyday world as banal, as mundane. But when you really consider it, there’s so much weird and amazing stuff. For instance: an amusement park has to have a place to store its prizes.

  And that place has to be amazing.

  I walked around for a bit, just staring. There were wide walkways between the piles, so it was possible to see almost all the way to each wall; it only increased the sense of scale. It was surreal. Warehouses are usually hard, industrial, practical places, right? This one looked like a warehouse—the corrugated iron, the bare brick walls. But it was full, I mean absolutely full, of soft toys. It was like something out of a fairy tale.

  As I wandered, I realized the mountains were arranged by type, each towering pile of transparent bags containing a different character. There was one that was all Pokémon, another—larger—full of Angry Birds. Disney characters took up an entire wall. Minnies, Donald Ducks. Olafs. There was a whole alpine range of Beanie Babies.

  “This is crazy,” I said.

  “It’s pretty full on,” you agreed.

  “How do you know where everything is?”

  You shrugged. “You get used to it.”

  “What are you getting today?”

  You pulled a piece of paper out of your pocket. “Two bags medium Bugs Bunny. Three bags large Minecraft people. The kids love Minecraft. And a small bag of Mickeys.”

  “And you know where all of those are?”

  “Yep. There. There. And there.” You pointed to three corners of the warehouse. “I’ll grab them in a moment. Come over here.”

  You led me to a small mound of stuffed dinosaurs. You pulled out a bag of them and motioned for me to sit on it. Then you sat down next to me.

  “You want to show me dinosaurs?” I said.

  You looked puzzled for a second. “Oh! No. But I thought of something.” You pulled out your phone. “I was thinking, we could start a hash tag. #SRT8; something like that. Get people to tweet the location if they see one.”

  “What?”

  “To find the car, you know?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t want to find it?”

  “I mean, no, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “We’ll get it trending,” you said. “Offer a prize or something to get the ball rolling. An iPad. It doesn’t matter. We can worry about making good on it later.”

  I looked right into your eyes. “What. Are. You. Talking. About?”

  You narrowed your eyes. “Wait. You don’t know Twitter?”

  “Yeah. I mean, I’ve heard of it.”

  “But you haven’t used it?”

  “No. I look on Instagram sometimes. For, like, fashion. You know.”

  You glanced at my clothes, raised your eyebrows.

  “Very funny,” I said.

  You put a hand over your heart. “Sorry. It was too easy. Okay. Listen.” You took out your phone, opened the Twitter app. You showed me the timeline, the trending hashtags. “What I’m thinking is, if we get people to tweet every time they see an SRT8, and we ask them to include a location, we might start to see a pattern.”

  “Why would people do that?”

  “That’s how come the prize. We say it’s a marketing thing, we pretend we work for Jeep or something. We say that every week one person who tweets that they’ve seen an SRT8 will win something.”

  “Okay … ,” I said. “And you think this will work?”

  “I have no idea. But I think it’s the kind of thing the cops would never think of. They’re still operating in the twentieth century.”

  “No. They just have systems that let them look up all the SRT8 owners in town.”

  “Well, okay,” you said. “Point taken. But this is what we have. It would be better if we had a license plate, of course.”

  Something itched at the back of my brain.

  “What is it, Cass? You look weird.”

  I closed my eyes. “I don’t …”

  “You thought of something?”

  “Sh,” I said. I had the strangest feeling. Like there was an idea curled up inside my mind and I needed to make it uncurl, open itself, like one of Dad’s millipedes.

  You shut up. I opened my eyes and saw the piles of toys, but I wasn’t really seeing them. I was going over everything Julie had said, the whole conversation with me and Agent Horowitz. I knew there was something there. Something that made me think … I don’t know what it made me think.

  That Julie might know the license plate, without realizing she did? I didn’t know why I thought that though.

  “No,” I said. “I can’t get it. It’s gone.”

  That feeling—of something being on the tip of my tongue, as Julie had said—had v
anished.

  “The license plate?”

  “Yeah. It’s making me think of something, but I don’t know what.”

  “Helpful.”

  “Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit,” I said.

  “No,” you said. “That’s photobombing.”

  “What? What’s photobombing?”

  “I despair of you.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Anyway,” you said eventually, “it could play without the license plate. We make it like one of those online treasure-hunt marketing campaigns. Pretend we’re driving a Jeep SRT8 around the town. First person to spot it each day wins a prize, kind of thing. So we say that they have to tweet #SRT8 and their location. We might see a pattern. Or at least find some people who drive them.”

  “If you say so. The whole Twitter thing is your area.”

  “Or,” you said, in a tentative tone—your voice a foot gingerly tapping on a frozen lake before venturing onto it. “Or … we could hand it over to the cops.”

  “You were the one who was all for investigating on our own.”

  “Yeah. But … I don’t know. This feels big.”

  “We can’t go to the cops,” I said.

  “You don’t trust them?”

  “Not that. My dad would find out. They’d tell him. They all eat at the restaurant.”

  “Hmm,” you said. “Your dad doesn’t like you hanging out with me, right?”

  “My dad doesn’t like a lot of stuff.”

  You had been playing with the bag of toys we were sitting on; you took out a stuffed T. rex and started tossing it up and down in the air, catching it by its tail. “So we do it ourselves. Run this Twitter thing. See what comes up.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay.”

  Silence. There was that moment—I know you felt it too—there was that moment where the boy and the girl realize they’re sitting next to each other, alone, in a mostly dark warehouse, on a soft surface. One they could sink down into.

  Together.

  “Um. So which school are you going to?” I said awkwardly.

  “What?”

  “You said you were going to college. On a swim scholarship.”

  “Oh. Brown.”

  “Brown? Wow. How good a swimmer are you?”

  “I’m okay. That’s why I’m not around at the apartment much. I do a bunch of training, when I’m not working.”

  Silence.

  “You?” you asked. “College, I mean?”

  “I … I guess. I have one year of high school left.”

  “Sucks.”

  “Yeah.”

  Silence. You shifted a little closer to me. I felt our molecules align with each other, like when we were on the couch in the apartment, the electrons synchronizing their spins, reaching out to each other across the distance between atoms.

  You looked into my eyes.

  You leaned toward me, to kiss me.

  And I pulled away, sharply. It was automatic. I … Paris had only just disappeared, and it felt wrong. It felt like betraying her, to be with you like that. I saw the hurt in your eyes immediately, and my heart flipped.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “No,” you said. “It was … I shouldn’t have …”

  Your voice frayed into silence.

  Unbelievably awkward silence.

  Our thousandth awkward moment, give or take.

  Then your radio crackled.

  “714, what’s your 20?” said a pissed-off sounding voice. “Where’s my goddamn plush?”

  “This is 714,” you said, thumbing the radio. “Leaving the warehouse now.”

  “Good. Get to Pier Two STAT. Then I want four bags of Pokémon to Pier One.”

  “10-4,” you said.

  “Out,” said the voice on the other end.

  “Out,” you said.

  You stood up stiffly. I stood up too. “You want to come with me?” you said. “I don’t want to … just leave you here.”

  “Um. Okay,” I said.

  Come on, Earth! Swallow me right now.

  But it never does.

  You pointed to the far left corner of the warehouse. “Can you grab the Bugs Bunnies? There are three piles—small, medium, large. We need medium. I’ll get the rest. But I have to hurry.” Your voice was flatter than usual, like you were trying not to show your feelings, trying to pave over them with smooth hardness. Concrete.

  “Can’t keep the kids waiting,” I said jokily.

  “No,” you said. Still flatly.

  I nodded, and started walking.

  It was weird, that voice on your radio. I mean, for once a voice came from nowhere and actually helped—broke that terrible moment after you tried to kiss me and I moved away.

  Has to be a first time for everything.

  Here’s the thing though: I wish I had let you kiss me. Part of me wanted to, I promise. Even if we were disturbed right away by the radio, I wish I had let our lips touch, wish I had not pulled away. Wish I had not caused that hurt in your eyes.

  But at the same time … I couldn’t. Not at that moment. And I was angry with the part of me that wanted me to, if I’m giving you the whole truth.

  Even writing this down, I feel pretty sickened by myself.

  I mean, Paris was gone, most probably dead, and I was even picturing the idea of kissing you.

  Because I pictured it a lot.

  Even then, just after Paris had gone missing.

  Believe me, I hate myself quite a lot right now, but what can I do? I said I would tell the truth, and only the truth, so help me, God.

  I offer two things in mitigation though:

  1. We were only together in the first place because of her. Because I wanted to find her. I mean, that was the whole thing we were doing. The Twitter thing. Working stuff out. It was you who knew the shape of the street Julie had been on; you who worked out that the car could only have turned out of a drive. It was all you—the clues, they all came from you. So you and Paris, you were connected.

  2. I was a teenager. Am a teenager. I figure if Paris were a couple years younger, and the situation were reversed, she would have wanted to be kissed too. If she never had been, I mean. Never kissed, I mean. She totally would. Yeah, you were the first person I kissed. Don’t get a big head about it.

  3. I was grieving. I was. And people’s emotions do weird things when they’re grieving. They want to kiss boys and stuff, and scream and shout and laugh. Or they pull away from a boy who tries to kiss them, even though they want to, even though they really want to. It’s not just feeling sad. It’s more complicated than that. Even Agent Horowitz said it.

  4. The voice punished me for it. I mean, not by making me hurt myself. I’d mostly stopped doing that, now that I knew the voice couldn’t kill my dad. Though sometimes I still cleaned my room and stuff when it told me to. Because the alternative was a lot of cursing and shouting from the voice, which was unpleasant. But … where was I? Oh yes. The voice did a lot of cursing and shouting after I got home that day. It was unpleasant.

  5. I’ve gone over my two things. I KNOW.

  You drove me to the pier. If it weren’t for Paris being gone, it would have been as good as the first time, cruising along the beach, the hard sand under the wheels, slaloming around the groups of people. You had turned the radio on—some MOR rock ballad was playing. The windows of the truck were open, and the wind whipped my hair.

  It’s strange: A car on a road feels normal. A car on a beach always feels like flying. Like freedom. Even then I felt it, almost wanted to ask you if I could drive again.

  You parked right by the pier and jumped down; threw the bags of toys up onto the side.

  I looked at my watch. “You’d better drop me at home. Sometimes Dad comes back for lunch.”

  “You grounded or something?”

  “It’s complicated,” I said.

  “Sure. Okay. I get that. I get complicated.”

  “You do?”

  “My mom d
ied too. When I was fifteen. Me and my dad … Things are difficult between us.”

  I was staring at you.

  “Oh, ****,” you said. “Your mom’s not dead? I thought your dad said … I thought it was … I don’t know. Something else we—”

  “No, she’s dead,” I said.

  You were swallowing anxiously. “Sorry, sorry, I just …”

  “It’s cool,” I said.

  “I blurt stuff out,” you said. “It’s a curse. My voice is totally out of my control.”

  Oh, I thought, you have no idea.

  “Anyway,” you said. “I’ll drive you home.”

  I walked into Dr. Rezwari’s office and stopped. She was sitting at her desk, which was usually bare, and there was work all over it—files, sheaths of paper held together with clips. Her makeup was not applied as adroitly as usual; her lipstick was smudged and there were tracks in her eyeliner.

  Her eyes were red and puffy.

  “Are you all right?” I asked. She was looking at me blankly.

  She did that blinking thing—I could almost see her consciousness swim up from some black depth. “I’m fine, thank you. Take a seat.”

  I sat down.

  “The voice is still gone?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Excellent. And how are you feeling?”

  “Good,” I said.

  “Okay,” said Dr. Rezwari. “And the medication. Any side effects?”

  “No.”

  “No drowsiness? Lack of appetite?”

  “Oh, yeah. All of that. But that’s normal, right?”

  “Yes. To a degree. Keep an eye on it, yes?” She moved papers around on her desk, absently.

  “I will.”

  “Great. You’re doing very well, Cassandra. I’m very pleased with your progress.”

  “No thanks to you.” That wasn’t me. That was the voice.

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  Dr. Rezwari rubbed at her eyes. Then she looked up at me and seemed surprised I was still there. “So … I’ll see you next week?” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Are you … um … can I help?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You seem upset. Can I help?”

  Dr. Rezwari laughed—a half-hollow, half-real laugh. “You want to help me? Your psychiatrist?”