Whisper to Me

by Nick Lake

  Why didn’t I check when I started?

  Behind me, the ocean smashed into a tumble of rocks, which lay between me and the yards of the houses, a barrier of rubble.

  I dived down, looking for Paris, eyes open and searching through the murk, but I couldn’t see her, and I couldn’t hold my breath either, and I had to push myself back up to the surface.

  How was I going to climb out over those rocks?

  I had no idea. But I had to try.

  I kicked toward them and my head ripped open and light flooded in, or lightning flashed, or both, I don’t know, and for a second I may have blacked out again; my mouth and nose were underwater, breathing in water, then I lifted myself up, coughing, spluttering. My arms were lead; my legs were marble.

  I felt stickiness, a sting, on my forehead, and I raised my hand and touched it to my head—big mistake, I went under, a wave hitting me, and for a moment was in the blackness again before I desperately trod water, got my head above water.

  And big mistake too, because I realized I was wounded. Whatever had struck my head, whatever I had struck my head on, had hurt me badly.

  I managed a couple more strokes, but I saw straightaway, even from this distance, the steepness, the angle and smoothness of the rocks between me and the shore; there was no way I was climbing them.

  “Swim south,” said the voice. “To the main beach.”

  Four blocks, I thought. I couldn’t even talk out loud, I was so cold, and my head was a bass drum going bang, bang, bang; what an irony, when your voice can speak and you can’t. I can’t make four blocks.

  “The rocks might end before that,” said the voice.

  Can’t do it, I thought.

  And then, cold as the ocean surrounding me, I realized something.

  I was going to die.

  I was going to die right here.

  It had always been waiting for me, this time this place, and now it was here.

  I tried, Paris, I thought.

  I was so very cold. My whole body was shaking.

  For a moment I thought about your swim training, about how you had been trying out for Nationals, and I imagined you surging strongly through the water toward me, knifing through it, swimming the crawl, to take me under the arms and hold me up. Or my dad, I mean he was a Navy SEAL, maybe he would be there suddenly in the water, maybe he had followed me in some way and he would—

  But this is not that kind of story, and this is not a movie, and you weren’t there.

  My dad wasn’t there.

  “It’s okay,” said a voice in my ear, a quiet voice, thrumming muted through viscous water.

  But not the voice.

  No.

  Paris’s voice.

  “It’s okay,” said Paris again. “It’s okay; you did try—you did.”

  I looked for her, treading water, turning to see her in the pale light, but I couldn’t. Even now there was a cold, rational part of me that thought she had never been there, that I had imagined her face in the water, the hair framing it.

  “You did try. You did.”

  At first it sounded like an echo, Paris’s voice repeating itself, but then I heard it, a soft burr, a hitch, in the throat of the speaker, a sound I knew so well. It was a different voice.

  Mom?

  “Yes, honey, I’m here. Oh honey, I’m so sorry.”

  For what?

  “Dying. Leaving you.”

  Not your fault. Those men. Just wish … just wish we could find them … wish we could make them pay.

  “Oh baby. Don’t you know? Don’t you know by now? Haven’t you learned anything?”

  Her voice getting quieter; departing. Leaving me.

  What? What? What should I have learned?

  “It’s not for us to find people. Or to make them pay. You take revenge, all you do is throw away your soul. Sometimes things happen that you can’t control. Sometimes we lose things we can’t get back. And there are some things we just can’t ever know.”

  But—

  A whisper now, nothing more:

  “I’m sorry, Cass.”

  Then gone.

  Nothing but cold, blank water, all around me, and I saw that I had sunk under it, had gone below the surface, and I hadn’t even registered. The water was dark around me; I wasn’t even sure which way was up.

  Then the clouds parted, and I realized I was looking right at the surface, was seeing the storm-lit sky through maybe a foot of seawater. There was a break in the darkness, and the stars were shining through, thousands of them, millions.

  I fixed on the stars.

  Eternity, and a couple of minutes, passed.

  Pressure tightened around my head; my chest was burning. And I kept on looking up through the water, as slowly, slowly, the stars began to go out, one by one. And then my heart did what it had been practicing for in the moment between every one of its millions of beats and, at last, stopped.

  I died.

  I mean, I guess I can’t prove that I did. But I know.

  My heart was still. There had been pain in my chest, but now it was gone, suddenly.

  Everything was pitch-black, and I had the sense that I was unraveling, a mummy with its bandages spiraling off it, crumbling into darkness and dust, disintegrating.

  The blackness opened its vast mouth and—

  “Excuse me, but are you fucking kidding me?” said the voice, from the darkness. I opened my eyes. The sky was dim light, above, through murky water.

  What? I thought, and I was kind of reeling in shock, I’ve tried to echo it by putting in the swearword when normally I star it out, to try to give you an idea of how that voice poked sharply through the darkness, how loud and intense it was, but I don’t know, it’s not something I can really convey.

  “Is that all you’ve got?” said the voice. “Are you ******* serious? You’re just going to give up and DIE? You ******* coward. You weak ******* *****. Enough of this ****, Cass. Go. There’s a rope right next to you, can’t you feel it touching your shoulder? It’s a tether rope, hanging from the pier. Grab it and haul your *** out of this water. Right now.”

  Leave me alone, I thought.

  I closed my eyes again.

  For just a fraction of an instant, I thought about giving up, giving in, to the black. Forgetting. Forgetting Paris being gone and Mom and all of it. But then the voice said this:

  “After all your weak-*** whining, THIS is how you’re going to let it end? You’ve got this. You’re in control now. You can still make things right. Haul your *** out of this water and go and get him, and tell him you’re sorry. Are you really going to let him go?”

  Confused, I thought of you.

  Let him go? I wasn’t meaning to—

  “Come on,” said the voice. “Get up there. Breathe. Get him back.”

  He won’t want me back, I thought.

  “Well, if you die, he won’t have much choice,” said the voice.

  Huh.

  “For him,” the voice continued, “it’ll be like you when your mom died. When Paris disappeared. You’ll be gone, and there’ll be nothing he can do about it. But if you fight …”

  If I fight, I thought, then I can at least give him the choice.

  But the sky was so far above, and I was so tired.

  “Look,” said the voice, almost reluctantly. “It’s not your fault, what happened to your mom. Or Paris. How were you supposed to save them? But if you breathe in this water and die right here, then what happens to him, how he feels about it, will be absolutely, entirely your fault. One hundred percent.”

  It was that 100 percent that got me, just like the voice knew it would. Your words, in the apartment.

  I thought about how you’d always been there for me, always tried to help me, even when I hurt you. At least, I figured, I ought to try to be there for you too.

  Oh screw it, I thought.

  I could feel rope, rough against the skin of my arm. I twisted in the water and there it was, simultaneously friction-he
avy and slimy, and I turned my head up and saw it rising into light. I seized it with my hands, my fingers wrapping around the rope almost without my asking them to.

  They closed around its clammy surface; it was as taut as a cable, almost resonating with the pull of the pier above and some weight below—a boat, long-since sunk?

  Whatever: it was a rope hanging from the pier and I was going to climb up it.

  I was going to live. And I was going to ask you to forgive me.

  I wasn’t going to be competing in Nationals. I wasn’t a Navy SEAL, but my dad taught me to swim when I was three years old, and I could do our house to the end of the boardwalk when I was seven, and I was not going to die in the ocean.

  Slowly, hand over hand, I pulled myself up and out of the water—my head broke free and I took a long, rasping, hitching breath. It was half-ocean, that breath, and I coughed as the acrid cold water hit my throat, but there was air too, and it filled my lungs. I felt instantly less like I was going to burst, less like a balloon on the verge of popping.

  Greedily, I gulped down air, felt it filling my lungs, wheezing. I had never been so hyperaware of my chest, my diaphragm and bronchioles, the simple mechanics of being alive. The stuff I took for granted.

  For a long time, I just breathed in and out, relishing it, enjoying it. I couldn’t tell what was rain falling on me and what was sea spray, whipped by the wind from the waves. It was still dark, and then FLASH, everything was lit.

  I glanced all around, getting my bearings in the light of the lightning.

  Good news: whatever happened when I fell, whether a few planks had broken or the end of the pier had collapsed or what, there was still some of the structure remaining, a dark frame against the darker sky, rising up like a promise.

  Bad news:

  It was high.

  For a moment, I just clung to the rope, in the cold, cold ocean, gazing at the far-off safety of the pier, mind spinning.

  Gym ropes was the absurd phrase that kept repeating in my head, like a prayer, like something to hold on to.

  Gym ropes.

  I was looking up at the impossible five feet between the surface of the water and the top of the pier, the rope glistening, leading up to the wooden bollard it was tied to above, and I was thinking about gym ropes and how in gym class I had never been able to climb them.

  “But in gym class you weren’t in danger of drowning,” said the voice. “You’ve got this. It’s going to hurt, but you’ve got this.”

  I sighed. Fine.

  I reached up my other hand and grabbed the rope a little higher up—then I pulled my body out of the cold water. My arms burned; my fingers were numb from the cold.

  Other arm.

  Other arm.

  My muscles screamed at me. Maybe I was screaming too, out loud, I don’t know. But the air was beginning to warm my skin, I was starting to feel less like I might shiver out my teeth.

  “Not far now,” said the voice. “Not ****** far now.”

  Dear Manager,

  I am writing to you because I am interested in the position of teller at your South Side branch. I am a good team player with

  Sorry, Dad came in.

  So.

  Where was I?

  Oh yes, I was climbing the rope.

  My legs were out of the water; I could feel the moist air on my skin; my clothes were plastered to my body. I wrapped my feet around the rope, chafing my ankles—one of my Converses had come off and was sinking to the bottom of the Atlantic, where I would have been if not for the voice.

  “Two feet now,” said the voice. And it was true; the pier, what was left of it, was just above. “Come on, you ******.”

  But I couldn’t. My arms wouldn’t work. It was like something had been cut between my head and the muscles. Snipped.

  “*********, come on,” said the voice. “You can ******* do it. You can do it. You can do it. You can do it.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Yes, you can. You can do anything. We can do anything. Come on.”

  “Okay,” I said. I was just pain, all over. My head, my arms, my throat where the cold water had burned it.

  And then suddenly there was more strength flowing into my arms; that’s what it felt like, hot liquid flowing; lava.

  “We’re ****** doing this,” said the voice. “We’re not ****** dying in the ******* ocean.”

  One arm went up; the fingers were gone, I mean I didn’t feel them anymore, but somehow they gripped onto the rope and … and then slid … but then they caught, found purchase, and again that’s what it felt like—

  —like I had to buy every inch, pay dearly for it. But I was moving again, moving up the rope, even if I felt something tear in my shoulder, and in my forearm. Something detaching from the bone, a tendon maybe, I didn’t know.

  Then.

  Then a miracle. I was by the side of the pier, hooking my knee over it, and then I fell, hard, and sprawled on the wooden top.

  Tears filled my eyes, blinding me, as if the water was still trying to get me, as if the ocean had gotten in behind my eyes, as if it didn’t want to let me go.

  Let me go, I thought.

  “No, I’m staying with you,” said the voice.

  “Not you,” I said.

  “Oh,” said the voice. “Well, then move. You keep still, you’re going to die of hypothermia.”

  “Okay.”

  I could see the knots in the wood of the pier below me. I pushed myself up onto my hands and knees. Rain no longer seemed to be falling, and the sky was lightening, a fast wind somewhere far above scouring the clouds, scrubbing them away, so that it almost seemed like the daytime that it really was.

  Ridiculously, I began to crawl. I didn’t have the strength to stand. I crawled along, and splinters from the wood cut into my hands, and I was glad because it meant I was alive; we can only be hurt when our hearts are beating.

  I don’t know how long I crawled along the pier for. A ray of sunshine illuminated my hands. I was shivering so hard my teeth were rattling. I didn’t realize that was a thing; I thought it was made up, for stories.

  Then I heard footsteps, and a black boot stopped in front of me.

  I looked up. A policeman stood there in his uniform, looking down at me with a worry that didn’t seem totally about my safety, the concern you see in the eyes of someone who thinks you might be crazy. He had a mustache, but a trendy hipster one, not an old-guy one. He was maybe thirty.

  “You fall in, ma’am?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. My voice came out tattered, like there were knives in my throat that had cut it into ribbons. “I thought I saw Paris in there, and I leaned down … to … look. And I fell in, and she wasn’t there.”

  A pause.

  “Right, ma’am. Come on. Let’s see if we can help you up. Aaron, you got the blankets?”

  He pulled me to my feet.

  “You’re lucky. Neighbor called. Said there was a girl—”

  But after that I don’t remember anything.

  After that, it’s not even black. It’s just nothingness.

  Until …

  INT. A HOSPITAL. DAY. A TEENAGE GIRL IS LYING ON A BED. THERE ARE FLOWERS ON A NIGHTSTAND NEXT TO HER. HER FATHER IS STANDING BY THE BED, HOLDING HER HAND, HE HAS BEEN HOLDING IT FOR HALF AN HOUR; HE DOESN’T WANT TO LET IT GO.

  THE GIRL BEGINS TO CRY. SHE CRIES LIKE IT’S NOT OKAY. BUT IT IS; IT’S JUST SAD. THAT’S THE THING ABOUT LIFE. SOMETIMES IT’S SAD, AND YOU DON’T GET TO KNOW STUFF, BUT YOU JUST HAVE TO ACCEPT IT.

  AND CLING TO THE PEOPLE WHO ARE LEFT.

  MINUTES PASS.

  HER FATHER: I’m proud of you, Cass.

  THE GIRL: Thanks, Dad.

  He steps away. He brushes at his eyes.

  THE GIRL: Don’t.

  HER FATHER: Don’t what?

  THE GIRL: Don’t take your hand away. I like it when you stroke my hair the way you used to. When I was little.

  He doesn’t. He doesn’t take his han
d away. He doesn’t take his hand away for the longest time.

  “You’re sure about this?” I said.

  “I’m sure,” said Julie. She was pale, had a hand on my arm, but she was wearing a faint smile.

  The Ferris wheel clunked to a stop, swung back and forth for a moment, a pendulum in the night air. The breeze that drifted past us was full of seawater, fizzing with it—the sky around us so dense you could have held it in your hands. Strings of light snaked out from the blaze of brightness below us, a glittering, phosphorescent bacterial culture, shimmering with neon, every color that forms the light we see, blinding.

  Julie looked down. Breeze ruffled her hair, and the sun glinted on the metal bars of the seats. “Remember Paris saying she wanted to wrap her arms around the little people down there?” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “To protect them.”

  I nodded.

  There were words in the air between us, the ocean air, that did not need to be spoken: we couldn’t protect her.

  We didn’t know she was dead. I mean, we knew. But we didn’t know for sure. We still talked to Agent Horowitz, me more than Julie, I’ll admit. I tried not to call him too often, knew that it annoyed him, but it seemed like he had resigned himself to it, like he understood that I was never going to stop.

  Progress was slow. They had Paris’s father’s license plate; they could prove that his car, at least, traveled from New York down to Oakwood the day before Paris disappeared. But he was saying he’d lent the car out to a friend, and at the moment it was stalemate. There was still no actual physical evidence. It might even have been the Houdini Killer. Hell, Paris’s dad might have been the Houdini Killer, though it seemed unlikely, what with him living in New York, and as far as I could tell from Agent Horowitz, who was understandably reluctant to share too much, they hadn’t caught his plate on other occasions.

  So.

  Run away? I was pretty sure not.

  Father killed her? Probably.

  Houdini Killer? Maybe.

  Dead?

  Definitely.

  And would I ever have closure, would I ever know for certain, would anyone ever pay for it?