Whisper Me This

by Kerry Anne King

  The girl looks like Mom, except that Mom always wears a dress or slacks and a blouse. Her hair is short. She never puts anything on her face except lotion and ChapStick.

  The picture makes my stomach feel sick, so I wrap it back up in the blanket. I pull the dress on over my head. It makes a whispering swish and spills out around me on the floor, more like Cinderella’s train than Leia’s dress. Marley picks out a pair of high-heeled shoes, and I’m balancing on them, precarious, checking out my transformation in the full-length mirror, when the closet door opens, and the Evil Stepmother stands there, staring at me, hands on both hips, lips pressed tightly together in an expression that means I am in serious trouble.

  Because it’s not the Evil Stepmother at all, and I’m neither Cinderella nor the brave Princess Leia saving an empire. My own real, true mother has caught me snooping in things that do not belong to me.

  “What are you doing?”

  It’s a trick question and I know better than to answer. She can see what I’m doing.

  “Who were you talking to?”

  “Nobody.”

  Her eyes burn me. I try to hold her gaze, but I’m balancing on high heels. My foot slips into the toe of the shoe and then sideways. I topple over, grabbing at an armful of dresses for balance, but they slide off their hangers and come with me, all of us in a heap at the bottom of the closet.

  Mom moves between me and the suitcase, closing the lid.

  “Get up. Take it off.”

  I scramble to obey, only I’m tangled in fear and fabric, and in the end, her hands lift the dress over my head.

  “You are not to come in my room without permission. You are never to play in this closet. Do you understand? Look at me when I’m talking to you.”

  My eyes travel up to her face, the same face as in the picture, only not so soft. I can’t look her in the eye, so I find the scar on her left cheek, a thin white line, and focus on that. The face in the picture didn’t have this scar, and I find that comforting. The picture girl couldn’t have been my mother, holding two babies wrapped in pink blankets.

  “Now,” Mom says. “Tell me again. Who were you talking to?”

  “Marley.” The name croaks out of me like a frog. I bend my head to hide my face, but Mom catches my chin in her hand and forces me to look up at her again. Her fingers are as hard and sharp as the gingerbread witch’s. They hurt me.

  “There is no Marley,” Mom says. “Do you understand me? I’ve told you before, you’re too old for an imaginary friend.”

  “She’s not imaginary.” I’m shocked and frightened by my own boldness.

  “Look around you,” Mom says. “Do you see any Marley?”

  “She’s hiding.”

  The fingers shift to my shoulders, both hands now, both shoulders, and she gives me a little shake. “She is not hiding. She is a figment”—shake—“of”—shake—“your imagination.”

  My shoulders hurt, enough to bring tears smarting into the backs of my eyes, but I won’t cry. I won’t. I know better than to say anything, and I set my chin, defiant.

  “Promise me you will stop this silly game,” Mom says. “Promise me. Now.”

  “No.”

  It’s the first time I’ve defied her. That one word hangs in the air between us.

  “You will give her up. You will give her up now. This is the end of this nonsense.” Mom grabs one of Dad’s belts from a hook in the closet. With her free hand, she clamps my wrist in an iron vise and drags me out of the closet and over to the bed.

  I don’t fight her. I’m too shocked to do anything but let her bend me over her knee. When the strap comes down on the backs of my legs, I start to struggle, but by then it’s too late. She’s got me pinned. The belt keeps coming, thwacking down on my butt, my thighs.

  All my resolution not to cry is gone by the third hit, and I hear myself wailing, loud and sad.

  “What’s going on?”

  Dad’s voice stops everything: the thwack of the belt, Mom’s torturing fingers anchoring me in place, the loud sobs bursting out of my throat. Both of us freeze, heads turning to look up at him.

  “I’ll take that,” he says, very quietly, and tugs the belt out of Mom’s hands.

  “She was snooping in the closet,” Mom says. “Into my stuff. Playing pretend.”

  “We weren’t snooping,” I whimper. “We were exploring. Marley is real. I don’t care what you say.”

  “See?” Mom says. “She still hasn’t learned. Give me back that belt.”

  “Leah,” he says. This time his voice is a reprimand, a reminder, the tone of voice he uses on me when I run into the house without taking off my muddy boots.

  Mom’s fingers press harder into my skin. They are going to tunnel through flesh and meet each other, and then the bone will crunch in her grasp. Marley whispers in my ear that maybe Mom is an ogress and not my real mother at all.

  “This is ridiculous,” the ogress says. “This Marley nonsense has got to stop.”

  “Let me deal with it. Please, Leah. You’re too angry.”

  Dad looks like the hero in one of my favorite fairy-tale movies, offering himself to the dragon in exchange for the princess.

  The ogress’s fingers are really starting to hurt. I keep my jaw clamped, but the whimper gets out anyway.

  “Leah.” Dad’s voice is very gentle now. He’s doing some sort of eye juju, his face only inches away from the ogress. He puts his hands over hers, and she lets go of my shoulders.

  The Dad Magic melts something inside her. She makes a strangled noise that turns her back into Mom and hurts me more than the belt ever did. Dad sits on the bed and puts his arms around her. She hides her face against his shoulder.

  “Go to your room, Maisey. I’ll be there in a bit,” Dad says. His voice is muffled, his cheek pressed against my mother’s hair.

  I go.

  My butt hurts and my legs hurt and the sounds my mother is making hurt me even more. I lie on my bed, my face buried in the pillow. Marley is here, but she looks thin and tattered around the edges.

  “I have to leave now,” she says, and even her voice sounds thin.

  “I know.”

  “Don’t forget me.”

  My heart is a lump in my chest when she evaporates and leaves me alone. I’m cold. My room is cold. I climb into bed with my bear and hide under the covers.

  I refuse to come out of my room for dinner.

  “I’m not hungry,” I tell Dad when he comes to check on me, but after he’s gone, I eat the cookies and milk he left on my dresser.

  Much later, Mom comes to tuck me in. I’m already in my pajamas and under the blankets, Grimm open in my hands, the lamp shedding a circle of light on the pages.

  “I’m sorry,” Mom says, perching like a bird on the edge of my bed. “I got too angry.” Her eyes are red and puffy, and she talks like her nose is blocked with a cold.

  “Can I have Marley, then?”

  She sighs. “There is no Marley. I got mad, and I’m sorry for that. But you need to grow up. No more Marley. Now, are you ready to read?”

  I look up from the book. “I can read it by myself.” It’s true. It’s been true for a long time—I just hadn’t realized.

  “I could read to you anyway.” She looks sad, sitting there on the edge of my bed. Part of me wants to hug her. But my legs are still burning from my whipping, and Marley’s gone, and in that moment, I love my mother and I hate her in equal measure.

  “That’s okay,” I say, keeping my eyes on the page, even though right now I’m not making sense of any of the letters. “But thanks anyway.”

  She lifts her hand as if to stroke my hair, then lets it fall onto the blanket between us. I pretend she isn’t there, that I’m all alone with the book. When she sighs again and leaves me, I bite my lip to stop calling out after her. And when the door closes behind her, with a barely audible click, I know that if I have punished her for taking Marley from me, then I have also punished myself.

  KANS
AS CITY, MISSOURI

  2017

  Chapter Two

  Time for me is not linear. It flows in random loops and swirls, and sometimes in huge, incomprehensible leaps. I have entertained the possibility that I possess my own personal wormhole that opens into an alternate time continuum whenever I’m engaged in an activity of interest. Reading, say, or messing around with paint.

  Today, for example, I swear it has only been two minutes of normal human time since I sat down to delve into the lusciously fat, solid, fantasy novel I bought yesterday. It can’t be more than two minutes, but the clock on the wall has mysteriously moved forward by fives and tens.

  The bacon I laid in a pan on the stove before picking up the book has gone from cold and flabby and streaked with white to black and crusty and on fire in a time span that is a matter of mystery. I can’t ponder the vagaries of time, though. I must face the shrill reality of a smoke-filled kitchen. Indecisive as usual, I’m torn between extinguishing the fire that has ignited in the spattering fat and doing something—anything—to stop the brain-blasting noise from the fire alarm over my head.

  Fire first. Always.

  Pinpricks of overheated oil spatter my hands and arms as I reach to put a lid over the pan and turn off the burner. My mother would have a fit. Thirty-nine years old and I can still hear her voice in my head, as clearly as if she’s in the room with me. Can see her plant both hands on her angular hips, tilt her head to the right just enough to let her hair graze her shoulder, and pin me with the gaze of disappointment.

  You must learn to focus, Maisey. One thing at a time. When you are cooking, cook. When you are studying, study. When you are cleaning, clean. You must learn this skill if you want to succeed.

  It’s an old lecture, one that follows me back as far into my childhood as I have memories. It’s as pointless now as it ever was. I am incapable of this type of unified purpose. My mother’s concept of success mystifies me as thoroughly as the idea of a straight line through time.

  My daughter, on the other hand, was born practical. No hesitation there, no scattered thoughts and indecision. She arrows into the room, focused and efficient.

  “Again?” she shouts, loud enough to be heard over the blaring screech.

  She drags a chair across the kitchen and climbs up on it. It strikes me, as she stretches for the smoke detector, how much she’s grown. The last time we played out this scenario her fingers barely grazed the plastic, and she had to stand on tiptoe. How long ago was that? Her T-shirt pulls tight against her chest, and I can see the unmistakable beginnings of breasts.

  “What?” she asks into a sudden silence, the battery in one hand, the detector in the other.

  I realize I’m staring, shattered by the realization that my baby is going to be a teen, only a few more months, and then the separation and the fighting and where will I be when she leaves me to follow her own life? Don’t leave me, Elle. Don’t ever leave me.

  When I don’t answer, she scrambles down and does all the things I should have done.

  Opens a window.

  Turns on the exhaust fan.

  Gets out a cloth and the dish soap and starts cleaning up the greasy mess all over the stove.

  “Seriously, Mom. You can’t be trusted to cook and read at the same time. How many times have we had this conversation?”

  She sounds exactly like my mother, which reminds me, belatedly, that I am the mother and Elle is still a child.

  “Here, I’ll do that.” I take the cloth from her hand and scrub the stove top. I’m focused enough now, my senses full of acrid smoke and the burning patches on my arms and the lump in the back of my throat.

  Elle makes a choking noise and opens the front door. Fresh, June-scented air flows into the kitchen, swirling the smoke.

  “Why are you making bacon anyway?” she demands. “What happened to salad for dinner? I thought that was the new normal.”

  “The new normal is me being allowed to deviate from routine.”

  “Oh, please. That’s the old normal.” She snorts, a disgusted chiding sort of snort, and then, unexpectedly, she bursts into a fit of helpless giggles. “You are incorrigible. And I love you that way.”

  She dances across the kitchen and hugs me. I can’t fit her head under my chin anymore, she’s gotten so tall. Another inch and she’ll be looking me level in the eyes.

  “Where did you learn that word?” I mumble against her hair, holding on to her as if she’s going to dissolve into the bacon smoke and be lost to me, a wraith, a memory.

  “My English teacher wrote it on my last paper.”

  “Oh dear. You need to pass English, Elle Belle.” I release the hug and tilt her chin up. Her eyes are the same changeable hazel as my mother’s—mosaic eyes, pixels of jade and mahogany, eyes that could mislead a casual acquaintance into overlooking the single-minded iron will behind them. My eyes can be blue or green, depending on the light. My father’s are gray. My genetics are as off-kilter as my sense of time.

  “Mrs. Wilson needs to stop giving out such stupid assignments,” Elle retorts. “I am not going to waste my time writing about my summer vacation.” She makes air quotes around the last three words, her voice a mockery of her teacher’s.

  “What exactly did you write?”

  “A short story. Can we go out for dinner?”

  “Now who is deviating from normal?” She is evading me, and I know it. Mrs. Wilson will no doubt be emailing to let me know that my daughter is persisting in a path of defiance and attach a copy of the offending story.

  But I also know that one of these days, inevitably, Elle will turn up her nose at the idea of dinner with her mother. Every day that she wants to be with me is a gift.

  “All right. Let’s go for dinner. Mexican?”

  “What happened to losing twenty pounds before you turn forty?”

  “I have a month. Close that window and get your shoes. Let’s make sure the bacon fire is out, though.”

  When my phone rings, I glance at it, but don’t answer. Nobody I know. The only people I ever really pick up the phone for are my parents, and not always even then.

  Elle is not like me.

  She answers before the second ring. “Yep, she’s here. Just a minute.”

  Ignoring my exaggerated headshaking and my lips forming the words “I’m not here,” she holds out the phone. “It’s somebody called Mrs. Carlton,” she says, and the world collapses inward, all in soft-focus slow motion, like an earthquake in a movie.

  One of my bare feet is illuminated by light from the window; the other foot remains in shadow. Tiny blobs of bacon grease speckle the floor between them. A haze of smoke winds its way in a visible layer above my head. Elle’s eyes are bright with curiosity. Her hand, holding the phone, looks strong and capable, and the smooth curve of her nails is the same as her father’s.

  I watch my own hand reach out for the phone. The fingers are longer than Elle’s, more tapered, the nails coated in glittery black. There’s a burn from a grease splash right next to the first knuckle. It’s red around the edges, forming a perfect fluid-filled blister at the center. All those little body cells, rushing around to do damage control, histamine alarms blaring, white blood cells rushing in.

  Elle shoves the phone into my hand, reminding me that I’m supposed to do something besides stand here. The phone feels heavier than it looks, and my voice, when I say hello, floats upward to join the smoke above my head, a cartoon bubble of a question that doesn’t want an answer.

  I’m going to get an answer though, whether I want it or not. A long, detailed, scorching one, because this is Mrs. Carlton calling. Mrs. Stay-Off-My-Lawn Carlton. Mrs. I’m-Telling-Your-Mother Carlton. Mrs. Shouldn’t-You-Be-Doing-Homework and Why-Is-That-Boy-Kissing-You Carlton.

  “Maisey?” I hardly recognize her voice. It’s gone soft and quavery. She sounds like she’s eighty. But then, she was already old when I was sixteen. She might be eighty now. She might be pushing a hundred.

  “How did you
get my number?”

  “It was on your mother’s fridge. I’m calling because I don’t think your father should be alone just now.”

  “Why not?” That’s the first question. It’s followed by the crushing and more obvious one, the question that transforms my lungs from spongy air reservoirs into solid, impermeable plastic, incapable of retaining oxygen. “Where’s Mom?” That’s the second question, the one I don’t want to hear the answer to.

  “The ambulance just left. The police are still here, but it doesn’t look like they’re going to arrest him. Heaven knows I can’t stay with him. I have things to do at my own house, and besides, I’m not sure I’d feel safe. You know?”

  I don’t know. I don’t know anything. None of this conversation makes sense.

  I can hear voices in the background. Male. Authoritative. Voices with answers.

  “The police are there?”

  “They came with the ambulance. I think they might call Adult Protective Services if they don’t arrest him, but you should probably—”

  “Let me talk to the police.”

  “You want to talk to the police?” She sounds scandalized, like I’ve asked to talk to somebody at ISIS headquarters.

  There’s a sound of heavy breathing and shuffling feet, and another voice comes on the phone.

  “Maisey?”

  “Dad? What on earth is going on over there?”

  “The police are here.”

  “I heard that. Why? Why are the police there? What happened to Mom?”

  “Your mother—” Silence. More heavy breathing. “They took her in the ambulance. She didn’t want to go, Maisey. And I can’t find the—”

  “This is Officer Mendez. Is this the daughter?”

  A new voice. Male. Confident. The slightest hint of a Latino accent. The question mark is only for the purposes of confirming my identity, and I know that I am now talking to the police.

  The daughter.

  As in, the next of kin. The now-responsible party for a disaster so high on the clusterfuck scale there is no number sufficient to mark it.