Whisper Me This

by Kerry Anne King

  “Ready,” she says. “I suggest we do a Maslow.”

  In case I’d forgotten that Elle is way too bright, this is a reminder. Of course, Maslow is partly my fault. I mentioned him once when she was four, talking to myself, really.

  I’d been contemplating taking a college class, had actually signed up and everything, all in a quest for self-actualization. Meanwhile, there was barely enough food in the refrigerator to get us through the week, and I was a month behind on the rent.

  “Who’s Maslow?” Elle had asked, plunking her sturdy, warm little body down in my lap and staring at my computer screen. “Is he a computer game?”

  I’d pictured Maslow traveling around like Pac-Man, snarfing up self-actualization diamonds. First I thought it was ridiculous. Then I thought maybe it was genius. Probably an idea that somebody will come up with in the future and use to make a shit ton of money.

  “Maslow is dead,” I’d told my daughter, completely unprepared for dewy eyelashes and a trembling lip.

  “Like Goldwing?”

  “Yes, like Goldwing.” Elle’s very first goldfish had passed just the week before, and her grasp of the permanent reality of death had been immediate and thorough, leading to a spate of nightmares that had just begun to taper off.

  “Did somebody flush him?”

  “What? No. No, he was buried. Long before you were born. In California, far, far from here.”

  “Did you know him?” She was all curiosity, which was infinitely preferable to inconsolable child grief, so I told her about Abraham Maslow and his hierarchy of needs.

  “He was famous,” I told her, “for figuring out something that is actually pretty simple. We need food and shelter first, before we need anything else, because without those things we will die. Then we need people to love. Once we have people to love, then we can learn to love ourselves and start working toward the things we are good at, the things that make us happy.”

  “I love you,” she’d announced, kissing me on the nose. “And you love me. So now we can go do happy things.” And then she’d run off singing to play some invented game involving all her stuffed animals and a box of Legos.

  Ever since then, though, we’ve engaged in what she calls “doing a Maslow” every time we have a problem to solve.

  “Food,” she says, writing it down in neat block letters. “We are all going to starve if we do not get some food in this house.”

  “The fridge is full of casseroles. Or you could eat oatmeal. I saw some in the pantry.”

  Elle makes gagging noises, sticks out her tongue, and lets her head drop over onto her shoulder like she’s dead. “Lentils, Mom. And I swear one of them is tofu.”

  I should insist on casserole as nourishment. They were a kind gift; the least we could do is eat them. But I also had a peek in the refrigerator and was equally uninspired by lentils and another dish with pale, nondescript chunks that jiggled when I pulled the pan out for a better look.

  “Your point is made. Number one task is buy groceries. Got it. Next up—a roof over our heads. And that’s not going to be quite so easy, Elle Belle.”

  “What’s hard? We live here. With Grandpa. Roof. Done.”

  “Sweetheart.”

  “Mom, don’t you dare even start.”

  And here we are, already, right at the heart of the difficulty. Maslow had it all wrong with his neat little pyramid, because the levels are all kinds of mixed up and interwoven. In this case, shelter is all tied up in love and belonging, meaning the tug-of-war between me and Greg over Elle.

  “You have school. Even smart kids can’t just skip out indefinitely.”

  “School is out in, like, a week.”

  “This might be a forever thing, Elle. He could be sick for a very long time.”

  “Then I can go to school here. Or—I know what! You can homeschool me.” Her face lights up as she says this, glowing like a mini sun. She’s been after me to homeschool her ever since she discovered, all the way back in first grade, that she already knew most of the curriculum.

  It’s not that I’m opposed to homeschooling. It’s that I’m opposed to the ridiculous concept of me as anybody’s teacher. Plus, I would have had to do battle with Greg, who has been pushing for the gifted program. At his urging, I went to one informational meeting, which was full of zealous mothers who reminded me too much of my own, and point-blank refused.

  Greg has acquiesced, for now, as long as I’ve kept up my end of what he calls enrichment and I call having fun with my daughter. We take adventurous trips to museums. Run small chemistry experiments. Bake cookies, which totally counts as math. Visit the zoo and talk to the zoo staff. We’ve watched caterpillars turn into butterflies, raised praying mantises and pollywogs, and even dissected a cow heart obtained from the butcher shop.

  Maybe I would be better at homeschooling than I’ve given myself credit for, but I shake my head. “There won’t be time. I’m going to need to find a job, Elle. Add that to the list as part of shelter.”

  “And while you’re at your job, who is going to stay with Grandpa? See? It’s perfect. I do homeschool and take care of him. You go to work. It’s not like you have to teach me things—there’s online school.”

  “Your father will never go for that.”

  “We could ask him.”

  This is not a new discussion, and both of us automatically assume our battle stations, shields up, weapons ready.

  Elle has both hands flat on the table, palms down. Every line of her body is alive with focused energy. Her eyes are target-locked on mine. I counter with my relaxed, confident Mom stance, the one that is meant to indicate there is not even an issue to address.

  Nothing to see here; move along folks.

  Not that this ever works, but I try.

  “What about your friends?”

  She shrugs, the one-shoulder version that says she’s hiding emotions.

  It strikes me that it’s been weeks since anybody has been over or since she’s asked to hang out somewhere.

  “Elle?”

  She sighs. “Erica’s moving to California. And Jaimie hasn’t talked about anything but boys for a year.”

  “You have other friends.”

  “Well, here I’ve got Mia.”

  “I mean kids your own age.”

  “Why? I like Mia. She actually talks about things besides boys and TV. Besides, it’s not like Kansas City has an exclusive on kids.”

  And with that, all my resistance crumbles. It’s an epic collapse and feels just like one of those videos where a large building is blown up with a demolition charge. I remember well enough feeling like I didn’t fit in at her age, how hard it was to navigate the relationships with the other girls.

  Besides, selfish or not, I need Elle to be with me.

  “Okay,” I tell her.

  Her mouth flops open and she gasps like a stranded fish. “Wait, what?”

  Suddenly giddy, I grin at her. “Great idea. Solves all kinds of problems. Add researching online homeschool to that list. And homeschool support groups in Colville. Oh, and Washington State homeschool regulations. Anything we need to present a case to your father.”

  Elle’s mouth closes, her eyes well up, and she melts down in her chair. Her arms go on the table, her face buried in them, her shoulders shaking with sobs.

  I freeze, an electric Taser jolt going straight to my heart. Paragraphs of intact text from the parenting books I’ve read laser through my brain. Kids need stability. Structure. Boundaries. They don’t really want change. They push against the boundaries, but they don’t really want them to give way. Elle needed me to hold the line, and instead I’ve restructured our whole world order.

  “Elle, honey. We don’t have to. I thought that’s what you wanted.”

  She launches like a rocket up out of her chair, sending it skittering backward across the tile. “Of course it’s what I want.” She flings herself into my lap with enough force that my chair nearly goes over backward. Both of her arms wrap
around my neck so tightly I can hardly breathe. “Thank you. You don’t know.” Her voice breaks off into sobbing.

  I pull her into my lap even though she’s nearly as tall as I am, rocking her like I used to when she was a little girl.

  “Honey, don’t get your heart too set on this. We’ve got to get through your father first.”

  She sniffles and scrubs her wet face on my shoulder. “You’re the custodial parent.”

  “And he’s an attorney. We don’t want to push him too far.”

  She sits back then and looks at me, her expressive face transitioning rapidly between joy, tears, fear, and consternation.

  “He wouldn’t go all legal on you. Would he?”

  “He never has, but I wouldn’t want to push him. He might win, Elle. If it came down to a custody battle.”

  “So you’re just going to cave? You’re not even going to try? Homeschooling is the dream of my heart, and you’re going to snatch it away before it has a chance.”

  These lines are delivered in true drama queen fashion with one hand over her heart, a performance worthy of an old-time silent movie heroine being tied to the railway tracks. Warring parts of me want to smile, weep, and smack her.

  “No, we’re going to create and present an airtight case. That’s your assignment.”

  “Got it.” She flings her arms around my neck and hugs me again. “I love you.”

  “I love you, too, baby girl. Now, are you going to keep writing things down? Because we are not done with Maslow yet.”

  She rubs her face on my shirt, leaving wet splotches behind, and then grins at me, impish and irrepressible. “Yes, but make it quick. I have a legal brief to write.”

  “God have mercy,” I mutter. “Okay. So we’ll live here and let Grandpa pay for our room and board. Our apartment lease is up next month, so we’ll let that go. But I’m still going to need a job.”

  Dutifully she writes, Find Mom a job.

  My prospects of finding a job in a small town are a little dismal, but if we live here with Dad, our overhead will be minimal. Greg pays healthy child support for Elle, enough to cover anything she needs. But my mother will roll over in her not-yet-grave if I take a job at McDonald’s or some other fast-food establishment.

  “You can do better, Maisey.” This has been her response to any job I’ve ever held. She’s right, of course. A gig taking Santa photos at the mall during the holiday season isn’t exactly a resume builder. It was fun, though. I loved every minute. Every job I’ve ever embarked upon was a learning experience or an adventure or just plain fun. Even the newspaper reporter job that took me to Kansas City in the first place was fun, until my editor retired and was replaced by a soul-sucking asshat who wanted to leap the corporate ladder in a single bound.

  About two weeks into his tenure, I quit and took a job with a temp agency, which has landed me stints doing everything from answering phones in a veterinary office to writing community articles for small newspapers. I love the variety, even though I know this is a phase I should probably have grown out of about twenty years ago. I keep waiting for some great life purpose to rise up in front of me and declare itself, but I don’t seem to be wired for greatness.

  Elle is staring at me, tapping the pen on the table.

  “What?”

  “You were daydreaming. Are you really going to just let the church ladies plan Grandma’s funeral?”

  “I am. What’s next?”

  She grins. “Tony.”

  “I don’t think I follow you.”

  “We’ve got safety and basic needs and shelter taken care of. Love and belonging come next.”

  “Could we skip that and get straight to self-actualization? Besides, I have you and Grandpa. All the love I could possibly need.”

  Elle makes a scoffing noise. “Not the same. Tony’s cute. Don’t you think?”

  Cute isn’t the word I would use for Tony. At all. Too masculine. Too much muscle. Too much shadow hidden beneath his grin and his gentleness. I’m not about to share any of these thoughts with my daughter.

  “Can we get back to work?” I ask her. “I don’t have time for boys right now.”

  This doesn’t get me off the hook.

  “Oh, fine,” she says. “Aunt Marley, then. She definitely fits under love and belonging. Don’t you miss her? We can go to the concert, right?”

  Marley.

  I don’t remember her as anything more than an imaginary friend, and yet her name is at the center of everything—all this mystery. It is also the heart of the breach between my mother and me. My desire to find my sister is equally balanced by a desire to stay as far away from her as possible.

  I take a breath, curl my toes, tap my fingers on my thighs. One of my counselors taught me this trick for staying grounded—one of the counselors who reinforced my mother’s continued statements that Marley was made up of my imagination, that I needed to make real friends and live in the real world.

  Elle is waiting for an answer. I give her an evasion.

  “So she’s Aunt Marley now? Just like that?”

  “Well, she is my aunt, right? So what else would I call her?”

  I drop my head into my hands and rub my temples. “Elle, this isn’t going to be some exuberant family reunion. She might not even want to know us. Maybe she’s a terrible person, and we don’t want to know her. If we go to that concert. If.”

  “She’s family,” Elle says, as if that is the answer to everything. “It doesn’t matter what kind of person she is; she’s still family.”

  Leah’s Journal

  I married Boots when I was sixteen, a bona fide shotgun wedding. My father sobered up long enough to be outraged and make some empty threats. Boots didn’t need threatening. He was into me and loved the idea of himself as a father, that he was recreating in his own image. He wanted me by his side all the time, everywhere. I loved the way he wanted me all to himself.

  “We don’t need anybody else,” he would say. I agreed. My few friendships fell away, one by one.

  Mom was just too beaten down and tired to raise a fuss.

  She tried. I’ll credit her with that.

  “You don’t have to do this,” she said to me. “Being pregnant isn’t the end of everything. Have the baby. Give it up for adoption. You’re a smart girl. You should finish school.”

  I thought this to be stupid advice. She hadn’t done that. Why should I?

  Logic, with a sixteen-year-old girl, doesn’t always exist. I ought to have seen it then, where her own shotgun marriage landed her. With me and an alcoholic husband and no real life whatsoever. But I was madly in love.

  At that point, I had no clue I was carrying twins. The idea of a baby (let alone two!) was sort of nebulous and unreal. My body hadn’t changed much. Apart from a little nausea in the mornings, I wasn’t even sick. Boots looked like an escape. Like salvation and a dream. He was going to be a rock star. And he’d chosen me—me! We were going to live in a mansion and have a castle in France. Travel all over the country, where he would perform before adoring fans.

  And me? I would travel with him, of course. Me and a baby. One happy family.

  It wasn’t a church wedding. The pastor of our church refused to perform the ceremony. I thought at the time he was judging us because I was pregnant. I wonder now if it was his attempt to save me, or at least his refusal to be part of the devil’s deal I was making.

  So we were married at the courthouse, by a justice of the peace. I couldn’t afford a wedding dress, and God knows Boots couldn’t afford to buy one for me. He told me not to worry about it.

  “We are not the dress-up sort of people, you and me,” he said. So I wore my usual blue jeans, with a long shirt to conceal the snap I could no longer close.

  I didn’t have a friend to be my witness. For one, they were all too young to be legal. And I’d been so completely absorbed in Boots since that very first night that I really had no friends left who were interested.

  My mother signed for me
.

  Boots brought two of his band members to bear witness. One was his buddy, Irv somebody. I never did know his last name. The other was a girl, Jolene Avery. Her name I knew too well. Boots talked about her a lot. What a fantastic singer she was. Her accommodating nature (this to highlight my own stubborn willfulness). How thin, how active, how sexy.

  On our wedding day, Boots bought me flowers. A bouquet of genuine red roses. Nobody had ever done that before. He told me I was the most beautiful girl in the world and that we were going to be ecstatically happy. He didn’t even look at Jolene on that day, his eyes only for me.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Of course we go to Marley’s concert on Friday night, even though Mom’s funeral is scheduled for Saturday. How can I not take advantage of an opportunity to talk to my sister? To finally find out what happened? To see if she’s anything like the Marley my imagination conjured up for me as a child?

  But it seems so wrong to go out to a brewpub for a concert, no matter what the reasons are. I worry about what people will think. I feel guilt and anticipation in equal measure.

  As for Elle, she just keeps on arranging everything, and I keep on letting her. One of the things she’s arranged, unbeknownst to me, is for Tony and Mia to go with us.

  “Good for you,” Mia says, engulfing me in a warm hug when they swing by to pick us up. “So many people get all stuffy about grief. Life doesn’t end when somebody dies. I think it’s fantastic that you’re trying to go do something fun.”

  Even Tony’s mother, who volunteered to stay with Dad while we are out, is totally on board with the program. She bustles in, radiating competence, kindness, and goodwill, another casserole in hand. This one gives off a heavenly aroma of tomato and cheese that makes my mouth water. She introduces herself as Hannah, but I can’t bring myself to call her anything but Mrs. Medina.

  The first thing she does after introductions is dish up a plate of food for Dad. He tries to tell her he isn’t hungry, but she won’t hear it. It only takes her about five minutes to cajole him into his chair at the table, a plate full of food in front of him.