Whisper Me This

by Kerry Anne King

  “Oh, Maisey,” Dad says. “I’m so sorry. I wish I could fix it. Such a helpless feeling to be an old man and not be able to do anything.”

  “There is something you can do.”

  “I can’t see what. But tell me.”

  “Talk to me about Marley. Tell me what Mom was doing with a gun. How did she break all of those bones?”

  All the clarity leaches out of him. I watch his gaze go from clear to fuzzy, his jaw slacken, his shoulders go soft. He turns the chair away from me and rests his hand on top of the papers. “I can’t.”

  I come up on my knees and turn the chair back so he has to face me. “There’s no point pretending. Marley was at the funeral. You had to have noticed. And if Mom suddenly went out and bought a gun, surely you noticed that, too.”

  He sighs and rubs his forehead with both hands, fretfully, like Elle does when she’s been up too late and had too much sugar.

  “So many secrets, Leah,” he whispers. “So damned many.”

  I think he’s drifted away from reality again, but then he drops his hands and looks at me, and I can see that he’s in the here and now.

  “She was only twenty when I met her. You were three. She applied for a front-desk job in my office, and I hired her on the spot.” He lights up a little, remembering. “You know why I hired her, Maisey? She had no experience running an office, no education beyond a GED. You might think it was sympathy for a young single mother. Sympathy was not something I felt. I hired her because she told me I was going to. She looked me directly in the eyes—you know that look—and explained to me that she was going to be a top-notch receptionist for me, and I’d be making a mistake if I passed her over for ‘the deceptive benefits of age and experience.’”

  I picture my mother, young and fierce and determined. Where was I while she had this job interview? Where was Marley?

  “She ran my office fearlessly from day one,” Dad goes on. “Changed up my operating system. Found me new clients. Read books from the library about office management. My business had been okay up until then. Most of my money for the year I made during tax season. The rest of the time I skimped. I was shy and socially awkward and didn’t have a clue about business. Leah changed all of that.”

  He falls into silence, lost in memories, and I call him back.

  “Dad? How did she get from secretary to wife?”

  “What?” His gaze comes around to me as if he’s surprised to see me in his office, then clears again. He laughs. “She told me I was going to marry her. That’s how that happened. Not that I had any objection, other than a little worry over what people would think. I was almost forty. Geeky. Reclusive. And she was beautiful and not yet twenty-one. I would never have dreamed of even asking her out.

  “She was an orchestrator, your mother. She would bring in coffees for both of us, and come sit in my office while she drank hers. And we would talk. She had a way of drawing me out of my shell, getting me to tell her things about my life, my family, my thoughts on the world. Somehow I never noticed that she told me nothing about hers.

  “One day I actually asked. ‘My family is not worth the words it takes to discuss them,’ she said. ‘That part of my life no longer exists. We don’t need to talk about that.’

  “And that was it. I let it go, Maisey, God forgive me. I told myself she was young, and that was certainly true. She would have been seventeen when you were born. I didn’t ask myself questions about her parents or her first husband or why she’d slammed the door between herself and them. She was so fierce, so determined. She could make me believe anything.”

  This I know to be true. My mother’s word was law. If she said it, then it was true. End of story. Even if she told you that a real, living, human being—your twin sister, say—was imaginary, then that became truth.

  “I came to believe,” Dad says, “that I really was your father. I mean, I always knew that I couldn’t be. Wasn’t there for the making of you or for your birth. But somehow the meaning of that would fade out of my consciousness. So yes, I helped your mother in what I see now was a deception. Was it a bad thing, really, not knowing you had a different biological father?”

  This is a question I don’t yet know the answer to. I can see this lie as a protective one. What good would it have ever done me to know I had another father somewhere?

  The other lie is so much more shattering.

  “But you knew about Marley,” I tell him, speaking the greatest betrayal of all. “You let Mom tell me I was crazy.”

  “I didn’t,” he says, shaking his head. “I didn’t know then. I swear to you, Maisey. Leah didn’t tell me about Marley until after the doctors found the aneurism. Looking back, there were times, in the beginning, when I should have guessed. You would go on about Marley, and she would get so irrationally distressed. ‘Don’t all kids have imaginary friends?’ I would ask her. I couldn’t understand her reaction.

  “And then, in the days of shock right after the MRI results came in, Leah had a nightmare. She was screaming for Marley. When she woke up, I insisted that she tell me, and she said that Marley was her baby, and she’d lost her. And that was all. When I tried to ask her questions—Was it adoption? Did the baby die? What happened?—she said, ‘That part of my life does not exist. We won’t speak of this again.’

  “But I was shaken, Maisey. I remembered your imaginary friend, then, and her reaction to that. I thought probably she’d had to give a child up for adoption. Curiosity got me, like it got you. I googled, never thinking I would actually find results. But I found Marley. And then I got to thinking. Leah would never revisit a decision she’d made, but surely things were different. She was going to die. She should know her daughter, or at least her daughter should have the chance to know her. I tried to tell her that, but she still wouldn’t listen. I tried to tell her she should tell you. We had raging battles for the first time in our marriage. I fought her on this. In the end, I wrote to Marley. She wrote back directly to your mother. The letter wasn’t . . . helpful.”

  “I’ve met her. I can imagine.”

  “Leah went from angry to paranoid. Maybe it was that thing in her brain, I don’t know. ‘You don’t know what you’ve done,’ she said.

  “‘Tell me, then,’ I begged her. ‘What’s so terrible about reaching out to your children before you die?’ But she refused to talk about it. She bought that gun. She got obsessive about locking doors, checking them five times before she’d go to bed, and then getting up in the middle of the night to check again.

  “Something like a wrong-number phone call would send her off on a reverse number search. I didn’t know what to do with her. She would tell me only that it was best if I didn’t know. Best if you didn’t know. And definitely best if she never, ever talked to Marley.”

  He falls quiet. I let him swivel the chair away from me, and he drops his head into his hands, both elbows resting on the desk. “And now I feel guilty, like I’ve betrayed her trust. Do you think she’s haunting us, Maisey, burning holes in my back with ghostly eyes right this minute?”

  I get up and stand behind him, draping my arms around his neck and pressing my cheek against the top of his head. “I think she was the luckiest woman in the world to find you and that she knew that. I think she’s resting quietly in her grave. I think you and I are both going to have a hell of a time figuring out how to make our own decisions.”

  He sighs, deeply. “You think?”

  “I know.”

  “God, I am so tired. I think I’m going back to bed.”

  “You need some dinner first.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Me, either,” I tell him. “But that’s one of those decisions we’re going to have to start making. Food. Minimum three times a day. All right?”

  “If you say so.”

  We both laugh at that, such a tiny little moment of relief. He leans on me when he stands. I put my arm around his waist, and we walk together to the kitchen, where we both turn up our noses at cass
eroles and go for sugar cereal and milk, a small, shared rebellion.

  I think we’ve left the topic of Marley behind, but when Dad sets his bowl in the sink he turns to me, serious, focused. “Leave Marley alone. It’s best. We opened the door to her, and she slammed it shut. We should respect that.”

  “We should. Do you need a hand back to your room?”

  “There are perfectly good walls to lean on. I’ll manage. Where’s Elle?”

  “Spending the night with Greg’s mom. She’s not particularly happy about it.”

  “She’ll live.” He drops a kiss on the top of my head and shuffles off down the hallway.

  When he’s out of sight, I pick up my cereal bowl in both hands and drain the sugary milk, making slurping noises and daring my mother’s ghost to come after me.

  What I should do and what I will do are two different chickens, and I’m pretty sure Dad knows it.

  Leah’s Journal

  Things got worse between me and Boots after the babies came home.

  It was easy to make excuses for him. Both of us were exhausted. It took two people working around the clock to manage the feeding and diapering and crying, not to mention the house and food and all those things.

  My mother was in a bout of major depression. She showed up twice in those first weeks, uncombed, gaunt, moving with exaggerated slowness. Holding her grandbabies did nothing to light a fire in her. She looked at them, dead-eyed, and began to silently weep.

  “I’ve not done right by you, Leah,” she whispered. “Not been a good mother.”

  “So be one now,” I told her. I didn’t have the energy to take care of her. I needed her to take care of me, just this once . . .

  I see now that she was clinically depressed. I’m sure she needed medications and counseling. My father was a late-stage alcoholic by then, never sober. He didn’t even come to see the little ones. I didn’t go to him.

  My mother-in-law came daily to snuggle babies, create a little order out of chaos, even restock the refrigerator. But she had her waitress job to manage, and she wasn’t young anymore. Night shifts were out of the question. And night shifts were the hardest of all.

  It was 1:03 a.m. when Boots snapped the first time. The red digital numbers of the bedside clock are imprinted in my brain.

  Both Maisey and Marley were crying. I don’t know why. I’d fed them, changed them, rocked them. And finally, exhausted beyond caring, I put them into the crib and dropped into a milk-sodden heap on the bed.

  Boots sat up when I lay down. If I’d been awake enough to care, I would have recognized that he was practically blaring outrage.

  “What are you doing?” His voice was a white heat of anger, but even that wasn’t enough to slice through the level of exhaustion that melted me into the bed.

  “Sleeping,” I mumbled, burrowing into the blankets, pulling a pillow over my head.

  “Oh no, you’re not.” He yanked the pillow away from me. “You are going to make that noise stop, and you’re going to do it now.”

  Adrenaline dispelled sleep enough for me to see the state he was in, but I still couldn’t think straight. “Your turn,” I said. “Please. I’m so tired.” Tears started to flow, sideways into my ears.

  “You’re a shitty mother,” he said. “You know that? I’ve been trying to help, but there’s only so much I can do. Get up and make them stop crying.”

  “I need—”

  He straddled me, knees on either side of my legs, face just visible in the light filtering in from the streetlights outside the window. “This isn’t about what you need. You wanted kids. Now you’ve got kids. And you can fucking get up and take care of them.”

  I wasn’t stupid. I remembered well enough the fist to my face, the boot to my belly. But I wasn’t thinking straight either, and I had always had a sharp tongue. His accusations, his tone, raised my own temper.

  “Maybe if you weren’t such a poor excuse for a father—”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Greg walks in at precisely 9:00 a.m. No knock. No warning.

  He powers into the kitchen like it’s a courtroom, freshly shaven, perfectly combed, briefcase in hand. I’m lounging at the table about halfway through my second mug of coffee, my rumpled T-shirt and yoga pants a counterpoint to his impeccably ironed shirt and perfectly matching tie.

  Elle flits by him, gives me a hug, and then plunks down on the floor in front of the cereal cupboard. She grabs a box of Froot Loops and hugs them to her chest.

  “You’ve had breakfast,” Greg says.

  She wrinkles her nose at him. “I’ve had fruit. And oatmeal. A girl needs sustenance.”

  “Put it back. It’s nothing but sugar.”

  “Oh good grief, Greg. Let her have some cereal.”

  Greg sets his briefcase on the table, a little harder than necessary. He glares, first at her, and then at me. He’s justified. I’ve undermined his authority in front of our daughter. My hand goes involuntarily to my bruised ribs, and the haze of fatigue clears from my head. I’m awake. I’m alert. I’m hyperfocused on his eyes and his hands, every muscle in my body prepped for flight.

  “Is this how she eats? No wonder she’s getting chubby. Do you—”

  “Her weight is perfect. Don’t start. Besides, it’s a funeral. Rules don’t apply.”

  “The funeral was yesterday.”

  “Precisely.”

  I’m amazed at my own audacity. The same part of me that was slurping cereal milk last night is enjoying contradicting Greg today, even as my early warning system starts sending siren bleats of danger through my brain and body.

  Be small. Be quiet. Just go along.

  I’ve done that. I’ve been doing that for years.

  Frankly, I’m pissed. I’m pissed at my mother for dying and for having secrets. I’m pissed that she lied to me, that she pushed and prodded and poked at me to try to make me marry Greg. And I’m royally, out-of-the-ballpark pissed at Greg for being Greg in the first place.

  “Coffee?” I ask him. “There’s more in the pot. Or Elle could fix you a bowl of cereal.”

  I brace myself for the possibility of violence, but it’s not like he’d actually hit me. Not in Dad’s house. Not in front of Elle. He’ll take it out in other ways.

  Right now, he very deliberately and precisely unlocks the briefcase and clicks it open. “We have a lot of work to do. You’re not even dressed.”

  “I’m dressed.” Maybe if he’d called ahead, I would have changed. Maybe I wouldn’t have. To be fair, Elle knows where the key is hidden under the mat, and I know she opened the door for both of them. Also, if I had stopped to think about it, his behavior is perfectly predictable. Up at six, breakfast, exercise, work at nine.

  His eyes flick over me with disdain, then go pointedly to the clock. He sits down at the table, but does nothing further.

  It’s now 9:05. I am not with the program. He fully expects me to get up from this chair and go put on some real clothes, at minimum. Comb my hair. I should have prepared. Should have had all relevant files laid out for his inspection.

  The usual guilt swamps my childish rebellion. Greg’s just trying to help. He wouldn’t have to do a thing, and yet here he is. He’s taking time away from his family, from his work, to help us out, and I am behaving badly.

  Elle drags out a chair and plunks a bowl and spoon onto the table. She’s mixed three different varieties of cereal. The milk is pink. My stomach takes a little spin at the thought of eating the concoction, but she makes a little hum of pleasure with the first bite.

  I take another sip of coffee and go refresh my cup. “What do you need?” I ask Greg. “Maybe we should move to the study.”

  “I’m already set up here. I’ve spoken with the police, Mental Health, and Adult Protective Services. They’ve sort of back-burnered your dad because nobody has pressed charges. But somebody should be set up with a power of attorney. I’d like to get that squared away before I go.”

  I feel a little quake at the t
hought of all the responsibility. “What all does that entail? The power of attorney thing?”

  “You would be responsible for his finances. For the estate. You could get him out of this house and into a facility.”

  “I don’t want to do that.”

  Greg rolls his shoulders and sighs, patiently. “He can’t stay here by himself. I think we all see that.”

  “I don’t. He’s a little muddled off and on, but what do you expect? My mom died, Greg. We buried her yesterday, in case you didn’t notice.”

  He slows his speech down into elements of exaggerated pronunciation. “You need to face the facts, here, Maisey. I know it’s not your favorite thing to do, so let me help you. Fact: Walter is an old man and is now alone. Fact: he didn’t call for help when your mother suddenly collapsed. For three days, Maisey. Three days. Think about that. Her lying unconscious in that bed, and him just letting her lie there. Fact: he was burning something in the fireplace and made a big enough fire to warrant a call to 911.”

  “It wasn’t that big of a fire,” Elle says with her mouth full.

  “Fact,” Greg goes on. “He burned papers in that fire. Maybe important papers, like an advanced directive.”

  “Objection. Speculation. We don’t know what he burned.”

  “I’m finding your attitude juvenile and not helpful,” Greg says. “You want to pay for an attorney to do all this? Or, better stated, can you afford one?”

  I squeeze my rebellious hands together in my lap and drop my eyes. “I’m sorry. Please proceed.”

  “Here’s what I’m thinking. If the power of attorney thing seems like too much for you, I’m willing to do it myself. It makes sense to have somebody a little . . . detached . . . from the emotions. The house will need to be sold, for example.”

  “No!”

  The mind-picture of strangers sitting at this table, working in Dad’s study, drinking coffee by the fireplace in the winter, is like a knife in my gut.

  “I’m not selling the house.”

  “See? You can’t be logical about this. You need somebody who is.”