Whisper Me This

by Kerry Anne King

  On this particular day, the problem has intensified to the point of being intolerable. Mia’s chatter has been full of Greg and his legal quest for custody of Elle, so Tony’s well up on the situation. His protective instincts are running high, and there’s no outlet for them. He’s exhausted and useless and literally pacing the living room, one side to the other, when the door opens and his family traipses in.

  Mia. His mother. All his sisters. None of the husbands or kids, and they all have that expression on their faces that means he’s in for some kind of lecture. They are also far too quiet. No laughter. No chatter.

  “God have mercy,” he says, watching them arrange themselves on chairs around the room. “What is this?”

  Mia stands in the doorway and folds her arms over her chest like a bouncer on duty. “This,” she says, “is an intervention.”

  “Sit down, Tony,” his mother says. “We need to talk to you.”

  “I think I’ll stand.” He leans his back against a wall, surveying the forces arrayed against him. He loves them all, but knows full well that when they unite in a common mission, they are formidable. His mother. His oldest sister, Theresa, fourteen years older and in many ways more mother than sister. He’s a foot taller than she is now, and has about a hundred pounds of muscle on her, but inside he still quakes when she looks at him like she is looking now.

  Vanessa and Jess, only one year apart and always attached at the hip. As little kids, they shared everything and even had a special language for a while that the rest of the family couldn’t interpret. They married brothers and live on the same street, sharing kids and household chores. Between them, they manage school fund-raisers, community blood drives, two husbands, and seven kids. There is no project they won’t tackle, and right now that project would appear to be Tony.

  Barb, quiet and thoughtful. Generally she minds her own business, and he knows it’s a busy time of year for her. She’ll be working horses, keeping an eye on the cattle, helping to get the fields planted on the ranch. The fact that she is now sitting in his house, with her hair braided to stay out of her way and mud on her boots, is possibly the most ominous sign of all.

  “I’m frightened,” Tony says, lightly. “You are all far too serious for my own good.”

  And he is frightened, although he hates himself for this fear. The blood is loud in his ears. His breath keeps catching in his throat. His knees are even a little wobbly, and he wishes he’d opted to sit down.

  “It’s time we had a little talk about your father,” his mother says. “Well past time, really.”

  Tony’s throat constricts. “And if I politely decline?”

  “Not an option.” Theresa leans forward in her chair and sets both of her capable hands on her knees, bracing herself. “This isn’t easy for any of us, Tonio. But there are things that need to be said.”

  “Why now?” he asks. “We’ve managed not to talk about it for, what, twenty-seven years? Seems like there should be a statute of limitations on certain topics of conversation.”

  “You’re having nightmares,” Mia says. “You think I don’t hear you talking in your sleep? That I don’t notice you getting up and checking doors?”

  “My sleep problems are my own business,” he says. “Please. I know you all mean well, but this isn’t going to help me.”

  “There’s also Maisey,” Mia says.

  “What does she have to do with any of this?”

  “Tony. Look at me.” His mother is so incredibly calm. She reminds him of the maple out back that holds his treehouse. Her roots run deep into the earth. She sways with the wind but never breaks.

  And yet, it’s her voice he hears screaming in his flashbacks and his nightmares. Hers. Theresa’s. Vanessa. Jess. Barb. Mia. All of them were there that night. All of them know what he did. The thing they’ve never talked about. The thing they inexplicably want to talk about now.

  “I was too broken to talk to you right after,” his mother says now. “I sent you to the counselor to do what I should have done myself. I am sorry for that.”

  “You have nothing to be sorry for,” he says. His voice is rough in his throat, sandpaper. The words hurt him. His breathing hurts him. All their eyes on him, the weight of their collective memory, hurts him.

  Vanessa and Jess wrap their arms around each other. Mia’s face is wet with tears. Even Barb’s sun-weathered face is creased with grief.

  But his mother continues, perfectly calm. “It never occurred to me to ask you what you remember about that night. What you believe. You were only a child, Tony. I’m not sure if you realize that.”

  “I was twelve!” His voice sounds angry, the rage he feels at himself breaking through his reserves. “Old enough to know what I was about.”

  “Same age as Elle is now,” Mia says, very softly. “Think on that, Tony.”

  “Not even a big twelve,” Barb agrees. “I could still take you in a fight.”

  “We were all bigger than you,” Vanessa says, “except for Mia.”

  Tony closes his eyes. In his memory, in his dreams, he’s always the size he is now. Six foot two, two hundred pounds of highly capable muscle. With their words, he has a sudden flash of himself at twelve, a skinny kid. Bookish. Shy.

  It’s too much of a shift for him. He shakes his head. “Old enough to think of something else.”

  Theresa gets up and crosses the room to him, takes his hands. He lets her, surprised to discover that hers have age spots. She’s fifty-three and was twenty-six the night it happened.

  Which is another trick his memory has played. He always sees her as a terrified child, huddled in the corner with the rest of his sisters. She was home for Thanksgiving, he remembers now. Had moved out the day after she graduated from high school.

  “I’ve always felt guilty,” Theresa says. “I took off as soon as I was legal and left the rest of you in that house. I didn’t have the guts to do what you did. I wish to God I had been the one to pull the trigger.”

  Her words carry him back to the cramped living room of the run-down house in Seattle. His sisters are all weeping silently, huddled in a little knot at the end of the sofa, as far away from his father as they can get.

  The TV is blaring, but it can’t shut out his mother’s voice, pleading, or his father’s, threatening.

  She’s on her knees, and her eye is swelling shut from where he punched her.

  Tony, man-size and powerful, holds a gun in his hands. He aims it, a deadly marksman, at his father’s chest and pulls the trigger. The recoil. The blood. The smell of gunpowder.

  But Theresa keeps talking, and her words change the picture.

  “You were such a stringy little kid,” she says. “Even at twelve. You hadn’t hit your growth spurt yet.”

  “And those glasses!” Barb’s voice adds in. “Too big for his face. Like Harry Potter.”

  “You couldn’t see properly that night because he’d blackened your eye and broken your nose before he started in on Mom. Your nose was pouring blood all down your shirt.”

  “No,” Tony says. “No, it wasn’t like that at all.”

  “It was exactly like that,” Vanessa and Jess say together.

  “Defiant,” Barb says. “All of us girls were trying to hide. But not you. You marched out of the room, a little wobbly from the head punches, and came back with the gun.”

  Flashes of memory come at Tony from all directions. He can’t look at any of them very long, they’re like a strobe light. Pain in his eye. Blurred vision. Blood gushing from his nose down the front of his shirt. Nausea twisting in his belly.

  And the blurred image of his father, yanking his mother’s head back by the hair.

  Tony gasps, leans back against the wall behind him. “He had a knife,” he says. “I’d forgotten the knife.”

  “You saved me,” his mother says, her calm voice cutting through the haze of his growing panic. “Maybe all of us. He was crazy drunk and into some kind of drugs, I think. I don’t know, but he was worse t
hat night than he’d ever been. Paranoid. He said I’d been cheating on him. He said he would kill me first, and then all of you, one by one.”

  Tony’s knees give way, and he slides down the wall, letting the floor and the wall hold muscles that don’t know what to do anymore. He is weeping in a way he didn’t know was possible, as if something lodged deep inside his gut is trying to tear itself loose.

  And then Theresa is on the floor beside him, with her arms around him, and she is weeping also. And then all of his sisters pile on, one after the other, like it’s a football game and he’s the quarterback. He’s buried in a pile of soft arms and hair and perfume and tears, but it’s all right. They are there because they love him.

  A long time later, when the tears stop and the girls are all sitting on the floor around him, he says, “I remember it all so different.”

  “I wish I had asked,” his mother says. “You don’t owe us anything, my son. You saved us. We owe you.”

  “I don’t know what that means,” he answers.

  “It means,” Mia says, irrepressible and already laughing through her tears, “that you can stop being such an idiot of a martyr and take Maisey out on a date.”

  “You’re a crazy girl,” Tony says. But in his heart, he begins to think that maybe, possibly, he might do exactly that.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  One day flows into another, and we flow with them.

  Marley and JB have moved into a house just outside of town, one with a couple of acres and their own small, personal forest. She says she can breathe out there and is working on clearing away too many years of ugly. Turns out JB is more teddy bear than bouncer, unless something is a threat to Marley.

  As for the rest of her band, they weren’t too excited about Colville. She says they can suck it up. She can find new people either here or in Spokane. It’s not like she even wants to be big-time; she just likes to make music. She’s teaching guitar lessons and waitressing for now, but she is talking about going back to school. She says she doesn’t care what she studies, as long as she studies something. She always wanted a college degree.

  Geoff succeeded in his bid to have Greg’s custody suit heard here in Colville. He’s also managed to get the date set for the first week of October. That way, he says, the best interests of the child are more likely to have her continue the school year here, especially if things are going well.

  We are now two weeks in, and so far Elle is happy. She says school is still boring, and she still wants to homeschool, but she gets that it will be better for the court thing if she’s enrolled in regular classes for now. She’s making friends, and she’s in band and choir and drama.

  As for me, I’m still at loose ends. Dad’s cognitive state is pretty good, in general, although he never has gone back to work. He reads a lot, sleeps a lot, takes long walks around the neighborhood. So he doesn’t require much care from me, apart from cleaning the house and making meals.

  Sooner or later, I’m going to have to do something to earn my keep, but for right now I feel like we’re both blessed to have time to reset and recover.

  I’ve started seeing a counselor to help me work through a lifetime of beliefs that need changing. It’s an amazing process to begin to understand that I couldn’t possibly have ever been enough for my mother, no matter what I’d managed to accomplish. Even if I’d gone into politics and managed to be the first woman in the White House, she would have still needed me to be more.

  So right now I’m working on being enough for me.

  I’m sitting on the front porch with my journal, breathing in afternoon sunshine that still smells of last night’s frost. The sky is cloudless and blue beyond imagining. The maple on the front lawn is scarlet, and I’ve forgotten about writing down my thoughts because I’m lost in the contrast between the scarlet and the blue and how beautiful it all is. How quiet.

  And then a pickup truck pulls into the driveway.

  Tony.

  My heart does a sideways lurch one direction and then the other. A flock of butterflies that has apparently been roosting in my belly bursts up in a flight pattern that would be the envy of the Blue Angels.

  The last time I saw Tony was that day when Walter told us the story of how my mother came to leave Marley behind. Mia and Mrs. Medina have been in and out of our house on a regular basis, and I’ve been to Mrs. Medina’s house for dinner more than once, but Tony has always been working. He hasn’t called to check in or offer any commentary on Boots or any words of support over Greg’s attempt to take Elle away from me.

  He hasn’t returned my calls.

  I watch him walk up the sidewalk and can’t think of anything to say.

  “So this is awkward,” he says. Sun picks out highlights in his hair, makes his eyes shine as blue as the sky. Despite how gorgeous he is, he makes me think of junior high dances, like both of us have too many hands and feet and not enough by way of words.

  “You could sit, if you want,” I tell him. “Chairs are free.”

  He settles himself into the Adirondack beside mine, and that’s better because we can both look at the tree and the sky instead of at each other. The silence stretches taut between us, until it reaches a point where it’s pulling at my lungs and my heart and I have to say something, anything.

  My mouth opens, but before any words come out Tony says, “Would you—I mean, could I take you out for dinner?”

  I stare at him in what would be a pin-drop silence if it weren’t for rustling leaves overhead and a car driving down the street. My mouth stays open. This totally unexpected question has incapacitated my brain circuits.

  An exploratory drop of drool creeps up over my bottom lip, and that jolts me back to my senses enough to make me close my mouth and swallow.

  Tony gives me a smile that’s equal parts charm and apology. “I’m sorry. You can call me Mr. Suave.”

  “Does this mean we’re not Betty and Al anymore?” I ask.

  He grins, his whole face coming alive in a way that melts my heart. “I thought you’d be mad.”

  “I am mad,” I tell him, but my voice doesn’t sound mad, and there’s a smile nudging at the edges of my lips. “Some bodyguard you turned out to be.”

  His face darkens, and he turns his head to look out into the street so that all I can see is his profile.

  I want him to smile again, to look at me again, but he’s got some explaining to do.

  “It’s not that I didn’t want to be here,” he says, finally. “I didn’t feel like you . . . like I . . . the last thing I thought you needed was a guy hanging around who has the kind of baggage I do.”

  “Seems like maybe that would be my decision to make. If you wanted to be here, that is.”

  “You’re right. I’m sorry. But that’s the thing. As hard as I try to not be like my father, the next thing I do turns out to be just like him. Assuming a woman can’t make her own decisions, for example.”

  “Tony.”

  He turns his head to look at me, and I can see it takes an effort.

  “I need to tell you some things I’ve been too much of a coward to tell you,” he says. “That’s why I haven’t been here. Couldn’t bring myself to do it. I didn’t want to see the way you were going to look at me after. Especially with how Boots turned out to be. And then Greg.”

  I lay my hand over his arm. It’s rigid and unyielding beneath my touch. “You are nothing like your father. Or Boots.”

  He takes the sort of breath Elle takes when something hurts her. A burn. A slap.

  “I’ve been to juvie,” he says.

  “I know.”

  “I”—he holds his breath, and when he releases it the words ride along with it, all in a rush—“killed my father.”

  “I know that, too.”

  The muscle beneath my hand softens ever so slightly. When he speaks again, it sounds like a question. “I have nightmares?”

  “Know it.”

  His head drops into his hands, and his shoulders quake.
I’m not sure if he’s laughing or crying, or both. “And you know all these things about me, how?” His voice comes out sounding all muffled.

  “Mia.”

  “Of course, Mia. My God. Nothing is sacred.” He draws in a shaky breath and drops his hands, but he still doesn’t look at me.

  “Mia casts you as a hero. Don’t let it go to your head or anything.”

  “Mia is . . . special. I don’t expect the rest of the world to see it that way.” What he means is that he doesn’t expect me to see it that way.

  I do, though. Ever since Mia told me about Tony, and how he saved them all from their dad the night he decided to kill them, I can’t help wondering how things would have been if somebody had just put a bullet in Boots’s forehead. Maybe then my mother would have been able to accept me for just me, instead of needing me to also be Marley. Maybe Marley would have gone to college and achieved some amazing degree and been a brilliant lawyer. Or maybe she could have played in a famous band that toured the world. Maybe I would have written novels or painted pictures.

  Or maybe none of those things would have happened.

  Maybe I never would have had Elle, and that is beyond imagining.

  “Yes,” I say, looking up at the sky.

  “Yes, what?”

  “Yes to dinner. Yes, I would like to go out with you.”

  I’m still looking at the sky, but I hear him draw in a deep breath and breathe it out in a whoosh. And then his hand finds mine. Our fingers intertwine and we sit there, separate but together, both of us looking up at the sky, and even though I’m not looking at him, I know his face wears a smile that matches the one on mine.

  Leah’s Journal

  Are you judging me yet, my Walter? I am judging myself, and find myself wanting. Not for what I did that day, the day I limped down the street with Maisey and that heavy old suitcase. Even now, looking back from this viewpoint, I don’t know what I could have done differently.

  I didn’t trust the police would protect me or that a restraining order would do me any good. And I believed then, and still believe, that Boots would have done as he said. I could have gone back to my life with him and taught my children that it is okay to be beaten into subjection and submission by a man who is nothing—nothing—compared to you in terms of intelligence and decency and worth.