Whisper

by Phoebe Kitanidis

  “We just thought it might be a nice birthday present,” Grandpa added, in what I was starting to think of as his hurt voice. “A trip to the salon for blond highlights.”

  Dad shrugged. “Only if she wants to.” Oh, great, he was passing the buck to me!

  “Well, Joy Marie?” Grandpa asked. “How would you like a nice present courtesy of the Stefanis?”

  My hand shook as I speared a hunk of dry chicken. “Um…I…ah…I’ll ask Mom if I’m allowed to.” Brilliant! Passing the buck to Mom.

  “What a good girl you are!” Grammy cried, and ruffled my dull hair. “Asking Mommy’s permission…Why, we should have thought of that ourselves, Grandpa.” (Grammy, for some reason, called her husband Grandpa around Icka and me, like we hadn’t figured out his name was Walter.)

  “That’s right,” Grandpa/Walter said, laughing ruefully. “Grandparents can’t just give the presents they want to these days, they have to ask the parents’ permission for every little thing. It’s like living under fascism.”

  Whoa. Fascism? Had Grandpa just compared my parents to Stalin and Mussolini? Was he trying to pick a fight?

  Dad took a slow breath, then pushed his plate of salmon Benedict forward. “Well, I’m stuffed,” he said in a friendly way, as if Grandpa hadn’t said any of that. “Are we ready for the check?”

  “I’m certainly not done yet!” Grammy said, though she’d all but licked her plate clean. “Besides, we’re in the middle of a lovely conversation.”

  “That’s right, you have to learn to be more patient, Bobbo.” Grandpa was wagging his finger, scolding Dad like he was an eight-year-old boy.

  But Dad just held up his hands and smiled. “Okay, sorry, my mistake.”

  Oddly enough, his apology took the wind out of Grandpa’s sails. His argument “won,” he had nothing to do but sit there clearing his throat and futzing with his napkin. For five incredibly long, awkward minutes, no one said a word, but I could Hear Grammy and Grandpa Whispering.

  I so want Bobbo to lose that gut.

  I wish he’d spend more time with us.

  How I long to see the girls in church.

  Would have been nice if he’d dressed up to show us respect.

  Hope next time we come all this way, more than half the family bothers to show up.

  Wish Kelli had taught the girls a lady never crosses her legs above the ankles.

  Automatically I uncrossed my legs. Then, after a moment, I recrossed them.

  “Check, please!” Dad flagged the waitress, and this time no one stopped him.

  Back home, when Grammy and Grandpa finally shuffled into their old blue Buick, Dad and I waved good-bye from the street, breathing identical sighs of relief. Then Dad turned to me. “I’m in the mood for vanilla hazelnut coffee,” he said. “Shall I make you a mug too?”

  I had never been into the bitter taste of coffee, but I said, “Absolutely.” Sitting across the table from Grammy and Grandpa, it had felt for once like Dad and I were on the same team, and I didn’t want our bond to fade just yet. Besides, it was so rare he gave me a signal of what he wanted me to do. I trailed him to the kitchen counter, watched him measure grounds into a fresh filter. Side by side, we read the newspaper as we waited for the coffee to brew. It felt like we were on the verge of spending actual time together.

  “So, was it just me?” Dad switched off the coffeemaker and filled my mug from the pot. “Or were my parents driving you insane as well?”

  “No, it was fun,” I said automatically, but it felt hollow. Why was I bothering to put a cheery spin on what we both knew was a crappy afternoon? I was like a robot. A lifetime of training had made perky optimism my default setting. I frowned and took my first sip of coffee in years. It wasn’t as bitter as I remembered. “Actually,” I said, hesitating. “To be honest, brunch kind of sucked.”

  Dad drained half his coffee, then slowly nodded. “I love them a lot,” he said, “but their demands and expectations can be hard to take sometimes. I can only imagine what it must be like for—”

  “They kept Whispering about me,” I blurted out. “And about you too. They wanted us to be, like…”

  “Totally different people?” he suggested calmly.

  “No. I don’t know. Maybe.” I sighed. “They didn’t used to be like this! When I was little…”

  Dad looked right at me. “Honey, they’ve pretty much always been like this.”

  I shook my head, not wanting to believe him, but my chest ached with the sudden horrible realization. If Grammy and Grandpa hadn’t changed, if they’d always been pushy and controlling, then that left only one possibility: I was the one who’d changed. My Hearing had grown, matured, just like Icka warned me. I was Hearing things I’d never Heard before. Things I didn’t want to Hear. Things like Icka Heard.

  “Are you absolutely sure about that?” I set my coffee down. “I mean, like you said, you can’t Hear.” I hadn’t meant the words to sound so harsh.

  “Hearing’s not the only way to know something, Joy,” he said, not sounding offended. “You can use logic, interpret the evidence. In my own way, I’ve been listening to their Whispers all my life.” I wish you could understand what it was like for me.

  My heart skipped a beat. Dad just made a wish, about me. To me.

  He must have seen my eyes widen because he grabbed his mug and turned. “Lots of work to do,” he muttered.

  “Dad, wait!” I touched his arm and Heard, I hope I never make you feel like they make me feel. “You don’t,” I said.

  He winced, then his face relaxed. “Oh,” he said softly. “Well…good.”

  “But Dad?” My voice shook at the very thought of saying what I was thinking.

  “Yes?”

  I took a deep breath and decided to trust myself. The last time I had Heard him Whisper about me, I was five; next time I could be thirty-five. I couldn’t afford to miss this opportunity. “Sometimes you make me feel confused,” I admitted. “And, well, frustrated.” Dad cocked his head to one side and narrowed his eyes, listening. “The thing is, I never know exactly what you want from me.”

  He stared at me. “Want from you?”

  “Yes! Tell me.” Finally! Why hadn’t I thought of asking years ago? “I need to know,” I said. “How can I do it if I don’t know what it is?”

  “But Joy,” he said, sounding frustrated and confused himself, “all I want is for you to be happy.”

  I blinked. There it was again, what Ben’s stoner-boy brother had Whispered to me. Now my own father was saying it, and it sounded nice, and I believed him.

  So why didn’t it make me feel any better?

  Dad waited, eyebrows up, for me to say something. But I was having trouble untangling my thoughts, so I just smiled and said, “Thanks, Dad.”

  “Pumpkin, you never have to thank me for that.” He set down his mug, squeezed my shoulder, kissed the top of my head. Then he slipped out the back door to his office, Whispering about defendants and depositions, whatever depositions were.

  How could I grant Dad’s wish for me to be happy, when what made me happy was granting wishes—and Dad’s were so far out of reach? I couldn’t hire him a great new paralegal or buy him a BMW. Everything he wanted was out of my hands. So how was I supposed to be happy around him?

  The phone rang, startling me. I picked it up, glanced at the caller ID. “Oh, hey, Aunt Jane!”

  “It’s me, honey.” Mom’s voice was a thin coat of cheer painted over exhaustion. “I called to say I won’t be coming home tonight.”

  Adrenaline pumped through me. “But I have to talk to you. What’s going on? Didn’t you and Icka—”

  “Your sister’s not with me,” Mom said. “I have no idea where she is.”

  12

  “Joy? Hello?”

  I blinked over and over. “You don’t…know where she is?” Oh my god.

  “Oh, honey, don’t worry,” Mom said quickly. “I didn’t mean she was lost at sea or something!” Her chuckle echoed holl
ow in my receiver. “Jessica’s off doing her own thing today, that’s all. Is your Dad home?”

  “Wait, what do you mean she’s off doing her own thing?” Panic alarms were going off in my head. The last time I saw Icka was when I told her to get out of my life, forever. I hoped that was coincidence—but with Icka, you just never knew. “Weren’t you supposed to pick her up?” My mind was suddenly flashing pictures of that small purple figure disappearing into the woods…. “Wasn’t she supposed to be waiting for you, at Pendleton?”

  “We-elll, as a matter of fact, she was waiting for me.” The same odd chuckle as before. What was going on here? “She just wanted to let me know,” Mom went on, “that she wasn’t ready to come home yet.”

  I felt my jaw relax. “Oh.” So Icka was okay—Mom had seen her—but she was just mega-avoiding me. She’d rather hang around some preppy private school today than deal with me. That’s how much I’d gotten to her. I settled back into a wicker breakfast chair, propped my socked feet on the table, and grinned. I should have told Icka off years ago!

  I was totally unprepared for what Mom said next.

  “Jessica can’t get enough of Pendleton! Her heart’s set on going next fall.”

  My mouth dropped open. For real. I shut it, but it just opened again, like a door in a haunted house. What Mom was saying was impossible. The thought of Icka liking a place that had other humans in Hearing distance, that actually hurt my brain. Ditto with setting her heart on something (assuming she had one). “Seriously?” I managed to say. “But…but…she so didn’t even want to go in the first place. Icka hates school. She hates people.” And people hate Icka, I added to myself. Icka equals hate.

  “Maybe she’s starting to get over it,” Mom suggested, as if we were talking about something simple, like a kid kicking an aversion to broccoli. “She told me she was having too much fun to leave and she’d like another day to enjoy herself.”

  “Fun, she really said fun?” I twisted my hair. “Are you sure she wasn’t being ironic?” A crazy idea popped into my head. What if Mom was just telling me Icka was okay so I wouldn’t worry?

  “Honey, she was grinning from ear to ear.” Was that pride in Mom’s tone, or exhaustion, or something else? I stumbled to my feet and paced the cordless around the table. What if Icka had never even made it to her college visit and was still freezing out there in the woods behind school, all alone? I gripped the white kitchen bar to steady myself. Mom wouldn’t flat-out lie to me. This was why I hated the phone: it was so easy to get confused without my Hearing.

  “I just…I can’t believe she liked it.” I swallowed. “I mean, she can’t stand being forced to Hear other people.”

  “Try thinking of it this way,” Mom said. “Your sister’s getting a fresh start, away from us, away from the kids she’s known for years. Maybe with these new folks she’s not already expecting to Hear the worst.”

  “Yeah, but still.” Though when she put it that way it almost made sense. Almost.

  “Not to mention?” Mom added coyly. “From what I could see, she and her freshman hosts are fast becoming best friends….”

  The word “friends” broke me. Crushing the phone to my ear, I speed walked into the living room, socks skidding on the parquet, and pounded up the stairs to make a beeline for my bed. My comforter still smelled like Parker’s shampoo. Friends. I could imagine Icka shivering in the woods, squatting in a rat-infested warehouse, or stumbling drunkenly into a stranger’s car—and doing it all just to mess with me and Mom. But having friends? “She can’t have friends!” I blurted out. “I mean, what kind of losers would like Icka?”

  “I like her.” Mom’s soft voice shamed me. “And more importantly, I love her and want her to be happy.” I cringed and curled up in bed, remembering all the times Mom had hoped and wished for Icka to have friends. I’d Heard her Whisper it year after year, when the only people singing around her daughter’s birthday cake were Mom, Dad, and me. Mom had held out hope all this time, encouraging Jessica, loving her even when she was hard to love. If I wanted to be like Mom when I grew up, I had a depressingly long way to go.

  Finally Mom said, “I’d like to chat more, sweetie, but I’m here at Aunt Jane’s, and it looks like I’ll be staying for dinner tonight, so—”

  “What? Why?”

  She lowered her voice. “Honey, Aunt Jane’s not doing so well today.”

  I stared at the white ceiling. “What’s she processing this time?”

  “Joy!” I couldn’t blame Mom for sounding shocked at my resentful tone; I didn’t normally argue with the time she spent supporting her sister. But this time I needed Mom’s support. What if I lost my Hearing again today, or picked up more Whispers like the ones from Grammy and Grandpa? Mom always knew what to do, how to make me feel better. My stomach was suddenly clenching at the thought of facing the day alone, without her advice to see me through.

  I heard Aunt Jane’s familiar low voice calling Mom in the background. “Hey, Kel?”

  “I have to go. She really needs someone to talk to.”

  “Well, what if I need to talk to you too?”

  “Joy,” Mom said, more gently this time. “Your aunt is truly alone in this world. I pray you never know what that feels like.” A chill ran down my back when she said the word “alone.” Alone, a-lone: like a disease, like a death sentence. I glanced around my neat, all-white room. What would it feel like, to be holed up all alone with nothing but my own thoughts ringing in my head…for the rest of my life? “You have your friends,” she reminded me. “And you can always talk to your father about family stuff.”

  I started to say I might as well be alone with just Dad in the house, but then I remembered the talk we’d just had about Grammy and Grandpa. I slipped my finger around my topaz pendent. Maybe Dad was becoming someone I could talk to. Maybe Aunt Jane did need Mom’s support more than I did. Maybe I was being selfish, again. Still, something just didn’t feel right.

  “I’ll be home with Jessica late tonight,” Mom promised. “And tomorrow you and I will have a super-fabulous mother-daughter time, okay? I’ll make those scones with the vanilla beans! Bye, hon!”

  I shrugged at the phone in my right hand and wondered exactly when I had entered this parallel universe in which everyone in my family had changed into someone else.

  I was still puzzling over the weird phone call at four P.M. when the 38 bus pulled up to Macy’s. Outside my rain-speckled window, gusts of wind were shaking skinny mall trees that were already lit up for Christmas. As I shuffled to my feet behind a gaggle of pantsuit-clad grannies, my pocket buzzed with a text.

  It was Bree, our unofficial event planner if Parker was busy. Rain sux. Meet @ SB not McD. I groaned to myself. SB. My least favorite of our serious-rain fallback meeting spots, and not just because it involved a trek across the mall.

  Coffee was a stimulant. It made people’s thoughts race, made them talk faster, made them Whisper more and louder. Listening in was habit for me, but sometimes the Whispers at Starbucks got so distracting I couldn’t focus on what my friends were saying.

  I dug my blue plaid umbrella out of my backpack and prepared to flash my bus pass.

  I wish I’d stuck it out in veterinary school. I glanced up in surprise at the grizzled bus driver. He stared dully back at me. “You have a good one, miss.”

  “You too.” I tucked my pass back into my wallet. Weird. In all the times I’d ridden his route before, I’d never Heard him Whisper about anything but traffic.

  I opened my umbrella. It jammed—halfway open, half closed. I pushed harder and heard the plink of a tiny metal piece hitting the concrete. Nice.

  Ahead of me, one of the older ladies sneezed and Whispered, Oh, dear, too bad I forgot to pack tissues. I rushed to pluck a minipacket of Kleenex from my purse and hand it to her. When she smiled and thanked me in a nasal voice, I felt a little better for the first time since Mom called.

  Talking to Dad sure hadn’t helped. All he did was glance up from his
screen for a moment to say he was glad Icka’s first college visit went well. Then, he asked how I felt about us ordering Chinese tonight and “each doing our own thing.” Translation: Without Mom around to enforce the dinner ritual, he planned to wolf down a few bites of beef chow fun and go right back to working till he passed out in his expensive chair. I’d stared at his face, Listened in for Whispers, but Dad had clearly failed to grasp the bizarreness of the situation. Then again, Dad had never grasped what a big deal it was for Icka to be friendless in the first place, so what did I expect? It’s not like he had any friends himself. Well, he had coworkers—he played racquetball at the gym with other lawyers from his firm—but that hardly counted.

  A goth chick in a corset was holding open the door to Hot Topic for her identically dressed friend as I approached, and I felt hardness in the pit of my stomach when I glimpsed who was inside. Two of the stoners who’d made fun of me on my birthday lurked by the register, browsing Urban Decay makeup with bored (or maybe stoned?) expressions. I looked for Ben’s brother, Jamie, and was glad when I didn’t see him. Even if he was a pothead and a thief, he was still too nice for that crowd. I’d Heard his thoughts, and I knew.

  By the time I’d trudged down to the ultracrowded Starbucks, my hair was a heavy, wet mop and my mood matched the weather. I surveyed the mobbed cafe from outside. Frustrated mom with screaming toddler, check. Stressed white-shirt corporate guy with BlackBerry, check. Awkward, mismatched couple probably on blind date, check check check. Okay, prospects did not look good. With the Whispers this crew would generate, I’d be lucky to come off as spacey rather than retarded.

  Still, I couldn’t help smiling when I spotted the back of Helena’s brown wavy hair and Bree’s bouncy curls.

  I bounded up to the tiny, overloaded table for two on which they’d managed to crowd a mound of muffins, cookies, and drinks. “I am so glad to see you guys!”

  “Hey, Joy!” Helena waved her calorie-free San Pellegrino in salute.

  Bree snapped her phone shut and grinned. “Pull up a chair, hurricane hair.”