Whisper to Me

by Nick Lake

  “And you got a black eye.”

  “Less than him.”

  This I believed. “You in trouble?”

  “Come on, Cass. Half the guys in the place are police.”

  I had no comeback to this. “You want an ice pack?” I asked. “I’m going to the library, but I can grab one for you before I go.”

  Dad shook his head. “School’s nearly out. You need a job,” he said. “You can’t be hanging around in the library all summer.”

  “I don’t just hang out there.”

  “Yeah, you hang out in the apartment above the garage too.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Yeah, Cass. About that …”

  You know the cliché “I had a sinking feeling”? It’s a cliché for a reason, because you do feel like you’re sinking, down into the ground. “What?” I asked.

  “I’m renting it. A couple of kids from up north. Lifeguard and a concessions’ stock boy.”

  “No,” I said.

  “What do you mean, no?” He took a step forward.

  “No, no, no.”

  “Cass, you’re shaking.”

  I didn’t know that. Panic had cut all the connections between my mind and my body. I kept opening my mouth, but nothing was coming out except for no. I was like a goldfish spewing the word no instead of bubbles.

  “Jesus, Cass, stop it, you’re scaring me.”

  I took a deep breath. “I need the apartment.”

  “So do I. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but there’s a recession, and someone’s snatching women, which isn’t exactly the world’s greatest tourist advertisement. People aren’t lining up for bottles of Chianti at the restaurant. The boardwalk is almost empty.”

  “That’s an exaggeration.”

  “Maybe. But it’s not like it was. And the overheads have not gone down.”

  “School’s not out yet.”

  “Cass.”

  “I’ll get a job.”

  “Good. We need all the money we can get.”

  “So you can buy more insects?”

  His eyes went cold. “Come work at the restaurant. The customers like you. They ask about you.”

  I couldn’t believe he was suggesting it. “You know I can’t do that.”

  He deflated a little. “Yeah, yeah. Something else then. Two Piers has jobs going. You could work one of the stands—hand out plush toys to kids who get a ring on the bottle. Or run one of the rides. Maybe take your old basketball-game job. You know they’d let you have it.”

  “Hmm,” I said.

  “And get out of the apartment. It’s not good for you, all this staying inside.”

  “But I’m safe there.”

  “You’re safe here in the house. I’m here.”

  I stared at him a moment too long, and I saw the skin of his face flush, the shame rising, with its anger chaser.

  “*****, Cass, I wouldn’t hurt you.”

  Again, I didn’t reply quickly enough, and I saw the red spreading.

  “I get angry sometimes, I know that, but I’m trying to—”

  He stopped.

  Threw the box across the room—it was stapled wood; it exploded when it hit the wall, pieces raining down on the computer monitor. A millipede landed, twitching, on the keyboard. It scuttled across the letters, as if typing a Mayday message.

  “You’re out of the apartment by the end of the week,” he said. “And you get a ********* job or you’re working at the restaurant, even if I have to drag you there.”

  I should back up and explain the whole Navy SEAL thing: Dad was a SEAL twice, so it was doubly important to him. The first time was when he was young—he fought in the first Gulf War, was stationed on a destroyer in the Persian Gulf. When I was small, he used to tell me stories about the dolphins they worked with, which would patrol the ships, trained to look for mines. As a kid, my whole image of the Gulf War was like a SeaWorld show. I just imagined guys like my dad playing with dolphins, in warm, glittering seas out of the Arabian Nights.

  Like I said before, he didn’t talk about it much. The only real story he ever told was about during his second stint as a SEAL in Afghanistan with Mike Osborne, a British guy. Mike was in the same unit. He and Dad both loved bugs—they would collect spiders and beetles and stuff when they were out in the mountains and fields. So they became friends.

  Then Dad’s SEAL team got a call one day. A load of Taliban who had surrendered had been taken to an old nineteenth-century fort in the desert, to be interrogated. Dad said the place was beautiful—sandstone walls rising out of the plain, all scrub and goats and the occasional tree, like something from an adventure story.

  But then it turned out that the whole thing was maybe a Trojan horse, because these Taliban prisoners—and there were hundreds of them—suddenly rose up and killed their guards and seized the fort.

  So now there was a heavily armed group of Taliban in a fortress, basically, with rockets and guns and mortars, and Dad and the SEALs were sent in to take control. Dad was put in a small team with Mike Osborne. Their job was to get as close as they could to the part of the fort that was most strongly defended, and to use GPS tracking to call in air strikes.

  So they snuck up to the walls, and managed to get into the main compound through some sort of side door—I think they killed some people to do this, but Dad glosses over that part. From their position, hidden by a low wall, they could see Taliban fighters up on the north side of the fort, embedded with their guns.

  They got on the radio and called in a strike.

  And someone on the support team got one of the coordinates wrong, just a decimal place, but it was enough.

  So when the plane came over and dropped the JDAM smart bomb that was supposed to destroy most of the Taliban resistance, it actually fell closer to where Dad, Mike, and two other SEALs were hiding. The explosion ripped out a whole section of the fort’s exterior wall, deafened Dad for a week, and threw Mike Osborne fifteen feet through the air to an exposed part of the fort’s interior. Dad meanwhile was smashed into a rock or something, and lay there dazed. He said it was like the whole world had tuned to static.

  Dust hung in the air, blurring everything. His ears registered only white noise. It was terribly hot too—he was baking in his helmet and uniform like he was in an oven. He could smell fireworks, and it weirdly made him feel like he was a kid back in Jersey.

  Immediately Mike Osborne, who Dad could see through the hole in the wall, was surrounded by enemy fighters. In the middle of all the fuzz that had fallen over everything, the dirt in the air and the buzzing—

  %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

  —Dad watched Mike get on one knee, and shoulder his assault rifle. He was bleeding from his arm—it would turn out later that it was very badly broken. He emptied the assault rifle, holding off the guys trying to kill him, and when that was gone he took his sidearm and kept firing.

  Dad says he didn’t think about what he did next. His legs and arms did it for him. But whatever he says, there’s still a medal upstairs in his nightstand that he doesn’t think I know about. A medal for conspicuous bravery that they don’t hand out very often.

  Anyway, whether he thought about it or not, Dad managed to get up and he ran through a silent storm of bullets to where Mike was kneeling. He didn’t know where the other two guys in the unit were—they might have been dead, or just thrown out of sight by the blast. As he got close, he saw that Mike was out of ammo.

  Mike saw him coming, and Dad drew his sidearm and threw it to him—Mike caught it out of the air, spun, and kept firing. Dad opened up with his assault rifle at the same time, suppressing the fire that was coming at them from the ramparts all around.

  PLEASE NOTE: This story came to me in fits and starts over the years. I am stitching it together.

  PLEASE ALSO NOTE: This next part I mostly heard from Mom, not Dad. Or at least, when Dad tells it, he leaves out key details. Key details like his own cour
age.

  So Dad said, “I’m covering you. Go.”

  Mike Osborne tried to say something, but Dad shrugged and pointed to his ear to show that he couldn’t hear, what with the fact that someone had carelessly dropped a bomb on them.

  “Go,” he said again. And whether Mike could hear or not, GO is a pretty obvious word to lip-read.

  So Mike Osborne nodded and ran for the exterior wall. Dad kept on firing every time he saw a head pop up or the flash of sunlight on a muzzle. Something smacked his head, and he saw only later that two bullets had hit his helmet.

  AND TO CUT A LONG STORY SHORT: He managed to stop the enemy from killing Mike Osborne, and then another bomb landed in the right place this time, and that gave him the chance to run. He said it was the closest he ever came to dying, apart from when he was in a cave complex sweeping for ammunition and a teenager with an AK shot him through the shoulder and leg.

  And the point is: They gave him a medal for saving Mike Osborne. For throwing himself into danger with no thought for his own safety. And I wanted to tell you this, because I wanted you to know one positive thing about my dad at least.

  Also: his experience in the war, and then Mom dying … they kind of made him who he is today. He’s an *******, it’s true. But there’s a reason why he’s an *******.

  And Mike Osborne?

  Mike Osborne was out on patrol a couple of months later when his team found a wounded kid. They’d gone to check on him, but the kid was rigged with grenades, and Mike Osborne was leaning right over him, about to give him CPR, when they went off. Mike Osborne was scattered over half a poppy field.

  It’s weird. I’m writing this to you, and you haven’t walked into my life yet. But I guess you already know when you first saw me.

  It’s like a wood in ancient Greece, a leafy glade. I’m here, and the voice is here—the echo—and we’re just waiting for you, for the real action to start.

  Which is soon.

  Things are going to go fast from here.

  Are you ready?

  Me, I held it together, just, for the next week. I kept going to the library, hiding out in the apartment. I read up on serial killers.

  Meanwhile the voice was bad, but in a way I could handle. Since I had decided to try to find the Houdini Killer, it had let up on me a bit. I figured this was because it was the voice of the woman with the severed foot. I also knew the rules now. Sometimes I would get something wrong—I would forget myself, and go to sit on the couch or whatever, do something comfortable.

  Then the voice would say:

  “Give me a hundred or your dad will lose his legs in a car accident.”

  And I would get down on the ground and do push-ups, like Dad made me do when he was teaching me to swim as a kid. Or I’d have to run to the beach and back, or up and down the stairs. I didn’t think Dad was noticing any of this stuff, but I guess, looking back, he was more perceptive than I realized.

  It was when I had to leave the apartment that things really fell apart. You summer-renter boys weren’t moving in for a couple of days, but Dad wanted to clean the place, get it ready. I didn’t tell him the apartment was already sparkling. The voice loved to make me clean, over and over again. I figured he’d see that when he came in.

  Last day of school was that Friday. It wasn’t a big celebration day for me. I moved back to my bedroom Saturday morning. Literally as soon as I did, the voice got worse, just like I’d thought it would. I walked into my room and it said,

  “Look at this ******** place. Get a brush and dustpan and then get down on your hands and knees.”

  “What?”

  “Get a brush and dustpan and clean up the floor.”

  “I can get the vacuum—”

  “No.”

  So I swept the floor. The whole floor. I wasn’t even allowed to use a broom. Dad was over in the apartment, changing the sheets or whatever. He and I weren’t speaking much. There’s this idea that there are optimistic people and pessimistic people. But the factor everyone ignores is that when these tendencies encounter the real world, are tested against experience, they can be dispelled or calcified. Take my dad: I’d say he’s naturally a glass-half-empty kind of guy. He always expects bad stuff to happen; my mom says he’s always been like that.

  But then he was in the Navy and he got shot. He left, joined civilian life again, and lost his wife. So he’s naturally pessimistic to begin with. But now, because of his experiences, he’s also just miserable. Miserable and angry.

  It took me like two hours to clean the floor, and then the voice wanted me to hurt myself, so I did.

  That night, Dad brought pizza back from the restaurant, tried to get me to laugh, but I wouldn’t say anything to him. I just ate my pepperoni slice and left the plate for him to clear up, left him sitting at the table alone. Just like a bratty teenager, but in my defense I was being tortured by a voice I couldn’t see. I could have acted worse.

  I only managed to hold on for a couple of days after that.

  There were still some times even in those two days that were okay. When I was outside, for example. I ended up spending more time in our yard than I ever had before. I could tell Dad found it weird. I would sit in one of the old mildew-covered deck chairs and zone out.

  A couple of times, Dad came out and tried to get me interested in bugs that were in the garden too, beetles and things that he brought to me proudly in the palm of his hand. That’s exactly what he was doing in fact when you arrived.

  So this is the first scene that you were there for too.

  EXT. A FRONT YARD ON A LOWER-MIDDLE-CLASS NEW JERSEY STREET. MORNING. OCEAN MIST IN THE AIR.

  A TEENAGE GIRL SITS IN A MOLDY DECK CHAIR. SHE IS PALLID, HER HAIR AND CLOTHES IN DISARRAY, BECAUSE SHE IS BEING HAUNTED BY A GHOST AND DOESN’T KNOW HOW TO DEAL WITH IT.

  THE SUN IS HIGH IN THE SKY. THE TIDE IS UP.

  DAD: (crouched next to me) “Look at this.” (proffering an insect that he has taken out of a FedEx box) “Australian spiny stick. Simple but fascinating.”

  THE VOICE: That’s disgusting. Tell him to go away.

  On the street, a bus rolls past, but I don’t really register it.

  ME: Nothing.

  Because …

  … I opened my mouth to do as the voice said, to tell Dad to go away, and that was when you and Shane appeared. I guess you had gotten off the bus, but it was as if you materialized, out of nothing, out of sea vapor maybe, carried up our street from the waves. You both stood there on the sidewalk, looking at the house number and then at us, you and Shane, with big duffel bags at your feet.

  I think Dad had forgotten that was the day you were arriving. You raised your hand in a half wave.

  Dad stood and nodded. “Uh, hi, boys,” he said. “The apartment, right?”

  “Yes, sir,” you said, and I could tell Dad liked that.

  “We can come back?” Shane said. “If you’re busy?”

  Dad looked down at the bug still in his hand. “No, no,” he said. “Just showing Cassie this stick insect. You like bugs?”

  “Um,” you said. “Sure?”

  “Great,” said Dad. “I’ll show you some stuff later that will blow your mind. But look at this guy. Look at those spines.” He stepped forward and reached out his hand and you made polite noises that only Dad would fail to notice were only for show.

  What he did finally notice was that he was introducing a bug before he introduced his one and only daughter, so he turned. “This is my daughter, Cassie,” he said.

  “Hi,” said Shane to me. “Nice to meet you.”

  “Hey,” you said.

  I said nothing, even though I wanted to. But I couldn’t antagonize the voice, not even for you. Not then. I got up to head back to my room.

  Dad glared at me, like, make nice. I ignored him. I must have seemed, and looked, terrible. I’m sure I was pale and thin, and I was wearing sweatpants and an old T-shirt. No makeup, hair in a scrunchie. The voice was always telling me I looked bad, but
it also didn’t like me dressing up or putting on mascara or anything like that because it said I looked like a slut. It was very contradictory.

  Anyway, focus, Cassie, focus on the main thing, which is not me but you, and to you, I must have made an awful first impression.

  What were my first impressions of you? I can’t remember. I think I noticed Shane more—his size, his muscles. I don’t mean I was attracted to him; I just mean he was more noticeable. He clearly worked out a lot and he had messed up his hair with wax. His Abercrombie & Fitch hoodie looked new and expensive. He had that square-jawed thing going on.

  You … You looked like the kind of guy you never see in a movie. Good looking, but not ostentatiously so. Sorry. Slim, but not one of those skinny quirky kids in films about outsiders who win everyone over in the end. And not the jock either. The clothes you were wearing looked old, but well looked after.

  Okay, I lied. I noticed Shane, but I noticed you. I mean, you bothered me, right from the start. I wanted to know more about you. It was your eyes, I think. I mean, they didn’t shine or any of those clichés. What they did was to look at things, all the time. Like you were interested in everything, curious about everything. Which, knowing you a bit better now, I think is probably true.

  But you didn’t look directly at me. Thinking about it now, I guess you were probably shy.

  Back then I felt like I wasn’t worth your attention. I felt like it made sense that you didn’t look at me.

  You hung back and let Shane do the talking. He told Dad how he’d come from New York and you’d come from Stonebridge, twenty miles inland, to work for the summer. You’d met each other at the bus station—you’d both been checking out the ad Dad had posted on the cork bulletin board. Shane was going to be a lifeguard for the summer, and you were going to work the concessions.

  “Gutting shrimp,” said Dad.

  “Excuse me?” you said.

  Dad smiled. “It’s what they get the out-of-town kids to do. There’s a big shrimp restaurant on Pier One. It’s kind of their thing. Buckets of shrimp, you know. The kids pull **** out of shrimps, all day long, six days a week. They keep the cushy jobs for the townies—running the stands, that kind of thing.”