Whisper to Me

by Nick Lake

  “Oh,” you said, frowning.

  “Shane here has the right idea,” said Dad. “Lifeguard certificate. Smart. Sit on your ass all day long, watching the girls go— Oh, sorry, honey.”

  I shrugged. I wanted to be alone.

  “You were a lifeguard, sir?” you asked Dad, breaking my fantasy, picking up on the tone of nostalgia in his voice.

  “Yep,” said Dad. “You don’t swim? You couldn’t have gotten a certificate like your buddy here?”

  You and Shane exchanged a look. I didn’t know, then, what it meant. “I swim,” you said. “But the hours are longer on the Pier. Beach shuts at sunset.”

  “You need the cash, huh?” said Dad.

  You nodded.

  “I feel that,” said Dad. “Well, I should show you two the apartment. You’ve got everything—washing machine, if you know how to use one, bath, kitchen. Though I don’t guess you’ll want to be cooking after shelling shrimp all day.”

  You gave a weak smile. But even that crinkled the skin around your green eyes and dimpled your cheeks. A half-formed thought crossed my mind that I wanted to make you smile at me.

  I want to be as accurate as possible, you know? It’s not like you were haloed by sunlight, or anything, that moment in the yard. I didn’t know then who you were going to be.

  Dad walked you up the stairs by the garage, you and Shane. I noticed something else then. Shane bounded up the steps, muscles moving under his sweatshirt. He had both your bags in his hands, showing off for me, I think. You walked up slowly behind him, looking around you, like you always did.

  I watched you, and I thought about ballet dancers. Not because you moved with grace, because you didn’t. It was like … You know how you watch a ballet dancer pirouetting or extending their leg or whatever, and you think what they’re doing seems smooth and effortless? But then you try it yourself—I did some ballet as a kid—and you realize that it takes just an unbelievable amount of strength to hold your body like that. Watching you climb the steps, that was the impression I had. That Shane might be the one with the muscles, but you were the strong one. It was something in the way you moved. A control.

  But I’m making it seem like this was a big deal in my mind, and it really wasn’t, sorry to offend you. I just want to try to record the things that went through my head when we first met.

  Mainly, I was thinking about how it was going to be way harder now to be alone, that’s the honest truth. As soon as you disappeared into the apartment you disappeared from my mind. It’s so hard, when you fall for someone—the temptation is to look back on the past and rewrite things so they seem more significant. There’s a part of me going: Did I know? Did I know the first time we met that you would change everything? That you would change me?

  But I didn’t. I’m sure I didn’t. The absolute reality is that I probably had a mental image of making out with Shane, just for a second. I mean, he was the obviously attractive one.

  Given what I did to you later, or what you think I did, I know this will not be easy for you to read. And I know this is not helping you to forgive me. But bear with me, please. I promise you, things are more complicated than you realize.

  Well, you know that already, now.

  But there’s more.

  Oh, there’s so much more.

  More:

  The day after you arrived, I went to the library. I walked, as usual. Mist had rolled in from the Atlantic: the ocean invading the town, sending smoke ahead of it to hide its troop movements. The street was full of cars now, and almost none of them were rusted. Tourists.

  I waited until someone was talking to Jane, but just as I walked past, the woman turned and walked away.

  Jane waved. “Cassie!” She’d redyed her hair; it was green now. Her nails looked like she’d painted them with Wite-Out. She was wearing a T-shirt with an old Moby-Dick cover on it.

  I tried to keep walking.

  “Cassie!” she called again, waving even more.

  ****, I thought.

  I turned and smiled at her. I felt like I was stepping in front of a bus. I went closer.

  “Hi,” I said.

  Waited, tense.

  No voice.

  Not yet.

  Jane beamed. “Hi! I haven’t wanted to disturb you. You’ve seemed like you wanted privacy. But you were passing and, well, I’ve missed you.” I could hear tinny music coming from the iPod buds hooked around her neck. It sounded like the Smiths.

  “You too,” I said truthfully. “Sorry, I’ve been … I don’t know.”

  “Okay,” she said. “You like the Murakami?”

  “Oh, yeah. Yeah, it was great.” I hadn’t read it of course.

  “The Manchuria part is dark, right?”

  “Hmm.”

  “And school’s out for the summer, that’s cool, huh?”

  “Yeah, cool.”

  All the time we were speaking I was wondering what the voice was going to do to me.

  “So what have you been researching? Murder? You planning to commit the perfect one or something?”

  I smiled, but I don’t think it looked right; I think it looked fake. “Watch out,” I said. “I’m kind of an expert now.”

  She laughed softly. “Just warn me if you’re going to go Jeffrey Dahmer on my ass, okay?”

  Even at the time this didn’t sound totally like a joke, but I kind of did one of those “ha” laughs that isn’t really a laugh.

  “Anyway, it’s good to see you,” she said. “I mean, properly.”

  “Yeah, you too.”

  “You’ll be here more now school’s out?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “Good. I look forward to seeing even more of you.”

  A man with glasses and a loosely tied tie was walking up to ask her something, so I smiled and walked over to my usual seat, hidden in the corner, beneath a READING OPENS DOORS poster.

  I opened my bag. It was the same bag I used for school and right at the top, in its own little pocket, was my EpiPen. The world contracted around it, a pupil narrowing in bright light. Fuzzed at the edges.

  “Take it out,” said the voice. “Take it out and inject yourself with it.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “It’s for an emergency. For anaphylaxis.”

  “You think it might hurt you if you inject it when you are not suffering an allergic reaction?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. So do it.”

  You know this part.

  Me: “Please.”

  The voice: “No.”

  Me: “Please. Don’t make me.”

  “You ignored me. You ignored me and spoke to that girl with the stupid hair. You remember what happened to your mom? That was because you didn’t listen to me.”

  “What?” I said, under my breath. “I didn’t hear you back then.”

  “Yes, you did. See? You’re so ******* pathetic, you don’t even remember **** like that. I was there.”

  Confusion seemed to blur the edges of everything. “No … you came … after the foot. On the beach.”

  “Wrong. Take the EpiPen.”

  “It could kill me. Give me a heart attack.”

  The silence of thought.

  “Well,” said the voice. “Let’s take the risk. Or this time, I will kill your father. I will make the guy he had a fight with come back with a knife when the restaurant is closed.”

  “You can’t do that.”

  “Try me.”

  What could I do? I picked up the casing, took off the outer plastic box. Removed the gray safety catch. It actually doesn’t look much like a pen—it’s thicker, more like a pregnancy test.

  Anyway, I stabbed the black end into my thigh and felt the sharp sting and heard it give a click. You have to hold it there for ten seconds; that’s something some people don’t know about epinephrine. To give it time to get right into the muscle. Maybe the voice wouldn’t know that. I started to pull it out—

  “Uh-uh,” said the voice. “Ten seco
nds.”

  I counted.

  One.

  Two.

  Three.

  Four.

  Five—

  I had to stop counting. My breath was rushing. My heart was filling my body. It was in my neck and my eyes, pulsing, getting faster and faster. The library was spinning the way the world spins when you’ve been swimming in the ocean all day—the way I used to with Dad, before Mom died—and then you’re lying in bed with your eyes closed.

  I put my head between my knees. Sweat was beading on my forehead, drops of it hitting the cheap concrete floor with a sound so loud I thought Jane would hear. I actually felt my heart

  —stop—

  for the longest

  moment.

  And start again with a jolt that hurt. I think, and I’m embarrassed to say this, I was actually disappointed for a second. I wanted to be gone, to not have to deal with this voice anymore, this angry murdered person in my head all day long.

  I must have dropped the EpiPen because I heard it clatter on the ground. There was no universe beyond the blackness of my closed eyes. There was no time apart from the fast beating of my heart.

  Gradually, gradually, the world started to come back. My heart slowed—it was still going terribly fast, and I felt like it was going to burst at any moment. I gasped, and put my hands over my mouth, trying to breathe in my own carbon dioxide, to wind myself down.

  “Oh,” said the voice, in the tone I imagine boys use when discussing the bees whose wings they have torn off. “You didn’t die.”

  Then a dark shape loomed in front of me. I looked up. Jane was standing there, looking down at me with solicitude turning her face into one big frown. “You need help?”

  “Outside,” I said quietly. The voice would want to punish me, but what could it do that would be worse?

  Jane got one hand under my arm and levered me to my feet, then escorted me out the front door and onto the sidewalk. I sank down against the side of the building.

  “What happened?” she asked. “You have low blood pressure?”

  I knew she was going to find the injector. “I … had some cake. From a bakery that supposedly is nut free. But I felt my throat swelling. I used my EpiPen.”

  “Jesus. I should call the paramedics.”

  “No, no. I’m fine.”

  “Really, I’m going to call an ambulance. You need to go to the hospital. Get checked out.”

  I looked into her eyes. “I’ll go. I’ll go, I promise. But not right now. Not an ambulance. My …” I searched for inspiration. “My dad will be pissed. I’m not supposed to eat out.”

  Something in her wavered. “I’ll call a cab, go with you.”

  “No, I’m fine on my own, honestly. See?” I stood up straighter. It was an effort. “Anyway, you need to stay here, right?”

  She glanced at the library. Past the peeling paint on the concrete wall, softened by ocean air, and through the grimy windows to the two people already waiting at the information desk. She was on her own, and I could sense her hesitating. “I’ll pay,” she said. “You go straight to the hospital, okay? You have insurance?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  She nodded and pulled the cell from her pocket.

  Five minutes later I eased myself into a cab. There was a little statue of Ganesh that wobbled as we drove and a prayer in Sanskrit taped to the dash. Colored glass beads hung from the rearview mirror. Once we pulled away, I told the driver not to go to the hospital, to drop me off at home.

  “You sure?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said, and he just nodded and turned up the Indian dance music on the stereo. He was a young guy with a big oversized watch on his wrist; he couldn’t care less where I went.

  When he dropped me off I hauled ass upstairs and lay down on my bed. I reached for my stereo, but my iPod wasn’t docked. I didn’t know where it was. The whole time the voice was keeping up a monologue—

  “You’re nothing. You’re a ***** ******. You deserve nothing. You will amount to nothing. You should just kill yourself. Your dad would be happy if you killed yourself. I don’t even hate you, you’re so pathetic. You are to be pitied. You are not worthy of …”

  I fumbled with the controls. I managed to get the radio on, and loud rock filled the room, but I could still hear the voice.

  “You will never be anyone. You are the ghost, not me. You have no one and nothing. You will …”

  My fingers kept turning, and the radio station disappeared into crackle, a phantom retreating into nothingness, fragmenting.

  Then I was in the space between stations, electromagnetic desert, blankness between the oases of music and talk.

  And the voice was gone.

  All that was there was white noise.

  Blissful white noise.

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

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

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

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

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

  I floated on a sea of static. It made me think of my dad, his ears ringing after the bomb nearly killed him, the atmosphere filled with dust. I remembered he said once that the weirdest thing about it, about the explosion and then running to help Mike Osborne, was how peaceful it felt. The hiss in his ears, the stillness of the motes of dust and metal and blood hanging in the air.

  Until then, I never understood what he meant—how could it be peaceful when people were shooting at you? But now I kind of got it. I closed my eyes, and let the white noise wash over me.

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

  Until I heard the door to my room open, and my dad came in followed by two guys in green suits with medical logos on them.

  “That’s her,” my dad said. “Cass, turn that **** off.”

  I turned off the radio. The voice only I could hear said:

  “Who are those people?”

  “Who are those people?” I asked, pointing to the men in green.

  “People who have come to help,” said Dad. He walked over to me, grabbed my arm, and pulled up my sleeve. He let out a fast breath when he saw marks on my skin, where the voice had made me pinch myself, or worse. He nodded to the two guys, like this confirmed something.

  “Dad!” I yanked at my sleeve. “What the hell?”

  He didn’t answer me, but I saw his eyes were red. Had he been crying? He turned to the paramedics or whatever they were. “She needs help,” he said.

  The two guys stepped forward. The first one was big, his arms like slabs of pork. One of those arms had a tribal tattoo around it. His hair was shaved close. The other was young, with a friendly face and curly hair. He looked like a boy playing dress-up.

  The muscle-builder took my finger and put a clip on it, which glowed red and had a cable running to a handheld reader. He looked at the monitor.

  “One hundred thirty,” he said to the kid. “Saturation one hundred.”

  “What’s happening, Dad?” I asked. “What are these guys doing?”

  He turned to me, and looked at me sadly. “Ms. Austin called me,” he said.

  “Ms. Austin?”

  “The public librarian
.”

  I stared at him. “How do you spell that?”

  “Cass …”

  “How’s it spelled?!”

  “P-U-B—”

  “No. Her name.”

  “Oh. A-U-S-T-I-N. I think. I knew her mom—used to teach at Fairview. She was still there when you were young, but—”

  “She’s named Jane Austin?”

  “The librarian?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh,” said Dad. “Yeah, I guess. Why?”

  “Why? Jesus, Dad.”

  “What? What’s this Jesus Dad?”

  I shook my head to clear it. “Whatever. So you want me to go get checked out? Okay. Let’s go. We need a new EpiPen too.”

  He sat down on my bed. “No, honey.”

  “No, you don’t want me to get checked out?”

  “Yes, but not in that way.”

  “In what way?”

  Dad turned to the paramedics, but they were examining the ceiling and the walls like there was a Michelangelo mural there.

  “She told me you’ve been talking to yourself,” he said. “Your teachers too. They called me last week.”

  I felt the bottom falling out of the world. At the same time, I was glad. Or part of me was. That it was out of my hands now. But I still didn’t want to go to the hospital.

  The voice didn’t either.

  “Make him stop,” it said. “Make him stop or you’ll suffer.”

  “Please, Dad, I don’t want to go anywhere.”

  He couldn’t meet my eyes. “I’m sorry, Cass. I don’t know how else to help you.”

  “Help me? You never help me. You’ve never been there for me.”

  He took a step back. “Maybe I … I don’t know. But this is what I’m doing now. I’m getting you some help.”

  I pointed to the two men. “This is help?”

  He made a what can I do? gesture. Then tipped his head to the guys, to say, take her.

  “YOU CANNOT LET THIS HAPPEN,” said the voice, and in that moment I was so afraid, so unable to deal with what would happen if these men took me someplace where I would have to talk about the voice, so freaked out by the thought of how much it would punish me, that I grabbed onto Dad, onto the front of his shirt, and I think I started to cry then, and I said, “Please, please, please, Dad, please, please, please, please …”