Whisper to Me

by Nick Lake

  “Sorry, it’s stupid, I—”

  “No, it’s kind of you. I guess my work with you is done! The pupil has become the master. I’m fine, truly.” She moved another file, randomly as far as I could see. “I just … something happened to one of our outpatients. Something terrible. Nothing to concern you.”

  “Paris?”

  Her eyes sharpened. “You knew her?”

  Suddenly I knew that I didn’t want to talk about Paris. “Not really. We met in the courtyard. But I read in the paper … about …”

  “Yes,” said Dr. Rezwari. She made a sobbing sound. “Oh God. Sorry. This is so unprofessional. I was … I was very fond of her.”

  I stared at her, surprised. But yes, why not? Paris was one of those people. She didn’t so much have charisma as an aura. To my amazement I found myself feeling a moment of connection with Dr. Rezwari. “Sorry,” I said.

  “Thank you. And now I must let you go, try to gather myself before my next appointment.”

  “Okay. See you next week.”

  “See you, Cassandra.” She looked down at her desk and didn’t look back up.

  I closed the door behind me, took the corridor lined with photos of old board members and then the green stairs down to the lobby, where the bus stop was.

  “Liar,” said the voice. “You lied to her about everything. About your drugs. About Paris.”

  “Shut up. It’s not six.”

  “Fine. But you’re still a liar. And it’s going to get you in trouble.”

  “This is it?”

  “Yeah,” you said. We were sitting in your pickup early in the morning, outside a liquor store. You had an hour before starting work—and every second counted. I mean, what could be happening to Paris as the hours ticked by … We both knew it, but neither of us said it.

  You showed me the screen of your phone. I looked at it. There was a list of tweets. The pictures next to them showed a whole range of people. Young, old, white, black. I didn’t know what you had done, but you had gotten a load of different people looking for that Jeep.

  “Read it,” you said.

  I read.

  #SRT8 Lauderdale b/t Ash and Ocean

  Spotted! Bayside 8th Street #SRT8

  #SRT8 @ the Laundromat on Fort in Lauderdale

  #SRT8 on Mayflower Drive in Lauderdale

  #Lauderdale #SRT8 #Ocean & 10th

  “That’s just a random sampling,” you said. “Notice anything?”

  “Yeah. Lauderdale.”

  “Hence, we are sitting here in Lauderdale.”

  “And we’re just going to wait till we see a Jeep SRT8?” I was starting to feel less sure about this plan. “There are hardly any houses around here. It’s all factories and offices and industrial buildings.”

  “Nevertheless,” you said, “Lauderdale came up most. That means someone who owns an SRT8 either lives here or works here. Furthermore, a lot of the tweets mention Ocean Avenue. Which is why we’re on Ocean Avenue.”

  “You’re a latter-day Sherlock,” I said.

  “That makes you Watson.”

  “Fine. I’m comfortable with—”

  I shut up. A black Jeep SRT8 had just turned right onto the street in front of us. It traveled north slowly. Its windows were darkened—privacy glass. Perfect for a murderer, I thought. Murderers like privacy.

  “There!” I said. “There!” There was a nasty worm of a thought at the back of my mind—this could be the person who …

  who …

  who took Paris.

  “Yep,” you said. You turned the key in the ignition.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to follow it, obviously.” You checked the traffic and then gunned across the road to catch up with the Jeep. A guy in a BMW shook his fist at us.

  “Keep two cars between us and them,” I said. “I saw it in a movie.”

  “Yeah, I’m not going to do that,” you said. “I’d just lose them. I’m not a spy.”

  “Okay.”

  We fell silent as you kept after the Jeep, turning when it turned. At one point we hit some lights and the Jeep got through just before they went red. You braked, hard. “****,” you said, hitting the steering wheel with the palm of your hand.

  But then the lights went green and you pulled away, and there was the SRT8, just turning left a block ahead. You accelerated—if there had been a camera, you’d have been so busted. You drove fast, turned the corner with the tires squealing. The Jeep was maybe two hundred yards ahead, just a Datsun mini-truck thing between us and it.

  Then the Jeep slowed and turned into a driveway.

  You slowed the pickup to a crawl and parked just down the street. I nodded at the car door and you nodded back; we both got out and walked down the street.

  You took my hand. It was the first time our skin had touched. I don’t know if you felt it, but I did. It was … it was as if there were thousands of nerve endings there, in my palm, in my fingers, that I had never known about, that had just lain dormant for my entire life. How can I have all this skin I didn’t know about? I thought. How can no one ever have touched it before?

  Because I had never felt anything like this before.

  I swallowed.

  I looked at you.

  We paused at the driveway where the Jeep turned, feeling the warmth of each other’s hands.

  We saw the Jeep’s taillights disappear behind a warehouse, which was next to a massive amount of heavy equipment—cranes, diggers, rollers. A few guys were walking around in yellow hard hats, hi-vis vests on, brown boots and jeans a kind of uniform.

  But none of this was what had snagged my attention.

  What had snagged my attention was:

  A sign on a couple of shiny stainless-steel poles, reading:

  DEVON AND SONS DEMOLITION.

  “What?” you said.

  “The sign. Let’s say you work for a demolition firm. Think you’d find it hard to hide a body?”

  “Oh.”

  Silence, as we both pictured Paris buried beneath the foundation of a building; her hair crushed by concrete.

  Well, I did anyway. I don’t know about you.

  That was when the Jeep SRT8 appeared again, around the warehouse. It bounced over the rutted earth toward us, the windshield darkened so we couldn’t see who was inside. We stepped back, eyes on the car.

  Then another Jeep SRT8 came out behind it, black too, its windows darkened.

  Then another.

  And another.

  “Oh,” you said. “Great.”

  “It’s a company car,” I said, stupidly. “A company car.”

  A long moment of silence.

  “There’s a lot of stuff to demolish when the economy is down, I suppose,” I said. I felt bleak. Our lead was not a lead at all. It was just a firm that owned a load of SRT8s.

  “Of course,” you said. “Stupid of me.”

  We watched the four black Jeeps drive down the road west from us, in convoy, before disappearing from view as they turned onto Ocean, toward town. Then we started walking back to the pickup.

  “Well, the tweet thing worked,” you said.

  “Yep.”

  “But now we have too many SRT8s.”

  “So we’re nowhere,” I said.

  “Yeah,” you said. “I mean, for now.”

  You pressed the key fob and the pickup flashed and beeped. We opened our doors to climb in.

  I put my hands against the dash. My breath was coming in gulps, violent. My heart was spinning, fast, like a blender. A blender that was turning my organs to mulch, to liquid.

  I touched my cheeks. Tears were running down them; I felt like I was choking. Actually choking.

  You put your hand on my shoulder. Nothing more. You didn’t say anything.

  “She’s dead, isn’t she?” I said.

  “Cass …”

  “She’s dead, and we had ONE LEAD. And now …”

  “The cops—”

  “The cop
s know NOTHING. You said so yourself.”

  “Oh, Cass.”

  I turned away from you. Through my tears, the world on the other side of the truck window was blurred; running to the ground, melting down to nothing. I shut my eyes and closed it out.

  “Cass. Cass.”

  I opened my eyes. We were parked on one of the streets behind the boardwalk. We were right outside a fifties motel. The Flamingo. There was a giant pink plastic flamingo outside, holding a cocktail with an umbrella in it. Three floors of rooms rose up on the other side of a thin strip of grass, pink with white balconies, like a wedding cake.

  “What are we doing here?” I said.

  “I want to show you something,” you said.

  “Don’t you have to go to work?”

  You shrugged. You tapped the radio on your shoulder. “I am at work. When there are no deliveries, I’m supposed to sort stock, tidy up the piles. That kind of ****. But they won’t know.”

  “And if you get a call for deliveries?”

  “Then I’ll have to take it.”

  “My dad—”

  “Won’t be home for hours and you know it.”

  “He sometimes comes back for lunch.”

  “When was the last time?”

  “About … Hmm. About two years ago.”

  “Wow,” you said. “You two make me and my dad look functional.”

  “We live to serve,” I said flatly.

  You made an impatient gesture. “Anyway. I do want to show you something. Come on,” you said, and you got out of the truck and walked up to the motel.

  “Fine,” I said, to nobody. And I followed you inside.

  The lobby was arranged around a pond, a fake palm tree in the middle of it. A huddle of pink lawn flamingos gathered next to the palm tree, metal legs disappearing into the murky water. A mural of a lagoon in Florida surrounded us, lurid sunset turning the walls orange and red.

  A young, bored-looking guy wearing glasses sat at the reception desk. You walked over, nodding to him.

  “You got it?” he said.

  “Yep.” You handed him a Jiffy envelope and he slid it away, out of sight under the desk.

  “Cool if we go to the roof?” you said.

  “Whenever, man,” said the guy behind the desk.

  You nodded toward a door at the back of the lobby and then opened it for me. “Jesus,” I said. “Are you a drug dealer?” I was remembering your saying that you’d made a delivery to Bayview; that this was why you knew about the cross streets.

  “Not me. My boss.”

  “But …”

  “Turns out, that’s why they wanted someone with a driving license. I don’t have to shell shrimp, but I do have to deliver stuff.”

  “But if you were caught …”

  “I won’t be. And I need the cash. It pays better than the shrimp.”

  “You can’t need the money that badly.”

  You stopped and looked at me. “No? My scholarship only pays tuition and room and board.”

  “Your dad—”

  “Lost his job like three years ago.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “So,” I said. “That’s what you wanted to show me? That you were dealing?”

  “Actually, no.”

  We were climbing the stairs; we’d arrived at the top of the building. We walked down a gloomy corridor, past a flickering green fire-exit sign, and stopped at a door that said,

  POOL. OPEN 10–4 P.M., MAY TO OCT. NO NUDITY OR DIVING. NO UNACCOMPANIED CHILDREN.

  You pushed open the door, and we stepped out onto the roof. Pink lounge chairs were lined up next to a surprisingly clean swimming pool, the water clear and blue under the bright sunny sky. We were three stories up; you could see over the buildings on the other side of the street to the boardwalk, and the beach beyond, the sand almost golden next to the dark navy of the ocean. A container ship crawled across the horizon.

  “Weirdly beautiful, isn’t it?” you said.

  “Yeah.”

  The pool was long and oblong. To the right of it was a bar area, a tiki-style thing with a straw roof. I figured they would be big on cocktails with umbrellas in them. Next to this was a small bandstand with mike stands, amps, and instruments sitting there, as if a band had been playing them and had suddenly abandoned them for some urgent reason.

  At the edges of the roof were low walls. I could see why there were NO UNACCOMPANIED CHILDREN. I could also see, by crouching, that when you were swimming you would barely see the walls—it would be as if you were swimming in the sea, nothing between you and the ocean.

  You saw me crouching. “Cool, no?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “When you’re in, it’s like an infinity of water.”

  “Poetic.”

  “Yeah. Sorry.”

  I walked around the pool. “You come here often?”

  “You picking me up?”

  I raised my eyebrows. Didn’t answer.

  “Sorry. Yeah, I do. To swim.”

  “You swim here?”

  You tapped your waist. “Always have swim shorts under my pants. I couldn’t be a lifeguard—not enough hours. But I have to swim.”

  “Have to?”

  “My scholarship.”

  I looked at the pool. Then I looked at you. “So swim.”

  “Now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Really? I don’t have—”

  “You just said you always do.”

  “Me and my big mouth. I’ll swim if you swim.”

  I shrugged. It’s like I was saying, grief takes away your inhibitions. “Okay,” I said. “But you get in first. Then close your eyes.”

  You shook your head, but it was kind of a formality; you were taking off your shirt, your shoes. Soon you were standing there in your shorts. I couldn’t help noticing the smooth ridges of your stomach. Then my eyes slid up and I saw something weird—a necklace around your neck, hanging down between your … between your, um, quite impressive pecs—but back to the point, the point being, it was kind of a feminine necklace. A silver chain, with a blue gemstone pendant of some kind. I thought it was odd, because it was totally the kind of thing a woman would wear.

  But I didn’t get to think about it for long because you smiled at me, then dived in, knifing into the water with almost no splash, coming up halfway across the pool.

  “Hey, no diving,” I said.

  “And no nudity,” you said. “So don’t even think about it.”

  “Ha-ha. Close your eyes.”

  I stripped down to my underwear—of course I had to be wearing a bra that didn’t match—and jumped in. The water was cold despite the warmth of the day. It sent a shiver through the core of me. I swam over to you. “Come on, then,” I said. “Show me what you got.”

  “A race?”

  “Two lengths. You and me.”

  “Okay …”

  “You think you’re going to destroy me? My dad was a SEAL, remember?”

  “True.”

  We half swam, half walked to the side of the pool facing the ocean. It was a shallow pool. Then we stood and looked at each other.

  “One. Two. Three.”

  We both threw ourselves forward. I swam as fast as I could, which was pretty fast because, well, Dad a SEAL and all that, doing the crawl, feeling the water rushing over me. When I breathed, I got a glimpse of the ocean, and you were right, it was like swimming in forever. Like there was no border between the pool and the ocean.

  I also saw that, as fast as I was, you were way ahead. You got to the end of the pool and did one of those turns pro swimmers do, disappearing under the water and then reappearing alongside me but facing the other way, already breaking the surface with a stroke. A few seconds later I reached the end and turned to see you already back where we had started.

  “Huh,” I said.

  You gave a sheepish smile. “I meant to go easy on you but—”

  “But you can’t help your
brilliance?”

  “I train a lot.”

  You sounded not entirely happy about this. “You don’t like it?” I asked.

  “It’s fine. It’s swimming. I don’t … It’s just something I do.”

  “Right.”

  You pulled yourself out of the pool; sat on the side and looked down at me.

  “I’m staying in here,” I said. “I’m in my underwear, remember?”

  “How could I forget?”

  “Ha-ha.”

  You sat there for a while, and we just didn’t say anything, the sun on our skin, your legs in the water, me kind of floating there. I never knew what people meant about comfortable silences before then because silences between me and my dad were never comfortable.

  A thought flashed: Yeah, and Paris is still gone.

  It punches you like that, when you least expect it.

  You kept glancing over at something—I thought maybe the bar? I thought maybe you were going to suggest that we steal a drink, which I would have been totally on board with at that point; I’d have been on board with drinking and drinking until I didn’t even remember that I ever knew anyone called Paris. But eventually you levered yourself up on your hands and kind of popped into a standing position, then walked over to the bandstand.

  I took a deep breath. Tried to put myself into the moment. To tell myself there was nothing I could do to find Paris right at that moment.

  You came back with a ukulele and sat down again, your feet in the water. “They have, like, a Hawaiian band that plays in the evenings,” you said. “It makes no sense; I mean, the decor is all Florida. But what can you do?”

  “Hmm,” I said. I was spaced out—the pool and the sun gleaming on it; I felt like I was dissolving. Into sparkle and blueness and the sound of lapping water, shushing and bubbling, tapping against the tiled sides.

  You cradled the ukulele. I was watching you. I succeeded so totally at getting into the moment, I forgot then that there was a voice. That I had a dad. That Paris had disappeared. I was feeling the water on my skin and looking at you, at the look on your face.

  The look was love.

  I don’t mean romantic love. I mean … the love of someone who is holding the thing they are meant to be holding. Doing the thing they are meant to be doing. It was interesting because I had not seen that look when you dived into the pool, or when you were swimming. But I saw it now, now that you had that instrument in your hands.