Whisper to Me

by Nick Lake

  Most likely not.

  But Julie and I could still do this. Could still finish something, at least.

  Julie took a deep breath. “We can’t protect any of those people.” They moved, below us, so many of them, bacteria under a microscope. “We can’t protect anyone.”

  “No,” I said. “But that’s okay. It’s okay.”

  Julie looked at me, surprised.

  “We can’t keep anyone safe,” I said. “So we just have to cling onto people when we can.”

  A moment of silence.

  Then Julie smiled.

  And took my hand.

  “You got the bags?” I said.

  “Yep.”

  Julie lifted the bags; they were just plastic shopping bags from a 7-Eleven. She held the first out to me, and I took one of the handles too, so we were holding it together, then we stood. The car of the wheel hung suspended in space and time.

  “Now?”

  “Now.”

  We tipped the bag over the side of the car. Then we did the second bag. Someone gasped in one of the cars below us. The cranes spilled, fluttering, all the colors of the lights below, falling in spirals, catching on the air, twisting. Sharp angles of their wings and beaks. Two hundred and sixty-one of them, paper birds, a confetti of birds, drifting down through the night air, spreading as they fell, caught in eddies and currents, caught on the struts of the wheel, landing inside cars.

  I thought of Julie saying that Paris loved everyone, of Paris saying that she would embrace the town if she could.

  Good-bye, Paris, I said silently in my head. I kept my eyes on the falling birds as long as I could, the cranes, which she had folded with her own hands, all of them.

  I watched them fall, slowly, spiraling. Blue and yellow and red and pink. I remembered lying in bed, half-asleep, thinking of the place where birds live, above the town, as a kind of heaven, and that was the idea of course, to drop her from here, to put her in a kind of heaven.

  It was like her soul had been divided into two hundred and sixty-one pieces, and now it was scattering over the glow of the town, over the brightness, spreading Paris all over, brightly colored pieces of her. Pan tore Echo into scraps, but the gods did the same to her voice, to her soul, made it everywhere and in fragments, so that she would never die, and now we had done the same for Paris, thrown her into the wind and the darkness and the glow of the town, the brightness, like Echo’s voice flung into the rocks and the trees and the mountains, Procne in the song of the nightingale, ringing out her accusation but also her voice and her soul, singing that there was a part of her that would never be killed, as long as she was remembered, and in the same way Paris would always be around, because of the cranes, if we came up here, to the top of the wheel and the place where the town was laid out below us like a city of light, shining in the darkness, glowing, the hope of the resurrection.

  “****,” said Julie. “Some of them are stuck in the bag.”

  She reached in to pull them out, to dislodge them, and the wheel jolted into motion and we stumbled into each other, stupidly put our arms out to clutch each other, toppled over.

  Julie screamed as we fell, but then the car was just moving slowly around and we weren’t dropping down to the ground below, plummeting; we just fell on our asses on the cold, hard floor of the car.

  “Ow,” said Julie.

  “Double ow,” I said.

  Quickly we scrabbled in the bag, yanked out the remaining cranes, threw them over the side—saw them whipped away by a sudden wind that had struck up.

  Julie got up first and pulled me to my feet. Her hand went to her backside, and she made a disgusted face. “I have gum on my butt,” she said.

  And then I was laughing, and she was laughing, and we laughed so hard, we laughed until we cried.

  And that’s it.

  But listen.

  This is the important thing. When I fell into the water, the ocean got behind my eyes, and you … I feel like you have done the same.

  You’re behind my eyes; you’re under my skin. The smell of your hair is in the cavities of my body, coursing in my veins. I can’t get rid of it. And you were 100 percent there for me, I see that now, you were on my side—hell, even when I kissed Dwight you were still worried that my dad was forcing me into breaking up with you, that he was abusing me in some way … I mean, he wasn’t, not really, but you still cared. You still wanted to help me.

  You’re on my team. You were, I mean. I never really had that before, not at school, not anywhere, my mom and dad just, but that’s their job, right? I’m rambling. What I mean is: you are kind of amazing. I don’t really deserve you, but I’d like to try to repay you if I can.

  I’d like to be on your team.

  100 percent.

  So … meet me? When you have read this? At Pirate Golf, on Pier One, on Friday at five p.m.?

  I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, Why would I forgive this girl when she hurt me like that? You’re thinking, Why would I want to see her again, after her dad kicked me out, said he didn’t want me seeing her? Not to mention that she hears a voice. And I understand that, I do. But I have some things to tell you, some things that might make you feel better.

  I don’t know. I don’t want to pressure you.

  But.

  First: I like you. I like you a lot. And believe it or not, everything I did to hurt you, I really did, in a ******-up way, because I was trying to keep you safe. Truly. Okay, that’s a lie. It’s also because I was embarrassed, by the voice, all that stuff. But … at least I’m honest, right? I mean, I am now. You don’t need me to protect you, but I swear I will always try to.

  Second …

  It’s about my dad. And about me.

  After I got out of the hospital, Dad drove me home. We went silently into the house. We both knew things were going to be hard. There was going to be a lot of media intrusion. I was going to have to talk to Dr. Rezwari and Dr. Lewis. Work out where to go with my treatment.

  I told Dad that in the hospital. I explained to him about the voice support group; I said how much it had helped me, how Dr. Rezwari was willing to try a collaborative approach. I told him how the voice helped me, when I was in the ocean, helped me to have the strength to climb. He didn’t say anything, but he did nod, which I took as a positive sign.

  Anyway.

  We went into the den. I had been told to get lots of rest. Dad led me to the couch and sat me down and then sat down beside me.

  “Is there anything I can do for you?” he said. He looked gray; he had lost so much weight. The stress had taken such a toll on him, I could see that now.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “What? Food? Coffee?”

  “You can forgive me,” I said.

  Dad frowned. It accentuated his new wrinkles, and I felt another stab of guilt. His muscled, tattooed arms were less muscled now.

  But I was sick of feeling guilty.

  I had had enough of feeling guilty.

  “What?” he said.

  “I want you to forgive me for … for …” I started to cry.

  “Pull yourself to-*******-gether,” said the voice, but I didn’t mind, it was okay, that was just how the voice talked; I knew that now. Also it was quiet these days, not the loud voice it had been—more like a whisper in my ear. Almost as if it was the wind speaking, like I could ignore it easily if I wanted to.

  “For what?” said Dad.

  “For killing Mom,” I said all in a rush.

  “Oh,” said Dad.

  Silence hung between us like string drawn tight; a humming kind of silence—a bird hanging on the air, wings beating, or one of Dad’s insects moving its legs together so fast you can’t see them.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Cass,” said Dad slowly. “I don’t think you killed your mom.”

  “You do,” I said.

  “You may think that. I don’t.”

  I continued to cry; I felt better and worse at the same time. �
�I moved her head,” I said. “I moved her head, and she had a head injury and—”

  “She was already dead,” said Dad, a strange expression on his face. “Didn’t you … didn’t you know?”

  “What?”

  “She was already dead, Cass. The doctors were very precise on that point.” I was staring at him. I saw that his eyes were red, but there was such love in them—do you understand? Such love and such softness, it was like I had broken through some hard shell on the outside of him, some exoskeleton, and suddenly he was the flesh of the bug beneath, naked.

  “What?” I said again, dumbly.

  “She was already dead when you lifted her head, or at least there was no possibility of recovery. The doctors had no doubt. No doubt at all. The blow. It … it … it destroyed the cerebral cortex, pretty much. That’s the part that does all the thinking. All the being.”

  “But I … you let … why didn’t you …”

  “Why didn’t I tell you? It was an upsetting detail. I didn’t think …”

  “But when we argued,” I said. “When you dumped out my pills, you said—”

  “I was angry, Cass. I felt like I couldn’t trust you. Like you were going behind my back again and again, and I didn’t know how to get through to you and I just … snapped. I couldn’t control it. And I was … I am … I was angry with myself, for not being there when she died. For the fact that it was you. That I wasn’t there for her.”

  Snapping. It happens in a moment, it happens suddenly.

  I knew that feeling. I knew what it was like.

  “So you don’t … you don’t blame me?”

  “Cass,” he said, very softly, but then he fell silent.

  “Yes?”

  “Cass, I don’t blame you. I blame myself, for not being there to stop it. You … I’m only grateful to you.”

  “Grateful? Why?”

  He moved closer to me, put his arm around me. “You know what I tell myself? In the dark, at night. I tell myself …”

  “Yeah?”

  “I tell myself that the last thing she saw, the last thing she knew, was you reaching down to hold her. You, kneeling to pick her up. You. She loved you so much, you can’t imagine. One day you’ll get it, when you have kids, I guess. You were the universe to her, and all the stars in it. So I picture her looking at you, having you as her last sight in the world, your face, and then the darkness inside me goes away.”

  Oh.

  I’ll skip the next bit. There was a lot of crying. You don’t need to see that.

  But there was something else important.

  After all the hugging was done, the hugging and the crying, I kind of coughed, like you do when there’s something hard to say and you don’t want to say it but at the same time you know you have to.

  Cough.

  “Dad,” I said. “I’m not going to stop seeing that boy. I mean, I don’t know if he will forgive me now, but I’m going to write him, and you can’t stop me.”

  “Cass …”

  “No. I’m not a little girl anymore.” And that was true. Something had changed in me when I climbed that rope. I could feel it.

  “I know that, and—”

  “I swear to God, Dad, if you stand in my way, I will leave this house and you will never see me again.”

  He sighed.

  A long silence.

  “I don’t want to stand in your way.”

  “So you won’t stop me seeing him?”

  Another silence.

  “If you follow your doctor’s orders,” he said eventually, “if you—”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’ll see her and Dr. Lewis, and we’ll work it out together, I promise.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Dad. “Him too. But fine. If you do all that, then I’m not going to stand in your way.” He made a lame effort at a smile.

  “Seriously? You’re … you’re fine with this? With me writing to him?”

  “I wouldn’t say I’m fine with it, but I can live with it.” He stood up. “But I would say, Cass …” He looked pained. “I would say it’s not me you need to convince. I don’t know what you did to that boy, but last time I saw him he did not look happy.”

  “I know,” I said.

  Dad stood there for a moment, awkwardly. Then he let out a long breath. “Oh, **** it,” he said. “If you write to him, tell him I’m sorry too.”

  Oh, and, ****, I’m running out of time now, but I’m aware, okay? I’m aware of what my dad said.

  It is you I need to convince.

  It is you I need to apologize to.

  So … Here’s the thing. I’ve learned stuff. I’m no longer the same person I was.

  For example: I have learned that some people come into our lives, and then are gone. And that part of the thing, part of life, is to accept that fact, to accept that they’re gone.

  But there’s something else too: and that’s realizing that a part of them will never be gone. We think of lives as stopping, suddenly. But they don’t. They are like waves, like ripples, like echoes that continue to resonate from their point of origin, out into the world. There was an Italian scientist named Marconi who said that sound waves, once generated, reverberate through the universe forever. Like, you could stand on Jupiter with a powerful-enough microphone and you’d hear conversations I had with my mom, with Paris.

  I mean, he was wrong, sure. But I love the idea. It’s like Echo, but real. Voices outlasting their owners.

  And, of course, and more simply, I can just remember those voices, and that keeps them with me. Remember their lives. Remember their words. The time my mom carried me home from the store, just because she said I’d soon be too heavy to do it. The time Paris won that Elmo, with her terrible fishing.

  But.

  But there are also, of course, people you don’t have to just remember, because they’re still around.

  And I guess that’s the other thing I have learned. There are people who come into our lives, and then are gone. But there are also people who come into our lives and who we need to hang on to.

  I have lost so many people. Friends, my mom, Paris. But there is one person I lost, and can maybe get back.

  You.

  I don’t want to let you go. I need you, 100 percent on my side.

  But here’s the thing: I’m 100 percent on your side too. I mean, I’m not claiming I’m ever going to be the best girlfriend in the world. But I know you. I knew you the first time I saw you, in your muscles, in your smile. And I think you know me. And I think we could be something special.

  And I will never, ever let you down.

  Again.

  I mean, I’ll never let you down again.

  Ahem.

  So, more important, I’m also sorry, okay? I need to finish this and hit Send—otherwise you’re not going to have time to read it before Friday—but I’m sorry.

  I’m sorry for making you think that I was with someone else, if you ever did believe that, I don’t know. If you didn’t, then I’m sorry for making you think I was a total ***** who wanted to **** with your mind.

  I’m sorry for shouting at your dad. I’m sorry for not understanding, about your mom, about the music, about the swimming. Though I hope that even if you do take the swim scholarship, you keep playing music.

  It would be a shame if you stopped.

  I’m sorry for everything the voice made me do.

  And I would like another chance.

  Oh.

  Oh, I should tell you about the voice too, I mean, hell, maybe even if you forgive me you won’t want to take me back because of the voice, because you don’t want a crazy girlfriend. I would understand that, I would.

  But here’s the thing—I’m not crazy.

  Something bad happened to me; I saw my mom die, and then when I found the foot on the beach, something went wrong, the needle skipped on the record in my brain—or substitute that with some more relevant modern analogy, I guess—and I started hearing a voice. But it was a coping mechanism. It to
ok my hatred for myself and insulated me from it. Placed it outside myself.

  And then, when I learned how to deal with it, how to act toward it, how to give it a schedule, limits, it started to help me.

  I’m not crazy. I’m really not. I got hurt; I developed a scar; and now the scar is healing. I see Dr. Rezwari and Dr. Lewis together now, and I’m doing well. Dr. Rezwari has helped me to see that I maybe fixated on Paris a bit, obsessed about her disappearance as a distraction from thinking about my guilt over my mom. I mean, Dwight was right: I hardly even knew her. Which is not to say that I didn’t like her.

  I don’t take the risperidone at all anymore. The paroxetine, I still take. Dr. Rezwari was right about antidepressants, as it turns out: they just make everything a little bit easier, for now anyway. The plan is that, at some point, I can slowly ease off them—NOT just stop taking them right away, because both Rezwari and Lewis have helped me to see that dropping my drugs instantly might not have been the best decision I ever made. I mean, I went after a serial killer. I knowingly ate a chocolate bar that could contain nuts; I pretended to be with Dwight, to get rid of you so that I didn’t have to tell you the truth.

  I was not, let’s say, strictly rational.

  But anyway, the antidepressants are it for now—most of it’s using the techniques Dr. Lewis has taught me. I’ve got one more year of school, and I’m going to make it count, go to college, study Classics. I’d like to anyway.

  And the truth is, I hardly hear the voice anymore. And when I do, it’s helpful, it’s nice … Well, okay, not nice. But it’s like my friend now, it points out things that I might have missed, it gives me clues, it gives me cues. It’s useful.

  And it really is no more than a whisper, it’s so quiet, and it’s hardly ever there.

  What else?

  I joined Julie’s roller derby team. I suck at it, but it’s fun, and I like feeling part of the group. A group that doesn’t involve people talking about their invisible voices. Though I still go to that group anyway. How long I’ll be able to hang out with Julie for, I don’t know. I want to go to college, and I think I’d like to leave Oakwood to do it. But for now it’s good, I mean she’s good, I mean she’s my friend and that’s good.