Whisper to Me (37 page)

“So a teenage girl isn’t going to solve a case the police can’t solve. Just …” I thought of Paris’s body, weighed down, at the bottom of the ocean. Bloating. Hair floating. Fish swimming through her clothes.

Ugh. Stop.

“Okay, then, just let her die,” said the voice.

“What do you want me to do?” I said again.

The voice fell silent for a moment. “Isn’t that boy coming to pick you up? Maybe he’ll have ideas.”

I checked my watch. The voice was right: it was time for you to pick me up—you had your break at eleven a.m., and we’d agreed to keep looking for Paris.

“I thought you didn’t like him?” I said to the voice.

“I don’t.”

“So aren’t you going to instruct me to break up with him? To, I don’t know, tell him to **** off or you will make me cut off my fingers?”

“You’ve made it clear you won’t respond to threats like that,” said the voice, in a weirdly reasonable tone.

“Right.”

“Anyway, I don’t need to,” it said, cruel again, mocking. “You’re going to mess things up yourself.”

“What? Why?”

“Have you told him about me? About … this?”

I sat up straighter on the bed. “No.”

“Well, there you go. A lie that is sure to blow up in your face. ‘Oh, sorry I didn’t mention that I’m a psycho.’ ”

“I’m not a psycho.”

“Semantics.”

I sighed. “Besides it’s all … I mean … I shouldn’t be with him anyway. It’s not the right time, with Paris, and …”

“Love is no respecter of right times,” said the voice. But not in a kind way.

“Oh, go away,” I said.

And it did. I felt it go behind its curtain, and the stage of my mind was clear. I closed my eyes for a long moment.
Maybe I should tell him
, I thought.

But then he will never look at you the same way again.

Maybe I shouldn’t be seeing him anyway. Maybe I’ll tell him we can’t be seeing each other. If my dad found out … If Paris …

Yeah, right. You tell him that. You tell him you don’t want to see him.

Look. I’m capable of having a conversation with myself even without the voice.

Well.

Why start holding back now?

I went downstairs, still turning everything over. Paris, the lack of evidence, the voice, the fact that I was lying to you.

You’re not lying to him; you’re just not telling him something.

Yeah, right.

As I waited on the porch I felt empty; scooped out like an avocado skin. Paris was gone, and I had failed to do anything about it. I’d failed
her
. Just like I failed my mom.

A clip played over and over in my head, a YouTube video on repeat—me lying on my bed, the white noise drowning out my phone so that I couldn’t hear it ringing, couldn’t hear Paris calling for my help. I might as well have handed her over to the Houdini Killer myself. And now there was nothing I could do to help her, nothing I could do to help find her.

I stood there, waiting for the voice to come back again and comment. To say,

“Yes. You’re worthless.”

Or,

“You disgust me.”

Or,

“It’s your fault she’s dead.”

But the voice didn’t say anything.

Strange.

A couple of minutes later you pulled up, one arm out the window of your pickup. You were wearing your Ray-Bans; the sun was shining brightly. There was a hummingbird hovering in the air over the rosebushes Mom planted, which had grown out of control, its red breast quivering. A few songbirds were chirping—our neighbor Mrs. Cartwright puts seed out for them.

I listened to the unchanging language of a sparrow; that same liquid phrase of notes, over and over; a musical motif that would never alter. It made me think of Philomela, and I thought,
What if that sparrow was Paris?

I guess you probably know the story. There was a king, Tereus, and he was married to Procne. But he desired her sister, Philomela. So he raped Philomela and then, to stop her telling anyone, he cut out her tongue and imprisoned her, telling his wife that her sister was dead. But Philomela wove a tapestry depicting what had happened to her, and had it smuggled to Procne.

Procne, learning of her husband’s crime, killed their son and served his flesh to her husband. Incensed with rage, Tereus pursued Procne and Philomela and tried to strangle them—but before he could, the gods turned them into birds: Procne into a nightingale, and Philomela into a swallow.

And that’s why the nightingale sings “tereu, tereu, tereu,” because forevermore it’s accusing Tereus, naming him, exposing his hideous crime. Like Echo mocking her murderer, Pan, by singing his voice and his music back to him.

There are no nightingales in North America of course. Just ordinary thrushes.

Anyway. That was my state of mind. Standing in the yard, thinking of stories about murder and cutting out tongues, and the ghosts of women turned into birds.

Maybe she really did run away.

Maybe she did go to New York.

“And maybe I’ll just never know,” I said aloud. And then burst into tears.

I concentrated on the sound of the sparrow.

Cheep-
cheep
. Cheep-
cheep
.

No
, I thought.
She’s dead. Paris is dead.

And what if she was in the sparrow’s voice? Like Procne and Philomela? A sparrow, instead of a nightingale or a swallow? What if she was telling me a name, telling it to me over and over, accusing someone?

Cheep-
cheep
.

It didn’t sound like any name I recognized.

Or what if she was in the cranes in her bedroom, the ones she’d made with her own hands, the two hundred and sixty-one cranes—Paris gone but still there, multiple, spread across paper birds?

I shook my head.

Crazy.

“What’s up with you?” you said, as you walked up.

“I was wondering what the sparrow was saying.”

You listened. “I think it’s saying, ‘I am a sparrow,’ ‘I am a sparrow.’ Over and over.”

“Huh,” I said.

“Why, what were you thinking?”

“Oh,” I said. “Pretty much the same.” I didn’t want you to know the kind of crazy thing I was thinking. Clearly I have no such compunction now.

We went over to the pickup and got inside. “So,” you said. “What did the cop say? Did you find out anything?”

“Nothing.” I told you about the parents, the empty case file that gave us nothing. But you know that of course. As I spoke, you drove the F-150 into town, and to the alley where the plush warehouse was.

“What do we do now?” you said.

“I have no idea.” Without warning, I started to cry again.

“Oh, Cass …”

You put your arms around me. They were strong, and the sound of cars passing was just a quiet shushing in the background, and I could smell you, the scent of you, and I wished that moment would never, ever end.

But it did. Those moments always do.

You pulled back, touched away a tear from my cheek with your thumb. Gently. So gently.

“But you said the cop was holding something back,” you said. “That he knew something.”

“Maybe.”

“Then we need to find out what it is.”

“Oh sure, that will be easy,” I said. “We’ll just make the cop tell us everything he knows, using our irresistible powers of suggestion.”

“Hmm.”

“Yeah,
hmm
.”

You made a kind of pained shrug movement. “So we’re stuck.”

“Yeah.”

You got out of the truck and pulled up the rolling door, then drove the pickup into the warehouse. It was a duller day; the beams of light shining down from the windows were less bright, the piles of toys lost in the gloom, as you looked deep into the warehouse. It was spookier—I could just make out the animals closest to us, their plastic eyes shining in the light from outside.

“Creepy,” I said.

“Yes.”

We made our way into the shadow-crossed space of the warehouse.

“What are we looking for?” I said.

“Seven mixed Disney characters, small,” you said. “Two SpongeBob, medium. Three Moshi Monsters, large.”

“Okay. Which way do I go?” I couldn’t think of anything better to do than to help you.

You pointed to the far right corner, and I took a step—at the same time you set out in the opposite direction, so we bumped into each other; I lost my balance; my hand shot out and you grabbed my arm, put your other hand behind my back.

We stood there for a moment, our bodies touching, your hands on me, holding me.

The light shifted outside; a cloud moved away from the face of the sun, or something; and a shaft of light came down, illuminated us. We were in a glowing column, dust hanging suspended in it; I almost thought we might rise up off the ground, like people in those weird religious paintings.

You shifted forward; I shifted forward.

The electrons in our bodies reached out for each other, spinning. I felt the charge of it, you a positive and me a negative, making sparks that flew from our eyes and our fingertips to touch each other; invisible.

You lowered your face and after a moment that felt

endless

your lips met mine and we kissed, very slowly. Time ended and has never really begun again, not for me. We sank down, we knew the beam of light would hold us and keep us safe; we lay on the softness of plush toys and our tongues touched and the circuit was completed; I lit up like a million-watt bulb.

I was
shining
. Light was blazing from my every pore. My eyes were closed, and the strip lights were turning the inside of my eyelids red, everything red. That’s your color, you know, the one I see and feel when I think of you. Emotions are always associated with colors, aren’t they? Green with envy. Well, when you are in my head you are always there with red: sunlight, warmth, heat.

People are green with envy. Yellow with cowardice. I am red with you.

Our arms were around each other, and we were cushioned by stuffed animals. I half opened my eyes, and I saw Elmo looking back at me. It was like he was smiling at me.

I want you to know something: I have never felt safer than in that moment. I felt like a fish, like a trout in the shade of a bank, enveloped by water, lifted up by it.

The promise of buoyancy. The impossibility of falling.

Then …

A buzzing.

An unmistakable crackling.

“714, where the hell are those bags? Get your ass to Pier One.”

My eyes snapped open. So did yours. “Unbelievable,” you said.

“Yeah,” I said.

You started to get up; put out your hand to catch mine and help me to my feet. “Oh well,” you said. “We have all the time in the world.”

I’m crying right now, just thinking about it.

There is no beam of light around me, keeping me protected.

There are only bugs, in their glowing tanks; stick insects and roaches and millipedes, crawling around with their stiff little bodies, their unloving ichor in place of blood, their clicking appendages and hard little shells.

They’re all around me, but they don’t give a ****. I don’t know why my dad likes them. They’re creatures of coldness; no heart in them at all. Primitive things like shards of stone that move, clacking and ticking. They have no voices. They will be here when we’re all dead.

I’m not proud of the next bit so I’m going to tell it quickly.

You dropped me at home and I was walking to the front door, already starting to sweat in the noonday sun, when the voice spoke.

“There is a way,” it said.

“Nice to hear from you,” I said without thinking. “But could you speak to me after—”

Then I stopped. I literally stopped moving, one foot up on the porch step. That hummingbird was
still
there; it was like it was frozen in time above those roses, except you could see its blurred wings beating. The sun was warm on my skin.

“Wait,” I said, suddenly hearing what the voice had said, hearing it properly. “What do you mean there is a way?”

“To get Dwight to talk.”

I sat down on the step. “Let me get this straight. You’re helping now?”

Silence.

“Hello?” I said.

“You don’t want me to help?” said the voice eventually. Its tone, its timbre, was less aggressive than usual. It sounded … like someone who knows they have behaved badly and is a little embarrassed, and—there’s no other word for it—
apologetic
.

“Um. Yes,” I said. “I guess.”

“Yes, you don’t want me to, or, yes, you want me to?”

“Yes, I want you to.”

“Okay,” said the voice. “Then listen.”

I rode the bus to the police station. I didn’t want to tell you what I was doing. Because I knew that you wouldn’t approve. Because I knew you would tell me not to.

You would have said it was mean, and you would have been right.

So … I lied to you again.

Basically.

For about the millionth time, I’m sorry.

Of course, it got an awful lot worse, later. The lying, that is. Not the sorriness. The sorriness is constant, and it could not get any worse.

When I arrived at the police station I asked for Dwight.

“Dwight what?” said the woman on reception, a brassy blonde with dark roots and even darker circles under her eyes. She looked like she needed to go home and get three hours more sleep before starting work again.

“Huh?” I said.

“His last name, honey,” said the woman.

“Oh. I don’t know. But he’s a cop. Here. His name is Dwight.”

The woman tapped her long fingernails on her desk. The desk was pitted, made of cheap wood. Everything about the station was cheap. “We have two Dwights. One’s in traffic. The other’s in homicide.”

“Homicide,” I said.

She raised her eyebrows. “You sure?”

I held her gaze. “Yes.”

She nodded slowly. “I’ll call up. See if he’s available. Your name was …?”

I hadn’t told her my name. “Cass,” I said. “He knows me.”

She dialed a number and waited while it rang. She told whoever was on the other line—Dwight, I guess—that I was there to see him. She listened for a moment, said “uh-huh”, and then put down the phone.

“Third floor, right-hand side,” she said. “There’s an elevator just there.”