Whisper to Me(125)

I looked for her, treading water, turning to see her in the pale light, but I couldn’t. Even now there was a cold, rational part of me that thought she had never been there, that I had imagined her face in the water, the hair framing it.

“You did try. You did.”

At first it sounded like an echo, Paris’s voice repeating itself, but then I heard it, a soft burr, a hitch, in the throat of the speaker, a sound I knew so well. It was a different voice.

Mom?

“Yes, honey, I’m here. Oh honey, I’m so sorry.”

For what?

“Dying. Leaving you.”

Not your fault. Those men. Just wish … just wish we could find them … wish we could make them pay.

“Oh baby. Don’t you know? Don’t you know by now? Haven’t you learned anything?”

Her voice getting quieter; departing. Leaving me.

What? What? What should I have learned?

“It’s not for us to find people. Or to make them pay. You take revenge, all you do is throw away your soul. Sometimes things happen that you can’t control. Sometimes we lose things we can’t get back. And there are some things we just can’t ever know.”

But—

A whisper now, nothing more:

“I’m sorry, Cass.”

Then gone.

Nothing but cold, blank water, all around me, and I saw that I had sunk under it, had gone below the surface, and I hadn’t even registered. The water was dark around me; I wasn’t even sure which way was up.

Then the clouds parted, and I realized I was looking right at the surface, was seeing the storm-lit sky through maybe a foot of seawater. There was a break in the darkness, and the stars were shining through, thousands of them, millions.

I fixed on the stars.

Eternity, and a couple of minutes, passed.

Pressure tightened around my head; my chest was burning. And I kept on looking up through the water, as slowly, slowly, the stars began to go out, one by one. And then my heart did what it had been practicing for in the moment between every one of its millions of beats and, at last, stopped.





I died.

I mean, I guess I can’t prove that I did. But I know.

My heart was still. There had been pain in my chest, but now it was gone, suddenly.

Everything was pitch-black, and I had the sense that I was unraveling, a mummy with its bandages spiraling off it, crumbling into darkness and dust, disintegrating.

The blackness opened its vast mouth and—





“Excuse me, but are you f*cking kidding me?” said the voice, from the darkness. I opened my eyes. The sky was dim light, above, through murky water.

What? I thought, and I was kind of reeling in shock, I’ve tried to echo it by putting in the swearword when normally I star it out, to try to give you an idea of how that voice poked sharply through the darkness, how loud and intense it was, but I don’t know, it’s not something I can really convey.

“Is that all you’ve got?” said the voice. “Are you ******* serious? You’re just going to give up and DIE? You ******* coward. You weak ******* *****. Enough of this ****, Cass. Go. There’s a rope right next to you, can’t you feel it touching your shoulder? It’s a tether rope, hanging from the pier. Grab it and haul your *** out of this water. Right now.”





Leave me alone, I thought.

I closed my eyes again.

For just a fraction of an instant, I thought about giving up, giving in, to the black. Forgetting. Forgetting Paris being gone and Mom and all of it. But then the voice said this:

“After all your weak-*** whining, THIS is how you’re going to let it end? You’ve got this. You’re in control now. You can still make things right. Haul your *** out of this water and go and get him, and tell him you’re sorry. Are you really going to let him go?”

Confused, I thought of you.

Let him go? I wasn’t meaning to—

“Come on,” said the voice. “Get up there. Breathe. Get him back.”

He won’t want me back, I thought.

“Well, if you die, he won’t have much choice,” said the voice.

Huh.

“For him,” the voice continued, “it’ll be like you when your mom died. When Paris disappeared. You’ll be gone, and there’ll be nothing he can do about it. But if you fight …”

If I fight, I thought, then I can at least give him the choice.

But the sky was so far above, and I was so tired.

“Look,” said the voice, almost reluctantly. “It’s not your fault, what happened to your mom. Or Paris. How were you supposed to save them? But if you breathe in this water and die right here, then what happens to him, how he feels about it, will be absolutely, entirely your fault. One hundred percent.”

It was that 100 percent that got me, just like the voice knew it would. Your words, in the apartment.

I thought about how you’d always been there for me, always tried to help me, even when I hurt you. At least, I figured, I ought to try to be there for you too.

Oh screw it, I thought.

I could feel rope, rough against the skin of my arm. I twisted in the water and there it was, simultaneously friction-heavy and slimy, and I turned my head up and saw it rising into light. I seized it with my hands, my fingers wrapping around the rope almost without my asking them to.