Whisper to Me(18)

“So do I. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but there’s a recession, and someone’s snatching women, which isn’t exactly the world’s greatest tourist advertisement. People aren’t lining up for bottles of Chianti at the restaurant. The boardwalk is almost empty.”

“That’s an exaggeration.”

“Maybe. But it’s not like it was. And the overheads have not gone down.”

“School’s not out yet.”

“Cass.”

“I’ll get a job.”

“Good. We need all the money we can get.”

“So you can buy more insects?”

His eyes went cold. “Come work at the restaurant. The customers like you. They ask about you.”

I couldn’t believe he was suggesting it. “You know I can’t do that.”

He deflated a little. “Yeah, yeah. Something else then. Two Piers has jobs going. You could work one of the stands—hand out plush toys to kids who get a ring on the bottle. Or run one of the rides. Maybe take your old basketball-game job. You know they’d let you have it.”

“Hmm,” I said.

“And get out of the apartment. It’s not good for you, all this staying inside.”

“But I’m safe there.”

“You’re safe here in the house. I’m here.”

I stared at him a moment too long, and I saw the skin of his face flush, the shame rising, with its anger chaser.

“*****, Cass, I wouldn’t hurt you.”

Again, I didn’t reply quickly enough, and I saw the red spreading.

“I get angry sometimes, I know that, but I’m trying to—”

He stopped.

Threw the box across the room—it was stapled wood; it exploded when it hit the wall, pieces raining down on the computer monitor. A millipede landed, twitching, on the keyboard. It scuttled across the letters, as if typing a Mayday message.

“You’re out of the apartment by the end of the week,” he said. “And you get a ********* job or you’re working at the restaurant, even if I have to drag you there.”





I should back up and explain the whole Navy SEAL thing: Dad was a SEAL twice, so it was doubly important to him. The first time was when he was young—he fought in the first Gulf War, was stationed on a destroyer in the Persian Gulf. When I was small, he used to tell me stories about the dolphins they worked with, which would patrol the ships, trained to look for mines. As a kid, my whole image of the Gulf War was like a SeaWorld show. I just imagined guys like my dad playing with dolphins, in warm, glittering seas out of the Arabian Nights.

Like I said before, he didn’t talk about it much. The only real story he ever told was about during his second stint as a SEAL in Afghanistan with Mike Osborne, a British guy. Mike was in the same unit. He and Dad both loved bugs—they would collect spiders and beetles and stuff when they were out in the mountains and fields. So they became friends.

Then Dad’s SEAL team got a call one day. A load of Taliban who had surrendered had been taken to an old nineteenth-century fort in the desert, to be interrogated. Dad said the place was beautiful—sandstone walls rising out of the plain, all scrub and goats and the occasional tree, like something from an adventure story.

But then it turned out that the whole thing was maybe a Trojan horse, because these Taliban prisoners—and there were hundreds of them—suddenly rose up and killed their guards and seized the fort.

So now there was a heavily armed group of Taliban in a fortress, basically, with rockets and guns and mortars, and Dad and the SEALs were sent in to take control. Dad was put in a small team with Mike Osborne. Their job was to get as close as they could to the part of the fort that was most strongly defended, and to use GPS tracking to call in air strikes.

So they snuck up to the walls, and managed to get into the main compound through some sort of side door—I think they killed some people to do this, but Dad glosses over that part. From their position, hidden by a low wall, they could see Taliban fighters up on the north side of the fort, embedded with their guns.

They got on the radio and called in a strike.

And someone on the support team got one of the coordinates wrong, just a decimal place, but it was enough.

So when the plane came over and dropped the JDAM smart bomb that was supposed to destroy most of the Taliban resistance, it actually fell closer to where Dad, Mike, and two other SEALs were hiding. The explosion ripped out a whole section of the fort’s exterior wall, deafened Dad for a week, and threw Mike Osborne fifteen feet through the air to an exposed part of the fort’s interior. Dad meanwhile was smashed into a rock or something, and lay there dazed. He said it was like the whole world had tuned to static.

Dust hung in the air, blurring everything. His ears registered only white noise. It was terribly hot too—he was baking in his helmet and uniform like he was in an oven. He could smell fireworks, and it weirdly made him feel like he was a kid back in Jersey.

Immediately Mike Osborne, who Dad could see through the hole in the wall, was surrounded by enemy fighters. In the middle of all the fuzz that had fallen over everything, the dirt in the air and the buzzing—

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—Dad watched Mike get on one knee, and shoulder his assault rifle. He was bleeding from his arm—it would turn out later that it was very badly broken. He emptied the assault rifle, holding off the guys trying to kill him, and when that was gone he took his sidearm and kept firing.