Whisper to Me(6)

Still nothing. My heartbeat started to slow again. I figured there was a camera or something, one with a speaker that enabled someone in another location to speak to me.

“Hello?” I said.

No voice.

I glanced at the mirror again before leaving the bathroom. Here’s the thing: the voice wasn’t wrong. I’d left the house without thinking about what I was wearing; I had on old, saggy sweatpants and one of my dad’s T-shirts, the green of which really did not go with the pink of the pants. I hadn’t brushed my hair.

Stupid kids, I said to myself. Though right at the back of my mind was the thought, already, that it was weird they had somehow managed to get a woman to join in with the prank. I mean, it was definitely a woman’s voice, not a girl’s. Anyway, I didn’t want to give them any satisfaction, whoever they were, so I smiled at myself and walked out, trying to make my gait casual, though of course that’s impossible to do when you’re thinking about it.

That was the first time I heard the voice, but even though it made me angry, it didn’t scare me. That came afterward in the car with my dad.

We were in the black Dodge Ram, Dad’s pride and joy. I had been almost surprised to see that it was dark out when I left the station through the revolving doors. The lights on the instrument panel were glowing as Dad drove, and there were goose bumps on my skin. I wished I had a sweater.

Thinking about that brought back an echo, not the voice, but the memory of it. “You ever think of coordinating?”

I shivered, and tried to think of something else. I don’t think I was aware of how badly my mind had been—and this is the proper word—disturbed by finding the foot. Tilted, like a spinning top, gyrating wildly, wobbling from side to side.

“You should be at the restaurant,” I said to Dad. Everything, the inside of the car, the signs—24/7 LIQUOR ASK ABOUT OUR WINE BOXES—seemed so there, so present, that it shimmered. A white seagull flashed past in the dark sky, like a comet.

“I get a call saying my daughter’s with the cops, I’m gonna come.”

“I’m okay,” I said.

He didn’t answer that. “You shouldn’t have gone out,” he said, his eyes on the road over the steering wheel, driving past what seemed like the same streetlights we had already passed a block back, this faceless chain-store sprawl on the outskirts of town like a cartoon background the animators were recycling, using the same frames again and again. “I can’t keep you safe out there.”

“It’s the beach,” I said. “In daytime.”

“Dusk.”

“Daytime, dusk, whatever. It’s safe.”

“It’s a murdered young woman is what it is.”

“What is?” I asked.

“The foot, genius.”

“They said that?” I was surprised. Like I said, I assumed it was a man’s foot.

“Those guys? No. But I spoke to Mastrangelo.” This is a cop who eats in our pizza place all the time. “One of the victims was wearing Air Jordans when she went missing.”

I had been watching the wide road going past, as we crossed from the copied-and-pasted strip-mall wasteland into the first layer of “real” Oakwood, the poor part, apartment blocks and smaller stores, the closed-down entertainment places, BASEBALL LANES 24/7 over shuttered-up windows, endless stop signs. “Someone cut her up? Ugh.”

He shook his head. “I don’t think so. I think she was whole when she was dumped out at sea.”

“What?”

“Thing about shoes that come up over the ankle—they protect the foot inside. The ocean’s violent. It throws the body around, takes it to pieces. At the joints, you know. Knee, ankle, elbow. Like pulling apart a chicken.”

“Dad …”

“Yeah, sorry. Anyway, the ankle separates and other parts disintegrate, or whatever. Clothes don’t help at all. But the foot in the shoe, it’s kept intact, and eventually it washes up.”

“How do you know this?”

He looked at me, then tapped his shoulder.

Oh.

His shoulder is where he has a shiny, puckered scar—a bullet went through from one side to the other, in the caves at Zhawar Kili, fired from a Taliban AK-47 when I was three years old. Dad was a Navy SEAL, until he got shot anyway. The other bullet pretty much vaporized his knee. They rebuilt it—the Navy has good doctors—but he wasn’t going to be jumping off a landing vessel again, or diving from a Zodiac to check for mines, so he was discharged.

But his tapping his shoulder, that was also code for the Marines. As in: I know that when people drown at sea their feet often wash up in their shoes because I have seen it in the Navy.

Weirdly, it made me feel close to him that we had both seen the same thing. Even if that same thing was a rotting foot in a shoe. I know, it’s not exactly a sitcom bonding moment.

“You told them?” I said. “The cops, I mean?”

“Yup,” he said. “Told Officer Fat and Agent Thin when you were in the bathroom. I think they knew already though. Oh, this is hush-hush, by the way. They don’t want publicity yet. Till now they’ve never had a body; all the women have just disappeared.”

I was silent for a moment.

Then …

I mean, we take what we can, right? Life is not a sitcom; life is not a movie.