Whisper to Me(7)

“So … Dad … You’ve seen … what I saw?” A foot in a shoe, washed up on shore.

“I’ve seen a lot worse than that.”

He didn’t say this proudly or anything. Just straight. Ex-military guys can be jerks, I’ve met plenty of them, but he wasn’t like that.

He didn’t speak much about the things he saw, or the things he did. I only knew the name Zhawar Kili because Mom mentioned it once, when he wasn’t around. And since she died, I don’t have any way of knowing more about it.

“Were you scared?” I asked.

“Back then? Yeah. I was scared a lot.”

“Dad—” I started, but then I stopped.

“Yeah?”

I wanted to ask him, Did you kill people? It was something I was always wanting to ask him. But how do you ask a person something like that?

And also: What would be the point?

Because I knew the answer already.

The answer was:

Yes. A lot.

So instead I just shut up. We were turning onto our street, cruising past the lights from the front windows, all of them identical. Slowing as we reached the drive into the garage. Turning, our headlights briefly illuminated the mobile home in the front yard of the neighbor’s house, on its cinder blocks, rusting. It takes up the whole space and has been there forever; you would think the garden had been planted around it.

That was when the voice spoke again. The voice of the woman I couldn’t see. It said: “Ask me if I was scared.”

I must have jumped in my seat because Dad hit the brakes and grabbed my arm, hard. “What the ****?” he said.

“N-nothing,” I managed to stammer out. It was like the voice was in the car with me. “Just the shock, I think.” I sensed it right away: that this wasn’t something I could tell him about. Dad frowned and eased the car into motion again.

“There’s Coke in the garage,” he said. “Bad for your teeth, but I guess you need it.”

I nodded.

“Ask me if I was scared when he killed me.”

That was the voice again, not Dad.

I tried to control myself so Dad wouldn’t freak out. Kept myself very still. But inside it was like I was falling from a building, gravity lifting my organs into my mouth.

I gripped the door handle very tightly as Dad pulled up. There is no woman in this car, I told myself. There is no woman in this car. I even took a peek at the backseats, and it was true: there was no woman in the car.

“I’m dead and you did nothing. Are you happy now?”

Take deep breaths, I told myself.

Take deep breaths.

The world narrowed, became something looked at through the wrong end of a telescope.

Please, I told the voice silently. Please, leave me alone.

Dad was standing outside the car, opening the door for me. I hadn’t even noticed him getting out.

“Inside,” he said. He took my arm and led me to the house. “Jesus, I thought I’d die with worry,” he said as we crossed the porch. His fingers were biting into my forearm, bone deep. “You know there’s someone killing women in this town, or did that not occur to you? Seriously, Cass. Never ****** do that to me again. And clean your ******* room.”

I told you: 0–60 anger in four seconds flat, my dad.





IMPORTANT CAPS-LOCK SPOILER:



THE VOICE DID NOT LEAVE ME ALONE.



But I did clean my room.





Next day was a school day. Sunlight woke me, slanting through the venetian blinds in my bedroom. I lay there, thinking I must have imagined what happened the previous day. Not the foot—that was undeniable. But the voice.

I got up, pulled on Levi’s and leather motorcycle boots. I don’t have a motorcycle, but I liked the boots when I saw them in a magazine someone had left at the library, so I saved up and got them on eBay. Vintage. In the photos in the magazine they went well with jeans and a loose, plain white T-shirt, which is what I put on next, yanking it over my head.

Of course, when I looked in the mirror it didn’t quite work on me. The T-shirt wasn’t fitting right, and it was creased. The boots and jeans, which had looked so good on the model, somehow didn’t click, somehow made me seem less like a fashionista slumming it and more like white trash on a break from busing tables in a late-night dive.

This is what always happens: I try to put clothes together and something is invariably missing, I get some detail wrong, I don’t know how. Even when I buy the exact same things that I see on TV or in a mag or whatever. Even when I put on the same eyeliner, the same bracelets. Something about me, some combination of my face and body, ruins it.

“You get a job as a day laborer?” said the voice as I regarded myself in the mirror.

I felt a tight, cold sensation in my chest. So the voice was still there. Fear twisted inside me, coiling around anger.

“Shut up,” I replied. I left the room, with a backward glance in the mirror at my terrible ensemble, and went downstairs.

Dad grunted at me when I reached the kitchen. He was holding a mug of coffee and eating a bagel. I waved to him. “See you after school,” I said.

He looked up. “You okay?”

“Sure.”

He nodded. “Take the bus. Safer.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said.