Whisper to Me(73)

Slowly …

Surely …

I just stopped myself from feeling stuff. From thinking about the killers, about justice, about revenge. I edited my memory. Deleted the part where I lifted her head, where I killed her.

Well.

I thought I had anyway.

It turns out that all I did was push this stuff way inside, tamp it down, squash it, until just like old shrimps and stuff got slicked into oil, far underground, the pain got transmuted into something black and liquid, running through the crevices of my mind.

The voice.





Four things happened after my unfortunate hospitalization with anaphylaxis:

1. Dad banned me from ever seeing Paris again.

2. Dad banned me from eating any food outside the house.

3. Dad tried to ban me from leaving the house at all, and I screamed so much he ended up backing down.

4. I remembered, when I got home, why I had taken my eye off the ball in the first place, why I had eaten the candy bar.

5. I knew why the voice had come. Because I had killed my mother and the voice was angry with me. Dr. Lewis was right. The voice was my mother. Or it was the part of me that hated myself, the part that I didn’t want to acknowledge. I was punishing myself.

6. This insight did not help. The voice came back but hard.

7. I know I said four things.

8. Yeah, yeah.

9. Whatever.

10. It’s my list.





5. FREEDOM. Challenge the power of the voice and establish dominance over it.





Round two.


It was weird.

I knew now what my trauma was: I knew, I mean consciously knew, that I had killed my mother. That it was my fault that my mother was dead.

But here’s the thing: you would think that would be terrible … only knowing that somehow made it easier, not harder. Because now that it was out in the open—I mean, the open inside my head, if that’s a thing—I could at least talk to myself about it.

I could say to myself,

“But, Cass, she would have died anyway.”

I could say to myself,

“But, Cass, you saw her eyes. She was gone. The doctors said there was nothing anyone could have done.”

And I didn’t really believe it, but at least I could talk to myself about it.

Not out loud of course. That would have been crazy.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

So … mentally, I was doing a bit better. I hated being basically grounded and I wanted to see Paris, and wanted more than I could even admit to myself to see you … but in my head, in the echo chamber of my mind, I was improving.

I realized, too, that I had been wrong—I mean, I had known there was something in Ovid, but I was looking for the wrong thing. I had been looking for Echo in the voice that I heard, when I should have been looking at myself. Ever since Mom died I had been Pygmalion’s statue—a girl who had been a solid object, an ivory girl—and now I had come to life, like Venus made Pygmalion’s statue come to life, and it was painful and amazing at the same time.

Dr. Rezwari was pleased with my progress. I went to see her in her strange empty room, with its shelves of books, and she said I was responding very well to the drugs. This was funny because I was NOT TAKING ANY. But I was lucky: I think I looked so dopey from the anaphylaxis and being generally tired and emotional that I looked like someone who was taking powerful antipsychotics.

“And do you ever hear the voice these days?” she asked.

“No,” I lied.

“That’s excellent,” said Dr. Rezwari. “Excellent.” Then she sent me home. Whether I heard the voice: that was the only thing she cared about. Not what might have caused it.

The day after that I was in my room. Dad was outside, on a ladder leaning against the wall, painting the window frames. He liked to do it in summer, when it was sunny. But not too hot, because then the paint would dry too quickly and crack. He wasn’t painting my window, he was doing his one, the next one along.

“Walk into the wall, *****,” said the voice.

“Hello,” I said. “How nice to hear—”

“Walk into the wall or your dad falls off the ladder.”

Deep breath.

“It’s two p.m. I’d really rather you spoke to me only after—”

“He’ll break both his legs. Walk into the wall. Right now.”

I don’t know why I did it. I really don’t. Maybe because the voice told me to eat the candy bar, and it really could have killed me? Anyway. I said, “No.”

“What?” said the voice.

“No. I won’t walk into the wall.”

“Are you ****** serious? Both legs, Cass. You want to hurt him like you hurt your mother?”

Rage filled me suddenly. I pictured it like redness rising up my eyes, flooding them. “Fuck you,” I said.

“Last chance,” said the voice.

Fear was fingers clasped tight on my body, shaking it. “No,” I said.

I waited.

The clock on the wall—Peter Rabbit, from when I was small—ticked and ticked, chopping up time into seconds.

I could hear Dad whistling as he painted. The Beach Boys. “God Only Knows.” He and Mom had it at their wedding. I smiled a little. I listened for the sound of his ladder slipping, him falling, the scream when he hit the ground.