Whisper to Me(80)

“I won’t do it,” I said.

“Then you will wake up in the morning and your father will be dead.”

I said nothing.

“He will die. Do you understand? I will kill him in his sleep. I will smother him until he stops breathing and his body is cold and dead.”

I said nothing.

“Get the bread knife. Now.”

“No.”

“Last chance, Cass.”

“No.”

The voice sighed. “He dies, then,” it said.

And then it did go. I felt it withdraw from the room.

From my head.





The voice didn’t speak then, but my mind was unquiet. You get that word in old gothic novels, don’t you? Unquiet ghosts and so on.

That was my mind that night. My thoughts just raced around, like ghosts in a haunted house, unstoppable.

What if your dad dies because of you?

How selfish are you?

You really want to kill another parent?

Sometimes they were words, like that, and sometimes they were images. Scenes, flashing in and out of my consciousness.

Tiles.

Blood.

The house was mostly wood and I could hear it expanding or contracting or whatever houses do at night when they cool down. Outside, there was a strong wind coming from the ocean. I could smell it through the cracks of my windows, salty and holding the promise of distance and forgetting—a promise I wished it would make good on. I wished that wind would sweep into my head and rinse it clean, whistle through the cavities of my skull until there was nothing there but emptiness, and silence.

But the wind didn’t do that, and the voice was still in my head. “He’s going to die, he’s going to die, he’s going to die, he’s going to die like a dog on the ground, like your mother. It’s going to be your fault.”

The voice was everywhere. It was speaking, in my ears, as a voice, but it was merging with everything else too. The creaking and clicking and ticking of the house were all consonants, the wind outside was all vowels, and together the house and the wind were saying,

Your dad is going to die.

In the end I couldn’t stand it anymore, and I got some old headphones out of my nightstand—I had to dig under the piles of medication that I hadn’t been taking; archaeology. I plugged them into my radio and tuned it to a dead channel again, the way I used to block out the voice.

I filled my head with white noise.

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I must have fallen asleep at some point because when I opened my eyes there was sunlight flooding the room and the white noise was still blasting in my ears, %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%.

I pulled off the headphones and vaulted off the bed. I ran out my door and just down the hallway to Dad’s.

I banged on it, hard.

No answer.

I hammered again on the door with my fist.

BANG, BANG, BANG.

Oh please oh please oh—

“Cass? What the hell?”

Relief snapped open and expanded inside me, like a parachute. “Dad?”

“Uh, yeah. It’s five thirty ********* a.m., Cass. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong, Dad. Nothing’s wrong.”

I heard him roll over in bed. “Then go back to ******* bed.”

But I didn’t. I bounced down the hall, elastic with happiness. I had challenged the voice and I had won. I had taken on step five for the second time, and I had come out victorious.

“You there?” I asked the voice.

No answer.

“Figures,” I said.

I didn’t know how I was going to wait till one o’clock for the Toy Story matinee with Paris. I was buzzing. I had 220 volts of electricity running through me, fizzing in my veins and nerves. I was wired. I went to my room and tried to read some of the Murakami—the voice said not one thing about it—but I couldn’t concentrate on the words.

A little later I heard Dad go downstairs and have his breakfast; then he left. He didn’t make me anything to eat, or call up, or anything. I went downstairs and tried to watch some TV for an hour or so, but I still couldn’t concentrate. I went back upstairs, still in my pajamas.