Whisper to Me (26 page)

Probably a good thing. If he’d found them, I’d have lost both my parents. He’d have ended up in prison.

There was a voice, and the street by the bowling alley began to reform itself around me, patchily. A scrap of concrete, a parking meter, the 7-Eleven, slowly reappearing out of the fog. A Polaroid, developing.

“—ambulance?” said the voice.

I looked up. There was a middle-aged woman standing over me, kind looking, with a fake Louis Vuitton purse and a long red coat. She looked like a housewife out to meet her lover. That may even have been what she was doing.

“Excuse me?” I said. I was coming to the realization that I was lying on the damp ground. It had stopped raining. But no more than a few minutes could possibly have elapsed—it was no darker than it had been when I left the bowling alley. The sky was still ablaze with the setting sun.

“Do you need an ambulance? Are you epileptic? Diabetic?”

I seized on this excuse for my weird behavior; anything is better than saying you hear a voice and someone has just pointed out that it is probably you internalizing your own mother, because you feel guilty about making her die.

“Just … need some sugar,” I said.

I must not have looked like a meth head or a bum, because the woman nodded and ran across the road to the 7-Eleven. She came back with a candy bar, which she handed to me. “Here,” she said.

At that moment I didn’t think about my allergy at all; it was like it had been rinsed from my mind, washed away by the storm of memories. I just tore open the bar and ate it. Chocolate. With some kind of crunchy filling.

“Thanks,” I said. I sat up, to show that I had more energy now. “Thank you so much. I’ll be fine.” I smiled, as best as I could.

“If you’re sure …”

“I’m sure. Thank you though. Please, let me …” I started to take out my wallet. I kept it in my back pocket, with a chain to my belt loops.

“No, no,” she said. “On me. I’m just glad you’re okay.”

I saw the crucifix around her neck now—a true Good Samaritan. “Thanks again,” I said.

She nodded and walked off. I took a long breath.
Paris, where are you?
I thought.

Then my long breath caught in my chest, like my body had closed around it, vice-hard. I coughed. I coughed some more. I pursed my lips. My mouth was fizzing, tingling, electricity running through it. I
felt
my lips swelling. My tongue. My bronchioles were going to swell too, till I would no longer be able to take in any oxygen.

Till I would die.

Yep.

Just my luck.

Peanuts.

Paris parked and opened the door of her surprisingly ordinary sedan—a Prius I think—just as I was injecting myself with my EpiPen, counting down the elephants.

“What the—”

“Shh,” I said. I finished counting. “—six elephants, seven elephants, eight elephants, nine elephants, ten elephants.”

“Elephants?” said Paris, in a hysterical tone. Like she was freaking out but
hard
. She was fully human now, the stony tone gone from her voice, and I almost forgot about how she had been on the phone earlier; I had other stuff on my mind.

I was a terrible friend.

Anyway.

I took another deep breath. Better. No hitching in the chest. I took another.

Okay.

My airways were clearing. The epinephrine was doing its job. My mouth was still sore though.

“You count to ten,” I said, as I massaged my thigh. “Because the spring keeps squeezing the drug through the needle. If you don’t wait, you lose some of the injection. They teach you to count elephants, because it makes sure.”

“What the **** happened?”

“A good Samaritan,” I said.

“Huh?”

I shook my head. “Long story.” I picked up my bag from the sidewalk—the shoulder bag I carried everywhere. It was green and had red writing embroidered onto it:

ALLERGIC TO PEANUTS!

CASSANDRA DI MATTEO

76 OCEAN DRIVE OAKWOOD

Mom had sewn it herself, and it was the lamest and least cool thing in the world, but I still carried it with me at all times and would have fought anyone who tried to take it from me, bare fists. I opened the bag and handed Paris my spare EpiPen. “Here: if I start struggling to breathe, give me that. Meanwhile, call an ambulance.”

“Now?”

“Yes, now. Make sure it’s a paramedic ambulance. Tell them I’m having an anaphylaxis and have injected myself with 0.3 of epinephrine. At …”—I checked my watch—“at about twenty past seven.”

Paris made the call, then she sat down beside me. “This is why you called?”

“What? Oh. No. I called because … You know what, I can’t … I can’t.”

“Sure,” said Paris. “Sure. Let’s just get you better.”

“I’ll be fine,” I said. “But they’ll want to keep me overnight.”

We waited in silence for a moment.

“Want me to come with you?” asked Paris.

“Please.”

“And your dad. You want me to call him?”

“Um … yes. Please. Wait.”

“Yeah?”

“We need a story. I need a story.” I thought for a moment. “Okay, so I was at your place. You made cookies. I ate one. Then we left to get sodas, and I had a delayed reaction. It can take two hours.”

“I don’t live very near here.”

“He doesn’t know that.”

“And won’t he be pissed with me for making you the cookies?”

“No. He’ll be pissed with me for not checking. I’ll say they were chocolate; that I wanted to be polite. Or something. He’ll probably never let me leave the house again; he’ll think I’m totally irresponsible. But hey.”

“You can’t tell him the truth? Whatever that is?”

“No.”

Paris frowned at me. “He doesn’t know about Dr. Lewis, does he?”

“No.”

“Jeez, Cass. Way to set yourself up for a fall. Wait. Does your psych know?”

Silence from me.

“
Jeez
, Cass.”

Paris dialed the number I gave her. It was a short conversation. What I could hear of it sounded like this:

She hung up.

“Wow,” she said to me. “That guy’s tense. Anyone would think I was telling him that his daughter had suffered a potentially life-threatening allergic reaction.”

I rolled my eyes at her, and she laughed.

“Seriously,” I said, “is he pissed?”

“Hard to tell. He’s jacked up though.”

“Super,” I said.

Paris started laughing again. I loved her for it.

Remember that:

I loved her.

Not like you, not
romantically
, but I loved her.

The ambulance came, and Paris rode in it with me all the way to the hospital. She was having the best time, now that I was clearly going to be all right. She flirted with Ben, the younger paramedic, and thought the banks of instruments were the
coolest
; she had never been in an ambulance before, she said.

Ben stuck tabs to the top of my chest and a clip to the end of my index finger. Then he watched my heartbeat on the screen. “107,” he said. “Saturation 100.”

“Good,” said the guy I think was called Peter. He was older, with a mustache. “Looks like you won’t need to be intubated,” he said to me.

“Hooray,” I said.

“I’m watching your heart on TV,” said Paris, eyeing the jagged peaks and troughs of my pulse. “It’s awesome.”

“Your friend is a little strange,” said Ben, smiling.

“People have commented,” I said.

“Wouldn’t you say that was a beautiful heartbeat?” said Paris. “Wouldn’t you say Cass has a beautiful heartbeat?”

“Uh, yeah,” said Ben.

Paris nodded, sagely. “She does,” she said, as if it had been
his
idea, as if she was agreeing with him.

Ben started filling in a chart. “You on any medications?” he asked.

I glanced at Paris. “Yes,” I lied. I knew my dad might see the chart, or someone might say something.

“Which ones?”

“Risperidone. Paroxetine.”

I saw his face change. Or maybe I imagined that I did. But I think it did. I mean: I had just shifted in front of his eyes into a different person, like a movie morphing trick. I had gone from:

Reasonably cute but maybe a bit plump teenage girl
→
mental patient.

He wrote something down on his chart.

He didn’t say anything after that. Nor did Paris. I think she sensed how he had swerved too, how his opinion of me had changed, and she was angry with him. Angry on my behalf.

And I loved her even more for that.

When we got to the hospital Dad was waiting outside and he spoke briefly to Paris, but he wasn’t even looking at her, so she waved to me and kind of subtracted herself from the scene, backed away, until she was gone. And Dad and I went into the building with the paramedics.

So now you know.

Now you know about my mom, about how she died.

I don’t …

I mean …

I guess I don’t need to tell you much about how it made me feel. You know all about parents dying. You get it. I mean, I didn’t know
that night
that your mom died, but I knew something had happened to her. And you told me later of course.

For a long time after the restaurant—this is even before I looked it up and found that I shouldn’t have moved her head—I felt a whole range of different things, different emotions, no single feeling that could be identified as “grief.”

I laughed at inappropriate ****. I laughed at the funeral, because we walked into the chapel and there was this little old lady at the back at this, like, raised mixing-desk thing, all knobs and lights and sliders to control the sound on the mikes at the front of the church, and I just started giggling hysterically because she looked like an octogenarian DJ, in a DJ booth.

My dad glared at me, then.

I felt okay for long periods, I forgot my mom was dead, and then it would hit me like a tidal wave, literally nearly knock me off my feet, the realization, the stupid simple realization, that she was gone and would never come back and we’d never make brownies again with peanut-free chocolate and lick the spoon.

I did that thing; I’m sure you did it too. That thing where I would go into my room and I’d see an album and I’d think, the last time I played that album my mom was still alive; I’d wear a T-shirt and I’d think, the last time I wore this T-shirt my mom was still alive; I’d pick up a book and—

You get the picture.

It sucked. I mean, you know all about it, right? One night I dreamed she was still alive and it was all a big mistake and she bent down low to fold me in her arms and then I woke up and—

Well. You know. I thought I might never stop crying that morning, like an ocean would come flooding out of me and I would disappear, just turn into a puddle on the floor, like some mutant in one of those comic book movies.

I dreamed about the robbers too. Daydreamed also. Fantasized about finding them and torturing them, choking the lives out of them. Making them feel a fraction of the pain I was feeling.

Every day, for like a month, I thought,
This is the day the cops will find them
.

But they didn’t, and they didn’t, and then … it was a year later, and the robbers were just gone. Like Keyser Söze, you know? Into the sea mist. Evaporated. Like they were never there.

The police kept saying they had leads, that it was only a matter of time, but I didn’t believe them anymore. And time slipped by. Breakfasts, TV, books, school, assignments. All the stuff that just keeps chipping away, keeps happening to you, and that you have to engage with.

“Life goes on” would be the simpler way to say this. But I don’t like those kinds of expressions; they’re so old that they’ve gotten worn and faded, and they don’t really convey what they’re supposed to mean anymore. And it doesn’t tell you anything. Life is always going on, for the living anyway.

Instead, what happens is that things accrete, tiny things, tiny experiences, going to the bathroom, doing makeup, getting dressed, walking places, and they end up covering the shape of the dead person, filling it in, like little bricks, tiny, until the hole is almost filled up and you realize that you’re forgetting, and that makes you feel even worse.