Page 3 of The Whisper Place
After brewing a few Keurig coffees, we sat down and got into details. I flipped the notebook to a fresh page. A fresh assignment.
“Let’s start with the basics. What’s her name?”
He swallowed a mouthful of coffee and looked down at the fancy mug.
“I don’t know.”
Jonah
Life was simpler before I knew her name. Not easier—my life had never mapped on the whistle-while-you-work spectrum—but objectively simpler before Dr. Eve Roth came into the picture.
I scrolled through the texts we’d been exchanging all night, rereading every word and trying to pretend I wasn’t memorizing everything she said. Her last message was twenty minutes ago. I’d sent a picture of a nearby gas station sign advertisingBuy One Get One Red Bulls, which she secretly loved and drank like an alcoholic trying to low-key slam tequila shots at the office. But she never responded to the picture. No emoji, nothing. And now I was obsessively refreshing the app, waiting for the nonexistent dots of her response to appear.
I put the phone down and looked around. The problem was I didn’t have much else to do. I was on a job, doing fieldwork in Max’s boring Toyota. An infidelity assignment. The cheating husband had left work and checked in at a hotel by himself, leaving me to sit at the edge of the parking lot taking pictures of every person who went in or out of the building, like a perv. The guy had to go home to his wife for dinner, which meant he and his sidepiece would becoming out again soon. If I was a different kind of investigator, I could’ve gone into the hotel and made friends with the front desk clerk, found out their room number, and maybe gotten a picture in a hallway where there was a better chance of catching them together. But hotels had people, and people were lousy with thoughts and feelings infinitely louder than any of them could imagine.
Out here, on the far side of the parking lot, I sensed almost nothing from the rotation of guests moving in and out of the hotel. A whiff of frustration from a dad packing his screaming kids into a minivan, but it was manageable. I could draw the boundaries of myself against the background static of humans living their lives. The farther away people were, the easier it was to tune them out, to remember where they stopped and I started.
Unless that person was Dr. Eve Roth.
I picked the phone up and refreshed the text feed. Nothing.
She’d been gone for over a month, in Australia studying tropical cyclones with a group of grad students. Flying into storms and probably learning Indigenous customs and wrestling giant snakes, although she only sent pictures of the storms. We texted daily. I gave her updates on her father-in-law, Earl, who was staying with a friend while she was gone. She gave me updates on the grad student drama—who was dating who and whose research looked promising—like I knew any of them. Her new PhD student, Chris, came up a lot and it was humiliating how much I viscerally hated seeing his name, the instant heat that boiled up at the idea of someone else being closer to Eve than I was. They’d arrived back in Iowa today and I could see Chris sitting next to her on the endless flights, discussing research methodologies and papers and all the data they’d probably collected together. Data was Eve’s love language.
We weren’t together.
I put the phone down and tried a few yoga breaths. Eve could date any brilliant twenty-something PhD student she wanted to. Not that she wanted to or seemed to think about—
I hit my head against the seat of Max’s cheap car, hard enough to interrupt my creepy consent-less obsession. God, I hated myself. I needed this client’s husband to appear so I could take a picture and leave. The freeway was in spitting distance and I wanted to bury the needle on this pile of beige scrap metal until bolts started shaking off.Not healthy, Eve had said. She’d been trying to get me to take up running lately, claiming it would be better than illegal street racing for my sero-adrenal whatever. She’d probably bookmarked studies and made charts about it. Most people’s minds were a chaotic scattershot of random thoughts and whiplash emotions, but Eve’s mind hummed. It was like being around a supercomputer, if supercomputers were bright and warm and—
The passenger door opened and I jerked, dropping the phone onto the camera.
“Hi.” Eve slid into the passenger seat and smiled.
I looked behind the car, trying to figure out where she came from, which made her laugh. “Did I just surprise a psychic?”
“Omniscience isn’t part of the deal.”
“No, but you’ve claimed a radius of awareness. If someone were to test that hypothesis, sneaking up on you might be a valid method.”
I hadn’t felt her approach because I was already thinking about her. Listening to the whirr of her mind from what I thought was miles away. I couldn’t tell her that, though. Just like I tried not to focus on the sudden singing in my chest.
“I’m sure I’d fail all your tests.”
“There’s no failure in science, only the elimination of possibilities.” The grin hung on her face, but I felt an undercurrent of exhaustion. She had dark circles beneath her eyes. Her short, dark red hair was messy and her jacket was rumpled. She should’ve been in bed, sleeping off the jet lag. The fact that she was here, that she’d found me instead . . .
“Wait, how did you sneak up on me? Are you the omniscient one?”
Leaning forward, she peered up at the sky. “Altocumulus are moving in. Based on the progression of the system and the timestamp on your picture, it was easy to find the longitude of the gas station location.”
Of course it was. For her. I’d seen her chase down a drug trafficking ring and hijack a plane. The list of things Eve would find challenging could fit on a Post-it note.
She sighed, watching the clouds. “I missed the sky here.” Contentment hummed out of her as her eyes darted from cloud to cloud. I forced myself to turn back to the hotel entrance and focused on separating her emotions from mine, redrawing the boundaries.
“Isn’t the sky the same everywhere?”
“No.”
I waited for the explanations, the ionic molecular something that impacted something else to support her conclusion, but she was silent. Waiting. I looked over to find her watching me, studying me as intently as she had the sky.
