Page 63 of The Whisper Place
“Then I’d pick up the entire bakery and put it at the edge of an ocean.”
“Beach bakery?”
“Not a scorching-sand-and-palm-tree beach. No one gorges on cinnamon rolls in a bikini. It would be a beach with hidden coves and cliffs, the store nestled right off a hiking trail with the sound of waves in the distance. And this guy runs a bicycle rental shop right across the street.” Her grin stretched wider, eyes lighting up as the idea unfolded. “He’s huge and bald, with one of those sexy carpenter beards. Full sleeves. Instantly in love with me but it takeshim months of coming in for coffee before he says a word. The grump to my sunshine.”
“A beach and a grumpy bicycle guy.” I could already see her there. Blake was someone who could belong anywhere: a beach, a mountaintop, a city, a submarine. The world would open wider to make room for her.
“You would be telling me to make the first move, because obviously I’m smitten with him, too. I’ve tried renting a bike and ended up with some hilarious scars. Oh, and I have a moped. The town is so small, I can get anywhere on it. But I still wait for him to make the first move and we end up thrown together in . . .” She ran through a few meet-cute ideas, but I was still stuck on the thing she said first.
“I would be there?”
“Youhaveto be there. It wouldn’t be my perfect life without you. I suppose Charlie can come too, if he must. But only to keep you happy. He has a different haircut. You’ll love it.”
My thumping, half-awake heart flooded with more emotion than I could handle at five in the morning. Tears welled in my eyes and I turned away from Blake, embarrassed.
“So what do you think? Beach town? Pastries & Dreams and endless shoreline, just waiting to be walked at sunset?”
“Yeah.” I blinked the water back and tried to make my voice sound normal. “I’m in.”
An arm looped around my shoulders and pulled me back until our heads bumped. “Good.”
I covered her flour-coated arm with mine and we stood there, sleepy and locked together, dreaming a life awake.
Concrete scraped my skin raw. Dirt, cobwebs, and sticky, seeping fluids coated my hands, my face, my throat. The darkness pitched and rolled, my eyes adding color where there was none. Waves crashed in my head, the white noise of nothingness breaking into patterns. It wasn’t real, or maybe it was. My brain clung to anything, desperate for relief. The memory of Blake and I in the kitchen faded, even as I tried to bring it back into focus, to feel the weight of her arm, the lilt of her voice. But the moment was gone. And I was still here.
Caged in a black room.
None of it felt real now. Blake and Charlie shimmered like fever dreams. The bakery couldn’t have been an actual place, on the beach or in Iowa or anywhere else. Nowhere was that perfect. I’d never been allowed in a space that light.
All of it felt like a movie I’d watched once a long time ago, when I was young enough to believe another world was waiting, the colors and music and laughter etched in a deep trench in the bowels of my mind, creating a nostalgia for something I’d never known. It was just a trick my brain had been playing on me since I was seventeen and Ted had dragged me down the basement stairs.
This was my life.
This was where I began and ended.
Noises gurgled out of me, shreds of sobs and syllables that lost any meaning. The walls breathed, sucking the oxygen from my lungs and shrinking the edges of the crawl space. They were trying to digest me, to work me into nothing. Or maybe they already had.
A clunk and a screech beyond the door sent me skittering backward. Heavy thumps came closer, the sound of boots on concrete.He came, I remembered. It happened once a day, I’d thought at one point. How many times had he come now? Ten? Twelve?
The metal padlock rattled on the door and then it was opening and the blinding light flashed on my head. I’d already buried my face and closed my eyes, knowing the light was worse than the darkness.
The bucket was dragged out and a fresh one put down. A softer thump—food—and a slosh—water.
“Why are you doing this?”
There was no answer, but the noises paused.
“Why don’t you just kill me?”
The flashlight clicked off and I heard the breathing, light and even. I felt his eyes on my back.
“That’s not the plan.”
The shock of hearing his voice made me raise my head. It was higher, softer than I remembered. Ted’s voice had always been loud and animated, filling any space it was in, crowding everything else out. This voice slid into the edges of the crawl space, whispering to the spiders, running finger-light along their webs.
I looked up at the silhouette of the man crouched in the tiny doorway. He was lean, folded up comically small to see inside my prison. The basement light outlined his messy hair, too messy to ever belong to my vain, image-obsessed stepfather.
“You’re not Ted.”
