Page 46 of The Whisper Place
He hauled me across the dark space, through the beams of ghost walls, over the dirt and cobwebs. I heard the screech of a door open and then I was kicked into blackness.
“This is your time-out room, Kate. You’re going to sit here and think long and hard about your behavior in my house. And if I hear one single sound from you, I’ll kill her.” His voice wavered and broke, as if even he was shocked by what he was saying. His hands shook. “Do you understand?”
I covered my mouth, trying to lock the whimper of pain and rising panic inside. Because he might not be bluffing. If he could do this, I had no idea what else he was capable of.
The door slammed and the metallic click of a padlock slotted into place. His footsteps padded away, and then there was nothing.
He locked me in the time-out room for two days. Two days of blackness. Two days of peeing in the corner and stuffing my fist in my mouth to choke off the sounds I couldn’t hold inside. It wasn’t a real room, just a crawl space three feet wide by six feet long. I could sit up but not stand. It felt like a tomb, a place for bodies to rot and be forgotten.
Spiders and insects crawled over my skin, making me scratch my arms and legs until they were wet with blood. I heard voices that weren’t there. I saw things that couldn’t exist. The world was dirty concrete and cinderblock.
I hummed to myself, so soft the spiders couldn’t even hear, lullabies Mom used to sing to me when I was young. I held my knees and rocked, mouthing the words, feeling her cool hand on my cheek. She always looked so tired, with bags under her eyes, mascara smeared as she perched on the edge of my twin bed, butshe never rushed me through our bedtime ritual. She sang and tucked in each of my stuffed animals around me, hugging me twice and kissing each cheek before going back to the kitchen. I fell asleep listening to her get ready for the next day, sometimes with the perfume of baking sugar in the air.
“It’s not your fault,” I told no one. “You didn’t know.”
He came back once. I didn’t know how long it had been, if I’d been trapped for hours or weeks. I didn’t know if my mother was alive or not. I hadn’t heard him come down the stairs and when he opened the door, I jumped and skittered backward like one of the bugs on the walls.
He set a chair in front of the door and sat on it, the creak and scrape of wood heavy underneath him. He didn’t talk at first. I was afraid to look at him, but I could feel his eyes on me. His breath sounded uneven and his foot tapped a rhythm-less pattern on the floor. I didn’t know what he was thinking—what he wasplanning—and the terror of not knowing choked up my throat and made me close my eyes. I waited; mute, blind, and frozen.
“There’s a lot of important people in my men’s group,” he finally said. “The deputy mayor, several police officers and firefighters. They know you through what I’ve told them and they’ve counseled me on how to be a father to such a troubled young woman.”
It felt like I was swimming up from the bottom of a dark pool. Faces of strange men floated above me, disconnected, meaningless. I didn’t understand what he was talking about.
The chair creaked again, closer this time.
“In the group, they study stories from the Bible. Most of the stories are morality lessons, hoops to keep the masses jumping, butI always liked the one about Jonah. Do you know that story, Kate? Did you ever once listen in all the times I brought you to church?”
I chanced a look, but a bare lightbulb shone directly behind his head. My eyes teared up, blurring everything into a wall of color and sound. “I’m sorry, Ted. I shouldn’t have—”
“No, you shouldn’t have.” His voice raised, sudden and loud like an explosion. The violence behind it cut off anything else I was going to say. Ted sighed as he resettled himself and the chair scraped against the concrete floor.
“Jonah thought he was just a regular man living his regular life before he died his regular death. He thought he was no one until God revealed His plan for him. God told Jonah that he was a prophet—he had been given divine insight—and it was Jonah’s fate to go to Nineveh and warn them that judgment was coming. They had sinned and God needed to punish them.
“That was why Jonah was born. He was born to deliver God’s message, to be a prophet. But Jonah—ignorant, defiant Jonah—thought he could change his life. He thought he could escape his fate. He ran from God. He boarded a ship to sail to the ends of the earth, but God followed. God set a storm upon the ship, ready to tear it apart until the sailors threw Jonah into the sea, then God sent a whale to eat him and bring him back to Nineveh.
“That’s what happens when you try to change things that have already been set in motion, when you think you can exert your little will on forces greater than you can imagine.”
Slowly, I sat up. My eyes had adjusted enough to see the loaf of bread and gallon of water he’d set inside the door. That’s when I realized he wasn’t letting me out. He’d come down here to give me enough food and water to keep me alive, and to hear the sound ofhis own voice, his favorite sound in the world. It felt like I finally surfaced from the dark water, as white-hot rage filled my entire body and the story he’d been telling shifted into focus.
“Are you supposed to be God in this delusion?”
“You still don’t get it.” He stood up, making the chair groan. “I’m the whale.”
Then he shut me in the dark again.
He came back the next day, shining a flashlight on me that made me scream and skitter into a corner. He dragged me out and made me wash myself and change my clothes. I begged him to tell me where my mother was—the pantry he’d locked her in was open and empty—but he refused to answer. I was too weak to try to escape or make any kind of plan, and suddenly we were in his pickup, stopped in front of the local police station. I surfaced to hear him saying, “—took off with some guy without telling your mom or me. His name was Brad. You never knew his last name. You called 911 at one point when you guys were on drugs. You finally sobered up and came home, and you’re fine.”
“Where’s my mother?”
He leaned in and it felt like his body filled the entire cab of the truck. I could still smell the dirt and dust. I could feel the bugs crawling over my skin.
“You’re going to tell them exactly what I just told you. Do you understand, Kate?”
I was terrified of what he wasn’t saying, the silences between his words where my mother wavered between existence and nonexistence. Nodding, I climbed out of the truck.
I parroted exactly what Ted told me to a bored investigator who spent twenty minutes asking about the drugs and lecturing me onthe irresponsibility of running away, skipping my last days of high school, and making a prank call to 911 while under the influence.
“I’m sorry,” I mumbled over and over again, as Ted asked them to go easy on me. “Her mom and I are just glad she’s home.” His hand hovered over the back of my chair, decorated with three long scratches that no one else seemed to notice.
