Page 56 of The Whisper Place
“Is that a real question?”
She laughed, breaking the tension in the car a little. “Okay, fair. But I’m ready to do this. I want it over.”
“Then let’s get your damn dough cutter back.”
She pulled into the driveway, blocking his truck in. We got out and walked to the sidewalk, stopping well short of the door. There was no need to ring the doorbell. Mr. Paranoia was aware of everyone who breathed on his property. I had my phone in one hand, recording, and pulled a bottle of mace out of my other pocket, opening it with the practiced ease of someone who’d been stalked for the past year and a half.
Mom stood with her hands empty, but there was a switchblade in her pocket. We’d gone over this plan for days and reviewed every detail on the way here. Despite all our preparation, I still felt a rolling wave of nausea when Ted opened the door.
Unlike the house, he’d changed. He still stood with his chest puffed, wearing a shirt tucked into his jeans, gold belt buckle flashing in the sun. His hair was still trimmed to military specification, jaw immaculately shaved, skin spray-tanned to match the belt. But there were puffy lines around his eyes and forehead. He sagged in some spots and was carved out in others like a cancer had been slowly feasting on him. His eyes gleamed blacker than I remembered them being as he stared at Mom, and the way he looked at her, like a naughty runaway pet had come crawling home, made sickness well in the back of my throat.
“Well, well.” The dark, oily words landed like bile.
“We need to talk,” Mom said. “Can we come in?”
He glanced at the phone in my hand and I could see the conspiracy theories clouding his obvious pleasure at luring us back here. He seemed to be weighing his options, planning the best way to manipulate and control the situation. He finally agreed, standing back and swinging the door open further.
It took everything I had to follow my mother inside that house. The can of mace turned slippery in my hand and the phone shook as I passed within feet of him. Mom went to the kitchen and straight to a side drawer, pulling out her dough cutter and pocketing it without a word.
“I invited you inside. I didn’t give you permission to steal from me.” He filled the kitchen doorway, making it impossible to get past him back to the front door.
Like a true queen, Mom didn’t even blink. She refused to take the bait. She pulled her hand out of her pocket, but instead of the utensil, it was a switchblade. She opened it one-handed.
“You think any of this bothers me? Your threats, your sad little pictures of our house, your pathetic calls to our jobs. You think any of it makes you matter? Makes you worth responding to?” She laughed again but it wasn’t like earlier in the car. This laugh was broad, unmitigated disdain. It was an unleashing, the click of a gate opening that could never be shut again.
“You’re nothing, Ted Kramer. You’ve always been nothing, and you’ll always be nothing. I came back for my dough cutter, because it’s worth more than a hundred of you.”
Her voice was steady and strong. Her eyes were blue fire. She was everything I wasn’t in that moment. Hair undone, makeup-less, wearing an old hoodie, with the might of a thousand women distilled into her slight body, she faced the monster who’d tried to destroy her and laughed in his face. I’d never loved her more than I did right now.
“If I’m nothing, why is your daughter shaking like a leaf?” Ted leered at me, and I felt the nausea give way to a bone-deep hatred.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, feeling my mother’s courage move into me. “Maybe because you kidnapped and locked me in a crawl space for two days.”
He shook his head in mock sympathy, performing directly to the camera in my hand. “Hard to kidnap someone in their own home. Which, I might remind you, this was. I provided everything for you, for both of you, and here you are, back for more, aren’t you?”
He kept talking, piling bullshit onto twisted bullshit. Trying to spin this situation until he was at the center of the narrative again, making himself the used, tragic hero. I don’t know how long he would have monologued, but Mom ended his garbage by yawningright in the middle of it. A huge, bored, over-it yawn and he stopped mid-sentence, a vein popping in his forehead.
“Thanks for showing me what I’m definitely not missing,” Mom said, and I couldn’t help it. She’d slightly misquotedLegally Blonde, one of our all-time favorite movies, and I burst out laughing.
Everything spun out of control. The gate my mom had unlatched flew wide, and the monster barreled into the room. Ted lost it. Face boiling red, he lunged for my mother. Time seemed to slow down. Adrenaline flooded me, replacing the giddiness with burning intent. I stepped between them and sprayed the mace directly in his face. He crashed into me, sending both me and Mom flying back into the stove.
It was that night all over again, only magnified with time and rage. I heard screaming. Bodies thudded together, ripping at each other. Groin. Throat. Eyes. The areas they’d taught us to strike in self-defense flashed through my head, but I couldn’t land a single punch. Somehow he had me by the neck. He was too strong. I’d lost my phone and the mace; there was no way out. My vision shrank and tunneled and just as my legs started to give out, I saw it: Mom’s knife making a swift, shining arc through the air.
I could breathe again. Blood flew everywhere. He lost his balance and fell. His head smashed onto the floor in front of me, and everything came into focus. I kicked at the back of his head, connecting my boot with his skull over and over again, needing it to disappear, to be smashed into oblivion forever.
There was a crunch that could have been from far away or deep inside my own head. I didn’t know, couldn’t tell inside from out, waking from dreaming. Vaguely, I felt hands pulling me away from the wrecked, bleeding body and then I was in my mom’s arms and we were shaking and holding each other on the floor.
I don’t know how long we sat like that. Mom rocked us back and forth, stroking the hair away from my forehead. We stared at Ted’s body—the man who’d terrorized us for years, lurking at the edge of every thought—lifeless.
“Is he dead?” I asked.
Mom let go of me and moved to check his pulse. I grabbed the bloody knife and hovered behind her, ready to attack if he reared up and grabbed her.
“I can’t feel a pulse,” she said after a minute and sat back on her haunches, staring at his bruised and bloated face. “I can’t believe I killed him.”
Using the knife to lift his shirt, we looked at the long, shallow cut across his torso. It wasn’t a fatal wound. There was another stab in his knee, seeping dark into his pants. Also not fatal. We glanced at each other, both of us realizing at the same time that she hadn’t killed him. I had. I’d literally beaten him to death.
I ate the whale.
