“How do you play it?”
“Whisper me truth, whisper me lies. You whisper two things, one truth, one lie—and I decide which is which.”
“You go first.”
Tony laughs softly. “All right. Here you go.” He drops his voice to a whisper. “The moon is really a giant spaceship. Grasshoppers have ears on their bellies.”
“Wait, what? That’s not fair. Neither one of those can be true.”
“You have to whisper,” he replies. “And pick one.”
“All right. I choose the grasshopper thing.”
“Good choice. Your turn.”
“Okay, but really with the grasshoppers?”
Tony laughs. “Nights on call as an EMT or firefighter means finding weird things on the internet. And yes, really.”
“Hmmm.” I lie back, pondering my turn. “No man has ever sung any song to me in my lifetime. The moon is not a spaceship; it really is made of cheese. Camembert, I think.”
“Definitely camembert,” Tony says. “I think there’s a moon cave somewhere full of bottles of wine to go with it.”
My laugh is a whisper. All the tension is drifting out of my body, up and away, like tendrils of mist rising off a morning lake. My limbs, my eyelids, grow heavy with sleep.
“My turn,” Tony says, but his voice sounds far away. “I was a contestant on America’s Got Talent. My favorite TV show ever was . . .”
I drift off into sleep before he finishes.
Chapter Twenty
Tony sits wide awake in the dark, listening to Maisey’s soft, even breathing, asking himself what the hell he was thinking. The song, the game, the vulnerability of sharing them after all these years, has flayed him wide open.
Logic tells him that the bone-deep trembling that starts in his gut and radiates out through his body is just adrenaline, nothing more than the PTSD he’s been dealing with since forever, but it’s worse than usual.
So much worse.
Every nerve, every memory circuit is lit up like a neon sign. His heart feels exposed, the tracery of his nerves visible and glowing in the dark like the project of some mad scientist. Even though he knows full well it’s not logical, he checks his hands and is relieved to find they’re normal.
He tries to hold himself in the present. This room. This task he’s set himself, to act as some sort of bodyguard for Maisey and her daughter. Who is he kidding? He’s no hero, has never been. He’s not even brave enough to tell Maisey the truth about the Whisper Me This game.
Truth is, he hasn’t thought about the game in years and doesn’t want to think about it now, but he has opened the door and the memories are determined to run through his mind, his body, dragging the emotional debris of fear and shame and loss along with them.
What he told Maisey about the game wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t the truth, either. Playing had nothing to do with sleep and everything to do with soothing frightened children and keeping them quiet. The game was played in closets, behind locked doors, always as a counterpoint to his father’s rages.
Tony grounds himself with his feet on the floor and grips the arms of the chair, but nothing he can do will hold back the tide of memory.
He huddles together with his sisters, all of them on one narrow bed. Vanessa and Jess have burrowed under a blanket. Theresa and Barb sit cross-legged, Barb hugging a pillow. Baby Mia is asleep in Theresa’s arms.
Downstairs, in the kitchen, his father is shouting. His mother’s voice, low and soothing, answers. Something crashes and all of them jump. The baby startles awake and begins to whimper, but Theresa hushes and rocks her, and she settles back to sleep.
Barb, always braver than the rest of them, tiptoes across the room to close and lock the door. Tony knows there is no real safety in this; the door to the room he now shares with Mia is cracked and hangs on its hinges, a reminder that locks can be broken and doors can be kicked in.
“Let’s play Whisper Me This,” Theresa says, cuddling the baby. “Vanessa, you first.”
“Okay.” Vanessa’s whispered voice is so soft it’s hard to hear through the muffling blanket. Tony doesn’t even try to listen. He tunes in on the downstairs noises. He squeezes his eyes shut, remembering the last time fists flew, of the sound they made striking his mother’s body, of her sobs, of the slap to the side of his own head that rattled his teeth and made stars flash in front of his eyes.
“Your turn, Tony.” Theresa touches his shoulder. “Whisper me truth, whisper me lies.”
He flinches at a dull thud downstairs, which is followed by a whimper and then the sound of weeping and more shouting. His body starts to shiver. “Boys don’t cry,” his father always says, but Tony’s eyes don’t care. Tears pour down his cheeks. His nose is running.
To his own surprise, his hands clench into fists. “When I’m big, I’m going to beat Dad up,” he whispers, and he means it for his truth. “I’ll make him stop.”
His sisters meet this statement with silence.
Barb reaches over and smooths his hair. Vanessa and Jess peek out over the top of the blanket, eyes wide. Theresa squints her eyes at him.
“That better be your lie, Tonio,” she says.
Another thud from downstairs. More shouting. A sharp cry of pain.
“I will,” Tony says, louder now, feeling that his sisters don’t believe him. “I’ll punch him in the nose and make him bleed.”
“That would make you like him,” Theresa whispers. “Do you want to be a man like that?”
Tony isn’t sure he wants to be a man at all. It’s all women in his life so far, his mother and his big sisters and now baby Mia. Dad is the only man he knows.
“Come over here,” Theresa says, and Tony crawls over Vanessa and Jess to sit directly beside her. She’s been bossing him since his earliest memory, and he’s used to following her commands.
“Hold out your arms,” she says, and Tony does so.
Theresa shifts the baby into his lap, and he automatically wraps his arms around her so she won’t slide off. He’s only held her once, the day she came home from the hospital. There are so many willing arms with all the girls that he hasn’t been offered the chance.
Which is fine with him. He hasn’t wanted to hold her again. She cries too much and takes more than her share of everybody’s attention. Her crib is in his bedroom, and she wakes him at night. He has to be extra quiet whenever she’s sleeping, too, and she’s stinky, all sour milk and poopy diapers.
Sometimes, he wants to shake her, even though he knows that’s bad.
Now, he’s surprised by how much heavier she is, how much she’s grown. Maybe she knows he doesn’t like her much, because she screws up her tiny face and makes a sound like she’s going to cry.
“Rock her,” Theresa says. “Pretend you’re a tree in the wind.”
Tony sways back and forth, pretending to be a tree, tuning out the sounds from downstairs.
Mia gives a little sigh and nestles against him. One tiny hand curls around his finger.
Something happens inside Tony’s chest right then, a sort of melting that he’s felt before when he’s petting his neighbor’s kittens. He doesn’t want to shake Mia anymore, or send her back to the hospital. He wants to hold her, and rock her, and make sure that she is happy and safe.
Theresa nods at him. “That’s the kind of man you want to be, Tonio. Don’t you forget it.”
Tony isn’t sure exactly what she means. He still wants to beat up his dad, maybe even more now than ever, because the baby needs protecting . . .
Maisey cries out in her sleep, and it jolts him back into the now.