A whisper is a story with many endings. Joyful, tragic, inevitable—it depends on who’s listening. There are whispers in the water, but only some of the time. There also must be silence.
It was dead quiet in Fiona Loomis’s basement when Alistair stood with his hand on the boiler, which was tall and round again, complete. After all he’d been through, he was back where he began.
Climbing the stairs, he tried to find himself, his own memories, within the maelstrom of his mind. A boy’s face in the water—that was his anchor. A boy’s face looking up at him.
In Fiona’s room, he loaded a tape into her tape player, pressed Record, and started to talk, because he needed to talk. He needed to remember who he was, who he had been before. When he finished talking, it was the next day, but the sun hadn’t risen yet.
So he crept out of the Loomises’ back door and snuck all the way home through the darkness of neighbors’ lawns. In the swamp behind his house, next to a rock that looked like a frog, by the light of police cars moving up and down the street, he buried the tape recorder with the tape still in it. Then he walked around to the front yard and sat down in the grass. He looked up at the stars.
That’s where his parents found him. That’s where the police, flashlights head-high and angled down, joined them. Among the barrage of questions, the one they all kept asking was, “Where’s Charlie? Where’s Charlie?”
They might as well have been asking him where his soul was. Alistair didn’t make a sound.