The Whisper Man

Why couldn’t Jake be more like the other children?

More normal?

It was an ugly thought, I knew, but it was only because I wanted to protect him. The world can be brutal when you’re as quiet and solitary as he was, and I didn’t want him to go through what I had at his age.

Regardless, until now the imaginary friends had manifested themselves subtly—more like little conversations he’d sometimes have with himself—and I wasn’t sure I liked this new development. I had no doubt the little girl he told me he’d been talking to all day had existed only in his head. This was the first time he’d acknowledged something like that out loud, talking to someone in front of other people, and that scared me slightly.

Of course, Rebecca had never been concerned. He’s fine—just let him be him. And since she knew better than me about most things, I’d always done my best to abide by that. But now? Now I wondered if maybe he needed real help.

Or maybe he was just being him.

It was one more overwhelming thing that I should have been able to deal with, but didn’t know how. I didn’t know what the right thing to do was, or how to be a good father to him. God, I wished that Rebecca was still here.

I miss you …

But that thought would make the tears come, so I cut it dead and picked up the plate. As I did, I heard Jake speaking quietly in the living room.

“Yes.”

And then, in answer to something I couldn’t hear, “Yes, I know.”

A shiver ran through me.

I walked quietly over to the doorway, but didn’t step through it yet—just stood there listening. I couldn’t see Jake, but the sunlight through the window at the far end of the room was casting his shadow by the side of the couch: an amorphous shape, not recognizably human but moving gently, as though he were rocking back and forth on his knees.

“I remember.”

There were a few seconds of silence then, in which the only sound was my own heartbeat. I realized I was holding my breath. When he spoke next, it was much louder, and he sounded upset.

“I don’t want to say them!”

And at that, I stepped through the doorway.

For a moment I wasn’t sure what I was going to see. But Jake was crouched down on the floor exactly where I’d left him, except that now he was staring off to one side, his drawing abandoned. I followed his gaze. There was nobody there, of course, but he seemed so intent on the empty space that it was easy to imagine a presence in the air there.

“Jake?” I said quietly.

He didn’t look at me.

“Who were you talking to?”

“Nobody.”

“I heard you talking.”

“Nobody.”

And then he turned slightly, picked his pencil back up, and started drawing again. I took another step forward.

“Can you put that down and answer me, please?”

“Why?”

“Because it’s important.”

“I wasn’t talking to anybody.”

“Then how about putting the pencil down because I said so?”

But he kept drawing, his hand moving more fervently now—the pencil making desperate circles around the little figures there.

My frustration curdled into anger. So often, Jake seemed like a problem I couldn’t solve, and I hated myself for being so useless and ineffective. At the same time, I also resented him for never offering me so much as a clue. Never meeting me halfway. I wanted to help him; I wanted to make sure he was okay. And it didn’t feel like I could do that by myself …

I realized I was gripping the plate too tightly.

“Your sandwich is ready.”

I put it down on the couch, not waiting to see if he stopped drawing or not. Instead, I went straight back through to the kitchen, leaned on the counter there, and closed my eyes. For some reason, my heart was pounding.

I miss you so much, I thought to Rebecca.

I wish you were here. For so many reasons, but right now because I don’t think I can do this.

I started to cry. It didn’t matter. Jake would either be drawing or eating his sandwich for a while, and he wasn’t going to come into the kitchen. Why would he, when there was only me here to see? So it was fine. My son could talk quietly to people who didn’t exist for a while. As long as I was equally quiet, so could I.

I miss you.

* * *

That night, as always, I carried Jake up to bed. It had been that way ever since Rebecca’s death. He refused to look at the place where he had seen her body, clinging to me instead, with his breath held and his face buried in my shoulder. Every morning; every night; every time he needed the bathroom. I understood why, but he was beginning to grow too heavy for me, in more ways than one.

Hopefully that would change soon.

After he was asleep, I went back downstairs and sat on the couch with a glass of wine and my iPad, loading up the details of our new house. Looking at the photograph on the website made me uneasy on a different level.

It was safe to say it was Jake who had chosen this house. I hadn’t been able to see the appeal at first. It was a small, detached property—old, two stories, with the ramshackle feel of a cottage. But there was something a little strange about it. The windows seemed oddly placed, so that it was hard to imagine the layout inside, and the angle of the roof was slightly off, so that the face of the building appeared to be tilted inquisitively, perhaps even angrily. But there was also a more general sensation—a tickling at the back of the skull. At first glance, the house had unnerved me.

And yet, from the moment Jake had seen it, he had been settled on it. Something about it had utterly entranced him, to the point that he refused to look at any others.

When he’d accompanied me to the first viewing, he had seemed almost hypnotized by the place. I had still not been convinced. The interior was a good size, but also grimy. There were dusty cabinets and chairs, bundles of old newspapers, cardboard boxes, a mattress in the spare room downstairs. The owner, an elderly woman called Mrs. Shearing, had been apologetic; this all belonged to a tenant she had been renting to, she explained, and would be gone by the time it was sold.

But Jake had been adamant, and so I’d organized a second viewing, this time by myself. That was when I had started to see the place with different eyes. Yes, it was odd-looking, but that gave it a sort of mongrel charm. And what had initially felt like an angry look now seemed more like wariness, as though the property had been hurt in the past and you’d have to work to earn its trust.

Character, I supposed.

Even so, the thought of moving terrified me. In fact, there had been a part of me that afternoon that had hoped the bank manager would see through the half-truths I’d told about my financial situation and just turn down the mortgage application outright. I was relieved now, though. When I looked around the living room at the dusty, discarded remnants of the life we’d once had, it was obvious that the two of us couldn’t continue as we were. Whatever difficulties lay ahead, we had to get out of this place. And however hard it was going to be for me over the coming months, my son needed this. We both did.

We had to make a fresh start. Someplace where he wouldn’t need to be carried up and down the stairs. Where he could find friends that existed outside his head. Where I didn’t see ghosts of my own in every corner.