The Voice She Used

The Voice She Used

I sat at the desk for hours after I came out of the lucid dream.

My head wasn't fog anymore. Everything in it had gone clear and hard-edged.

The 15-year-old adopted kid who had slid the door bolt open himself that night was awake in me, and he had lined up with the crime writer who had spent half a life taking other people's plots apart on paper.

I knew the whole truth about how my parents died. It didn't stop there.

One layer of the game was left to take off: Emily.

Eleven years of nights I went under. The glass bottle on the shelf. The smell, and the numbness in both temples every time I dropped.

What exactly had she been doing to my brain? How had she put the coordinates into my head, the victims in New Jersey, the ones out on the Hudson flats?

I didn't go down the hall to scream at her or break anything. I wasn't going to do this the way a beaten man does it.

I set a trap.

I used the writer's head they had run my whole life on, and I built one counterattack with it.

6:00 p.m.

I went into the main bathroom and bolted the door. I took Emily's glass bottle down off the wooden shelf and turned the cap open, easy, with my hand flat on the glass. The smell came up at once, musty herbs and cold mint, and the chemical underneath it.

Before I poured anything out I drew off about a teaspoon into an amber pill bottle from the medicine cabinet and screwed the cap down hard. There was a date on the cap in pencil, 4/14. I wrapped the bottle in a washcloth and taped it up inside the vanity cabinet, behind the drain trap, where the wood was swollen and nobody put a hand.

I tipped the bottle and put all of it down the sink drain. I ran the water hard and watched the last of it go.

Then I rinsed the bottle. Three times with hot water, neck down, and a fourth time after that. I dried the inside with a cotton swab and stood it upside down on a hand towel.

I wiped the basin with a paper towel and folded the towel into a sandwich bag, and the bag went in my coat pocket. On the shelf there was a ring in the dust where the bottle had stood for years. I left the ring alone.

Then I took out the small glass vial Ethan had left me, the one with the clear liquid in it.

I poured all of it into Emily's empty bottle. The liquid had no color and no smell, and it went into the glass without leaving a line on it. Then I added three drops of peppermint oil from the drugstore at the end of the main street in Milton, close enough to the mint end of hers. I screwed the cap down and put the bottle back in the ring.

A clean swap. Tonight she would work the same bottle into my temples, and what was in it was the thing Ethan had made to undo it.

I took my father's old tape recorder out of my coat. I checked the reel, put in two fresh batteries, and taped it under the vanity table at the head of the bed, in the corner the night-light never reached.

I ran it once to test it, talking at the pillow from where her hands would be, and played it back with the speaker against my ear. Every word came through. The head of the reel sat about 30 inches from the pillow, angled up. There were two strips of old tape residue in that same corner of the vanity, dried gray, and I put the new tape down beside them.

Then I lay on my side of the bed with my arms straight and practiced. Six seconds in, seven out, mouth a little open, one hand turned palm up the way it goes when the compound takes the muscle. I ran it for four minutes by the clock on the nightstand and made myself hold the count past 20 without changing anything in my face.

On a half sheet of typing paper I wrote four lines and dated the top: The bottle on the shelf is not hers. A recorder is taped under the vanity at the head of the bed, right side. Anything after seven o'clock tonight, I did on purpose. If you don't remember doing it, play the tape before you say one word to her. I folded the sheet twice and pushed it into the inside pocket of my coat.

7:15 p.m.

I went downstairs walking badly.

I faked the collapse. Shoulders down, eyes dull, the corners of my mouth loose. I was better at it than I expected, and not all of it was performance.

Michael's accident and the coma he hadn't come out of were still taking something out of me by the hour. That part was real. I was using it.

I went down onto the living room sofa with my head in both hands and let some sound come out of me.

Emily came out of the kitchen. She looked at me with the sympathy I knew, the look I had treated for 11 years as the one safe place I had.

"Michael... they don't think he's going to make it."

I said it low, with a shake in it I put there on purpose.

"It's all coming down around me. I can't breathe."

Emily came over. She knelt down next to the sofa and put her cool hands on both sides of my face.

"Come to bed," she said, low. "I'll help you sleep. You need to sleep tonight, James."

She went up first, and I heard the fifth and sixth stairs take her weight and then the bathroom tap. I stayed on the sofa another 40 minutes with the lamp off and the furnace cycling on and off every six or seven minutes. The kitchen clock said 9:04 when I got up. My phone said 8:53.

10:00 p.m.

The bedroom was down to the orange night-light. Nothing came in from outside.

The room held around 62 degrees. The radiator under the window knocked twice when the heat came up and stayed quiet after that. Under her coconut oil there was the old smell of the house, dry paper and mouse. The closet door stood open about four inches, and it had been shut when I came up.

I lay on my back with my eyes shut and kept my breathing even.

Emily started her routine.

I heard her feet cross to the shelf in the bathroom. The glass cap turned open — click.

She came back to the bed and sat down on the edge of the mattress. The mint came up thin over the coconut oil, nothing like the chemical that flattened me every other night.

Her hand touched my face.

The same rhythm. The same circle. She pressed both thumbs into the middle of my forehead and drew them slowly out to my temples.

One circle. Two. Three.

Her hands knew the work, the same motion at the same interval, over and over. I kept the deep slow breathing of a man already gone under. I counted my own breaths in my head: forty-two, forty-three, forty-four...

On the old compound I never got past the twentieth breath; by then every band of muscle let go and the temporary paralysis had me. Tonight I was at forty-four and I could still feel my own hands.

Emily's hands stopped. She leaned down close to my face and listened to me breathe for about 10 seconds.

When she was satisfied I had gone all the way in, the real procedure started.

She sat up straight. Her voice came.

The softness was gone out of it. What came out ran flat and level, at the pace of a clock counting down.

She read a short string of commands, over and over, the way you say a prayer you stopped hearing years ago:

"Subject B. Session four thousand three hundred twelve."

She let two seconds go.

"The Hudson flats. Marker three. Black canvas duffel under the rotted willow. Eleven years old. Name, Mia."

Two seconds.

"Remember. Take it down. Write it out."

"Subject B. Session four thousand three hundred twelve. The Hudson flats..."

Her voice held the same level the whole way through, with nothing human anywhere in it. That was how she had put hundreds of Kessler's cases and thousands of his details into my head across 11 years.

She was the relay. She was the valve that turned me into a machine for writing down other men's crimes, and I never knew any of it was happening.

Then the string stopped.

The room went quiet.

I kept breathing on the count, six seconds in and seven out, the way I had run it at the nightstand. Seventy-one. Seventy-two. The house settled somewhere under us, one board and then nothing, and a pipe in the wall behind the headboard ticked as the water in it cooled.

The strip under the bedroom door was lit. At ten it had been dark, and neither of us had been out of the room since. I counted to 20 with my eyes shut and started the count over.

Something hot came down on my cheek. Then a second one. A third.

Emily was crying.

None of it was aimed at me and none of it was asking me for anything. It came up out of her chest in pieces, the way it does when something has been held down for years. She put her head on my chest.

And she started saying a thing that wasn't in any procedure or any script:

"I'm sorry... I'm sorry... I'm sorry..."

She said it over and over until her breathing came apart and turned into short hard sounds in the dark:

"I'm sorry, James... I'm sorry..."

I opened my eyes.

The orange light was on her face, wet all the way across, six inches from my chest.