WHISPERS
(55200 Words)
Middle Grade/Magical Realism
by
Andrew Phillips
Prologue
“Sam.”
“Who…who is it?”
“It’s me. It’s Daddy.”
“Where…where are you?”
“I’m here. With them.”
“With who, Daddy?”
“Don’t worry. They’re taking good care of me, honey, until I’m better.”
“But who is taking care of you? And where are you?”
“The MerPeople.
“The MerPeople? Like in…mermaids?”
“Ha, ha, yes, honey. Like in mermaids.”
“Daddy?...Daddy?…are you still there?”
“I’m still here. I really wish you could see this place, Sam. I know you. You’d love to see all the sandcastles that the MerPeople live in.”
Chapter One
“Daddy’s dead.”
“Take that back.” I grabbed Kate by the shoulders. Five-year-old sisters didn’t know anything. For sure, five-year-old sisters who were six years younger than you.
“But he is,” she said.
“Don’t you ever say such a thing to me again. He’s missing, that’s all.” This time, I squeezed her shoulders. I was so mad at her I could bite an Airhead Extreme in two.
“You’re hurting me! Mommy! Sam-Sam’s hurting me!”
Mona‒I started calling my mother by her first name right after Daddy went missing‒opened the screen door and poked her head through the open doorway. No makeup. She’d stopped putting it on ever since the accident.
“What’s going on, now, you two?”
“Tell her to stop saying Daddy’s dead. Oh, yeah…that includes you too.” That’s what I said…on the inside. On the outside, I said,
“Kate and me was just…talking.”
“It would be great if y’all would get along at least some of the time…especially now, since your daddy…” Mona stopped, shook her head and closed the door. She was worried. Everybody was worried. But why did adults always think the worst about everything?
I leaned into Kate’s face until we almost touched noses, but made sure to whisper,
“You’re a little twerp.”
Kate turned up her nose and stuck out her tongue. Classic Kate.
“You’re a big twerp,” she said.
“Whatever.” I continued down the steps and headed for the beach. It’s where I was headed in the first place. To escape from Kate and Mona.
You see, Daddy’s plane, Rosebud, a Piper Cherokee 235, crashed in the ocean off the coast. He called it Rosebud because it was his pet name for Mona. He even painted a picture of a rose on the wing. And Mona had a special coin made for him. It had a rose on one side and her name on the other. He said it was his good luck coin. Carried it with him everywhere he went. While we were here during the July 4th holiday, Daddy flew out of the Michael J. Smith airport, in Beaufort, to the Ocracoke Island Airport and dropped off some fishermen. He flew back along the beach line through a bad storm. That’s when something went wrong. I heard some old timers say the storm was as “black as witches' cats and just as savage.”
Everybody said he died. That’s only because they haven’t found his body or anything. So how could they declare, without any proof, that he was dead? Some lawyer friend of Mona’s and Daddy’s said it was an official legal term or something. It seemed like adults were always declaring stuff, like they knew everything. Just because a great pilot’s perfectly good plane went down into the ocean didn’t mean that person died. Anyway, I knew the truth.
I tried to tell Mona and everybody else. Because Daddy told me himself. Well, not actually in person. He whispered it into my brain in a dream. I figured that was how mermaids must talk. It’s called telepathy. He told me that the MerPeople saved him, and they were going to look after him until he was better.
We’re actually staying at our beach house in Whisper Beach, which was on one of the Outer Banks islands in North Carolina. You had to cross over on a pretty long bridge. Mona and Daddy bought the beach house right after Kate was born. Since then, we always stayed several weeks here in the summer and some other times like Thanksgiving and maybe a few weekends. It only took a couple of hours to get to here from our home in Johnston County. That’s where they held a memorial service.
I didn’t go, of course. Daddy wasn’t there. I did listen politely to everything the preacher told me. While I was sitting in the car, of course. I was not coming out because I knew he was just telling me those grown-up neat and tidies. You know, stuff like I’d regret it forever if I didn’t go kind of stuff. Seemed like it was easier for them to accept what they wanted the truth to be instead of doing the hard work it took to keep believing.
After the stupid memorial service, Mona brought me and Kate back to the beach house. She thought being here would help us to get on with our lives or something lame like that. I figured we’d be able to get on with our lives as soon as Daddy came back.
Whisper Beach was called that for a reason. There was this legend. It had to do with the fact that tons of sea turtles crawled up on lots of places on the Outer Banks to lay, what Daddy said, was called a clutch of eggs. They’re like the size of ping pong balls. This always happened sometime between May and November. They could lay 150 eggs that they covered up beneath the sand. Most of them were loggerheads, but some were green turtles and even some leatherbacks. When the local wildlife folks called N.E.S.T‒Network for Endangered Sea Turtles‒found a clutch, they’d go with some volunteers to mark it with stakes and tape. Kind of like the “Crime Scene Do Not Cross” tape police use. It’s not really a crime scene, of course. But it’s there to, you know, to protect it. They’d watch and wait and hope to be there when they hatched. This mostly happened at night. When that happened, the hatchlings crawled up out of the nest. They called this a boil, I guessed because all those little turtle babies scrambling around must look like water boiling or something. I heard one of the volunteers say their instinct was to crawl toward light. At night, the light would be the moon over the ocean most of the time. But sometimes the little guys didn’t, especially when vacationers did something stupid like shine a flashlight on them or something. And since there was just a whole bunch of lights near beaches now, sometimes the little baby turtles would go the wrong way. This was where the legend came in.
On the night they hatched‒especially if there was a cloudy sky covering up the moon‒MerPeople waited out in the water. They’d call to the baby turtles to help them find their way. And on those nights, if you were really quiet and lucky, you were supposed to be able to hear the MerPeople whispering. Everybody that thought the legend was made up said that the whispering noises was the sound of ripples from the curling waves.
But Daddy said nobody just made up legends. That they were always based on something somebody saw or heard or had happen to them. I’d never been lucky enough to be around when a clutch boiled, so I’d never heard the whispering. Didn’t mean the legend wasn’t true. Which was why I believed what my Daddy whispered in my head in that dream.
There’s even a clutch not far down the beach that’s just waiting for the little guys to hatch any minute. So that means if there’s really MerPeople out there looking after little baby sea turtles, why couldn’t they be out there looking after my daddy?
He probably floated around on a broken wing for a long time waiting for somebody to pick him up. The Coast Guard went out there. First, they called it a “search and rescue.” When they screwed up and couldn’t find him after a couple of days, they called it a “search and recovery.” But the MerPeople were keeping him safe down under the water. Until they’re ready to send him home. That’s why the Coast Guard guys couldn’t find him.
The MerPeople I’m talking about were the ones they did that show about on TV. And I’m sure they have telepathic powers. It’s the only way he could contact me, seeing as how he’s out there under the ocean. I watched a YouTube that said we used a measly ten percent of our brain power. I figured our thoughts could travel around anywhere, especially when we’re sleeping, and we could thinkspeak with each other if we knew how. I’m sure the MerPeople taught Daddy how to do it. And I’ve watched a bunch of that Ancient Aliens show too. Maybe the MerPeople are aliens. And who’s to say that there aren’t extraterrestrials living in the ocean. Probably been around forever. They must have some kind of magic or technology or DNA or something that allows them to breathe under the water. Maybe they put Daddy inside some sort of air bubble thing. You know, something like that. Of course, this kind of thinking drove Mona nuts. I could hear her now.
“Samantha Lynne Stuart, you are 11 years old, which is old enough to know those TV shows are fake.”
“But…”
“No buts. And the mermaids…MerPeople…whatever… people claim to hear around here whispering are just the sound of the quiet waves that break long before they get to the beach. It’s a fun story, that’s all it is.”
I knew better. Just a fun story was what the government and parents said when they didn’t want you to believe that something strange going on was true.
I figured Daddy'd talk to me again. When he was ready to come home or needed to let me know how he was doing. Maybe even one of the MerPeople would send me a message. But in case I missed anymore of those “thinkspeak” dream messages, I was gonna keep looking myself. I wasn’t sure how they’d get him back to the surface after he was all better. Would they swim up with him and put him up on the dock? Or swim on the waves and let him walk in on the beach? I hoped wherever those sandcastles were he was talking about, it wouldn’t take too long for the MerPeople to help him get home. They might be kind of shy, though, about being around lots of humans, anyway, so they might even just find a boat or something and put Daddy in that. And I was going to keep bugging the coast guard to do their job too and keep looking. That’s why I’ve got my binoculars.
I kept thinking about what he said about the sandcastles. But who built them? The MerPeople?
Daddy and I had a knack for building them. Anybody could pack sand or use a mold to build an ordinary castle. But we constructed masterpieces with ramparts, moats, towers, stairways, and hidden rooms. And we always scratched our names at the bottom right hand corner on the outside wall of each one. It’s like we were sandcastle artists. Daddy said all our sandcastles were masterpieces until the tide came in. That the tide transformed them into a masterpiece memory. But I’m not building another one until he gets back. It’d be bad luck to build one by myself.
My eyes were green just like my daddy’s. And I had his slightly turned-up nose. People told me there was nothing wrong with a turned-up nose. I think they said that to try to convince me not to demand a nose job as soon as possible. After we found Daddy, I planned on having it done. He always called my hair color “oughta be on a dog,”—you know—au-du-bon? That’s a kind of a golden-reddish sort of color. I always thought he figured saying it was funnier than it really was. He liked it when I grew it long. I’ll never cut it–ever. Well, at least not until after they rescued Daddy. I’ll grow it down to my ankles if that’s how long it took. They couldn’t make me cut it.
This was America.
Chapter Two
It didn’t take long to get to the beach from our cottage. The access path was two beach house rows away. Some of the other access paths on the beach were long deck bridges. They hadn’t built one for us yet, so we our path was still all sand. Could be really hot in the middle of the summer. You were stupid if you didn’t wear flip flops.
As soon as I reached the top of the dunes, I could see the tide already knocking down some kid’s drip castle. It was like the water tortured it one wave at a time. I’d better smash it first, to put it out of its misery. I hated to give the tide the satisfaction. Daddy and I had never built one that could stand up to the tide. Couldn’t imagine that anybody ever had.
It was kind of breezy, and I wished I’d brought a scrunchie.
While I was pushing my hair back I saw something out in the water.
It bobbed up and down not too far past the first breakers. Whatever’s floating out there kept disappearing behind the swells. Like it wasn’t just something floating on top. A chill‒Mona called it a rabbit‒ran down my back. The castle’d have to wait.
“Daddy!” I waved my arms.
Before I could even get my binoculars up to my eyes, I watched as a goofy pelican flapped his wings and took off.
“Daddy” had just been a tired pelican, rocking and rolling over the waves.
“Stupid bird.”
I ran back to what was left of the sandcastle. The tide had about done its dirty work, but what was left was enough to kick. So I did. Again and again. Pretty soon it was wet sand mush. And then gone. Like it had never been there. A good thing for that pelican that he didn’t land on that castle.
Build it…so it could be torn down.
“That is not logical,” I said out loud. Spock was my favorite character on those old Star Trek shows. Daddy loved Captain James T. Kirk. He’s all right, but Spock’s way cooler.
When I glanced down the beach, I saw a group of people stood around the staked-out clutch of sea turtle eggs.
It can’t be hatching yet, can it?
I was out of breath when I reached the group gathered around the clutch.
“It’s been here for almost two months,” a guy from the aquarium said before I could even ask. “ May hatch any day now.”
“Yes!” I shouted on the inside, pumping my fist. On the outside, I asked him,
“Ever seen ‘em boil?”
“Several times,” he said.
“Ever, you know, heard the mermaids whispering?”
He laughed.
“Can’t claim that I have.”
“Maybe this time, huh?”
“Would make the event special,” he said. “Oh, yeah, if you come down at night to check on the clutch, be sure not to turn your flashlight on. Remember, if they’re actually hatching when you get here, your light will confuse them.”
“Duh…Isn’t that why the MerPeople whisper to them to make sure they come toward the ocean?” That’s what I said on the inside. On the outside, I said,
“I know.”
I left the clutch and walked back up the beach. That goofy pelican had landed again and still floated over the waves. Time to head back to the cottage for lunch.
And I wanted to get to the Coast Guard Station after I ate.
