The Murmurings Read Online Free PDF Page A

reminded her of talking to you, actually.”
    I shift my weight from one foot to the other. I’m feeling sort of achy. Tiny prickles of sweat form around my hairline, like when I have a fever. “She talked about me?”
    “She talked a lot about you. I get the sense that you two had a lot in common. That you . . . saw things in very much the same way.”
    “I don’t see anything,” I say a little too quickly. Nell wouldn’t have told him anything. She couldn’t have. Unless she really was that angry.
    “I meant that metaphorically, of course,” he says, his tone easy, conversational, as if we’ve known each other a long time. Suddenly, his familiarity makes my stomach turn over.
    This box, this is all I have left of her. These are the last things that Nell touched in this place.
    “Nell was the poet, not me. A really good one, too. She wrote about things you didn’t even know you were feeling, that you didn’t even know were feelings until she put names to them,” I blurt.
    I try to say more, but my words get caught in my throat, and my eyes start welling up, and I can feel my breath stop and start. I want Dr. Keller to know that Nell was more thanwhatever’s been left behind in this weightless box, whatever was or wasn’t found hanging from that tree, that she was more special and complicated than he could ever understand. I want him to say he’s sorry. But his gray eyes just look concerned, and I let the door close behind me.
    By the time I reach the front doors, the sun has set.
    The orderly behind the front counter doesn’t see me at first, so I snap, “Can I get out of here?”
    She jumps at my voice, then lazily makes her way to the little room to open the inner Plexiglas door. The man is still playing with his Legos in the corner. We lock eyes, and for the first time since I got here, I’m scared. Maybe it’s because, of all the people here, his gaze is the only one I can’t read. Then his eyes shift to the box I’m holding, and I can see my sister’s name on his lips as he reads silently. He looks up at me again, his hands shaking above his Lego tower, which is higher than I’ve ever seen it before.
    “We were the last three.”
    He looks sincere, earnest. His chin quivers, and a single strand of spit closes the gap between his upper and lower lips.
    What he says doesn’t make any sense, but he looks lucid. I open my mouth to say something in return, but all I can picture are the initials my sister used in her journal to describehim: LM. Then, the Plexiglas swishes open, beckoning me into the antechamber between the first and second doors. The orderly in the button room is waving me along. I take one more look at the man with the bald head before stepping through the doors. He’s looking at Nell’s box again, his mouth open, lips shaking.
    I step toward the second doors, waiting for them to open, and catch a glimpse of my reflection. I look skinnier than I did even a month ago, my shorts sitting lower on my hips. But it’s my face that startles me. Because it’s not my face anymore.
    My eyes are gone, sunken into vast caverns above jagged cheekbones. A mouth moves, forming a circle, then stretching into a thin line. Cracked lips pull over long, flat teeth that look too big for their mouth. The mouth keeps moving, but I can’t hear what it’s saying.
    That’s not me.
    I step backward, dragging my eyes from the reflection. I look behind me, but there’s nothing there.
    The annoyed orderly knocks on the window, waving me forward. But I just keep looking at her. I can’t scream. I can’t even move.
    Why isn’t she coming in here to help me? Can’t she see . . . ?
    But then I realize she can’t. I turn to the sliding doors. My reflection looks just as it should. Only now there’s a hairline crack in the glass just above my head that I swear wasn’t there before. I can hear blood pounding in my ears. A voice from some staticky speaker above me says, “You’ve gotta walk