The Whispers Read Online Free Page A

before she figured out what she was going to do to support them moving forward. Eloise had started driving again as soon as the doctor said it was okay, because she wanted Amanda to see her doing it. She needed her daughter to know that they were strong enough to get through this—even if Eloise wasn’t totally convinced of it herself. Fake it until you make it. It worked.
    That afternoon of the dream and Amanda talking, they drove to the family therapist they’d been seeing for an emergency session. Amanda had been coming with Eloise all along, though naturally Eloise had done all the talking. Eloise and the doctor had agreed that it would be healing for Amanda to sit in on the sessions, even if she didn’t say anything right away.
    “Why today?” Dr. Ben asked Amanda.
    She offered a lazy teenager shrug. “My mom needs me,” said Amanda. “She’s been so strong. But I think it’s getting to her.”
    “Why do you say that?”
    Amanda told him that Eloise had started sleepwalking, that she had found her mother on the living room floor this afternoon.
    “Is that true?” asked Dr. Ben.
    Now it was Eloise’s turn to shrug. She really didn’t want to get into this. “I suppose I had some kind of dream today.” She did not say that there was a girl sitting in her living room. And that it didn’t seem like a dream at all. That she had this gnawing sense that there was something she was supposed to do but had no idea what. She wasn’t going to say any of that.
    “It’s not the first time,” said Amanda.
    “Isn’t it?” said Eloise, surprised.
    “She walks around at night, talking to people who aren’t there.”
    Eloise shook her head at the doctor to indicate that this was news to her.
    “No awareness of this, Eloise?” he asked. He pushed his glasses back, wore a concerned frown.
    “None,” she said.
    He jotted down some notes. He didn’t seem especially concerned with the content of her dreams, just that she was dreaming and moving about.
    “Sleepwalking can be a side effect of the medication you’re taking.”
    She had been prescribed Ambien, but she’d never taken it. She told him as much.
    “Well, dreams and nightmares are to be expected in cases like this. It’s your psyche’s way of working through the trauma you’ve experienced.”
    She wanted to argue that what she’d experienced wasn’t precisely a dream. But she wasn’t going to open that can of worms, so she just nodded solemnly and said she understood. Which she did, because it seemed like Psychology 101. She promised that she’d bring it up again next session if the sleepwalking continued.
    •    •    •
    Eloise and Amanda had taken to watching dinner with the television on, something not allowed before . But the nighttime was the hardest, just after the sun set, when they would usually have all been home together—the girls doing their homework, Alfie grading papers, Eloise cooking dinner. It was always her favorite time of the day. Now she dreaded it.
    But on Friday night, Amanda talked—she talked and talked. And Eloise listened as if her daughter’s voice were a song she loved but hadn’t heard in too long. Amanda talked about what she remembered about that day, how she’d been so mad at Emily who called her Marion the Librarian, and how she was always so mad at Emily who always seemed smarter and cooler, and more just knowing somehow. And how she thought that Emily was their father’s favorite and how she hated her sister a little for that. Amanda had often wished that she were an only child, like her friend Bethany.
    “But now that she’s gone, it seems like the world can never be right again. I don’t even know who I am without being different from her,” said Amanda. “And I loved her. I didn’t even know it, but I did. And I’m sure I never told her, not once.”
    “You didn’t have to tell her,” Eloise said. “Everyone in this family always knew that love was the first feeling, the