The Whispers


 
 
 
 also by ashley audrain
 
 The Push
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 VIKING
 An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
 penguinrandomhouse.com
 Simultaneously published in hardcover in Great Britain by Michael Joseph, an imprint of Penguin Random House Ltd., London
 First United States edition published by Pamela Dorman Books/Viking
 Copyright © 2023 by Ashley Audrain Creative Inc.
 Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.
 A Pamela Dorman Book/Viking
 library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
 Names: Audrain, Ashley, 1982– author.
 Title: The whispers: a novel / Ashley Audrain.
 Description: First. | [New York]: Pamela Dorman Books/Viking [2023]
 Identifiers: LCCN 2022051777 (print) | LCCN 2022051778 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984881694 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781984881700 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593655733 (international edition)
 Classification: LCC PR9199.4.A9244 W55 2023 (print) | LCC PR9199.4.A9244 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022051777
 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022051778
 Cover design: Sara Wood
 Cover image: andersboman / Getty Images
 Designed by Meighan Cavanaugh, adapted for ebook by Cora Wigen
 This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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 For every mom hanging on by a thread. And for those trying desperately to be one.
 
 
 
 What I increasingly felt, in marriage and in motherhood, was that to live as a woman and to live as a feminist were two different and possibly irreconcilable things.
 —Rachel Cusk, in an interview with The Globe and Mail, 2012
 
 
 
 He lifts two fingers to his nose and smells the child’s mother as his eyes grow wide in the dark of his kitchen. The clock on the oven reads 11:56 p.m. His chest. Everything feels tight. Is he having a heart attack? Is this how a heart attack feels? He must move. He paces the white-oak hardwood and touches things, the lever on the toaster; the stainless-steel handle of the fridge; the softening, fragrant bananas in the fruit bowl. He is looking for familiarity to ground him. To bring him back.
 A shower. He should shower. He scales the stairs like a toddler.
 He refuses to look at himself in the bathroom mirror.
 His skin stings. He scrubs.
 He thinks he hears sirens. Are those sirens?
 He wrenches the shower handle and listens. Nothing.
 Bed, he should be in bed. That’s where he would be if nothing had happened. If this was just another Wednesday night in June. He dries himself and places the towel on the door’s hook where it always hangs. He fiddles with the way the white terry cloth falls, perfecting the ripple in the fabric like he’s staging a department store display, his hands twitching with an unfamiliar fear.
 His phone. He creeps through the dark house looking for where he’s put it—the hallway bench, the kitchen counter, the table near the foot of 
 September
 The Loverlys’ Backyard
 There is something animalistic about the way the middle-aged adults size each other up while feigning friendliness in the backyard of the most expensive house on the street. The crowd drifts toward the most attractive ones. They are there for a neighborly family afternoon, for the children, who play a parallel kind of game, but the men have chosen nice shoes, and the women wear accessories that don’t make it to the playground, and the tone of everyone’s voice is polished.
 The party is catered. There are large steel tubs with icy craft beer and bite-size burgers on long wooden platters and paper cones overflowing with shoestring fries. There are loot bags with cookies iced in each child’s name, the cellophane tied with thick satin ribbon.
 The back fence is lined with a strip of mature trees, newly planted, lifted and placed by a crane. There’s no sign of the unpleasant back alley they abut, the dwellers from the rehab housing units four blocks away, the sewers that overflow in the rain. The grass is an admirable shade of green. There’s an irrigation system. The polished concrete patio off the kitchen is anchored with carefully arranged planters of boxwood. There is a shed that isn’t really a shed—its door pivots, there’s a proper light fixture.
 Three children belong to this backyard, to the towering three-story