Our old house didn’t appeal to our family at first—my dad thought the modern design, with its boxy architecture and plasticky-white countertops, lacked soul. It was the location that drove my parents to sign the purchase agreement. The house was located on a small cliff, which squatted over the sea. Before the novelty wore off, it was like a 24/7 vacation. Anytime you wanted, you could climb down the rocks and feel water at your feet, tugging you out to the open ocean.
My older sister Felicity and I were outdoors often. My dad sometimes joined us on the weekends, bringing a beach ball to toss around, which we would nearly lose to the waves with every missed catch. My mom rarely came. It was unspoken knowledge in our family that she liked the idea of the house more than actually living there. To her, the value of the property and its beautiful surroundings were a marker of prestige. Of a lifestyle captured in the Facebook photos of acquaintances and mutual friends, the kind of lifestyle she grew up wanting and could now post online for the world to see. “Money can’t buy happiness, but it can help you get there,” she would joke with Felicity, who was already taking after her, buying branded clothes from thrift stores and passing them off as new, snapping selfies by the Mercedes-Benz parked in the local mall garage and counting the likes and comments they earned. But there was a warmth in Felicity that my mom didn’t have. She always let me borrow her things: the collection of cheap necklaces in her wardrobe, the moon-shaped earrings she’d had since she was nine and shopped at Claire’s, the pink glitter pen from her favorite stationery set. She didn’t complain when her hair got wet or her acne-hiding makeup got damaged, or when sand wedged itself under her nails, brown and stubborn, chipping away paint that she had applied the night before. Sometimes she did my nails too, making me swear I wouldn’t bite them off like I always did.
The first day Felicity came home crying, I was the only one to comfort her: my dad was still working, having texted us that he wouldn’t be back for dinner, and my mom was at a baby shower for friends she would forget in a year or so. Felicity ordered pizza over the phone, tremors in her fingers, and she told me what happened. How she’d gotten her chemistry test back with a near-failing grade. How one of her friends started talking to the boy she’d crushed on for weeks, whose Snapchat texts got an instant reply and whose cartoon likenesses filled entire pages of her diary. And I hugged her close and never gave it a second thought, how we were three years apart but I was the one looking after her now.
Things didn’t get better after that. Felicity started lying at school, telling her classmates that she spent her summers on yachts and had been scouted to model in New York City, and soon the clothes and makeup that once sculpted her image now tore it down, evidence that she tried too hard to be someone she wasn’t. I hated them for making fun of her, but I didn’t understand Felicity. Didn’t she know that lying didn’t get you what you wanted? Yes, she assured me, until the word lost the y and became a series of hisses.
________
We left the windows open during the summer, breeze carrying the faint taste of salt into the kitchen. That was how we first heard the voices.
Even now, a part of me remains drawn to them, never again having heard something so beautiful or demented. They sounded like birthday cake, the overpowering taste of factory-processed sugar. They sounded like a car crash on the freeway, broken metal catching the sunlight. They sounded like a music box. They sounded like a movie scream. They sounded like God and they sounded like evil and they didn’t say our names, but they didn’t have to. Felicity was already up and running, pages of her homework whisked off the dining table. She followed them to the water and stopped where the tide began. When I smacked into her, she didn’t even react. Just stood there, in her slides and pajama shorts.
“Felicity?” I said. Then, louder: “Felicity!”
The voices disappeared.
She looked back at me. Her pupils were dilated, blacking out her irises. I watched as they shrunk.
“Why’re we out here?” she said.
I shook my head. I don’t know. A broken shell washed up to my ankle, prickling at the bone.
________
Months passed by without hearing the voices, and in time we forgot them, memories overwritten with:
My best friend Hannah and I were at the borderline age: too young to go to the beer-soaked parties they ripped straight from TV, where kids bumbled around an unfinished basement and left empty Solo cups on someone’s washing machine, where everyone seemed to have either the best night of their lives or the worst; too old to skip up the stairs to someone’s door, palms open for candy. But we wanted to go trick-or-treating anyway, and had planned to go as the two versions of Aurora in Sleeping Beauty: me in the pink dress, her in the blue. We shuffled into our costumes in front of my room’s standing mirror, which hadn’t been cleaned since we moved in, and took selfies we had no intention of posting. Just for fun. Lit up by the camera flash, our eyes almost looked ghoulish.
“Ready to go?” Felicity asked us. She was dropping us off at the next neighborhood, where the people were less stingy, even though she only had a learner’s permit and couldn’t drive without an adult in the car. I didn’t ask if Felicity had any plans of her own.
The route took us down the shoreline. The sun had already gone down, and foam-topped waves were the only visible part of the sea. Felicity put on the music she liked, some esoteric 1970s rock album, and Hannah and I fought for the AUX, insisting that our own songs were lined up: “Play Red!” “No—play Lil Baby!”
“Driver gets DJ privileges,” Felicity said, laughing.
To spite her, Hannah and I started talking over the music. A third voice soon joined us, and I thought it was Felicity until the voice deepened, growing louder and more distorted, as if it was being played from a speaker that couldn’t handle the volume. Panicked, I watched Hannah’s face for any reaction to the sound, but she gave none. The voice got so deafening that it drowned her out completely, blaring in my ears, making them hurt—
Felicity slammed the brakes, jolting our bodies forward. I hit the back of her seat open-mouthed, leaving drool on the leather. We were now stopped in the middle of the road, but it didn’t matter: there was no one else around us.
“Shit, shit, shit!” Hannah was saying. She looked at Felicity, who was breathing hard, and then at me. “Why did we stop?”
Felicity’s eyes flitted up to the rearview mirror. Searching for mine. She swallowed, audibly, and looked back down. “Just felt a little dizzy,” she said.
The music was still on, but the voices had stopped. We stayed there like that until the song changed.
________
Both Felicity and I remained tense after that. We both agreed not to tell our parents what happened. On some days we talked about it, chasing theories made out of fluff: a car malfunction, a medical issue. We went to the hospital Friday, and the doctor seeing us ran half-heartedly through a series of questions. Any recent issues with tinnitus? Yes, that’s the ringing in—in your ears….uh huh, okay…..and any prior experience with ear pain? Any fluid buildup? He put an instrument in the ear canal that burned a little bit, shifting it around the wax, and sent us away with a clean bill of health.
I started sleeping in Felicity’s bed more often. I was scared of the Voices, V-capitalized, but I was scared of other voices too, the ones that crept under the crack in Felicity’s door at night. The one my mom used to defend her impulse purchases to my dad—the Singer machine she used to start projects she didn’t finish, half-hemmed fabric dangling over the needle plate; the knife set endorsed by a celebrity chef; the portable blender she could use to drink her smoothie on the way to Pilates class, even though the old, bulky one worked fine. So he argued back twice as loud, telling her that she was being senseless, wasting money (his money, went the unsaid addition, something they both danced around). And Felicity and I listened until we couldn’t stand to, bunching our pillows around our ears like shields.
Felicity said they might get divorced.
I rolled over. She had her back to me, hands moving over the music box on her nightstand. It had been painted to resemble a phonograph, with a shiny gold record, fleur-de-lis designs on its top and bottom corners, and a horn with a pink, flowerlike brim. She’d gotten it from a gift shop during our trip to Nashville.
I asked her how she knew.
“They don’t love each other anymore.”
“Yeah, they do.”
“Not like that,” she said. “Not the way you’re supposed to.”
________
Felicity didn’t want to go to school anymore.
“You can’t just stop going,” my mom said.
“Mom,” she said, “you don’t get it. The people there—the people there are just. They suck.” Her voice started wobbling.
A spiteful part of me thought, They might suck less if you stopped lying to them.
Then I felt guilty. This was Felicity, the girl who lent me all her things, the girl who let me kick around in my sleep even if it hurt her, the girl who was never too busy to listen to me. My older sister. Why did I feel this way? I swallowed it down.
She got worse, lost herself to late-night Netflix binges and hours of pointless scrolling. Sometimes I made popcorn in the microwave and brought it to her, and we would eat it together, brushing kernels off the sheets and letting them accumulate on the rug.
Then the room got worse, and my mom hated the folded-over snack packets and clothing heaps tossed on the floor, clean T-shirts mixed with dirty underwear. She would yell at Felicity to fix it and she would. Or pretend to, until the shit she’d shoved away started bulging out of her closet, stopping it from closing all the way. Sweat and weeks-old rot became a constant smell there, lingering even when my mom forced her to the ground, called her insane, held her nose to the odor until Felicity, squirming and crying, finally vacuumed the mess clean.
My mom took her phone away. Felicity quit all of her clubs and extracurriculars and spent her after-school time napping. On the surface, it was a protest. A way of getting back at my mom, whose plans for our future included Ivy League schools and stylish apartments in the city. But deep down I think she hoped that if she could cocoon herself in her comforter long enough, she would wake up a new person, someone without acne spotting her forehead and sadness to carry around like an ache and the incessant need to lie and lie and lie.
_________
The third time we heard the Voices, it was after another argument between Felicity and my mom. Felicity ended it first, slamming the front door so that it echoed through the entire house. I didn’t go after her. By now, their fights had become a daily occurrence and I’d become tired of Felicity’s tears, springing from some inexhaustible well inside her. I would hug her and tell her it would be OK, only for the same thing to happen tomorrow. Any past comfort poured down the drain.
They started off slowly this time, washing over me before I knew what was happening. They sang about peace. They made me feel it. I was in my bathtub, floating on the water, pink bubbles from the Lush bars Felicity had gotten on a long-passed birthday filling my ears and nose and eyes—
I sat up straight. I was in my chair, slumped over the dining table.
Felicity.
I sprinted outside. Felicity was sitting on the doorsteps, earbuds tucked in, wires stretching to the phone in her pocket. She turned out. “Wha–”
A single earbud popped out.
What happened next can only be described as chaos. Her arm fell to her side first, as if the invisible strings holding it up had been severed by a guillotine. When she started running, I kept up with her, not caring if the neighbors heard me screaming or saw my ratty sweatpants or the desperate flash of my arms, reaching for her. But she didn’t seem to hear it. She fell over the cliff’s edge before I could catch her, body twisted in the rocks, and my howling mixed with the Voices until I could no longer distinguish the two.
________
Felicity had broken two ribs and both of her legs. She had ruptured her spleen, but had avoided injuring her head.
I don’t remember how we ended up in that overly-sanitized waiting room, or who told us that Felicity would be all right. I remember gripping the plastic armrests of my chair until it hurt, milking the relief of those words for all they were worth. I hazily remember telling my mom that we had to leave the house, or we’d get snared by the thing waiting for us. Her refusal. “Stop making a scene here,” she hissed. “Your sister just got hurt and you want to talk about the house and your nightmares?”
But I knew it had never really been about Felicity.
She didn’t want to go to school until her legs healed, though they offered to provide a wheelchair for her, and since online schooling wasn’t a big thing then, she stayed at home. Her absence soon became “worryingly long”, according to the dean of students, who called my mom and told her that Felicity might have to repeat a grade. Felicity didn’t care. The best and last fun we ever had was during those days, when we tossed a million clothes into virtual shopping carts and closed the tab on them all, played Monopoly with the board we hadn’t taken out since I was seven, posted pictures of wine glasses filled with pink lemonade. When we were scared of the Voices, we were scared together. We both knew we couldn’t tell our mom the truth, or she would think I had caught whatever insanity Felicity had. Couldn’t tell our dad either, now that he was working harder lately, like he was trying to keep afloat of the rising credit card bills. But we knew the Voices were still out there somewhere, waiting for us.
One of my last memories of Felicity involved a storm. They thought a hurricane might hit the upstate area, and where we lived, the rain bulleted the ground, choking the gutters along the streets.
We stayed indoors. I made mugs of watery hot cocoa, the milk having run out that morning, spent on my mom’s coffee. We drank it on the bed and watched old episodes of Pretty Little Liars on Felicity’s laptop. Between credits she would turn on the music box, and its chimelike tunes drifted through the house, eerie and comforting.
Soon my vision got fuzzy. What episode were we on? My mom came in to say goodnight. My eyes kept closing and reopening. I heard the music box go silent.
There was a sharp pain in my neck when I woke up—I had fallen asleep in a sitting position, head limp. Felicity was gone, leaving behind rumpled sheets and a half-closed laptop. The window was open, and below it, the sea had gushed completely over the rocks, obscuring them from view.
________
We filed the missing person report as soon as we could, and by the time the case had grown cold and the press attention had withered away (their intrigue stemming from the fact that Felicity, whose legs were broken, couldn’t have gone anywhere by herself), our family had packed up and left the house at last. My mom had been adamant on staying, adamant that someday Felicity would come back, but my dad and I were tired. Neither of us wanted to eat at a table with a conspicuously empty chair, or walk past a room that was gathering dust, long-gone hope still lighting up every now and then that we’d see her there, asleep as always. At one point my dad lost it. “If you want to stay here, then stay,” he’d screamed at my mom. “Stay as long as you fucking want. But I’m leaving and so is Becca.”
She caved. We sold the property a few months later, to a bright-smiling family from out of town that either didn’t know about Felicity or didn’t care, were charmed by the sea that crashed blindly against the cliff, flailing under the grip of the moon. As for us, we found a house in the suburbs. It was nice enough, with Ionic columns holding up its front balcony and a private pool, but nothing special. With nothing to post but squirrels and clipped, tame grass, my mom’s Facebook posts quickly dried up.
Felicity’s last post, meanwhile, got a lot of attention. She had been posed against the headboard of her bed, glass of lemonade in hand, face turned as if she were contemplating something. I had taken it, telling her that angle suited her best. At the time, it had received a handful of likes and two comments (Hannah’s and mine), but while the search for her was in progress, the post was assaulted with pithy statements from her classmates and former friends. “praying for u rn, please come back safe <3,” read one. “My heart is actually broken, why do the worst things always happen to the sweetest people,” read another. Even the boy she liked once said something: “Situation just sucks. Hope nothing bad happened.” Sucks. My sun could shatter, but in someone else’s solar system, the lights remained intact. Not even a day later, they were posting stories featuring trips to the mall and glasses of chocolate mousse, served in restaurants with fashionably exposed ceilings and polished metal stools.
They didn’t try to approach me at school, thank God: it was easier to lie on a dead girl’s post (and I knew she was dead, knew it in the place that tells you to blink and be afraid of the dark) than to comfort the living, who could still judge you, condemn you. My teachers tiptoed around the issue, handing out extensions and bumping up my grades, and so I stopped studying for tests and handed in assignments a week after the deadline. A part of me still wonders whether it was out of grief or a desire to exploit the situation. In a sense, then, I wasn’t much better than the people in Felicity’s grade; we both had used her disappearance for our benefit. I kept her music box in my new room, almost like penance.
In the months leading up to the move, I had waited for the Voices to return, believing with dull certainty that they would. But they never did.
_______
I won’t bore you with the details of my transition from middle to high school, or the things Hannah and I missed out on, shutting ourselves out from the world while our peers moved on and grew up. While other friends came and went, splitting off because of petty drama or a wedge driven in by time, Hannah stayed by my side. Let me cry on the days Felicity’s memory was particularly strong. When I told her about the Voices, years after I had last heard them, I could tell she didn’t believe it, but knew she would never say that to me. “Describe it,” she said. So I told her about the way they sounded, like the last burst of warmth you feel before succumbing to winter. I told her we’d heard the Voices that night in the car, and that was why Felicity had stopped. I even told her how dismissive my mom had been, calling them nightmares. Bullshit.
“So how do you feel?” Hannah said, suddenly. We had been painting each other’s nails, and it was her turn to do mine. I watched her work, applying the polish in precise, steady strokes.
“About my mom?”
“Well,” she said, “I meant about the whole thing. How you feel now. But sure.”
“I hate her.” Until that moment I hadn’t, but my words had crystallized it into being.
Hannah nodded. Then she blew air onto my hands.
_________
We had a Greek mythology unit in English class, where we read translated excerpts of the epics and wrote essays about their modern relevance. One excerpt in particular grabbed my attention. It was a section from the Odyssey, where the witch Circe warned the titular hero about the sirens. “The only way to avoid their song,” she said, “is to plug your ears with wax.”
After class, Hannah waited for me as I shoved my folderless papers into my backpack. She didn’t have to say anything; we both knew what each other was thinking. We walked out into the hall, the swarms of kids going to their next class or to skip in the auditorium, and for a moment we were buoyed above them all, held up by a single, damning, isolating truth.
__________
“We have to do something about it,” Hannah said. We were sitting in my dad’s Porsche, parked outside the school.
“Like what?” I mumbled.
“Find out if they were real or not. Do something.” She looked at me, at my drooping posture, which seemed to aggravate her. “Don’t you want to know what happened?”
“Uh-huh.”
“If it’s real, we can put a stop to it.”
“Look. Whether it was real or not isn’t the issue. I know it was. And there’s nothing we can do.”
“How are you so sure?”
“Because I was there, okay? I fucking heard it!”
“So you just plug your ears,” she said.
I’d had enough. Something inside of me couldn’t bear to see her speak so flippantly about the things that had taken my sister, as if her death was easily preventable from the start. “What the fuck is your problem?” I said. “Why do you care so much? This didn’t even happen to you.”
“Because other people could get hurt!”
I just laughed. Hannah got out of the car and I didn’t call her to stay.
_________
Hannah texted me for two weeks, begging me not to be mad at her, telling me that she knew she had overstepped, that she was sorry and wouldn’t bring it up again. Her messages grew longer every time I read them without replying. At school, she would talk to me and I would give her one-word answers until, wilting, she left me alone.
I don’t know why I did it. I was angry, but even back then I knew I was being stupid and childish. Then when that wore off, I felt guilty. I didn’t know how to respond. It doesn’t matter now, I guess—there are some things you can’t take back.
_________
They found a body this time. According to Hannah’s parents’ version of the police report, she swam into the ocean surrounding our old house, too drunk to think straight, and drowned. A freak accident.
But I knew a different version of the story.
Shortly before Hannah went missing, I got a text from her, containing a link to a Google Doc. It was a letter. It talked about how I used to sit next to her in sixth grade math class, when I took Felicity’s pink pen to school and drew a cat on Hannah’s agenda when she wasn’t looking, one ear in the Sunday column and the other in Monday. Hannah wrote her number under it half-jokingly, I laughed, and she started loving me.
You didn’t have to love me back, said the letter, just care a little bit. I wasn’t even going to tell you how I felt.
Until I threw her away.
The letter talked about driving around my old house every day, hoping to hear the Voices, getting more and more desperate the longer I went without talking to her. She’d worn headphones at first, but as time wore on, she got bolder, leaving her only protection on her car seat and going down to the rocks. Courting death. One night, she found what she was looking for. In her final moments of clarity, she finished the letter and sent it to me.
I can hear them now, Rebecca, she said. They sound so beautiful.
They sound like you.
_________
First Felicity, then Hannah. And now maybe me.
I stalked the new family from my car until I had memorized all of their comings and goings, when the dad and mom worked late, when the kids had after-school extracurriculars. On a day I knew no one would be home, I took my mom’s biggest kitchen knife out of its wooden storage block, sheathing it in a dirty tea towel. I bought rope from a nearby Home Depot. As I type this, I’m standing outside my old house. I’m going to make my way to the rocks, and tie the rope around the sturdiest one I can find. I’ll tie the other end to myself, pause my music, take out my earbuds. and post my story. Knife strapped to my chest, I’ll swim, guided by the sound of their Voices.
Just like Felicity, who was so enticed that she defeated her broken legs and climbed out of her bedroom window, falling to the waves. Like Hannah, who knew better and still followed her example.
I think I know how the Voices choose their victims. Why they haven’t taken the new family in our house, whose smiles, as I know from watching them, are genuine. No, they take people who feel they have nothing left to live for. People whose strongest desires will never be fulfilled.
All I want is to see them again.
________
I’ve removed my earbuds. Seagulls skirt the water around me. My knife is ready, strapped to my chest with an old belt.
Pink bubbles have started to bud from the blue. There’s a quiet tune in the distance.
It sounds like Felicity’s music box.
She isn’t dead. I can see her now, she’s calling to me. She’s telling me to take off my rope and belt.
I’m going to swim with her now. I’m so happy, I can’t believe I’ve found her again.