Catherine McKenzie - Hidden

Then my eyes track to the “forgot your password?” prompt. I follow the instructions to have a password hint sent to jmanning@johnson.com, and wait the anxious seconds before the email arrives. It pings into place and I open it. I almost laugh out loud. Jeff’s password hint is fuck off.

It would be. I type fuck off into the password space, and still nothing.

Goddamnit. My only hope now is, if I can’t figure it out, maybe no one else can either.

A faint hope indeed.

Twenty minutes later I’m home again and crawling back into bed, though sleep is an impossibility. The lanyard is still around my neck. I clutch the USB key in my hand like it might contain some part of Jeff that’s still alive. His beating heart. His gentle brain.

“Did you go out?” Brian says, startling me.

“I, uh, remembered I hadn’t sent a report to Mr. Keene that he needs first thing tomorrow morning.”

“Couldn’t you have sent it from here?”

“Something’s wrong with the remote server.”

“Sorry you had to go out.”

“That’s okay.”

“You know you don’t have to work there if you don’t want to.”

“I know.”

He pulls the covers up to his shoulders. “I should get back to sleep, and so should you.”

“Don’t worry about me.”

His hand snakes to my thigh under the covers. “I won’t ever stop.”

About a year ago, Johnson Company did a total software overhaul. Our new email program took its cue from Facebook. Everyone in the system now had a user profile that included a picture and a mini-bio that popped up on the side of the page if you clicked on their contact information or emailed them.

My name is Jeff Manning. I like sunsets and kittens and…

It was meant to foster “inter-office collegiality” or some such bullshit. As far as I could tell, it was mainly an opportunity for voyeurism and ridicule, particularly for the people—almost always women, almost always of a certain age—who took the whole thing too seriously. They’d strike “alluring” poses with their faces tilted to the side, their hair salon-perfect, and post bios full of their likes and dislikes. If they were stupid enough to mention their cats—or, God forbid, pose with one of them—they were done for.

I don’t know if it was spite, boredom, or low-level rebellion, but the minute the site went live, there was a small but persistent group—almost always men, almost always of a certain age—who started compiling lists.

Top Ten Most Likely to Have Their Corpse Eaten by Their Cats. Top Ten Trying Too Hard. Top Ten MILFs. And so on. If you can think of it, the list existed. While some of them were funny, those of us “lucky” enough to be management had the distinctly unfun task of trying to discover the perpetrators so they could be disciplined.

And that’s how I re-met Tish.

When a particularly nasty list went around—Top Ten Facial Blemishes That Ought to Be Taken Care of Immediately—I actually felt motivated to find the culprit. My own assistant was on it, and the mole on her chin wasn’t that bad, really. I had a pretty good idea who the perpetrator was, a junior accountant named Evan. Since he was someone I’d been wishing I had something on for a while—he was a dick of the highest order, and marginally competent to boot—I did some skulking around and got the proof I needed.

My boss, Gerry, was all for firing him, so he took it upstairs and came back with the okay to give him the axe. An “example had to be set,” and guess who got to set it?

Yessir.

Gerry suggested I get some HR training before I did the deed, something about protecting us from liability if Evan went postal.

“I’ve found Tish from the other Springfield helpful. Plus, she’s number five on—”

I held up my hand. “Don’t say it. Then I’ll have to report you too.”

“Good luck with that.”

He did one of those high school bird-flipping maneuvers that turned into rubbing the side of his nose before snickering his way out of my office.

I’m pretty sure Gerry’s the origin of more than one list.

I almost called after him to ask “Tish who?” but it occurred to me that Tish was a pretty unusual name. There probably weren’t two people named Tish in the HR department in the other Springfield.

So it proved. A couple clicks of the keyboard brought me to the contact page of Tish Underhill—real name Patricia—and I couldn’t keep my face from breaking into a grin.

I’d thought of her occasionally since that chance meeting in the food line. Fleeting thoughts, mostly when HR got mentioned, but I’d never made any effort to find her. Because what was the point? She’d made it fairly clear that she didn’t want to be found…

But when I pulled up her contact information, I admit I spent a long time studying it, her picture in particular. Not because she looked great in it—okay, not only because she looked great in it—but because of the whole attitude of the thing. Her dark hair tumbled over her shoulders, like she’d just released it from an elastic, and she wasn’t wearing any makeup. She held her chin in her hand, a pose I usually would’ve found derisible, but in her case, it gave off the perfect mix of ease and I-don’t-give-a-fuck. This is me, her picture said, love it or hate it.

I loved it, and found myself looking at it whenever I had an idle moment.

I may have had a lot of idle moments.

I also loved what she wrote in her profile. No embellishments or waxing eloquent about her pets. She was married, she had a daughter, she loved reading and golf.

It was, in fact, nearly word for word what I wrote in my own biography, which I’d left till the last minute and dashed off without any thought. Maybe that’s what she’d done too. Whatever it was—our strange first conversation, the similarity of our thought process—I felt a sense of kinship with her.

If I’m being honest, it took me a few days to work up the courage to contact her. But like all things, it had to be done sometime. There was a firing to do, after all, and so I opened her contact page, glanced at her now familiar picture, discarded the mental drafts I’d composed, and wrote:

Patricia,

Not sure if you remember me, but we met a while back at that company retreat in Mexico. I was the guy who completely embarrassed himself in the food line. “You schooled that flagpole” is a line that’s been haunting me for a while.

Anyway, I have an HR situation I need a consult on. Can we hop on the line when you have a chance?

Best,

Jeff Manning

I hit Send without reading it through, feeling like I’d asked her on a date.

Which was ridiculous.

Ridiculous.

Ping!

There was a reply from her in my inbox.

Jeff,

Please call me Tish. And how could I forget your knight in shining armor act on the driving range? If you hadn’t dragged that guy away, there might’ve been a homicide. Besides, I was trying to school that thing, so no need to be haunted, if you were.

Hop on whenever you’d like.

Tish

A slight pause and then,

Tish,

Hop on now?

Jeff

Seconds later,

Hop away.

I glanced at her phone number and dialed it. My fingers felt shaky and I kept clearing my throat, like I had a cold coming on, which I didn’t.

Ring, ring.

“Jeff,” she said, a laugh in her voice. “What took you so long?”

I wake on Thursday feeling something, some measure, like myself. I have a bit of that thumping energy I get, the will to do something, something, I always have to be doing something. I want to leave the house so badly I wish I had somewhere to go to like Seth does. School, I want to go to school, I realize as I’m eating my sugarcoated breakfast while trying to ignore the never-ending flow of my parents’ bickering. And I have a school to go to. My school.

With Beth’s encouragement and over my mother’s halfhearted protests, I shower, dress, make an attempt to arrange my hair, and walk to Playthings. The day promises glorious and the trees are greening. Life, it all screams. Life.

Driving’s still out of the question, but I leave the funeral pills behind. They make me too fuzzy, too lizard-brained, and if my mind’s now full of racing thoughts, at least they aren’t only about Jeff. The slow-motion slideshow of our life together that seems to wend endlessly through my brain has small commercial breaks. We need some better food in the house. Seth should get a haircut. Is there any chance I might convince Beth to move home and, possibly, in with us?

Playthings ends up being exactly what I need. Not the work, or the bills waiting for my attention, or the lease that needs renegotiating, but the kids. When I enter the building and breathe in the familiar smell of fruit-based children’s snacks and papier-mâché materials, I decide to bypass my office and the red light I can see on my desk phone blinking message, message, message and head right for the primary colors.

I feel the strange looks aimed my way from some of the staff, but none of them tries to dissuade me. The tiny little children don’t know any better. They have a new big person to pay attention to them; all’s right in their me, me, me world.

I play blocks, I read the same story about Thomas the Tank Engine (go, Thomas, go, Thomas, go go go) more times than I can count. I roll around on the floor and let the boys take out their aggression by pouncing on me with squeals of delight. I plunk out a few tunes on the child-sized piano, all off-chords and tinny sounds. When snack time arrives, I scoot around the low plastic table, scooping little Ruby Adams into my lap. We share a cut-up apple, some grapes, and a handful of Goldfish.

We play a game with the fish-shaped crackers, pretending they’re swimming in an imaginary sea. After snack comes nap time, and I’m as ready for it as the children are. Ruby pats the space next to her with her slightly yellowed fingers, and I tuck a plush toy under my head.

As I start to drift, the feel of the plastic mat underneath me knocks a new memory into my brain. And as much as I don’t want to think about it, I fall asleep to thoughts of the last time I was on a mat in this room, and with whom.

I leave Playthings before the parents start arriving for pickup, wanting to avoid the uncomfortable conversations that are sure to ensue. Like the messages from my friends I keep on ignoring, I’ll leave it till tomorrow, I think, then think it again the next day.

The air outside is cooler than when I arrived. April’s been fooling us these last few weeks into believing it’s spring, but winter isn’t quite ready to give up its grip. I double over the front of my light coat, holding it tight against my body with my hands thrust in my pockets, and walk as quickly as I can.

It’s fully dark by the time I get home. I can see small puffs of my breath in the glow from the street lamps. When I get to my front walk, Beth’s sitting on the front porch in my winter parka, waiting, I assume, for me.

“Hey,” she says, looking up from her iPad.

It’s open to her work email, which is full of red-exclamation-mark-important messages.

Beth’s a partner in a swanky big-city firm located a thousand miles away from here. She’d wanted to leave Springfield as long as I can remember. It was how she started most of her sentences growing up when we were out of our parents’ hearing.

“When I get out of here…”

I never quite understood what it was that drove her. She’s always been really close with our father, his favorite ever since she declared at ten that she wanted to be a lawyer like him. It was she who spent her summers working in the filing room, running documents to court, learning how to do easy research mandates. He even had “James & James” business cards made up when she got into law school.

But she was determined. And when she went first to college as far away as possible, and then to law school even farther away than that, I watched my father’s heart crack at the realization that what he’d always taken as a given wasn’t going to happen.