Catherine McKenzie - Hidden

A few days after she’d called to say she’d accepted a job at a fancy West Coast firm that subsisted on sunshine and movie stars, I found him sitting in his study with the box of business cards in his hands. He looked so lost I found myself saying something I wasn’t even sure was true.

“I’m going to be a lawyer, Dad. I’ve decided.”

He looked up, startled, clearly having been unaware of my presence until I spoke. “That’s nice, dear.”

“No, I mean it. Really. And I want to come back, I…want to work with you.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“I want to.”

He looked at me for a moment, like he was puzzling something out. “I always thought…are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Well, I guess I’ll keep these then,” he said, patting the box.

When I turned to leave, I heard him slide open the drawer to his desk, the one that squeaked, his discard drawer where old papers he couldn’t quite bring himself to throw away went to live their lives in rarely disturbed seclusion. The box thunked onto the stack of brittle papers, and I imagined the dust motes floating up to tickle my father’s nose. That he’d placed the cards in that particular drawer told me he didn’t believe me, despite what he said.

And as he sneezed a mighty sneeze, I thought, You’ll see, Dad. You’ll see.

So Beth left and I stayed. She makes it home about twice a year, if we’re lucky. She had a brief, disastrous marriage to a guy I never really got to know, which ended when he cheated on her, and since the divorce, I’ve heard little of her dating life. I wonder sometimes if she’s lonely, but it isn’t the sort of thing we ask in our family, or admit to.

“Has the firm collapsed since you’ve been gone?” I ask.

“It spins on without me.”

“Then why do you look so serious?”

She shrugs. “How was Playthings? Still standing without you, or have the kids torn it down brick by brick?”

I take a seat next to her on the porch. The wood releases its stored-up cold.

“It was good, really good, actually, and it’s still standing. But why did you change the subject?”

Her email pings. She frowns at the screen, which casts a greenish glow on her skin.

“Did I?”

“Yeah, you did. What gives?”

She types as she talks, her fingers moving in a practiced way across the screen. “Nothing. Did you want to go out for dinner? How about Joe’s? I haven’t been there in ages.” She hits Send, folds the cover over the screen, and stands up. “Do you mind if we go now? I’m starving.”

“What about Seth?”

“He’s having dinner at a friend’s.”

“Who authorized that? Which friend?”

“I did. Carter someone. I thought it was a good sign. Hope that’s okay.”

“I suppose so.”

“We good to go, then?”

I feel a knot of annoyance at the Seth thing, but it doesn’t distract me from the fact that Beth seems awfully anxious to leave. Not that I can blame her. Our parents are probably in the house squabbling over the remote, or something else equally inane.

But still.

“Do you mind if I change first? I smell like Play-Doh.”

“It’s fine for Joe’s.”

I stand up. Even in flats, Beth’s a head taller than me. “What’s up with you?”

“Nothing. I’m hungry. You know how I get when I don’t eat.”

“Well, your stomach’s going to have to cool it for a minute, because I need to pee.”

She lurches so she’s standing between me and the front door. “Okay, seriously now, Bethie. What the hell?”

She breathes in and out deeply, steeling herself for something. “Tim’s in there.”

“Oh, is that—” I stop and search her face for some explanation. “I mean, of course he’s here. I knew that. We knew that. Today’s Thursday, right? So what’s the big deal?”

“What’s the big deal? Come on, Claire.”

The knot of annoyance grows. Or maybe it’s a knot of something else.

“That’s all past. It’s in the past.”

“Is it?”

“Of course. Jesus. Jeff just—”

She puts her hands on my shoulders, pulling me close. I can smell her citrusy shampoo. It feels too close for comfort.

“I know, Claire. I know.”

“I’m going to have to see him sometime.”

“I know that too.”

“So?”

“I thought…”

I take a step back. “You really think the worst of me, don’t you?”

“No, of course not. I was just…I don’t know what I was trying to do. I was being stupid, okay? Forgive me?”

I meet her eyes, a clearer, lighter version of my own. “Do you forgive me? I mean, really forgive. Not lip service.”

Her hesitation speaks for her.

“That’s what I thought.”

I walk to the front door and stop with my hand on the knob. “He forgave me, you know.”

“Do you mean Jeff, or Tim?”

I shoot her a look and enter the house. The heat is higher than we normally keep it, and I can hear the murmur of voices in the living room. My parents’ voices mixed with a deeper one, only slightly less familiar. A voice from the echoey past.

As I take off my coat, sadness replaces it, a tight fit. It makes walking to the living room harder, even though I can’t help myself from doing so.

When I reach the doorway, there they all are. My parents, sitting on the loveseat, forced closer together than they ever are in real life. Tim, in the wingback chair no one sits in, not ever. His face is tanned and wrinkled from the sun. He’s wearing chinos, a white T-shirt, and a chunky steel watch on his wrist. His left hand rests casually on the chair arm. His fingers are long, thin, and bare.

I stand there silently, watching, listening to the tone of the talk rather than the substance.

My mother senses my presence first. “Why, Claire. How long have you been standing there?”

Tim reacts like an electric shock’s passed through him, or the shiver of a ghost.

“Not long.”

“Tim’s here,” she says.

“I see that.”

Tim stands at the sound of his name, so quickly the chair tips backward and almost over before righting itself in the deep impressions it’s left in the carpet.

We stare at each other for a moment before he walks toward me, quick and certain. He takes me in his arms, pressing my face to his chest. He smells of salt and an aftershave I don’t recognize.

“I’m so terribly sorry, Claire,” he says.

Then he releases me and leaves.

Despite being only five hundred miles away from one another as the crow flies, there are no direct flights between my Springfield and Jeff’s.

I consider driving to the funeral, but since I don’t think I can stand that much time alone with my thoughts, I take a connecting flight through one of those hubs whose terminals splay out like spokes on a wheel. An hour there, an hour layover, an hour to the other Springfield, and I’ll be there.

I’ll. Be. There.

But what am I even doing here, on my way to Springfield, on my way to the funeral I told Zoey I wouldn’t be attending?

The day after the day, after the shouting, the crying, what I hope was the worst day of my life, I managed, somehow, to pull a cloak of normalcy around me. I sat at my desk, answered my phone and emails, and processed paperwork for the next three unfortunates who were being terminated. I pretended I wasn’t the object of stares, of whispers, of questions, of doubt. In my silence, I hoped, I’d reinforce the hasty explanations I gave on the ride home with Lori, and that would be that. If I was lucky, there’d be some other event, or someone else, to talk about tomorrow.

At midday, an email went out to the members of the HR department. It had been decided that someone from the company should attend the funeral. Be an envoy. Say a few nice things about how devoted Jeff was, how well liked. It wouldn’t be a pleasant mission, so a volunteer would be appreciated.

The email felt like a bomb sitting in my inbox.

Were my coworkers expecting me to defuse it?

As the minutes ticked away and no one reply-alled their raised hand, my chest started to constrict and I worried I might start hyperventilating. I wanted to go, and I knew at the same time that it was the last thing I should be doing.

In the end, I couldn’t help myself.

I’ll go, I wrote and hit Send before sanity restored itself.

As my email pinged into my department’s inboxes, I imagined I heard a collective sigh of relief. Oh, thank God, a dozen people were thinking. I won’t have to be surrounded by sad people, or search for the right words to say. Besides, my thoughts ran on, she should be the one to go, anyway.

Shouldn’t she?

I waited for the right moment to tell Brian. For many reasons, but in particular because of the timing.

Because timing is everything, and the timing here was way off.

“But it’s Nationals,” Brian said once I managed to get the words out in the kitchen after dinner. I’d poured him an extra-strong drink an hour earlier, but the whole bottle wouldn’t make him forget that detail.

“I talked to Zoey—”

“What do you mean, you talked to Zoey?”

“I explained the situation and asked her whether she’d mind if I wasn’t there.”

“You explained the situation?”

“I told her it was a work thing. She said it was okay.”

He leaned against the counter, an incredulous look on his face. “Of course she said it was okay, but you know she didn’t mean it.”

“She seemed sincere.”

“She’s eleven. It’s not her decision. She’s competing at Nationals, for Christ’s sake. Her mother should be there. You should be there.”

The stab of guilt penetrated through the Ativan shield I was still hiding behind. I have one pill left, and I’m saving it for what’s coming.

“It’s not like it’s the first time she’s been there. Or that there’s any doubt she’s going to win. Besides, I almost never go anymore. It’s your thing together. Your thing with Zoey.”

He held his thoughts for a moment. “Maybe you’re right, but it shouldn’t be.”

“I thought you were fine with that? You never said—”

“Honestly? I was hoping you’d realize it on your own.”

He pushed himself away from the counter. I reached out to him, but my reflexes were slow and all I ended up grabbing was the edge of his shirt, right below the elbow.

“Brian.”

He half turned to me. “Let’s drop it, all right? You’ve made up your mind anyway. But it’s not okay, Tish. I am not okay with this.”

He put his hand on the hinged door leading into the dining room and pushed it hard enough so that it slammed against the wall.

I stood there for a long time watching the door swing back and forth, thinking that it should be creaking, that its courtesy-of-Brian-oiled silence was a rebuke, evidence that his commitment to this house, this life, has always been greater than mine.

Julia agreed to drive me to the airport, but there was a thick silence between us.

She pulled up to the five-minute unloading zone. “You have everything you need?”

“I think so.”

“Will you tell me one thing?”

“What’s that?”

“Forget it. You won’t say, anyway.”

Her face was a mask.

“I can’t explain, Julia. Not now. Can’t you understand how this might happen, even a little?”

“Understand how it might happen to someone else? Or you?”

“Why is it any different if it’s me?”

“I’m not sure. It just is.”

“I’m sorry, Jules.”

“Yeah, well.” She glanced in the rearview mirror. Her son, Will, was asleep in his car seat, his face flushed, his head resting at an angle only a small child can sleep at. “You should probably go. Don’t want to miss your flight.”

“Right.”

I gathered my purse from the floor, checking it automatically for the hard shape of my phone.

“Can we talk, you think, when I get back?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe. We’ll see, okay?”

“Thanks for the lift.”

She nodded and pushed the button to release the trunk.

“Have a safe flight.”

I collected my carry-on, and as I walked to the entrance it began to sink in that maybe I had lost more than Jeff.