Catherine McKenzie - Hidden

We showed up as the sun was setting behind his house. It was a half-cloudy day, and the sky was streaked with orange and topaz. His street was full of mature trees, their leaves gone months ago. The air smelled cold, even though the sun had been warm earlier. I looked up at the brilliant sunset as Tim pressed the bell, so I wasn’t looking ahead as the door opened.

“Hey, guys,” Rob said, a mixture of surprise and fear in his voice.

My head snapped down and I took a step back before I could help myself. Rob was standing in the doorway, but I barely recognized him. He was thirty pounds thinner, had black rims around his eyes, and a yellow tinge to his skin.

It was pancreatic cancer, he told us when we were seated in his gloomy living room, untouched beers in our hands. He’d taken a leave of absence from work when he got the diagnosis and, as far as I could tell, had holed up in this fourteen-by-fourteen-foot room since then. A film of dust coated everything, even him, it seemed.

The cancer was terminal. He was, for lack of a better phrase, waiting in that room to die. He didn’t say the words—he didn’t have to. The pills on the coffee table, the makeshift bed on the couch, the pile of DVDs of all his favorite movies stacked up like a Jenga game next to the TV all spoke for him.

What they couldn’t say was why he’d kept it to himself. How he could have kept it from us all this time. He never knew his dad, and with his mom gone, we were, for all intents and purposes, his family.

I asked, once, but he acted as if he didn’t hear me. He kept on washing the dishes in the sink, slowly, rhythmically, and just changed the topic.

We spent the rest of the holiday with him. We took him on a slow walk around the block, filled his fridge and freezer with prepared food, and bought him a dozen more DVDs. I taped my numbers on a piece of paper near the phone and wrote “In case of emergency” above them. Rob saw me do it, shook his head slightly, but didn’t say anything. We talked sporadically, letting him set the pace, and when it was time to go back to school, we hugged good-bye, something we rarely did. His bones felt like a bird’s against me, so fragile, and my brain shivered.

He died six weeks later. Tim and I both spoke at the service, telling funny stories, trying to keep it light. What else do you do when a twenty-one-year-old dies? You say he lived his life to the fullest, whether he did or not, that you were sure he had no regrets, no things left undone.

But, of course, everyone has regrets. Loose ends. Things they could do if they had more time.

Everyone does.

Afterward, we gathered in the church basement, a depressing room with ceilings so low anyone approaching six feet had to stoop. The adrenaline began to drop, reality began to hit, and I’m sure I would have lost it completely if Tim hadn’t chosen that moment to put his hand on my shoulder and suggest we get out of there.

I agreed readily, and we moved to a dingy bar down the street with a group of our childhood friends. I remember an old jukebox, a bar-food menu, the smell of half-rotted oats and cheap detergent. We ordered pitchers of beer—a local brew that’s thick and strong—and we continued on, telling every story we could remember about Rob, even the ones whose endings had been consumed by alcohol molecules or time.

When the stories petered out, Tim said how much it sucked that Rob wasn’t there. That he couldn’t hear how much he meant to us, what a hole he left behind. “People shouldn’t have to be dead for them to hear that shit,” he said, his words slurring, though that didn’t blunt the ring of truth.

The idea was born from this. We should have a funeral for all of us, one we could attend. It would be a celebration of our life till then that wasn’t tinged with anything other than love, brother, love.

Maybe it was because we’d reached the I-love-you-man part of the evening, but we agreed to a date there and then. A date we kept, six months later.

Our families thought we were crazy, but we didn’t care. We were doing this for Rob. We were doing this for us. We were doing it.

Despite people’s doubts, the town hall was packed and, pretty soon, laughter clung to the rafters. Each of us spoke of the others: the good, the bad, the funny. Tim even put together a slideshow and set it to schmaltzy music. I’m sure he was doing it to be ironic, but halfway through Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” we were all wiping tears away.

We swore we’d do it again in five years, and every five years after that. To remember Rob, but also to remember us.

It never happened. Life became too complicated, too busy. But because of the pre-funeral, I know a few things you don’t usually know.

The last person to speak about me will be Tim. There will be laughter, a few tears. He’ll have a slideshow full of embarrassing shots of me as a child in a series of unfortunate outfits. He’ll remind everyone of the time I almost set the house on fire, how I’d succeeded in running the school mascot’s uniform up our high school’s flagpole, how I still thought I might make the PGA one day, or at least the Senior Tour. Then he’ll signal to someone and they’ll click to the next slide, and there I’ll be. My face projected through a bright stream of light, smiling, laughing, Rob and our friend Kevin on either side of me, gussied up in tuxedos for prom, awkwardly holding the corsages we’d bought for our dates.

Oh, God, we were young.

When Tim has finished speaking, he walks through the stream of light that’s projecting Jeff’s face onto the screen behind him. His shadow crosses Jeff’s younger smile, a momentary reprieve.

It’s such an odd place to be. Sitting in a pew at my husband’s funeral. My sister on one side, my son sitting rigid against me on the other, murmuring under his breath while he repeatedly smooths a piece of foolscap across his knees. The air smells like a botanical garden, and there’s a certain quality to the silence. Even what Seth’s wearing marks this day as different: gray flannel pants and a blue blazer. It’s his first almost-suit, something I’ll never make him wear again, like the dress I bought with Beth that is, as predicted, scratchy and uncomfortable.

I’ve heard Tim’s stories before, of course, first from Tim and then from Jeff. I knew Tim would be telling them because they told me all about that ridiculous event they insisted on having after their friend Rob died. The “pre-funeral,” Jeff called it, serious and laughing, trying to make me understand. And while I did understand what gave birth to it, I couldn’t support it. I laughed at the stories when they told them to me, but inside I felt nervous. Because if you attend your own funeral, if you know what everyone really thinks about you, if you are, essentially, at peace, don’t you tip the odds toward death? Maybe it was magical thinking, but I couldn’t help believing that if you were prepared for the worst, you might make it come true.

The miscarriage was one confirmation of my theory; Jeff’s death is the ultimate.

The person who first taught me to believe it is sitting next to Beth, and he’s barely spoken to me since he’s arrived.

Tim and I met during our first year of law school when we both tried out for the annual fund-raiser talent show.

My reason for being there was piano. Despite the crushing course load, I took an advanced orchestra class each semester. The music faculty made an exception for me, and that’s probably why, when the law school came calling for its yearly favor (someone who could play whatever music was needed), Professor Davenport offered me up.

I’d fulfilled the same role in high school when tryouts for the school plays were as much a popularity contest as they were about talent. I could sing and memorize lines, but the parts went to Beth and her friends, and the ones who replaced them at the top of the social pyramid when they left. I could sing in the chorus, or play the piano. I chose the latter, my back mostly to the audience, but at least I had my own minute of applause at the end of the evening.

That year the law school had decided to do a musical instead of the usual compilation of sketches, a revival of Guys and Dolls.

My usual early-for-everything-even-when-I-try-to-arrive-late programming brought me to the auditorium a full half hour before I needed to be there. Most of the lights were off. There was a small spotlight focused on the stage, and the running lights that ran along the rows of red plush auditorium seating were on. The score, already half memorized, was tucked under my arm.

I walked down the aisle slowly, breathing in the mustiness left by a summer’s un-use.

What happened next was like in one of those movies aimed at women. The geeky background girl sees her opportunity to feel what it’s like (literally) to be in the spotlight, even though she isn’t the geeky girl anymore. Away from the queen bees, in this mostly new place, she has come into her own. She expresses her opinions. The boys/men don’t need to be drunk to approach her. Sometimes, she even approaches them.

But something about this place brings back memories. She places her music carefully on the piano and climbs the steps to the stage. She faces the empty seats, shadowy in the half-light. She takes a deep breath and sings a plaintive love song, the love song from the show she’ll never audition for.

She gets lost in the music, her voice growing confident, the score she isn’t playing loud and bright in her mind. She nails it.

If only there was someone to hear her.

There is. The room is not empty. The music director is standing stage left. When she stops singing, there’s complete silence, followed by the sound of one person clapping. Startled, she blushes to her toes and apologizes. No, don’t, he says. That was beautiful. What’s your name?

She gives it, and he writes it down. Oh, no, she says, I’m only here to play. He raises an eyebrow, but before he can say anything else, the doors burst open, a gaggle of giggling young women tumbling through them.

She backs into the dark, and when you next see her she’s sitting at her usual place, like Anne in Persuasion, ready to play for others’ amusement.

Cue the hero, who’s been dragged to the audition by his soccer buddies in his gray sweat shorts and a polo shirt whose collar is all stretched out. She recognizes the face sticking out of the polo shirt. He’s from her hometown, though she doubts he’ll remember her, if he looks at her. If he wasn’t so preoccupied with acting like he doesn’t want to be there. But he’s been caught singing in the shower after practice one time too many, and he’s been man-dared, mad-dogged-dared into it.

He waits his turn while she plays for the women with big egos and mediocre skills, for the serious guys who ignore the jocks’ catcalls. If she glances at him, in between the beats, she sees his foot tapping, keeping time. She speeds up to test if he really can keep time or if it’s a coincidence. He can, but the poor guy onstage can’t.

A voice barks from the audience to pay attention, and the blush is back, her face angled away permanently.

His name’s finally called. His friends are whistling and stamping, but he asks her to play “Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat” anyway, and when she does he sings it well and with confidence. His friends stop their carping, respect creeping in. That respect snakes around the room and up to the music director, cast in his half shadow, as he should be.

It’s no surprise when, a week later, she checks the cast list out of curiosity (she tells herself) and there his name is next to the part of Guy Masterson. And she pretends to be surprised, though she isn’t really, when hers is set down for Adelaide, the missionary who falls in love with the gambler who eventually wants to change for his love of her.

She thinks, briefly, of turning it down, but fuck that, right? Fuck that.

They meet properly at the first rehearsal. She’s about to mention their hometown connection when he does it for her. She wasn’t as anonymous as she thought, after all.

In that first exchange there’s already an undercurrent of flirting. And by the time they sing the song she sang to get her here, long before opening night, they’re already in the love they are singing about.

The church organ is slightly off-key, something that makes me wince. Then the minister is speaking again, words that are meant to soothe, words I can’t really hear. Is it simply the usual platitudes, or something he really feels? He knew Jeff, knew him all his life. He married us, and chastised us on the occasions when we ran into him for not attending church. But he says that to everyone, so I can’t tell. I only know that the timbre of his voice is the same as it’s been every other time I’ve heard him speak at a funeral. The same cadence governs his speech, the rise and fall of his voice almost hypnotic. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe that’s how you get through these terrible moments? Being lulled into the brief silences between old words.