Catherine McKenzie - Hidden

Then he says a new word and I’m snatched from the somnambulant place I’ve been hiding.

“Seth,” he says. “Did you want to speak?”

My son nods silently next to me, his hand still smoothing the piece of foolscap resting on his knees. I put my hand on his arm.

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

“No,” he whispers. “I have to. For Dad.”

He stands up and walks to the dais. He’s just tall enough to see over the pulpit, and reaches for the microphone to adjust it to his height. He’s about to grow tall like Jeff, but it’s going to come too late.

“My dad was the best dad,” he says, his voice cracking. “He was always…the best dad. I wish I could say more, for him, but I can’t. So, Dad, I hope you understand that if I was any good at saying what I really felt, this is what I would say.”

He looks up from his paper, and I wonder what he’s looking at, if he sees anything beyond his fear. His lips tremble and my heart breaks all over again. He’s not going to be able to do it, I think, half rising from my seat to go rescue him. But Beth holds me in place, and, after a moment, he bends his head and starts reading:

I don’t need my heart anymore,

you can have it.

Cut it out,

put it in a box,

bury it in the hard ground,

next to you.

My eyes are useless too.

They only show me a world

without you.

Color blind,

color absent,

colorless.

And my mind screams, Not fair!

Not right.

Not what I was promised

on the swing set

as you pushed me

toward the sun.

None of the stories you read me

schooled me for this.

I didn’t learn this lesson

in the moon,

or on the train,

or as a thing to be curious about.

So I don’t need my heart anymore,

you can have it.

Let it be buried,

in the hard ground,

next to you.

I wake in my anonymous hotel room on the morning of Jeff’s funeral feeling closer to control, but not close enough. I need to punish my body into some sort of submission, something that’ll hold together through the funeral, the burial, the wake.

I call from the hotel room phone to check in with Brian and Zoey. They’re leaving for Nationals today, a five-hour drive in the opposite direction.

“I have a bad feeling about this one,” Zoey says, sounding uncharacteristically nervous.

“What do you mean, sweetheart? You’ll do great.”

“Dad’s been pacing all morning.”

“You know he gets nervous for you. We both do.”

“I flubbed that line last time.”

“What’s up, Zo? Really?”

“Nothing, I…Are you okay?”

I try to keep the catch out of my voice. “I’m just sad, that’s all. I’ll be thinking of you.”

“Dad wants to talk to you.”

“All right. Good luck.”

“Mom!”

“Sorry, sorry. Break a leg.”

She thunks the phone down on the counter and yells for Brian. A few more clunks and he picks up.

“I tried calling last night…”

“Yeah, sorry. I realized this morning my cell phone was dead. I forgot to charge it.”

“Got it. How is it there?”

“It looks a lot like home. Sans mountains.”

“No, I meant…Anyway, Zoey is freaking out.”

“Yeah, she kind of said. Look, if she doesn’t want to go, don’t make her, okay?”

“Don’t forget your knapsack, Zo. What? No, no, she wants to go. God, can you believe it, but I think it’s about a boy.”

I looked out the window at the colorless sky. A boy. A boy.

“Our Zoey?”

He chuckled. “Who would’ve thunk it?”

“Do we know this boy?”

“That Zuckerman kid, maybe.”

“Zuckerberg? The one from the western region?”

“Yeah, that one.”

“Why him?”

“Not sure. He seems like the most likely candidate.”

“Mmm. Well, hopefully it’ll all blow over. Or maybe you can ask her on the drive?”

“I think that’s your territory.”

A reproach. If I were where I should be, I could ask her myself.

“Make sure she’s got enough warm clothes.”

“It’s coming on summer here. Like someone flipped a switch overnight.”

Not here. Not here.

“Drive safe, then.”

“Will do. Check in later?”

“Yes.”

We hang up and I flip through the town directory kept helpfully next to the telephone until I find what I need. A public golf course that isn’t connected with Jeff as far as I know. I call to check if they’re open, and when they say they are, I pull together a passable outfit and ask for directions from the twenty-something at the front desk.

“Cold day for golf,” she says in the local twang that sometimes crept into Jeff’s voice, the words slowed down, like the batteries running out on a music player.

The course is a twenty-minute walk away. The morning still holds the chill of the night I never saw. As directed, I walk along the local bike trail, still muddy from the just-gone snow. It was built on an old rail bed, and there are sections where the overhanging trees form a canopy that blocks out the weakly rising sun.

It ends at the golf course. The clubhouse and pro shop are deserted.

They’re happy for the business, renting me a bag full of semi-decent clubs and giving me enough tokens for several hours’ worth of hitting. I sling the bag on my shoulder, feeling the familiar weight, steadying my body against it, and trudge over the bike path to the range. The pickets haven’t even been set up yet, and the ball machine groans like an old Coke machine that doesn’t want to give up its treasure. But eventually the balls fall into the rusty wire basket, and the one after that.

I take out my seven iron and tee up a ball. My first swings are as rusty as the ball basket, the shaft clanging against the ground, sending shudders of protest up my arms. Soon enough the rhythm returns, but not the hum. That blank-mind state that Brick’s searching for in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. He used alcohol, but for me, that click from consciousness to only breathing, existing, comes from pushing myself as hard as I can physically.

I was counting on this today. I need it today, but it doesn’t come. Instead, all the memories, the conversations, the words said and unsaid stream in and speed up until I’m hyperventilating again, barely able to catch my breath.

I keep on as the tears start. I swing and I swing, and I wait and I wait, but I never get there, not in the first hour, or in the second either. My back screams, my knees complain, my stomach and shoulders throw out aches and pains, but I’m not stopping for anything.

In my sorrow I’ve found the drive I needed all those years ago.

I want that click, I need that click, and I’m going to keep swinging until I find it, or my body gives out beneath me.

Back at the hotel, I strip my sweat-saturated clothes from my body, and I do, finally, feel a sort of calm. I feel strong enough, anyway, to climb into the shower and stand under the scalding stream until my body is as red as my face.

The rest is mechanical. Drying my hair, hiding the dark circles under my eyes with concealer, pressing the black dress I pulled from the back of my closet, purchased for some forgotten event when I was a dress size smaller. Or, at least, a dress size smaller than I was last week; now the dress fits fine.

I get to the church almost an hour early. I’m never early for anything, but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that I’m early today.

The day has become bright and sunny. I find a bench in a park nearby to sit on and stare into the middle distance. When I try to check the time on my phone, I realize I still haven’t charged it.

As I clutch the useless device in my hand I briefly consider pitching it into the duck pond glimmering a few feet away, but I stifle the impulse. Throwing it away isn’t going to change anything. Instead, I try to count the waves rippling gently against the pond’s edge, matching the slow thud of my heart.

When I’ve counted what feels like enough waves to fill up three hours, I walk slowly back to the church. Cars have arrived, the parking lot’s filling up, a fleet of black limos are parked in the circular drive. I reach into my purse to find the piece of paper torn from my notebook that I’d stashed there, full of words I can’t read aloud, but that I will, if able, place with Jeff.

My pupils dilate in the vestibule. As I look down the long row of straight-backed pews, I know immediately that I’ll be denied this too. The casket’s lid is firmly shut, and in the minute it takes to register, I’m happy for it to be. I don’t need that kind of personal encounter, not with him, not with anyone.

I take a seat in the back row and dig into my purse again for something I will definitely need, the last Ativan in my possession. There’s a chance that in my current state it’ll put me into a semi-coma, but it’s the only way I’m going to survive the rest of today. I swallow the whole thing dry and am thankful when I start to feel its effects.

Sad-postured bodies in dark clothes pass me by while I stare fixedly ahead at the large, stained-glass window behind the altar depicting some biblical scene I could identify if I could focus. No one sits next to me, the stranger, the outsider, so I’m alone in my pew, a collection of worn hymnals available for my perusal if I thought a bombastic song would fix what ails me.

An organ starts, the family is ushered in. Claire looking shell-shocked and stoic. A woman who, from the looks of her, must be her sister. Seth, who, if he knew how much his father loved him, might be able to forgive him anything. Two older couples, then another face I recognize, Jeff after forty if he lived in the sun and on a larger scale. His brother.

The minister asks us to stand, to sing, to sit, to bow our heads. Jeff’s friends speak, telling stories I’d heard from Jeff, as I knew they would. When he told me about it, I thought the pre-funeral was brilliant and only wished I’d had the opportunity to do one with my own childhood friends before we’d grown up and drifted apart.

When the projection of Jeff’s smiling face is looming over us, I feel a sense of relief. Surely we must be almost done. A few more solemn words and I’ll have succeeded in my impossible task of not causing any more harm than I already have.

But then Seth rises, pale, terrified, his head shaped like his father’s, the slight diphthong in his voice one I thought I’d never hear again, and he says something totally unexpected.

“I don’t need my heart anymore / you can have it…”

The words crash down around me, the threads that have been holding me together snap, and there’s nothing I can do to save myself but head for the exit.

An hour later, I’m sitting huddled against a tree. It’s half in leaf. When the wind blows, the loose buds plunk down around me like fat drops of rain.

I watched them lower Jeff’s coffin into the hard ground, but I couldn’t get close enough to hear the words. I couldn’t make myself do this, even if it would’ve been a good idea. The act of watching was enough to drive the Ativan from my system, and my brain feels clear as a bell. Ringing out a warning.

Now they’ve all started to disperse, to walk solemnly back to their cars, their lives. I know from the program still clutched in my hand that there’s a reception at the house, but right now the most likely option seems like I’ll be staying here overnight.

A shadow crosses above me.

“Are you all right?” a man asks.

I look up; it’s Tim. It must be. His hands are stuffed in the pockets of his suit. He looks like he hasn’t slept well in days.

I ought to know.

I run a hand across my cheek to wipe the tears I cannot hide away and edge myself to a standing position. “I’ll survive.”

“Were…were you a friend of Jeff’s?”

“We worked together. I’m the company representative, I guess, here to show the flag.”