Catherine McKenzie - Hidden

“I’m Jeff’s brother, Tim.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“It’s all right.”

“Pleased to meet you.”

She holds out her tanned hand, diamonds flashing. Tim takes it briefly, and I swear she’s batting her eyelashes at him. Maybe those rumors of LT’s father sleeping on the couch are true.

“You have a minute, Claire?” Tim asks.

“I’m sure she does. I’ll be running along. Ta.”

Tim watches her leave, shaking his head. When she’s maybe out of earshot he says, “ ‘Ta’? Does she think she’s a queen?”

“In the furthest reaches of her mind? Probably.”

“What did she ask you to do when she found out her kid was allergic to pollen?”

“Cancel all field trips. Have the windows sealed. Have special HEPA filters installed in the ventilation system.”

“Why not just put him in a bubble?”

“I thought about suggesting that, but I think it would’ve been too much trouble for her. I mean, if someone came to the house, and LT wasn’t in the bubble, or there wasn’t even a bubble, people might talk.”

“She’s a piece of work.”

“She is. How come you’re here?”

He frowns. “I hadn’t seen you for a couple of days, and I thought…I wanted to see how this place turned out in the end.”

I wave my hand around. “Here it is, in all its glory. What do you think?”

He does a full 360, taking in the primary colors, the handprints on the wall from every class I’ve had since I started the place, the massive jar of pennies the kids are collecting to buy books to send to kids in Africa, then back to me.

“I like it very much,” he says. “Very much indeed.”

When I thought of the idea of Playthings, I clung to it like a piece of driftwood that crosses the path of someone lost at sea, just about to give up. And then, because more pieces floated by, I started constructing the pieces into a raft that would take me back to myself, home.

It didn’t really surprise me that Jeff was skeptical about it. I was skeptical myself. Was I really ready to give up something I’d worked toward for years? Do something that was going to disappoint so many people, my father in particular? Losing the baby had nothing to do with my job. Why was my brain connecting the two and making it impossible to disentangle them?

But six months of haunting playgrounds and feigning normalcy hadn’t given me any answers. My brain was playing tricks on me, sucking me inward, away from my life, my family, myself. I might’ve clung on to anything that floated by. If I’d been hanging out in a coffee shop instead of a playground, I might be the proud owner of a Starbucks knock-off right now.

All I knew is that I could see land for the first time in months, and if the wind didn’t change, I’d be ashore soon.

So I threw myself into the project. What it would’ve been prudent to take six months to do, I did in one. I scouted locations, researched licensing requirements, started seeking out disgruntled staff at other daycares to steal them away when the time was right. I even fomented dissent among parents I knew about their current daycares. Did they have a sign-in system? No? Really? Oh well, I’m sure it’s fine…

There was a sense of unreality about the whole thing. I might’ve been on the raft, paddling in the right direction, but I didn’t expect it to last. Like a fat person who’d gotten thin, I couldn’t see the real me in the mirror yet. And also, Jeff wasn’t on the raft with me. I wanted him to be, he wanted to be, but I didn’t know how to make any room, and he didn’t know how to climb on board.

The reappearance of Tim made it more complicated. Things were so tense between him and Jeff and me. As far as I knew, they hadn’t talked since the wedding. And it had never really been normal between Tim and me since we broke up and he left.

Our breakup had been sudden. Or maybe that’s not right. Maybe the truth is that the seeds of it had been there the whole time, but we were concentrating on the bright blooming things and not the choking weeds that were getting bigger by the day. But I’d promised my father I was going home, and Tim wanted nothing to do with it. So when he proposed Australia or Phuket or anywhere but Springfield, we’d finally said the things out loud that we thought we’d said before, but never had.

“I always told you I was going home,” I said.

“And I always told you I wasn’t.”

“But I thought—”

“I thought it too, but I guess neither of us is going to compromise, are we?”

There were other words. Angry ones. A few desperate weeks where we argued, and were silent, and had frantic sex where I’d cry afterward, trying to muffle my tears with my pillow while Tim pretended to sleep. Neither of us would bend. Each of us expected the other to.

In the end, that’s really all it came down to. And if we regretted it after, neither of us was willing to be the first to say so. Maybe it was for the best. No, it was. It was.

Tim seemed to be making an effort this time. He spent a lot of time with his parents. He took an interest in Seth, filling in when Jeff and I were absent. He made overtures to Jeff. They shared a beer, went on a night out with the boys, played a round of golf. And he kept his distance from me. He acted like a polite, distant brother-in-law who barely knew me. Which was, on many levels, the truth.

Then I found the perfect place. This place where I am now, where the children are laughing in the other room, where despite the Mandys of the world I was able to paddle my raft to shore, get back home and almost forget what it was like to be at sea.

After all the papers were signed and I got the keys from the realtor, I left a quick note for Jeff on the kitchen table telling him where I was and made a beeline for this building. It had been a gymnasium before and the previous tenants had left lots of useful equipment behind. An enclosed space full of balls for the kids to jump around in, bright colors on the walls, those mats we used in high school for sit-up drills, which would be perfect for the kids’ naps.

I walked into what I already knew would be the toddler room, pulled a couple of the mats to the middle of the floor, and sat lotus-style, letting the room tell me what it wanted to be, letting it become my home away from home. It was pelting rain outside, the drops making a soothing hum as they plinked against the metal roof.

“Are you meditating?”

“Jeff, you came!” I opened my eyes. “Tim. Sorry—”

“I sound like him?”

“You do.”

He motioned to the floor. His hair was wet from the rain and he carried a sodden jacket over his arm. “There room enough for two on there?”

“I guess.”

He draped his jacket over a tiny plastic chair and sat next to me. He tried to emulate my position but stopped halfway, grimacing.

“Not as flexible as I once was.”

“No way you could ever do that.”

“You don’t know, maybe I could.”

I shook my head. “How’d you know I was here?”

“Saw your note for Jeff. Thought I’d take a spin by. See what all the fuss was about.”

“What do you think?”

He looked around him. Not a cursory look, but really taking the place in.

“You going to have two kids’ rooms?”

“Yes, exactly…how did you know that?”

“Makes sense.”

“Right.”

“The place is awesome, Claire. I’m really proud of you.”

I don’t know what it was, his tone, the word proud, but in an instant I was crying. Crying like I hadn’t in a long time.

“Claire? Are you all right? Claire?”

I couldn’t speak, could only shake my head. Tim’s arm went around me and he held me to his chest. He smelled like he always smelled, like a boy at bath time after he’d been playing in the rain. His other arm went around me and I gave in to his embrace, burying my face in his chest, soaking his shirt.

I don’t know how long we stayed like that, but at some point the tears dried up, as they always do, as they have to.

Tim kept holding me, though, stroking my hair, making small comforting noises like I did when Seth needed them after a skinned knee, a toy taken away, a bad childhood day. And then, I don’t know why, or how, or why, but then I was looking up at him and he was looking down at me, and his lips brushed mine, once, quickly, and then again, for longer. And though my brain was screaming that I should pull away, that I had to stop this now, immediately, I didn’t.

The clang of the front door did it for me. We sprang apart and I bolted to my feet, knowing, somehow, that it was Jeff, that he had seen, oh God, that he had seen.

I rushed to the front door. It was still rattling on its hinges, but when I got it open and made it outside, all I found was the driving rain and the certainty that I was too late.

Zoey comes around before the ambulance gets to our house, but two fainting spells in two days is enough to worry the most sanguine of mothers, which I am not, and send Brian into a worst-case-scenario level of hypochondria that I haven’t seen in him since I was pregnant.

We spend the weekend ferrying Zoey back and forth to the hospital, where she’s put through a battery of tests. She has a headache that won’t go away, and her vision’s a bit blurry she says, but each test tells us nothing, only scratches one more archaic possibility off the list, like on an episode of House. And maybe it’s the influence of television, but I keep expecting Zoey to get worse, for more symptoms to appear. Instead, all she does is submit to each blood sample, body scan, and pupil-dilating exam with an uncharacteristic silence, and no answers emerge.

On Sunday, while Zoey’s with an eye doctor to check if her problems are optical, Brian and I see the neurologist. He’s come in on his day off, and though he claims to be happy to do so, the fact that he’s dressed like a teenaged boy sends a different message.

We thank him for taking the time, and I sit quietly while he flips through Zoey’s charts and tests results, and Brian reels off possibilities like answers in a multiple-choice exam. Dr. Coast shakes his head at each of them, and eventually Brian runs out of suggestions. The clock on his wall ticks loudly, a reminder of each second passing by.

Dr. Coast finally puts down Zoey’s file. “I understand that this must’ve been a trying few days for you, but I think that everything that can be done has been done.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with Zoey.”

I hear the words, but they don’t bring relief, not yet.

“But how can that be? She fainted twice in twenty-four hours. And her headache? The blurry vision? That’s not normal, is it?”

He leans back in his chair. The hood of his brown sweatshirt reminds me of a monk’s cowl.

“I understand your confusion, and if I were at the beginning of my career I’d be running a whole battery of tests to be a hundred percent sure. But I think Zoey’s had enough tests, don’t you?”

“Yes, of course,” Brian says, concern edging out his usual professional medical tone, “but we need to be absolutely positive. Surely you understand.”

“I do. Unfortunately, we often have to live with uncertainty in these kinds of situations. We know so little about the brain, really, despite our efforts. But if I had to give you my best guess, I’d say it was stress related.”

“She’s eleven,” I say. “There’s nothing stressful going on with her. She…she’s a good kid. Things with her are good.”

“The beginning of adolescence can be a very stressful time. Surely you remember?”

Brian makes a frustrated noise. “She’s not like other kids. She takes things in stride. And with her IQ…”

“Yes, I’ve seen that in her file, but that might just mean she’s better at hiding things. And those competitions she does must be stressful.”

Brian’s jaw clenches and I reach for his hand. He squeezes it and glances at me as if to ask, Are we on the same page?

We are.

“She likes those competitions,” I say. “We don’t push her to do them. And she’s been doing them for years without incident.”

“Perhaps she’s changed the way she feels about them?”

“She would have told us.”

“Maybe she didn’t realize it herself.”

“So that’s it? We take her home and…what?”