Catherine McKenzie - Hidden

“I got it!” Seth bellows from upstairs.

I raise the phone to put it back in its cradle slowly. A few words tumble out, a giggle, a how are you? Seth’s voice a little deeper saying he’s all right, you know? Considering.

“Are you eavesdropping?”

I jump and put the receiver down louder than I meant to. I’m busted now, and Seth’ll probably have something to say about it, as he should.

“A mother’s prerogative.”

Beth smiles through her red face. Her hair’s slicked back, like she’s just had a shower, and she’s wearing a loose pair of sweats. She leans on the counter and stretches her legs behind her.

“That did me some good. You should join me at the gym sometime.”

“And run like a rat in a cage? I don’t think so.”

“There are lots of other things you could do. Besides, they say that…”

She bends over quickly, touching her toes, like that was her plan all along.

“That exercise is good for depression?” I ask, more aggressively than I should. But the thought of it, the thought of falling back into that dark place with no joy and no light, and no light even at the end of the tunnel, makes me feel like fighting. I have to fight that, no matter what, with everything I’ve got, and then some.

“I, well…”

“I’m not depressed, okay? I’m sad. I know the difference.”

She straightens up. “I only meant, if you were looking for something to do…ah, hell. Forget I said anything, all right?”

“Okay.”

She moves to the fridge and asks me about work. As she assembles some of the same food we just ate, I tell her about how crazy Mandy was being, and about Tim stopping by.

“What did he want?”

“To see the place. He didn’t stay long.”

“I see.”

“What?” I ask, though I know what. I’ve never been able to keep anything from Beth, and she knows all about that rainy day. She barely spoke to me for months after I told her; having been on the receiving end of deception, she had trouble forgiving me. I’m still not sure she has.

She brings her plate to the table and sits, and picks up the newspaper, though that doesn’t mean she’s done talking. That’s my sister, always doing three things at once. “I’m surprised he’s still here.”

“I think he feels like he should be here for his folks. And this has been hard for him too.”

“Losing a brother he’d barely spoken to in twenty years?”

“That’s not fair, or accurate. They’d…they’d been in touch again these last few years.”

Beth gives me a skeptical look, but it’s true. Though I hadn’t spoken to Tim since that day until he came home last week, he had something to do with Jeff forgiving me, with him agreeing to see if we could try to get past it all.

And though I don’t know the details (because part of our tacit agreement for trying to put it behind us was that the only relationship Tim had with our family was on Jeff’s terms), I know they’ve been communicating off and on over the last couple of years. That Tim had reached out, and Jeff had responded. Gifts arrived sporadically for Seth. Always age appropriate and something Seth had been hankering for. And Jeff’s casual references to Tim in conversation, every once in a while, were an acknowledgment that his forgiveness was real, and remained.

“Holy shit!” Beth says.

“What?”

“Have you seen this?” She hands me the paper, her finger stabbing at a small article whose headline reads: DRIVER IN ACCIDENT THAT KILLED LOCAL HOSPITALIZED.

“Oh. Yes. Um, what’s his name, Marc Duggard, told me that when he came to give me…Jeff’s effects.”

My eyes track to where the bag’s still sitting on the kitchen counter, half hidden by unanswered mail. A growing pile of things I cannot face yet.

“And you didn’t mention it to me because…?”

“I haven’t thought about it that much.”

“Seriously?”

“What’s the point?”

“If it were me? I’d be insisting they press charges.”

“I’ve never been you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. As Seth would say, jeez.”

She smiles, but she doesn’t let it go. “Okay, but still. Aren’t you bothered by this?”

“Of course I am. I…can you imagine? What it must be like for her? I mean, she killed someone. I’d be on suicide watch too.”

“I don’t give a shit about her, and you shouldn’t either.”

“It was an accident, Beth. It could’ve happened to anyone.”

“But it didn’t happen to anyone. It happened to you.”

“It happened to Jeff, actually.”

She stands. “That’s my cue to leave.”

“Why?”

“I have some work to do, but mostly because I don’t feel like fighting right now.”

“I’m not trying to fight.”

“That’s why I’m leaving.” She gives me a quick hug, and then I’m left alone in the kitchen. I try to keep busy with little tasks but find myself pulled to the pile of mail and the bag sitting behind it. I lift it in my hand. Jeff’s wedding band clicks against his cell phone, his watch, the only things he had on him. Where are his keys? I wonder. Did he lose them? Is that why he was walking home?

I reach for what I think will cause me the least amount of harm, his cell phone. The ring and the watch are things I gave him, things that are connected with me, with us. His cell phone is all him. Our house has been so silent since he left, and silly as it might sound, this broken cell phone is part of the reason. There are no longer any dings or buzzes or swooshes of texts being sent and received. He spent so much time on his phone that sometimes I felt like he was lost in there. And the mystic part of me wonders if he still is, if that’s where he’s really gone.

I sit at the table, holding the smashed device in my hand. I plug it into the charger and press the power button, not expecting anything to happen, but after a few moments it starts to whir. The screen flashes and then goes dark, flashes again. It feels warm, as if it’s been placed in a microwave, and it’s emitting some kind of current that makes my teeth hurt. Then it vibrates and the screen comes briefly to life. A message pops up. It’s a notification of a text message from Patricia Underhill. I tap the notice with my finger, but the text doesn’t open.

I lean forward, confused, trying to make out what I’m seeing, when the phone vibrates again and a black line begins crawling across the screen, eating up the pixels in its way like Pac-Man. It eats and eats until the phone goes dark and cool.

It all happens so quickly that when I’m staring at the black screen, moments later, I can’t help but wonder if I’ve imagined the whole thing.

He caught me at the right moment.

That’s what I always remember thinking of Jeff in the days after we started speaking, emailing, spending time together in the ways that we could. When I was trying to figure out what I was doing. What it was about him, about me, that was pulling us together and holding us in place. Why I let him in.

He caught me at the right moment. That much was clear.

But what I still wasn’t sure of a year later was what made the moment right in the first place?

The MRI shows what Dr. Coast expected it to, a normal, functioning brain with no mistakes in it. When we get the results on Monday, I can tell that Brian’s both relieved and unsatisfied, but I’m only relieved. When he says she’s going to be fine, my heart feels like a too-full balloon that’s been popped. All my anxiety rushes from me in a few, brief seconds, and I collapse in on myself, a shrunken parody of what I once was. But then I take a deep breath, and I look through the glass of Dr. Coast’s office at my bored daughter slumped in a plastic waiting-room chair, who is going to be okay, she is, and my heart starts to expand again, taking a shape that can withstand being batted about.

There isn’t always an explanation for everything, I say to a still-unconvinced Brian, parroting back what he’s told me plenty of times about his own patients. He nods and agrees, but he’ll be spending nights up late surfing the Internet, researching her symptoms. When I’d punched them into WebMD myself, it gave too many possibilities to count, but the first one was something called “vasovagal syncope,” a fancy way of saying that it’s the body’s way of reacting to emotional or physical stress. Dr. Coast’s explanation, which I hoped he’d gotten from somewhere other than WebMD.

When we tell her we’re all done, Zoey seems happy to be done with the tests and anxious to put it behind her. When we get home, she wants to go back to school today, even though the day’s already half over.

“Let’s wait till tomorrow, all right?”

“But I have to, Mom.”

“I’m sure the teachers will let you make up whatever work you’ve missed.”

She chews on the end of her hair.

“What is it, Zo? What can’t wait till tomorrow?”

“The longer I stay away, the bigger deal it’s going to be when I get back. Like, ooh, Zoey was all hiding because of that video. Check out the Freak Fainting Girl.”

Goddamn that little shit who posted the video. He should count himself lucky that Brian’s been too distracted to carry through on his promise to track him down and teach him a lesson.

“But won’t it bring more attention if you show up in the middle of the day? Why not start fresh tomorrow in homeroom, like it’s any other day?”

“It doesn’t work like that. There’s no reset button. Unless some kid decides to shoot up the school, or something…”

“Zoey!”

“I’m just saying.”

“Okay, but it’s already lunchtime. You need to shower and eat, and by the time you do all that the day really will be almost over. Let’s relax this afternoon, take it easy. One more day isn’t going to make a difference.”

“Don’t you have to go to work?” she asks hopefully.

“One more day isn’t going to make a difference there either.”

And if I have my own reasons for avoiding the office, that’s my problem, not hers.

She shrugs, giving in, and clomps up the stairs. I call after her that I’ll make us some lunch, maybe with that bacon we were supposed to eat the other day, but she doesn’t answer.

Brian emerges from his study, telling me he’s had a call from one of his patients, he’s needed, do I mind if he goes? He looks guilty for asking, but I reassure him. Everything’s all right here. I’d like a bit of time alone with Zoey, anyway.

He gets his medical bag and kisses me good-bye, and I go to the kitchen to assemble lunch things. I stop in front of the fridge. My flight itinerary’s tacked to it, held fast by a Cabo San Lucas magnet, right where I left it.

Springfield to Springfield and back again.

Oh, Jeff.

I hear a thump from upstairs, and then another and another.

“Zoey? Zo?”

Now there’s a crash, and more thumps. Something being pulled over, something being thrown. I take the stairs two at a time and find Zoey in her room on the floor surrounded by a tipped-over bookshelf, binders and notebooks, all full of her writing. Zoey’s room has always been a reflection of her pinwheel mind, but never like this.

“Zoey?”

She looks up at me like she doesn’t know how she came to be in the middle of this hurricane. Her face is wet with tears.

“Are you all right? What is it? Why did you…?” My eyes dart around the room and come to rest on her flickering laptop. A video’s playing, the video of Zoey stepping up to the mike, going pale, falling to the floor, and then up again as it happens all over again. And now I understand. Although Ethan told her about the video, we’ve kept her from watching it, which was easy to do these last couple of days. I should’ve known she’d make a beeline for it the moment she was alone.

I maneuver around her things till I get to the laptop and shut the lid. “You shouldn’t watch that.”

“Ha! Too late.”

I sit down on the edge of her bed, still unmade from the day she left for the competition.

“It’ll blow over, Zo—”

“I want to throw this stuff away.”

“No, Zoey. No.”

“Yes. I don’t need it anymore. I’m not going—”

“Honey, please. You don’t have to do the competitions anymore if you don’t want to, but trust me. You don’t want to throw this stuff away. It’s a part of you. And you’ll regret it if it’s gone.”