Catherine McKenzie - Hidden

That was a good day. A day worth savoring.

I scroll down and get a different kind of emotional stomach punch. His page is full of sympathetic messages from friends, distant cousins, and townsfolk reaching out: I’m so terribly sorry. We miss you. We’re thinking of you.

Like Jeff’s going to be checking his Facebook page from the great beyond.

My heart skips a beat when I see a message on his wall from Lily, his college girlfriend. She’s <3broken. (It takes a second till I figure out this is some kind of online abbreviation for “heartbroken.” Blech!) I check. They’re Facebook friends, another thing I don’t remember him mentioning. Stupid Facebook. Some people are meant to disappear from your life, to remain a memory, a faded possibility. A curiosity. I ought to know. But when curiosity is so easily fulfilled, how do you avoid fulfilling it? A button is pressed and you’re friends again.

I log in as him (Jeff’s password for everything has always been Abacus—I gave him one for his first birthday after we started dating) and go to his direct messages. If I know Jeff, if, any message he’s ever written will be there.

And so it is.

I almost breathe a sigh of relief, but there’s nothing relieving about this situation. Hunched over a desk at two thirty in the morning, going through my dead husband’s Facebook messages for evidence of…what? What?

The messages are sporadic, more of them at the beginning, when everyone was getting on Facebook and reconnecting with people long gone and long forgotten. A message from Lily is there, from five years ago. Harmless, harmless.

I’m married, he wrote in response to her Hey there, stranger.

So am I. I have two kids.

I have one. I still live in Springfield.

Still? Why am I not surprised? Anyway, I hope you’re happy. I hope you’re well.

I am happy, Jeff wrote. I really am.

Five exchanges over three days, and then nothing. The rest are all from his college buddies, and other names I vaguely recognize. Messages from a few bands or other things he’s a “fan” of.

Of Patricia Underhill, I find nothing.

Jeff has 153 friends, and Tish is one of them. I scroll back through his meager timeline history and find the entry, a little over a year ago: Jeff and Patricia Underhill are now friends.

A year ago. So not after the company event in Mexico where we met, two and a half years back. What happened a year ago? What made them suddenly become (Facebook) friends?

I click through to her page. She’s also several years younger in her photo. She’s wearing a yellow rain slicker, and her daughter’s sitting in her lap, a miniature six-year-old version of her. They’re grinning at the camera like bandits, and I can almost imagine the muddy puddles they just finished thumping around in.

Tish works at Johnson Company, likes hiking and golf, and is married to someone named Brian, whose Facebook page is even more spartan than Jeff’s. He’s a doctor. He has twenty-four friends. He lives with his wife and daughter in Springfield, the other Springfield. His favorite quote is “First, heal thyself.”

Jeff’s not friends with Tish’s daughter or her husband, of course he isn’t, but her daughter’s page is an open book like that of everyone her age. She has 515 friends and is fond of posting bits of poetry (hers, I imagine) between uploaded photos of almost weekly road trips to some kind of competition. I play the voyeur for a few more minutes, but there isn’t anything for me to learn here.

But…golf. I click back to Tish’s page, searching for more information, but it doesn’t provide any. She likes golf. So what?

My next stop is the Johnson website. Jeff’s username (jmanning) and password (Abacus) get me into the employee-only section. I click around, not sure, really, what I’m looking for.

“Staff” brings me to an index where I search for Tish’s name, and there she is again, dressed less casually this time but still comfortable in front of the camera. She has her chin in her hand, and her smile is half smirk, half amusement. Her biography is simple, no different from the Facebook one.

I skip over “Resources,” “Announcements,” and “Reports” and check “Activities.” The first one listed is Jeff’s funeral, and I suck in my breath. Jeff’s funeral is an activity? Honestly, as Jeff would say, what’s wrong with these people?

I’m grateful there are no links to pictures of the event. It seems their callousness stops somewhere, at least.

Underneath Jeff’s funeral notice is the title “Lottery.” It’s the firm thing Jeff went to in Palm Springs a few weeks before he died.

I search my memory for mentions of Tish. Maybe her name came up once or twice in conversation, but if so, it was a while ago, a medium-term memory. Jeff certainly never said anything about her being in Palm Springs. Of that I am sure.

At least, I think I am.

And why would he mention her, anyway? my voice of reason asks. He told me a couple of funny stories about one particularly bad seminar. He said he couldn’t believe that John Scott was actually there, as Jeff predicted he’d be. He talked about the few other people I knew who were there too. Of the fifty people there, most were unmentioned.

But then again, most of them didn’t give him a book.

Or send him a text.

Or travel to his funeral.

There are fifty-four photos linked to the lottery, and my hand’s shaking as I start the slideshow: the resort, the welcome banner, the first night dinner, lecture, lecture. Neither Jeff nor Tish are anywhere to be seen in these pictures. Was Jeff even there? Yes, of course he was. I called him there. I called him in his room because his cell was on the fritz. I left a message on his room’s voicemail and he called me back. Stuck at a deadly dinner, he’d said, sounding sober and tired. Rest well, I’d said.

He was there, and lots of people were missing from these photos. So calm yourself, Claire.

First, calm yourself.

Click, click, click, the slideshow keeps sliding. A sunny day, breakfast, a golf course, and then the final shot, everyone crowded in, come on, come on, get closer, closer, and say Johnson!

Jeff’s standing in the second row, and Tish is next to him. The proud mama herself.

There’s only one thing left to do now, but still, I hesitate. If I go to his email, if I see what I expect to see, find what I expect to find, am I going to feel better? Right now I have suspicions and doubts, but it’s the middle of the night, and all these things might have an innocent explanation. In the cold light of day, all these things might fade and disappear.

But no. I’ve come this far. If I don’t look now, I’ll torture myself until I do.

I go to his email page and enter his username and password. The page won’t load. My username and password are incorrect. I try again. I must have mistyped it. Username and password are incorrect. Incorrect. Not Abacus, not anymore. And not his birthday, or mine, or Seth’s, or our address or his favorite word (motherfucker—he could be childish sometimes), or any of the other combinations of letters and numbers I can think of.

Why would a man change the password to his email? my brain mocks me.

Why?

I feel sick and tired, so tired now, but I have to press on, if I can. I have to know if there’s anything more.

I scurry downstairs, knocking into corners in the gloomy light, in my tiredness, and panic, and search through the unpaid stack of bills until I find what I’m looking for: Jeff’s cell phone bill. I take it back upstairs, waiting till I’m there to open it.

A long list of calls and texts, almost exclusively to me, with three exceptions: three texts to a number I don’t recognize on the weekend he was away. When his phone wasn’t supposed to be working. I check the area code on the web. It’s for the other Springfield.

I stumble in a daze to the corner of the room and slide to the floor. Jeff’s travel bag is where he left it, still packed, where it might still be sitting even if he were alive today.

This is where Seth found the book.

I take the items out one by one: dirty socks and underwear; grass-stained golf pants; his rumpled dress clothes, in need of a dry cleaning; two golf gloves. There’s nothing else. No lipstick on any of his clothes, no strange receipts in any of his pockets, no condoms.

I raise his golf shirt to my nose and all I smell is him, faded, and grass. It doesn’t smell of perfume. There are no stray black hairs, or stray hairs of any kind. I hold the shirt to my face for a while, closing my eyes, trying to decide if Jeff’s scent is a help or a hindrance at this point.

I put his shirt down and run my hand around the bottom of the case, thorough in my investigation, even though I doubt I could remember my own email password right now, and my hand comes up against something hard and sharp. Something I missed.

I pull it out. It’s a black folded corkscrew, like the kind you buy in convenience stores or find in hotel rooms. The name of the hotel where Jeff stayed is stamped on the back.

I unfold it, one side a corkscrew, the other a knife. A small piece of cork foil clings to the corkscrew part. Burgundy colored, still smelling faintly of the bottle it protected.

The text.

The book.

The trip.

The changed password.

The corkscrew.

They are all I have to go on.

They are not enough.

Beth finds me in the study sometime at dawn. I’m leaning against the wall, the corkscrew in one hand, Jeff’s clothes strewn around me, a couple of hours of tears half dried on my face and T-shirt.

“Claire! What the hell?”

“I found this,” I say, holding out the corkscrew. “And he changed his email password.”

A few quick strides and Beth is by my side, prying the device from my hand, moving Jeff’s clothes away. “Come on, honey. Stand up.”

“And there was a text. Texts. She texted him. I think he texted her. She came to the funeral. Why, Beth? Why?”

Beth doesn’t answer me, she just leads me out of the study to our bedroom, mine and Jeff’s.

“Do you still have those pills the doctor prescribed? What did he call them?”

“Funeral pills,” I say, and the tears start again. “For a girl who mourns for someone who doesn’t deserve it.”

“Where are they?”

I slump on the bed and pull a pillow over my eyes. “Bathroom.”

I listen to her leave the room, run some water in a glass, and crack the cap off a plastic bottle.

“Take these.”

“No, Beth. I have to tell you. You have to see.”

“No, not now. Take these. Sleep. I’ll get Seth to school. We’ll talk about this when you wake up.”

“I won’t be able to sleep.”

“Yes, you will.”

She pulls the pillow from my eyes and props me up. She’s holding two pills in her hand, not one.

“That’s too many.”

“No, it isn’t.”

She holds them below my mouth and I open it like a child whose mother is playing airplane with her food. She hands me the glass and I swallow, once, twice. The pills stick in my throat at first but then they go down.

“Get into bed.”

“Beth.”

“I mean it, Claire. Get into bed right now.”

“Are you angry with me?”

“Of course not, but you need to listen to me.”

She has her sternest expression on, the one she must use to pulverize opponents in court. The pills are already making me woozy, or maybe it’s being up all night, so I give in. I lie back and Beth pulls the covers up over me, tucking me in.

“You’d be a good mother, Bethie.”

“Thank you. Now go to sleep. Don’t think. Sleep.”

Don’t think. Don’t think. Don’t think.

But how can I not?

The text.

The cell phone bill.

The book.

The trip.

The corkscrew.

I count these things.

I count them until I sleep.

Tuesday morning, and it’s time for Zoey and me both to go back to real life. School for her, work for me.

Brian’s still out on his call by the time we finish breakfast, so I decide to drive Zoey to school, rather than let her brave the bus. She puts up a bit of protest, but it’s feeble. I can tell she wanted to ask, but keeping her brave face on won out.