Catherine McKenzie - Hidden

But maybe it’s more that it’s strange inside my head, rather than outside, in my life, because as I go to work, and care for Seth, and half listen to Beth’s (I can only call them) lectures, my mind is striving for forgiveness. No, that’s not even the right word. My mind is striving for…doubt, and giving its benefit to Jeff. It’s leaning toward acquittal, and eventually, toward innocence.

It’s hard to say what tips the scales. I replay the conversation with Tish over and over and over, and a line from Pride and Prejudice keeps coming into my mind: “There was truth in his looks.” But that thought is confusing because the person Elizabeth Bennet is talking about (the charming but dastardly Wickham) is anything but truthful. Regardless, Tish looked innocent, she sounded innocent, and everything she said, everything I could verify, has been borne out.

I spend more hours in Jeff’s email, find and check his cell phone bills, and those bear them out too. There’s nothing in his inbox, his sent messages, his deleted files, his calls or texts. If they communicated on a regular basis, then nothing she wrote was worth keeping, and that means something, doesn’t it?

Doesn’t it?

Jeff stayed. When I strayed, when I let him down, when I acted the fool with Tim, Jeff had every reason to pack up and leave. But he didn’t. I stayed in Springfield for him, and he stayed for me.

This I know. Of this I am certain.

“What do you think you’re going to find in there?” Beth asks when she finds me in front of the computer for the second morning in a row, still investigating, still searching, still trying to make sure before I decide.

I quickly close Jeff’s email. “I don’t know.”

She’s in her running clothes, sweat stained and smelling like salt. She sits on the floor, stretching her legs out in front of her.

“Remember what I told you about Rick?”

“About the cheating?”

She lunges at her toes. “About me wishing I didn’t know.”

“Is that really true?”

She sits back up, bringing her feet together in a yoga pose, centering her back. “Damned if I know.”

“But that would’ve been a lie. He betrayed you.”

“Everyone says that, but we all lie about things. Little things, big things. We all keep stuff hidden. And the longer you’re with someone, the more stuff there is like that, I think. That doesn’t mean he didn’t love me, or wasn’t good to me in other ways. So it made me think. Maybe honesty isn’t always the best policy. Because him telling me about it was selfish. The only person it was going to make feel any better was him. So maybe if you make a mistake, you have to live with it by yourself, and that’s how you fix it.”

I twist Jeff’s chair back and forth, back and forth, watching Beth trying to calm herself, trying to let her mind be.

“But what if you found out? Then wouldn’t all the time you’d spent together between when he did it and when it came out, wouldn’t that all be a lie?”

“People always say that too, but what does it really mean? Like, if you’d been on some great trip, say, and had an amazing time together, would that mean that it wasn’t really amazing?”

“I’ve been trying to figure that out.”

“Precisely, because it’s not obvious. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this, too much probably, and I don’t think that bad actions erase good ones. Not really.”

“So if you could change the past?”

“I’d tell Rick to keep his goddamn mouth shut, and maybe we’d both be happy right now, instead of neither of us being happy.”

“Are you really unhappy, Bethie?”

She opens her eyes, looks at me for a moment. “Sometimes. Yes. It’s hard. It’s hard to find someone you’d rather spend time with than not.”

“I know.”

“I know you do, honey. I’m sorry. I’m not trying to bring you down. I’m…I think you should let this go. I think you should focus on the good times you had together, the good life. Getting hung up on this, it’s a way of not moving on, of keeping happiness at bay.”

“Jeff only died a couple of weeks ago. I wouldn’t be happy, anyway.”

“Of course not, but you’re going to be someday, and sooner if you focus on what used to make you happy.” She comes up on her knees and rests her chin on my lap. “Don’t let this define you, even if it happened. Jeff didn’t tell you. He didn’t leave. He chose to stay.”

Beth’s right, of course. Maybe not about all of it. Maybe not the part about knowing and wishing you didn’t. Or maybe she is. She’s the one who really knows. I only have suspicions, doubts, and circumstantial evidence. I can still decide. I can acquit Jeff. I can choose. Like I did all those years ago. I can choose him, and that’s probably the right thing.

“Mom?”

“We’re in here.”

Seth pops his head in the door. “Can you give me a ride to school? I missed the bus.”

I drive Seth to school, drop him off, watch him walk into the building, greet his friends, act normal.

When he’s safely inside, I cue in the latest piece that Connie wants me to learn on my iPod, Mozart’s Rondo in A Minor, a tricky piece I don’t know. As it starts playing through the car’s mediocre sound system, I think about what Connie told me about it. How the principal theme, or refrain, alternates with contrasting themes, called episodes, or digressions. There’s always a pattern: theme, episode, theme, episode 2, and so on. The number of themes can vary, and the recurring part is sometimes embellished or shortened to provide variation. But when you listen to it, it’s reassuring, because no matter how far off it goes, it will always come back to the theme. It always ends where it starts, telling a story, then folding in on itself, its end in its beginning.

When I get to my office at the daycare, I find Mandy Holden waiting for me, her foot tapping her impossibly high heel on the tiled floor.

“Claire, finally. I need to talk to you about something.”

I sit down at my desk. My message light is blinking angrily once again. Maybe I’ll return some calls today.

“What’s up?”

“I’ve been thinking. Have you ever considered being open on the weekends?”

“Pardon?”

“The week’s so hectic, and that’s the only time I can really get things done, and it’s hard to find reliable babysitters, so I was thinking, if you had Saturday and Sunday hours, maybe even half days, you could make a killing, right?”

I sit there watching her, speechless, no idea even where to begin.

“What do you think?”

“I think that’s the craziest idea I’ve heard in a while.”

“Come on, you won’t even consider it?”

“That’s when the staff is off. We need the weekend. I need the weekend. Surely you can understand that?”

“Oh, well, when you put it that way…”

I can tell she’s thinking that if she sits here long enough, I might cave in to her insane idea. I start moving things around my desk, adjusting a pile of paper, opening my email, giving all the social cues that a normal person would know meant “We’re done.”

But not Mandy. “What if you hired additional staff?”

I shake my head as I notice a small card-sized box sitting on the edge of my desk. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t there the last time I was in the office, but it looks vaguely familiar. I put my hand on it as Mandy watches.

“What’s that?”

“Not sure.” I pull off the lid. There’s a sticky note inside with my sister’s handwriting on it. It reads: Found this at Mom and Dad’s. I’ll do it if you will.

I pull the sticky off and underneath it is a yellowing pile of business cards. James & James—Attorneys at Law.

“Are you going to be a lawyer again?” Mandy’s voice has a note of panic. “Are you closing Playthings?”

I close the box, smiling, which I’m sure was Beth’s intention. “No, Mandy. Relax.”

“But no weekend services?”

“No.”

She sighs. “I kind of expected you’d say that.”

“Good of you to ask, though. If you don’t ask, you don’t get.”

“That’s totally what I think!”

I smile at her, my eyes drifting away, and she finally gets it. She leaves, muttering something about checking on LT one last time. I reach for the box again, lifting the lid, taking out a card, wondering if this is something I should consider, if maybe Beth was being serious.

I connect my iPod to the speakers on my desk and cue up the Mozart again. I close my eyes and listen to the pattern, the little bits of the theme scattered through the different episodes, letting the music fill me, crowd out the lingering doubts and uncertainties, smoothing out the vast rocky unhappiness that fills me.

The main theme comes around again, tweaked, revised, but still close enough to the beginning to know that the journey hasn’t been so far. There’s a map back to where it all began.

It’s an ordinary day at the daycare.

I spend the days following my confrontations with Claire nervous, worried, waiting for the axe to fall.

But it doesn’t.

I go to work expecting the phone to ring, an email to arrive, Brian to text me angrily that we need to talk, but none of that transpires.

Work is as it always is. People are hired, reprimanded, fired. They might be bringing a new round of consultants in. There’s a rumor that they’re thinking of eliminating the Safety Minute. I get two more citations for parking “illegally” in the parking lot. My pay will be docked next time, but I don’t care.

Zoey returns to normal. Back to hiding behind her curtain of hair, scribbling on pieces of paper. Brian sticks to his word, the doctor’s advice, and doesn’t bring up next month’s competition, one she’s already registered and paid for. She does. She wants to go. She wants to show Ethan and the others that Nationals was an aberration. That she’s stronger than that. Stronger than me.

And since she is, I’m all for it. Brian protests, but I talk him into it. We’ll all go together, I say, and we’ll see. If she can’t handle it, then we’ll leave. But if she wants to do it, if she feels like she has something to prove, let’s help her do it.

Brian puts up a good fight, but his opponents are the two women in the world he loves most. We win.

By Friday, three weeks to the day that Jeff died, I’m starting to relax. Not entirely, but enough to have moments where I’m not feeling like some prisoner on death row, eating her last meal, spending her last hours with her family. And while Jeff’s face, things he said and wrote, the way his hands felt on mine that day on the golf course, are a constant companion, they feel more like a scrapbook than a threat. I know why I took the risks I took, but I’m relieved too. That I can keep all this as a memory. That I seem to have contained the collateral damage.

I try not to ask myself if I would do it all again. What we were thinking. Why we were willing to get so close to risking everything, other people. I tell myself I got sucked into the happiness, the surge of the drug we seemed to make together. But was it real? Would it have survived in real life? Would it even have happened if we didn’t have other lives to lead but had met each other first?

I guess everyone asks themselves that, about one thing or another. Jeff must’ve too. But we chose to give in to it. Each time we spoke or wrote or thought, we chose. The line we drew, the deadline, we chose that too. And it’s because of this one thing, this one right thing that we were going to have to live with even if the worst hadn’t happened, that makes me feel like, in some small way, I deserve this reprieve.

I probably don’t. I probably don’t deserve any of this. But I’m not perfect. Nobody is. And maybe I’m kidding myself, but it feels like I paid for my mistakes, that I’m paying still.

And Jeff? Jeff has paid in full.

It’s Friday night. Brian’s out on a call and Zoey’s downstairs, waiting for me to watch The Notebook, a movie she’s chosen because she knows it will be “so bad, it’s good.”

The popcorn’s in the microwave, popping furiously, suffusing the house with its buttery smell.

“Mmooomm! Let’s go!”

“I’ll be down in a sec. Fast-forward through the previews.”

I go to my bedroom, open a drawer, and feel for the back of it until my hand closes on the USB key. I pull it out by the lanyard, letting it dangle in front of me like a hypnotist’s watch.