Catherine McKenzie - Hidden

But what I couldn’t understand, and can’t explain to Julia, is what made me so worried, why that worry grew as the hours passed, why it became so all-consuming. All I can come up with is that it isn’t just the silence but its quality. Something about our usual connection seems missing, and that absence is tugging away at me. Part of me knows I’m being completely irrational, and the other part is terrified I’m not.

My phone pinged for the last time last night around nine. My breath caught. It was a Google Alert for Jeff Manning. My hands shook as I opened it, but it was nothing. Some other Jeff Manning was getting married. How nice for him. My panic subsided, and I smiled as I remembered setting up the alert in the first place.

It was right around the time of a big mine disaster that dominated the news. In the buzz of media attention, it came to light that one of the miners had a wife and a girlfriend. Jeff and I were emailing about it at work.

Not the best way for something like that to get out, he wrote.

Uh, no. “Something like that.” Funny.

I’m glad I amuse you.

I keep thinking about the girlfriend.

What about her?

Well…and okay, this may be stupid or paranoid or whatever, but…I keep thinking about how the only reason she even knows what happened to him is because it’s this big media event. If he’d disappeared or died for some ordinary reason, it’s not like anyone would tell her.

I sense a deeper thought here.

Yeah, well…how would I know if anything ever happened to you?

Inter-office memo.

Ha!

I went back to work, but the idea stuck with me. How would I know if something ever happened to him? Not that anything should, but still.

Have found a solution, I wrote a few days later.

Solution for?

Miner’s girlfriend problem.

You worry too much.

Like you’re the first person to tell me this?

What’s the solution?

Google Alert.

You think technology is the solution to everything.

Because it is.

So I’d set up a Google Alert for Jeff Manning, the theory being that my friend Google would crawl the net for me and send me a message any time his name was mentioned online.

It ended up being a joke between us. Turns out there are a lot of Jeff Mannings out there. One won a blue ribbon at a state fair for having the biggest pumpkin. One was a professional downhill skier who liked to party when he wasn’t in training. There were even Jeff Manning obituaries once in a while, old men dying peacefully or after a long illness. And once, tragically, a young boy.

Whenever there was a particularly funny one, I’d let Jeff know what his namesake was up to. If one of them died, we’d hold a minute of silence, or make an anonymous donation to the charity specified in the obituary. A really big one in the case of little Jeff Manning.

But underneath, there was always that niggling worry, one I couldn’t even explain to myself, especially since it was so close to the feeling I had about Zoey sometimes, particularly when she was a baby and I was sure I was going to drop her at any moment.

After getting the false Alert, a weariness passed through me, the product of tension and little food. I chewed my thumb, contemplating whether I should send one more message. In the end, I couldn’t help myself from emailing: Worried. Please answer whenever you get this. I didn’t bother waiting for a response. Instead, I brought the phone upstairs with me and left it on my nightstand.

If it buzzed in the night, I wanted to know.

Today, I woke with the sun, exhausted and certain in the knowledge that there was no message.

Lying there in bed, I flipped through the possibilities like they were index cards. One or two of them made me angry, and the rest made me so sad I’d flick them away only to have them return moments later. Others seemed irrational, but what if they weren’t? I don’t possess any special immunity against bad things happening to someone I care about because I can’t handle it.

And all the while, I couldn’t help thinking about the deadline, still weeks away. Clearly, I’m not ready for it. Maybe he figured that out? Maybe this is like agreeing to count to three, but dunking your kid on two, so they don’t see it coming? Well, fuck that. If this ends up being some kind of test, I’m going to kill him.

A final check of my phone confirmed what I already knew. He hadn’t answered. Again, I couldn’t keep myself from emailing: Really worried. Please, please reply. After I sent it, I didn’t know what to do with myself. All I knew was I had to talk to someone. I had to try to steal someone’s rationality. But talking would mean telling, and I struggled with that for the next several hours as I wandered aimlessly around the house. Eventually, I decided I didn’t have a choice. Someone had to be told, and Julia was the only possibility.

So here I am, on the floor, phone in hand, putting out as few words as possible, trying to downplay, to couch, to duck and cover. But Julia isn’t stupid. And after I hem and haw, she asks the question I was trying to avoid all along.

“Tish, are you having an affair with this man?”

I met Claire soon after I moved home from college.

I grew up in Springfield, an almost-a-city town set in the middle of a vast plain of flatness. They used to grow wheat here a century ago, before the land was used up and the farmers moved farther west. Old barns and grain silos still dot the landscape, empty now except for the history they hold.

My parents’ house was equidistant between the only wooded area in town—called, imaginatively, the Woods—and the public golf course. I spent an equal amount of time at both, allowed by my parents to roam free with my older brother, Tim. We learned to swim in the cold pools in the river, and played Pirates, Capture the Flag, and a game of our own invention called “You Can’t Get There from Here” in the Woods.

When Tim tired of me, I’d sling a bag full of my dad’s cast-off clubs over my shoulder and walk to the golf course. Everyone knew me there, and many of the grown-ups would let me join them, cheering me on if I made a good shot, helping me search for my ball in the tall grasses that waved along the side of the course when I didn’t.

Winter meant snow forts and snowball fights, skating on the rink my dad made in the backyard: Fueled by his dreams of having at least one son in the NHL, he’d be out there late most nights smoothing the surface by applying a fresh layer of water with a garden hose. It also meant shuffling to the golf course to look out over the snowy undulations and frozen water hazards, waiting longingly for spring.

When it was time to apply to college, Tim was already in his second year at State, but I decided to cast a wider net. I had good grades, so why not? And if the schools I applied to tended to have less winter and be in proximity to affordable golf, or have—nirvana—their own golf course, all the better.

I got into a smaller liberal arts college several degrees latitude south, and my parents were amenable to helping me out, so that’s where I went.

I came home six years later.

I knew a few things about myself by then. The first and foremost was that I was never going to make the PGA Tour. Okay, I already kind of knew that, but a guy can dream, can’t he? But I also knew I didn’t want to be anything I’d imagined being as a boy—fireman, teacher, lawyer. What I really enjoyed was numbers, the certainty of 2 + 2. In my junior year, I’d switched from history to accounting, stuck around for a few extra years to get my CPA, and worked on how to make “I’m going to be an accountant” sound intriguing enough to get a couple girls to go home with me.

As much as I’d enjoyed my time away, I also knew I wanted to go back to Springfield.

Maybe I was homesick, but I felt like I knew that most of all.

After I got back, I spent enough time living with my parents to change my leisurely plan of looking for an apartment while I set up my accounting practice into a thing of urgency, then borrowed some money from them to buy a condo in a newer building close to what passed for downtown in Springfield.

And that’s how I met Claire.

I needed a lawyer to work out the paperwork for the condo, and to set up my new business. A bit of asking around told me that James & Franzen were the best, so I called to make an appointment. The receptionist asked me if I minded working with one of the newer members of the firm.

“Sure, that’d be fine.”

“Great. Claire James has an opening tomorrow at eleven thirty, would that do you?”

The name seemed familiar, but I couldn’t place it. “It would.”

The next day I put on a pair of pressed khakis and a sport coat—a hand-me-down from my father that had the golf course’s crest embroidered above the right-hand pocket—and strolled across the town square. As I passed person after person I knew, and smiled and nodded and said, “Yup, I’m back for good, you need an accountant, you give me a call,” I wondered what it was about the name Claire James that was so familiar, but I still couldn’t get there.

I cast those thoughts aside as the Claire James in question came out to meet me. She was about my age, maybe a bit older, and pretty. Wearing a navy-blue skirt and jacket, she had chestnut hair that touched her shoulders, pale blue eyes that were a little close together above a straight nose, and medium-full lips covered in a light gloss. She smiled and her whole face lit up, exuding warmth and confidence.

I felt tongue-tied as I followed her down the corridor. Although I was still in the process of breaking up with my college girlfriend, Lily—she didn’t want to move to Springfield, but we weren’t quite prepared to give up on the idea of us having a future together—I knew immediately that I really wanted to ask Claire out.

But first, we had some business to attend to.

“Did Tim give you my name?” she asked as she sat down behind her desk, kicking off an uncomfortable-looking pair of high-heeled shoes. “You don’t mind, do you?”

My brain fogged with confusion until I realized she was referring to her stockinged feet.

“No, of course not. But how do you…”

Her face fell as memory clicked into place. Claire James. Shit. This was Tim’s law school girlfriend, who happened to be from Springfield too. The one I didn’t meet because Tim and I never seemed to be home at the same time anymore. The one I never met before that because she went through the private school system and was Tim’s age. And, most importantly, the one Tim broke up with around graduation and had been tight-lipped about ever since.

“Oh,” was all I could manage.

“I’m guessing that means Tim didn’t send you?”

“I’m sorry, I called the general line and they put me on to you.”

“Why are you apologizing?”

“For not making the connection, I guess.”

“That’s all right. Have you heard from Tim lately?”

She was trying to act casual as she asked this, but the way her neck flushed gave her away. Problem was, I hadn’t spoken to Tim lately. None of us had. He’d fucked off a few months after finishing law school to take a “spin around the world,” and his communication since then had been infrequent and short. In Spain read one postcard, sent from Seville and depicting a bullfight. Old buildings.

“Not really.”

“Me neither.”

“If this is going to be awkward, I’m sure I can find someone else to handle my stuff.”

“No, no,” she said, and waved off my suggestion. “That’s all done with. And it’s not your problem.”

But it was.

When I was twelve, my dad decided it was time to give me the Talk.

I’d been caught folding my stained Matchbox-car sheets into the washing machine early one Sunday morning. I stood there, frozen, while my dad watched me over his coffee cup with a look of deep understanding. My ears went hot, feverish. I thanked God my mom was a late sleeper.

He beckoned me into the kitchen, poured me a small cup of joe, and stumbled his way through a version of the facts of life that was so alien to what I already knew from TV and the schoolyard I was pretty sure he didn’t know what he was talking about.