Catherine McKenzie - Hidden

“I did?”

She looks genuinely puzzled, but I press on. “It was on his phone. A text from you.”

“What did it say?”

“I couldn’t read it. The phone’s busted,” I admit.

Her brow creases, concentrating. “I think…you know I work in HR, right?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s how we met. Jeff and I. About a year ago, he had to do HR training, and he was in my group. Afterward, when he had an issue, he’d call me. Anyway, he called me a couple of weeks ago. He had to fire someone in his department, Art somebody, I think, and he was finding it hard to do it. So I gave him some pointers. He said he’d let me know how it went. When I didn’t hear from him…I thought I sent him an email, but I guess I sent him a text.”

“How did you have his cell number?”

“From the golf retreat. We were both on the prize committee, and we had to coordinate, so he gave me his cell number.”

“So why was he texting you?”

“I…I thought you were talking about me texting him?”

“He texted you too,” I say, reaching into my bag for the cell phone bill. “This is your number, right?”

She takes the bill and looks at the three times her number appears that I’ve highlighted in yellow.

“Yes, that’s my number.”

“So he was texting you.”

“To coordinate, like I said. I…that’s right. His phone wasn’t working properly. He could text, but nothing else.”

She hands the bill back to me, and I feel my confidence slipping. I didn’t have time to go through Jeff’s other cell phone bills before I ran off to confront her. I’ve gone about this the wrong way. I’m asking questions I don’t know the answers to, breaking the first rule of cross-examination. And her lies seem to come so easily. Is there any possibility they’re the truth?

“Why were you at the funeral? Why were you so upset?”

“Someone from HR had to go. I…I volunteered. I was the only one who knew him. I thought it made sense if it was me. And I’m sorry for being such a mess. I genuinely liked Jeff, and I am sad about what happened. But also, my father died a few years ago, and that poem Seth read, Zoey wrote that about him. I have a hard time listening to it.”

Her voice catches as she says this, but she holds her tears in check. She watches me, waiting for my next question. She looks sad but in control.

The texts. The book. The funeral. I have one piece of evidence left.

I reach into my purse again and pull out the corkscrew. “What about this?”

She stares at the item in my hand as if she’s trying to figure out what it is.

“I’ve never seen that in my life.”

I’m back on my dining room floor, phone clutched in my hand, Julia on the other end of the line. Only this time, my daughter’s upstairs and my husband’s due back any minute, and I thought that the worst had happened, but now I know better.

As much as it hurt to lose Jeff, I was losing him anyway. I decided, we decided, to lose each other so we could keep this. My daughter upstairs, my husband due back any minute.

I can’t lose this. And I can’t let Jeff lose it either.

“What should I do?” I ask Julia, speaking low, as calm as can be, so Zoey isn’t alarmed again, doesn’t come to my rescue.

“Maybe she’ll leave it alone now?”

“No, I…I don’t think I convinced her. I don’t think I said enough.”

“What’s the last thing she said?”

“It’s hazy. I was in shock.”

I think I still am. And that’s what I said to Claire, after her questions had run out. We stared at each other across the room, neither of us blinking, each of us wondering what the next move was, the next thing to say. Then we could hear Zoey banging around upstairs, and I asked, I tried not to beg, Claire to leave. Said that now wasn’t a good time, my daughter had just gone through a health scare. Asked her if we could talk about this later as I was inching her up, guiding her to the front door, querying whether she needed a cab.

“You’re in shock,” I said. “You need to rest. You need to stop wondering about this. Because there’s nothing. There’s nothing.”

Claire looked at my mouth moving. Maybe she heard me, maybe she didn’t. But she seemed to have run out of words, or the energy to say them. She was doubting me, herself, Jeff. Her thoughts were a coin tossed in the air, twirling, twinkling, with a fifty-fifty chance of coming down on either side. Belief or doubt. But I couldn’t pick which one she’d choose. I only knew that I had to get her away from me, and the butterfly effect I’d had on her life. The sooner she was out of here, the better the odds were of it playing out naturally.

“She didn’t say anything. She held on to that corkscrew like it was the only thing holding her together.”

“Maybe you did all you could?”

“No. I…I have to make sure…I have to…”

“Make sure of what?”

“That she believes me. That she doesn’t leave here thinking that Jeff and I, that…”

“Because you didn’t?”

I close my eyes. I think of my promise.

“We didn’t. We couldn’t.”

“Don’t lie to me, Tish.”

“I’m not.”

“So tell her that.”

“I can’t do that. Would you want to hear that?”

Will wails in the background. The phone scrapes against Julia’s ear and I can hear her shushing him.

“Hear that my husband almost cheated on me, that he might’ve been in love with another woman, but he decided to do the honorable thing and stick by me?”

“It sounds so awful when you say it like that.”

“Is there any way to say it that doesn’t make it awful?”

“But it wasn’t like that. That’s not why—”

“For Christ’s sake, Tish. What do you want me to say?”

“I don’t know, okay? I just…need someone on my side, right now.”

She sighs. “I’m on your side. Barely, but I am.”

I pace the floor waiting for Brian to get home, trying to formulate a plan, figure out what to do. Sometimes less is more, I remember an English teacher saying in college, in a creative writing class. But this isn’t fiction. This is my life. And I’m pretty sure that more is required. More is necessary. Less isn’t going to get the job done.

And though I want to be a coward, crawl away, wait to see what the outcome might be, I can’t. Claire has enough to live with. She doesn’t need me too.

Brian finally gets home looking tired and sad, and smelling like the disinfectant that’s supposed to wash the death away but never quite does. After an hour of worrying, I have my plan ready. Julia’s not doing so well, I tell him. She’s not sleeping and Will has croup and her husband isn’t being any kind of help. I said I’d go over there, if I could. Watch Will for a few hours so she can get some sleep, keep her sanity.

Of course, Brian says. Zoey’s sleeping. He needs to sleep too. They’ll be fine without me.

I hold him close, tell him how sorry I am that things didn’t go better, that the climbers didn’t make it. I want to take the death away, but I can’t do that tonight. It will take weeks before he forgives himself, before he really believes that he did all that he could, that no one could do more.

I will give him those weeks. I will.

But first I have to do one last thing for Jeff.

This time, Claire’s the one who’s surprised when her door swings open, revealing not the room service she must’ve ordered but me.

She’s wearing one of those white terry-cloth hotel robes, and her hair is damp. The room’s nondescript, and a small red suitcase sits on the edge of her bed, a few clothes spilling out of it.

“What are you doing here?” she asks. “How did you even find me?”

“Small town. I called every hotel in the book until I found you.”

It didn’t take that long. Third time was the charm.

Her bloodshot eyes barely meet mine. “What do you want?”

“Can I come in?”

Maybe she wants to say no, slam the door in my face, but the curiosity I was counting on, the lingering doubt, makes her step back, leaving me enough space to enter the sad little room and sit down in the red fabric chair wedged into the corner.

She sits on the edge of the bed, the farthest away she can get from me in this miserable space.

She holds the top of the robe closed. “I thought we were done.”

“I’m sorry I pushed you out of my house like that. I know how it must look.”

“Really?”

“I think so. I’ve been trying to understand things from your perspective since you left. To see why you might think—”

“That you and Jeff were having an affair?”

I try not to flinch. “But we weren’t. We really weren’t.”

“How can I believe that? Of course you’re not going to admit it.”

“I’ve been thinking about that. Why would you believe me? Would I believe you if the tables were reversed?”

“Would you?”

“I don’t know. I’d want to, though. I’d like to think I know my husband well enough that whatever I found out, there’d be some reasonable explanation. I’ve been racking my brain, trying to think of a way to convince you, but proving a negative, that’s a hard thing to do. Then I thought, maybe that’s the explanation.”

“I don’t follow.”

“What I meant was, if it was true, wouldn’t it be obvious? Wouldn’t there be lots of signs and clues? More than a few tiny connections that I have with lots of people, that we all do?”

“Like?”

“Like…the book, for instance. Fifty people have that book, all with the same inscription. And the texts, they were about work.”