Catherine McKenzie - Hidden

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.

I cross to the bed where my laptop is sitting. I insert the USB key, click it open, and highlight the emails, my hand hovering over the Delete key. Erasing these will be like erasing part of myself, but I count to three quickly and do it. I pull the Band-Aid off. It stings, I’ll have moments of regret, but everyone has regrets.

Then I open my email, go to the draft section, find the email I wrote weeks ago, right after we imposed the deadline. It’s entitled, simply, Good-bye.

It contains the only poem I wrote about us, the one I read to myself on the plane ride to his funeral. It’s not any good. It’s not anything I would’ve published in any circumstances. But when the words come, and they come rarely now, I write them down. And when it came time to write this email, something I felt like I had to do in advance as part of my preparation, I thought of it and typed it out.

They’re the words I wanted to try to leave with Jeff at his funeral. The words no one but the two of us should see.

My hand hesitates. Shifting between wanting to send the email and erasing it. But I know what I have to do.

I hit Delete.

I have promises to keep.

And I will keep them, always.

Turns out that Tish’s room wasn’t just on the same floor as mine, it was next to mine. We shared a wall, and that Saturday night, after the maybe-okay-she-probably-was-flirting-with-me dinner partner, and too many glasses of wine, I lay on my back in bed listening to her move around her room: the TV turning on; her smashing into something and swearing loudly; running the water for a bath.

I turned on my own TV then. I had willpower, and I was exercising it, but every man has his limits.

When I was about to drift off into a wine-fueled sleep, I heard her door open. I sprang from my bed and pressed my eye against the peephole, fast enough to catch her walking past, her hair wet, wearing the kind of loose cotton clothing one might wear as pajamas, hugging a blanket to her chest.

I pulled on my jeans and a sweatshirt, grabbed the bottle of wine I stole and the corkscrew from the prize pack. I almost forgot my room key, but remembered it right before my door clanged shut. Key in my pocket, I walked in my bare feet down the hall to the elevator.

Tish was nowhere to be found.

I waited thirty seconds for the elevator, and then I was in the empty bright lobby with one person behind the desk. Was I imagining it, or were the front doors still rattling in their hinges?

Outside, my eyes adjusted to the night, searching for movement. There. Something white in the dark, moving away quickly, a determined destination.

I followed her. I tried to walk casually, to make sure I didn’t spook her like a deer in the woods. She was heading toward the golf course. The sky was clear and full of stars, the air damp from the irrigation system, the grass wet and slick against my tender feet. The moon was rising in a sliver.

She walked through the first tee-box. She seemed to be almost running away, or maybe I imagined that because in this moment it felt like we were running away together.

She stopped on the other side of the ladies’ tee on the second hole and spread her blanket along the slope.

Then she whirled around and spoke into the night. “Why are you following me?”

I thought she sounded afraid.

“It’s me,” I tried to reassure her. “It’s Jeff.”

“I know who it is.”

“Oh, sorry, I—”

“No, it’s okay. You’re here now.”

She sat on the blanket. I hesitated for a moment, then followed her, setting the wine bottle down next to me. The corkscrew dug into my thigh, but I left it there.

“What are you doing out here?” I asked.

“Told you. Conjunction.” She pointed to the sky. “See that bright star near the crescent? That’s Venus.” I nodded. “Now look left. That fainter star’s Jupiter.”

“Neat.”

“Don’t make fun of me.”

“I’m not. Truly.”

She turned toward me. In the darkness I couldn’t tell if her face was registering annoyance or if she was trying to gauge my seriousness.

“I mean it,” I said. “Tell me more.”

She lay down, her legs straight below her, her arms at her sides. “If we had a telescope or binoculars, we could see Mercury too. And in a couple of months, Venus is going to traverse the sun, like an eclipse, and that’s really rare. It only happens twice every hundred years or so. Not again in our lifetime.”

I chuckled.

“What?”

“Nothing. You’re cute.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“I don’t mean it in a bad way. I like how enthusiastic you are about things.”

“I talk too much.”

“I like listening to you talk.”

“Okay,” she said, but then she fell silent while we watched the black sky and the bright stars.

I lay there, listening to her breathing, feeling the world spin underneath us, tilting as all the wine I’d drunk refused to release its grip.

After a while, I heard her shifting. I looked over. She was on her side, facing me, her hands tucked under the side of her face, her knees pulled up.

“This is…nice,” she said.

I moved so my position mirrored her own. “It is. It really is.”

“I’m glad I came.”

“Me too.”

I reached out and stroked the side of her face. She made a small noise—a gasp—but didn’t pull away. Her skin was soft and my brain was fuzzy, and the only thing I could think of was how her lips would taste.

I kissed her. Hungrily. Slowly. Her lips. Her face. Her neck.

I kissed her.

And she kissed me back.

Afterward, we lay wrapped in the blanket, our clothes scattered around us, loose limbed, our tastes mixed together, mixing with the night, mixing with the stars. Our foreheads were touching, our mouths inches apart, then together again, small kisses, resting against each other. My thumb rubbed little circles into the small of her back, and her hands rested on my waist, holding me inside her. She was warm, so warm, and the small beat of her pulse kept me hard enough to stay in place.