Catherine McKenzie: Hidden

Tish reappears holding two glasses of white wine.

“In case you changed your mind,” she says, putting one of the glasses on the coffee table in front of me.

There’s a coaster next to it, and I resist the urge to move the glass onto it. I want to let the glass bleed water onto her nice mahogany, as petty as that is.

She sits across from me, cradling her wineglass in her hand, not drinking from it. She’s eyeing me like my therapist used to, waiting for me to say something.

Eventually, she does.

“I guess I’m just…really confused about why you’re here.”

“I have something to ask you.”

“Okay.”

I hesitate. In court, when you’re trying to get information out of someone, trying to get them to admit what you’re trying to prove, the better strategy is generally to ask a series of innocuous questions, laying a trap, building up to the final question so carefully that they can’t escape. But sometimes another strategy works: Ask what you want to know so directly that the witness will be shocked into telling the truth. And because I haven’t had enough time to prepare properly, this is the strategy I use.

“Were you sleeping with my husband?”

“No!”

The vehemence of her denial startles me. Startles her too, I guess, since she nearly drops her wineglass, and as it is, half of its contents spills on her leg.

She looks down at the spreading wet and pats it with her hand, as if it’s absorbent. She puts the wineglass on the floor next to her.

“Sorry…I…that’s not what I expected you to say.”

“What were you expecting?”

“I really don’t—”

“Mom? Are you all right?”

Her daughter’s standing in the doorway, looking frightened. She’s wearing her school uniform, and she looks innocent, and less confident than in her book jacket photo.

Tish rises quickly. “Didn’t I say to stay in the kitchen?”

“I thought you hurt yourself.”

“No, I…spilled something. See, nothing’s the matter.” Zoey looks at me with her pale blue eyes. I feel a stab of guilt that I’ve made this child worried somehow, but that’s her mother’s fault, not mine.

“Who’s that?” she asks.

“This is…Claire. She came to…visit for a few minutes.”

Zoey relaxes and holds out her hand. It’s stained with blue ink. “Hi, Claire. I’m Zoey.”

My hand reaches out automatically. She takes it and pumps it up and down, once, twice, a grown-up’s handshake, though I know from my Internet snooping that she’s just a year younger than Seth.

“Nice to meet you,” she says. “How do you know my mom?”

“Zoey.”

“What? I was just curious.”

“Curiosity killed the cat. Why don’t you take your homework and go up to your room? I’ll be up in a few minutes.”

“Aren’t you going to change out of your wet clothes?”

“I’ll do that after Claire leaves. Room, now, please.”

“ Oookkkaayyy. Bye, Claire.”

“Bye, Zoey.”

She leaves and pounds up the stairs, leaving an imprint on the world.

Tish comes back to her seat. “Sorry about that.”

“No, I…I know how it is. Seth’s…”

“Seth is…?”

“You know what? I don’t want to talk about him with you.”

“Because you think that Jeff and I—”

“Were sleeping together. Yes.”

“No, Claire. We weren’t. We were only friends.”

“I find that hard to believe, given everything.”

“What everything?”

I rotate through the list that’s been cycling through my brain.

“Why did he have that book? Her book?”

“Zoey’s book? That Seth read from at the funeral?”

“For starters.”

“I gave it to a lot of people. Brian, my husband, ordered so many copies—”

“Did you give it to him at the golf retreat?”

“Yes, that’s right. I brought a bunch of them with me. For the prize packs. Everyone who attended got one.”

A muscle twitches in my eye. “Why did you text him?”

“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.