Catherine McKenzie - Hidden

“For Jeff?”

“For all of us. Do you understand?”

“Of course.”

He fiddles with his suitcase, trying to unlock the rolling handle. I click the plastic button that will release it and it springs to attention.

“Thanks,” he says, but he won’t look me in the eye.

“Hey, come here.”

I put my arms over his shoulders. He straightens up and stands immobile for a moment, then puts his arms around my waist, pulling me in.

My face is in the front of his shirt. Citrusy laundry detergent fills my nostrils. I hug him tight, counting to ten in my head, because on ten I’m going to let him go.

“I never stopped, you know,” Tim says. “Loving you.”

I step back. It’s been ten seconds.

“You don’t have to say that.”

He shakes his head. “And I wanted to tell you that, despite everything, how angry I was, how I took it out on you and Jeff, the crappy things I did, it was because I loved you. It was because I didn’t know how to be without you.”

“But you were always okay without me, Tim.”

“I wasn’t. Not really. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t understand why you wouldn’t come with me, or why you chose Jeff. I never thought he was the consolation prize. I knew he wasn’t. And I told him that.”

“Did Jeff believe you?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

I kiss him on the cheek. “Thank you.”

“What for?”

“Telling me. It…it helps, knowing that Jeff believed it. It helps a lot.”

“I’m glad I did something right.”

“More than one thing.”

He smiles and grabs the handle of his bag.

“Keep in touch,” he says.

“You too. Have a safe flight.”

He nods and walks away. I watch him until he’s in the building, then climb back into the car and start the engine.

And when I look back, he’s gone.

It’s a strange next couple of days, and given how my life’s been going recently, that’s saying something.

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.