Catherine McKenzie: Hidden

When I get to my office at the daycare, I find Mandy Holden waiting for me, her foot tapping her impossibly high heel on the tiled floor.

“Claire, finally. I need to talk to you about something.”

I sit down at my desk. My message light is blinking angrily once again. Maybe I’ll return some calls today.

“What’s up?”

“I’ve been thinking. Have you ever considered being open on the weekends?”

“Pardon?”

“The week’s so hectic, and that’s the only time I can really get things done, and it’s hard to find reliable babysitters, so I was thinking, if you had Saturday and Sunday hours, maybe even half days, you could make a killing, right?”

I sit there watching her, speechless, no idea even where to begin.

“What do you think?”

“I think that’s the craziest idea I’ve heard in a while.”

“Come on, you won’t even consider it?”

“That’s when the staff is off. We need the weekend. I need the weekend. Surely you can understand that?”

“Oh, well, when you put it that way…”

I can tell she’s thinking that if she sits here long enough, I might cave in to her insane idea. I start moving things around my desk, adjusting a pile of paper, opening my email, giving all the social cues that a normal person would know meant “We’re done.”

But not Mandy. “What if you hired additional staff?”

I shake my head as I notice a small card-sized box sitting on the edge of my desk. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t there the last time I was in the office, but it looks vaguely familiar. I put my hand on it as Mandy watches.

“What’s that?”

“Not sure.” I pull off the lid. There’s a sticky note inside with my sister’s handwriting on it. It reads: Found this at Mom and Dad’s. I’ll do it if you will.

I pull the sticky off and underneath it is a yellowing pile of business cards. James & James—Attorneys at Law.

“Are you going to be a lawyer again?” Mandy’s voice has a note of panic. “Are you closing Playthings?”

I close the box, smiling, which I’m sure was Beth’s intention. “No, Mandy. Relax.”

“But no weekend services?”

“No.”

She sighs. “I kind of expected you’d say that.”

“Good of you to ask, though. If you don’t ask, you don’t get.”

“That’s totally what I think!”

I smile at her, my eyes drifting away, and she finally gets it. She leaves, muttering something about checking on LT one last time. I reach for the box again, lifting the lid, taking out a card, wondering if this is something I should consider, if maybe Beth was being serious.

I connect my iPod to the speakers on my desk and cue up the Mozart again. I close my eyes and listen to the pattern, the little bits of the theme scattered through the different episodes, letting the music fill me, crowd out the lingering doubts and uncertainties, smoothing out the vast rocky unhappiness that fills me.

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 confrontationswith 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.