J. Wachowski - In Plain View

Jenny walked down the hall toward the room. She stopped in the doorway. Her heart was beating fast. She looked around. Empty. The room looked…ordinary in the daylight. Not the way it did at night. She took hold of the door knob, feeling calmer.

As she turned her head, she noticed it. The drawer was open.

Her mother’s picture drawer in the bedside table was hanging open. Empty. All the pictures were gone.

“What’s wrong?” Aunt Maddy asked. Like magic, her aunt was suddenly standing right behind her.

Jenny felt her body fly out in all directions at once.

“Whoa.” Aunt Maddy touched her shoulder. “Easy, kiddo. I didn’t mean to scare you. What’s up?”

Guilt stuck in Jenny’s throat. Where did the pictures go? If she told her aunt about the pictures, she’d have to tell her about being in the room. She didn’t want to talk about that.

“You haven’t been messing around in here, have you?”

“No. Not me,” Jenny answered.

She wasn’t lying. It was more like a wish.

(DR. GRAHAM ON SCREEN): “Tom Jost’s suicide might not be so surprising considering the statistics. There are patterns of inherited depression among Amish. There are patterns of depression in emergency service workers as well.”

9:55:00 a.m.

“She’s here!” Jenny called.

I heard the door open and my friend, Tonya Brown, made her usual entrance.

“Mmm, mmm. That’s what I needed this morning. How does someone so tiny give such good hugging? Your auntie awake yet?”

“She’s awake. Did you bring polish?”

“I did.”

Their feet clomped above me, then echoed on the wooden steps down into the basement.

“Hey,” I called from the treadmill.

Tonya marched over and clicked off the CNN. “Non-business hours, honey. It’s music time.” She popped a best of En Vogue CD into the player and winked at Jenny.

The first time Tonya Brown made the trip out to my little ranch was the day after my sister’s funeral. She’d brought her gym bag and my entire free weight set, scavenged from my north side apartment. The suspension on her drag-ass POS car would never be the same.

God, was I glad to see her.

Every Saturday morning since, she’d come to work out and hang out with Jenny and me. Jenny liked her, too. A lot.

Tonya was an ER nurse at County Hospital when I first met her. I’d been hired to develop a story on inner-city emergency-room medicine. It wasn’t that far from my usual material. The executive who did the hiring had used me several times that year. Maybe he liked my eye for stills, or maybe someone tipped him off that I needed down time after Afghanistan. That was the summer I drove Peg into a sidewalk mailbox near the intersection of Sheridan Road and Jonquil, two days before the Fourth of July. Kids were playing with fireworks; I thought somebody was shooting at me.

Anyway, Tonya and I hit it off. Whenever I was home for a few days, T and I got together at my apartment on Saturdays. We lifted weights in the morning, drank margaritas until dinner and spent the rest of the night in a quiet restaurant complaining about work or men, or work and men.

When my life changed, Tonya found a way to keep the healthy part of our tradition going. We still worked out on Saturday mornings, Jenny fiddling with something nearby. Lately, the two of them had bonded over hair and nails. Tonya is the only weight lifter I know who maintains her relaxed grip on the bar by virtue of three-inch fingernails. Today, they were painted electric green.

Jenny was impressed. “Tonya, could you bring the green nail polish for me next week? It’s awesome.”

“Sure, baby.” The bar clanged as she finished a set. “This girl’s got sophisticated taste, Maddy. Not everybody appreciates my green.”

Or her chartreuse unitard. Or the matching beads clackety-clacking as her extensions swung above her shoulders. Of course, only an idiot would fail to appreciate the entire package.

“Huh,” seemed a safe enough answer. I timed it to an exhale on my leg press.

Tonya twisted one elbow high beside her ear for a triceps stretch, while fishing around in her giant bag with the other arm. She grabbed a handful of something prescription level and chased it with water. “Don’t eyeball me, Maddy O’Hara. I’m clean and legal here.”

“Wouldn’t think of it.” I shifted the pin on the weight stack for my last set of reps, cleverly looking the other way. “How’s the back?”

“Oh, just shitty. Sorry, baby, don’t listen to that nasty talk.” She must have told Jenny not to listen fifty times a day. “I may have to take another promotion if it keeps acting up.”

“Why are you lifting if your back is bothering you?”

“Please,” she cut me off in her Top Administrator voice. “I’m a trained professional. Bicep curls are good for me.”

“What’s with the meds?”

“Pain slows healing.” She winked at Jenny, who was trying not to be noticed watching us. “I take a couple of these and feel no pain at all.”

When T left the ER to become Director of Nursing, part of the reason was the added challenge. Most of the reason was the disc she’d blown rolling a road worker off a bed onto a gurney. Another reason T and I were friends-she understood pushing harder than made sense.

Sweat popped everywhere as I cranked out my last two presses. I can do this. I can do this.

“I think I’ll need two coats of purple,” Jenny announced. “I like them really dark. Next time though, I want to try orange and green.”

“I think that’d be very…autumn. Now I’m going to do one more set of curls, baby, so I can still beat your auntie arm wrestling, and then we’ll see about braiding your hair. Sound good?”

Jenny gave Tonya a pressed-tight smile, the one that always seemed to me as if she was hoarding her happiness.

I swung my legs around the bench and sat up. Exhaustion hit me hard.

All Tonya had to say was, “Would you go run and get me some more water, baby?” and we had a moment to speak privately.

“Thanks for coming out today and hanging with the kid,” I offered.

“Daylight hours are no problem. It’s those midnight runs that kill me.”

“Uhn,” was the best answer I could manage.

“Any more bad nights?”

“Not since the last time I called.”

Things had calmed down since the school routine had gone into effect. Midsummer, I’d had a bad spell. I started slipping out at night when the kid was sleeping. At first, I’d walk to the mailbox and come right back. Then I went all the way to the corner and back. One night I walked all the way to the highway and back. That night, I got back just before dawn. Jenny was still sleeping peacefully.

But I knew we had a problem.

The next time I had the urge to walk away, I called Tonya after Jenny fell asleep. She came, no questions asked. I always returned before Jenny woke.

“Work’s helping?” Tonya asked.

“Yeah. Sort of.”

“Talk to me, Mad-dee.” Tonya teased my name out.

I had hung a clock on the wall across from my treadmill, so I didn’t have to feel the clock in my head while I worked out. It’s always there,:60,:30,:10, bumper, commercial, joiner. Out. How much time did we have to talk privately? Minutes, if I was lucky. I usually worked myself up to these kinds of conversations, over hours and an entire pitcher of margaritas. Another lifestyle change: pruning my emotional life into the time limit that fit around Jenny.

Tonya leaned back against the wall and patted her face with a towel, as if we had all the time in the world.

“This story I’m working on. It’s got something. At first, I was afraid it was pretty run-of-the-mill creepy sex stuff, you know. But there’s something else there.” I tried to shake it off. Make it seem less significant.