Little Secrets

by Jennifer Hillier

“I don’t have all the details, but … he overdosed. And he was in there for a couple of days after he … I guess the others thought he was sleeping. They didn’t find any ID on him, but he had a tattoo on his wrist that said ‘Frances,’ and a few of the other junkies confirmed that he went by the name Tommy.”

  “When did he…” She can’t finish the sentence.

  “Two weeks ago,” Simon says. “It took that long to ID him. I guess it wasn’t a priority.”

  She can feel herself sliding down from the bed to the floor. Her ass hits the carpet soundlessly. She can barely hold the phone to her ear; it’s like her entire body has turned to jelly. Oh god. Oh Frances. Poor Frances.

  “Why didn’t Thomas call her? Why didn’t he just go home?” she says into the phone, but she and Simon both know she’s not asking this because she expects an answer. There are no answers. There are only more questions. And more pain.

  “I don’t know.” Simon’s voice cracks. “I don’t know, Marin.”

  “Where’s Frances now?”

  “She called me from the airport,” he says. “She’s on her way to Stockton. She has to go to the morgue there to make an official ID, and she’s…” His voice breaks. “She’s going to bring his body home.”

  Oh Jesus Christ. “I have to call her.”

  “She was about to board the plane when she called me, but for sure, give her a call. I’m sure she’ll appreciate hearing from you.”

  “Does Lila know?”

  “She does now. I called her in between calls to you.”

  “We need to be here for Frances when she gets back.” Marin’s brain is going in a hundred different directions. “Let’s plan to meet. She might need help planning his funeral—”

  She stops speaking, and gasps as the horror of her words hits her. Her scattered thoughts narrow into one. Just one. And then the flood is unleashed.

  The sobs she lets loose are so fast and furious, she can hardly breathe, and it feels like her stomach is convulsing. The phone slips out of her fingers and lands on the carpet beside her. She cries harder than she ever has in her life, because Frances’s terrible news feels like her terrible news, and Simon’s and Lila’s terrible news, because it’s the thing they dread learning the most from the moment they understand their child is missing. The pain is so intense, it feels like she’s cracking into pieces.

  On the other end of the line, Simon is crying as hard as she is. Because the only thing worse than not knowing is … knowing.

  “Marin? Are you there?” she hears Simon say, but she can’t speak to him. She can’t do this, she can’t process, she can’t deal. It’s all too much.

  She disconnects the call without saying goodbye. Simon will understand. He will not call back today.

  She scrambles to her feet and runs to the bathroom, where the faucet is still going, steam coming up from the tub like a hot spring. She makes it to the toilet just in time to vomit her Four Seasons breakfast into it.

  She strips off her clothes and sinks into the near-scalding hot water. The heats attacks her skin like a million pinpricks, but she welcomes it, welcomes the pain. She wants her skin to sear off, she wants to shed everything that hurts, she wants to be someone else, anyone else, because anything is better than being this, than feeling this.

  She aches for Frances. Thomas was only twenty-four. An adult, yes, but a young one, and the exact same age as Derek’s mistress.

  She sits up straight, then bolts out of the bathtub, not bothering to wrap a towel around herself. She drips water all over the tile, and then the carpet, as she reaches for her phone to text Sal.

  Call it off. With J.

  Sal replies immediately. You sure? You won’t get a refund.

  Call it off, she texts again. Right now. I’m serious.

  I’ll tell him, Sal says, and though Marin can’t hear his voice or see his face, she senses relief in his words.

  It should never have gone this far. This only confirms why she and Sal can never be together. They are not good for each other. He is the id to her ego, the devil to her angel, the magnetic force that steers her moral compass in the wrong direction.

  She may hate McKenzie Li, but McKenzie Li is someone’s child. Somebody loves her. Somebody will cry for her when she’s dead. And Marin can’t do to someone what has just been done to Frances, and what might one day be done to her.

  She returns to the bathroom and sinks back into the tub. It’s completely full, which means there’s more than enough water to drown herself.

  Chapter 22

  Of course, Marin won’t do it.

  But she thinks about it. She thinks about it all the time. She just doesn’t say it out loud, because the last time she let it slip, Derek panicked and put her in the hospital again, where she was stuck for two days until they were sure she wasn’t going to hurt herself.

  She can’t blame Derek, or the doctors. She had attempted suicide before, after all. A month after Sebastian went missing, when the FBI informed them that the search was going nowhere, she had swallowed a bottle of benzodiazepines with a bottle of wine. She doesn’t remember Derek finding her, trying to revive her, the paramedics, the ambulance ride, the stomach pump. She only remembers waking up early the next morning in a hospital room, Derek slumped in a chair in a corner, trickles of light coming in through the window blinds. Her first coherent thought was, Shit, it didn’t work.

  A few months ago, there were news reports of a child’s body found in the woods beside the dismembered remains of a young woman who wasn’t his mother. Marin was at work when she read the article, but when she got home, she started drinking immediately and waited for the phone to ring. She was certain the FBI would call to confirm that it was Sebastian. It wasn’t, thank god. But by the time the deceased’s identities were released, she had finished an entire bottle of merlot and was digging through the bathroom cabinet on Derek’s side of the vanity. She found what she was looking for—a brand-new package of razor blades meant for her husband’s Merkur safety razor, hidden under a pile of old rags—and was just about to tear it open when Derek came home.

  He walked into the bathroom just as she was shoving the pack of razors back into the cabinet. If he noticed she was drunk, he didn’t comment on it; all he did was ask her if she was okay. He’d seen the same news reports she had. His day had been rough, as well. They spoke for a few minutes, their shared horror at the news reports briefly uniting them after months of disconnect.

  Derek had saved Marin a second time that night. He just didn’t know it.

  This is her life now. It’s made up of good moments, terrible moments, and all the numbness in between.

  Her skin is pink like a newborn baby’s when she gets out of the bath thirty minutes later. After wrapping herself in a terrycloth robe, she makes the call she’s been dreading, the one she’d rather do anything else than make.

  She exhales when it goes straight to voice mail, as she anticipated it would. She isn’t sure she can stay strong speaking to Frances right now. Marin leaves a message, asking her to call back whenever she feels up to it.

  “I love you,” Marin says into the dead air of Frances’s voice mail. “I’m here for you, for whatever you need, day or night. I’m so sorry, Frances. I am so, so sorry.”

  She ends the call, feeling as helpless as she’s ever felt. But offering support is all she can do. It’s all anyone can do. Nobody could possibly understand the unique cocktail of emotions that Frances is feeling right now, that probably change minute to minute. Nobody knows what she truly needs. There’s no how-to manual for this shit.

  Marin tosses her phone onto the bed. The razor blades are still buried under the rags in the cabinet. She could get back into the tub. She could.

  But she won’t. There are other ways she can hurt herself.

  Still in her robe, she takes her laptop from the charger and sits on the bed, logging in to a site she hasn’t looked at in a while. She’s not supposed to. She promised Dr. Chen she wouldn’t. She c
ould go to prison. The dark net is illegal, and there’s a reason it takes a bunch of rerouting and passwords, and more rerouting and more passwords, before you can get to the sites where the children are.

  Sebastian has a small, dark pink birthmark the shape of a crescent on his right inner thigh. In the months after his disappearance, Marin became obsessed with searching for it online, scrolling through picture after terrible picture, looking for any evidence that her son might be one of these children. She never found him, but in the process of searching, pieces of herself were destroyed. No human can look at photographs like these without parts of themselves dying.

  This is a place meant only for monsters.

  But she needed to look. She was compelled to look. If her son was one of these horrifically abused children, the least she could do was see.

  The more she looked, the more she drank. The more she drank, the more pills she took. This went on for months, up until her last therapy appointment, when she’d finally confessed her secret to Dr. Chen. He’d reacted strongly to her admission about her dark net activity.

  “If you ever feel you need to look, you must take a moment and ask yourself what’s causing you to feel this way,” her therapist said. “And accept that it’s your anxiety lying to you, telling you that you need to do this in order to feel a sense of control over a situation that’s wholly out of your control. Anxiety can be very convincing. Don’t believe what it’s telling you. Because looking at these images won’t help your anxiety, Marin. It will only make it much, much worse. What you’ve been doing is an act of self-harm, and I am very, very concerned.”

  Dr. Chen is half right. Anxiety does lie. But the situation isn’t out of Marin’s control, and as her computer finds its way, she examines her hands. Hands that look normal; hands that are strong; hands that can wield sharp shears, turning hair into something beautiful; hands that can cook, clean, hold, squeeze, caress, and show love; hands that gesture when she’s emotional; hands that protect.

  Hands that let go of her little boy in a busy, crowded market on the Saturday before Christmas.

  She’s thought about the horrors that were likely to have befallen Sebastian in the hours after he was led away by Santa Claus. She’s read the stats, and she knows that children his age—if they’re not found within twenty-four hours—are likely to be dead. And if they’re not, surely there are more horrors awaiting.

  It’s Marin’s fault. All of it. Including everything that’s come after. Her goddamned hands. She’d been tempted to slice them off a few nights ago, but then Derek came home with an anniversary card, and asked if they could try again.

  “You came home,” was all she’d managed to say.

  “I always come home,” her husband said. “And I always will come home.”

  Derek has never punished her for grieving the way she grieves. Maybe she shouldn’t punish him for grieving the way he grieves.

  The thoughts never leave her, though. But they’re only thoughts, and she’s better at keeping them to herself; otherwise, people become concerned and feel the need to intervene for fear that she might self-harm due to her fragile emotional health.

  After her hospital stay, she promised Derek she would never try it again. And at her last appointment with Dr. Chen, she promised her therapist she would no longer visit these sites.

  She’s going to break one of those promises now.

  She starts scrolling, searching for the birthmark, the crescent. Searching for her son. She doesn’t know these children, but she cries for them, she cries for their mothers, and later, she’ll cry herself to sleep.

  Sometimes, in her dreams, Sebastian is with a new family. Some poor woman who was desperate to have children took him from the market and is raising him with all the love that Marin and Derek would have given him. And with every passing day, Sebastian forgets about them, about Marin, and he grows to love his new mother. He is fine, he is safe, he is whole.

  And sometimes, in her dreams, Sebastian is screaming for her. And no matter what Marin does, she can never get to him in time. Her little boy simply vanishes, like a puff of air, there one moment, gone the next, snatched by a face she can’t see and brought to a dark place where the monsters hide.

  “See? There are no monsters in Mommy’s house,” she had once said reassuringly to her son when she finished reading him The Monster at the End of This Book. It was one of her favorites as a child, and it stars lovable Grover from Sesame Street, who’s terrified about a monster he’s certain will appear at the end of the book, only to discover that the monster is actually himself. “And just because someone looks like a monster doesn’t mean he is.”

  And just because someone doesn’t, doesn’t mean he isn’t.

  If Marin ever gets the call that Frances got, she will kill herself. She’s made a lot of promises to a lot of people.

  This is the one she’s made to herself.

  Chapter 23

  When she gets to work the next morning, there’s a voice mail on her phone from Vanessa Castro.

  Marin’s first instinct is to drop everything and call Derek at work, so they can find out the horrible news together, but then she remembers. Derek still doesn’t know about the private investigator. In hindsight, the distance in their marriage might not all be coming from him. Marin is full of secrets, too.

  She needs a minute to gather herself before calling the PI back, and she shuts the door to her office so nobody will disturb her. She thinks about dinner the night before. When Derek got home after work, there were no steaks on the counter ready for grilling, no Brussels sprouts roasting in the oven. He came upstairs to find her sitting on the bed staring at her laptop, and he watched without comment when she slammed it shut. He didn’t ask what she was looking at. He took one look at her hollow, tearstained face and seemed to understand instantly that his wife was having a rough evening. He didn’t ask why, because he knew why, even if he didn’t know the details.

  Instead, he gave her a kiss on the cheek. “Indian, Greek, or Thai?”

  “You pick,” she said. She was about to apologize for forgetting the steaks, but he was on the phone calling for takeout before she got the chance.

  Vanessa Castro never just calls. The PI always emails first so they can agree on a time to speak. These days, nobody likes it when the phone rings out of the blue; it feels intrusive, which is why nobody bothers with a landline anymore. A landline can do only one thing—ring.

  The PI only spoke five words in her voice mail: “It’s Vanessa. Call me. Thanks.”

  She thinks of Frances. Oh god. Taking a deep breath, she makes the call.

  “It’s Marin,” she says, when the PI picks up.

  “Hi,” Castro says. “Sorry to call out of the blue.”

  “Just tell me.”

  “It’s not about Sebastian,” the other woman says, and every part of Marin’s body sags with relief at those four words. “Oh, shit. I should have explained that in my message. I’m sorry, Marin, I was distracted. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “It’s okay.” It isn’t really, but it will be, once Marin’s heart returns to its normal rhythm and she can breathe again. “What’s going on?”

  “McKenzie Li,” Castro says. Hearing the name makes Marin sit up straighter. “Are you aware that she’s missing?”

  Missing? Sharp inhale. Her heart rate picks up again.

  “Missing?” Marin repeats, trying to inject the right note of confusion into her voice, trying to react as if she didn’t potentially have something to do with it. But she couldn’t have—she’d changed her mind about Julian, so why the hell would the younger woman be missing? “What … what do you mean?”

  “I’ve been keeping loose tabs on her…” Castro does sound distracted, like she’s following a train of thought that’s much further along than what they’re currently discussing, and maybe reading through something on her computer at the same time. “I know you said you were handling it, but I’d already started digging and I just wanted
to keep going for a little bit…”

  Marin closes her eyes. Shit shit shit. “Right…”

  “… and a few hours ago her roommate posted something on Facebook about her being missing.”

  Marin realizes she’s holding her breath again, and she forces herself to exhale. She has to say something, and she doesn’t know how to respond. Her heart is thumping wildly in her chest, and she thanks god Castro isn’t telling her this in person, because she’s certain the guilt is written all over her face. “When … when did this happen?”

  “It seems she’s been gone for two nights,” the PI says. “Which is long enough to concern her roommate, because they apparently had dinner plans last night.”

  “We … Derek and I just got back from Whistler yesterday. We were out of town for the weekend.”

  “Yes, I saw that on your Instagram,” Castro says absently. Her words give Marin another jolt. The private investigator she hired checks her Instagram? “I wasn’t checking up on you,” she adds, as if reading Marin’s mind. “I happened to check this morning because I saw the Facebook post McKenzie’s roommate made, and I wanted a quick way to verify where Derek was, in the chance that they might be together. But they weren’t, because he was with you.”

  “That’s right.” Marin is hesitant. She can’t seem to figure out where the PI is going with this, and she’s still trying to process that the woman thinks Derek’s mistress—former mistress—is missing.

  And what exactly does she mean by missing? Missing as in McKenzie took off, didn’t feel like telling anyone, and no one can verify where she is? Or missing like she’s dead in a ditch somewhere, because Julian got to her before Sal could get to him?

  “Derek has been with me,” Marin says. “We’ve been … working on things.” She takes another breath. “Are you thinking he had something to do with—”

  “No, no,” Castro says, and her voice sounds more present. “Not at all. But with McKenzie missing, this makes two people in your husband’s life that have disappeared. Which makes him the common denominator.”