Little Secrets (ARC)

by Jennifer Hillier

  —Mary Oliver

  Chapter 2

  They say if a missing child Sebastian’s age isn’t found within twenty-four hours of his disappearance, chances are he never will be.

  This is the first coherent thought Marin Machado has every morning when she wakes up.

  The second thought is whether this will be the day she’ll kill herself.

  Sometimes the thoughts dissipate by the time she’s out of bed and in the shower, obliterated by the steaming water bursting out of the showerhead. Sometimes they dissipate by the time she’s finished her coffee and is driving to work. But sometimes they stay with her all day, like whispering, ominous clouds in the background of her mind, a soundtrack she can’t shut off. On those days, she might pass as normal from the outside, just a regular person having regular conversations with the people around her. Internally, there’s a whole other dialogue going on.

  This happened just the other morning, for instance. Marin showed up at her downtown salon wearing a pink Chanel shift dress she’d found at the back of her closet, still in its dry-cleaning plastic. She was looking pretty fabulous when she walked into work, and her receptionist, a young blonde with an impeccable sense of style, noticed.

  “Good morning, Marin,” Veronique called out with a bright smile. “Look at you, rocking that dress. You look like a million bucks.”

  Marin returned the receptionist’s smile as she walked through the elegant waiting room to her private office in the back of the salon. “Thanks, V. Forgot I had it. How’s the schedule looking?”

  “Fully booked,” Veronique said in a singsong voice, the same one all morning people seemed to have.

  Marin nodded and smiled again, heading to her office, all the while thinking, Maybe today is the day. I’ll take the shears—not the new ones I used on Scarlett Johansson last summer, but the old ones I used on J.Lo five years ago, the ones that have always felt best in my hand—and I’ll stab them into my neck, right where I can see my pulse. I’ll do it in front of the mirror in the bathroom, so that I don’t screw it up. Yes, definitely the bathroom, it’s the easiest place for them to clean up; the tile is slate, the grout is dark, and the bloodstains won’t show.

  She didn’t do it. Clearly.

  But she thought about it. She thinks about it. Every morning. Most evenings. Occasional afternoons.

  Today, thankfully, is starting out as a better day, and the thoughts that attacked her when Marin first woke up are beginning to fade. They’re fully gone by the time her alarm goes off. She switches the beside lamp on, grimacing at the foul taste in her mouth from the entire bottle of red wine she drank the night before. She takes a long sip of water from the glass she keeps by the bed, swishing it around her dry mouth, then unplugs her phone from the charger.

  One new message. You alive?

  It’s Sal, of course, and it’s his usual text, the one he sends every morning if he hasn’t already heard from her. To anyone else, a text like this might be considered insensitive. But it’s Sal. They go back a long way and share the same dark sense of humor, and she’s thankful she still has one person in her life who doesn’t feel the need to tiptoe around her precious feelings. She’s also fairly certain that Sal’s the only person in the world who doesn’t secretly think she’s a piece of shit.

  She replies with numb fingers, eyes still bleary, head pounding from the hangover. Barely, she texts back. It’s her usual response, brief, but it’s all he needs. He’ll check on her again around bedtime. Sal knows bedtimes and mornings are the worst for her, when she’s least able to deal with the reality that is now her life.

  Beside her, the bed is empty. The pillow is still perfect and the sheets are still flat. Derek didn’t sleep here last night. He’s out of town on business, again. She has no idea when he’s coming back. He forgot to tell her yesterday when he left, and she forgot to ask.

  It’s been four hundred eighty-five days since she lost Sebastian.

  This means she’s had four hundred eighty-five evenings where she hasn’t bathed her son, put him in clean pajamas, tucked him into bed, and read him Goodnight Moon. She’s had four hundred eighty-five mornings of waking up to a quiet house devoid of laughter and stomping feet, and no calls of “Mommy, wipe!” emanating from the hallway bathroom, because while he was fully potty trained, he was only four, still learning how to handle his own basic hygiene.

  Four hundred eighty-five days of this nightmare.

  Panic sets in. She takes a minute and does the deep-breathing exercises her therapist taught her until the worst of it passes and she can function. Nothing about anything feels normal anymore, but she’s better at faking it than she used to be. For the most part, she’s stopped scaring people. She’s been back at work for four months now. The routine of work has been good for her; it gets her out of the house, gives structure to her day, and gives her something to think about other than Sebastian.

  Swinging her legs over the side of the bed, she winces as a sharp pain stabs her in the temple. She downs her Lexapro and a multivitamin with what’s left of her lukewarm water, and is in the shower within five minutes. Forty-five minutes later, she’s out of the bathroom, fully dressed, makeup on, hair clean and styled. She feels better. Not great—her child is still missing and it’s still totally her fault—but she does have moments when she doesn’t feel like she’s dangling by a rapidly unraveling thread. This is one of them. She counts it as a win.

  The day passes quickly. Four haircuts, a double process, a balayage, and a staff meeting, which she attends but Sadie leads. She promoted Sadie to general manager with a huge salary bump right after she had the baby, and Sadie now runs the day-to-day operations for all three salons. Marin could hardly stand to lose Sadie before everything happened with Sebastian; afterward, the thought was unfathomable. Marin needed to stay home and fall apart, which she did, for months, until Derek and her therapist suggested it was time to come back to work.

  She still oversees everything—the company is, after all, Marin’s—but mainly she’s moved back to the salon floor, cutting and coloring hair for a select group of longtime clients known internally as VIPs. They’re all absurdly wealthy. More than a few are minor celebrities, and they pay six hundred dollars an hour to have their hair done personally by Marin Machado of Marin Machado Salon & Spa.

  Because once upon a time, she was somebody. Her work has been featured in Vogue, Allure, Marie Claire. It used to be cool to be Marin Machado. You could google her name and photos of the three biggest celebrity Jennifers—Lopez, Lawrence, and Aniston—would come up, all women she’s worked on personally—but now articles about her work take a back seat to news reports about Sebastian’s disappearance. The massive search that went nowhere. Complaints about the special treatment she and Derek received from the cops because Derek is a somebody, too, and they’re an affluent couple with connections, a friendship with the chief of police (which was vastly overstated—they barely know the woman outside of seeing her at a few charity events over the years), and rumors that Marin tried to kill herself.

  Now she’s a cautionary tale.

  It was Sadie’s idea to put her back on the floor. Doing hair is good for Marin. It’s something she enjoys, and there’s no place she feels more herself than behind the chair, mixing colors and painting strands and wielding shears. Hairstyling is the perfect blend of craft and chemistry, and she’s good at it.

  In her chair right now is woman named Aurora, a longtime client who’s married to a retired Seattle Mariner. Her naturally brunette hair is going gray, and she’s been transitioning to blond for the past few appointments. Aurora is requesting face-framing platinum blond highlights that look “beachy,” but her hair is dry, fine, and aging. Marin decides to hand-paint the highlights in with a low-strength bleach mixed with bond rebuilder. When the woman’s hair lightens to a shade of pale yellow similar to the inside of a banana peel—a processing time that can take anywhere from ten to twenty-five minutes, depending on a hundred different factors—M
arin rinses and applies a violet toner, which she leaves on for no more than three minutes, to create that perfect white-blond look the client is hoping for.

  This process is complicated, but it’s something Marin can control. It’s extremely important for her to do things with predictable outcomes. Her first week back to work, she realized she’d have been better off coming back to the salon sooner, rather than spend all that time in therapy.

  “So? What do you think?” she asks Aurora now, moving a few locks of her client’s hair around before misting the strands with a flexible-hold hairspray.

  “It’s perfect, as usual.” It’s what Aurora always says, because she never seems to know what to say to Marin anymore. In the past, Aurora was very vocal about what she liked and didn’t like about her hair. But since Marin’s returned to work, Aurora has only showered her stylist with compliments.

  Marin watches her client closely for signs of displeasure, but Aurora seems genuinely pleased, turning her head this way and that so she can see the highlights from different angles. She gives Marin a satisfied smile in the mirror. “I love it. Great job.”

  Marin accepts the praise with a nod and a smile, removes the woman’s cape, and walks her over to the reception desk where Veronique is waiting to cash her out. She offers Aurora a brief hug, and the woman accepts, grasping her a little too tightly.

  “You’re doing great, honey, keep hanging in there,” Aurora whispers, and automatically Marin feels claustrophobic. She murmurs a thank you in return, and is relieved when the woman finally lets go.

  “Taking off?” her receptionist asks her a few minutes later, when she sees Marin come out of the office with her coat and purse.

  Marin peeks at the receptionist’s computer to check the next day’s bookings. Only three appointments in the afternoon, which, after her therapy appointment in the morning, leaves a couple of hours before lunch for administrative stuff. She doesn’t technically have to do any of it, but she feels bad for dumping so much of it on Sadie.

  “Tell Sadie I’ll be here in the morning,” Marin says, checking her phone. “Have a good night, V.”

  She heads to her car, and is starting the ignition when a text from Sal comes in. These days, he seems to be the only person who can coax a smile out of her that doesn’t make her feel like she’s doing it out of politeness or obligation.

  Come by the bar, he texts. I’m all alone with a bunch of college shits who don’t realize there are beers other than Budweiser.

  Can’t, she replies. On my way to group.

  Fine, Sal texts. Then come by when you’re done self-flagellating. I miss your face.

  She’s tempted to say yes, because she misses him, too, but she’s always drained after group. Maybe, she types, not wanting to say no. You know how tired I get. I’ll let you know.

  Fair enough, he writes back. But I invented a new cocktail I want you to try—mojito with a splash of grenadine and pineapple. I’m calling it the Hawaii 5-0.

  Sounds disgusting, she texts back, smiling. She’s rewarded with a GIF of a man giving her the middle finger, which makes her snort.

  Sal doesn’t ask where Derek is tonight. He never does.

  It’s a fifteen-minute drive to SoDo, the area of Seattle known as “south of downtown.” By the time she pulls into the parking lot of the dilapidated plaza where group takes place, she’s sad again. Which is fine, because this is probably the one place in the entire world where she can feel as miserable as she needs to, without feeling the need to apologize for it, while still not necessarily being the most miserable person in the room. Not even therapy is like that. Therapy is a safe space, certainly, but there’s still judgment involved, and an unspoken expectation that she’s there to get better.

  This meeting tonight, on the other hand, forces no such pretense. The Support Group for Parents of Missing Children—Greater Seattle is a fancy name for a bunch of people with one terrible thing in common: they all have missing kids. Sal described going to group as an act of self-flagellation. He isn’t wrong. Some nights, that’s exactly what it is, which is exactly what she needs.

  One year, three months, and twenty-two days ago was the worst day of her life, when Marin did the worst thing she will ever do. It was nobody’s fault but hers; she has nobody to blame but herself.

  If she hadn’t been texting, if she hadn’t let go of Sebastian’s hand, if they’d gone to the candy store earlier, if she hadn’t dragged him to the bookstore, if she had looked up from her phone sooner, if if if if if . . .

  Her therapist says she has to stop fixating on that day, that it’s not helpful to replay every second again and again in her head, as if some new detail will magically present itself. He says she needs to find a way to process what happened and move through it, which doesn’t mean she’s letting Sebastian go. It would mean she’d be living a productive life despite what happened, despite the thing she let happen, despite what she’s done.

  Marin thinks he’s full of shit. Which is why she doesn’t want to see him anymore. All she wants to do is fixate on it. She wants to continue picking at the wound. She doesn’t want it to heal, because if it heals, that means it’s over, and her little boy is lost forever. It boggles her mind that nobody seems to understand that.

  Except for the people at group.

  She stares up at the aging yellow sign of the donut shop, which is a shade somewhere between mustard and lemon. It’s always lit. If someone had told her last year that she’d be here once a month to spend time with a group of people she hadn’t even met yet, she wouldn’t have believed it.

  There are a lot of things she wouldn’t have believed.

  Her keys slip out of her hands, and she manages to catch them before they land in a dirty parking lot puddle. And that’s what life is these days, isn’t it? A series of slips and catches, mistakes and remorse, a constant juggling act of pretending to feel okay when all she wants to do is fall apart.

  One day, all those balls will drop, and they won’t just break.

  They’ll shatter.

  Chapter 3

  The FBI estimates that there are currently over thirty thousand active missing persons cases for children.

  It’s an alarmingly high number, and yet somehow, being the parent of a missing child is weirdly isolating. Unless it’s happened to you, you can’t possibly understand the unique nightmare of not knowing where your child is, and whether he’s alive or dead. Marin needs to be around people who get this specific brand of hell. She needs a safe place to dump out all her fears so she can examine and dissect them, knowing the others in the room are doing the exact same thing.

  She asked Derek to attend the group meetings with her, but he declined. Talking about feelings wasn’t his thing to begin with, and he refuses to discuss Sebastian. Any time anyone mentions their son, he shuts down. It’s the emotional equivalent of playing dead; the more you show concern for Derek’s well-being, the less he’ll react, until you give up and leave him alone. He even does this with Marin. Maybe especially with Marin.

  A little under a year ago, when she first started attending group, there were seven people. The meetings took place in the basement of St. Augustine Church. The group is now down to four and has since moved to the back of this donut shop. An odd choice of location, but the woman who owns Big Holes is the mother of a missing child.

  The name Big Holes should be funny, but Frances Payne does not have much of a sense of humor. One of the first things she said when she met Marin was that Big Holes wasn’t a bakery, since it only made two things consistently: coffee and donuts. Calling it a bakery, she insisted, suggested a level of pastry skill that she doesn’t have. Frances is in her early fifties but looks seventy, the lines in her face so deeply etched, it’s like looking at a relief map. Her son, Thomas, went missing when he was fifteen. He went to a party one night where everyone was underage, drinking, and doing drugs. The next morning, he was gone. Nobody remembers him leaving the party. Nothing was left behind. Just gone. Frances
is a single mom and Thomas was all she had. His disappearance happened nine years ago.

  Lila Figueroa is the youngest member at thirty-four. She’s a mother of three, a dental hygienist, and married to Kyle, a pediatric dentist. Together, they have two toddler boys. The child who’s missing is Devon, her eldest son, from a previous relationship. He was picked up from school one day by his biological father, who did not have custody, and was never seen or heard from again. This happened three years ago, when Devon was ten, and the last place he and his father were spotted was Santa Fe, New Mexico. Though Devon isn’t a victim of stranger abduction, his father is abusive, Lila has said. When Devon was a baby, his father burned their son’s leg on the stove on purpose when he wouldn’t stop crying, which is the primary reason she took Devon and left.

  Simon Polniak is the only father in their little group. He manages a Toyota dealership in Woodinville and every few months pulls up in whatever new car he’s demo-ing. He and his wife, Lindsay, used to come to group together, but they divorced six months ago. She kept the Labradoodle, and Simon kept group. He likes to joke that she got the better end of that deal. Their daughter, Brianna, was thirteen when she was lured away from home by a stranger on the internet, someone who’d pretended to be a sixteen-year-old boy named Travis. The investigation showed Travis to be a twenty-nine-year-old part-time electronics warehouse employee who still lived with his parents, and when Brianna disappeared, so did he. This was four years ago, and neither has been heard from since.

  Every first Tuesday of the month, the four of them meet in a small room at the back of Big Holes. Occasionally someone new will find them—Frances keeps a Facebook page, and there’s a sign on the St. Augustine Church bulletin board and on their website, and the group is searchable online—but they don’t always stick around. Group meetings, especially this group, aren’t for everyone.

  Tonight, there’s someone new. Frances introduces her as Jamie—no last name, at least not yet. When Marin enters the back room, it’s clear by Jamie’s body language that whatever her situation is, it’s fresh. Her eyes are puffy, her cheeks hollow, her hair damp from a shower that she probably forced herself to take before leaving the house. Her clothes hang on her like she’s recently lost weight. It’s hard to tell how old she is, but Marin is guessing late thirties. Her Coach bag sits on the floor beside her, and her Michael Kors–sandaled feet are bobbing up and down. She looks like the kind of woman who’d normally have a pedicure, but she doesn’t have one now. Her toenails are long, unpainted.