Little Secrets (ARC)

by Jennifer Hillier

  “Four eggs? I thought you didn’t eat breakfast.”

  “I normally don’t,” Frances says. “But I was so hungry. And afterward, I went back upstairs, took a long shower, and sobbed like a baby. Did the whole ugly cry, and you guys know I’m not a crier. I stayed in the shower so long, the water started coming out cold.”

  “Oh, Frances . . .” Marin says, but her friend isn’t looking at her. She’s staring down at the hand-rolled joint, which she’s smoked nearly down to the end. “You lost your son. What else are you supposed to do? How else are you supposed to feel?”

  Frances looks up. “The thing is, Marin, I wasn’t crying because I felt sad. Not that I’m not sad,” she adds, searching Marin’s face for any sign of judgment. She won’t find any. “Of course I’m sad. I’m devastated. But I cried because I felt . . . guilty.”

  “About what?”

  “For feeling so goddamned relieved.” She looks down again. “Because it’s over. I finally know where my son is. Isn’t that awful? Isn’t that the worst thing you could ever hear a mother say? My son is in a casket, and I’m relieved to know he’s in there. I mean, what the hell, Marin? How terrible is that? I’m burying him tomorrow. I’m putting my son in the ground. How can I be feeling anything but grief?”

  Marin reaches for Frances’s hand. It’s as cold as her own, the skin paper-thin over the woman’s knobby knuckles.

  “But it’s over,” Frances says. “I may not have all the questions answered, but at least I don’t have to wait for him to come home anymore. I’ve had these back issues for the past decade—”

  “I know, you’ve been seeing a chiropractor.”

  “—and this morning, when I woke up, I didn’t need a pain pill. I needed food. My back feels better than it has in years. It’s like there’s nothing to be afraid of now. Ever since Thomas disappeared, I’ve been waiting for that phone call, that knock on the door, from someone who was going to tell me that my son is dead. I’ve dreamt about it and I’ve dreaded it and I’ve been terrified of it, as if the news was like a bogeyman that was going to jump out and get me at any moment. But in that fear, there’s hope.”

  Marin nods. She understands completely.

  “And that hope is why you can’t run from it. That hope is what keeps you stuck inside the emotional nothingness of waiting, where you can’t move forward and you can’t go back. All you can do is spin in place because there’s no sense of direction, because you don’t know . . .”

  She stops, choking on her words, and Marin sees that her friend’s eyes are wet. The sight of Frances crying actual tears is jarring.

  “And now it’s over,” Frances says. “It’s not the answer I wanted, but it was always the answer I was going to get.”

  The words cut, and Marin winces.

  “I’m sorry, Marin.” Frances’s voice is hoarse. She tosses the burnt-out stub of her joint onto the pavement and reaches for Marin’s other hand. “I know that’s incredibly insensitive of me to say. Especially to you. I’m not at all suggesting that this is what you can expect with Sebastian, it’s just . . . this is how it feels right now. To me.”

  “Don’t you dare apologize,” Marin says, not wanting to add to her friend’s pain by admitting her own. “You feel how you feel, and you should be able to express it. God knows you’ve been through enough.”

  Frances squeezes both her hands. “I don’t wish this on you, do you understand?” Her voice is urgent, compelling Marin to look her directly in the eyes. “I don’t wish this on you, or Simon, or Lila, or on anybody inside that room”—she jerks her head toward the back door—“whose child is still out there. This isn’t the outcome I prayed for.”

  “I know that. I do.”

  “But Marin, I’m grateful.” Frances takes a long, deep breath. “I’m so grateful that the nightmare of not knowing is over. And now I feel . . . I feel . . .”

  Frances starts sobbing again, collapsing against her, and Marin takes her in her arms and starts sobbing, too, crying for her friend’s loss and her grief and her guilt, and for her own loss and her own grief and her own guilt, crying because she loves Frances, and she feels her, and she feels for her.

  “What do you feel?” Marin whispers, holding the other woman tightly, stroking her hair. “Tell me.”

  “Free.” Frances chokes the word out, and then she sobs again. “I feel free.”

  Marin holds her for a while longer, until Simon comes looking for them and it’s time to go back inside. And all Marin can think, as she watches her grieving friend circulate around the small donut shop, making sure her guests have sandwiches and vegetables and donuts and coffee, is that she resents the other woman for saying it. Marin resents her for feeling it, for confessing it, and for it being true.

  Frances is free.

  Marin is jealous, and she hates herself for it.

  Chapter 26

  For about four or five seconds, first thing in the morning, Marin doesn’t remember. Everything feels normal, like it would for any other person rousing from sleep.

  And then it hits her. And it’s like losing him all over again. The pain is intense, paralyzing, the pressure bearing down on her chest, threatening to snap bones and pulverize muscles, squishing the life out of her because she dared to do something as simple and natural as wake up.

  Marin opens her eyes and fixes her gaze on a spot on the ceiling. Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale. After a dozen or so breaths, the pain in her chest subsides.

  It’s been four hundred ninety-three days.

  Rolling over, she reaches for the phone to check the text that woke her. You alive?

  She replies to Sal with sleep-numb fingers—Good morning—then puts the phone back on the nightstand.

  She’ll never understand how Sal can run a bar and wake up earlier than she does, but he’s never needed much sleep. Back in college, they’d often crawl into bed together at two a.m., horny and drunk, the alcohol in his system having zero effect on his ability to perform sexually. The next morning, she’d wake up to the smell of frying bacon and scrambled eggs as he made breakfast for the two of them. It was the opposite of Marin, who functions best on a full eight hours—nine, ideally—and who hasn’t had an unmedicated sleep in four hundred ninety-three days.

  After Thomas’s funeral, she and Jamie left Big Holes at the same time. They paused to chat by their cars, which once again ended up parked side by side. Perhaps it was the cathartic effect of the funeral, which allowed all of them a good cry at multiple points throughout the day, but Jamie finally revealed her story to Marin. Her daughter has been missing for a little over two months, abducted by her ex-husband, whom Jamie described as a narcissist. Marin was familiar with the word, but not in the clinical sense, so Jamie explained it.

  “Aaron has an inflated sense of self, and he hates everything that doesn’t reflect how amazing he thinks he is. Everything always had to be perfect. He wanted a perfect house, perfect job, perfect wife, perfect child. He was supercritical of me, of what I ate, what I wore, how I styled my hair. He would take over every conversation, belittling anyone who didn’t agree with him. We would lose friends because he was so obnoxious. His secret weapon, though, was gaslighting. He was good at making you feel crazy, and for years I thought I was being hypersensitive to things, when I know now that he was being an asshole. Ultimately, he cheated,” Jamie said with a shrug. “And had the audacity to tell me it was my fault, that if I’d taken better care of myself, and better care of him, he wouldn’t have felt the need.”

  “Bastard,” Marin said, and meant it.

  “Truth be told, I was relieved when I found out. At least I finally had a concrete reason to leave him, something I could explain in one sentence to anyone who asked. Saying you split up with someone because they’re exhausting, cruel, manipulative, and a liar can be a little much.” Jamie’s smile was bitter. “The custody battle got ugly. I wanted full custody of Olivia, and so did he. He dragged me through the mud, but the judge ultimately sided with m
e. A few weeks later, he took her. Waited for her outside her friend’s house, two hours before I was due to pick her up. The friend’s mother—who was aware of our situation—wasn’t home. It was only the grandmother, who saw my daughter run to her father and didn’t think to question whether or not the handsome, charming dad was supposed to be there. I didn’t know Olivia had been taken until I arrived two hours later. Two hours,” she repeated, her voice quivering.

  “How old is your daughter?”

  “She’s eleven.”

  “They issue an AMBER Alert?”

  Jamie nodded. “They did. Based on things he’d said during the custody dispute, I had reason to believe he was going to take her far away and never bring her back. They found his car a mile away in a shopping mall parking lot. There was no way to know what he was driving after that, and no way to know where they went.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Marin said.

  Jamie looked at her. “I’m sorry, too,” she said. “I know we all have our own unique stories, but I feel like I said the wrong thing when I saw you at group last week. I told you at the end that I felt better, and that wasn’t fair.”

  “It’s perfectly okay—”

  “No, it’s not,” she said. “It’s not fair to you. Regardless of the issues my ex-husband has—and trust me, he has a lot—he adores Olivia. Wherever they are, wherever they end up, he’s not going to hurt her. This, I know. Unlike you, and Simon, and Lila, and Frances—up until she found out about Thomas—I don’t live in constant fear that Olivia isn’t going to survive. The only fear I have is that I’ll never see her again. Not because she’ll be dead, but because he’ll turn her against me. It’s exactly what he’d do, paint me as the bad guy so she’ll never want to come home.” She glances up at the gaudy yellow Big Holes sign and then down at her shoes. “That’s why I felt better after the group meeting. Which makes me an asshole. I’m sorry.”

  “It doesn’t make you an asshole. It makes you a mother.” Marin touched Jamie’s arm. “I’ve learned not to make comparisons. Hell is hell, in all its incarnations.”

  Unlike with Jamie’s daughter, no AMBER Alert was issued for Sebastian. His kidnapping did not fit the criteria. It was ridiculous when the police first explained this to Marin and Derek. AMBER Alerts were used in cases of child abduction, and nobody was disputing that it was a child abduction. The video made that clear.

  However, there was no vehicle that witnesses could place Sebastian in. There was no identity, no description for the abductor other than the Santa Claus costume. The authorities have to believe that there’s sufficient information about the disappearance of the child in order for an AMBER Alert to be able to assist in finding the child. It’s decided on a case-by-case basis, and Sebastian’s case didn’t qualify.

  There were other things they could do, however. The security footage from Pike Place Market was circulated across the country. Anybody with a TV would have seen Sebastian’s picture on the news in the days that followed his kidnapping. His Missing Child poster was retweeted and shared on Twitter and Facebook nearly a million times combined. The idea that “Santa” kidnapped a child three days before Christmas was titillating, and it made the story go viral in a matter of hours. The evening of the abduction, Derek and Marin were filmed outside their home by local news stations, begging the public for any information about their son. By the end of the week, they were on CNN, pleading for his safe return.

  The lack of information about her son’s disappearance was both mind-boggling and frustrating. Early on, Marin overheard one of the police officers say to another, “Either the kidnapper planned this meticulously, or the sonofabitch got ridiculously lucky . . . There’s no way to know.”

  It was easy to assume that Sebastian and his abductor had entered the underground parking garage, based on the exit that was chosen by the abductor. But there was no specific evidence to confirm that. They could have walked to a side street and gotten into a car, a truck, or a van. They could have been picked up by someone. Or they could have gone into the parking garage and been one of the fifty-four cars to exit the underground lot within the next hour. The angle of the only working security camera, across the street, made it impossible to catch license plate numbers on those vehicles.

  Derek used his connections to get as much coverage as possible. So did Marin. A wealthy, prominent Seattle couple whose child was abducted in broad daylight? The police assumed ransom. But ransom demands usually happen within the first twenty-four hours, forty-eight at the most. Neither Derek nor Marin was contacted. There were no notes left on the doorstep, no texts, no strange phone calls from unknown numbers.

  The five-dollar lollipop was what had convinced Marin that the kidnapper knew Sebastian. At the time, it had seemed like such a specific thing to give to him, and only seven lollipops were sold at La Parisienne Doux that day. But five out of the seven sold were paid for by debit or credit cards, and those customers had been tracked down. They all checked out. The last two were paid for in cash, and the ladies working at the candy store said they remembered that customer clearly, a grandmother who’d bought matching lollipops for her twin granddaughters.

  In any case, La Parisienne Doux lollipops were oversize, colorful, and probably a magnet for any child under the age of ten. The lollipop could have been purchased anytime in advance and stuffed into a coat pocket or a shopping tote, ready to be used as bait when the perfect moment arrived. As part of the investigation, every single person in Marin’s and Derek’s lives who knew Sebastian was interviewed. All the vendors at the market that day were questioned. Nobody seemed to know anything.

  Sebastian just vanished. Without a trace. And sixteen months later, Marin still has no answers.

  A long time ago, there was this movie that scared the shit out of her. She was still in high school, and a bunch of them were hanging out one Saturday night. Someone brought over a VHS tape of the movie The Vanishing, a thriller starring Jeff Bridges and Kiefer Sutherland. During a brief stop at a gas station while on a road trip, Jeff Bridges (Barney) kidnaps Kiefer Sutherland’s girlfriend, Diane (played by a very young Sandra Bullock).

  Fast-forward a few years, and Kiefer’s character, Jeff, still doesn’t know what happened to his missing girlfriend. He’s become obsessed with finding out, almost to the point of going mad. Nancy Travis plays his new love interest (Rita), and together they eventually figure out that this Barney guy was at the gas station the day Diane disappeared, and certainly knows something. They confront him, and ultimately Barney says to Jeff, “If you want to know what happened to her, you have to go through the same things . . .”

  Jeff agrees, and willingly drinks something that knocks him out cold the way Diane was knocked out. He wakes up inside a wooden crate buried in the woods. It takes him a few seconds to realize that he’s trapped, and that he will die like Diane did, suffocating to death in a tiny coffin in the dark with nobody to hear him scream and nobody knowing what happened to him.

  It was a creepy, entertaining movie that gave Marin nightmares for a week afterward.

  She’s Jeff now. And if Santa appeared on her doorstep, offering her definitive answers about her child along with a cup of spiked tea guaranteed to knock her out, she’d down that sucker in a heartbeat. She would swallow every drop.

  Because anything is better than this.

  A missing child is an open, infected wound. Some days you can take a painkiller and slap a Band-Aid on it and maybe manage your day, but it’s never not there, it’s not never not festering, and the slightest poke can cause it to start gushing all over again.

  Marin’s still lying down, and she needs to get up and start moving. She looks over to Derek’s side of the bed. It’s empty, but the indent in the pillow from where his head had rested the night before is still there, reminding her that he left for Portland earlier this morning. It was a last-minute decision made before they went to sleep, to soothe some squirrelly investors.

  “It’s only for the day,” he’d told
her, and immediately she’d thought, McKenzie. “There’s an eight a.m. flight, so I’ll be out of the house by six. And I’ll be home in time for dinner. Want to come with? I’ll be stuck in meetings all day, and I’ll have to take the investors out to lunch, but you could join us, then get some shopping in. No sales tax in Oregon, remember.”

  She chuckled. “That’s a five a.m. wake-up call. I’d rather sleep in and pay the sales tax.”

  His quick invite made Marin feel better, though. How long would it be before she doesn’t wonder what Derek is really doing when he’s not with her? How long before McKenzie Li disappears from their marriage completely?

  She’s about to sit up when her phone rings. She checks the number, picks up.

  “Still in bed?” Sal asks.

  “Yeah.”

  “What are you wearing?”

  “Shut up, perv.”

  A laugh. “How was the funeral?”

  She supposes she should ask herself why she’d told her friend, and not her husband, about Frances’s son, but it’s too early for that level of emotional deep-diving. “It was sad, obviously,” she says, getting out of bed and padding to the bathroom. “But Frances seemed . . . all right. Better, even.”

  “What do you mean, better?”

  Marin looks at herself in the vanity mirror, running a hand through her tangled hair. “Relieved, I think,” she says. “That she has answers. That she can grieve him, and bury him, and try to move on. She has closure, finally.”

  A short pause on the other end. “I don’t know what to say to that,” Sal finally says. “I mean, I’m glad for her, but at the same time, it’s . . .”