Little Secrets

by Jennifer Hillier

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.

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.

Hope lasts only so long, can carry you only so far. It’s both a blessing and a curse. Sometimes it’s all you have. It keeps you going when there’s nothing else to hold on to.

But hope can also be terrible. It keeps you wanting, waiting, wishing for something that might never happen. It’s like a glass wall between where you are and where you want to be. You can see the life you want, but you can’t have it. You’re a fish in a bowl.

Final acceptance is tough, whether you get news or you come to it on your own. But maybe now Frances can begin to heal.

As they get into their cars, Marin is reminded, and not for the first time, that sometimes someone else’s pain is the only thing that makes yours better.

She is enraged. She feels it washing over her like hot wax, coating her outsides, hardening like an armored shell over all the soft, squishy, vulnerable, unprotected places. She welcomes it. It’s been a long time since she felt anger like this, and she’ll take anger over sadness, any day. For the past four hundred eighty-six days, sadness has knocked her sideways, debilitated her, confused her, made her weak, talked her into settling for things she doesn’t want, and never did. Rage, on the other hand, will get shit done.

A strange thing happens when you’re going through something terrible. It’s as if your body and mind separate, and you cease to become a whole person. Your body goes through the motions of what you need to do to survive—eat, sleep, excrete, repeat—while your brain further divides into compartments of Things You Need to Do Now, and Things You Should Process Later When You’re in Your Right Mind.

Even without the Rolex—which was a birthday gift from Marin—she’d know that arm anywhere. She’s been held by that arm, tickled by that arm, she’s slept on top of that arm. She knows how that arm feels exactly. She knows where the muscles are, where the veins are, she knows the feel of the hairs on her cheek, and she knows the scent—clean, musky, male—of that skin.

Love is unpredictable, and love hurts. Trust is reliable, dependable, and solid. Like Sal.

but over time, it became clear that sometimes two people just don’t get along. And never will, no matter what you do.

Who would have thought that who you love and who you feel safe with might not be the same person?

emotions. It’s funny how life can blow up in a matter of minutes. One minute, you have a son. The next minute, he’s gone. One minute, your husband is faithful. The next, he’s screwing a twenty-four-year-old, and you’re wondering if your best friend actually knows a guy. Because if anyone knows a guy, it’s Sal.

“No, he’s not. He’s nice, and there’s a difference. You can be nice to someone and still cheat. You can be nice and do shitty things. You can still be nice and ruin someone’s life. He’s nice, Mar, but he’s not good. I hope one day you’ll understand the difference.”

“Conversations about murder are much easier to have when your stomach is full, don’t you think?”

him. And this is what makes it so different with him. It’s the sex, yes, but it’s also how the sex makes her feel. When they fuck, she can be anything she wants to be. She can say anything she wants to say. She is completely uninhibited in a way she’s never been with anyone before. She might not know how to ask him to hold her hand in public, but she does know how to demand he stick his tongue deeper into her. She comes hard, writhing in his face, and he doesn’t stop until she’s finished and tells him to.

“You came home,” was all she’d managed to say. “I always come home,” her husband said. “And I always will come home.”

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.

“You’re hilarious,” the younger woman says, and Marin pauses to glance back. Ginny’s voice is like ice, her eyes like daggers. “Sal will never be anyone’s, thanks to you.”

“I like to answer, ‘I’m managing,’” Marin says, and offers a small smile. She knows exactly how the other woman feels. “It reminds them that I’m going through something hard, but doesn’t imply that I’m good, or bad.”

“I had to see it for myself, though.” Jamie seems to be speaking more to herself than to Marin. “There are only three possible outcomes for our children: they stay missing forever, they’re found safe, or they’re found dead. I needed to see what one of the outcomes looked like. To … prepare myself.”

You do batshit-crazy things when you’re drowning. When you’re underwater, you’ll grab on to whatever’s closest to you if it means you can take one more breath.

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.”

“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…”

“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.”

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.

Frances is free. Marin is jealous, and she hates herself for it.

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.

“I’ve learned not to make comparisons. Hell is hell, in all its incarnations.”

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 never not festering, and the slightest poke can cause it to start gushing all over again.

She accepts that she loves J.R., and always will—some people worm their way into you and never leave. But there are times, like right now, when she can’t remember why she loves him.

It’s interesting to watch a liar when you know they’re lying. The tiny facial twitches, the spotty eye contact, the little vibrations of various body parts. Things you might not notice if you didn’t know they were lying. Things you would never think to look for if you trust them, because you’re assuming everything they tell you is true. Someone who loves you isn’t supposed to lie to you.

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end —SEMISONIC