Catherine McKenzie - Hidden

When we got there, the Shields Date Gardens was the one old thing in a sea of new. It was protected by a grove of palm trees, and proudly announced itself as being the Date Capital of the World.

I guess everything needs a capital.

And yes, there was also the film—The Romance and Sex Life of the Date—which was, the sign said, “Free for Life.”

It would be.

We walked around the large, run-down store, Tish delighting in the ridiculousness of it all.

“Check this type out,” she said, pointing to a sign above a large barrel of dates. “ ‘Sweet and Creamy Super Jumbo Royal Medjools.’ You can’t make this stuff up!”

“That’s a hell of a moniker. Do you think they call it Super Jumbo for short, or Royal Medjool?”

“I’d prefer to be called Royal Medjool, myself. Much more mysterious.”

“Agreed. Shall we watch the movie?”

“Hold on, we have to get a shake first.”

“A what?”

“A date shake. The guidebook says they’re highly recommended.”

“What’s in them? Wait, I don’t want to know.”

She went to the snack counter in the corner and ordered a large shake that looked about as unappetizing as you might imagine it would look, and we crossed over into the old, worn theater. The movie played every ten minutes or so, and the next showing was about to start.

The room was ghostly quiet except for the sound of the ancient projector wheezing to life. After a few moments, a scratchy black-and-white film that looked like it was being held together with duct tape started. The soundtrack sounded as if it were being played on a phonograph that was underwater, all echoes and skips.

Tish tapped me on the arm. “Date shake?”

I looked at it dubiously. It was really the last thing I wanted to be trying. But Tish looked so…so cute, really, even though women don’t like to be called that, but she was, her ponytail bouncing slightly, a we-just-cut-class-successfully grin on her face, that I said:

“Don’t mind if I do.”

I spend the night going around in circles.

The text.

The book.

Tish’s presence at the funeral, her odd behavior outside my house.

What does it all mean?

What does it goddamn mean?

My careening brain brings me to the computer in our study at 2 a.m. When I open it, the web browser loads Facebook, and so this is where I start. I go to Jeff’s page, one he set up years ago and rarely consults. His picture is de rigueur for guys almost forty with families. A picture of him with Seth from a few years ago, a picture I took one summer at the beach. They’re both wearing bathing trunks that end at their knees, sand, sunburned noses, and identical grins.

That was a good day. A day worth savoring.

I scroll down and get a different kind of emotional stomach punch. His page is full of sympathetic messages from friends, distant cousins, and townsfolk reaching out: I’m so terribly sorry. We miss you. We’re thinking of you.

Like Jeff’s going to be checking his Facebook page from the great beyond.

My heart skips a beat when I see a message on his wall from Lily, his college girlfriend. She’s <3broken. (It takes a second till I figure out this is some kind of online abbreviation for “heartbroken.” Blech!) I check. They’re Facebook friends, another thing I don’t remember him mentioning. Stupid Facebook. Some people are meant to disappear from your life, to remain a memory, a faded possibility. A curiosity. I ought to know. But when curiosity is so easily fulfilled, how do you avoid fulfilling it? A button is pressed and you’re friends again.

I log in as him (Jeff’s password for everything has always been Abacus—I gave him one for his first birthday after we started dating) and go to his direct messages. If I know Jeff, if, any message he’s ever written will be there.

And so it is.

I almost breathe a sigh of relief, but there’s nothing relieving about this situation. Hunched over a desk at two thirty in the morning, going through my dead husband’s Facebook messages for evidence of…what? What?

The messages are sporadic, more of them at the beginning, when everyone was getting on Facebook and reconnecting with people long gone and long forgotten. A message from Lily is there, from five years ago. Harmless, harmless.

I’m married, he wrote in response to her Hey there, stranger.

So am I. I have two kids.

I have one. I still live in Springfield.

Still? Why am I not surprised? Anyway, I hope you’re happy. I hope you’re well.

I am happy, Jeff wrote. I really am.

Five exchanges over three days, and then nothing. The rest are all from his college buddies, and other names I vaguely recognize. Messages from a few bands or other things he’s a “fan” of.

Of Patricia Underhill, I find nothing.

Jeff has 153 friends, and Tish is one of them. I scroll back through his meager timeline history and find the entry, a little over a year ago: Jeff and Patricia Underhill are now friends.

A year ago. So not after the company event in Mexico where we met, two and a half years back. What happened a year ago? What made them suddenly become (Facebook) friends?

I click through to her page. She’s also several years younger in her photo. She’s wearing a yellow rain slicker, and her daughter’s sitting in her lap, a miniature six-year-old version of her. They’re grinning at the camera like bandits, and I can almost imagine the muddy puddles they just finished thumping around in.

Tish works at Johnson Company, likes hiking and golf, and is married to someone named Brian, whose Facebook page is even more spartan than Jeff’s. He’s a doctor. He has twenty-four friends. He lives with his wife and daughter in Springfield, the other Springfield. His favorite quote is “First, heal thyself.”

Jeff’s not friends with Tish’s daughter or her husband, of course he isn’t, but her daughter’s page is an open book like that of everyone her age. She has 515 friends and is fond of posting bits of poetry (hers, I imagine) between uploaded photos of almost weekly road trips to some kind of competition. I play the voyeur for a few more minutes, but there isn’t anything for me to learn here.

But…golf. I click back to Tish’s page, searching for more information, but it doesn’t provide any. She likes golf. So what?

My next stop is the Johnson website. Jeff’s username (jmanning) and password (Abacus) get me into the employee-only section. I click around, not sure, really, what I’m looking for.

“Staff” brings me to an index where I search for Tish’s name, and there she is again, dressed less casually this time but still comfortable in front of the camera. She has her chin in her hand, and her smile is half smirk, half amusement. Her biography is simple, no different from the Facebook one.

I skip over “Resources,” “Announcements,” and “Reports” and check “Activities.” The first one listed is Jeff’s funeral, and I suck in my breath. Jeff’s funeral is an activity? Honestly, as Jeff would say, what’s wrong with these people?

I’m grateful there are no links to pictures of the event. It seems their callousness stops somewhere, at least.

Underneath Jeff’s funeral notice is the title “Lottery.” It’s the firm thing Jeff went to in Palm Springs a few weeks before he died.

I search my memory for mentions of Tish. Maybe her name came up once or twice in conversation, but if so, it was a while ago, a medium-term memory. Jeff certainly never said anything about her being in Palm Springs. Of that I am sure.

At least, I think I am.

And why would he mention her, anyway? my voice of reason asks. He told me a couple of funny stories about one particularly bad seminar. He said he couldn’t believe that John Scott was actually there, as Jeff predicted he’d be. He talked about the few other people I knew who were there too. Of the fifty people there, most were unmentioned.

But then again, most of them didn’t give him a book.

Or send him a text.

Or travel to his funeral.

There are fifty-four photos linked to the lottery, and my hand’s shaking as I start the slideshow: the resort, the welcome banner, the first night dinner, lecture, lecture. Neither Jeff nor Tish are anywhere to be seen in these pictures. Was Jeff even there? Yes, of course he was. I called him there. I called him in his room because his cell was on the fritz. I left a message on his room’s voicemail and he called me back. Stuck at a deadly dinner, he’d said, sounding sober and tired. Rest well, I’d said.

He was there, and lots of people were missing from these photos. So calm yourself, Claire.

First, calm yourself.

Click, click, click, the slideshow keeps sliding. A sunny day, breakfast, a golf course, and then the final shot, everyone crowded in, come on, come on, get closer, closer, and say Johnson!

Jeff’s standing in the second row, and Tish is next to him. The proud mama herself.

There’s only one thing left to do now, but still, I hesitate. If I go to his email, if I see what I expect to see, find what I expect to find, am I going to feel better? Right now I have suspicions and doubts, but it’s the middle of the night, and all these things might have an innocent explanation. In the cold light of day, all these things might fade and disappear.