Little Secrets(72)

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 could 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.”