Little Secrets(84)
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 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…”
“Yeah.”
A comfortable silence falls between them. She can tell Sal’s in his car by the background noise, but before she can ask where he’s going so early, he says, “Do you think you’d feel the way she does? If you got the answers she did?”
“No,” Marin says immediately. “I can imagine how Frances feels, but I just don’t think I’d feel the same way. Maybe because Sebastian’s still so little…” She stops for a second, aware that she still talks about her son in the present tense. “And maybe because I know it’s my fault, that what I did that day is the reason he’s not here with me.”
“You gotta stop blaming yourself, Mar. Sometimes I wish…”
“What? Say it.”
“Sometimes I wish you could know, either way. So you could move on. Like Frances.”
“But I’m not Frances,” she says. “I need to know what happened to Bash, but if I ever find out for certain that my little boy is dead, I’m as good as dead, too.”
“Still?” Sal’s voice is anguished. “You still feel that way?”
Marin has no idea how they got on this subject, or why they’re even having this conversation. She hasn’t even had her coffee yet. But if he wants the honest truth, she’s going to give it to him.
“I never want to see my son lying in a casket, Sal. I don’t ever want to have a funeral for him. I do need to know what happened to him, because living like this is hell. But if the answer is that he’s dead, I’d jump off a bridge tomorrow.”