A Life Well-Hidden

by Emily Nealis

  “No one will know you gave it to me. What is it?” I leaned against the counter, crossing my arm in front of my chest.

  “It’s ‘Kerrigan’.”

  After I ended the call, I remained in the kitchen, leaning against the counter in silence. Chewing our conversation over in my mind, I speculated that Travis told me about Tara-Lynn because he thought if I said anything to Carolyn, she would believe me, no questions asked. The more I thought about it, the more I began to realize the weight of Travis’s decision to call me. I’m not fool enough to think that I hold a higher status in Travis’s life than Adam does. Even if they don’t speak as often as they used to, Travis still considered Adam an older brother, a mentor of sorts. At least that’s how it was at one point. I doubted their drifting apart from one another meant that Travis was drifting closer to me, and that was fine.

  However, it was clear that Travis was smart enough to consider my friendship with his wife. I’m ashamed to admit it, but before that phone call, I thought that Travis might hold his friendship with Adam, whether deteriorated or intact, in higher regard than his marriage with Carolyn. Maybe I was wrong. That’s what it seemed like, anyway. Maybe Travis finally made a definitive choice, for once in his life. Travis entrusted me not to tell my husband about the information he gave me, and he also trusted me not to wreck his marriage.

  I wouldn’t do anything of the sort, of course. Instead, I decided to take the information Travis offered. I had not yet decided how I would use it, but I had time. I experienced a morbid exhilaration from learning the password from Travis, but that was only half of the story. Travis didn’t know the meaning of the name, Kerrigan, but I did. I hadn’t thought about that name in almost 10 years. It held a significance only a few people would remember, none of which still exist in my life.

  It belonged to Jason Kerrigan, one of our friends from high school. He and Adam rekindled their friendship after Adam came home from the military. They both worked in HVAC, although not for the same company. The two of us regularly went out with Jason and spent time with the same group of friends. This was normal, until one day it wasn’t. One evening, Adam and Jason got into an argument and nothing was the same after that.

  It happened years ago, when June was still a baby. My parents kept June for the night so we could go out, which was a pretty special occasion at the time. The argument began over the shirt I was wearing that night. Adam and I met Jason at a bar near our house. I kept noticing Adam giving me these strange looks, so much that I kept looking down at my purple V-neck shirt to see if I’d spilled something on myself. Finally, Adam commented on the low neckline of my shirt. Having known Adam for as long as I did, I knew this was not a flirtatious statement. He was saying it in a judgmental way, as though I shouldn’t have been wearing a shirt like that, as if it were too revealing for me to be seen in. I’d always brushed off comments like this, usually modifying my behavior to blend back into normalcy. But, this time, Jason overheard him and got involved.

  “Maybe you should just tell your wife she looks nice.” Jason stared into Adam’s eyes. His expression was calm, a slight smile on his face. I was caught off-guard by his interjection, as was Adam, from the look he was giving Jason. I began to get uncomfortable. Why did you have to say anything? This wouldn’t have been anything out of the ordinary if Jason hadn’t felt the need to say something.

  “Is your name Haley?” Adam asked him, returning the glare. Jason leaned closer to Adam, much to my relief, avoiding attracting attention from anyone else in the vicinity.

  “Everyone else is too afraid of you to say this, but I’m not,” Jason articulated his words with deadly accuracy, “You need to grow up and realize how good of a woman you have. For reasons I’ll never understand, Haley allows you to treat her like total garbage. But I’m going to tell you right now, for your information, your wife is an adult and she’s allowed to wear what she pleases without childish comment from you. She may put up with you controlling her every move at home, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to watch you do that shit in front of me.”

  After Jason said that, I didn’t know whether to smile or run and hide in embarrassment. It was one of the nicest things someone had said about me, but at the same time I was petrified that I was about to witness the apocalypse. I’d seen fights before—fights between Adam and other, faceless people started over much less than what just transpired between Adam and Jason. They just stared at one another for a minute. I thought I was about to have a stroke, die of fright and embarrassment in the middle of that bar. Instead, I heard my name.

  “C’mon, Haley, let’s get out of here.” Adam got up from his chair, still staring at Jason. I stood up, welcoming an escape from the situation. As I walked toward the exit, Adam rested his hand on the lower part of my back. I was surprised, and extremely relieved, that he decided to leave the bar without a word. I was impressed, as this was most unexpected. It wasn’t until I was sitting in the passenger seat of Adam’s truck and we were halfway home that Jason’s words began to sink in. Was this how other people saw Adam and I? This was how Jason saw us, at least. If that was how Jason saw us, other people could have the same opinion. I felt humiliated—did other people just see me as some worn down dishrag? I was fuming by the time we arrived at the house.

  For a moment, I felt like I was watching my life from outside my body. For a moment, I believed what Jason said to Adam, that I was so much better than that. I’d never noticed any of these things until Jason said them out loud. Once inside the house, I confronted Adam about the way he was treating me, constantly critiquing me for no reason. Soon, the argument escalated into another fight, with harsh words being thrown back and forth. Adam speculated about my friendship with Jason. I called him a paranoid psycho. It ended with a slam of the door, Adam storming out of the house into the darkness.

  Adam did come back. He wasn’t even gone for one hour. But when he did come back, he was a completely different person. There was blood streaked across his shirt, and he looked like he’d seen a ghost. When I asked him was happened, he said some guy tried to mug him while he was walking. They ended up in a total fight on the ground and the guy pulled a knife and cut him a couple of times on his chest and side. Adam only got away because he found a rock and was able to knock him out. Adam’s shirt was a mess—soaked with blood from the cuts on his body, which were superficial enough not to need stitches, and blood spatter from whoever had attacked him. I tried to convince Adam to call the police or at least go to the emergency room, but he refused, not wanting to add medical bills to our expenses when we were still living on a shoe-string budget. At the time, this was a valid concern.

  We forgot about the argument. Instead, all I could do was thank God Adam came home alive. I helped him get cleaned up, bandaged his cuts, and said I would toss his shirt, which was ruined. After showering and washing the grime and debris from his skin, he told me he was going to talk to Jason the next day and tell him he was right. It was clear he’d had some sort of revelation. Adam sat on the edge of the bed reflecting on his life and the choices he’d made until that point. He said he was going to make things right with me and be a better person. I’d never seen Adam so shaken. It was as though he realized everything could change in an instant, and it changed his entire outlook on life. Adam was a new person, changed forever.

  Whenever Adam was out of town for work, the girls and I have a standing date for a phone call each evening. This evening was no different, except for the fact that my mind was preoccupied by more significant things than wondering how his day went or when he would be returning. I sat next to the girls on the couch, my phone perched on my knee, staring off into space as June and Vivian recounted the day’s adventures to their dad. I felt as though I was having an out-of-body experience, watching myself participate in normal, everyday life, but with a sense of impending doom. Ordinarily, I would be relieved when he returned home. Now, however, I was overwhelmed with a trance-like melancholy.

  “I taught Viv how
to drive the go-kart and she almost wrecked us into a tree.” June explained to Adam over speaker phone. She rolled her eyes at Vivian, a shrewd smile creeping across her mouth. She knew how to press her sister’s buttons.

  “I did not!” Vivian screeched, leaning over my phone, “June was being a fraidy cat because I drive fast!”

  “Well, both of those scenarios sound terrible.” Adam laughed on the other end of the phone. I rubbed my forehead; Adam goes out of town and, as usual, the girls try to destroy one another.

  “And this is why neither of them are allowed to do any driving for the rest of the weekend.” I interjected, taking the opportunity to change the subject, “I talked to your mom today, she said they’ve decided to come stay with us on the weekend of the 12th.”

  We spoke for a few minutes about plans in the coming weeks, until the girls’ attention span began to deteriorate and they started getting restless and drifting around the room. I knew if they didn’t say goodnight now, I would lose them to some distraction on the other side of the house, spelling disaster for bedtime. I wrapped up the conversation, nearly drowned out by the girls leaning across me to the phone, calling goodnight to their dad. I told Adam to call me the next day whenever he could.

  After finally putting the girls to bed, I returned to the living room, surveying the silence of the house. Shut up and locked away in our castle, I meandered around the room, deciding what to do. I glanced over at the table in the corner. Adam’s laptop rested on top of the printer. I paused for a moment, just staring at it. Maybe I was trying to give my conscience a chance at redemption. In the end, I knew it was pointless. I crossed the room, picked up the laptop, and returned to the couch. When the login screen appeared, I typed the name, “Kerrigan”, into the password field.

  I was somewhat surprised when the home screen appeared. I didn’t think Travis was lying, but I knew there was also a chance Adam’s password might have changed since then. Clearly, it hadn’t. I was in, but where did I go from there? I opened the internet browser and typed Gmail into the search bar. Adam’s email populated the screen, still signed in. I clicked through the folders, not expecting to find much. I searched for Diana’s name in the inbox search bar, which resulted in nothing. I knew, of course, that if any incriminating evidence existed, Adam would not leave it open in his email. I clicked through the folders on his hard drive, expecting the same results. I wasn’t disappointed; they yielded nothing but tax information, family photos, and work documents.

  I stared at the screen covered in a stock photo landscape of the desert. If I wanted to hide something on a computer, where would I put it? I had no idea, I wasn’t some hacker. I didn’t even consider myself tech-savvy. I thought about Carolyn’s suspicions, and then about Adam’s work phone. I didn’t have Adam’s work phone, much less the password to even access it. I opened the browser again and typed Google Drive into the search bar. Both Adam and I had iPhones, but his work phone was an Android, which might be connected to Google Drive. The page loaded and appeared to be signed in to an account. Maybe I was more tech-savvy than I thought.

  I navigated through the folders, confirming that the account was associated with Adam’s work phone, evident by the photos and documents bearing his company name. I searched through each one, regardless of how mundane the folder and file names sounded. Soon, I arrived at a folder containing a barrage of photos, automatically uploaded from his camera roll. Some were photos of equipment, some were clearly job sites, others were random places and objects that were obviously captured opportunistically. After only two swipes of my fingertips on the touchpad, scrolling down a few rows, I froze.

  I saw a face I recognized, one which had no earthly business being on Adam’s work phone. A short, staccato breath leapt from my throat in utter shock. I double-clicked on the image, enlarging it nearly to the size of the screen. Her face stared back at me, a smile bearing two rows of bright, white teeth. I had never noticed how straight her teeth were. Those brilliant, straight, white teeth stared back at me, fueling the hatred that burned in my chest. She acted like she was my friend, that vindictive, lying bitch. It was obvious what was occurring in the photo, and who she was with. I recognized the tattoos stretching down his arm, dead-ending at the same watch he’d worn every day for the last 12 years. I could have thrown Adam’s laptop across the room, smashed it against the wall, screaming profanities, cursing him to hell. Instead, I sat there on my couch, inside the house I shared with Adam, staring at a photo of him with another woman. Part of me tried to convince myself it was a photo from one of Ryan and Leslie’s pool parties, or a family vacation to the beach. It wasn’t. Instead of a swimsuit, this woman was wearing nothing but a bra and underwear, and instead of the beach, she was reclining on a bed, leaning against Adam, his arm hanging around her shoulder, his fingers intertwined with hers. Only, he didn’t even have the courtesy to show his face. But I knew it was him, without a shadow of a doubt. And that’s what mattered.

  I couldn’t decide whether to feel victorious or destroyed. For weeks I’d been accusing Adam of the exact thing of which I’d just found evidence. I didn’t want it to be true, and yet, this was what I’d been searching for. Why did I feel the need to keep searching, to seek out something so terrible? I didn’t want to find it; who wants to find something like that? But still, I searched and searched until I finally found it. Now that I had it, I needed to decide what to do with it. I couldn’t stop and dwell on what I was seeing. I would fall apart, descend into a blubbering mess on the very same couch as Carolyn had.

  I pressed my palms to my cheeks, feeling the heat radiating from my skin. I took a deep breath, closing my eyes. Keep it together. I kept my hands glued to my face until I was sure they’d stopped shaking. I exhaled and turned back to the screen. Like a robot, I clicked around, methodically, copying and attaching, sending and deleting the evidence. I closed the browser and returned to the home screen, locking the screen before shutting the laptop. I walked across the room and set it back down gently on top of the printer. It was as though I was never there.

  I stood looking at the empty room, reflecting upon the past. On that night 10 years ago, everything changed. But not in the way I expected. Adam never got the chance to speak to Jason Kerrigan again. Jason disappeared without a trace. That is, until a couple of weeks later, when he was found dead.

  It was a shock to everyone. Upon returning home after the mugging, Adam tried to call Jason, but no one answered. He tried calling again the next day, and the day after, with the same result. Eventually, each call went straight to voicemail. No one knew what happened to Jason. He was there, and then suddenly he wasn’t. Jason’s girlfriend, Paige, called everyone, including us, before reporting him missing. She said he left his truck at the bar the night we saw him and walked home. After he got home, he realized he was out of cigarettes and decided to walk to the gas station down the road to get more. He never came back. Two weeks later, a couple of kids found Jason face down, his body partially submerged in the culvert in the creek along the railroad tracks behind the middle school.

  The police reached out to us since we were two of the last people to see Jason alive. Jason stayed at the bar for another hour after Adam and I left, having run into some friends. After having a few drinks, he walked the mile home, leaving his truck at the bar overnight. Adam was distraught, telling the officers he’d had an argument with Jason that night. Jason said he didn’t like Adam’s attitude, and we left the bar. Later that night, after Adam had a change of heart, he tried to call Jason, but never got through. I just sat there crying, still unable to believe that our friend was dead and we’d left on such bad terms. The police took our statements, left our house, and that was that. We were never contacted again.

  According to the paper, Jason’s cause of death was blunt force trauma to his head, which destroyed his skull. Initially, the police suspected possible foul play. Knowing he’d been drinking, they concluded that he cut across the railroad tracks on the way to the gas statio
n. It appeared that Jason might have suffered additional trauma to his torso, but there was no definitive answer as to whether it was the result of an attack or a fall down the rocks to the creek. Eventually, we stopped hearing anything about it. In the end, we attended Jason’s funeral, cried with his friends and family, and tried to move on just like everyone else, with the regret that we lost such a good friend.

  It wasn’t until days after the police left our house that I realized there was no mention of the fight Adam and I had that night, that he’d left the house, or that he himself had been attacked. The entire time they were in our house, sitting on our couch, they were blithely unaware of the knife wounds under Adam’s shirt. At the time, I didn’t know why it should come up. It didn’t seem relevant. However, being such a rule-follower, I felt guilty for forgetting about it and not mentioning every detail of that night. After all, Adam didn’t bring it up, either. Maybe the officers wouldn’t have cared. It didn’t seem worth calling them back to tell them about a domestic dispute and attempted mugging that happened weeks ago. Especially after Adam came home, promising to make things right, who would care?