Hiding

by Henry Turner

  It was wrong.

  I guess I just didn’t care.

  I went to one of the bureaus resting against a wall. It had a framed mirror on top on a kind of pivot, and some pretty enamel boxes in front of the mirror, painted in a sort of Asian fashion.

  I opened them.

  Makeup.

  Some jewelry.

  I closed them one by one.

  I opened the first bureau drawer.

  Clothes. Tops.

  I fingered through them.

  Nothing.

  I opened the next few drawers.

  Clothes, clothes, clothes.

  I crouched down and opened the bottom drawer. The second I had it open I wanted to close it. I mean that.

  But I couldn’t.

  I guess all girls have this sort of stuff. Suzie Perkins did. She didn’t pack it away so nicely, though, but usually just threw it all over the floor.

  The bras were on the left side and the panties on the right.

  I swear, I didn’t touch them.

  Some were cotton; some were fancy lace.

  I’d opened the drawer. Why close it?

  I knew it didn’t matter.

  There was no going back on it. I was sorry, but it was done.

  Still, it wasn’t enough.

  You see, I just kept having these thoughts.

  I mean these really weird thoughts just kept sort of occurring to me, like they had out in the hall when I sat against the wall and downstairs and even last night in the basement, and they were thoughts I felt I’d had on my mind all along but was only now letting myself become aware of.

  I didn’t know how much time I had. I admit I felt pretty scared, because I could still hear the maid downstairs, but not so clearly because the house was insulated pretty well, and I could hear these little thumps. I realized it would be smart to sort of hurry up and get it over with—searching, I mean—so I could find a way out before the maid maybe came upstairs or somebody else arrived.

  But I kept having these weird thoughts—and one thought in particular—maybe just to convince myself to stay there and not be so nervous, because to tell you the truth, I sort of really did want to leave, but I couldn’t help thinking this weird thought that there was something dangerous in the room, and I really wanted to know what it was.

  Of course, maybe it was me.

  Maybe the danger was me.

  Maybe I was losing it.

  I stood. I looked around. Her computer was on the desk. Check her files, her emails? I might be able to ferret out her passwords somewhere in one file or another, or scribbled in one of the notebooks she had stacked on an open shelf in the desk.

  But I didn’t think it would help.

  I knew I wouldn’t find what I was searching for—whatever it might be—in her computer.

  I stepped lightly to a closet and slid it open.

  Dresses on hangers, most of them in protective vinyl slips.

  I looked all over. In boxes on upper shelves. In these neat storage containers down below.

  Nothing.

  I went into every cabinet. The worst I found were the same drugs her mother took.

  Mood stabilizers.

  She’d never told me.

  Suzie Perkins would have told me. She probably would have offered me one. Suzie hid nothing. Had I been searching her room, I’d have learned everything about her in a minute, from what was strewn on the floor.

  But here I learned nothing.

  Laura’s was a good girl’s room.

  A perfect girl’s room.

  Well behaved and well brought-up. It really did look like a room display in a department store catalog.

  I was about to give up.

  There was nothing.

  Then I found what was under the bed.

  When I first felt it I knew I had to be careful. It was heavy. I couldn’t get it out without pulling it across the floor. I pulled it slowly and steadily, so the maid wouldn’t hear.

  It was an open wooden box, about three feet wide and two feet long, the drawer from some old chest.

  The first thing I saw were some paintings.

  Laura had told me a little about them. I mean she’d mentioned a couple times that she loved painting, when she told me how she wanted to go to art school, which she told me that day we were kissing on my bed. I don’t mean she talked too much about it, but just sort of mentioned it, because she always said she wasn’t good enough. You could kind of see she felt that way. The paintings I found weren’t signed on the front or anything, and only when I turned them over did I see her initials on the backs of them, in the corners, small and hidden.

  I looked at one. It was a little hard to see because of a reason I’ll tell you about in just a second, but I thought the painting was all right.

  No, it was better than all right.

  It was a picture she must have painted from life, or from a photo, I guess, because it looked pretty realistic. It showed a field in the country with a white fence, one of those fences you always see along the side of the road whenever you drive out far enough, and behind the fence there were three horses, two brown and a gray one, with their heads pressed together over the fence, and in the background there were trees.

  Everything was really well painted and proportionate, but that wasn’t what made it good. What made it good was the way she did the light, because there was, like, a bar or a stripe of light across the horses’ heads, and more light fell onto the field behind them, making certain areas of the grass bright with sunshine, while the rest of the grass was in shadow. And then very far in the background I saw another horse running, buried in shadow.

  I really liked the picture.

  To tell you the truth, I liked it a lot more than any of her mom’s stuff on the walls downstairs, which mostly looked like building materials screwed together, like wall displays for siding in one of those big hardware superstores.

  Laura’s painting seemed really human. It was crazy that her mom hadn’t hung it up on the wall. You could really feel Laura’s love of horses, which was something she had never even told me about.

  I liked it.

  I think I loved it.

  It said something about her, I thought. It was sort of serene, but also sort of sad.

  The only problem was the X.

  That was the problem with all of the paintings, and there were, like, half a dozen of them, all really carefully painted on canvas boards, and all with big Xs gashed into them with a knife or a key or something.

  Another painting was of Dobey and I thought it was terrific. He was sitting on the grass, and it looked like a real painting and not just the flat smeary mess you see a lot of times, but again there was the X.

  That was hard for me to deal with.

  It scared me, actually.

  It scared me a lot.

  I wanted to look at the other paintings because I could tell they were all good, but they all had the damned Xs, slashed on them like open wounds.

  I hated the Xs.

  I couldn’t stand the Xs.

  Her mother had said painting was not practical; I remembered that now. Laura had told me how her mother had said that.

  I tried to think clearly about that.

  All I could think was, To hell with what’s practical.

  I couldn’t look at the paintings anymore. The Xs were hateful.

  It was like Laura had attacked her paintings.

  It was like she’d attacked herself.

  I took them out and put them face-down on the floor beside the box.

  What was under them was worse.

  There were all these prizes, certificates, and medals on tangled ribbons she’d won since she was a kid—I could tell by the dates. There were at least two dozen of them, lying on a bed of shredded paper. I lifted them carefully and put them aside.

  No, it wasn’t shredded paper. It was lots of photos of her.

  They were all torn up.

  I wondered, Did Laura tear them up? My mo
ther had done that too—I remembered my grandma telling me. But my mother had only hated how she’d looked. I stirred my fingers through the torn shreds and looked down at the paintings I’d turned over to hide the horrible Xs. I closed my eyes.

  I said, “You don’t hate yourself, Laura.”

  I did not say it because it was true.

  I said it because I hoped it was true.

  I took out the pile of torn pieces and spread them on the bed. The pieces all looked similar for some reason, and then I got it. They had all been taken in a gym, and all of them showed her doing gymnastics exercises.

  For a second I wondered why she hadn’t thrown the pictures away. She’d torn them up—what good were they now? All I could think of was how some kids scar themselves—they cut themselves with a razor or a knife, and they are left with the scars. They like looking at the scars.

  These were her scars.

  Some of the photos were pretty big—I mean the pieces of them. I managed to put one photograph together like a puzzle; I found about seventy percent of the pieces. It showed her on the balance beam—one of her legs was missing, but the other one she was sticking out straight in front of her; and part of the background was missing, part of the wall over the rows of those bleachers they have in gyms.

  She looked incredible in this white-and-blue leotard. You wouldn’t believe the muscles she had.

  In the background I saw other girls too, all of them gymnasts in the same leotard—a team leotard, I guessed—standing off to the side in a line, obviously waiting for their turns on the beam. And there was a man standing off to the side of the beam, making a gesture with his hands. From the shape of his mouth you could see he was yelling something to Laura; he was probably her coach. He was a pretty young guy, maybe thirty, and pretty handsome and muscular, with short blond hair. He seemed hard and intense. In the picture Laura’s face was totally focused but worried. I could see that. I could see the nervousness through the fixity of her face, mostly in her eyes. I’m not just making that up—I could see it. She was afraid of screwing up. That was obvious.

  I really wanted to see the rest of the picture, especially her other leg and the whole complete pose with her arms spread out like wings.

  I rummaged my fingers through the rest of the torn pieces and found what I thought would fit. Two of the pieces had these colored rings. I put them together, placed them where the wall was missing over the seats, and stopped, unable to breathe.

  It was the Olympics symbol.

  I didn’t understand.

  She had never been in the Olympics.

  It was impossible. She’d told me nothing about it, nothing at all.

  I sifted through the pieces but didn’t assemble any more photos. I couldn’t stand to because whenever I found a piece with her face on it, there was always that same look, that hard focus over a look of fear.

  One thing remained in the box.

  A diary.

  I picked it up and put it aside.

  I quickly put everything back in the box, and then I took the diary in my hands and sat with my back against the bed, staring across the room.

  Chapter

  Sixteen

  It was a red clothbound book, one of those classic girl’s diaries, with a strap and key lock on it to keep it private. It said Diary on it, in gold cursive letters.

  I held it, looking at it.

  I didn’t want to read it.

  Anyways, I couldn’t open it without the key.

  I wouldn’t open it, even with the key.

  I sat there for a while, my back to the bed, and when I got tired of that I lay on the floor and looked at the ceiling. I guessed the maid was gone by now; it must have just been her downstairs day or something. I didn’t hear her anymore, but from a couple barks I knew Dobey was still out back on the deck.

  I just lay there thinking, the diary still in my hand.

  I had all these weird ideas.

  I don’t really know where they came from, but after looking in the box, I just sort of had them, and I lay there just trying to add them up.

  I didn’t want to read her diary—I mean it.

  But maybe I wasn’t very serious about that, because I started looking around the room again—just sort of looking around—trying to think of where she might have hidden it.

  The key, I mean.

  Of course, I’d already looked everywhere.

  In every box and drawer and everywhere else.

  So I just sort of skimmed the room, trying to see if there was any place I’d missed.

  And then I laughed because I saw something funny.

  My mother’s damned book.

  It was right there under some papers on Laura’s computer desk, on one of the narrow shelf spaces beside where Laura’s beautiful legs would be when she was sitting in the swivel chair there, doing her homework or something.

  I couldn’t see the cover, but I knew I was right just from looking at the way the pages were all worn and stained from being read a million times. I could recognize that.

  What was funny is that it was hidden.

  I mean, that’s what made me laugh.

  Even in her room she’d hidden it, stuffed there in the papers like it was some kind of crazy secret she didn’t want anyone to see.

  She knew I wouldn’t see it, because we’d broken up, and even when we were together there wouldn’t have been any chance of my ever spotting it lying around, because she’d never let me come into the house—I told you all about that.

  But it was hidden anyways.

  I guess it was so private she had to hide it.

  Maybe she didn’t want anyone to see it, her mom probably most of all. I kind of had the idea it was something she’d never want her mom to know she had read and liked so much.

  I wondered if I should take it and bring it back to my mom. But I knew Laura would notice it was gone, and she wouldn’t know who had taken it, and I didn’t want her to freak out about finding it missing.

  Still, I sort of felt like taking a look at it.

  So after a minute I pulled myself across the floor and took it out of the papers.

  I looked at the cover.

  I turned it around and read the back cover for about the million and first time.

  God, what a depressing book.

  Of course she didn’t want her mom to know she liked it. She would never talk about it with her mom, because it was a book about a girl who had nothing but trouble with her parents, so what good would it do to talk about it?

  But she’d talked about it with me.

  Well, she tried to.

  She tried to talk about it with me, and all I did was kind of go off on her, and then tell her that crazy story about the country club, because I guess I just couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stand hearing her praise the book and relate to it, and even just holding it in my hands made me feel kind of very nervous.

  The book really bothered me. I admit it.

  I guess it really bothered me to talk about it, even though maybe everybody in the whole world can relate to it because maybe sometimes the lid really does come down, and maybe I really should have read it, because, you know, “everybody in the whole world” I suppose includes me, too, but I’m sorry, I still can’t talk about it, and I just don’t want to ever read it.

  Because I can’t accept that.

  I mean the thing about the lid.

  I mean, maybe the lid’s been down on me my whole life.

  Maybe it’s been down on all of us our whole lives, but I can’t accept that.

  I hate that.

  I mean, if I had a motto, I think it’d be “Ignore the lid.”

  And even if I haven’t exactly lived up to that motto, I’ve at least done a pretty good job of pretending the lid isn’t there, because I just can’t stand hearing about such stuff and actually find it kind of incredibly disturbing.

  But Laura didn’t mind hearing about it.

  She liked hearing about it.

&
nbsp; She wanted to talk about it.

  But I sort of didn’t let her.

  I still had the book in my hand and I hadn’t even moved in a while , but the funny thing is, I was sweating. It was crazy. I was sweating like I’d run around the block, and I was breathing, too, pretty heavily, and I figured I had to calm down. I mean, I really had to calm down.

  Because I must admit, even just thinking about the book still made me a little mad at Laura. I mean just for ever even bringing the damn thing up, and I wished my mom had never loaned it to her, and I wished the lady who wrote it had never written it and had just thrown it away; I really couldn’t stand it. And all Laura ever wanted to do was sort of shove it in my face, just like my mom always had, and make me just sort of hear all about it and accept everything it said.

  I couldn’t believe I was mad at Laura again, because after seeing her wrecked paintings and all the ripped-up photographs, I felt nothing but sympathy for her, knowing what I now knew, because it was just too sad and depressing, and I’d thought I could never be mad at her again, and probably hadn’t ever really been mad but actually just sort of jealous.

  But I was mad.

  I had to calm down.

  I mean I really had to sort of relax.

  I kind of waited a minute.

  I waited to calm down.

  Of course, I can’t just say that Laura had wanted to bother me with it. I mean, I don’t think it was, like, her plan to deliberately hurt me. I felt pretty hurt and it did piss me off a lot.

  But then I sort of thought that if she didn’t want to hurt me—I mean, if that really wasn’t her plan to sort of just shove the thing in my face like my mom always had—maybe she was doing it for some other reason.

  Maybe she was trying to tell me something.

  Maybe she was like the girl in the book.

  Maybe she was trying to tell me that.

  But I didn’t listen.

  It never even occurred to me then that she wanted to maybe, like, share it with me.

  Sharing is something they talk about when you’re little, like six. I think it’s by the time you’re maybe ten that sharing goes out the window.

  But she’d meant to share it with me, in a way.

  I put the book back. I mean I just sort of stuffed it back into the papers where she’d hidden it.

  I must admit, I felt pretty stupid.