Best Kept Secret: A Novel

The morning startles me now, with its silence. On Tuesday, I open my eyes from a dreamless sleep and begin to lose Charlie all over again. I lose him in the absence of loud, clamoring early morning cartoons. I lose him when I realize there are no dresser drawers being banged shut as he tries on ten different outfits to see which best suits his mood. I lose him in the sad fact that the only person I have to cook breakfast for is me. Pancakes for one is a pitiful thing—I cannot bring myself to make them.

I try to escape. I pace. I walk around the house, into the kitchen, back out to the living room. I stand in front of the closed door to Charlie’s room and can’t bring myself to look inside. The sight of the bed he has not slept in is too much for me to bear. The tiny, lonely sock he left on the floor might as well be a dagger lodged in my chest. I’m not sure what to do with all I feel. I’m unwieldy. Unbalanced. I only want the ache to go away. I call Jess, but get her voicemail. I can hear what my mother would say without having to pick up the phone. She prescribes work for matters of uncertainty the way other mothers prescribe chicken soup for a cold.

I leave a message for Susanne, not really expecting to hear back. My not being able to drink with her has changed us. Andi warned me that it might.

“You getting sober shifts the dynamics in your friendship,” she said. “Just like you would have a hard time being around her because she drinks, she might have a hard time being around you because you don’t.”

“So I lose her altogether?”

“You might,” Andi said. “It’s unfortunate, but sometimes, that’s the way it goes.”

I flash on the idea of turning this phenomenon into an article—when friendships fade. I sit down at the table and attempt to get a few words on the page, but I can’t get anything done. What else can I write about? When a Grown Woman Can’t Take Care of Her Son? When Writer’s Block Strikes? The Bitter Aftermath of Bad Choices? What to Do When You Don’t Have Any Idea What the Hell to Do with the Rest of Your Life?

Right. There’s some high-quality journalism. My mind won’t sit still. I feel like a ticking bomb.

I stand up and open the cupboards, cruising for something—anything—to eat. There’s nothing—only a stale loaf of bread in my refrigerator and a single slice of moldy cheese. I’ve been living off coffee and takeout. I decide to go shopping and use up the hours and minutes that torture me with their lack of direction. I used to have a compass. I used to have Charlie.

It’s the middle of the day, and the store’s customers are mostly retirees and mothers with their children. Damn. I keep my head down and fill my cart with good intentions: lettuce, tomatoes, low-fat yogurt. I didn’t make a list. I wander the aisles in a slow, haphazard pattern. I take time to read the nutritional content on a package of sharp cheddar cheese and am horrified at the amount of fat in one tiny little ounce. Still. I keep reading the packages before I put them in my cart. The longer I’m here, the less time alone I’ll have to endure.

I turn the corner and there it is. The wine aisle. Oh God. A gripping, physical sense of longing fills me. An urge as primitive as hunger. My craving speaks to me in a hypnotic lover’s voice. I feel like the woman who wants to return to the man who beats her. She convinces herself that this time he will be different; she’ll just be more careful around him. Despite what I know, despite the fact that I’m in danger of losing my son, this voice entices me to believe that this time, the drink won’t hurt. It makes the promise that this time, I won’t end up black and blue.

I whip my cart around. I grab the makings for lasagna and stew, packages of precooked chicken and lunch meats. I think of the meals I made for the expectant mothers of Mommy and Me and start planning out menus in my head. Maybe I can fill my days with cooking, fill my freezer with food for my son. Chicken soup, taco meat, shepherd’s pie. His favorites.

I take a deep breath and push my cart around the corner. I hear the bright, chirping chatter of a little girl speaking to her mother. “Can we get this cereal, Mama?” she pleads. “Can we, can we pleeeeease?”

I look up to see the mother’s tired, haggard face as she responds. Her shoulders are hunched; she is carrying another child in a baby sling—a newborn. “No, honey,” she says. “That’s a sugar cereal. It’s not good for us.”

“But please, Mama!” the little girl begs, stomping her feet and shaking the brightly colored box a couple of times for emphasis. “I will clean my room. I will even throw away Trevor’s poopy diapers.”

The mother sighs quietly. “I said no, Emma. We have cereal at home.” Baby Trevor starts to cry and so does Emma. Her face screws up and fat tears roll down her chubby pink cheeks. She plops down on the floor and sits cross-legged, her plump fingers gripped into angry fists on top of her knees. “I want it!” she screams. “I want it!”

Watching this scene unfold, my heart aches not only for the mother—who looks as though she’d love nothing more than to curl up for a good, long nap—but for myself. My heart aches for Charlie. I think of the countless times my son threw a fit exactly like this one in the middle of a store. How in those moments part of me wanted to plop him down on a shelf, paste a bright yellow price tag on his head, and leave him there for some other woman to take home.

You don’t know what you have, I long to tell her. I know it’s hard. I know you feel like you might just collapse right here in the grocery aisle. But you don’t know. You have no idea how horrified you’d be if you did something to lose this. If someone tried to take them away. You have no idea how much you’d hate yourself for thinking you don’t want it.

I move my cart down the aisle and look up only to see a box of Froot Loops. That’s it. I lose it. I begin to weep. It’s Charlie’s favorite. A treat I rarely let him indulge in, but his favorite nonetheless. Who really gives a fuck if he eats sugar cereal? There are so many worse things a mother could do wrong. I grab a box and throw it into my cart. And then another. And one more. I want to be prepared.

I want to be ready for him when he comes home.

My attorney, Scott Watson, works out of a small space above a Thai restaurant on Capitol Hill. The tantalizing, spicy-sweet aroma of lemongrass and red chili paste serves as the dangling carrot for having to come see my lawyer; I do my best to plan my appointments with him around the lunch hour so I can grab an order of pad thai and swimming rama to take home.

On Wednesday, my stomach gurgles and growls as I walk up the stairs to Scott’s office. I was referred to him by the team at Promises—he was the only lawyer who had the availability to take my case, and whose rates I could actually afford.

When I met him back in March, his open, flamboyant nature put me at ease right off the bat—during our first appointment he told me entertaining stories about his weekend dinner parties and his own dysfunctional family dynamics, giving me a glimpse of him as a human being, not simply an attorney who, while paid to be on my side, I feared might be quietly passing judgment. There is no sense of this about him; instead, he exudes an acceptance and confidence that I am incapable of at the moment—the proper balance of determination and optimism to make me believe he may actually be able to get Charlie back.

“Cadence, darling!” he exclaims from his desk, looking up as I step into his office. His legal assistant, David, had announced my arrival. “How are you?”

I shrug. “I’m okay. How are you?” Always immaculately groomed, he wears a well-cut black pinstripe suit, shiny black loafers, and a white handkerchief in his breast pocket. Not more than a few years older than me, he is still slight enough to make you think for a moment he is a teenager dressing up in his father’s workclothes.

“Good, good.” He shuffles a messy stack of papers on his desk, then motions to the chair I am standing behind. “Have a seat.”

I step around the chair, sit, cross both my arms and legs. “Any news?”

He shakes his head, lips pursed. “Nope. You’re meeting Mr. Hines at his office, when?”

“May fifteenth,” I say, wiggling my foot in the air.

Scott sits back in his wing-backed leather chair, casually assessing my jittery behavior. “You had your first visit with Charlie, didn’t you? How’d it go?”

“Good, for the most part.” Again, as I had in group, I relate the conversation Alice and I had shared, but also how wonderful it was to be with Charlie.

He taps a pen against his phone. “You didn’t bring him home?”

“No. Was I supposed to?” The muscles in my chest seize; I tighten my fingers around each of my biceps. The empty ache in my stomach suddenly vanishes and is replaced by nausea. Since Martin filed for custody, I’m basically at the mercy of the legal system. The process of trying to get my son back is out of my control—have I screwed up the one thing I could have influenced?

“You didn’t have to, it just might have looked a little better if you had. Like you were confident in being alone with him.”

“He wanted to see his cousins and his aunt,” I say, immediately set on the defensive. “What’s wrong with that?” I’m not confident! I want to scream. I’m a pitiful, writhing mass of insecurity! Can’t you see that? Do I really have to say it out loud?

Scott sits back, places his hands over his rib cage, and pats them rhythmically, like he is playing the piano on his suit buttons. He is contemplating. “Nothing is wrong with it, it just doesn’t paint the picture I was hoping your time alone with him would.” He flips a hand in the air, dismissing the subject. “No worries, we’ll handle it. The next weekend, though, you should bring him home, okay? Have him spend the night there.”

“Okay.” I am fighting the feelings as they rise in me: panic, fear, anger. I see Scott register this, and again, a concerned look passes over his face.

“Cadence, look,” he says, tucking his hands flat beneath opposite biceps. “I’m going to tell you something, okay? I’ve thought about telling you this since our first meeting, but the timing just never seemed right. I trust you’ll hold what I say in confidence?”

I nod, swallow twice, blinking back the tears.

He takes a deep breath. “I’m an alcoholic. Four years sober. I see the old me written all over your face, hear myself in almost every word you say. You’re scared, defensive, smart as hell, but baffled as to how you got to this horrifying place. So believe me, I get this. I get how crazy you feel right now. I don’t have kids to lose custody of, but I lost a lot in the process of getting sober.”

“Like what?” My ears are perked now, my panic momentarily quelled by his revelation.

He laughs, a short, barking sound. “My boyfriend, for one. Steve. I was a very messy drunk and he got tired of cleaning up after me.”

“I’m so sorry,” I say. “How long were you together?”

“Eight years,” he says. Wry regret cloaks his words. “He finally left after the night he came home to find me making boy soup.”

“Boy soup?” I laugh, and must look as confused as I feel, because he goes on to explain.

“I brought home three other men from the bar. We were in the hot tub when Steve came in. Hot water, naked bodies . . . boy soup.”

I suck a breath in through my teeth. “Ahh.” And then, after a brief pause. “Wow. Three men?”

“What can I say?” He smiles, shrugging his shoulders almost imperceptibly. “I’m ambitious.” He untucks his hands, presses them flat on the tops of his thighs. “That wasn’t who I was, you know? I loved Steve. Drinking just totally changed my personality. It took away my dignity and my ability to make rational choices. My partner track with a well-known law firm went away, too.” He motions around the small room. “I didn’t set out to be a one-man practice, taking clients at rates less than a third an hour than what I was making. But it took what it took. I hit rock bottom and didn’t get disbarred. I should have been. I was shit-faced in court on more than one occasion.”

“How did you know when you hit bottom?” I ask, genuinely interested in his response, though simultaneously shocked and touched that he would share such frank, intimate details of his life. I find this at AA meetings, too, people just opening up, confessing the most appalling of sins with a comfort and ease I’ve never known. I can’t decide if this impresses or horrifies me.

“When I stopped digging,” he says, and something about this image makes sense to me; it clicks inside my head, a key fitting into a lock. I see myself at the base of a deep, dark hole, shovel in hand, face blackened, exhausted. I’m prodding the soil, digging here and there, the ground literally falling out from under me, right along with my footing. But it’s me, I’m the one digging. I stop my jabbing movements and see myself lifting the shovel out of the dirt. I hold on to it still, unsure how to let go, where to put it, no clue as to what else I might use as a tool to find my way out of this deep well I’ve put myself in.

“How do I stop digging?” My voice is quiet. “I don’t know how to stop.”

“Put down the shovel, honey,” he says. “That’s all. Just put it down and start looking up.”