Best Kept Secret: A Novel

That night, on Scott’s recommendation, I pick Charlie up from Alice for our newly scheduled weekly dinner and bring him back to our house.

“What did you make me for dinner, Mommy?” he asks when we arrive.

I turn around in the driver’s seat and smile at him. “Brussels sprouts and spinach salad, of course. Your favorites.”

“Ew!” Charlie says, scrunching up his face. “No way am I eating that.”

“No way, huh?” I pretend to sigh. “Okay, I guess we’ll have to settle for homemade pizza. And green beans.” As long as the beans were slathered in butter, I could get my son to eat them.

“All right!” he says, and we head inside the house. I’d made the dough in my bread machine after my appointment with Scott, so now I let Charlie help me roll it out into two small pizzas—one for each of us. He slops pizza sauce, a mountain of mozzarella cheese, and three pieces of turkey pepperoni onto his and calls it good. I spread pesto, crumbled goat cheese, and toasted pine nuts on mine and pop them both in the oven.

“What do you want to play?” I ask him, brushing flour off my hands. “Blocks? Cars?”

“Can I watch TV?” he asks, clasping his hands together in front of his chest and batting his eyelashes at me.

I laugh. “Nice try, Mr. Man. But not right now. I don’t get to see you enough. I want to do something together.”

“But we can watch TV together,” he says, his voice lifting up at the end of the phrase.

“Later. How about Connect Four?”

“Okay,” he says. “I get to be red.”

“You always get to be red,” I tease him.

“It’s my favorite color.”

“I thought orange was your favorite color.”

“Not anymore.” He dashes into the living room and grabs the game from the shelf by the fireplace.

His favorite color had changed. I wondered if this happened when I was drinking, or only since he has been staying with Martin. Not knowing this feels wrong, like I’m deficient as a mother in yet another new and debilitating way. I take a deep breath as we sit down at the table, determined to not let this feeling ruin my time with my son.

After we play and eat, I let Charlie choose one cartoon for us to watch as we snuggle on the couch. “It’s time to go, kiddo,” I say when SpongeBob SquarePants is over. “I have to have you back to your daddy by eight o’clock.”

Charlie throws his arms around my waist and clings to me. “No. I don’t want to leave.”

“I know, baby,” I say, a lump already forming in my throat. “I don’t want you to leave, either. But I don’t have a choice.”

“Why not?” he whines. “I want to stay here in my room.”

“You have a wonderful room at Daddy’s, don’t you?”

He nods his head against my chest and I kiss the slightly musty mess of his hair. “Well, then, you get to stay there. And then, not this weekend, but the next one, you get to stay here. Okay?”

“Okay,” he says, drawing out the word. He tilts his head back to look at me. “But you won’t let any other little boys in my room, right, Mommy?”

“No way,” I tell him, trying to swallow back my tears. “That room was made just for you.”

The next morning, I am back at Promises for my individual session with Andi. She sits in her chair, notepad on her lap. Her outfit today is head-to-toe royal purple—a healing color, she says. After she tells me this, I feel somehow lacking in my jeans and emerald sweater set, as though I, too, should consider the influence the colors of my outfit might have on the people around me. We’re discussing the bout of irritation I had with my son at Jess’s house. This is normal, she assures me, for a newly recovering alcoholic or any other tired, stressed-out mother.

“All mothers get irritated,” she says. “Kids are irritating creatures. You acknowledged you screwed up, apologized, and he forgave you. That’s a good thing.”

“How is it a good thing?” I ask, bewildered.

“It’s good because Charlie gets to see that grown-ups make mistakes, too,” Andi explains. She is ever-patient with my questioning. “He also gets to see his mom admit she did something wrong and apologize for it. That’s called modeling positive behavior.”

I sigh. “The way you say it makes it sound so logical.”

“Forgiving yourself takes time,” she says, the barest hint of exasperation lacing through her words. “Being a good mother does not mean being perfect every moment. We screw up. We get mad, we drink too much, eat too much, yell too much. A good mother learns from her mistakes and does what she can to not let them happen over and over.”

“Well, I’ve failed that one,” I say, taking a quick sip of my coffee. “Look how often I got drunk around him.” Still, the words are like jagged pebbles caught in my throat. All the good things I’ve done as a mother—the books I’ve read, the countless hours I’ve spent snuggling my son, kissing his scrapes, dancing with him in the living room to the Wiggles—none of this matters. My drinking looms above it all, casting a thick, black shadow over anything I may have done right.

“And now you’re here, doing everything you can to not let that happen again.” She sighs, looks at me. “You don’t have to go through any of this alone.”

“I understand that, in theory. But allowing myself to rely on other people isn’t as easy as it sounds. Kind of like the whole ‘eat less, move more’ mantra is supposed to work for weight loss. If it were that simple, everyone who struggles with their weight would just do it.”

“I know. I’ve been through it, remember? Understanding how you ended up where you are isn’t a one-shot deal. It’s a process. My job is to help point you in the right direction so you don’t land here again.”

“Can I ask you something?” I say.

“Of course.”

“I was wondering what you think Martin’s reasons are for trying to take Charlie from me.”

She looks pensive. “It’s probably a combination of things. The most significant being that you were too drunk to take care of your son. At the point you were at in your drinking, it was right for him to take Charlie away.”

Her words sting. My cheeks flush and the tears come again.

“I know that’s hard to hear.”

I can’t even nod. I can’t move. My eyes burn.

“Martin also sounds like the kind of guy who does the ‘right’ thing,” Andi says, lifting her fingers to make invisible quotation marks around the word. “He’s very logical, right? A left-brained thinker?”

This time, I manage to respond. “Very much so.”

“So his brain takes the facts—as he sees them, at least—and lines them up, arranging them in a logical order so he can draw a conclusion.” She sits forward, hands clasped, elbows resting on her knees. “We all wish life were logical. And admitting we screwed up and aren’t capable of fixing something that has gone wrong is a devastating thing. We’re used to applying our dizzying intellect to a problem and making it go away.”

I raise one eyebrow at her. “I wouldn’t call my intellect ‘dizzying,’ exactly. If it were, I wouldn’t be in this god-awful nightmare of a mess, now would I?”

She smiles. “Don’t be too sure. This is not a matter of intellect. It has to do with biology and emotion. Some of the smartest, most successful people I know are alcoholics. But for whatever reason, they never learned how to manage their feelings. So they drank to numb them out. But the underlying issue is not having the right emotional skills to manage the feelings in the first place. That’s what you have to learn to do.”

“And how do I do that?”

She sits back into her chair and smiles. “You feel them.”

Later that day, I am sitting at the computer in my kitchen, browsing through the freelance writing job postings on Craigslist, thinking I might be able to make more money auctioning off a kidney on eBay, when the phone rings. It’s Peter, calling from his office at the Herald. I picture him sitting behind his desk—a huge African American man—six foot four and well over three hundred pounds. His burly voice definitely matches his build; it used to shake the glass walls of his office when I worked in the newsroom.

“Have you sent a query over to Tara Isaacs over at O yet?” he bellows.

“Not yet,” I say. “I’m still trying to come up with a good pitch.” I don’t tell him that what I’m really trying to do is figure out whether I want to be a writer at all. I’m not sure I still have it in me.

“Screw the pitch. Just make contact with her. Have you forgotten everything I taught you? Sell, sell, sell yourself. You’ll never make it in the freelance world if you can’t.”

I sigh. “Then maybe I’m not meant to make it.” Even as I say this, I realize how much this makes me sound like a victim, and I shudder.

“Bullshit. You’re a talented writer. Get over yourself and send the woman an e-mail. Just a follow-up, ‘hey, how ya doin’, pleased to meet you, my friend Peter the sex god told me we might get along.’ ”

I laugh. “I might have to leave that last part out, but all right, I’ll send the e-mail.”

“Good girl. Let me know how it goes.”

We hang up and I rest my fingers on the keyboard. This used to come so easily to me. I’d find the first sentence and the rest would spill out on its own. I decide to keep it simple. The e-mail Peter sent a couple of weeks ago has Tara’s e-mail address as a direct link, so all I have to do is click on it and it opens up a fresh, blank e-mail screen.

Dear Ms. Isaacs,

Peter Baskin, the editor-in-chief at the Seattle Herald, gave me your contact information after meeting you at an event in Chicago about a month ago. My name is Cadence Sutter, and I’ve been a journalist and freelance writer for over seven years.

I’ve taken some time off lately to spend more time with my young son, but am very interested in the possibility of working for such a prestigious, well-reputed magazine as O. If you have a specific subject you believe your readers would like to see explored, please let me know. Otherwise, I’ll be in touch soon with some of my own ideas.

I attach a list of the publications my work has been featured in, as well as a few of my best articles for her review, then cross my fingers before hitting send. I don’t expect to hear back from her for a few days at least, but an hour later, as I’m scrubbing the outsides of my kitchen cupboards, the new e-mail alert sounds on my laptop. I rush over to check, and it is, indeed, from Tara. It reads:

Dear Cadence,

It was certainly a pleasure to discuss your work with Peter—he did nothing but sing your praises when we spoke. I look forward to hearing back from you regarding what you think your writing could bring to our publication. I don’t like to assign ideas to the freelancers I work with, as I find that they, most always, come up with something better than I could have ever dreamed.

Take care, and I hope to hear from you soon.

All best,

Tara Isaacs

Oh, holy crap. Now I have to come up with something. She didn’t give me a deadline, but still, I’m not sure I can do it.

I may have just bitten off a hell of a lot more than I can chew.

I am alone over the weekend and Saturday night I go to bed early and lie in that all too familiar twilight space of not really asleep, not really awake. It’s the space I used to escape by downing another glass of wine. A tangible remedy to an intangible ill.

Feel the feelings, Andi said. I don’t understand why the thought of this terrifies me. Maybe because part of me believes if I don’t acknowledge how I feel, then I don’t have to acknowledge what I did. I’m terrified to face it. Around and around my mind goes while my body pretends to be asleep.

The phone rings, interrupting my thoughts. I end up fumbling for it, not looking at the caller ID. I bark an unfriendly greeting. The possibility flashes through my mind that perhaps it is Kristin calling me for the first time, in some kind of crisis, or maybe even Laura. But the demand behind my ex-husband’s words is unmistakable.

“Why did you call our son a freak?” he says without so much as identifying himself. I exhale a heavy breath into the receiver, attempting to release the immediate tension that seizes my body the instant I know who it is on the other end of the line.

“What?” My brain is fuzzy but my heart is wide awake, already thumping an anxious pattern in my chest. The blood pushes quickly through my veins. “I didn’t.”

And even though I know what he’s saying isn’t true—I didn’t call our son a freak—I do know he’s referring to a week ago when I lost my temper with Charlie at Jess’s house. The accusation hurts. I think of how easily I became irritated with my son, the grip of my hand on his fragile arm. How much more damage did I cause him?

“He said you did.”

I rub my eyes and look at the clock: 9:00 p.m. I’d only been in bed for half an hour. “Why are you calling me about this now?”

“He didn’t tell me about it until I was putting him to bed tonight,” he says, his voice short. “And I’m meeting with Mr. Hines on Monday, so I want to be prepared.” I grit my teeth at this classic Martin behavior. His mathematician’s makeup prohibits him from allowing any unexpected scenarios in his life; he has to be ready for the most infinitesimal of possibilities. I can see him sitting at his desk, the light from the computer illuminating his face, a spreadsheet—color-coded, of course—created for the express purpose of documenting for his lawyer every moment I spend with our son. Any compassion I felt for him last week around his having to take care of Alice disappears.

I sigh, roll over in my bed, and throw my forearm against my forehead. It’s amazing to me still the degree of animosity between us, how easily the daggers are thrown. He is not the tender man I married. I wonder sometimes how we ended up in this horrible place.

“I did not call him a name,” I say, attempting to remain calm. “You know me better than that. He was jumping all over Jess’s furniture and I said he was ‘freaking out.’ That’s it, that’s all. You can call Jess and she’ll tell you the same thing.” My stomach clenches, panicking, and I fall into a repair attempt. “Are we really going to stoop to this level?” I plead. “Can’t we figure this out another way? I don’t understand why you can’t give me a chance to make this right.” I paused, choosing my next words carefully. “There is nothing you can say about what has happened to make me feel any worse than I already do.”

“Any worse about what you’ve done, you mean. Not ‘what happened.’ What you did.”

“Yes. What I’ve done.”

Martin is quiet a moment now. I allow myself to feel buoyed by a small flash of optimism.

“Treatment’s helping,” I say. “I’m starting to understand why it happened. I intend to make sure it never happens again.” My voice is shaky. I’m not sure how convincing I sound. Part of me feels that after what I’ve done, I’ve lost the right to defend myself.

“Intentions aren’t enough, Cadee. How do I know you won’t drink again? How do I know Charlie will be safe?” He sighs, the old Martin I know coming through, if only for a moment, the ghost of the man who once loved me. I know part of him only wants to do the right thing by our son. But I don’t understand how he could possibly think the best thing is for Charlie to be without me.

“It’s probably better to leave it to the lawyers,” he says. “I’m sorry I bothered you. Have a nice night.”

Yeah, right, I think, as I hang up the phone. No problem, I’m sure I’ll drift right off to sleep now. Sweet dreams to you, too. Bastard.

I flop over to lie on my side, punch my pillow, once, twice. I wriggle beneath the covers to find a comfortable position, unsuccessfully trying to blank my mind of any thought. I flip over one more time, wrestling around with the covers.

My relationship with Martin doesn’t matter anymore. I can’t fix it, I can’t change it. What matters is my son. I miss him violently; there is a Charlie-shaped hole inside me. Is there one shaped like me inside of him?

Nighttime is the worst. The quiet makes me feel like I’ve lost him completely, like he might never be coming back. I watch moonlight graze the tips of its long golden fingers over my bedroom walls. Swayed by a gentle breeze, the laurel outside my bedroom window taps on the glass in a soft, staccato beat. Trying to find relief, I gather the nearest pillow I can find to my heart, hold it close, rock it. In the dark I pretend it is my son, soft and warm, quiet and sweet, my child peacefully sleeping.