Best Kept Secret: A Novel

I leave my house the next morning dressed simply in a lavender cardigan and dark jeans. I’m jittery with renewed determination to present my case to Mr. Hines. I weave my way south down Interstate 5, drive beneath the ill-advised, traffic-inducing monstrosity of the Convention Center down the freeway about a mile. Qwest and Safeco Fields are off to my right. I take the exit next to the Tully’s Coffee roasting plant, a building that twenty years ago used to produce Rainier Beer. As children, when my mother drove past it, Jess and I debated the more accurate characterization of the scent in the air—urine or cornflakes? I much prefer the current, easily distinguished nutty bouquet of roasting coffee.

Driving up and over the West Seattle Bridge, I listen to the calm, computerized tones of my GPS directing me to follow Fauntleroy Way, cross over California Avenue, and down the hill toward Lincoln Park. I find Mr. Hines’s office a few blocks away from the Fauntleroy Ferry terminal. It’s disguised as a two-story, sky blue Victorian-style house, complete with sharp gables and white gingerbread trim. I had imagined I’d arrive at a nondescript office building, but the address is right. It’s not until I find a tiny black sign tacked to the left side of the front door, emblazoned with scrolled brass letters—RONALD HINES, MSW, GAL—that I’m certain I’m in the right place.

My cell phone rings just as I’m lifting my index finger to press the doorbell. I reach inside my purse and flip the phone open.

“Hello?” The word comes out as a whisper, though I’m not sure why.

“Hey, I just wanted to wish you good luck,” Jess says. “I love you. I know you’ll do great.”

The tension woven through the muscles of my chest relaxes a bit. “Thanks, Jess. I appreciate it.” I take a deep breath. “I need to talk with you about selling my house, too, okay?”

“Yeah, sure, of course,” she says. “I’ll run a CMA to see what we can list it for.”

“What’s a CMA?”

“Comparative market analysis. It tells us what houses are going for in your neighborhood.”

“Oh, okay. That sounds great. Thank you.” I pause to take another deep breath. “I’m standing on the front porch of his office right now. I should probably go.”

“Okay. Call me later.”

“I will. ’Bye.” I press the bell and hear the thud of a man’s footsteps moving toward the door. It swings open and Mr. Hines stands in front of me. I’m not sure what I was expecting him to look like, but it wasn’t this. His blond hair is unkempt. He’s stocky, not particularly handsome; at least, not in the traditional sense of the word. The pale pink, striped dress shirt and khakis he’s wearing are rumpled and creased.

“Ms. Sutter?” he inquires. His voice resonates in a low, deep timbre.

I nod, my lips pressed together, too afraid to speak. I’m afraid I might let loose a wild string of babbling hysteria, begging this man to give me my son back. I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t go over well. My breath is shallow; my lungs feel like overinflated balloons behind my rib cage.

“Come in.” He gestures for me to step inside a long, narrow hallway. He closes the door, slips past me with his back against the wall. I follow him into a small, square room with three long, rectangular windows. It’s sparsely decorated with a couple of chairs, a round end table, and a bookshelf. He sits in one of the padded, forest green armchairs and looks at me expectantly. “Please, sit down.”

I lower myself into the other seat. Our knees are barely a foot apart. This arrangement feels oddly intimate to me, so I angle my knees off to one side to create a slightly larger space between us. “I’m really nervous,” I blurt. “I don’t know what to expect.”

He shifts his mouth in a small motion. It’s not quite what I would call a smile. “I wouldn’t expect you to,” he says. “And I’m sorry you’re nervous. We’ll take this slowly.” He reaches for a yellow legal pad and a pen, crossing his left leg over his right knee. “Why don’t you start by telling me about your marriage to Martin?” He drops his eyes to the notepad and waits, pen poised just above the page.

“Okay.” I take a deep breath, unlacing my fingers and setting my hands flat on the tops of my thighs. I give him the short version, how Martin and I met, dated, and then decided to get married when I found out I was pregnant with Charlie.

He looks up when I say this. “Charlie wasn’t planned, then, I take it?”

“No,” I say. “But it only took me about two seconds to know I would keep him, once I knew I was pregnant.”

“How did you feel about becoming a mother?” His eyes are intent on mine and I have to force myself to not look away.

“A little scared,” I say, wanting to be honest with him, knowing this is what Martin most likely said about how I felt, too. “But aren’t all mothers scared, the first time? I know my sister was. It kind of goes with the territory.”

“So, how was being a mother once Charlie arrived? Were you still scared?”

I consider this, drumming my fingers across my thighs. “Well, in a different way, I suppose. I loved him immensely. I had never felt anything like it, to tell you the truth. I was scared I wouldn’t be a good enough mother to him.” As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I want to reel them back in, to somehow make it so they hadn’t been spoken.

“Really.” He looks thoughtful. “Why was that?”

I struggle to find the right words, panicking that he has just now, within the first thirty minutes of our conversation, decided I shouldn’t have Charlie with me. “I think it was because my own mother was absent a lot when I was growing up. She was a single mom, and there was this part of me that was afraid that since I hadn’t seen how to be a present, loving, involved mother, I wouldn’t know how to do it myself. But I learned.” I tick off the list of all the activities Charlie and I took on during the first couple of years of his life. I talk about teaching him some basic sign language, the classes we took, the play dates at the park.

“What did you find hard about being a mother?”

“Well . . . hmm.” I fiddle with the hem of my shirt. “Mostly it just took time for me to adjust to how much Charlie needed me. For everything. It felt like a lot of pressure to get it all right.”

“All of what right?”

“Everything. I wanted to give him the kind of childhood I didn’t have. I wanted to be with him every minute of every day. I wanted him to feel treasured. I wanted to play pat-a-cake and peekaboo and hold him every minute he’d let me.” I make a quivering, throaty noise I hope he interprets as laughter. “That was easier to do when he was a baby. Now he only lets me hold him when he’s tired. The rest of the time he whirls around. He’s a very energetic kid.”

“Are you?”

“Energetic?”

“Yes. Do you feel like your energy level matches your son’s?”

“Does any adult have the same energy level as a child?” I’m answering his questions with another question, an old habit from my reporting days. Deflect a subject’s questioning of you with another question. He starts tapping his pen against his jawline. I try again. “I’m not an athletic person, if that’s what you mean. My idea of exercise tends toward pacing back and forth in front of my computer when I can’t think of a story idea.”

“I see.” Mr. Hines looks down to his notepad, scribbles a bit, then raises his eyes back up to me. “And your marriage? Why do you think it ended?”

I push a breath out between my lips before speaking. “There’s a complicated question.”

“I realize that. Can you at least try to answer it for me?”

So I do, first giving him the background on Martin’s changing careers, then how our relationship shifted when Charlie arrived. “Martin was an only child,” I explained. “It was just him and his mother from the time he was two years old. I think in some ways he got used to having a woman focus all her attentions on him. And only him. I sort of took over that role when we were dating, and our relationship worked. But then Charlie came along and I couldn’t do that anymore. Martin had a difficult time adjusting.”

“So you’re saying you got divorced because he was jealous of Charlie?” Mr. Hines’s silver irises peek up at me underneath twin blond caterpillar eyebrows. He appears doubtful.

“No, no, of course not,” I backtrack, shaking my head. “Martin loves Charlie. But he wasn’t around very much. For either of us. I tried talking with him, I even tried to get him to see a counselor with me. He refused.”

“Ah,” Mr. Hines says, scribbling another note on the page in front of him. “I see.”

“There was so much distance between us,” I say. “He was working an insane amount of hours, Charlie and I barely saw him, and when we did, he and I argued over parenting issues. Or his mother. Basically, whatever the subject was, we argued. He retreated, and I didn’t want to rock the boat and make things worse, so nothing was ever resolved.” My gaze lifts out the window before I bring it back to Mr. Hines. “It just wouldn’t have worked. At least not for me. I felt like if he couldn’t even acknowledge we had issues we needed to address, there wasn’t enough of a foundation for us to try to build the relationship back up again. He abandoned us emotionally long before I filed for divorce.”

“And when did your drinking begin?” He asks this as if he is inquiring when dinner might be served.

I swallow once, hard. “About two months after he left.” I told him of my inability to sleep, the anxious thoughts that would spin like a top in my head. About having a glass of wine at night to relax. How it progressed slowly, over a period of months. How one day, a year later, I woke up and alcohol had taken over. “It didn’t feel like a choice anymore,” I say. “My body demanded that I drink. If I didn’t, I got so ill I couldn’t function. It wasn’t like I just up and decided one day, oh, I think I’ll start drinking on a regular basis so I don’t have to think about my problems anymore,” I explain, basically repeating what I’d told the doctor who admitted me to the psychiatric ward. “I didn’t realize it was happening. I didn’t know what was wrong with me.”

“Did you tell your doctor how much you were drinking?”

Does anyone? I wonder. Oh, yes, Doctor, I’m downing a good eight glasses of merlot a night. “No, I didn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Well, I think at that point I didn’t realize how much I was drinking. Or maybe I just couldn’t admit it to myself. It felt pretty much next to impossible to admit it to her. It wasn’t until I got to the psych ward and the doctor on duty that night asked me how much I drank that I got honest about it.”

“I see.” He makes another note. I resist the urge to snatch the pad from his lap and read what he is writing about me. “Why didn’t you ask for help?”

“I just kept thinking I would find a way to manage it. I felt like there was something incredibly wrong with me that I couldn’t just handle everything on my own.”

“No one is completely self-sufficient,” Mr. Hines says.

I raise an eyebrow at him. “You haven’t met my mother yet. She worked two jobs, went to college, and raised two little girls entirely on her own. Martin’s mother is like that, too. She raised Martin and ran a successful business. I had all these strong, successful women around me. I wanted to be one of them.”

“So you pretended that you were and drank to alleviate the knowledge that you weren’t?”

I look down at my fingernails. “That’s simplifying it a bit, but yes. I suppose you could say that.”

“What about your sister? You couldn’t talk to her?”

“By the time I started to suspect I might have a problem, she was busy with infant twins and trying to sell houses. I didn’t want to be a burden.” I take a deep breath and look back up at him, wanting to direct the conversation back to a more positive note. “The good news is, I’m learning a lot about choices in treatment. That I can learn different tools to manage my unhappiness. Alcohol just happened to be there. I had no idea it would take me over the way it did. I understand that part of it is physical, but for me, it was more emotional and mental. I feel like knowledge is power, you know? I know better now, so it won’t happen again.”

He nods, listening. “So knowing you’re an alcoholic enables you to stop being one?”

“Well,” I say, drawing out the word, “to tell you the truth, I’m not exactly sure I’m an alcoholic.”

He cocks his head to the side. “Can you elaborate on that?”

I pause, carefully considering my words. “Well . . . I think most alcoholics have trouble with drinking their whole lives. I haven’t. I listen to people in meetings talk about the first drink they took when they were twelve years old. And it didn’t happen like that for me. I drank socially for years without any problems, so I guess it feels more like a bad episode for me. A rough patch. Like I said, I’m used to being independent, not asking for help.” I shrug. “I understand that I need to, especially now that I’m on my own. When Martin left, I was in unfamiliar territory, and I drank to relieve the discomfort.”

He looks at me, his gaze sharp. “Alcoholics, by definition, have a life that has become unmanageable. Would you say that your life was unmanageable while you were drinking?”

“Yes,” I start, not wanting to argue with him, but also wanting to be as honest as possible about my thoughts. “But it’s not anymore. I’m managing it. I’m getting treatment. I’m learning the right way to handle my stress.” I lean forward, my fingers linked, elbows resting on my knees. “I swear, I am going to do everything in my power to make sure I never pick up another drink. I’ll do whatever my treatment counselor tells me. I’ll go to meetings, get a sponsor, whatever it is I need to do.” The tears come now, despite my valiant efforts to keep them at bay. “Charlie is everything to me,” I say, my voice cracking on the words. “He’s my life. I need to have him back with me. I want him back more than I’ve ever wanted anything.” I sit back, wiping away the tears with the edge of my hand. “He needs me. I’m the first face he’s seen every morning since he was born. I’ve given him every bath and kissed every scratch he’s ever had. I taught him his alphabet. I tickle his back every night. He says he can’t sleep unless I do this for him . . . I’m scared he’s not sleeping . . .” I lose it at this point. The tears take over.

After a minute or two of me weeping, Mr. Hines quietly leans over and pulls a few tissues from the box on a table next to him, then hands them to me.

“Thank you,” I sniff. “Sorry about that.”

He waves his hand, dismissing my words. “No need to apologize. I’d be more worried if you didn’t cry, to tell you the truth.” He sighs. “I think that’s enough for today, Ms. Sutter. If I have any more specific questions, we can save them for when I come visit the house.”

“Okay,” I say, hesitating. “Are you sure? I’m happy to stay.”

“No, no. I’ve got enough of the basics here. Thank you for your honesty. I know this is hard to discuss.”

“Yes.” I reach for my purse, then look at him with what I hope is the clearest expression of gratitude I can muster. “Thank you for your time.”

I want to say more. I want to beg him to just give my child back to me. Anything, I want to tell him. I’ll do anything you tell me to. Jump off a bridge, stand on my head, take night courses on healthy parenting for the next ten years. Whatever you decide, I will do. Just give me my child. I’ll get down on my knees, right here. Please. I want my child back.

My cell phone rings the next afternoon. I fumble for it, hoping by some miracle it might be Scott calling to tell me Charlie would be on his way home by the end of the week. I’d spent the day after my meeting with Mr. Hines in front of the television, waiting. Instead, Jess’s name pops up on the caller ID.

“Hey, there,” I say, flopping back into my well-worn groove on the couch. I click the mute button on the television remote.

“Hey,” she says. “You never called me back.”

“Sorry,” I say. “I kind of vegged out watching the Food Network when I got home.”

“Your personal porn channel, you mean?”

I laugh. “Pretty much.” I don’t tell her that I also ate six pieces of fried chicken I brought home from the grocery store, topped off with a full pint of Ben & Jerry’s Crème Brûlée ice cream. Nor do I tell her I roamed the cupboards after eating all of that, looking for more, even though it felt as though my stomach might burst. Different behavior, same compulsion, Andi would say.

“Okay. Well, I was worried.” I hear her take a deep breath. “So, how did it go?”

“Fine, I guess. I lost it, totally cried my eyes out in front of him talking about losing Charlie. It sucked.” My throat thickens again just thinking about it.

“Well, he’d probably be more concerned if you didn’t lose it.”

“That’s what he said.” I don’t want to talk about this anymore. I don’t even want to be living through it. “Anyway. How are you? How are the boys?”

“I’m good, they’re a couple of terrors. When do you get Charlie again?”

“Not until the weekend. I’ve been relegated to the status of ‘every other mother.’ ”

“It’ll be okay, Cadee.” She knows me too well to ignore the sadness in my voice, however well I try to mask it.

I clear my throat. I can’t cry again. I just can’t. “I should go. I’ll talk to you about the house stuff later?”

“Okay. I love you.”

“Love you, too.”

I hang up, grateful for Jess’s heartfelt assurance that all will be well. I want desperately to believe her, but we are sisters, after all. Her desire to soothe me might compel her to lie the same way drinking taught me to lie to myself.