Page 4 of Little Secrets
—MARYLIVER
Chapter 2
They say if a missing child Sebastian’s age isn’t found within twenty-four hours of his disappearance, chances are he never will be.
This is the first coherent thought Marin Machado has every morning when she wakes up.
The second thought is whether this will be the day she’ll kill herself.
Sometimes the thoughts dissipate by the time she’s out of bed and in the shower, obliterated by the steaming water bursting out of the showerhead. Sometimes they dissipate by the time she’s finished her coffee and is driving to work. But sometimes they stay with her all day, like whispering, ominous clouds in the background of her mind, a soundtrack she can’t shut off. On those days, she might pass as normal from the outside, just a regular person having regular conversations with the people around her. Internally, there’s a whole other dialogue going on.
This happened just the other morning, for instance. Marin showed up at her downtown salon wearing a pink Chanel shift dress she’d found at the back of her closet, still in its dry-cleaning plastic. She was looking pretty fabulous when she walked into work, and her receptionist, a young blonde with an impeccable sense of style, noticed.
“Good morning, Marin,” Veronique called out with a bright smile. “Look at you, rocking that dress. You look like a million bucks.”
Marin returned the receptionist’s smile as she walked through the elegant waiting room to her private office in the back of the salon. “Thanks, V. Forgot I had it. How’s the schedule looking?”
“Fully booked,” Veronique said in a singsong voice, the same one all morning people seemed to have.
Marin nodded and smiled again, heading to her office, all the while thinking,Maybe today is the day. I’ll take the shears—not the new ones I used on Scarlett Johansson last summer, but the old ones I used on J.Lo five years ago, the ones that have always felt best in my hand—and I’ll stab them into my neck, right where I can see my pulse. I’ll do it in front of the mirror in the bathroom, so that I don’t screw it up. Yes, definitely the bathroom, it’s the easiest place for them to clean up; the tile is slate, the grout is dark, and the bloodstains won’t show.
She didn’t do it. Clearly.
But she thought about it. Shethinksabout it. Every morning. Most evenings. Occasional afternoons.
Today, thankfully, is starting out as a better day, and the thoughts that attacked her when Marin first woke up are beginning to fade. They’re fully gone by the time her alarm goes off. She switches the bedside lamp on, grimacing at the foul taste in her mouth from the entire bottle of red wine she drank the night before. She takes a long sip of water from the glass she keeps by the bed, swishing it around her dry mouth, then unplugs her phone from the charger.
One new message.You alive?
It’s Sal, of course, and it’s his usual text, the one he sends every morning if he hasn’t already heard from her. To anyone else, a text like this might be considered insensitive. But it’s Sal. They go back a long way and share the same dark sense of humor, and she’s thankful she still has one person in her life who doesn’t feel the need to tiptoearound her precious feelings. She’s also fairly certain that Sal’s the only person in the world who doesn’t secretly think she’s a piece of shit.
She replies with numb fingers, eyes still bleary, head pounding from the hangover.Barely, she texts back. It’s her usual response, brief, but it’s all he needs. He’ll check on her again around bedtime. Sal knows bedtimes and mornings are the worst for her, when she’s least able to deal with the reality that is now her life.
Beside her, the bed is empty. The pillow is still perfect and the sheets are still flat. Derek didn’t sleep here last night. He’s out of town on business, again. She has no idea when he’s coming back. He forgot to tell her yesterday when he left, and she forgot to ask.
It’s been four hundred eighty-five days since she lost Sebastian.
This means she’s had four hundred eighty-five evenings where she hasn’t bathed her son, put him in clean pajamas, tucked him into bed, and read himGoodnight Moon. She’s had four hundred eighty-five mornings of waking up to a quiet house devoid of laughter and stomping feet, and no calls of “Mommy, wipe!” emanating from the hallway bathroom, because while he was fully potty trained, he was only four, still learning how to handle his own basic hygiene.
Four hundred eighty-five days of this nightmare.
Panic sets in. She takes a minute and does the deep-breathing exercises her therapist taught her until the worst of it passes and she can function. Nothing about anything feels normal anymore, but she’s better at faking it than she used to be. For the most part, she’s stopped scaring people. She’s been back at work for four months now. The routine of work has been good for her; it gets her out of the house, gives structure to her day, and gives her something to think about other than Sebastian.
Swinging her legs over the side of the bed, she winces as a sharp pain stabs her in the temple. She downs her Lexapro and a multivitamin with what’s left of her lukewarm water, and is in the showerwithin five minutes. Forty-five minutes later, she’s out of the bathroom, fully dressed, makeup on, hair clean and styled. She feels better. Not great—her child is still missing and it’s still totally her fault—but she does have moments when she doesn’t feel like she’s dangling by a rapidly unraveling thread. This is one of them. She counts it as a win.
The day passes quickly. Four haircuts, a double process, a balayage, and a staff meeting, which she attends but Sadie leads. She promoted Sadie to general manager with a huge salary bump right after she had the baby, and Sadie now runs the day-to-day operations for all three salons. Marin could hardly stand to lose Sadie before everything happened with Sebastian; afterward, the thought was unfathomable. Marin needed to stay home and fall apart, which she did, for a year, until Derek and her therapist suggested it was time to come back to work.
She still oversees everything—the company is, after all, Marin’s—but mainly she’s moved back to the salon floor, cutting and coloring hair for a select group of longtime clients known internally as VIPs. They’re all absurdly wealthy. More than a few are minor celebrities, and they pay six hundred dollars an hour to have their hair done personally by Marin Machado of Marin Machado Salon & Spa.
Because once upon a time, she wassomebody. Her work has been featured inVogue,Allure,Marie Claire. It used to be cool to be Marin Machado. You could google her name and photos of the three biggest celebrity Jennifers—Lopez, Lawrence, and Aniston—would come up, all women she’s worked on personally—but now articles about her work take a back seat to news reports about Sebastian’s disappearance. The massive search that went nowhere. Complaints about the special treatment she and Derek received from the cops because Derek is a somebody, too, and they’re an affluent couple with connections, a friendship with the chief of police (which was vastly overstated—they barely know the woman outside of seeing her at afew charity events over the years), and rumors that Marin tried to kill herself.
Now she’s a cautionary tale.
It was Sadie’s idea to put her back on the floor. Doing hair is good for Marin. It’s something she enjoys, and there’s no place she feels more herself than behind the chair, mixing colors and painting strands and wielding shears. Hairstyling is the perfect blend of craft and chemistry, and she’s good at it.
In her chair right now is a woman named Aurora, a longtime client who’s married to a retired Seattle Mariner. Her naturally brunette hair is going gray, and she’s been transitioning to blond for the past few appointments. Aurora is requesting face-framing platinum blond highlights that look “beachy,” but her hair is dry, fine, and aging. Marin decides to hand-paint the highlights in with a low-strength bleach mixed with bond rebuilder. When the woman’s hair lightens to a shade of pale yellow similar to the inside of a banana peel—a processing time that can take anywhere from ten to twenty-five minutes, depending on a hundred different factors—Marin rinses and applies a violet toner, which she leaves on for no more than three minutes, to create that perfect white-blond look the client is hoping for.
This process is complicated, but it’s something Marin can control. It’s extremely important for her to do things with predictable outcomes. Her first week back to work, she realized she’d have been better off coming back to the salon sooner, rather than spending all that time in therapy.
