Page 59 of The Secret
An uncomfortable prickle takes over my throat, eyes tightening. I can’t hold his gaze.All this time.I worried about him.When I look back, he’s frowning, and he lifts a hand at me like he’s telling me to wait, and my legs go weak, cold flooding through me. After all the torture of the last three years, he’s going to talk to me. I can’t bear it.
The man he’s talking to gestures with his hands, and two other guys butt into the conversation, angry and arms waving, arguing. His eyes switch from one to the other, nodding, patient. The crowd is fading a bit now, and so I scurry down the aisle toward the front. As I look around, a white lady and a small girl I didn’t notice before are standing to the side at the front. They’re looking at the platform, watching. I shift slightly closer. The girl is gorgeous, with blonde curly hair that reaches the woman’s waist and an inability to keep still. Her bouncing and fidgeting almost make me laugh. It reminds me so much of the energy I had when I was younger. She keeps pulling on the lady’s sleeve, who bends down to quietly answer her questions. I move nearer and as the noise drops, I start to pick up on their conversation.
“When will Daddy be finished?” she says, and I look toward the people crowded around the platform.
“As soon as he’s answered all the people’s questions,” the woman replies, eyes flickering over me with a smile, before returning to the knot of people surrounding Dan.
Who are they waiting for?My eyes dart from the pair of them back to the group of people milling around at the front. And it all happens in slow motion in front of me. The building pit in my stomach.They’re watching Dan. My gaze swings from Dan to them. I study the blonde curls and Dan’s hair. Oh my God, this, this … what isthis? My eyes track over the woman, and she smiles at me as my eyes skitter away. I stand like I’m carved out of wood. Is this, is this … was she talking about Dan? Dan is herdad? I scrutinize her small, upturned face, the blonde lashes sweeping her cheeks like they hold some genetic clue. How old is she? How can Dan be her father?Three years.She’s not tiny, the minimum age she could be is … God, I don’t know. I inhale and roll my lips together.I’m going to be sick.
Dan’s head is bent down as he talks to someone, no longer looking at me, and I turn slowly on my heel and walk in a daze across the battered wooden floor toward the exit.Don’t look back.What am I doing?I’m just going to head away for a bit and think. Get some air. As I push through the old oak doors, a sign for a restroom looms on my right and in seconds I’m pushing through a swinging door and leaning over a crumbling toilet bowl as the contents of my stomach splatter onto the old porcelain.
How old was she? I try to visualize her height. I want to go back in to take some photos so I can review it all later when I’m calmer and can rationally understand what I saw. What Iheard. My hand shakes as I press a finger to my lips. Why are they shaking like this? Leaning against the green-painted walls, I rest my hands on my knees in an attempt to stop it. The noise is fading in and out, the floor a blur of brown-and-blue mosaic tiles. Distant voices filter in from the hall, the clink and clatter of traders on the street outside the old Victorian window. Time slips away. I have no idea how long I stand like this, pulling my breath in and pushing it out, trying to keep standing, keep breathing, keep suppressing the nausea.
The little girl’s face pops into my head unbidden and with such clarity that I lurch sideways over the toilet again, bringing up more of the chicken and jollof rice I ate for lunch. I wipe a sweaty hand over my face, yanking the ancient flush and fumbling over to the cracked sink to splash some water on my face, drying it on the bottom of my shirt. As I lift my head, a woman with a pasty face appears in the decaying mirror over the sink and stares at me.
What just happened?
29
LISS
Saturday, February 26, 2022
Outside of the plane window, the sky is an inky black—is it nothing or something? A reflection of seats and lights and people engrossed on phones and screens. A strange lethargy has taken over my body. I have no memory of getting back to the hotel after I left the talk, but suddenly I was in my room, stripping out of sweaty clothes, standing in the shower and then lying on the bed in my underwear. I don’t remember sleeping. The night outside turned black, the room went dark, and I lay on the covers as the moon tracked across the ceiling: me and ten brown marks on the plaster.
At some point, I got up and drank neat gin from the minibar. Guzzled it like water and lay back down. In the morning, all the spirit bottles were empty. As the room became lighter, I must have dozed. The blare of my alarm woke me up at 7 a.m., and I got up and came to the airport, checked in and sat watching the people come and go—kids, families, grandparents.
My eyes droop and my limbs are heavy like I’m swimming in molasses.I don’t want to think about it. But it keeps popping into my head like a fly stuck inside a mosquito net.
“When will Daddy be finished?”
Twisting on the woman’s hand, scuffing her shoes on the floor. How tall are children at certain ages? She seemed … she seemed …big? And my eyes have strayed to every child I’ve seen since. I can still see the blonde curls resting against the woman’s waist. When did Dan have her? Before or after me? Who is the woman? Part of me wishes I’d stayed and faced whatever there was to face, but it felt impossible, my body just not capable of … A long sigh seeps through my clenched teeth. If I’d known how much I was going to torture myself, I would’ve waited.Maybe. And there’s no doubt some questions have been answered now. Leaving me was deliberate, and he had a small child, and therefore, presumably, another relationship.
The little boy in front of me peers at me over the top of this seat, eyes huge like a frog, and I smile at him.
“Hello,” I say, and he instantly ducks down, but seconds later a small face appears in the gap between the seats. I wink and he vanishes again, and the lady beside me chuckles and I share a smile with her. It’s rusty, like my fun mechanism is broken. I stare out into the sky again, but the little guy in front is determined to be curious. He peeks around the seat again, right next to the window.
“Hello,” I say again, and this time he giggles.
The woman in the seat next to him moves and leans over to say something to him, and he disappears, permanently this time. I close my eyes and must fall into a deep sleep because, before I know it, an announcement starts in the speaker overhead and the woman beside me shifts, putting her bag under the seat in front and heading out of her seat, presumably to the toilet.
I sigh, check my seatbelt and flick through my phone, which is useless without Wi-Fi or a mobile signal. In no time at all, the tarmac and lights are rushing closer and the plane jolts as we squeal onto the runway and people stand as soon as we stop taxiing, pulling their luggage from overhead bins. As we’re standing waiting to exit, the lady from the seat in front turns.
“I’m sorry if he was bothering you,” she says.
I give her my rusty smile.
“Not at all.” I look at the dark curls and big, solemn brown eyes of the little boy.
She rumples his hair. “You’re a nuisance,” she laughs, and my heart aches for him a bit.
“It was fine,” I say. “He was no trouble.”
I’m oversensitive to these kinds of parental comments, an echo of the malicious remarks my dad subjected me to, although there’s no real animosity in her tone.
“You always worry that they’re bothering other people,” she mutters with genuine concern in her eyes, hand on his head as he gazes up at me.
“How old is he?”
