She’d once heard a news story about a man who’d kept a secret family locked inside his basement, a second wife whom he’d kidnapped and three children she’d birthed and raised in captivity. All while his first wife and their children lived upstairs. Hazel could imagine, somewhat, the possibility that maybe the upstairs children didn’t know. But the upstairs wife? The case came up in one of her psychology classes, and the general consensus was how could she not know? There were some holdouts—maybe the wife was just a really trusting person and so on, and wasn’t it plausible that she believed he kept the basement triple padlocked for boring reasons, like being super protective of his carpentry hobby space? Other students piped up with stories about the wives of prolific serial-rapist torture murderers. When their husbands were finally caught and found to have murdered dozens of women, often over a series of decades, some wives claimed to have never suspected a thing. But weren’t these husbands probably great liars? her classmate friend wondered. Their professor cast his own vote. He looked a little like a Beethoven/Einstein hybrid, the latter’s wild hair with the former’s serious gravity. Everything he said sounded prophetic and metaphorically dimensional; a statement like Please shut the door because I can smell the lunchroom and do not wish to seemed a rumination on the greater impossibilities of privacy. He’d looked at them and said, “Everyone knows everything all the time.” Huh? they’d all thought at first. But yeah, okay, Hazel later reasoned. Maybe not all the time, maybe not everything, but on certain levels, subconscious and whatnot, she gathered that people did probably know a lot more than they let themselves acknowledge.
Which now seemed applicable to her own situation. Sure she’d wanted to believe the narrative that she was inexplicably lovable: one encounter with her and a calculating, domineering technology genius was swept off his feet. No strings attached. She did believe he’d been fascinated by her; maybe he still was, a little bit. But he’d assumed that choosing her meant she would perform feats of active gratitude on his behalf for the rest of her life. Which actually, Hazel was fine admitting, was probably a fair thing for him to expect, given who he was. So many women would’ve been able to fall under his spell. Hazel saw them all the time—his assistant, Fiffany, was the clearest example—and had assumed that she too would eventually fall. Why wouldn’t she? She’d accomplished nothing, and was in the midst of a few life pickles. Hastily leaping into something new was her preference. Byron also likely found it great that in terms of science and engineering, she did not have a clue. He wanted someone he could astonish. And use.
This was the secret gut knowledge that she’d had and didn’t listen to. She should’ve bowed out the day of the engagement. Her ring had several nano computer chips embedded between layers of the band. One was actually placed into the center of the diamond itself—for Hazel’s “safety” the diamond’s interior housed a GPS and various other internal monitors. Immediately after he’d slipped it onto her finger, she’d gotten a text message from the ring’s sensors explaining that her heart rate was too rapid; it instructed her to sit down, place her head between her knees, and begin slow, deep breaths. “You should,” Byron insisted, and she had. “I’m just so happy,” she’d said. But not really. It was a panic attack.
Her life was going to be so different from what she’d thought. This had felt sad and she wasn’t sure why, because she’d always planned on having a terrible life. But familiar terrors: loneliness, paycheck-to-paycheck ennui, unsatisfying dates with people a lot like her whom she wouldn’t enjoy because she did not enjoy herself. In a life with Byron she had no idea what to expect. But Hazel reasoned that Byron’s proposal was a phew, that was close! situation. She’d found a loophole to all the warnings her parents had ever badgered her with, their insistence that she’d have to clean up her messes. Her student loan and credit card debt felt crippling to her, but it was an inconsequential amount to Byron—he’d pay it. She’d partied too much, been lazy, and was about to flunk out of college. Readmission would be a long and tough road. But college was silly to Byron. “I dropped out to devote myself to my start-up full-time,” he told her. “Wouldn’t you say I’m doing okay?” Her mother had just died, and now, instead of having to move back home at a time when her father would be even more emotionally unpleasant than usual, she was going to be moving into a futuristic mansion the size of a small village. Maybe her father would even be forced to stop disapproving of her on all accounts since she’d landed such a successful husband. “You rescued me,” she’d joked to Byron, and he’d replied, “You rescued me too. You’re the first and only woman I ever thought of marrying.”
“Same,” Hazel said, but marriage with all sorts of people had long been one of her most obsessive thoughts. The first person to actually ask her had been the mechanic at the oil-change place when she was fifteen. He’d proposed to her on the spot after a ten-minute conversation and she’d felt that she liked him enough: he had a thin scar on his cheek that looked like a cat whisker, and though the stitched name on his uniform said “Jake,” he assured her that was not actually his name. As for his real name? I haven’t totally decided, he’d said, but he promised to pick one before the wedding so he’d have a name to put on the certificate. In the meantime he told her to call him Been-Jake, if she wanted to, or said she could come up with her own name for him. Hazel had loved this because she’d never named anything before.
ONCE, AS A CHILD, HAZEL HAD TRIED TO NAME THE FAMILY CHRISTMAS tree, but she was overruled. She’d gone into the kitchen to tell her parents (“I named the tree! Piney!”) and found them both at the table weeping. A woman named Phyllis had just died; she was a friend of theirs Hazel had never met who lived several states away in a region of the country Hazel had never traveled to.
“Well, if we’re naming the tree this year,” her mother had sobbed, “we’re going to name it Phyllis!” This had caused a fresh round of vocal grief on her father’s part, which in turn triggered another from her mother. “I love that idea,” Hazel lied.
The tree’s namesake status proved to be a deflating element of that year’s holiday—it wasn’t right to have celebratory lighting and ornaments strewn all over Phyllis, her mother insisted; it was not okay to place presents below her branches that weren’t direct offerings for the departed. The bulbs and ornaments were removed and a black linen scarf was draped in their stead. On Christmas morning, rather than open up gifts, they prepared a meat loaf and put it beneath the tree, along with a can of Dr Pepper and a TV Guide opened up to the “Cheers ’n Jeers” page: a few of Phyllis’s favorite things. Then they’d sat on the sofa together as a family and watched the steam of the meat loaf dissipate. When it appeared to have cooled down, her mother said, “I feel like we just saw Phyllis’s spirit leave the earth and ascend up to heaven.”
“Are we going to eat?” Hazel asked.
Her mother sighed. “After seeing that, I’m really not hungry. The symbolic transition from life into death reenacted before us, wow. Now that’s a true Christmas gift. Just a very solemn one. I think I’m going to go lie down.” Her father had agreed, and after they’d left the room, Hazel did something she knew would be frowned upon but also didn’t see the harm in—she went up to the tree and ran her finger along the ketchupy spine of the loaf’s top then tasted it. It was candy sweet. She started to go in for another, but felt something on the back of her neck: the energy in the room had shifted from neutral to judgmental. She spun around and saw her father standing in the doorway, eyeing her in disgust, shaking his head. But then he left, and she tasted another bite anyway. The meat loaf was present; his scorn had left the room.
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