Big Little Secrets (Binge-worthy domestic psychological thrillers) Page 2

  “I get them every five years. It wasn’t a big deal, and I wasn’t gonna go. But I’ve changed my mind.”

  The steady flow of cold air from the duct ruffles the top of my hair, and I shiver. “Is this because I’m traveling a lot? You know it’s work, and I only go because I have to be there, not because I want to.”

  “Work?” she scoffs.

  “Don’t start it again. Don pays me well. We all benefit from my job.”

  “Okay.” She is short with me, like usual whenever she makes a point that she won’t engage in a conversation about our current situation.

  I clench my jaw to swallow the fight that’s brewing. My car will be here in fifteen minutes, and I better get going because I can’t miss my flight.

  Don is already in Tulum. He flew in from San Francisco yesterday, where he had dinner with a few Silicon Valley tech guys. I was supposed to be on that trip with him, but Nelli and I took Ryan to Universal Studios last weekend. It was supposed to be a long-awaited fun family trip, but it nearly ended in tragedy.

  While Nelli was holding our spot in the line for the rollercoaster, I took Ryan to get a butterbeer by the Harry Potter castle. I handed him my credit card and told him to get his drink while I took a call from Don. I only looked away for a minute, and when I turned back, Ryan was missing from the line. My heart raced with panic as I called his name, pushing through the crowd. As I’d become more frantic looking for my son, everybody stepped away from me as if I were infected with some deadly disease. The shock on peoples’ faces filled me with guilt and fear. Anyone could have taken him, so many places to hide him.

  I texted Nelli, hoping that Ryan had gotten upset with me for not paying attention to him and for talking on the phone and walked back to his mom. But he wasn’t there, and the only thing I achieved with that call was to freak out my wife.

  An employee dressed as Professor Dumbledore approached me and suggested I alert security. The park security mobilized every available guard immediately.

  Nelli was beside herself, running into every bathroom, searching every stall, every restaurant, every vendor, while security stood guard at every exit and entrance. She wasn’t yelling at me. She didn’t even talk to me, and it killed me. I called Don to tell him what was going on. He said he knew some big dog at Universal and he would call in a favor for me. I hung up because I couldn’t take his bullshit at that moment.

  After a devastatingly long three hours of searching, security found Ryan by the Mummy’s Revenge walking by himself. He said an older woman who knew Nelli said that his mom had gotten heat stroke standing in line and was taken away by the paramedics. She knew our names and where we lived and said that she was from Kaposvar, Hungary. She also had an accent like his mom’s, so my nine-year-old son believed her and followed her. Then the woman kept changing her story, saying that I was with Nelli, and we’d asked her to look after Ryan until we got back to the park. She bought him chow mein and orange chicken at Panda Express, and they went on rides. She had a VIP pass, and they got on the Transformers ride six times.

  Then when Ryan started to complain, the Hungarian woman sent him to a security officer, saying that she needed to use the bathroom but never returned. Later on, the police found Ryan and his kidnapper in the park’s security footage, but the woman wore a summer hat and sunglasses, deeming her unidentifiable.

  After we returned home, Nelli didn’t talk to me for days. Our relationship is slowly improving but still fragile. And now she is flying back to Hungary without me?

  “Are you taking Ryan with you?”

  “Yes. My parents are dying to see him.”

  “How long are you staying?”

  “A week. Maybe two.”

  I look at my watch and realize that I no longer have time to eat breakfast. That’s okay. I can grab something to nibble on at the airport.

  “I’ll come after you when I’m done in Tulum.”

  She takes a sip of her coffee. “Don’t you have to go to New York next week?”

  “I can cancel it. Don will understand,” I say as I finish buttoning my shirt. I slip my feet into my shoes and grab my suitcase. “Walk me out?”

  Nelli nods and follows me down the staircase. Don lives on the first floor with his plastic bimbo girlfriend, who drinks too much and eats too little. She’s here now, lying on the couch and watching TV with her little housebound dog propped on her flat stomach. The air is heavy with the scent of dog piss and shit that I’m still not used to.

  I shake my head and sigh. “I wish you wouldn’t have sprung this on me when I don’t have time to talk about it.”

  “There is nothing to talk about. I’m going to fly back home to attend a high school reunion, then I’ll be back by next Friday. It will be good for Ryan. I hate that he spends his summer break in Vegas.”

  As I stand at the door, I feel overwhelmed with looming deadlines and marital troubles.

  The car service app’s beeping on my phone notifies me about my car’s arrival. Despite my wife’s lack of willingness to talk about her past, we’ve always been close to one another. We built our own life without her Hungarian family and friends. It was so comfortable and intimate that I no longer wondered about her life growing up in a different country. Does she miss her friends? Her family? The flavors? The cooking? I have no idea.

  I can sense I’m losing her. I’ve been losing her since we left Colorado. She isn’t the type of woman who gets excited about money or expensive gifts. Yet, my new profit-centered mind is already running ideas of buying her jewelry or a family vacation to the Maldives to earn back her love and attention.

  Don has changed me, and I loathe the new me when I’m clearheaded enough to see myself objectively.

  I’m not gonna lie, without Nelli as my moral compass, I might have sold my soul to the devil a long time ago. Like every ambitious man, I do enjoy the attention. I love bathing in the limelight. VIP tickets. Special events. Private jets. Expensive dinners. Luxury clothing. It’s what every man wants, isn’t it? And I achieved it for myself. I’m one of the rich guys now. I’m somebody. But what will all this matter if I lose my family for it?

  I set my suitcase on the marble tile floor that’s littered with fine dog hair and take Nelli’s face into my hands. “Are we okay?”

  She pulls her head out of the hold. “It’s a trip home. Nothing more. Don’t overthink it.”

  I take a deep breath, feeling uneasy. This feeling teleports me back to the time we met. She was a beautiful woman: tall, slender, two round butt-cheeks tight in her jeans. She was smart and charming with a kind of exotic look that caught everyone’s eyes. Not many people knew that underneath the beautiful shell she had several scars from failed suicide attempts from her teen years. Strangers only saw the outside, and whenever we went out and I left her alone at the bar for a minute to visit the restroom, I usually found her surrounded by men wooing her when I returned. She could have anybody, but she chose me, a restaurant manager. I was enough for her. She loved me for me. But that didn’t stop me from being sick with jealousy more times than I dare to admit.

  Now we are rich, and she resents me for it.

  “Make sure you call me as soon as you arrive in Budapest. Do you have enough money?”

  “I have my cards and some cash. Don’t worry. We’ll be fine.” She lifts the handle of my suitcase and hands it to me. “Go, you’ll miss your flight.”

  “I should say goodbye to Ryan.”

  “He’s still sleeping, and you have no time.”

  “You should have told me earlier.”

  “I didn’t know I was going.”

  “What changed your mind?”

  She sucks in her lower lip. “I just need to go. I haven’t been back for sixteen years. It’s time.”

  She opens the door for me—all too eager to get me out of the house. I have a bad feeling about this.

  I give her one last kiss, then turn and make my way down the sidewalk. My gut twists, and I look back. The door is already cl
osed behind me.

  NELLI

  My life is a game of pretend. It starts every morning when I wake up and turn to my husband with a smile. Sometimes that smile does come from my heart, and it is indeed the expression of my current mood, but most of the time I smile to make him believe I’m okay. If I fold into myself too much and get lost in my thoughts or allow that gray cloud that has been hanging over my mood since high school to show, Clint will start asking questions like, “What’s wrong? Are you okay? Is something bothering you?” and then I have to lie to him.

  I don’t like to lie to my husband. Clint is a great man, and he deserves honesty from me. I don’t have the right to trick him and deceive him, but I do it every day because I want him to be happy. I want our family to be a happy one.

  There are mornings when I wake up genuinely joyful and satisfied. I always sleep better and start my next day more positively when Clint makes love to me the night before. He likes to have a drink at night as we lie on the couch in the living room and watch TV, and sometimes I dare to have one or two drinks myself. But I always stop after the second drink. Alcohol makes me chatty, and I’ve already let more details about my past slip than I was willing to share. The past should stay in the past, and my focus needs to be on my family’s present and future for the sake of our son, but keeping secrets can be very damaging to the soul. It’s like a dark abyss that keeps calling for me.

  When I was younger, still living in Hungary, I tended to bury my mind under demanding tasks or mindless pleasures so that I could forget my past mistakes for a few days or only hours. I’d work and go to the gym and clubs until I dropped. Any activity that would slow me down and make me think was not welcome in my life.

  Once I ended up in a hospital on IV from dehydration and exhaustion due to overworking and lack of nutrition. The doctor suggested that I eat healthier and relax more with yoga or meditation. I couldn’t tell him that every time I let my mind be still, my thoughts would wander, and my conscience would torture me. After Eva, my best friend in high school, had disappeared on a school trip, my parents thought I needed peace and rest. But it was in the idleness and quiet when my thoughts ran rampant, and all I asked for was the voice in my head to go silent.

  At the time, I thought the only place I could find peace was in death, and I tried to meet my maker a couple of times, but my friends saved my life. To this day, my parents still don’t know about the scars on my wrists, and they never will.

  I wasn’t the only one who suffered from regrets and a bad conscience. All seven of us friends had a hard time moving on and forgetting what we had done. Except for Nora, the rest of us found solace in drinking, doing drugs, and partying. Nora turned to God instead.

  After I broke up with my high school sweetheart, the singer of our school band, I started hooking up with guys more often than I dare to admit. Allowing myself to be safe and loved seemed impossible. If I let someone in, I was scared that they would see right through me and learn about my secret.

  The only people I felt safe with and could confide in were my six friends from school. Nora was the only one who seemed to be unaffected by what happened in Vienna. Her behavior puzzled me as much as it irritated me because she was close to Eva too. She dated Eva’s brother throughout freshman and sophomore years. She spent a lot of time at Eva’s house, and they were just as close as we were.

  But people process grief and tragedy in different ways, and at the time, I thought Nora was the strongest of us all for managing to stay on track. Maybe I should have chosen God instead of alcohol and partying to help me forget.

  Graduates from our advanced high school are expected to go into higher education. Except for Petra, who moved to England to work as a nanny, and Milan, who went to Italy to work as a bartender, the rest of us went to college. Peter went to medical school just like his father. Daniel studied to be a PE teacher and a personal trainer. Vicky got into a prestigious college of economics but dropped out in her junior year. I graduated from business school, but it took me an extra year to finish, and it was far from the school of law my parents had in mind for me before that tragic school trip.

  Despite the fact that we all thought she had her shit together the most, Nora got knocked up six months into her first year in college, and she moved back to Kaposvar to have her baby as a single mother. She got married to some dude a few years later and had two more kids. I heard that the guy was a piece of work. And there went my hope for any of us living a normal happy life. All seven of us were broken.

  After college, Daniel traveled to New York on a travel visa and stayed. He kept calling me, telling me how different life was in America. He said there were so many people there from all over the world, and New York allowed you to start your life with a clean slate.

  At the time, I was living in a dingy apartment in Budapest, renting the place with two other girls I knew from college, working at a travel agency earning a mediocre salary. I earned in a month the same money Daniel did for a night of dancing.

  He kept sending me pictures of his travels. He looked content and was always surrounded by friends. I was so desperate to have what he had that I packed up all my clothes and got on a plane one day. My dad was so disappointed in me for taking off without a word that he didn’t talk to me for years. But if I had told my parents about my plans, they would have tried to talk me out of it. My relationship with my parents was restored when my son, Ryan, was born. Now they come to visit us once a year.

  I was careful when I packed my luggage for the trip to America. My stomach was in a knot as I passed through border control. Eastern European girls traveling alone were considered suspicious, and many were sent back home without ever setting foot on American soil. I heard about some specific personal items the immigration officers would target: too many boxes of tampons, family pictures, clothes for more than one season, lack of cash, etc. I did my best to look like a tourist visiting a friend in New York City.

  Daniel got me the address of an American citizen he knew to put on the forms.

  I got in.

  I remember how the feeling of glory for outsmarting border officials fueled me for days, but being in a foreign country on the other side of the world scared the hell out of me.

  Life in New York wasn’t as easy as I expected. I’d never been a waitress, so bussing tables all night every night was challenging, but I managed. Everything was better than being back in my old life facing my demons.

  I lived with Daniel in his apartment in Brooklyn. I worked and I slept. When I had a few hours of downtime, I’d wander the city alone. It was exhilarating as much as it was scary. I didn’t have much money, no health insurance, no papers.

  Back home, I was an educated woman with a job and connections. In New York, I was an illegal immigrant with an accent—the scum of the earth. People judged my intelligence based on my ability to speak English, so I became obsessed with improving my language skills. I watched American movies with English subtitles and wrote down every word I didn’t understand. Then I used a dictionary to translate them all. Then I re-watched the film following my handwritten translation. I slowly became more confident at talking. My pronunciations improved, but at the nightclub, I was still treated like trash. Out in the city, however, I felt free.

  Things were on the right track. Then I got an email.

  It was the invitation to my first high school reunion.

  It didn’t matter that I moved to the other side of the world because my past still found me.

  I became paranoid. I thought people were watching me, and they knew who I was. I couldn’t eat or sleep. Then one day, my burden had become too heavy to carry. I’d had enough of this life where I had no prospects, no hope for happiness. I went to Central Park, thinking about my options, when I noticed a group of about thirty cyclists riding fast in a tight formation, and without thinking, I stepped in front of them.

  CLINT

  I push open my hotel room door and step into the darkness. I let out a ragged breath, ti
nged with worry that’s been clinging to me like a parasite all day. My eyes are too sensitive and my nerves are too irritated to be further assaulted by bright lights, so I keep the room dark. Having only the silver glow of the moonlight that filters through the window to guide me, I stumble my way to the console and switch on the TV.

  Some ’90s thriller glares up on the screen, bathing the bed and carpet in an eerie maroon light. I settle on the edge of the bed and look at my phone to check for any calls or texts I may have missed. Nothing from Nelli.

  It’s been three days since I hugged my wife goodbye at our home’s front door, and that was the last time I heard from her. When we are apart, we always follow our routine of checking in with one another. We never let a day pass without talking. As much as Nelli has accepted the demanding life that keeps me away from my family for days, she won’t compromise when it comes to our son, Ryan. If I can’t call before bedtime, I catch him at breakfast. Nelli records Ryan’s soccer games when I’m on the road, and I’ll watch the replay and talk about his performance with him over the phone. My son knows that he is everything to me, and being involved in every aspect of his life is important to me.

  I’m swiping through our recent photos on my phone with a strong feeling of nostalgia and pain when I notice that it’s already two in the morning here in Tulum, which means it’s eleven o’clock in the morning in Hungary. I can try Facetime Nelli again. This must be the tenth time today I’ve tried to reach her. The call goes unanswered.

  I pull up the banking app on my phone to check the latest credit and debit card transactions. The last charge was yesterday at Café Frei in Kaposvar, and since then, nothing.

  The beep of the card reader by the door makes my eyes roll. I left the party because I didn’t have the patience for Don’s one-upping game today, and I had to walk away before I said something I would regret later.

  “Why are you sitting in the dark?” he asks as he lets go of the door that slams behind him, making my muscles contract. Don is a boisterous and loud person. Since he makes his living from being noticed, I understand why he has an almost pathological need to be the center of attention all the time, but now it’s only the two of us in the middle of the night, for Christ’s sake. Settle the fuck down already.