Friday, July 15, 1994

Friday, July 15, 1994

2:50 p.m.

Joyce remains at the kitchen island long after Ashley has gone. In the afternoon silence, she can't help but feel foolish. What kind of woman confides in her teenage neighbor? Weeping while doing it, no less? No wonder Ashley volunteered to watch Ethan for free. She probably wanted to get as far away as possible. Joyce can't blame her. If she had been in Ashley's shoes, she would have done the same thing.

Left all alone, Joyce surveys the kitchen and sighs. This, it seems, is where she's destined to be. Her mother certainly thought so. She was of the generation that believed a woman's place is in the home, so that's where she stayed. Joyce remembers being a little girl and watching her mother toil all day. Cleaning and laundry, ironing and cooking. It never seemed to end. Since all the mothers in the neighborhood did the same thing, Joyce had grown up not knowing there were other options even after she went to college, which to her was simply a place where women made friends and met their future husbands.

Joyce did both, joining a sorority and meeting a handsome senior named Fred Marsh during her first mixer. When they got engaged by the end of her freshman year, there seemed no need to continue her studies, and so Joyce quit school and ended up doing the same thing as her mother.

For a time, she found contentment in making sure her family was cared for. She took pride in driving Ethan to school, attending his silly class plays in which he had one line, spending an entire evening making dozens of cupcakes for the school bake sale. No, she wasn't running a business or curing the sick or doing one of the millions of jobs that women do every day. But she'd learned from observing her mother that domesticity was important. It mattered. Without homemakers, who would run the PTA? Or volunteer on field day? Or shuttle hordes of kids from one extracurricular activity to another? In short, who would keep things flowing in that way that looks effortless but in truth is exhausting?

Certainly not the men, Joyce thought.

But she wasn't prepared for how lonely it all felt in between one obligation and the next. That's something she wished her mother had warned her about. The long, quiet hours when she wasn't needed. Those were the times when Joyce got to thinking that maybe she wanted more. Not a bigger house or a better kitchen or a nicer car. She was happy with what she had, and grateful for all of it.

What Joyce wanted was a sense of accomplishment outside of her home and her family. She wanted a purpose beyond the needs of her husband and her son. So, after discussing it with Fred, she took the first job she could find.

At the Hawthorne Institute.

Before starting there, she'd been only vaguely familiar with the place. She was told by the wife of one of Fred's colleagues that it was full of crackpots who did things like stare at animals and try to read their minds. It was all completely harmless, she assured Joyce. Just weird.

Joyce took the job anyway. A low-level secretarial job. An assistant to an assistant. Still, she liked it. She liked how the office smelled of fresh coffee in the mornings and how she and Margie, the senior assistant, would sometimes eat their lunch outside by the falls, gazing at the water crashing into the lake below. She enjoyed the studious quiet of the place. It felt like working in a library.

Yes, there was some weirdness, starting with the fact that everyone but she and Margie wore black suits. Joyce assumed it was to emulate Ezra Hawthorne, who, despite founding and funding the institute, made himself scarce. She'd only glimpsed him three times. The first was to welcome her the day she started working there. The second was a week later, when a group photo was taken in the vast entrance hall.

The third time was when everything went wrong.

Joyce technically reported to Margie, who reported to their boss, who had the ear of Mr. Hawthorne. When Joyce noticed something strange, she knew not to ask. That was the first thing Margie told her: Don't ask questions. Just keep your head down, do what needs to be done, ignore the rest. Still, Joyce couldn't help but be curious about the odd symbols tattooed on a visitor she was asked to fetch coffee for. Or the strange music she sometimes heard coming from the second floor. Or that time she spent an afternoon typing up transcripts of Rorschach tests conducted on blind people.

"Why would they do that?" she asked Margie. "It's such a waste of time and resources."

"Mr. Hawthorne has all the money in the world," Margie said. "If he wants to waste it on this silliness, he can be my guest as long as he pays me."

And pay he did. Joyce's salary was almost twice as much as similar assistant jobs in the pharmaceutical companies that dotted the area. That alone made up for the weirdness. Joyce enjoyed having money of her own. Money she had earned. She and Fred had a joint account, which she could tap whenever she wanted, for whatever she wanted. Yet she always felt weird buying her husband Christmas presents or birthday gifts with money he had made. So the first thing she did with her money was use it to buy Fred a watch for his birthday, which was coming up on the eighteenth.

Ironic, seeing as how it ultimately led to her getting fired.

Not wanting to risk Fred finding it at home, she kept the watch in the top drawer of her desk at work. She had intended to bring it home with her the night before and then drop it off at the engraver's on her way to work so it would be ready by Monday. Only she'd forgotten to do that, a mistake she realized while washing dishes after dinner. She grabbed her keys and told Fred, "I need to go to the office real quick. I left something there."

"Now?" he said. "Can't it wait until morning?"

It really couldn't. "I'll be just a minute," she said, hurrying away before Fred could ask any more questions.

On her way to the Hawthorne Institute, she worried the front gate would be closed and that all this sneakiness would be for nothing. The gate ended up being open, but the institute itself was completely dark and the front door locked. Not having a key herself, Joyce went around to the back, hoping that maybe one of the rear doors was open.

Halfway there, she heard the chanting.

At first, she thought someone was listening to a CD of those Gregorian chants that are inexplicably all the rage right now. But the sound quality was too clear to be coming from a recording.

This was live.

Joyce almost turned around and left. In hindsight, she should have done exactly that. But curiosity got the best of her, and she tiptoed around the corner of the building to see what could possibly be going on.

Sitting in her kitchen in the bright light of day, she gets a chill thinking about what she saw, even though she still doesn't understand any of it.

The chanting.

The robes.

The blood.

It was all so unexpected and surreal and, yes, terrifying that she almost screamed. Instead, she forced the sound down and backed away—literally bumping into her boss. This time, she did attempt a scream, which was stifled when her boss slapped a hand over her mouth.

"You shouldn't be here," he hissed as he pulled her away to the front of the building. There, he unlocked the front door and led her inside to his office, which overlooked the back garden. Although the blinds were blessedly closed, sparing Joyce from another glimpse of what was happening outside, she still heard the chanting as her boss sat her down.

"What did you see?" he asked.

"Not much," Joyce said.

But it was enough to make her dizzy. So very dizzy. It dawned on her that she could be in shock.

"What were they doing?" she said. "What is this place?"

Instead of an answer, she was told she was being fired.

Now, eighteen hours later, she sits in her all-too-familiar kitchen, still unable to comprehend just what it was she had witnessed. Not having any answers is bad enough, but even worse is how she's not allowed to tell anyone about it. Not even her husband. Her boss made sure of that when he forced her to sign that piece of paper before escorting her out of the building.

Joyce remembers staring at the sheet, trying to speed-read all that fine print, confused by, well, everything.

"What is this?" she asked.

"An NDA."

Joyce had frowned at the paper, confused. "A what?"

"A nondisclosure agreement. In short, it means you can't mention a word of what you saw tonight to anyone."

"Not even Fred?"

"No," her boss said. "Not even your husband."

That seemed way too extreme for her. How could she tell anyone about it when she didn't even know what she saw?

"And—" Joyce hesitated, afraid to ask the question that was nagging at her. "What will happen to me if I do tell someone?"

"Mr. Hawthorne will sue you."

"Can he do that?" she said.

Her boss flashed a smile that was in no way friendly. "Mr. Hawthorne has enough money to do whatever he wants. If he wants to sue you, he will. And he'll make sure he wins. His lawyers are very good at keeping his secrets."

Joyce had no more questions after that. With a trembling hand, she signed the paper that guaranteed a lifetime of silence, went back to her office, and quickly gathered her things, including the stupid watch she'd bought for Fred.

Thinking about it now makes her want to start crying again, mostly because she knows she'll never give it to him. On Monday, she'll return it to the store and get back her money, which she'll quietly deposit into the joint account.

The watch is now a luxury she can no longer afford on her own.