The woman swallows.
The interior of the Mercedes turns ice cold.
The man can’t breathe.
Both are terrified by what they’ve witnessed. The chill of it crawls deep into their bones. The tall driver hurries back to the hatchback. He leans into the driver’s side and fiddles with something beneath the steering wheel. The two drivers watch as the hatchback moves toward the water, as if of its own volition.
“Oh my God, they’ve jammed down the accelerator! We need to get out of here.” The woman reaches for the ignition.
“Stop.” The man clamps his hand over her forearm. “Do not move a single muscle until they’re gone. They could kill us for what we’ve just seen.”
They stare in mounting horror as the hatchback seems to hesitate, then tilts over the edge of the dock. As it plunges over, it catches refracted light from the bridge traffic. It’s a yellow car, the woman thinks. A Subaru Crosstrek like the one she and her husband bought their son for his eighteenth birthday. The logo on the door seems familiar. She’s seen it before but can’t think where. The water closes over the car, leaving a luminous froth of foam that travels with the current toward the bridge. It disappears. There’s nothing left—no indication that anything went off the dock. Just black water muscling with the tide.
The two drivers hasten to the waiting sedan. The tall one climbs into the driver’s side, the shorter one into the passenger side. The doors slam shut. The sedan lurches at speed along the muddy track. Brake lights flare, and it crosses the tracks, then turns and trundles across the deserted silo yard. It vanishes into fog.
Neither of the Mercedes’s occupants speaks. Tension hangs thick between them. They should call 911.
Both know they won’t.
Neither will breathe a word of this to a single solitary soul, because if anyone learns they were here, together, at this abandoned place beneath the bridge in the dark and very early hours of what is now Friday morning, they will lose everything.
THE MAID’S DIARY
Just start, my therapist said. Put words down, even if it’s stream of consciousness, even if it’s only to record something very ordinary you did in your day. If you find it difficult, try noting something that worries you. Just one thing. Or pick a thing that makes you happy. Or enraged. Or something that terrifies you. Write things you’ll never let anyone read. Then for every insight, ask yourself why. Why do you think this? What are the stakes of losing that illusion? Ask why, write why, until you want to scream. Until you cannot stare at the words any longer, or until you drop through a trapdoor into something new. Then step away. Be physical. Walk, run, hike, swim, dance. Keep doing that until you’re ready to return to the page. The key is just to start. Keep it simple. And I promise you, it will begin to flow.
So here I am, Dear Diary—my Dear Therapist-by-proxy—just putting it down. Starting simple. My name is Kit. Kit Darling. I’m thirty-four. Single. Vegan. Love animals. Feed birds.
I’m a maid.
My passion is amateur theater.
My superpower is being invisible.
Yes, you read that right. I have been bestowed with the gift of invisibility. I move through people’s houses unseen—a ghost—quietly dusting off the daily debris of their lives, restoring order to their outwardly “perfect” little microcosms. I wash and tidy and fold and sift through the privacy of elitist enclaves, touching, sniffing, envying, and at times trying on belongings. And here’s a thing I’ve learned: Perfection is deception. An illusion. It’s a carefully curated but false narrative. The golden family you think you know from the luxury home down the street—they’re not who you believe they are. They have faults, secrets. Sometimes dark and terrible ones. Oddly, as a house cleaner, a processor of garbage and dirt, I am entrusted with the secrets inside these houses. Perhaps it’s because I’m seen as irrelevant. Benign. Not worthy of deeper consideration. Just the hired help.
So I go about my dusting and vacuuming, and I snoop.
That’s the other thing: I have a snooping problem.
I mean, we all get a dopamine-adrenaline kick when we glimpse something that wasn’t meant for us to see, right? Don’t pretend you’re above it. We scroll through social media, hunting for the train wrecks happening in real time, and we cannot look away. We click on those links that promise to reveal a Hollywood star in a compromising bikini shot, or without makeup, or being a bad mommy in Starbucks. In the supermarket checkout line, we reach for the tabloid that screams with promises of insider tidbits about a British prince’s affair. I just take it up a level. It keeps my days exciting.
When I arrive at a job, I already have my snooping strategy in place. I set a timer, and I do my cleaning fast enough that I always have a spare chunk of time to go through a dresser, a closet, a box in an attic, or a certain room.
And I follow the little clues. I find secrets that the occupants of a house try desperately to hide even from one another: the wife from her husband, the father from his daughter, a son from his mother. I see the little blue pills. A syringe. Breath mints and cigarette butts hidden in a cracked pot in a garden shed. A teen’s tequila bottle stashed at the back of an underwear drawer. A husband’s porn links saved in his computer. A wife’s carefully hidden note from a not-so-long-ago lover, or a letter from a parole board. A pregnancy test secreted among trash that has been set aside for me to take out.
I see these people.
I know the occupants of these houses.
But they don’t see me.
They don’t know me.
Should I bump into one of them on a nearby sidewalk, or in the aisles of a grocery store, they won’t recognize the invisible girl in their lives. The anonymous girl. I don’t really care—I don’t want to be “seen.” Not by them.
My therapist has some theories on my desire to remain invisible. After I told her I was a ghost in people’s homes, she asked if I’d always been a ghost. I wasn’t sure how to answer, so I just clammed up. Her question has been worrying me, though. After a few more back-to-back abortive therapy sessions of us getting nowhere on the invisibility issue, my shrink suggested journaling.
She believes that opening up to private, nonthreatening blank pages might be a way for me to mine deeper into the unconscious parts of my psyche that are hiding things from my conscious （and even subconscious） self. She made it clear I should not feel compelled in any way to share my writing with her. But I can if I want to.
“It’s only when you look at something long enough, Kit,” she said, “and in the right way, that the real image starts to appear. But first you need something to look at. You need words on a page. Even if those words seem banal or tedious or incongruent, or shameful, or even embarrassing, it’s from this field of text that your true story will arise. And don’t self-edit,” she warned. “Because until the full image is revealed to you, you won’t know what part of the story is real, true, and what part you should leave out.” She said the process is similar to those ambiguous, trick-the-eye reversible images—you know that classic drawing of the young woman? When you stare at it in a certain way, the image of the young woman suddenly flips into an old crone. And then you can’t unsee it. It’s a matter of shifting your perspective.