The secret of the Secret, part 3 - Maida(Martha Spring) Part 3 - Maida

She had been working in his house for two years. She hated her job of cleaning his house and cooking food for him. She loved him a lot and never, even for a second, doubted that her future with him had been already written down with her as his wife and the co-owner of his money. She knew he had had no real girlfriend for a long time, just some women he was dating on the Internet. Sometimes he would take a break for a couple of months, and then start searching for a new one. She thought it was going to be this way forever until one day he told her that he was going to Paris on a date with the girl of his dreams. Closing the door of the airport taxi he asked her to wish him luck and so she did, but after he left she grabbed his favorite crystal vase that was among several things he inherited from his father and dropped it on the hardwood floor so the little pieces of crystals flew all over his guest room. She was so angry she couldn't breath, but a couple of minutes later her usual calmness took over her and she cleaned the floor putting the crystal garbage in a plastic bag so he could see it was an accident, she didn't steal the vase. 

He trusted her. He needed her. She knew that deep in his heart he loved her very much but for some reasons was too shy to openly admit it. She was waiting for that to happen one day. And when it happened she was going to be ready. Looking through the fashion magazines she bent the pages with the dresses and shoes she would ask him to get for her the moment she became his wife. One day, she was going to be his wife, there was no doubt about that. 

She knew he was the one the moment he put his head on her shoulder crying at his father's funeral. She was working at his father's house as a maid while finishing high school, trying to save some money for college. She wanted to become a nurse. She liked the idea of taking care of others. She took good care of his father's house, so good that right after his father's funeral he asked her if she would consider working for him. That was what he told her, but she always knew there was another reason for him to invite her to be his maid. And since then, she was patiently waiting for that moment when she gets to become his wife and not a maid anymore.

Time was passing fast. She didn't go to college thinking that with a husband like him she wouldn't need to go to work. She tried to openly show him her affection by giving him  suggestive smiles and having long conversations about her thoughts on love and marriage. He seemed to be interested while she was talking but so far his interest stopped there. Once, he told her he would have to marry her if he didn't find a wife soon. She waited. Two years passed by, yet she was still there waiting to hear the words she dreamed about hearing so much. There came a day when she finally heard what she was waiting for, she herd him saying the words of love and the promise of taking care forever, but not to her. These words were directed to another woman, the one whom he brought from somewhere overseas, the one whom he was about to marry.  

Seeing another woman taking her place in his life was so unbearable to her that she fainted when Fiona stepped over his threshold. After that day her life changed. She continued working for him cleaning and cooking as before, but something inside her died. There was no hope for her anymore but constant suffering seeing how someone else is living the life she was supposed to have. She cried while she was cleaning, she cried while she was cooking, but that didn't change anything and was not noticed by anybody. Sometimes she tried to think about her future but these attempts always ended with nothing but more reasons to cry. 

Almost three months past this way. It was late Spring now and that meant it was time to clean their windows. So, that was what she was doing when she saw a high school girl passing by. She had never seen this girl before but there was something that made her heart stop - the girl's backpack, an old black leather backpack, that same one she had been carrying to school a long time ago. It was hers, no doubt about that, she remembered it too well. His father gave it to her as a birthday present wishing her to finish school and go to college to become a nurse as she dreamed, promising her that the backpack being a very high quality would survive through anything. She sold it to someone after she finished her high school and selling it at that time meant that she was going to be a student no more. She was going to be his wife and all dreams about doing something else that was not leading there would take a lot of her time away from him and had to go away. 

This is how it was then. This is how small her dreams became a couple of years ago, she could see it now. Falling in love with someone so selfish and greedy. He never gave her any presents even for Christmas but enjoyed hers all the same, she could smell the French cologne she gave him for Christmas, and every time she cleaned his office she could see the Montblanc fountain pen she gave him for his birthday. What he payed her was almost half of what she could have in another house, but every time when she was brave enough to bring up the salary question he changed it into a joke saying that for allowing her to work in such a nice house she should pay him instead. And she was forgiving him, trying to forget the moments she didn't like and remember only the good ones, like when he told her that she could be a great wife for a guy like him. She thought he really meant it. Her blind love for him made her so stupid...

Seeing her old backpack still going to school made her feel so ashamed of herself, of where life had brought her. She would have had the bright future of a college girl if it had not been for her love for him that made her desire to stay as close to him as possible, working and hoping for something that never came. Why did she waste two years of her life on cleaning his house instead of siting behind a student's desk learning something that one day could help her to earn enough money to have her own big house and even her own maid? What was that thing still holding her working in this house even now when all her dreams have been dead? Where was her life heading? Was she going to clean this house for the rest of her life? That was a frightening thought. She wanted to get out of this house and out of his life. She wanted to get back to her own life, she wanted to have dreams in which there was no place for him. She wanted so much, so many different things but working for him was not one of them. So, she stopped. She spent quite a while sitting on the windowsill thinking about her future and regretting about her past.

She wanted to leave his house immediately but the feeling of unfairness stopped her. Leaving right now wouldn't help her in any way to get back all the time she lost on him, being disrespected, unappreciated, underpaid, and overworked. He owed her so much. If he had payed her what was due, by now she would have saved enough money to get to any college she wanted. Leaving him now wouldn't help her to get all the money she needed for college. But staying could help. She had never had any ideas of stealing something from a man she loved, but stealing from someone she hated and especially from his fiancée didn't seem so bad. If she had no money to get her through college after all this cleaning and cooking for him, how come his fiancée who did not do any work at all deserved to get so many diamonds as presents? All those diamonds surely would be enough to pay for college.

The diamonds were kept in a safe hidden in the closet wall in his bedroom. That much she knew since she started cleaning the house. But she did not know the safe combination until a couple of weeks ago when she saw it written down on a piece of paper that his fiancée put on the bedside table trying to memorize it. It took a couple of hours for his fiancée to memorize eight digits, but not so long for his maid who had only three seconds to look at the numbers while she was picking up an empty coffee cup from the table. She liked numbers. In fact, mathematics was her favorite subject and she was pretty good at it before she met him and started to spend all her time on day dreaming about him loving her. 

Maybe she didn't remember everything about mathematics she learned before, but one thing she definitely remembered were the Fibonacci numbers. She considered them to be so much fun that she liked to play counting them while cleaning his floors. She was unimaginably surprised when she saw an eight digit string that was nothing more but a Fibonacci numbers starting at two hundred thirty three. 

At that time she didn't know what it was but decided not to ask. She saw how two of them went into the closet and spent some time in there behind the closed door. After that, he went to his office and put that little pice of paper into the paper shredder. At that time she got very intrigued but soon she forgot all about it. Now, it seemed a good time to find out if the code she saw was opening that safe in the closet. 

She found a moment when there was nobody else in the house but her and walked into the closet. There it was, hidden under the clothes, the safe's door with the combination lock. For a short moment she stood very quietly listening. There was no sound. She put on her cleaning gloves and dialed the code. A little red light on the lock turned green. She opened the safe. She looked at all the diamonds that should have been hers if she had been his wife. She saw his father's diamond wedding ring she knew so well. She closed the safe. Now it was not the time to take anything. She should come up with a plan first.

There was nobody whom she could trust with the task at hand but herself. She found that relaxing since it would be only her alone suffering if anything should go wrong. But she was going to make sure nothing was going to go wrong. She needed a good plan. So, this what she was doing while taking a couple of days off from her cleaning and cooking job lying she had a cold, she was planing how to get away clean with her hands full of gold and diamonds.

She saw how her beloved John exploded with happiness and pride after his son was born. It looked like he unquestionably believed he got the best fiancée on Earth. She saw how he had been giving his fiancée diamond presents even before the baby was born, but now there was no week passing without him getting her more and more little shinny presents. It looked like he had a goal of making her shine. And that had to be stopped.  

Maida was on her knees cleaning the floor in her own little apartment. Her TV was on creating the feeling of other people's presence. She was tired of a two day thinking marathon that was supposed to create an idea of how she would get everything she wanted. She felt empty and disappointed in herself because no matter how hard she tried her imagination was not strong enough to produce anything useful. A new show was about to start on TV, one she didn't want to be played on her TV. That show she never watched but hated a lot because it was his fiancée's favorite soap opera. She got up from her knees and walked toward the coffee table where the TV remote was. But before she was able to grab the device the commercials were over and the recap sequence started. And since she was standing right in front of the TV, she couldn't avoid looking at it. What she saw stopped her from changing the channel. For a moment she froze. Then she waltzed across the room holding her sports pants on both sides like they were a skirt. She was dancing, singing, and laughing. Finally, she knew what she had to do. She would do that tomorrow.

The next day she came back home tired and frustrated. She was frustrated because she couldn't find the right time and conditions to do what she intended to do. Instead, her whole day passed in doing things they told her to do. There were mountains of dirty dishes in their kitchen since nobody took care of them while she was absent, there were piles of dirty clothes on the floor in their bedroom since nobody would pick them up and carry into the laundry room. Plus, she was told to clean the baby's room since John believed that his baby's room was not clean enough. Of course, she had to clean the windows she didn't finish last time. And in between of doing all that she had to manage cooking lunch and dinner. That was her day. That was her life she didn't want anymore.

Every day she would come to work hoping that was going to be the day when she could try to do something according to her plan. Every second she was waiting for the right moment. But the right moment was taking it's time. Until one day when she knew it was the time. It was that right moment.

She saw him quietly standing  in the corridor in front of the mirror with his hair comb in his hand, thinking about something. She saw his fiancée sitting on the sofa breast-feeding the baby with her cellphone in her hand. It looked like she tried to call her mother as she always did while feeding the baby but this time her mother wasn't there. It was that right moment when he would definitely hear Fiona talking on the phone. He would hear her every word.

Being a made in someone's house had its advantages and one of them was knowing the house better than the owners did. She dialed his fiancée's cellphone number and heard her answer. Hiding in the kitchen she could see John in the corridor, she could see how he stopped thinking and started listening. What he heard was a conversation on the phone between his fiancée and someone else, what he didn't know was that the person on the other end of the phone line was his maid hiding behind his kitchen door, looking at him and hopping to see him reacting as he did. The conversation went as planed. Maida explained to Fiona that right now she couldn't leave the kitchen because she was cooking and asked her to help her dumb maid to understand if the baby in her favorite TV show was born from a man who was officially known as his father or not. Fiona tried to explain that the baby was born not from the one who is on the documents but from another man that nobody knows yet, but the made turned out to be very stupid. She asked so many questions about the unknown man. She asked one question after another giving no time to answer the questions in complete sentences. All Fiona could do was to answer her in short fragments like "no, the baby is not his ... no, someone else's .... no, he is not the father...  the baby was born from someone else... no, not from him..."

Hidden in the kitchen Maida saw John's face. She saw the doubt growing inside him. She saw the anger becoming more and more clearly visible on his face. She saw his hands started to shake. She heard him breathing fast and heavily. She knew her plan was working.

Time was slowly passing by as she waited for something bad to happen in their family but nothing did. She was patiently waiting for a fight between them or at least a little dialog about the question she planted in his mind but that didn't happen. She was about to give up her dreams of ever getting out of this house with something more than broken heart and empty hands when handling his mail she noticed an envelope from the DNA Testing Laboratories. That was unexpected. That was much more than she could hope for.

New ideas were swirling in her head. If he decided to do a paternity test then there was something she could do to further play with his mind. She still had a chance to get what she wanted. 

Next day she was walking home with an envelop in her purse, the one she was waiting for. It was in his outgoing mail hidden under all the other envelopes, but she immediately recognized it by the address it was going to. She couldn't just let it go with the other mail. First, she had to add some of her own DNA to his cotton swab so it would completely mess up his DNA test which she did by rolling his cotton swab on the inside of her cheek. And only then the envelope was allowed to go into the mail.

It was time for her to make sure nobody was going to be surprised when she suddenly stopped working. She had to tell him she was planning to go to college soon. It was a very pleasurable experience to make announcement that surprised him so much but also it opened her eyes to how little he was thinking about her. She thought he would be positively surprised but instead he asked what made her think she could manage being a student. He wasn't sure she had what it took to be a good student. At another time, she would pretend that a remark like that was nothing but later come home and cry for hours. Now, she was too busy to do that. After work she didn't go home, she went to the college to fill an application.

A week later there was a reply from the DNA Testing Laboratory in her hand. Breathing heavily and feeling her heart beats in her stomach she put the envelope on his office table. What was said in the test results? 

She saw him entering the office and closing the door behind. For an hour she was waiting to see him exit the room, and the longer she waited the easier she could breath. He wouldn't be sitting there for so long if the news was good. She was getting tired of pretending to clean their shoes and boots so she could have a reason to be in the corridor and have a good view of the office door. When the door opened and he came out, one quick look at his face made her heart jump with joy. It seemed that everything was going the way she intended.

She saw him pulling his fiancée into the baby's room and heard him screaming at her. Standing in the corridor alone Maida smiled to herself. She was wearing one of her working aprons, the one with the widest and deepest pockets. The fight in the room was just getting hotter with every second so it seemed to be the right time for her to go and take everything that was meant to be hers if only he loved her instead of that bitch. She put on a pair of fresh cleaning gloves went to the closet where the safe was waiting for her. 

She didn't take a single dollar of his money that was in the safe. She took only the things that should have been hers - his fiancée's jewelry all in beautiful jewelry boxes, and also his parents' wedding rings that she intended to return at the right time. She emptied the jewelry boxes in her big apron's pockets. The empty boxes went into the garbage bag she prepared for exactly this purpose, that she put in the kitchen garbage can as fast as she entered the kitchen.

Looking through a half closed kitchen door she saw him walking into his office with the face as red as could be, his clothes torn into pieces. She saw his fiancée crying and saying something in her native language. Maida didn't understand a single word but the intonation full of hate was talking for itself. Was that bitch finally leaving his house for good or was she just going somewhere to take a short break and then come back and continue to play with his mind as always pretending to love him? Was Maida going to get into trouble for what she had done? She would have to put everything back the way it was if his fiancée decided not to leave him. That would be so unfair!

Her heard jumped with joy as she saw Fiona caring the baby in one hand and the ugly luggage she came with from her home country in the other, walking in the direction of the front door, kicking everything out of her way including her own numerous pairs of shoes that Maida was pretending to clean in the corridor. It looked like his fiancée was leaving the house for good. 

Closing the door behind his ex-fiancée Maida jumped with joy, and hearing the sound her pockets made, she smiled with the widest smile she cold possibly muster. She was free to be what she wanted to be, free to leave this house and never come back, free of her love for him.  And she was not leaving empty handed. 

He could appear out of his room any time now so for her it was time to run back to the safe that looked so empty now, put his parents' wedding rings back in there, and be ready to play her final little role of a concerned maid. She went to the kitchen and turned on the water so he could hear the water running and knew that there was someone in the kitchen. A couple of drops of tap water on he face made it look like she was crying. When she heard his footsteps in the corridor she rubbed her face with her palms to make her cheeks red and talking to him tried to keep a sad expression on her face. From her kitchen window she saw him outside of the house looking in all directions, searching for Fiona but not finding.

Maida looked at him running from one room to another like a cat looks at a scared mouse. It was all over, it came to the end where there was nothing else for her to do but to say goodbye to him, to his house, and to this part of her live. It was time to start a new one. The last thing she did in his house was taking the kitchen garbage out. And then, she went home...

On her way home all she could think about was him, the man she still loved so much. Would she ever see him again? She felt guilty and small. She wanted to run back, grab him in her arms, kiss him, tell him how much she loved him, but the weight of the diamonds in her pocket stopped her from turning back and she slowly continued to walk forward, into her future, to the new life where she becomes a nurse as she dreamed, one of the best surgical nurses, saving many lives and getting her hands kissed by the patients and their relatives. She will always have a question if the destruction of the family of one man is worth saving her own life and the lives of hundreds. She will never find an answer no matter how many philosophy classes she takes in search for it...


The End

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