Page 1 of How to Hide in Plain Sight
Prologue
HERE’S WHAT YOU NEED TOunderstand about my family: all of our money came from drugs.
Nothing illegal, of course. Not crack or quaaludes or even marijuana. All government sanctioned. The good stuff, you know? Prozac. Insulin. Cialis. (That’s a PDE-5 inhibitor, a drug that helps men get it up—the alternative to Viagra. I know. The assholes at Pfizer ruined any chance we had at brand recognition. There’s only so much brain space Americans are willing to commit to boner medication.)
Another thing you need to understand about my family: it’s big. I couldn’t tell you the number of times I’ve said those words. At parties, on the job.Tell me about yourself, says someone I’ve just met.Well, I grew up in a big family.It’s a great opening line. People trust me right away, which makes no sense. As if being born into a big family says something about your character. As if there’s a reproductive threshold above which none of your children become psychopaths or serial killers. As if Jeffrey Dahmer would have turned out okay if only he’d had a couple more brothers and sisters hanging around.
I was a happy kid. How could I not be? I was raised the way all parents dream of raising their children: in a big house in the suburbs of Chicago, right on the shore of Lake Michigan. Our town was just large enough for me to run free on the weekend, but just small enough to come home with nothing worse than a skinnedknee. Our school district liberal enough to preach universal love, but so white that I didn’t discover racism until we reached the chapter on slavery in our fifth grade history textbook.
I was given everything—including, but not limited to, that most elusive of gifts: the Happy Family. Undivorced parents. Siblings who can actually stand each other. Who vacation together and eat family dinner around a worn wooden table and only try to kill each other on special occasions. Who even—when the climate is right—likeeach other.
There were unhappy moments, too, of course. And chaos. Plenty of chaos. In a family of eight, if you want to be heard, you yell: at dinner, during card games, on long road trips, when the back two rows of the Suburban become louder and more political than the floor of Congress. Everyone talks over each other. Facts are not as important as volume.
As the youngest—and therefore least authoritative—member of the family, I was never going to be the loudest. So, instead, I watched. Listened. Took in the laughter and the chaos and the secrets and the broken parts. Because, yes, the Beck family is a Happy Family. But behind the curtain, we fight. We hurt each other. We even hate each other, for a time. But we forgive. We always forgive.
We have to.
We’re family.
PART I
The WelcomeDinner
1
NOW
IN THE THIRTEEN HOURS ITtook me to drive from New York City to Port Windfall, Ontario, I drank three cups of coffee, started four podcasts, engaged in countless lively debates with drivers who couldn’t hear me, and listened to every single one of my Spotify playlists. Twice.
When I ran out of background noise, I took reality and shaped it into copywriting templates. I do that sometimes.
HEADLINE:Disgraced Daughter Returns to Family’s Private Island for Four-Day “Wedding of the Century”
OFFER:Ready to face your demons, relish lavish excess, and suffer through nightly political diatribes, all while wearing a smile that says you’re having the time of your life?
CALL TO ACTION:Click for Free Trial!
When I tell people I’m a copywriter, most often they pictureMad Men: long rows of women in smart wool skirts pounding at typewriters, dodging the advances of male executives, locked out of the meetings whererealdecisions are made. You don’t need talent to be a copywriter. You just need to be able to type.
Let me tell you a secret: copy is far more than words on an advertisement. It’s everything. It’s everywhere. We copywriters are the engine that moves society forward. Without us, progress grinds to a halt. Instruction manuals are blank. Street signs don’t exist. Travel becomes impossible. No sentence comes from nothing, after all: from the saccharine Christmas message on the side of your soda to thescrew u browritten on a bathroom stall; from the seat-back sign telling youlife vest under seatto the greeting that welcomes you to a website. Even the highway sign telling you that you’re now leaving Ohio, bidding you farewell and asking that you come back soon. Do you ever think about who wrote those words? Of course not. Those words are not words to us, with authors and backstories and spellcheck. They’re background. They’re grass and trees, part of the landscape.emergency exitsigns sayemergency exitbecause that’s how it is. Car mirrors tell us thatobjects in the mirror are closer than they appearbecause they do. Because they always have. These words, these pillars of society—they weren’twritten. They sprang into existence at the exact moment society needed them. Perhaps they were even created by God:And on the third day, God created the sun and the moon and the instruction manual for how to set up your Google Edge TPU™Application-Specific Integrated Circuit.
Anyway.
My destination was Cradle Island: a mile-around private paradise purchased by my father during the coked-up height of his second marriage. He found it in a newspaper advertisement.island for sale!I imagine the ad said.excellent value! 100% surrounded by water!
The way Dad tells it, he almost flipped right past. But then he saw the bird’s-eye shot of Cradle Island at the bottom of the advertisement. And the island looked like a cradle. An abstract cradle. A cradle on drugs. My father was also on drugs. He found this coincidence so funny that he laughed until he cried.
Then he bought it.
That was a different lifetime. By the time I got into the car borrowed from one of my coworkers to travel from Brooklyn to Ontario, Dad was almost thirty years sober.
As was I. Recovered from my addictions, I mean. Not to drugs or alcohol—to other things. Thoughts, food, people, places. Oh, yes—you can be addicted to a place. It happened to me as a kid. Every year, in the middle of February—deep in the bowels of the Chicago winter—I started to crave Cradle Island. The sound of sparrows in the afternoon. Its curving beaches, peppered with cattails. In the first light of morning, when the lake turns to glass. It was the strangest feeling. More potent than desire for food. Because when you want ice cream or crispy, hot buttered bread, the feeling pools right atop your tongue, but when you want a place, it calls to you witheverysense, sight and smell and touch and sound and, yes, even taste.
When I moved to New York, I cut all cravings out of my life. All of them. I had to. “No seas tonta,” Manuel would have said, waving a bottle of beer in my face. “Just have one.”
I gripped the steering wheel. Squeezed my eyes closed and open. Blinked his face from my memory.No. That was before.Before I took control of my life. Before I worked my schedule down to an exacting science, to a well-oiled machine that left no room for darker thoughts. Before I learned to ignore the siren call of my memories, their taunts, daring me to jump down, down, down, into that all-too-familiar place—a hole into which at times I fell accidentally and at others I climbed willingly, allowing the rest of the soil to tumble in after me, shutting off all oxygen and blotting out the sun.
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