Page 19 of How to Hide in Plain Sight
Ah, yes. The Trek of Chaos. My siblings’ fond nickname for the weeklong excursions we took every two years to an exotic locale selected by Wendy—Rome, London, Stockholm, Tokyo, Budapest, Seoul. In theory, the trips were a dream. In practice, they mostly amounted to the six of us trying to pull each other’s hair out in the lobbies of various Four Seasons resorts.
As she so often did when telling stories that took place “before my time,” Karma turned to me specifically, providing context to a story I couldn’t possibly remember. “Speedy and Wendy crammed all six of us—you included—into this one room on the top floor of the tiny hotel where we were staying in Moscow. Which would have been fine, but all the AC units up there were broken. Place was hotter than the inside of the devil’s ass crack.”
“Except for that one floor fan,” Clarence corrected.
“Which you spent every night hogging.”
“Untilyou, my loving little sister, tried to smother me in my sleep.”
“And Boose howled so loudly that we covered her crib with a wool blanket we found in the closet, remember? The one with Rasputin’s face on it?”
“Oh yeah. She kept shaking the crib, making it look like Rasputin was having a seizure.”
“And every five minutes,” Karma added, “we heard thepshhhof a bottle being opened, and we’d look over and find Taz holding yet another Coca-Cola he’d taken from the mini fridge—”
“—which he would only drink two sips of before he’d put it down, forget about it, and open another one five minutes later.”
Karma grinned wryly. “Remember the KGB pocket watch?”
“Ho-lyhell.” Clarence grinned. “You mean the one that Taz begged Wendy to buy him at the first stall we visited in the street market? The one about which he said, ‘This is it, Mom. I need this pocket watch. It’s the only thing I’ll ask for this entire trip.’ ”
“And then”—Karma was starting to hiccup with laughter—“and then as soon as we got to the next stall and he saw all the vintage coins—”
“—he said, ‘Mom’ ”—Clarence screwed his face up into an exaggerated pout—“ ‘did I ever tell you I’m starting a coin collection?’ ”
Karma and Shelly howled with laughter.
And they were off. I already knew what the rest of dinner would entail: Karma, Clarence, Taz, and Caleb splitting the talking stick, telling stories of their childhoods. Stories of hijinks and hilarity, pranks and mischief. Stories I desperately wished I could remember.
But such is not the lot of the youngest.
To my left, a low, familiar voice spoke up, startling me. “You never answered my question.”
All my muscles seized up at once. That voice. It was like a warning, like a memory. It rattled straight to my bones, shaking loose long-buried sensations that were once as familiar as the beating of my own heart.
I half turned to Manuel and cleared my throat. “Which question?”
“What’s life like in the big city?”
“Oh.” I mushed the prongs of my fork into the dirty end of my burger, the one that Karma’s spit had landed on, leaving little imprints behind. “I mean…I’ve been there for three years now. There’s a lot to tell.”
“Well,” he said, “why don’t you just start from the beginning?”
The beginning?
Where begins the beginning?
Is it the first moment my feet hit Seventh Avenue? When Penn Station spat me out onto a yawning city block at five p.m. eastern time, the very peak of rush hour? Or does it begin even earlier, with a string of rejection letters from every college I want to attend? With watching my best friend get into Harvard? Withit—the incident that happened the night before he left? With lying flat on my back in the sweaty box of my childhood bedroom every day for a week afterward, refusing to eat, refusing to pack, refusing, even, to turn on the air conditioner?
Any of those moments would have been a suitable place to start. But in the time I had spent trying to craft an answer, my siblings’ conversation had died out. They were now looking at me. All of them. Waiting to hear my answer. And I found I could not begin anywhere.
Family isn’t about telling the truth. It’s not about starting from the real beginning. To your family, you tell the story they need to hear. And I knew that my family didn’t actually care about the crowd of humanity that had swept me and my two suitcases down Seventh Avenue, about bobbing up and down in their current, gasping for air, praying I was moving in the right direction, whatever that direction might be. They didn’t want to know that all I saw in my first few moments in New York City were a sea of legs and a sky bathed in concrete.
What they wanted to know was: Is it working out?
At my job, have I been promoted?
Have I been fired?
