Page 2 of How to Hide in Plain Sight
THE NERVES DIDN’T SET INuntil just before I arrived at the marina. I was running late—Mom said to meet at the dock at five o’clock,and it was almost half past. All those damn cups of coffee. I hadn’t accounted for the number of times I had to pull into a nowhere gas station and sprint to the bathroom, buying a pack of gum on the way out to stave off the cashier’s cool glare. Plus, there’d been that semi moving with hair-pulling sluggishness down the winding one-lane highway…
All of that to say: I was late, and my siblings weren’t going to let me off easy. They never did. The pile of wisecracks was probably growing higher by the minute.
My nerves probably should have set in long before then. Frankly, they should have set in the minute I pulled the glossy RSVP card from its envelope and laid it against the plug-in coffeepot in my studio and left it there, untouched, its cheerful calligraphy mocking me every time I walked in or out the apartment’s front door. Even then, in my hesitation, I wasn’t nervous. I wasn’t anything, really.
But I should have been.
See, the issue was this: on the day I arrived at the marina for Taz’s wedding, I hadn’t seen my family in three years.
It wasn’t that I’d beenavoidingthem. Not at first, anyway. I was still there, still included in all the group chats and email threads and family conference calls, during which Dad explained for the fourth or fifth timeexactlyhow capital gains or fixed-interest mortgages work. But I rarely contributed to these conversations. Instead, I sat silently in my apartment in New York, a spectator to the continuing lives of my family in the Midwest.
I listened to what my parents told me growing up: Make your own way. Live as if you will inherit nothing. Do not rely on anyone else to save you—including us. So I did. After high school, I skipped the pointless charade of college. Moved to Brooklyn. Lived on a couch. Worked my ass off to find a job. Paid my own rent and taxes. Never touched a dime of the Trust Fund, that grown-up allowance that leaked tens of thousands of dollars into my bank account eachyear. Doubtless they would prefer that I had a college degree, but such things are neither here nor there. I did it. I achieved financial independence. And at twenty-one years old, I’d done it well before anyone else had.
I imagined my solo arrival to this wedding as a moment of triumph.Here she comes, they would say.Eliot Beck, Corporate Woman in the Big City!
But when I crossed the bridge into Port Windfall, the town where we store our boats in the winter, I started to actually picture the scene that would be waiting for me. They’d be there, all of them, loading their bags into theSilver Heron, a fifty-four-foot Bertram yacht purchased by my father in 1975. Mom would be whirring around in one of her usual states. Dad would be up on the flybridge. Karma would be giving directions. Clarence and Caleb would be standing off to the side, arguing about God knows what—probably who would get the bigger bed in Tangled Blue, their favorite cabin on the island, that year. I never understood my half brothers’ relationship; they hated each other, yet they insisted on staying in the same cabin every year. Both claimed it was their favorite and neither was the type to relent.
Every family reunion begins with a round of hugs and the promise you’ve missed one another. For me, that promise was always true. But that summer, after three years away, it was truer than ever.
And yet. Andyet. I avoided everyone for a reason. For multiple reasons, actually, and it was only at the last minute—when I turned the steering wheel to pull into Kilwin Marina and heard the familiar crunch of gravel beneath the tires, smelled the algae and hull wax and molding rope—that I realized the full depth of what I was doing. Where I was going. I was driving toward not just a wedding but also a week spent trapped on a tiny island with no control over my diet. My routine. My exercise. No East River to run beside in the morning. No cabinet full of gluten-free, dairy-free, paleo-ketoWhole30 nutrition bars stolen from the pantry at work. Just me and my family. And suddenly, I felt nothing short of naked.
I parked the car. Unclipped my seat belt. Rolled down the car window.
The wind blew warm and lazy off Lake Huron, heavy with the smell of gasoline and fried fish. In the slip where theSilver Heronnormally waited—tall, beast-like, built for function, the floating equivalent of a sensible boot—sat nothing. Just water.
I stared at the empty slip, dumbfounded.
They’d left without me.
—
HERE’S A RIDDLE FOR YOU:How do you form meaningful relationships with a family you didn’t grow up with?
Sometimes, I think my entire life has been one long attempt to answer that question. When you grow up with gaps between you and your siblings as wide as the ones between me and mine (seven years at the smallest, twenty-eight years at the widest), you don’t grow up with them, you grow up behind them. The rest of the family shares a wealth of memories that you’ll never have access to. Those memories—the earliest, most formative moments—become the backbone of your family history. They’re the stories you tell at dinners, at reunions, over beers at a bar your older siblings used to sneak into together, and seven years later, you snuck into with your best friend. Those memories become your origin story. An origin story you didn’t get to write.
—
FOR A FEW MINUTES Isat in the driver’s seat, unwilling to believe my eyes. How the hell was I supposed to get to Cradle now? Swim?
But then I spotted thePeriwinkle, a twin-engine whaler used mostly for grocery runs. Next to the boat was a tall figure with darkhair—one of my brothers, probably. Left behind to pick up the spare.
I unloaded my luggage—one backpack and one gas station bag full of snack wrappers and coffee cups—and walked down the dock craning my neck to see which of my brothers it was.
But then the figure turned around and smiled. “Hey, Beck.”
I froze.
No.
Only one person called me by my last name, and there was no way that person could be here, at this very moment, standing on the dock in front of me. I blinked hard. Tried to make his face go away, just as I had in the car.Blink. Blink.But he was still there.
No.
This cannot be happening.
I took a step back.
He looked different. He’d let his hair grow long and wild, the way my mom and I always told him he should. That was all I noticed, at first. His hair. How unfamiliar it was. And why shouldn’t it be? Three years at college will do that. Will transform the lanky teenager you once knew into something resembling a man.
