Page 33 of How to Hide in Plain Sight
“I don’t—”
“The guy, the guy,” he said, hand gesturing jerkily, as if he wanted to hit something. “The guy who hurt you. Who was he?” He grabbed my shoulders, looking deep into my eyes. “Who did this to you?”
And that’s when I understood.
“Oh,” I said softly. “Oh, Manny—no. It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t…”
Sweet Jesus. This was exactly why I went to New York in the first place. Why I cut Manuel out of my life and my family and anyone else who might care to ask me these sorts of questions. I couldn’t answer them. Not without revealing the ugly truth of myself. All Icould do was lie and lie and lie, until the lies wound around my throat, dipped into my mouth, curled around my tongue, gagged me, choked me, left me unable to speak, to eat, to breathe.
“Then what was it?” He shook my shoulders. “Tell me, Beck,please. Why did you run?”
“I…” I swallowed thickly, glancing around the room. “I, um…”
I saw the exact moment that Manuel shut down. Saw his mouth go slack, his eyes close up, his entire being draw protectively around itself, like storm shutters drawn for the winter.
“I see,” he said, dropping his hands from my shoulders. He stepped back. “I see.”
“Manuel—”
“No.” He stepped back again. “Don’t bother. I can tell you don’t feel you owe me an explanation. And it figures, doesn’t it? You were always like that. Always thought you belonged to no one but yourself.”
Then, before I could say anything back, he turned around and walked toward the back porch. I inhaled raggedly. Ducked my head and made for the front door. Pulled it open and slammed it behind me, vanishing into that vast, familiar abyss of questions left unasked.
No, I thought as I emerged into the morning sunlight, tears stinging at my eyes.No, Manuel. I’ve never belonged to myself. I’ve always been yours.
—
OUTSIDE, THE AIR WAS STILLand hot. Muggy. Standard summer weather for New York City, but not for the North Woods. I hopped off the boardwalk. Crunched my way over twigs and peat grass, crossing the short distance to the entrance to the forest.
Once you cross that boundary, leaving the island’s shoreline, you’re swallowed up by its untamed center. Cicadas call. Leftoverraindrops drip from pine needles. Thriving colonies of moss stretch from rock to rock in a blanket of vibrant green.
“Never step on moss,” Henry once told me. “That’s where the Moss People live.”
Here’s the thing about losing a brother at age ten: you wobble atop that precarious point, the threshold of lasting memory, when every moment could fall to either side—into the slim collection of images that will one day make up your past, or into the far more extensive chasm of the forgotten, of moments too ordinary or too shameful or too terrifying to keep forever. You might live every moment, but they don’t stay. Not all of them. Most disappear, sucked into that yawning abyss of memory. And those thatdoremain will be nothing but snippets. Hazy photographs. Paper memories to which you’ll return over and over, running your fingers along their edges until they crinkle.
I walked. Deeper and deeper into the island, farther from civilization, from the boy I most wanted to talk to. The boy I could not, under any circumstance, talk to right now.
Instead, I thought of Henry.
When I thought of my dead brother, a long history of memory didn’t play before my eyes. I wished it did. I saw his face, but was itreallyhis face, or was it the face supplied to me by photographs—the ones Mom had arranged in chronological order, then dropped into a beige storage box? A box she labeledHENRYand shoved onto the highest shelf in the attic.
Sometimes I would dig out one of those old photos and just stare at him. Study him. Separate his face into individual components, working meticulously, as if with tweezers, until each feature floated before me, alone in its own purpose, its own importance. Then I put it all back together. It was the same technique I used when learning how to spell. First understand the letters, then understand the word.
I did it over and over, trying to decide whether the boy in my hands matched the boy in my mind.
—
INSIDE THE ISLAND, NO MATTERhow deliberately you steer, fallen trees block your path—trees ripped up by their roots, trees with branches dangling pathetically at their sides, trees cracked right in half by a bolt of lightning, split down the center in a jagged fault line, the top a crown of splintered wood. After a storm, Henry and I used to explore all of that beautiful destruction, in search of whatever we could find. In search, perhaps, of magic.
The year before he died, we found that magic.
The Fort was birthed by wind and lightning. When a big tree falls and drags its entire trunk out of the ground—and I meanreallyout of the ground, roots and all—it becomes something new. The roots rip from the earth, pulling a mess of mud and moss with them. A few remain burrowed in the soil, but the rest now form a jagged arch around the base of the trunk. Sometimes, if everything bends just so, that arch becomes a cave.
We found our cave towering above a wide clearing. A sturdy wooden wall, roots curved into rafters, mud collapsed into a soft pile on the ground: the perfect hideaway. The skeleton of something wonderful.
It took us three days. Henry stole a thick roll of sandpaper from the boathouse and used it to sand down the inside of the tree, which turned from a muddy, gnarled mess into a smooth ceiling. We dug up the juniper bushes and weeds that clogged the clearing. Once we stripped that circle of forest to be as clear and flat as nature can be, the job became as simple as making the Fort feel like home. We laid tarps atop the mud. Lined the inside with thick blankets and pillows wrapped in flannel. Hung an electric lamp from the ceiling. Stole battery-operated Christmas lights from the craft closet andlooped them around the remaining twigs and knobs; when turned on, the lights made a lopsided constellation. As a final touch, we punched ten holes into one side of a tarp and hung it from the wild crown of roots at the top. A front door.
This was it. This was our fortress. Here, we wouldn’t be just the youngest ones on the island. Here, we would have our own voice. Our own life. It was gorgeous. It was hideous. It was a pile of wood and mud and moss and tarp, and it looked like something you could cover in gasoline and set on fire.
