Page 6 of How to Hide in Plain Sight
“Let’s just say that there are lots of cabins with lots of cabinets on this island.”
Once Karma starts baking, she doesn’t stop. She bakes aggressively. Vengefully. Blondies. Lemon bars. Cinnamon buns. Raspberry tortes. Peppermint bark. A week passes during which we see Karma only under the strawberry-orange light of the kitchen. Her recipes grow longer, more advanced, requiring two or three tries to get right. But she never gives up. Not until they’re perfect.
Out of my sister’s earshot, I hear Mom mutter, “This is, without a doubt, the strangest form of teenage rebellion I’ve ever seen.”
“This isn’t rebellion, Wendy,” Dad whispers back. “It’s mourning.”
—
FOR AS LONG AS I’VEknown Taz—which is my whole life, actually—the only thing he’s wanted to do is make animated movies. Everywhere he goes, his iPad comes with. When he walks, he folds it under his arm like a purse. When he sits, he flicks it open and loses himself in an unknowable universe of castles and aliens and fire-breathing math teachers. Pixelated smiles. Wide-brimmed eyes.
After Henry dies, Taz stops carrying around his iPad. Now, in the kitchen, he holds no electronics at all. He looks naked without them.
Instead he carries a sketch pad. He scratches at it throughout the day—simple drawings so faint they seem to have bled onto the paper from elsewhere. They aren’t storyboards. In fact, there’s no connection between them at all. I find them scattered about the island—decaying fruit, half-finished maps of the world, a face with no identifiable features. It seems he doesn’t care what happens to them once he sets them down.
I start to collect them. When I find a drawing, I slip it into the pocket of my hiking backpack, just in case he needs them one day.
—
I THOUGHT CRADLE ISLAND WOULDfix us. I did. That the waters would heal us, just the way Mom said they could. But here we are, and everywhere I turn, I see grief. I see it in the strange actions of my siblings and the dead silence at the dinner table and the hushed voices of my parents in the hallway outside my bedroom door. Grief didn’t leave; if anything, it burrowed even deeper in. Took the place of the one who left. Grief sits in Henry’s chair at dinner, sleeps in his bed at night. The island, which once seemed ready to burst from all the life packed onto its shores, has become a colorless place.
As I lie in bed at night, I hear my mom whisper to my dad, “You really aren’t worried? I swear, I haven’t seen her cry once.”
“Everyone grieves differently,” says Dad. “She’s so young.”
I shake my head into the pillowcase. Mom is silly to think there’s something wrong with me. I’m the only one who can say Henry’s name without crying. I’m the only one who eats more than half of her dinner. I’m the only one who still goes out exploring. I’m the only one who hasn’t lost her mind.
—
IT’S THE END OF THEsummer. I’m hunched into a ball outside my parents’ bedroom, ear pressed to the door. Dad is inside, rummaging about his suitcase. Mom is elsewhere. Tomorrow, we leave.
“This can’t be happening,” Dad says to no one. “They were in here two days ago.” The rummaging increases in intensity. “I never took them out,” he says. “I never even took them out!” Something hits the floor with a great crash.
Then I hear a new sound, an awful sound, like a tornado alarm or a bullhorn. I leap to my feet and throw open the door, forgetting I’m supposed to be hiding. What I find inside is not a siren. It’s my dad, bent on all fours, wailing. That’s the word that pops into myhead:wailing. I don’t know where that word came from, but there it is, and there’s my father, hunched over himself. Wailing. The floor is covered in what appears to be the contents of every drawer, closet, and cranny in the bedroom. In the corner is a puddle of shattered purple ceramic.
Theerrrn.
I stand frozen in the doorway. If Dad sees me, he doesn’t say so. In fact, after this is over—after Dad stops wailing, after I creep back into the hallway, after he slowly picks up the destroyed bedroom and turns on every light in the cabin and takes a thirty-minute-long shower and crawls into bed for the night, even though it’s only 7:30 p.m.—he’ll never mention this scene, or the impossible disappearance that led to it, ever again. Not to me. Not to Mom. Not to anyone, as far as I know. Why would he? Why be so cruel? Why tell us that, when he was finally ready to scatter Henry’s ashes, when he grabbed theerrrnand looked inside, there was nothing there? Why tell us that he found only an empty ceramic hole, a dark pit almost as deep as the one now yawning open within him? Why tell us he’s lost the ashes of our dead brother? Even at ten years old, I know he won’t. I watch him there on the floor, and I just know. He won’t make anyone else shoulder this burden. There would be no point.
His arms and legs quiver. His whole body shakes with the weight of holding itself up.
A few months later, his legs will give out forever.
3
NOW
THE BOAT RIDE WAS EXCRUCIATING.After taking my backpack off my hands and firing up the boat, steering us out toward the channel, Manuel offered no explanation for his appearance. Instead, he left me to fill the awkward silence with the only tactic I knew: incoherent babbling.
I talked almost nonstop from dock to dock. Filled the wind whipping past our heads with eight miles of banal nothingness. My legs shook. Out of nerves or too much caffeine, I wasn’t sure.
“The drive was a nightmare. I haven’t been behind the wheel of a car in almost three years. You just don’t need one in New York, you know? Of course you know. You live in Boston. I mean, Cambridge. That’s where Harvard is, right? Cambridge? Pretty funny that the best college in America is in a city named after the best college in England. Or would that be Oxford? I wouldn’t know. Never been the smart one. That was always you, ha ha. Ha. Ha.”
Et cetera.
Help.
—
