Page 8 of How to Hide in Plain Sight
“I haven’t been out to eat…much,” I said weakly to Shelly. An understatement if I had ever spoken one. “But I’ll text you the next time I do.”
“The Boose,” came a voice from across the cabin, “is in…the…building!”
I turned to see Clarence charging at me like a loose bull. He scooped me up and swung my body in circles, an act that always made me dissolve into laughter as a kid. Big, genuine bellows, straight from the gut. I heard that same sound echo in the rafters of the cabin that afternoon and almost didn’t recognize it as coming from me.
Clarence looked different than I remembered. Occasionally, he posted photos on his musician page—blurry concert shots that focused on his guitar, not his face—but they didn’t give much away. You couldn’t see the wrinkles of age that now blossomed at the corners of his eyes, the razor burn beneath his five-o’clock shadow. The sun spots and smile lines. The subtle wave in his once pin-straight hair.
Despite the twenty-five years that separated us, Clarence and I had been close. Not as close as him and Karma, but enough to matter. Enough that I knew it would have hurt him when I disappeared.
He set me down. “Jesus,” he said, shaking his head. “Little Boose Beck. All grown up.”
—
WHEN THE HUGS WERE OVER,I was released from the throng. Finally, a moment to breathe. To clear my head. I turned away from the group—
Only to find myself face-to-face with a roadblock.
A very tall, very handsome roadblock.
“Beck.” Manuel’s soft brown eyes smiled. He nodded his head at the side porch. “Can we talk for a minute?”
“Um.”
All those words, that effortless stream of copy that flowed from my lips during the boat ride over, the same way it does at my job…all of it, gone. Poof.
“Um,” I said again. “Actually—”Think, Eliot. All you need is one excuse. Just one.“Actually, I thought I saw my dad out back.”
Manuel glanced over his shoulder. “You did?”
“Yeah. So. I’m just going to go look for him. To say hi.”
“I’ll come with,” he said automatically. “I haven’t seen Speedy yet, either.”
“No,” I said too quickly, too forcefully.
Manuel’s eyes widened. Behind me, I could practically feel Karma’s eyes flick up from watching strawberries to burn holes in the back of my head.
“I mean—”Think, for fuck’s sake.“There’s…something I need to discuss with him. In private.”
Manuel may not truly be family—may have been born to different people in a different country and grown up in a different house—but he knew me better than anyone in that cabin. Better than anyone on Earth, if I was being honest. He knew my moods, my quirks, the twisted knots of my mind. Three years before, I could never have gotten away with that lie.
I could only hope that enough time had passed for him to forget just how intimately we knew each other.
His eyes narrowed.
No such luck, then.
“Anyway!” I said too brightly. I pushed past him and practically sprinted outside.
Out on the back porch, I gripped the railing and stared out at the waves, at the whole of the North Channel—wide and windy, the pulmonary artery of Lake Huron. I heaved in deep, calming breaths, the way Dr.Droopy taught me to do.
Cradle Island. I’d forgotten how beautiful it was. Really, I had. I hadn’t been able to properly take it in on the ride in with Manuel. I was too busy groping the air for words, most of which didn’t even emerge in full sentences—just unintelligible smoothies of speech and semi-hysterical laughter.
Cradle isn’t a tropical island. Its outside—a thin, treeless shoreline—is not sand but rock. Rock that seems, impossibly, alive. It’s orange and green and grey and turquoise. It moves without moving: up, then down, then up again. It grows and shrinks and piles up atop itself. Moss and feathery grass grow from its cracks. Here it’s tall and reaching. There it breaks down into a beach made of ten thousand pebbles. Inside the harbor—a generous crescent protected on all sides by long, empty islands—are the cabins. They’re connected by a boardwalk that blends into the rest of the island, as if the oak and white pine grew up around it, rather than the other way around.
My head throbbed. My fingers drummed the railing impatiently. Not even a day away from my job and my entire body ached for a keyboard, a monitor, a meeting to lead—something. Work. Work. All I thought about was work. I kept a strict schedule. Never turned off email or Slack notifications. Did tasks the moment they were assigned to me, truly unable to put them off. When I lay down to sleep at night, my to-do list for the next day played through my mind on an endless cycle.
It’s not that I didn’t understand the value of a vacation; it’s more that when I wasn’t working, I felt a constant gnawing at the back of my mind, as if I were forgetting something essential.
