Page 9 of How to Hide in Plain Sight
I tried to blink the nagging away, to bring the island back into focus. I made the decision to leave New York for this wedding; I should at least try to enjoy it. And hadn’t Cradle Island once been my happy place? Wasn’t it home to almost all of my best memories? Memories with my family, with Henry, with Manuel…
Oh God. Manuel was here.Here. Trapped with me on this island, nowhere to hide.
Footsteps and squeaking wheels sounded on the rocks beside the back porch, shaking me out of my trance. I looked over, and there he was: Stephen S. Beck IV (aka Speedy, aka Dad), flanked on either side by a pair of enormous women.
The women in question were the Nurses. Two of them.One for each leg, as Dad always said, usually followed by a bout of wheezing laughter. The Nurses changed almost every year, but they always looked the same: thick, muscular, wooden faced. Tree trunks of women. Nothing like the friendly ladies who used to take my blood pressure at the pediatrician. To be honest, my siblings and I weren’t even sure they were RNs; they looked more like ex-Marines. Their names were punchy little things, likeKimorMackorGena.That year, as Speedy told us in a text message the week before, they were named June and Jane.
It might sound impossible that a man without the use of either of his legs would choose to spend three months of the year on an island in the Canadian wilderness, but back in his heyday, Speedy had been king of it all. He led the hikes. He taught us to swim. He danced around the kitchen to Eric Clapton and tossed his pint-sized children into the air like weightless balloons. He was the best slalom skier in the family, bar none. Back in the eighties, Speedy Beck could hit a dry start off the floating dock with a joint between his fingers, ski twice around the island, and land smoothly back at the dock—joint still burning, not a drop of water on his head or hash.
Those days are over for my father. They ended the minute his legs did.
For some, losing mobility would have been enough to give up the whole thing: sell the island, find a house in South Florida with a chauffeur and an elevator. Not Speedy. He’d lost too much already—all of it due, in one way or another, to the whims and weaknesses of the human body.
Five decades, three wives, and six children later, Stephen S. Beck IV is not the playboy heir he could have been. He sold off his stake and his board seat at Beck Pharma just a few years before I was born, and then, retired, confined to a wheelchair, all he wanted was to kayak and fish and drive big boats and eat dessert twice a day.
Most people would probably be shocked to learn that my energetic, ALL-CAPS, DO-IT-ALL-DO-IT-NOW mother is married to a man in a wheelchair. But back when they met, Dad was still walking. In fact, even though he was already forty, twice divorced, and had two teenage kids, he was as youthful and springy as a college student. He traveled. He played tennis. He water-skied like an Olympian. He hiked and swam and cooked extravagant meals and drank wine with abandon. And to top it all off, he loved no physical activity more than romping about with his children.
Marriage to a much older, twice-divorced man had never been part of my mother’s life plan. Though she grew up in St. Louis, same as my father, they didn’t meet until they were adults. She knew who he was, of course—given that he was born to the wealthiest, most infamous family in the city—but by the time they formally met, Mom was a newly licensed lawyer with a degree from Mizzou and a job offer at the most prestigious firm in Chicago. She was doing it. She was leaving. Oldest of her family, first to fly the nest, first to find success. When she walked into the party that night, the last she would attend before moving to Chicago (a chance to see inside thehome of the infamous Beck family? What a send-off!), her future spread as wide and promising as the streets of the brand-new city she would soon call home.
And then…there he was. Speedy Beck. With his green eyes and swimmer’s shoulders and floppy blond hair, passing out drinks, bustling about the kitchen with his two children. They were with him that weekend, Caleb and Clarence, though their mother never would have allowed it had she known he was throwing one of his “small dinner parties.” They wouldn’t tell, my brothers. They loved cooking with Dad. When Mom walked in the door, all three of them stood behind the kitchen counter, chopping and singing loudly to Derek and the Dominos. They had on matching aprons.
Though she wouldn’t learn it until many years later, that man—the one taking such good care of his children it made her ovaries ache—was also high on 3.4 grams of the best dust money could buy.
When my father spotted me standing up on the patio, he stopped, braking his signature black Feather Chair®—The World’s Lightest Wheelchairs, I had looked up their slogan long before—down on the rocks and straightening up. Unmoving, unsmiling. Face like a stone. He still cut an imposing figure, even at almost seventy years old.
“Father,” I said.
“Daughter.”
There was a long pause. Then his face broke into a grin. “Get over here, Guppy.”
—
BACK INSIDE, THE FAMILY WASsetting the table and tidying up the kitchen. I passed Manuel on my way to the sink. He was carrying a stack of plates out to the screened-in porch. We made eye contact over the plates, then quickly looked away.
In the kitchen, I picked up a wet rag and started turning it in circles along the counter’s edge. Everyone pitched in except Karma and Clarence, who popped one of Speedy’s “Best of” CDs into the stereo and started to dance around the open living room.
“Planning to help?” Caleb asked, hands wrist-deep in the kitchen sink.
“We are helping,” Karma said. “We’re providing the entertainment.”
Providing the entertainment.That was an excuse Clarence and Karma used a lot when I was little. They said it so much I thought it was a legitimate reason to get out of work. I tried it out one time, when Manuel and I got in trouble for being disruptive during History. Told Ms.Jacobs we were just providing the entertainment for everyone else.
Didn’t go over well.
I watched Karma and Clarence groove about, heads swinging, bare feet twisting on the wood-paneled floor. Long-stemmed wineglasses sloshed about in their hands.
I envied them. I envied their inside jokes and knowing glances, their private party within the swirling vortex of our family. How nice it must be, to have a best friend built into your bloodline. I looked at them and saw what could have been had Henry lived.
My sister and half brother have a miracle bond, overcoming seventeen years’ age difference, the awkwardness of being not-quite-siblings, and vastly different interests. While Karma worked in food, Clarence was a researcher at Beck Pharma’s Chicago office. On weekends, he played backup guitar for the country acts that traveled through the city. “To keep me young,” he once said, eyes twinkling with more youth at thirty-eight than mine held at thirteen—or perhaps had ever held, period.
Three years might have passed since I saw them, but Clarence and Karma were just the same. Still throwing themselves at lifewith unbridled, unapologetic energy. As if the only way they knew how to love something was to get so pissed off about it they could barely form a coherent sentence. It scared me sometimes, but it was an intoxicating kind of fear. One that drags you closer even as you know you should run away.
4
FIFTH GRADE
ON THE DAY WE RETURNfrom Cradle Island—exactly one day after I find Dad wailing on the floor surrounded by the broken pieces of Henry’serrrn—Mom walks straight through the front door of our home and up to her bedroom without saying a word. Doesn’t touch her suitcase. Leaves it in the trunk and carries only herself up the stairs, as if the weight of her body is the only thing she can handle.
