Page 93 of How to Hide in Plain Sight
SUMMER BEFORE COLLEGE
CHE AND JULI DECIDE TOhost an end-of-summer party before we head off to college. “Feel free to invite your friends,” they say. “Butabsolutamente ninguna bebida alcohólica. Okay?”
We nod vigorously. Then we drive to 7-Eleven and buy three handles of tequila.
In the hours leading up to the party, Manuel and I circle each other like nervous fireflies. We stack Solo cups and spread garbage bags throughout the basement, always sticking close to each other but careful never to touch.
Che and Juli keep a margarita machine in their basement closet. They pull it out whenever important-looking people arrive to stay in their guest room. On hot summer days, they make virgin daiquiris for Manuel and me to sip while we lie on plastic sun chairs out back. We dig out the machine now, while his parents are out buying hors d’oeuvres. We pour in a pound of ice, an entire bottle of premade margarita mix, and two handles of tequila.
Just as the final drop of alcohol falls into the swirling mixture, Valentina walks into the basement carrying a stack of paper plates. Manuel and I freeze. I’m holding the empty bottle. It danglesidiotically over the hole into the machine. We stare at each other, all three of us.
Then Valentina winks and keeps walking.
Tonight is special. Tomorrow, Manny leaves to live in a place I don’t belong. I can go see him, but I’ll always be a visitor, semi-real, existing in finite chunks of one weekend at a time. Never permanent. Just a friend from home.
For twenty minutes, the party is wonderful. For twenty minutes, Manuel and I guzzle frozen margaritas and dance to ABBA in the backyard. For twenty minutes, I get steadily drunker as we whirl about each other, sometimes grazing palms, sometimes brushing bare feet. Then…
Then come the children.
30
NOW
DESPITE THE ELECTRICITY BEING OUT,Mom was determined to continue with wedding festivities as planned. If anything, her drive to celebrate reached a new level—sheer joy verging on hysteria.
“I don’t know what planet everyone else is living on,” she said, “but onthisplanet, my son is getting married in twenty-four hours, and his guests will be here in less time than that, which means we need to get to work.”
The group dispersed to tend to wedding preparations. The frantic atmosphere reminded me of being back in the office. Of the final few hours before a product launch. As if Taz and Helene were a new brand of gluten-free almond milk, and their marriage was a marketing campaign we’d neglected for far too long. With the bachelor and bachelorette parties that night and the Big Day just twenty-four hours away, it was officially All Hands on Deck. Those of us on the decoration committee were to report to the couches in the corner of Sunny Sunday immediately for alignment on Key Performance Indicators and individual task assignments.
Manuel and I were assigned to different groups. When we waved goodbye for the day, I felt a strange pit in my stomach. As ifsomething terrible were about to happen. As if, were he to leave my side, I might never see him again.
—
WE WENT ABOUT THE DAY,busying ourselves with the long list of things that needed to be done. Mom assigned Karma, Shelly, and me to the task of braiding flowers into a long chain, a seemingly endless job given the length of chain that was needed to wrap around the patio. Wendy and Pam worked on flower arrangements and place-card settings. Taz and Helene carried folding chairs up from the boathouse to Sunny Sunday. Clarence and Caleb hauled up coolers full of wine and champagne, arguing the whole way about the correct way to hold the coolers’ handles.
“No fair,” Clarence said after dropping off the first cooler. “How come the girls get to sit around braiding flowers and we have to haul up the heavy drinks? That’s sexist.”
“Yes, it is,” said Karma, “and you can kiss my lesbian ass if you think I give one single fuck.”
One hour turned to two, which turned to four. Still the power didn’t return. Nobody listened to Mom—who does?—and we opened the fridge whenever we wanted, for soda or lunch meat or leftover fried fish. We all thought the same thing.Well, if onlyIdo it…But eventually those I’s started to add up, and a new smell—subtle but still there—began to drift from the dark shelves.
Every time I opened the door that day, the smell gathered power. No matter how quickly I moved, the stench made it out. I held my breath and opened the door and grabbed what I needed and slammed it shut and drew breath, and there it was, a silent belch, that lingering breath of grey meat and rotting vegetables. And there was no way to know if my mom was right, if it was getting worse because we kept looking or if it would have rotted anyway.
31
SUMMER BEFORE COLLEGE
CHE AND JULI INVITED THEM.Well, they invited theirownfriends, many of whom have children, and they brought their kids with them.
At first, I’m excited. As the youngest of a family of adults, Ineverget to hang out with kids. Never get to squeeze their puffy cheeks or hear the sound of their laughter. Caleb is the only one of us with children so far, and he never brings them around.
But tonight…
The kids are tiny and adorable. They run about in tiny Converse and tiny baseball caps, or tiny sundresses and bare feet, or with no clothes at all, saggy white-grey diapers shaking joyfully behind. Manuel knows several of them by name. We chase them in circles around the backyard. We scoop them up and twirl them around, falling to the ground and laughing at the grass stains on our knees.
One child takes a special liking to me—a three-year-old named Clara. She has soft blond curls and bright blue eyes. She looks like a cherub, like the winged angel babies I saw flying across enormous paintings when Wendy dragged us to museums in Europe during our Treks of Chaos. Her arms are round and squeezable. Her faceeternally curious. She follows me around the party, clinging to my hand like a lifeboat. I love her immediately.
That’s when I hear it. When the forgotten whisper stirs at the back of my mind.
