Page 84 of How to Hide in Plain Sight
“Am I having déjà vu?” Mom asks as she cleans our dirty breakfast bowls one morning. “Are you kids twelve years old again?”
“Nah,” I say. “That’s wishful thinking, Grandma. You’re exactly as old as you think you are.”
“Andyou’regrounded.”
“Excellent choice, Wendy. Ground the daughter in a place she can’t leave anyway.”
“Fine. You’re grounded forever, then. No college.” She shakes the excess water from both bowls and lays them on the drying rack. “But seriously, where do you two go all day?”
Without missing a beat, we say, “To the office.”
Karma, reading the newspaper next to Shelly, snorts. “Oh yeah,” she says, “this time they’redefinitelymaking out in the woods.”
Manuel and I look at each other. Our eyes glitter mischievously. Then, in unison, we open our mouths and pretend to gag. Then we fill two Ziploc bags with Oreos (for Manuel) and trail mix (for me) and run out the back door.
—
OUR LAST NIGHT ON THEisland, Mom cooks a special dinner, rosemary potatoes with Speedy’s barbecued chicken. She pours two deep glasses of red wine and hands them to Manuel and me. She winks conspiratorially and says, “Better to have your first drink in the safety of home, right?”
We eat by the flickering light of driftwood candelabra. After we scrape our plates clean, Mom proposes a toast to our bright futures. She takes unwarranted pride in Manuel’s Harvard acceptance, as if a decade of being his best friend’s mother lays claim to his brilliance.
After that toast, we’re released from duty. Manuel and I jump upfrom the table. When we pass my mom, we pause to plant kisses on her head. Then we dump our plates in the sink and hurry out the door. We have plans for the evening: one old bottle of brandy, three-fourths empty, lying in wait on our bedroom floor. The same place it’s been since we left it there three years ago.
Down in Chelsea Morning, I reach one hand under the bed and push the bottle with my fingertips. It rolls out the other side, where Manuel is waiting to grab it. My head pops up on my side. Manny’s pops up on the other. He lifts the bottle. We grin at each other across the bed.
“I have an idea,” he says as we push ourselves up off the floor.
“What?”
“Let’s go to the Fort.”
It’s been years since we last visited our old stronghold. The structure looms ominously at the other edge of the clearing. A series of deep Canadian winters and summers free from regular romp and maintenance allowed a thick coat of spores and moss to sprout from the trunk. The tarp we draped over the entrance lies in a puddle on the ground. The roots, which once stuck proudly into the sky, seem to droop at the edges. The clearing is no longer clear; juniper bushes run wild, mushrooming up in deceptively fluffy patches. We pick our way around them. At the entrance, we stare down into a dark, tiny cave.
“Well,” I say, “this is an absolute shithole.”
“It’s not so bad.” Manuel stoops to shine the flashlight around inside. “Maybe a bit smaller than I remember.”
I snort.
He looks up. “Do you want to go back to the cabin?”
I glance around the unclear clearing. I take in the twigs, the weeds, the juniper bushes waving beneath the bright white moon. I rip them up with my mind—pull them from the earth and toss them into the forest, emptying the space of all its obstacles. I placeeleven-year-old Manuel inside it. He’s holding the battery-powered boom box we stole from Sunny Sunday. He pushes a Simon & Garfunkel cassette into its mouth and presses play. Now I’m there in the clearing flailing my arms, dancing in the shameless way only an empty forest enables. And Manuel stands off to the side, head tipped back, bursting at the seams with laughter—the only audience who feels, to me, just as safe as no one at all.
Back in the present, I bend down and pick up the tarp.
“Nah,” I say. “Let’s get this place back into action.”
Manuel grabs a fistful of the fraying rope that dangles from the tarp. Together, we tease loose the knots from its spine. Then we tie both ends of the rope onto the crown of roots and let the bottom of the tarp fall to the ground in one wrinkled curtain, and the Fort disappears from the island once again.
—
WE’RE DRUNK. PROPERLY DRUNK.
I’m cross-legged. The neck of the brandy handle rests against my thigh like a small child. Manuel kneels before me, waist-deep in an impersonation of my mother so spot-on it hurts my side.
“They’re wonderful people, Jay and Julie, truly wonderful, but I just feel like they don’t understand my…sorry, I meanttheirson…the way I do,” he says. “I just feel like…I mean, look at the journey he’s taken. Talk about the American Dream. It’s enough to make you cry. I might start crying right now. Not that you would understand, Catherine. Not everyone is born into a family like ours. Not everyone has the luxury of growing up with so much money they can just skip college and decide to become a happy-go-lucky cupcake-making lesbian. That’s called privilege.Privilege.Something you children seem to know absolutely nothing about.”
I’m still laughing. The brandy bottle sloshes about in my lap. “Oh my God,” I say, gasping for air. “Karma would lose her shit if sheheard the phrase ‘happy-go-lucky cupcake-making lesbian’ come out of your mouth.”
