How to Hide in Plain Sight

1

now

In the thirteen hours it took me to drive from New York City to Port Windfall, Ontario, I drank three cups of coffee, started four podcasts, engaged in countless lively debates with drivers who couldn't hear me, and listened to every single one of my Spotify playlists. Twice.

When I ran out of background noise, I took reality and shaped it into copywriting templates. I do that sometimes.

HEADLINE: Disgraced Daughter Returns to Family's Private Island for Four-Day "Wedding of the Century"

OFFER: Ready to face your demons, relish lavish excess, and suffer through nightly political diatribes, all while wearing a smile that says you're having the time of your life?

CTA: Click for Free Trial!

When I tell people I'm a copywriter, most often they picture Mad Men: long rows of women in smart wool skirts pounding at typewriters, dodging the advances of male executives, locked out of the meetings where real decisions are made. You don't need talent to be a copywriter. You just need to be able to type.

Let me tell you a secret: copy is far more than words on an advertisement. It's everything. It's everywhere. We copywriters are the engine that moves society forward. Without us, progress grinds to a halt. Instruction manuals are blank. Street signs don't exist. Travel becomes impossible. No sentence comes from nothing, after all: from the saccharine Christmas message on the side of your soda to the screw u bro written on a bathroom stall; from the seat-back sign telling you life vest under seat to the greeting that welcomes you to a website. Even the highway sign telling you that you're now leaving Ohio, bidding you farewell and asking that you come back soon. Do you ever think about who wrote those words? Of course not. Those words are not words to us, with authors and backstories and spellcheck. They're background. They're grass and trees, part of the landscape. emergency exit signs say emergency exit because that's how it is. Car mirrors tell us that objects in the mirror are closer than they appear because they do. Because they always have. These words, these pillars of society-they weren't written. They sprang into existence at the exact moment society needed them. Perhaps they were even created by God: And on the third day, God created the sun and the moon and the instruction manual for how to set up your Google Edge TPU™ Application-Specific Integrated Circuit.

Anyway.

My destination was Cradle Island: a mile-around private paradise purchased by my father during the coked-up height of his second marriage. He found it in a newspaper advertisement. island for sale! I imagine the ad said. excellent value! 100% surrounded by water!

The way Dad tells it, he almost flipped right past. But then he saw the bird's-eye shot of Cradle Island at the bottom of the advertisement. And the island looked like a cradle. An abstract cradle. A cradle on drugs. My father was also on drugs. He found this coincidence so funny that he laughed until he cried.

Then he bought it.

That was a different lifetime. By the time I got into the car borrowed from one of my coworkers to travel from Brooklyn to Ontario, Dad was almost thirty years sober.

As was I. Recovered from my addictions, I mean. Not to drugs or alcohol-to other things. Thoughts, food, people, places. Oh, yes-you can be addicted to a place. It happened to me as a kid. Every year, in the middle of February-deep in the bowels of the Chicago winter-I started to crave Cradle Island. The sound of sparrows in the afternoon. Its curving beaches, peppered with cattails. In the first light of morning, when the lake turns to glass. It was the strangest feeling. More potent than desire for food. Because when you want ice cream or crispy, hot buttered bread, the feeling pools right atop your tongue, but when you want a place, it calls to you with every sense, sight and smell and touch and sound and, yes, even taste.

When I moved to New York, I cut all cravings out of my life. All of them. I had to. "No seas tonta," Manuel would have said, waving a bottle of beer in my face. "Just have one."

I gripped the steering wheel. Squeezed my eyes closed and open. Blinked his face from my memory. No. That was before. Before I took control of my life. Before I worked my schedule down to an exacting science, to a well-oiled machine that left no room for darker thoughts. Before I learned to ignore the siren call of my memories, their taunts, daring me to jump down, down, down, into that all-too-familiar place-a hole into which at times I fell accidentally and at others I climbed willingly, allowing the rest of the soil to tumble in after me, shutting off all oxygen and blotting out the sun.


The nerves didn’t set in until just before I arrived at the marina. I was running late-Mom said to meet at the dock at five o’clock, and it was almost half past. All those damn cups of coffee. I hadn’t accounted for the number of times I had to pull into a nowhere gas station and sprint to the bathroom, buying a pack of gum on the way out to stave off the cashier’s cool glare. Plus, there’d been that semi moving with hair-pulling sluggishness down the winding one-lane highway . . .

All of that to say: I was late, and my siblings weren't going to let me off easy. They never did. The pile of wisecracks was probably growing higher by the minute.

My nerves probably should have set in long before then. Frankly, they should have set in the minute I pulled the glossy RSVP card from its envelope and laid it against the plug-in coffeepot in my studio and left it there, untouched, its cheerful calligraphy mocking me every time I walked in or out the apartment's front door. Even then, in my hesitation, I wasn't nervous. I wasn't anything, really.

But I should have been.

See, the issue was this: on the day I arrived at the marina for Taz's wedding, I hadn't seen my family in three years.

It wasn't that I'd been avoiding them. Not at first, anyway. I was still there, still included in all the group chats and email threads and family conference calls, during which Dad explained for the fourth or fifth time exactly how capital gains or fixed-interest mortgages work. But I rarely contributed to these conversations. Instead, I sat silently in my apartment in New York, a spectator to the continuing lives of my family in the Midwest.

I listened to what my parents told me growing up: Make your own way. Live as if you will inherit nothing. Do not rely on anyone else to save you-including us. So I did. After high school, I skipped the pointless charade of college. Moved to Brooklyn. Lived on a couch. Worked my ass off to find a job. Paid my own rent and taxes. Never touched a dime of the Trust Fund, that grown-up allowance that leaked tens of thousands of dollars into my bank account each year. Doubtless they would prefer that I had a college degree, but such things are neither here nor there. I did it. I achieved financial independence. And at twenty-one years old, I'd done it well before anyone else had.

I imagined my solo arrival to this wedding as a moment of triumph. Here she comes, they would say. Eliot Beck, Corporate Woman in the Big City!

But when I crossed the bridge into Port Windfall, the town where we store our boats in the winter, I started to actually picture the scene that would be waiting for me. They'd be there, all of them, loading their bags into the Silver Heron, a fifty-four-foot Bertram yacht purchased by my father in 1975. Mom would be whirring around in one of her usual states. Dad would be up on the flybridge. Karma would be giving directions. Clarence and Caleb would be standing off to the side, arguing about God knows what-probably who would get the bigger bed in Tangled Blue, their favorite cabin on the island, that year. I never understood my half brothers' relationship; they hated each other, yet they insisted on staying in the same cabin every year. Both claimed it was their favorite and neither was the type to relent.

Every family reunion begins with a round of hugs and the promise you've missed one another. For me, that promise was always true. But that summer, after three years away, it was truer than ever.

And yet. And yet. I avoided everyone for a reason. For multiple reasons, actually, and it was only at the last minute-when I turned the steering wheel to pull into Kilwin Marina and heard the familiar crunch of gravel beneath the tires, smelled the algae and hull wax and molding rope-that I realized the full depth of what I was doing. Where I was going. I was driving toward not just a wedding but also a week spent trapped on a tiny island with no control over my diet. My routine. My exercise. No East River to run beside in the morning. No cabinet full of gluten-free, dairy-free, paleo-keto Whole30 nutrition bars stolen from the pantry at work. Just me and my family. And suddenly, I felt nothing short of naked.

I parked the car. Unclipped my seat belt. Rolled down the car window.

The wind blew warm and lazy off Lake Huron, heavy with the smell of gasoline and fried fish. In the slip where the Silver Heron normally waited-tall, beast-like, built for function, the floating equivalent of a sensible boot-sat nothing. Just water.

I stared at the empty slip, dumbfounded.

They'd left without me.


Here’s a riddle for you: How do you form meaningful relationships with a family you didn’t grow up with?

Sometimes, I think my entire life has been one long attempt to answer that question. When you grow up with gaps between you and your siblings as wide as the ones between me and mine (eight years at the smallest, twenty-eight years at the widest), you don't grow up with them, you grow up behind them. The rest of the family shares a wealth of memories that you'll never have access to. Those memories-the earliest, most formative moments-become the backbone of your family history. They're the stories you tell at dinners, at reunions, over beers at a bar your older siblings used to sneak into together, and eight years later, you snuck into with your best friend. Those memories become your origin story. An origin story you didn't get to write.


For a few minutes I sat in the driver’s seat, unwilling to believe my eyes. How the hell was I supposed to get to Cradle now? Swim?

But then I spotted the Periwinkle, a twin-engine whaler used mostly for grocery runs. Next to the boat was a tall figure with dark hair-one of my brothers, probably. Left behind to pick up the spare.

I unloaded my luggage-one backpack and one gas station bag full of snack wrappers and coffee cups-and walked down the dock craning my neck to see which of my brothers it was.

But then the figure turned around and smiled. "Hey, Beck."

I froze.

No.

Only one person called me by my last name, and there was no way that person could be here, at this very moment, standing on the dock in front of me. I blinked hard. Tried to make his face go away, just as I had in the car. Blink. Blink. But he was still there.

No.

This cannot be happening.

I took a step back.

He looked different. He'd let his hair grow long and wild, the way my mom and I always told him he should. That was all I noticed, at first. His hair. How unfamiliar it was. And why shouldn't it be? Three years at college will do that. Will transform the lanky teenager you once knew into something resembling a man.

An old feeling, long forgotten-or, more accurately, long bound, gagged, and stuffed away in a corner of my mind from which I bade it to never return-yawned and stretched its wings inside my stomach.

No, no, no.

He stepped forward. "Surprise," he said, lips curving up shyly.

Saliva edged up the back of my tongue. He's here. He's really here. What was he doing here? The first few days of the wedding were family only-it said so in clear, shimmering letters on Taz and Helene's invitation. So, why was my former best friend standing two feet in front of me, soft chestnut eyes watching me warily beneath wild curls?

He reached out one hand. I froze, uncertain of what would happen next.

Then he grabbed my shoulder and pulled me into his chest.

Despite being skinny as a willow branch, Manuel Garcia Valdecasas gives hugs that feel like drowning. He sucks you into the void of his arms, drags you to the very deepest point of comfort.

"You're here," he said into my hair. That was it. Nothing else.

I thought I didn't miss him. Really, I did. For three years, I pushed him from my mind. Focused on my life in New York. That's what you do, that's what everyone does: you grow up, you fly the coop, you leave the other birds behind.

I knew I shouldn't let myself take comfort in his embrace. I'd been a bad friend. An awful friend, really. But I did. I let myself sink, just for a moment. And it felt good. God, it felt so good. It felt just the way they say it does-that clear, heady euphoria of death by drowning.

2

summer before fifth grade

My story begins with the death of my brother.

I'm ten years old. I'm standing on the porch of Sunny Sunday, the main cabin on Cradle Island. The lake is the color of storm clouds. My mom has just come outside from talking on the telephone. She pulls me onto her lap and says something I don't understand.

"What do you mean, gone?" I ask. I study her expression. It's too close, her face. Old people look scary up close. I want to get down. I fear I might catch whatever it is that makes her old.

"He isn't here anymore."

"But he wasn't here in the first place," I say. "He stayed in Winnetka. You said he had summer school, so he stayed home."

She blinks. Her eyes are big and old.

"How can he be gone if he was never here in the first place?"