How to Hide in Plain Sight

Prologue

HERE’S WHAT YOU NEED TO understand about my family: all of our money came from drugs.

Nothing illegal, of course. Not crack or quaaludes or even marijuana. All government sanctioned. The good stuff, you know? Prozac. Insulin. Cialis. (That’s a PDE-5 inhibitor, a drug that helps men get it up—the alternative to Viagra. I know. The assholes at Pfizer ruined any chance we had at brand recognition. There’s only so much brain space Americans are willing to commit to boner medication.)

Another thing you need to understand about my family: it’s big. I couldn’t tell you the number of times I’ve said those words. At parties, on the job. Tell me about yourself , says someone I’ve just met. Well, I grew up in a big family. It’s a great opening line. People trust me right away, which makes no sense. As if being born into a big family says something about your character. As if there’s a reproductive threshold above which none of your children become psychopaths or serial killers. As if Jeffrey Dahmer would have turned out okay if only he’d had a couple more brothers and sisters hanging around.

I was a happy kid. How could I not be? I was raised the way all parents dream of raising their children: in a big house in the suburbs of Chicago, right on the shore of Lake Michigan. Our town was just large enough for me to run free on the weekend, but just small enough to come home with nothing worse than a skinned knee. Our school district liberal enough to preach universal love, but so white that I didn’t discover racism until we reached the chapter on slavery in our fifth grade history textbook.

I was given everything—including, but not limited to, that most elusive of gifts: the Happy Family. Undivorced parents. Siblings who can actually stand each other. Who vacation together and eat family dinner around a worn wooden table and only try to kill each other on special occasions. Who even—when the climate is right— like each other.

There were unhappy moments, too, of course. And chaos. Plenty of chaos. In a family of eight, if you want to be heard, you yell: at dinner, during card games, on long road trips, when the back two rows of the Suburban become louder and more political than the floor of Congress. Everyone talks over each other. Facts are not as important as volume.

As the youngest—and therefore least authoritative—member of the family, I was never going to be the loudest. So, instead, I watched. Listened. Took in the laughter and the chaos and the secrets and the broken parts. Because, yes, the Beck family is a Happy Family. But behind the curtain, we fight. We hurt each other. We even hate each other, for a time. But we forgive. We always forgive.

We have to.

We’re family.