Chapter 3
3
NOW
THE BOAT RIDE WAS EXCRUCIATING. After taking my backpack off my hands and firing up the boat, steering us out toward the channel, Manuel offered no explanation for his appearance. Instead, he left me to fill the awkward silence with the only tactic I knew: incoherent babbling.
I talked almost nonstop from dock to dock. Filled the wind whipping past our heads with eight miles of banal nothingness. My legs shook. Out of nerves or too much caffeine, I wasn’t sure.
“The drive was a nightmare. I haven’t been behind the wheel of a car in almost three years. You just don’t need one in New York, you know? Of course you know. You live in Boston. I mean, Cambridge. That’s where Harvard is, right? Cambridge? Pretty funny that the best college in America is in a city named after the best college in England. Or would that be Oxford? I wouldn’t know. Never been the smart one. That was always you, ha ha. Ha. Ha.”
Et cetera.
Help.
—
WE ARRIVED, NATURALLY, TO CHAOS.
“ Allergic to spice? The hell does she mean, allergic to spice ?”
We entered Sunny Sunday to find Karma and her wife, Shelly, huddled in the far corner of the kitchen, chopping fruit and whispering loudly. My half brothers, Clarence and Caleb, sat, wine in hand, in the cluster of plump linen sofas. Mom looked woefully lost as she fiddled with the stereo. Dad was nowhere to be seen.
“You can’t be allergic to a taste,” continued Karma as her tiny hands lined up a string of ripe strawberries. “You can be allergic to a food, like walnuts. You can be allergic to dairy or penicillin or grass or latex or bumblebees, but you can’t be allergic to a goddamn sensation .” The knife came down, severing the strawberries’ green heads from their bodies.
People assume that because my sister is five foot one and owns the largest cupcake chain in Chicago, she’s sweet as red velvet.
They are wrong.
Karma looked up and spotted us lingering awkwardly by the door. It was the first time we had made eye contact in three years, and she didn’t even flinch. “Well,” she said, pointing the knife right at my chest, “if it isn’t our little workaholic, come home at last.”
Before I could respond, a wave of fabric engulfed me. My vision went black. “Eliot, my God . I’m so happy to see you.” Mom. Her words came out fast and practiced, like a monologue she’d rehearsed on the flight over. “You had me worried sick. When you weren’t at the dock, I was sure your car crashed or a truck driver kidnapped you, I swear to God. This is why you shouldn’t drive up here alone. I tried to tell you. I tried to tell you. Your father…”
When I managed to peel myself out of her embrace, she clutched my face between her hands, eyes aglow. Then she turned to Manuel, spread her arms as wide as they would go, said, “And Manny— thank you so much for bringing her,” and ran him through the same punishment.
In the corner of my eye, I saw Karma roll her eyes at Shelly.
Next, I found myself face-to-face with Caleb, the firstborn. First of all of Dad’s children.
Dad might’ve been our father, but Caleb was our patriarch. Stately and doctoral, nearly thirty years my senior, he had an almost inhuman talent for leadership. During long family discussions, he let everyone else speak first—and talk in long-winded circles—only to chime in at the very end. He’d take all the nonsense we’d spewed and sum it up concisely, wrapping our ideas and presenting them back to us with a tight little bow.
“Yes,” we would say, nodding. “That’s what we meant.”
I didn’t grow up in the same house as Caleb or Clarence. By the time I elbowed my way out into the world, they’d both grown up and settled into their own lives. While Clarence made a concerted effort to connect with his younger siblings—and to this day would probably volunteer to sit at the kids’ table, even though there were no kids left—Caleb was as foreign and unknowable to me as a stone tablet. He had his own life, a family—a wife, two teenage kids—a medical practice, and he often passed on coming to Thanksgivings or Christmases. On the rare occasion he did join, he almost never brought his wife or kids along. It was as if he feared that, were his smaller family to meet his larger one, they might get swallowed up entirely.
I didn’t exactly blame him. He married his wife, Addie, just after he finished medical school. Addie was tall, gorgeous, and had this carefree way of laughing, where she tipped her head back and let it all go at once. Though I hadn’t gotten to see her much as a kid, on the few occasions that she had come around, I’d watched her with starry-eyed wonder, like a preteen seeing a pop star on the street. She was easygoing, fun, and had a sense of humor to rival Clarence’s. She and Caleb were completely, utterly in love.
It was a life worth protecting.
Next came Taz; his fiancée, Helene; and Helene’s parents. Second of Mom’s children and fourth overall, Taron Beck was the leading candidate for Favorite Child?. He was brilliant, steady as a freight train, logical as a computer, and most notably, had never once yelled or caused a scene in public. He moved through life on his own schedule. Took his time, weighed all options. Chose his next move based on logic, not emotion—a trait which few can honestly claim.
Which is why, when he texted a picture of an enormous diamond ring on a delicate, manicured hand just six weeks after telling us he had a girlfriend, the family erupted.
Within seconds, Karma started a text thread with all the siblings except Taz. The message said, meaningfully, WTF?
Even I—hidden away in my shoebox in Bed-Stuy, a black hole of my own making—felt the shock waves. I had always known that, in order to bring someone successfully into the Beck family, you have to allow time for acclimation. I mean, Karma and Shelly dated for eight years before tying the knot. Eight years! If I were ever to get married, it would be after a long courtship, allowing plenty of time for my theoretical fiancé to pass a long series of approvals and, of course, to give him a fair chance to run.
That night, the first in four days of wedding celebrations, was also my first time meeting my future sister-in-law. At that point, the facts I knew about her were as follows: Helene Marcus (twenty-five) was a principal ballerina at the Joffrey Ballet in downtown Chicago. On the night her company wrapped performances of Don Quixote , they went out drinking at a bar in Streeterville. That’s where she met Taz. They exchanged numbers, met for their first date shortly thereafter. According to my mother, in the six weeks that followed, Taz left work early every day to walk the twelve blocks from his office to the Joffrey, stopping each night at a different restaurant. When Helene emerged from rehearsal, there he’d be: Taron Beck, long limbed and shy, a bag of takeout dangling from his left hand.
Helene and I didn’t shake hands. Instead, she placed a delicate palm on each of my shoulders and said, “We are so grateful you made it.” Her big eyes melted with warm sincerity. “We know how busy you are.”
Helene was followed by her parents, Pam and Tim, who wrapped me in excited hugs. Helene was their only child. They seemed pretty excited about the prospect of inheriting five more.
Poor saps , I thought. No idea what they’re marrying into.
And then: Shelly. My sister’s wife.
She stepped forward, dark curly hair swishing, and squinted her eyes playfully, wrinkling the dark skin around them. “You promised to tell me about every restaurant you tried in New York,” she said, reaching out one hand and lightly squeezing my arm. “Three years, and I haven’t heard about even one.”
Food is what brought Karma and Shelly together. Karma’s a baker, Shelly’s a chef. Both women are Big Deals in their own rights, but when they met, they were nothing more than kitchen interns who frequented the same bars after work. The culinary scene in Chicago is small. The single, gay, early twenties scene is also small. The single, gay, early twenties, involved-in-the-culinary-world-in-Chicago scene is nearly microscopic.
I love my sister-in-law. When I was a kid, Karma teased me relentlessly— Eliot and Manny sittin’ in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G —but Shelly always had my back. A wink, a squeeze of the arm, a few words saying, “Ease up, Karm. Let Boose do her thing.” Quiet comfort, the counterpoint to my sister’s loud confidence. But don’t mistake her kindness for weakness; I’ve seen what Shelly can do with a knife.
My siblings call me Boose. Or Gup, sometimes, as in Guppy. As in the youngest, the smallest, the tail end of the family. I used to love my nicknames. In many ways I still do, but since Henry’s death…I don’t know. It isn’t the same. I’m still the caboose, but my link to the rest of the train vanished a long time ago. They’re all chugging ahead, far ahead, years ahead, and I’m back here.
On my own, as ever.
“I haven’t been out to eat…much,” I said weakly to Shelly. An understatement if I had ever spoken one. “But I’ll text you the next time I do.”
“ The Boose ,” came a voice from across the cabin, “ is in…the…building! ”
I turned to see Clarence charging at me like a loose bull. He scooped me up and swung my body in circles, an act that always made me dissolve into laughter as a kid. Big, genuine bellows, straight from the gut. I heard that same sound echo in the rafters of the cabin that afternoon and almost didn’t recognize it as coming from me.
Clarence looked different than I remembered. Occasionally, he posted photos on his musician page—blurry concert shots that focused on his guitar, not his face—but they didn’t give much away. You couldn’t see the wrinkles of age that now blossomed at the corners of his eyes, the razor burn beneath his five-o’clock shadow. The sun spots and smile lines. The subtle wave in his once pin-straight hair.
Despite the twenty-five years that separated us, Clarence and I had been close. Not as close as him and Karma, but enough to matter. Enough that I knew it would have hurt him when I disappeared.
He set me down. “Jesus,” he said, shaking his head. “Little Boose Beck. All grown up.”
—
WHEN THE HUGS WERE OVER, I was released from the throng. Finally, a moment to breathe. To clear my head. I turned away from the group—
Only to find myself face-to-face with a roadblock.
A very tall, very handsome roadblock.
“Beck.” Manuel’s soft brown eyes smiled. He nodded his head at the side porch. “Can we talk for a minute?”
“Um.”
All those words, that effortless stream of copy that flowed from my lips during the boat ride over, the same way it does at my job…all of it, gone. Poof.
“Um,” I said again. “Actually—” Think, Eliot. All you need is one excuse. Just one. “Actually, I thought I saw my dad out back.”
Manuel glanced over his shoulder. “You did?”
“Yeah. So. I’m just going to go look for him. To say hi.”
“I’ll come with,” he said automatically. “I haven’t seen Speedy yet, either.”
“No,” I said too quickly, too forcefully.
Manuel’s eyes widened. Behind me, I could practically feel Karma’s eyes flick up from watching strawberries to burn holes in the back of my head.
“I mean—” Think, for fuck’s sake. “There’s…something I need to discuss with him. In private.”
Manuel may not truly be family—may have been born to different people in a different country and grown up in a different house—but he knew me better than anyone in that cabin. Better than anyone on Earth, if I was being honest. He knew my moods, my quirks, the twisted knots of my mind. Three years before, I could never have gotten away with that lie.
I could only hope that enough time had passed for him to forget just how intimately we knew each other.
His eyes narrowed.
No such luck, then.
“Anyway!” I said too brightly. I pushed past him and practically sprinted outside.
Out on the back porch, I gripped the railing and stared out at the waves, at the whole of the North Channel—wide and windy, the pulmonary artery of Lake Huron. I heaved in deep, calming breaths, the way Dr.Droopy taught me to do.
Cradle Island. I’d forgotten how beautiful it was. Really, I had. I hadn’t been able to properly take it in on the ride in with Manuel. I was too busy groping the air for words, most of which didn’t even emerge in full sentences—just unintelligible smoothies of speech and semi-hysterical laughter.
Cradle isn’t a tropical island. Its outside—a thin, treeless shoreline—is not sand but rock. Rock that seems, impossibly, alive. It’s orange and green and grey and turquoise. It moves without moving: up, then down, then up again. It grows and shrinks and piles up atop itself. Moss and feathery grass grow from its cracks. Here it’s tall and reaching. There it breaks down into a beach made of ten thousand pebbles. Inside the harbor—a generous crescent protected on all sides by long, empty islands—are the cabins. They’re connected by a boardwalk that blends into the rest of the island, as if the oak and white pine grew up around it, rather than the other way around.
My head throbbed. My fingers drummed the railing impatiently. Not even a day away from my job and my entire body ached for a keyboard, a monitor, a meeting to lead—something. Work. Work. All I thought about was work. I kept a strict schedule. Never turned off email or Slack notifications. Did tasks the moment they were assigned to me, truly unable to put them off. When I lay down to sleep at night, my to-do list for the next day played through my mind on an endless cycle.
It’s not that I didn’t understand the value of a vacation; it’s more that when I wasn’t working, I felt a constant gnawing at the back of my mind, as if I were forgetting something essential.
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, like Kim or Mack or Gena. 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 the home 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 WAS setting 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 life with 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.