How to Hide in Plain Sight - Softcover

Noyes, Emma

 
9780593639023: How to Hide in Plain Sight
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0593639022 ISBN 13: 9780593639023
Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

The unbreakable bonds of family and love are explored in this brilliant and tender story from the author of Guy's Girl.

On the day she arrives in Canada for her older brother's wedding, Eliot Beck hasn't seen her family in three years. Eliot adores her big, wacky, dysfunctional collection of siblings and in-laws, but there's a reason she fled to Manhattan and buried herself in her work—and she’s not ready to share it with anyone. Not when speaking it aloud could send her back into the never-ending cycle of the obsessive-compulsive disorder that consumed her for years. 

Eliot thinks she's prepared to survive the four-day-long wedding extravaganza—until she sees her best friend, Manuel, waiting for her at the marina and looking as handsome as ever. He was the person who, when they met as children, felt like finding the missing half of her soul. The person she tried so hard not to fall in love with… but did anyway. 

Manuel's presence at the wedding threatens to undo the walls Eliot has built around herself. The fortress that keeps her okay. If she isn't careful, by the end of this wedding, the whole castle might come crumbling down.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Emma Noyes told her mother she wanted to be an author when she was six. She grew up in a suburb outside Chicago and attended Harvard University, where shestudied history and literature. She started her career at a beer company, but left because she wanted to write about mermaids and witches—eventually publishing her first YA fantasy series, the Sunken City. She now lives in Chicago with her Swedish boyfriend and miniature Pomeranian.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

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...

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Verlag
Penguin Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593639022
ISBN 13 
9780593639023
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
400
Kontakt zum Hersteller
BERKLEY
https://www.penguin.com/?s=BERKLEY

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