Erin Kelly won hide and seek forever.
The kids in Cascade Meadows all played one day, in their gated community, north of a big American city when a construction mishap knocked out all the power.
Erin was the new girl. She never remembered who organized the game, or who decided who was “it”, she just remembered feeling lucky that she went outside to play in a forest green sweatshirt that blended in with the trees and bushes. She remembered feeling happy that she was making new friends.
Erin and I share a father.
His work made us move.
A lot.
Making friends was tough, and for the most part discouraged.
There were a lot of tears back then, moving from place to place, country to country, trying to learn the basics of a new language from a book on an airplane.
Erin and I speak English and Southern Peninsular Arabic fluently, we both read Cyrillic Russian, struggle with French, dabble in Spanish.
Our father caused countless tears, more than we ever knew.
That day in Cascade Meadows Erin nestled into some well manicured evergreen bushes in front of a beautiful colonial.
She was so intent on winning, she even held her breath at first, as though the person searching for a dozen kids across a sprawling private subdivision of thirty houses would hear her.
Her mom found her before anyone else, and with that sympathetic look, one that came too naturally, she said “It’s time to go, honey.”
No warning, no nothing and we were off again.
Those kids never found Erin Kelly.
They didn’t know her well enough to miss her, but it must have freaked them out.
She won. She decided that. They never found her, so she won.
When I was really, really upset, when I told mom that Erin was sick of it, and Laura was sick of it, that we were all sick of it, she would whisper in my ear “When you’re eighteen, you’ll have a lot of money. You can go anywhere you want in the world, and stay there forever.”
Erin was gone, and Laura, and Michelle, and Corinne, all of them,except Amy, when my mom held Amy tight in a hotel in Singapore, crying herself, and said “Daddy’s gone.”
I never knew him well, but I loved him, I guess, like any daughter would, and I cried, and I was still crying, when the FBI came and got us and put us in a van, then on a plane.
My mom went to Leavenworth, for what she knew, and I went to a foster home until I turned 18.
All the money was gone, and there was nowhere to stay forever.
All the girls I had been are still a part of me, but like ghosts in closets I rarely open.
The languages I speak don’t mean much, because I have a hard time taking the time to make friends.
According to the news, my father was indirectly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands in violent conflicts all over the globe.
He was also responsible for the birth, and death of all of my aliases, starting when I was too young to understand.
My name, on my original birth certificate but none of my passports, is Kimberly Franklin Haskins.
I’m an alcoholic, the daughter of an arms dealer, and I don’t play hide and seek anymore, though one of me retired as champion.
***
Really packs a punch in a short story. Very tight narrative. Great job, Jimmy.
I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this before, so forgive me if I’m giving you this compliment twice, but one of the things I love about your stories is that they don’t feel like fiction. Of course I know it’s just a story, but it doesn’t feel like you decided to write a story about a woman named Kimberly Franklin Haskins who used to go by Erin Kelly and many other names. This reads more like you found a woman, interviewed her, and eloquently retold her story in a way that breaks hearts.
By the way, my thought process while reading this was “The narrator has a half sister? Oh, the narrator has many sisters. Wait… Oh my GOD Jimmy!”