NO PLACE TO HIDE

I think I hate Hide and Seek.

“Close your eyes, Dad!” she says, “Count to twenty. Are they closed?”

Sigh. “Yes.” And she’s off.

She’s asked to play almost every night for the last six months — or is it eight, or eighteen? However long it’s been, I know in this time of Covid and civil unrest, the word "hate" should have no home, or even a breath. But I still hate Hide and Seek.

“Dad, I can’t believe you couldn’t find me, I was right there."

She’s in 5th grade, 11, and still believed in the tooth fairy until one of her Zoom teachers bluntly pointed out that the tooth fairy wasn’t real, and kids could pretend to believe as a way to shake down parents for money.

The next day, I found the tooth fairy envelope and note crumpled on her desk. The money was gone and also some magic. Everything has its time, right? But Covid has a way of making "ending moments," however small, feel ... well, big. So I keep playing.

“Look, only two rounds, two rounds, Dad, and that’s it!”

I wonder if she knows that I see her every time and pretend not to. Or maybe she doesn’t care. It’s not a corn maze, just a two-bedroom condo. I mean how many ways can you hide behind couch cushions? This is not the kind of space where I grew up, and where my mother still lives, where the phrase "nooks and crannies" is an insult to nooks and crannies everywhere. That’s a place where Hide and Seek has some real options, perhaps even danger, or at least a surprise!

It was years before I learned how my big brother would enter one closet of our bedroom and then somehow Houdini over to the other to exit.

“Show me!” I’d say.

“Nope, it’s magic, can’t.”

And I’d shoot into each closet and start kicking, pulling and pounding on every board while he smiled at all my futile attempts to figure out his gateway magic.

It was many years later when he would finally unveil his secret, which was only a brick.

“Look," he says, and points. He'd wedged a brick against the key panel he slid through all those years, so it wouldn't move when my younger, smaller fists had no effect.

He looked at me as only big brothers can.

"I can’t believe you never figured it out.”

I guess fun was the spell to my stupidity ... and mysterious portals and magical brothers are better than bricks. And yeah, I wasn’t very bright.

“OK, 18, 19, 20, here I come!”

“Wait, I need more time!”

“OK, last one...”

She knows it’s not. But how much does she know? And when is it ever time to trade magic for bricks?

For now, I agree not to see her shoes peeking out from the curtain and she agrees not to tell me that the tooth fairy isn’t real. This is our understanding, to make this last leg back to our new-old normal less hard on both of us.

I close my eyes and count the days until we can feel safe going to Grandma's house. Because this is where secret portals, nooks and crannies might save us both.