SOMEONE MOVED A ROCK

My little sister Hannah looks adorable in her brand new carnation pink Easter dress. She’s dressed for an egg hunt, to be followed by a champagne brunch at the Hotel del Coronado. She hums an aimless Easter ditty and straightens out the kinks in her dress while we wait for our parents to join us in the car.

“Your mother dresses you alright,” I say, searching the expansive back seat for my seat belt. All I can find are fast food napkins stuffed into the creases of the leather. I pull out a crumpled ball of paper; a receipt for donuts and coffee. “I think my mom was out to embarrass me.”

“I know,” she declares.

I laugh. Hannah pulls out a sketchbook from the seat pocket in front of her and flips through the pages. I watch her. This girl’s life has been more interesting in her six years on Earth than mine has been in twenty-three.

Born and then abandoned on a church stoop, she lived the first year of her life in a Chinese orphanage, where she slept in a cramped plastic basin alongside twenty other infants. She had barely enough room to turn over. Five years ago she had the good fortune to be adopted by my dad and stepmother, Teri. They hopped on a plane to China, plucked her out of her misery, and now she’s destined to live out the next twelve years of her life in the suburbs of Arizona. Whenever Teri reminds me of what Hannah’s life was like before she was brought to America, I contrast it with Hannah’s current situation: she now has three beds in three different cities, each a study in how many fluffy pillows one bed can contain before collapsing. What a lucky girl.

“How’s school going?” I ask, stuffing the donut receipt into the door.

“It’s pretty much done with, really.”

“I thought you had like, a whole other month?”

“I guess we do, ” she replies. “Are we leaving yet?”

I look towards the stairwell door. Dad and Teri are still upstairs. “Pretty soon. So are you excited for second grade?”

“Kind of but not really.”

“Kind of but not really?”

“I’m already reading at, like, a third grade level, so kind of but not really,” she says.

I nod and pull out my cell phone to check the time. “When I was in second grade, I wrote a book. It was about me and all my classmates working in a giant submarine,” I say. She looks interested, so I add: “You should write one, too.”

“When did you do that?” she asks, picking at the red and black plush diamondback coiled on the seat next to her.

“Second grade.”

“No, I know that,” she says, rolling her eyes. “I mean when did you write it in second grade?”

“During class.”

She looks away, her mouth slightly parted, her eyes focused on something distant. I hear the rattle and creak of the stairwell door opening and look back to see Teri following Dad towards the car. She hurriedly crams something into her purse. He shakes his head, mutters something derisive.

I look back at Hannah. She has set the plush diamondback free in the wilds of the SUV and sits staring at her sketchbook, her pencil pressed against paper. She looks uninspired.

We set out for the hotel, passing a long line of weather-beaten homes built in a long line on a cliff bend. From the top of the hill that rises out of the bay area all the way to the bridge that connects one peninsula to the next, thirty or so houses stand sentinel over the water, their warped wooden facades peeling white.

“Bro?” my sister asks, shaking off her spell. “Do you ever get up early?” The question is posed in a sinister way, or as sinister as a six-year-old girl can be, with her head crooked to one side and her eyes barely open.

“Uh, well, I guess that depends on what you call early.”

“Do you have a job yet?” she asks. She straightens her legs and then lets them go slack, thumping them loudly against the seat. I see Teri start to turn back towards us, then think better of it. Instead, she puts her arm on the shoulder of the driver’s seat and looks ahead as the car makes a wide left turn onto a cement bridge.

“No,” I reply.

“Oh. Why not?”

“I did. For a week. Now I’m looking again.”

“I wake up around 5:30,” she says, not listening. She shrugs again, this time with both hands up in the air, palms towards the sky, like a cartoon character feigning ignorance. “Sometimes later but not most of the time,” she adds, and then returns to her drawings, her pencil straightening in the air like an exclamation point.

In the front seat, Teri turns to Dad and smiles. He chortles softly and turns up the volume on the Frank Sinatra station. Nancy Sinatra is reading fan mail. She sounds ancient.

Hannah doodles on her sketchpad for a few minutes. The freeway bends around San Diego harbor and the city peeks out from behind a thick patch of palms. Behind it lies the tiny island of Coronado, our destination, connected to the city by an enormous blue arch of a bridge. The bay below it is filled with boats of every shape and size, from battleships to harbor cruises.

Hannah turns to me and asks, “Will you show me how to draw a man?”

By the time we get to the Hotel del Coronado and park our car, the little babies have already been let loose on the grassy knoll. They teeter forward with greedy arms out as they trawl for plastic eggs full of candy. Their parents accompany them on the field while an older man in a blue and white fedora announces the play-by-play.

“This is the group before Hannah’s,” Teri says.

We walk the perimeter of the oval lawn as the last of the eggs are collected. I watch an overeager father drop to his stomach to snap a picture of his wide-eyed toddler batting two plastic eggs together. The red-bricked path that curves towards the registration table is filled with kids on sugar highs bouncing from one brick to another. Their stressed out parents have given up trying to contain them. Hell, it’s a holiday.

The line for registration is six people deep. A trio of pretty concierge girls in pink skirts and black jackets greet guests with chipper greetings. “I think I’m going to go get a tea. You guys want anything?” I ask my family.

“I’ll go with you,” my father says.

My father and I find stand a tiny French café inside the hotel. They have an assortment of fresh baked croissants and quiches available, but all we’re interested in is whether or not they have lemonade for Hannah.

“They have a soda fountain,” I say. “Does she drink Sierra Mist or 7-Up or whatever?”

“Oh, yeah. That should be fine.”

I cut ahead in line to take a peek at their selection of teas. A pretty blonde woman in the front of the line covers her mouth and watches me, probably wondering whether or not to accuse me of cutting. She’s spent too much time around her children. I smile as I shuffle past her to rejoin my father in the back.

“So… tell me again what happened with this whole Census thing, because I’m a little confused,” he says.

“Yeah. It’s confusing.”

“You were hired and then they said you weren’t?”

“Pretty much, yeah. They booked me and they trained me and then they said, you know, ‘Sorry, but we only have sixteen slots or positions available and we’re going to take these sixteen and not you.’ I guess that’s the government for you,” I summarize.

“I suppose.”

“I was put on layaway, essentially.”

He chortles, a deep laugh that rises from his belly. “I’ve never heard of that before. ‘On layaway.’ So they might hire you, but at a later date?”

“Sure,” I say. “If I still want that.”

He nods and watches the door with a thoughtful look. “You know you have our support in whatever it is you do, right?”

“Yeah. I know. To a fault.”

“No, no. Not to a fault. I’m here to supply you with whatever resources you need in order to succeed. I’ll take care of my end. You take care of the rest,” he says, putting his hand on my shoulder. “As long as you aren’t smoking pot and playing video games all day.”

I step up to the counter, hoping that my father isn’t referring to Hardcasual, a blog I write for that practically requires the reader to smoke pot and play video games all day. I ask the sleepy eyed Hispanic woman working there if she sells lemonade. She thinks about it for a second, then walks to the other side of the counter to inspect the soda fountain.

My father pulls a fresh twenty out his money clip and hands it to me. “Listen: if the government doesn’t want you, fuck ‘em.”

When we return outside, the infants have all been cleared off the lawn, replaced by a couple of tan, beefy hotel workers in wraparound sunglasses. They pull handfuls of plastic eggs out of garbage bags and launch them in every direction. The second age – the six to eight year olds – have gathered around the perimeter, their nice dress shoes half on the sidewalk and half on the grass. They look eager for the event to start. Their parents look eager to get this over with.

We find Hannah and Teri and take a few pictures before the event starts. I put my arm around my sister and tell her to find me a Butterfinger. She says she’ll try but not to expect anything.

After the lawn is sufficiently peppered with pastel eggs and individually wrapped candies, the man in the fedora counts down for the second round of egg hunting to begin. A hundred parents watch with fifty expensive-looking digital cameras trained on their children. Teri replaces Hannah’s basket with a tote bag at the last minute, muttering something about how Hannah’s eggs always fall out because she twirls her basket too much. The man in the fedora yells, “Go!” and the hunt begins.

Most of the kids sprint towards the center. Hannah dawdles. She takes a step forward and picks up the dozen or so plastic eggs at her feet. She tosses them into her tote bag and continues this way around the periphery, avoiding the frenzied mass of children bouncing around the middle.

I watch one of the burly hotel workers stop a little boy and search his basket. The boy shakes his head sadly, takes out a few eggs and drops them on the ground. He looks at the hotel worker and extends his free arm out, as if to say, “Are you happy now?”

“What are those guys doing?” I ask.

“The kids aren’t allowed more than five eggs,” Teri replies. “They can have all the candy they want. There just aren’t enough eggs.”

“Did they tell the kids?”

“They are now.”

For the next five minutes the hotel workers go from kid to kid inspecting their baskets and tossing out any excess eggs. Having gained and lost a good majority of their winnings, the demoralized youngsters walk the lawn with shoulders sagged. Every few seconds one of them finds a candy bar stuck in the turf and joylessly tosses it in the basket. They look like the surviving soldiers of some terrible battle searching for something worthwhile to salvage.

Hannah reappears at my feet. She looks exhausted. “Can you open this for me?” she asks. She hands me a Starburst and I struggle to unwrap it. We follow Teri towards the arts and crafts area, which is just a couple tables set up with cheap plastic tablecloths. Nevertheless, there’s line of parents and kids waiting to pay for admission. Inside I see a few kids my sister’s age painting tiny wooden birdhouses.

Teri and Hannah get in line. Dad and I hang out nearby and finish off our drinks. The lawn is being set up one last time for the oldest group, which apparently goes as high as twelve years old. I watch a family of five take a photograph at the edge of the lawn. The kids look huge. Teenager huge.

“That’s John Shadegg,” Dad blurts out. “John!”

An attractive couple in their fifties stroll arm-in-arm around the lawn. They walk in silence, their eyes are focused on the path in front of them. The man looks up, bewildered. My Dad waves. The man offers his hand to shake before recognizing the man whose hand he’s shaking. His name is John Shadegg: a Congressman.

“Tom Littler!” my father proclaims.

“Tommy!” Shadegg says, smiling warmly. He clasps Dad’s hand between his. Shadegg is short with chipmunk cheeks and a perfectly combed head of white hair. His eyes convey an intense intelligence, but I sense a hesitancy behind his words, as if he’s too focused on digging up relevant personal material to make polite chit chat. “You know my wife?”

Dad does, and I am introduced to both as the visiting son. Mrs. Shadegg and I stand aside, smiling politely as the two talk shop. The congressman listens to my father, nodding and asking questions about the shape of the economy. Dad is an attorney who specializes in bankruptcy litigation, so he has his ear to the rail when it comes to these things. The conversation is short and after promises to keep in touch, the two resume their stroll around the hotel grounds.

Dad leans against the fence and smiles. We watch the kids in the oldest age group prepare themselves for the hunt. They stare steely-eyed at the lawn, planning strategies in their heads. Some of them stretch their legs like runners; others carry more than one basket. The man in the fedora counts down on the microphone.

“Five, four, three…”

One of the teenagers bolts towards the center. It starts a chain reaction as others follow. All hell breaks loose. The greedy little monsters ravage the lawn, picking up eggs by the handful. The hotel workers can’t work fast enough. The man on the loudspeaker tries to remind everyone that there are only five eggs to a basket, but no one listens. No one cares. The eggs are gone in a matter of seconds. The slower children run to their parents, crying out of shame.

“Pretty funny,” Dad says.

“I don’t think he finds it very funny,” I say, pointing at a distressed boy. His mother pets his hair. His father unwraps a candy for him. He cries and cries.

“I meant the day. The holiday.”

“What’s funny about it?” I ask.

“Well, you know how I feel about this crap,” he says and takes off his sunglasses. He wipes them with his shirt. “All this because what? Because someone moved a rock?”

After brunch I drive back to Los Angeles. I roll the windows down and let the wind whip at my arm. Every time I drive over that hill and see downtown peeking out behind its toxic cloud I feel sick to my stomach. I’ve been here almost a year and have nothing to show for it. No job, no prospects. Nothing. I wonder what it is exactly I’m doing here.

I think about the conversation I had with my little sister that morning. The one about the book. I think about the first story I ever wrote. I think about the same thing I think about every Easter: the day my parents separated.

I am sleeping over Easter morning at my next-door neighbor’s house. I wake up on the couch to the sound of a car door slamming. I sit up and look out the window. Dad is walking up my neighbor’s driveway. He stands at the door a long time before knocking. He asks my neighbor’s mother to fetch me and I groggily pull myself off the couch, careful not trip over N64, to say hello.

He says he is leaving for San Diego for a week, and that he will see me when he returns. He tells me to have a happy Easter. We hug. I close the door and watch him through the window as he climbs into his car and drives out of the neighborhood.

Every Easter I’m reminded  of the terrible gnawing in the pit of my stomach I had that morning as I packed up my controllers and said goodbye to my neighbor, who was eating waffles and watching cartoons with his sisters in the kitchen. I’m reminded of how long the walk back to my house felt in the cool desert air. I’m reminded of how, after knocking on the front door, I wished desperately that nobody would answer.

I knew that once that door opened it could not be closed. The holiday would be set. The rock would be moved. It would go on and on that way forever.