by Jael McHenry
I had already learned to apologize. Nonna, I’m sorry I ruined your sweater.
And she said, Oh, uccellina, uccellina. No you worry. Always there are other sweaters.
Nonna is gone. Her sweater is gone. That memory, there’s no part of it I can ever have back again, except the taste. I want the sunflower seeds, that exact kind. The kind in waxy, clingy chocolate with an unnaturally bright candy shell around the outside. I want to shake the long plastic package and hear the rain-stick sound it makes. If I can’t have anything else from the past, I can at least have its taste.
So I grab the credit card and walk down to the Korean grocery, and it looks like it’s going to be one of the nine out of ten uneventful trips. I get my sunflower seeds and a Fresca, and set them on the counter.
The woman behind the counter picks up my card, and I read the long list of ingredients on the back of the package of sunflower seeds while she handles it, dehydrated cane juice cocoa butter whole milk powder chocolate liquor soybean lecithin carnauba wax, and my attention is elsewhere so when she speaks to me I’m startled.
“No,” she says.
For a moment I think she’s trying to stop me from buying something she knows is bad for me. For a moment it’s touching. Then she says “No” again, and taps the credit card, and I realize she’s saying the card won’t work.
Amanda.
She said she would leave me alone and see how I liked it. Apparently she’s done more than that. Alone doesn’t just mean without people. It can mean without anything else. And maybe, even without putting a word on me, she’s found a way to take away things I thought were mine. If this is the start I have no way to know when it will stop.
I leave the candy on the counter and walk out, hoping hoping hoping no one will touch me as I leave because I don’t think I could take it, and no one does, and I walk straight home almost running and the closet downstairs still has Dad’s rain boots in it and thank goodness for that.
AN HOUR LATER, I go upstairs to my parents’ room and find Midnight on the window seat. She blinks when I turn on the light. I lean back against the wall, and stroke the cat’s soft fur, and take stock of the situation. I could take the cash from one of the envelopes, and pay for the sunflower seeds with that, but the short-term problem is not the real problem. It’s the other things Amanda might be able to take away. She is cutting me off, cutting me out. I try to apply logic. On one hand, I can deal with that. I can get the card reactivated, I’m sure that won’t be a problem. My name is on it. There’s a number on the back. I can call. And maybe, if she leaves me alone for a while, that’s okay. Because I’ve done what Nonna and Ma told me to do, what Dad tells me he and Ma were very careful to do my whole life. I’ve kept her from putting a word on me. She can live with her family and I can live by myself, and we’ll all be happy with that, won’t we?
But it’s not all about me.
Do no let her. It’s very important that you not let Amanda.
Maybe it’s not me I’m not supposed to let Amanda put a word on.
Maybe, by trying to figure out what the ghosts want and blocking whatever it is they want blocked, I’ve actually made the thing they don’t want come to pass. I was the one who suggested Shannon might have the syndrome. If Amanda puts a word on her, it’s my fault, not hers. Mine.
I call Amanda, call her, call her. She won’t pick up. She knows it’s me. After ten o’clock at night I realize I need to stop calling, it’s getting late, and when I try one last time she’s turned her phone off anyway.
There is a kind of sleep where you’re absolutely certain you were awake all night. That’s the kind of sleep I have, waiting for morning, hoping tomorrow isn’t too late.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Hot Chocolate
First thing in the morning I call the only person I can call.
“Gert, I need a favor.”
“Of course. I will help you if I can.”
“I need you to drive me somewhere.”
“I am sorry, Ginny, this is something I cannot do. I have no car. I do not drive. I do not need to.”
“Oh.”
She says, “A few years ago David used to drive me where I needed to go.”
“Does he still have a car?”
“He has it,” she says. “He does not like to drive it, but he has it.”
“Thank you,” I say.
I try calling Amanda again, but the situation is the same. The first few times she lets it ring through to voice mail, then later, she turns the whole phone off.
I can’t reach her this way, but I have to reach her. I’ll have to try something else. List the options, figure out what’s possible, make it happen.
This is one of Ma’s lessons: Sometimes you have to cut toward your thumb. It was a hard lesson for me. It was a cut toward my thumb that scarred me, and all the books say not to do it. After I hurt myself, she took charge of me in the kitchen. She wouldn’t let me touch the knives unless I promised to use them only on the cutting board. But when I was nine, she taught me a new lesson that contradicted the old one. She was showing me the secret of her potatoes au gratin. First, she taught me that au gratin doesn’t mean cheese, like everyone thinks it does. Then, she taught me that everyone else slices their potatoes, but she chips them. And so I learned to chip.
You slice off a bit of the potato. It’ll leave a point. See this here, this point? Then you cut that off. It makes this little kind of triangle shape. But now you have another place where too much potato sticks out. So you cut that off too.
I do as Ma says. In my mind, I chip the potato. Cutting off any part that sticks out. Cutting toward my thumb, though I had learned always to cut away. Cut, turn, drop, cut, turn, drop. Until my hands are sticky with starch. The starch makes them slippery, like oil, but white and powdery, like chalk. The heap of chipped potatoes grows on the cutting board. Cut, turn, drop. Cut, turn, drop.
In my mind the knife slips so fast I don’t feel the pain until long after I’m cut and bleeding. A fat, thick, wet red bubbles up out of the gash. It isn’t real but it still hurts.
It’s time to cut toward my thumb in another way. I dig through the kitchen drawers until I find the scrap of paper bag I’m looking for. I look up the address on the Internet, and just put my feet on the sidewalk, and go.
THE HOUSE AT 114 Pine Street is a brownstone, flat and imposing, not as large as my parents’ house but in the same classic Philadelphia style. I swing open an iron gate and go down a short set of stairs to the door marked 114A. Cold air settles into the stone. I knock. He answers, brown hair sticking up all over. I try to read his face. I can’t imagine he feels anything but surprise.
“Oh, it’s you!” he says.
“It’s me.”
“I got the check.”
“That’s not what I’m here about.” I realize I’m not responding the way he expects. I add, “Good.”
“Come on in before all that cold air ends up in here,” he says, and I go in, and he shuts the door behind me. “You know, no one has ever visited me here before.”
“Gert hasn’t?”
“I always go to her apartment,” he says. “She’s come here once, maybe. I go over there, we have dinner, I stay overnight in my old room from when I was a kid. If she came here, she’d have to see what I have left of Elena. I’d have to be who I am instead of the one she wants me to be.”
My eyes are still adjusting from the bright sun glinting off the snow outside. All I can tell is that the apartment is small and dark and warm.
He says, “Sorry, sorry. Pretty heavy conversation for me to lay on you first thing in the morning. But for some reason I always want to tell you everything. You’re a good listener.”
“I don’t know if I’m that good,” I say.
“Well, anyway. Sorry. My issues aside, how are you? How do you like the place?”
Now that my eyes have adjusted I can see that the apartment is a small room made smaller by the stacks of cardboard boxes lining ea
ch wall. Each one is labeled in Spanish, which I can’t read. There’s only enough room for a bed, a chair, and something that looks like a lamp with a brightly patterned cloth draped over it. The cloth on the lamp is the only color in the room. The only window I see is here, high up, near the door.
“It’s like being in a 250-degree oven,” I say to David.
“Is it that hot?”
“No, I mean, it’s dark, and warm. Two hundred and fifty degrees is a good warming temperature. It’s the lowest a lot of ovens go.” I’m struggling to make conversation, to be polite, not to let what I want override everything else. It’s hard. I don’t think I’m doing it right. But if I just tell David what I want from him with no conversation at all, I know he’s less likely to help me. We need to go through this process.
“Oh.”
He says, “Well, let me show you around the place.”
“I think I can see everything.”
“Everything but Tambo,” he says, and reaches for the cloth I thought was covering a lamp. It isn’t a lamp at all. It’s a birdcage.
Inside is a single bird, very small, drab in color. Black on the top of its head and under the beak where its chin would be if birds had chins, white on the sides of the head, tan on the breast. Not much bigger than David’s thumb. Not an exotic bird. Just like the ones I see flying around outside. It looks like it has soft feathers. It flicks its black-and-white tail from side to side.
“She was Elena’s,” he says. “Her favorite kind of bird.”
“What kind?”
“Chickadee. She just loved that word. It was her favorite English word. When she found out we had chickadees in Pennsylvania, she was so excited, and we’d go out biking to try to spot them. So when she found an injured baby one, you should have seen her. There was no question. She was going to save that bird. And she did. She didn’t let Tambo die, and I haven’t either.”
I can’t wait any longer. “David, I have a favor to ask you.”
“What is it?”
“I need you to take me to my sister’s house.”
“Where’s your sister’s house?”
“Out in Haddon Township.” I keep looking at the bird. It shakes its wings, in a tiny rippling motion, a kind of shiver.
David says, “What, you want me to ride the train with you?”
“No.”
“We won’t both fit on the bike.”
“No, I want you to drive me,” I tell him.
Silence at first. Then David says, spitting the words out like cherry pits, “You want me. To get behind. The wheel of a car.”
“Your mom says you still have the car.”
“You asked her first?”
“Yes.”
“And she sent you to me.”
“Not really.” I tell the truth. “She said you have a car.”
“She’s not stupid enough to think I’ll drive it.”
“Why not? Why do you have it if you don’t drive it?”
“Do I have to spell it out for you? Do you remember this?” He thrusts out his hand toward me and I see the thick scar where my dad sewed his fingers back on. As much time as he’s had to heal, it still looks raw.
“Your accident,” I say, realizing. “You were driving.”
“And that was the last time I drove, and I killed my wife doing it. So you’ll understand why I’m not exactly eager to hop behind the wheel.” His voice is the darkest I’ve ever heard it, all the chocolate notes smothered under seething, spreading mud.
“Just this once,” I say, desperate. “It’s a beautiful day. The weather’s fine. It’s an easy drive.”
He says, “You have a sick sense of what’s easy.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. I force myself to look away from the bird, at him. I get as far as his chin. “I’m not good at this. I know that. I know I’m weird and quirky and I don’t act the way you expect polite people to act. I’ll never really know all the rules. So I say things wrong and I do things wrong. But I’m a person and so are you and I just need this one favor. It will make a huge difference for me. I need to see my sister, and I need you to take me to her.”
He says, “No.”
“No?” My stomach feels like it’s full of cookie dough.
“Look at it from my position,” he says. “You’re asking me to do something I am really terrified of doing, and you haven’t even given me a good reason.”
“I have to tell Amanda something.”
“Call her.”
“I have been. Since yesterday, over and over. She won’t answer. She doesn’t want to hear what I have to say.”
“What’s it about?”
“It’s private.”
David snaps, “Be private and take the subway, then.”
“The subway doesn’t go to her house.”
“Call a cab.”
“Amanda put a hold on my credit card,” I say. “And all the cash I have isn’t enough to pay for it.” I’ve put several twenty-dollar bills in the pocket of my jeans, but I know they’ll only cover the trip out, not the trip back. And I have to come back. I don’t know what I’ll find there.
“You can find a better way. A different way. Don’t ask me to do this. Not unless you can give me a really good reason.”
My heart is beating so hard I can hear it. I need something to calm me. Something sweet and rich and decadent. Not chocolate, not pie. There it is. Tres leches cake. A white cake waiting in a white porcelain baking dish. Cream pouring down, not a drizzle, but a thick, steady, heavy stream. Soaking into the dry sponge of the cake. Being drunk up hungrily. Seeming to disappear, but changing everything. Texture. Taste. The cake can’t stay the way it is. Without all three milks it’s too dry. It has to change.
I open my eyes. I’m willing to risk everything.
“I can help you see your wife again,” I tell him.
“What did you say?”
“Just what you think I said. It sounds crazy, but it’s true. I can help you see your wife again.”
He sits hard on the bed, springs up again, clenches his fists, unclenches them. It’s too much motion for a tiny room. I take a step back toward the door. “That is sick, Ginny, just sick. My wife is dead. You know that.”
“I do! That’s why I’m the only one who can help you. I can see ghosts.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“I know. I know. It is.” The air in here is getting hotter, harder to breathe. It feels even more like I’m inside an oven. I scramble to make myself make sense. “I never believed in ghosts either. Not till I saw one. But ever since my parents died, I can make something from a recipe, and I can see the ghost of the person who made it.”
“That is … I don’t know … it’s ridiculous, that’s all I can think, ridiculous.”
“But it’s true.”
“But it’s ridiculous.”
I ask him, “Do you have a recipe?”
“For what?”
“Doesn’t matter. Anything. Anything of Elena’s. Any recipe she wrote.”
“Yes.”
Everything is uncertain. I am running out of strategies and he doesn’t believe me. I don’t know how to make him. “Tell me about it. The recipe.”
He gulps in air and says, “Okay, yes, I have her recipe for aji de gallina. It’s a Peruvian dish, her favorite, with chicken and potatoes. In a yellow sauce. When we were dating she gave it to me and said if I could make it I would impress her. I never made it but she married me anyway.”
I still need to know one more thing. “And is it … from a book, or—”
“She wrote it down for me,” he says.
He fumbles with his wallet and drops it on the carpet. I don’t bend to pick it up, we are too close in here. He opens the wallet and pulls out a folded piece of paper. The chickadee softly chirps three notes.
Carefully, David unfolds the paper and spreads it out on the bed. He beckons me over, and I cross the short space to look.
A handwritten recipe. Sharp slant
ed letters and numbers, all leaning right. Faded, but whole.
In a quiet, hard voice like a brick, David says, “Is this what you need?”
“Yes. Her handwriting. I’ll make the recipe, and she’ll come. I promise.”
“You promise?”
“Yes.”
“It’s not enough,” he says. “I can’t believe you, it’s just not possible.”
He lifts his hand quickly and I think for a second he’s going to hit me, so I step back, but I trip on a box and land hard on the bed, on my side. Without thinking about it I hold up my hand as if that will keep him from hitting me if that’s what he wants to do. This is why my mother wouldn’t let me get into these situations. I can’t read them. I can’t save myself if someone has bad intentions.
David says, “Don’t be afraid,” and I realize I shouldn’t be. He isn’t going to hurt me.
He grabs my extended hand.
“Your dad,” he says.
I wonder if he wants to know if I’ve seen the ghost of my dad. I start, “Yesterday, he said—”
“Don’t,” David interrupts. “I don’t want to talk about ghosts.”
I don’t know what he’s saying.
He places the palm of his hand against mine. His hand is dry and firm. I feel the warmth of his skin. One scar against another.