The Kitchen Daughter

by Jael McHenry

  David says, “For your dad’s sake, I’ll do it. Because he helped me.”

  I sit up. “You’ll do it?”

  “Yes,” he says. “I’ll take you to your sister’s.”

  IT TAKES A WHILE to find the keys, but I don’t rush him. Any minute he could still change his mind. It’s a terrible thing to ask of him, but I need his help. And I’ve promised something in return that he needs. Even if right now he doesn’t believe me, or doesn’t think that’s what he wants. I promised. We won’t know for a while who made the more dangerous bargain.

  The garage is in back. It’s musty and cobwebbed. The car is covered under a cloth, and when he pulls the cloth off, I see its silver sides are smooth and unmarked.

  He answers my question before I ask it. “That’s the worst part. I made her let me drive that day, it was her car, I shouldn’t even have been behind the wheel. And if you ask me to say one more word about it we are not going anywhere. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  We get in the car. I hand him the directions. He nods, three times, and hands them back to me. We drive in silence, his hands high up on the wheel, my feet jammed hard against the floor. My legs are tense and straight as celery sticks.

  The streets are familiar at first. Brick from the 1830s mixed with tall modern glass boxes, everything colorful and close together. Narrow, one-way streets, packed tight. Then things open up a bit more. We take the parkway, moving north. Roadways blur into one another. Wide, gray streets. A long bridge, soaring upward. With the gray sky there is little to see. The warm, dry air of the car makes me sleepy. I almost give in to it. My head lolls against the window.

  From the other side of the car, David says, “Ginny? You all right?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “You don’t look okay,” he says. “You look awful.”

  “You look awful,” I say. It’s a reflex.

  “I suppose I do. This isn’t easy for me.”

  I apologize, not as a reflex, but because I mean it. I shouldn’t have put him through this. “I’m sorry.”

  “Me too,” he says, his eyes on the road.

  We arrive before I realize we’ve turned off the parkway. The house is large and white. I don’t know how to describe it. I never learned the words for architecture. With all the things I threw myself into between my childhood and now—round things, and ESP, and Turkish rug patterns, and letters written by nuns, and food, so much food—I was never all that interested in houses. I’ve only been here twice before. It looks big and comfortable. It looks like a place real people live.

  “Okay,” he says. “I’ll wait here.”

  I remind myself, this is what I wanted. Before I can second-guess myself into inaction I push the door of the car open and stride up to the front door, rapping on it with my knuckles, rap rap rap a steady rap.

  Nothing happens.

  I turn my fist to the side and instead of rapping I’m pounding, and I realize how desperate I am to see Amanda’s face appear at the door, so I pound, and I pound, slamming my fist into the wood of the door like I’m crushing a bagful of graham crackers, but the firm wood doesn’t yield, not even a little.

  “Amanda!” I shout. “Amanda!”

  I think I see little faces at the window, but it could be my imagination.

  Someone is coming up next to me on the porch, and I think for a second it’s David, but he’s still in the car. Brennan must have come out of a side door, or the garage, maybe. He steps up onto the porch with me and I back into the only space left, against the door.

  “Stop shouting,” he says.

  “I’ll stop shouting when she comes out. Amanda!”

  “No, stop shouting,” he says, and reaches for my mouth with his hand. I smack his arm, hard. He yanks it back.

  He glares at me and I make myself glare back at him, gaze locked, silent.

  Brennan says, “Ginny, she doesn’t want to talk to you.”

  “It’ll only take a minute,” I say.

  “She’s not coming out.”

  I try to tell him. “I just want to explain to her, it’s the family, she doesn’t know about Dad, and the syndrome, and me, if it’s Shannon, there are so many different points on the spectrum she shouldn’t be afraid—”

  “Listen. Don’t tell me either. I’m trying to deal with two scared little girls and their hysterical mother, she is so worked up about this, I can’t even tell you. Yesterday instead of putting the girls to bed she locked herself in the bathroom and sobbed on the phone to Angelica for an hour. Maybe two.”

  He turns and looks in the front window. I follow his gaze but no one is there. He says, “I don’t know if she even slept last night. I’ve never seen her like this. She said all she ever tried to do was help, and now you’ve gone crazy, and she’s washing her hands of you.”

  “I’m not crazy,” I say. “I’m normal.”

  He pauses and puts his fingers and thumb across his forehead, pinching, like he’s trying to press through to his brain. “I’m not going to debate this with you. Honestly, this whole thing is awful. I think you’re both having a lot of trouble dealing with—you know, your parents. And you really need each other, but you don’t know how to handle what’s going on, and you just can’t see straight. So go home and cool off. And try this another day.”

  “But it’s important.”

  “It’ll still be important tomorrow.”

  “It’s about Shannon.”

  “Shannon’s fine,” he says. “Shannon’s inside the house right now. Nothing’s going to happen to her.”

  “But I want to tell—”

  “Ginny,” he says. “Please. Whatever it is you want to say, Amanda’s not ready to hear it. The longer you stay here the more the neighbors will stare. And the more the neighbors stare the madder she’ll get. She cares how things look and this looks bad. You want to give her some time to calm down.”

  I say, “Is that what I want?” I intend it to sound defiant, but it comes out in a soft, questioning voice, and that’s how I find out I don’t really know. I don’t know what I want. I don’t know who I am or what’s going on or what to do.

  Brennan says, “Go home, Ginny.”

  And I go. I climb back into the car. I close the door and the sound of it closing is too loud. I look up to see if Brennan is still on the porch, but he’s gone inside. The house presents a blank face. Nothing in the window but a curtain.

  David asks, “Did it work?”

  “No.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I say, “Not your fault,” but even the effort of getting those few polite words out undoes me, and I drop my head down to my knees and reach for some kind of food memory but I can’t find anything, my brain won’t put it together, matambre lungo fleur de sel zeppole. The rush of the car’s engine as it starts. Blood orange, think of oranges, think of citrus, lemon, lime. We’re in motion. I can’t get food and I can’t get in the closet so I hug my knees and rock and I don’t know there’s a noise coming out of me until David says something.

  “Shhhh. Easy, Ginny, easy,” he says. “It’ll be okay.”

  “No it won’t! It won’t be okay!”

  David says, “It might.”

  I press my head against my knees and feel the horrible ache in my stomach. Rocking gets me nowhere. Things are black. I keen but David doesn’t tell me to be quiet so I keep keening and I try to find something, anything, to think about. We’re in a car. A car. What’s on a page with car?

  Carpaccio. I latch onto it. I clutch my hands around the idea as if I could touch it. I think about all the different things a person could carpaccio. The only true carpaccio is beef, though it was an invented dish anyway, named for a painter, so true is a misnomer. Now it’s anything sliced thin, usually raw. Scallop carpaccio. Portobello carpaccio, an invented dish from an invented mushroom. Sometimes chefs even extend it to dessert. Pineapple carpaccio, very difficult, since when you slice the outer layer of pineapple it tends to fall apart so you really
need to slice it from the tender flesh right next to the core. People don’t realize the heart of the fruit is often a different texture from the edge. Almost everything has its own kind of grain. You can only get a feel for it by handling it yourself. You have to learn to recognize the difference, feeling it resist your knife. What happens when you push, what happens when it pushes back, how you refine your approach to get just exactly the right amount of pressure. That’s the only way you know.

  “Ginny,” says David’s voice from far away. “Ginny.”

  I open my eyes. My right hand is stretched in front of me, bent at the wrist with the fingers curled together, as if I were holding a knife. I let the hand drop. We’re sitting in front of my house, its stone steps reaching up to the portico, looking like a mile’s climb.

  “Let’s get you inside,” says David. “Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  I push open the door. I expect my legs to be unsteady, but why should they be? It’s my heart that’s injured, not my body. Squeezed dry like a lemon wrung for juice. Collapsed like an overbeaten egg white. One foot in front of the other. Up the steps to the door.

  When I get to the top of the stairs I notice his hand is on the small of my back, supporting me. Strange that I didn’t even feel it. Amazing, even.

  “Come on,” he says, “inside. I’ll help you.”

  “No more help,” I say, and he takes his hand away, but as I walk inside he walks along behind me, until we get to the living room.

  He says, “Sit down, you look like death. There’s the couch.”

  I want to protest but I fall down onto it instead. I can’t remember the last time I sat on the couch. For the first six months Ma wouldn’t let us sit on it, and although that must have been at least ten years ago, it never felt right to disobey.

  When I open my eyes again David is standing with his back to me facing the mantel, staring at a scrap of paper there. The recipe, of course. I know what he wants.

  “I wasn’t lying,” I say. “I promised I’d bring her. I can do it right now.”

  “You can barely stand up right now,” he says. “Stay there.”

  I stand up, just to prove I can. The edges of the plaster molding high above me swim a bit, then settle into place.

  He says, with a biting, mineral edge, “Ginny, what’s going on? Are you really just crazy, like your brother-in-law said?”

  “No,” I say firmly. I hadn’t realized he heard the conversation. I hadn’t thought about it. I play it back: All she ever tried to do was help, and now you’ve gone crazy, and she’s washing her hands of you. “I’m not crazy.”

  “Did you tell your sister you can see ghosts? Is that what this is all about? And that’s why she won’t take your calls or see you?”

  “No,” I say, “she wants me to go to a doctor.”

  “Are you sick?”

  “No. Well, she thinks so, that’s what it’s about. I won’t get a diagnosis like she wants me to and I told her that her daughter might have the same syndrome she thinks I have.”

  “You have a syndrome?”

  “I have a personality,” I say, but it’s just a reflex. Right now, I don’t believe it.

  “But it has nothing to do with the ghosts?”

  “No, I haven’t told her about the ghosts. But the ghosts, they had warnings, they warned me about her …” I trail off, because now I’m not sure I understood the warning. It was about Amanda, but was it also about me? Or Shannon? I don’t think they know about Shannon, but even if that’s not what the ghosts meant, she’s more important. However I succeed or fail, it’s up to me now. Shannon is so young. Her happiness depends on her mother.

  “Tell me about the ghosts,” David says. “No, wait. Let me make you some hot chocolate first.”

  My instinct is to say no—if I wanted some, I’d make it myself—but he’s right. Drinking something warm might help this cold, hollow, exhausted feeling.

  In the kitchen, I reach for the cocoa, but he says, “You let me do that, okay?”

  I pull my hand back. “Okay.”

  He starts opening and closing cupboards, looking for things. He roots around in the junk drawer, not realizing right away that he won’t find what he’s looking for among the hammers and phone cords and index cards. I stay silent. Instead of wasting time disagreeing, I go over to the glass cabinets and take out Drinkonomicon, which I place on the counter next to the stove and open to the right page. In case he needs it. While he is knocking pieces of silverware together in a different drawer looking for the right spoon, I open the cookbook to the Hot Chocolate page.

  “Oh, I don’t need that,” he says. “I’m going to make you my specialty.”

  “I thought you were going to make hot chocolate.”

  “I am. But mine is special.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s hot hot chocolate,” he says. “There’s a secret ingredient.”

  He holds up a spice jar he’s taken off the shelf. Ancho powder.

  “Okay,” I say.

  “Just wait till you taste it.”

  As David heats the milk on the stove, he says, “It’s not just different, it’s better. Amazing. After this you’ll never make hot chocolate any other way.”

  “Won’t I?” He’s distracting me. Thank goodness.

  “Well, if I were you, I wouldn’t. Because it’s the best. But if things that aren’t the best are fine with you, by all means, go ahead.”

  He stirs the milk, which isn’t boiling yet.

  I say, “You can do that in the microwave, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t think it tastes any different if you use the microwave.”

  “Hush. You have your methods, I have mine.”

  We stand in silence, his attention on the milk, my attention on him. I shift toward the refrigerator so I have a better view of what he’s doing, and watch his hands. When little bubbles foam around the lip of the saucepan, he spoons in the sugar first, a spoonful at a time, then the cocoa, the same way. The milk goes tan, then brown, then almost a red-brown, even before the ancho powder goes in. This last spoon he tips in with a flourish, and stirs gently, the spoon not touching the bottom of the pan.

  When it’s all done, he fills two mugs, one green, one brown.

  He hands me the brown one. The brown of the cup is a different, less interesting brown than the brown of the chocolate. I put both hands around the mug and inhale. The smell revives me.

  “Why don’t you hold it by the handle?”

  I raise my face from the hot cocoa long enough to say, “Because I don’t,” and deeply inhale again. I am trying to discern the heat. The spice, I should say. It’s in there, but deep.

  “It’s not poisoned,” he says. “Drink it.”

  “I’m savoring.”

  “Oh. Well. That’s okay then.”

  I take a sip. I open my mouth. I learned this from a Kitcherati thread on wine tasting, but it works on all the other kinds of tasting too. The air circulating in your mouth helps things land differently on your taste buds. You taste better with air.

  “It’s delicious.” The cocoa is dusky. The milk, rich. The ancho adds an earthy note. The whole thing together is perfectly bitter and perfectly sweet.

  “I knew you’d like it,” he says.

  We drink our chocolate, standing up in the kitchen. I can feel the cold trying to get in through the windows, but the warmth holds it off.

  When I am halfway through my chocolate, David says, “Now. Ginny. Tell me about the ghosts.”

  I tell him everything, simply. The ribollita that brought Nonna. The shortbread that didn’t bring Grandma Damson. The water and the wine and Necie. The brownies that brought Evangeline. Trying again with the ribollita to see Nonna, failing. The biscuits and gravy that brought Ma. The homemade Play-Doh recipe that brought Dad. All of it. Their warnings. My mistakes. I even tell him about Dr. Stewart, even though she has nothing to do with the ghosts. Once I get started talking it’s har
d to stop. I trust David and I have already opened the door. There’s nothing to hold back. I tell him about everything, even the syndrome.

  After a long pause, he says, “I really … I thought … I really don’t know.”

  “Don’t know what?”

  “These ghosts, this ghost thing. You say you can bring them.”

  “By cooking.”

  “By whatever way, it shouldn’t matter,” he says. “There’s no such thing. So I shouldn’t believe you at all. Not even a little. Because it’s not possible, and because it doesn’t make any sense.”

  I say, “When you see it for yourself you’ll believe me.”

  He says, “That, that right there. The way you say that. So sincere. Not even any hesitation. And then I buy it, I buy it all. Because you sound so sure.”

  “I am sure.”

  “And you don’t sound crazy.”

  “I’m not.”

  “It even makes sense, why you can do it,” he says. “Why you can bring the ghosts.”

  “It does?”

  “Sure,” says David. “You’re making other people’s recipes, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And because of this syndrome, your memory, your obsession, I bet you’re making things exactly as the recipe tells you. You’re doing Nonna’s recipe exactly like Nonna would, or your mom’s recipe exactly like your mom would. So that connects with them in some way.”

  He’s right. It does make sense. But that’s not really what I want to know.

  “And you don’t think I’m crazy,” I say.

  “No. I don’t think you’re crazy.”

  “What do you think I am?” I ask, desperate for an answer.

  “Just someone trying to get by,” he says. “Like me. Like any of us. There are lots of people who think ghosts exist, and I’ve never been one, but … I don’t know. Mom always says she feels spirits, but that’s a feeling, right? I guess I feel Elena’s spirit, in the things she left behind.”

  “Her chickadee.”

  “Chickadee,” he says, and smiles.

  “You still love her,” I say.

  “I can’t stop. I know she’s dead. I mean, it’s a fact, I know it. But I can’t let her go. I can’t move on. So when you said I could see her—maybe that’s it. Maybe if I saw her ghost I could say good-bye and I can let go of this feeling, this guilt. You don’t know what it’s like.”