MalContents
Page 8
“Hi, I’m Rona. Rona Bustamante, and you’d better remember the name, because you’ve never met a chef like me before.”
The woman’s voice slithered out of sight, from the top of the desk. Sunny blinked, and she was again back on the bathroom floor at the Pru, being screamed at by a chef the likes of which she really had never met before.
“My point of view mixes traditional flavors with cherished family recipes, with a bit of bite and unapologetic flair. You see—”
A croaking thunderclap shocked Sunny out of her paralysis. She crawled back to the chair and pulled herself halfway up. The top of the desk and the laptop lowered into view. On the screen, in that wretched apartment in Lovell Green, Rona Bustamante stood dressed in shiny black latex, black fishnets, and boots with spiked heels that looked about six inches tall. She wielded a riding crop, which she struck against her thigh again, producing the whip-crack of thunder.
“I’m a hell of a chef by day and an even more hellacious dominatrix by night. That’s right, you sniveling dogs . . .” She aimed the crop’s leather strap at the viewer. “Tonight, I’m making my Nona Bustamante’s famous crab-stuffed mushrooms for you, and you’re gonna love them.” She delivered the rest in patronizing shouts. “You’d better . . . or else! Now, in order to bake my Nona’s favorite appetizer, set your damn oven at 410 degrees. Yes, ten, you miserable worms. Don’t question my late, great and powerful Nona. I learned everything from her. She was a wise woman…and you’d best never question her grand-dominatrix, Rona, because if you do . . .” Sunny clicked off the video. Bustamante’s voice rambled on for another second or two, spilling out of the laptop’s speakers as the system caught up.
“ . . . I’ll find you and make you suf—”
Sunny slammed the laptop shut. Rage rose white-hot inside her, and she briefly thought about pitching the laptop through the window, onto the street below. But that was a crazy person’s solution, a Rona Bustamante way of doing things.
“No wonder the show rejected you, you crazy bitch,” she muttered, her eyes locked on the closed laptop. “You were even too psycho for Slice and Dice.”
Like the office, Sunny’s presence in the kitchen had been almost nonexistent since the night of the attack. Methodically, she set to creating a classic Sunny Weir spread: a luscious salad of wedged lettuce, heirloom tomatoes, red onion, and bleu cheese, drizzled with a homemade dressing; cheddar and basil scones; a colorful lobster and scallop casserole—sans crab, which she normally would have added; and a luscious raspberry and lemon tort. The meal bore Sunny’s signature bright and fresh ingredients, all of them working together in exquisite harmony, sunny in appearance with pops of solar-yellow, saffron-orange, and rich, robust reds.
Joseph entered the house, looking so handsome in his dishevelment with his tie unknotted and five o’clock shadow creeping along his chin, cheeks, and throat. He set down his Italian leather valise. “I’m home.”
“I see,” she said lightly, flashing a coy smile.
Joseph loosened his tie further. “Hello, have we met? You could pass for this woman I used to know. Hell of a chef in the kitchen. Real hot ass.”
He slapped her rear end for effect, and Sunny squealed. “Hungry?”
“Very,” Joseph growled.
She caught his scent, that deliciously clean smell of a man’s skin, a mix of sweat and masculine pheromones, and sensed he was growing aroused. He moved up behind her, dominating her body with his. Joseph leaned over her shoulder and kissed her neck. The scrape of his cheek launched a crackle of excitement through her core. She felt his instant hardness through his pants and her jeans.
“Welcome back,” he said, hugging her around the waist.
They ate the amazing meal, and they fucked with equal luxury, trying out several different positions and kinks not dared until that night. Everything seemed perfect until, in the afterglow, Sunny told Joseph that she was leaving.
A week, maybe two. However long it took. Time enough to regroup, to recoup. To reckon if, after having been sliced and diced, Sunny wanted to return to the reality competition, the decision of which was nearing its eleventh hour. Let them replace her on the show, she said. Joseph hadn’t liked that alternative and let her know it. She’d fired back that there were times when she thought he actually liked the paparazzi, who’d dogged them since the night of Bustamante’s attack.
“I’m going to Foster’s Island,” she’d said after the opening salvos were launched, setting their new peace aflame. “Alone. I’ll be back.”
“Maybe I’ll still be here,” he said, one last nuclear strike.
“That’s your choice,” she said, picking up her bags and calmly walking down to the garage.
Foster’s Island sat in the western corner of a shallow, kidney-shaped body of water in the town of Anderson, Massachusetts. In the 1940s, farmers had dammed up the lower eastern runoff, turning swampland into pond. The western side of Foster’s Pond retained its marshy appearance, while the dam had become a famous local postcard image of solid stone and concrete, with a gentle waterfall tumbling down the spill.
Very little remained of the original Weir farm. The developers who’d taken the farm in the land grab of the late ’90s had scraped the topsoil down to the clay, hacked down the ancient fruit orchards and grape vines, and had leveled the rambling New Englander in whose kitchen Sunny first explored her love of cooking. Her grandmother, too, had been a strong and powerful woman. Rachel Weir had run the farm and cared for a sick husband after Grandpa Wally came down with the Big C. She’d also raised Sunny while still managing, every night of every week, to put a delicious, sunny-bright meal on the table.
“And I didn’t have to strap on a dildo in order to appreciate her cuisine,” Sunny huffed under her breath, channeling her Inner Bitch.
The farm was gone, and a neighborhood of nondescript houses you could find in any uppity development now stood there in its place, each wreathed in lawns too green to believe as being real. Only the boathouse remained, and it still contained Grandpa Wally’s old row-boat—now equipped with a motor. Sunny had managed to hold onto that, and by the time her star had begun to rise, she’d purchased the island, with its house and outbuildings, from the town of Anderson. In seven seasons of Sunny’s Side Up, she’d traveled to Paris, Provence, Madrid, and a dozen other culinary capitols. But Massachusetts would always be more inspiring to her, because it was home.
Sunny pulled up to the boathouse, a weathered but sturdy structure likely more solid than the houses rising through breaks in the trees at the far side of the road that used to be Weir farmland. She’d made her escape without so much as one click of the camera, and fate smiled down on her here as well, not a money-grubbing shutterbug in sight. She’d packed lightly. A few canvas shopping bags filled with the decadent essentials—lemons and limes, bottles of seltzer water, fresh asparagus and salad things—quickly filled the spaces between the seats where she and Grandpa Wally once sat in her sepia-colored memories.
Sunny started the boat’s motor. Since buying Foster’s Island, which could only be accessed by boat six months of the year, she’d conceded she was a passenger, not a rower, and headed out. She checked her cell phone. The two bars at the boathouse had dwindled to one halfway across the water. No coverage. No wireless internet. No distractions, like Joseph.
“Heavenly,” she said aloud.
Wind swept around her, carrying the earthy smell of the woods and water, the wildflowers growing in little sheltered corners of the island, and the late-morning sunshine. Such a sunny day, she thought with a smile. In more ways than one.
The island rose before her, three acres of former hilltop, studded with ancient sap pines, hemlocks, skeletal white birch, maples, and various wild berry patches—blueberry, blackberry, and raspberry. Over the past few years, the perennials she’d planted around the house became actual gardens. Even from the distance, vibrant pops of yellows and crimson glittered through the layered green foliage. The clematis had climbed pa
rtway up the side of the house, she saw.
The house was a two-story cottage, sitting atop a stone cellar. Gabled roof, brick fireplace, a wraparound deck complete with Adirondack chairs. One of Sunny’s favorite memories of growing up on the farm was the day the Indians came chugging down the road— it was a dirt road back then—in a big pickup truck whose bed was stacked full of Adirondack chairs. Grandpa Wally had bought three chairs, right off the back of the truck. Hell on the ass, they were, but Sunny loved the memory. Three new expensive ones out of the latest uppity Sonoma catalogue graced the deck.
Sunny killed the engine and floated up to the dock. Her arrival sent a sunbathing turtle scrambling into the water. Overhead in the branches, a blue jay bitched. A dragon fly darted past. She drew in a deep breath of the day’s warmth and glanced up. Not a single cloud stained the sky.
When Sunny woke up, it was raining. Not just raining, but a downpour drilled against the roof. The loud plunk of raindrops drew her eyes toward the windows. The sills were soaked and growing wetter.
In a fog, Sunny pulled herself out of the fetal curl she’d passed out in and stood. The room took a spin. Sunny wobbled. For an instant, she didn’t know where she was or how she’d gotten there. Then she recognized the antique brass bed with the headboard decorated in porcelain finials, and the Paul de Lonpré print of Cosmos flowers in the gold-gilt frame. Foster’s Island. The main bedroom.
And the rain was getting in.
Sunny shook out of her fugue state and hurried over to the windows, drawing both down. A few hours earlier, she’d opened every window on a cloudless day to air the place out, which she’d last visited with Joseph in late April. Before crawling into bed exhausted, the day had been dry and comfortable, picture-perfect. A wall of nasty, damp air slammed into her on the way to the next window.
The air wasn’t simply humid; it smelled putrid, like something dead was falling out of the sky, its decaying molecules contained within the raindrops. The stench triggered a memory still fresh in Sunny’s mind: that rotting odor of crab from Rona Bustamante’s fridge mixed with a liberal dose of the dead mushrooms in her pantry.
Sunny ignored the comparison and willed her twisting guts to settle. She closed the window in the bathroom before heading down the stairs and followed suit, in sequence, around the first floor, living room to back bedroom to kitchen. When the house was sealed up tight against the storm, she found herself struggling to breathe because, though now dry, closing the windows had also bottled the foul-smelling humidity within its walls.
Rain splattered the windows. The guttural cadence steadily crawled on Sunny’s nerves. Sweat blossomed on her upper lip, at her hairline, seemingly everywhere across her body. She walked down to the fridge and opened the door. Cool air spilled out, a temporary reprieve. She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply, loving the citrus-tinged scent of the organic cleaner she used to wipe down the glass shelves.
The house had been wired for electricity years before Sunny bought the island; an underwater cable snaked out to the pole on the shore opposite the boathouse, out of sight and mostly mind. Sunny had installed satellite for the TV, which droned on in the background as she cooled off at the open fridge door and waited for the central a-c, another of her upgrades, to kick in. The reassuring hum of the unit whispered through the house. Sunny extracted herself from the refrigerator and poured a cold drink, seltzer with a wedge of lime.
She walked it back into the living room, where the television was tuned to YUM! and one of the lower-tier network offerings, The Grossest Thing I Ever Ate, one of those experimental attempts at programming designed to lure in the elusive male viewer. Her own lunch, a lightly grilled chicken breast with basil mayonnaise and slices of garden tomato, was starting to take on the distinction of the grossest thing she’d ever eaten while she waited for the a-c to still her heat-fueled nausea.
Robin Newmark, a ballsy young Brit with spiked hair and a smoky Cockney accent, was bouncing across the screen, blathering about Rocky Mountain Oysters while pulling a sour face. Sunny reached for the remote and was about to change the channel when the screen locked, paralyzing Newmark’s face in a slightly goofy yet undeniably sexy expression. Sunny sipped the refreshing water and studied the vision. He wasn’t quite the man Joseph was, but still oh so cute. The kind of one night stand you’d feel dirty and guilty about as soon as the deed ended, but would relive forever the moment you stepped out of the shower, she thought with a smirk.
Robin Newmark’s frozen face shorted out, replaced by a solid palette of cobalt blue. The lights on the box winked out in order, telegraphing that the satellite signal had been lost, which was to be expected in summer downpours and winter whiteouts, not that she’d ever braved the latter on Foster’s Island.
She waited. The signal didn’t come back, which was okay, she supposed. She hadn’t come to the island to lounge in front of the tube. She was here to finish the recuperation process. The body had healed. The spirit, too, mostly. Only the mind, the psyche, needed consoling.
Sunny needed to look within, decide about Slice and Dice, perhaps begin work on the next cookbook. There were vegetarian dishes she wanted to explore with greater urgency now that she’d been on the other side of the knife; now that she’d felt a pig’s, a cow’s, and a chicken’s slaughter so intimately.
Glass in hand, Sunny marched back up the stairs. It wasn’t quite five in the afternoon, but the storm had transformed the late day into a false dusk. The tight staircase took a turn to the right, toward the bathroom first and then the upstairs bedroom. The bedroom’s window faced the direction of the boathouse and, unavoidably, the neighborhood of houses where the Weir farm used to sit. Beyond the windowpanes, a golden streak shone down upon the distant rooftops. It was raining on the island, but sunny on the shore. A sun shower, she thought.
The cool billows of the central air conditioning were working magic in the upstairs. Sunny set the sweating glass down on the side table, atop a coaster—an official Sunny Weir coaster, beautifully decorated in a vibrant yellow lemon wedge pattern—and settled back on the bed, which bore the unpleasant mark of her sweat. While returning to match the position already sculpted into the bedclothes, she pondered the next few days. A new cookbook . . . she could assemble a proposal and pull together enough recipes to fill a book in a week’s time. The last cookbook, the one they’d been celebrating the night of the attack, had been a best-of, greatest hits collection from her TV show and had taken less time to pull together. Five days? Fast food, she thought with a chuckle. Only did she really want to bang out another cookbook this quickly after suffering the worst night of her life?
Sunny stretched out of her fetal curl. Maybe it was the perfect time to write her autobiography, using the attack as a jumping off point. After that moment of high tension, she would backtrack to her humble beginnings, the orphaned daughter of a single mom raised by loving grandparents on a farm in Massachusetts. She’d relate how she learned to make butternut squash pie in Grammy Rae’s kitchen for Thanksgiving, bright squash pie, the origins of her colorful cooking style. She’d turned sunny food into a career, a way of life, and a life story.
Energy surged through her. Saul would love it. So would Conelle. The readers, too. A celebrity bestseller, not that she needed the money, but the prestige would be great and a biopic deal would likely follow. She mentally cast Bullock in the role of Sunny Weir, borderline giddy at the possibility.
The book would open with the knife attack. She didn’t know how it would end, not suspecting as the rain fell, that the final chapter of this particular biography was far from written.
It was still raining the following morning. Gazing at the grimy bedroom windows, Sunny got her first inkling that something was seriously wrong. The landscape beyond the glass, the little she could glean, sat shrouded in mist. The outsides of both windows were caked in a layer of gritty gray.
Sunny padded into the bathroom and squatted. Her half-closed eyes drifted up to the lone window. Its pane, too,
was stained.
“What the fuck?” she asked aloud.
Feeling desperately in need of a shower, she marched down the stairs. Every window she passed on the lower level looked coated in nuclear fallout. Sweat plastered the inside of the panes, an icy reaction to the humidity outside, cold and hot in collision. Inner Bitch banished the analogy because it belonged to the knife attack, to Rona Bustamante.
Sunny opened the front door. A wall of oppressively humid air billowed in, thick and chalky. Chalk, she thought, glancing out, into the mist. The deck and chairs were soaked. The water ran gray and gritty where it puddled. Not chalk, because chalk was white. Dust?
She stepped out onto the deck. It wasn’t until the gray rain was running down her hair and squishing between her bare toes that it struck her, and the reality made her retch.
Not chalk, not dust. Ashes.
A coincidence, that’s what it was, what it had to be. Maybe one of those big fires in Canada that sent billows of smoke down to New England had sparked and this was the next phase. Only she couldn’t shake Deschler’s words about Rona Bustamante, cremated and floating around in the clouds.
The clouds hanging over Foster’s Island continued to drop their toxic rain well into the afternoon. The TV was still dead, so she had no way of knowing what was happening in the outside world since leaving Boston. There was no internet, no cell phone reception, and her imagination started to wander.
In the later afternoon, the torrential downpour abated, leaving a muggy, misty haze sitting on top of the island. Sunny pulled on the old pair of sneakers she’d left during a visit some years earlier, her gardening sneakers now, and a light jacket, that only to cover her bare arms from mosquitoes and whatever fallout had come down in the raindrops. She pulled one of Joseph’s baseball caps off a peg on the hall tree and caught a hint of his masculine sweat. She loved Joseph. Granted, these days, she didn’t necessarily like him, but what she wouldn’t give to have him there because as much as she loathed admitting it she sometimes needed his strength, his ruggedness. Like when insane strangers came at her with carving knives.