The Journey Home

by Michael Baron

  “Don, we’re going to have a baby.”

  Then she was in his arms again and the full force of the doctor’s news hit her. There would be a baby in their home again. Seventeen years after tuberculosis had stolen their little boy when he was only fourteen months old, they would once more have a child. For so long, they couldn’t even think about trying again, and then when they did, Antoinette could-n’t conceive.

  But now . . .

  She started sobbing and Don held her to his chest.

  “After all these years,” she said.

  “I know, darling. We’d stopped hoping. This is such a blessing.”

  She looked up at Don, reaching to hold his face in her hands. She hadn’t realized until that point that Don was crying as well. “I’ve missed him so much. I’ll never stop missing him.”

  “That will never go away. How could it possibly go away? How could we ever want that? But this – this – is a remarkable thing.”

  A laugh burst forth from deep inside of her, shaking her with its power. She’d certainly run the gamut of emotions in the past few minutes, hadn’t she? “It is a remarkable thing, Don. Remarkable.”

  Dr. Turner cleared his throat and rose from his chair. “We have some things to discuss. Pregnancy at your age is a little more complicated than it was when you were younger. But we can get to that another time. For now, I’ll just leave you alone to savor this moment. Congratulations.”

  With that, he left, patting her on the shoulder as he did.

  “I think we just kicked the doctor out of his own office,” Don said.

  Antoinette laughed again. There was so much to think about. They had family and friends to tell, a room to clean out for the nursery, and a million little things to do before the baby arrived.

  For now, though, the only thing she wanted to do – or even could do – was let Don hold her. As excited as she was about everything, she needed to be here right now. She needed to feel this because she had been so convinced that she would never feel it.

  TWENTY-ONE

  More Feelers

  Warren had given long thought to whether he should try making Warren’s Apologize to the Neighbors Chicken before he did it. The cooking aromas were very strong. Very, very strong. The first time Mom made it, Warren told her that he could smell it while he was playing outside at a friend’s house, which was how the dish got its name. Mom was being facetious then – the neighbors didn’t seek apologies, though they regularly sought invitations to dinner – but he wondered if he might not be apologizing to the people at Treetops for days after making this in his mother’s apartment.

  In the end, he decided to forge ahead. He’d made many meals for Jan at this point, but he’d never made her any of the dishes Mom had created in his name. And he was decidedly cooking for Jan now. Warren no longer had any illusions about serving this food to his mother. She hadn’t had a bite of anything he’d made since the tiny bit of Ellie’s Chicken Pie he’d gotten into her when she woke suddenly a few weeks back. If that were truly the last home-cooked food his mother ever ate, he wished it could have been something more sumptuous and something with more personal resonance. If he had only known, he would have made one of her favorites. Maybe he even would have taken the ultimate risk and tried to create a dish in her name. That would have been the proper tribute, the kind of dedication appropriate to someone who’d dedicated so much to others. It was not to be, though, so his only alternative was to continue cooking in her name.

  He browned chicken pieces in the fat rendered from a half-pound of bacon. He did this in the electric skillet, knowing he could never get the sear he wanted on the apartment’s stove. Warren had only recently started to cook the occasional dinner at home – he was usually too full from lunch to need anything other than a salad or some soup – and he was delighted to learn that his own stove was considerably more potent. Only a couple of months ago, having a powerful stove at home wouldn’t have mattered to him at all. When the chicken was brown, he removed it from the skillet and added the peeled cloves from two full heads of garlic, allowing them to get a bit of color and to, as his mother used to say, “stink up the place.” Then he returned the chicken and bacon to the pan, added a bit of chicken broth, and allowed the entire thing to simmer for an hour. The intense smells of the garlic and bacon filled the room; it was aromatherapy for gourmands.

  Normally, he would have tried to speed things along with the pressure cooker, but he had something else to do with the time today. The job prospect that had seemed so promising had ended with an insulting offer – slightly more than half of what he’d been making before – so he’d brought his laptop with him to send out more feelers while the flavors in the chicken developed. He’d do more of this when he got back to his place later, but he wanted to get a jump on it here.

  When the hour passed, Warren added some chopped tomatoes and let them cook into the sauce for forty-five minutes. By the time this happened, he’d sent his résumé to a dozen new HR departments and had joined his fourth social networking site for corporate professionals. When Jan arrived, he threw pasta into a pot of boiling water and stirred a few tablespoons of heavy cream into the chicken.

  “I’ve been smelling this all morning,” Jan said, “and now I’m ravenous.”

  “The question is whether the people on the highway or maybe in the next town have also been smelling it all morning.”

  “A definite possibility. Mrs. London asked me today why the food coming from the kitchen always smelled so good and then tasted so plain. I didn’t have the heart to explain it to her. Have you thought about putting a catering truck outside? I’ll bet we could negotiate it into the residents’ meal plans.”

  “Thanks for the idea. I’ll work on that.”

  Jan walked into Mom’s room, emerging about fifteen seconds later. “I just wanted to check on her. She seems comfortable, though her breathing is still a little shallow.”

  Warren had never seen Jan with any of the other residents, so he had no idea if she was like this with everyone, but the caring look on her face after she tended to his mother always touched him. She took her job incredibly seriously and she was sure the people in her charge felt it, even if many of them had minds as clouded as Mom’s had become.

  “If I stay in there with her for a while, I notice that it cycles. Sometimes her breathing quickens and sometimes she’s very still.”

  Jan looked back into the room, seeming contemplative. That could mean so many things, some of which were welcome and most of which were not. She turned and offered him a narrow smile that required no interpretation. After a moment, though, she brightened.

  “So, what’s on the menu.”

  Warren told her the name of the dish.

  “She made this one for you?”

  “She did.”

  It suddenly seemed to Warren as thought they were crossing some kind of threshold with his presentation of this meal. Since he always told Jan what he knew about why a dish had its name, she understood what Mom tried to capture when she created something original. Therefore, presenting Jan with Warren’s Apologize to the Neighbors Chicken was a form of inviting Jan to see him as his mother saw him. He hadn’t considered that when he’d decided to make it today, and now he found himself reviewing every step he’d taken. He certainly hoped he’d cooked the dish properly. There was no time to worry about that now, though. Jan was here and lunch was ready.

  Warren put Jan’s plate in front of her and her eyes widened. “Wow, it’s even more powerful when you serve it than it was in the pan.” She grinned at him. “Were you particularly . . . fragrant when you were a child?”

  “I’ll never admit to that.”

  She cut a piece of chicken and tasted, reacting with the level of appreciation he’d come to anticipate from her but never fully expect. “Oh, I get it, you were an especially delicious child growing up.”

  Warren’s face warmed and he hid it by getting up to retrieve a jar of crushed red pepper. “Give
it some of this,” he said, handing her the jar. “It completes the assault on your senses.”

  Jan shook on a few flakes and tasted again, nodding to acknowledge that his recommendation had been a good one. “How close is this to what you remember?”

  Warren took another forkful of chicken and then tasted it again with the pasta, allowing himself to go back to his first memory of the dish when he was in elementary school. It had been an entirely ordinary spring day, warm enough to play outside after school. When his mother served it for dinner that night, the flavors hit him immediately. It took longer than that, though, for the import of his mother’s naming the dish for him to sink in. That day, she’d said that she wanted to make something very dramatic in his name because that would show him how dramatic his place in her heart was. At the time, he’d passed this off as the kind of soppy thing mothers said to their kids. He wasn’t thinking that now.

  “I think it’s pretty close.”

  “That says a lot.”

  “Is this going to be another stinky joke?”

  Jan smiled and sat back in her seat, her eyes sweeping him up, as they so often did. “I was going to say that I could taste your mother’s love for you in it.”

  The comment affected Warren especially strongly. Since he’d begun replicating the food Mom served, he’d thought about the fun she had creating these culinary monuments to family and friends. Now, though, he flashed back on the look of excitement in her eyes when presented his plate and told him the name, or the pleasure that she reflected when he would subsequently request the dish. She desperately wanted him to love this food, because if he did, he was accepting much more than nourishment from her.

  Surprisingly, he felt his eyes get misty. He lowered his head and attempted to blink this away.

  Jan reached across the table and took his hand. She didn’t squeeze it or pat it. Instead, she just held it. “You must have been such a gift to her, her only child coming at that stage in her life.”

  Warren looked up at Jan and then down again at their entwined hands. She was reaching across the table, which had to be uncomfortable for her. While he didn’t want to let go, he squeezed her hand once and then released it. Jan smiled softly and then picked up her fork.

  “I wasn’t her only child,” Warren said.

  Jan’s fork paused in midair. “You weren’t?”

  “I had a brother. He died a long, long time before I was born. He was only a little more than a year old.”

  Jan looked over Warren’s shoulder toward his mother’s room. “That must have been terrible for your parents. Was it some kind of accident?”

  “Tuberculosis. I heard the story from my mother and father so many times that I feel like I was there. There was less than a week from the time they found out he was sick to the time he died.”

  Jan put a hand to her mouth and shook her head slowly.

  “I showed up seventeen years later.”

  “Wow. You really were a gift.”

  “I’m not sure they felt that way when I entered puberty.”

  “Try that line on someone who hasn’t known your mother for a few years. My guess is that she always saw you as a gift.”

  Warren ate some more pasta, savoring it with newly tuned taste buds. “I hope so. My brother was a pretty cute kid.”

  “Was he?”

  “Yeah. They had pictures of him all over the house. Everything from my mother bringing him home from the hospital to him taking his first steps only days before he got sick. He was adorable, though I probably wouldn’t have thought so if he were beating me up all the time.” Warren pointed toward a sideboard under the window that held a number of framed photographs. “That’s him over there all the way to the right.”

  Jan went over the sideboard and bent to get a closer look at the photo. Then she looked at the photo next to it.

  “Is this your baby picture?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “You were cute, too.”

  “Please. I was a late bloomer. At that age, I looked like my Uncle Sal. Some people were convinced that I could fly by flapping my ears.”

  Jan giggled. “You’re going to have to bring in more pictures tomorrow.”

  “We could pull out my mother’s photo books. I’m amazed she never forced you to sit down with them. She did it all the time when she was still in her house – the neighbors, relatives, the UPS guy.”

  Jan returned to the couch quickly, her face blooming with excitement. “Let’s do it now.”

  Warren held up a hand. “No, I’m afraid that’s not going to happen,” he said with mock sternness. “We’re going to need a little quid pro quo here.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “If you want to see more of my childhood pictures, I’m afraid you’re going to have to bring in some of your own.”

  “No, no, no. That’s not a good idea.”

  “Come on! Don’t tell me you’re self-conscious about them. You were probably this supernaturally beautiful child that caused people to run into walls when they saw you.”

  Jan’s eyes grew big and she blushed. Thinking about what he’d just said to her made Warren blush as well. Unfortunately, getting up for more red pepper wasn’t an option, so he was just going to have to play this out.

  “Okay,” she said with an exaggerated tone of concession. “I’ll bring in a couple tomorrow. A couple of very carefully selected pictures.”

  “Then we have a deal.”

  Jan had to get back to work a few minutes later. Before she left, she kissed him on the cheek and thanked him for the lunch. She’d been doing that for a while, but something felt different when their faces touched this time. Her skin felt warmer; he suddenly realized how intimate it felt to have her this close. And as he started to clean up, he couldn’t help but notice the sense of lightness that accompanied his movements.

  As he started to remove the leftover chicken from the skillet, an idea stopped him. Rather than putting the chicken away, he added some water to the pan and turned the power back on. The intense aroma of the food had been comforting and maybe even a little incantatory today. He wasn’t ready to let go of it yet. He had his computer with him and he didn’t need to be anywhere this afternoon. He could do everything he needed to do from here. He’d let the chicken simmer a while longer, casting its distinctive scent throughout the apartment.

  When he finished cleaning everything else, he visited his mother’s room. As had been the case the last time he checked on her, she seemed deeply indented in the bed.

  He kissed the cool skin of her forehead. “Hey, Mom. I have some of my chicken cooking.” The smell of the food had gotten stronger even in the minute he’d been there. “I love that you were thinking of me the first time you made it. Let me know if you want some.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  Bordering on Overpowering

  Joseph kept glancing over at Will as they drove. Since they’d left the playground, he’d been contemplating a scenario so disconnected from his instincts that he couldn’t even think of addressing it aloud. So little of it made sense, and like the majority of his thoughts since he’d awakened without his memory, all of it was hazy. He was still chasing after moments of clarity. Something would sharpen for an instant, but then very quickly become lost in murkiness.

  One notion had continued to grow stronger since they’d watched the toddler in the park taking his first steps: Will was not simply the helpful stranger Joseph had been assuming he was the past five days. They had a very different relationship, one that Joseph couldn’t fully identify and of which even Will might be completely unaware. While Joseph was now convinced of this much, the murkiness made it impossible for him to see it any better than that.

  Joseph didn’t realize he’d been staring at the boy until Will turned to him and said, “What’s up with you? It’s like you’re trying to burn a hole into my head with your eyes.”

  Joseph looked away, setting his sights on the road instead. They’d come to a l
arge commercial district, stopping at traffic lights every thousand or so feet. “I was just admiring your handsome profile,” he said, attempting to be casually jovial. “Is that a problem?”

  “Well, yeah, actually it is. That’s also not what you were doing. You’re thinking about something. What is it?”

  “I was thinking you should change the music. This stuff is awful. Put on that Ari Hest guy again.”

  Will didn’t touch the music, which meant he was-n’t buying this at all. The teen focused on his driving, and for the next ten minutes, neither of them spoke. Then, still not saying a word, Will turned into a strip mall and parked the car.

  “I’m getting hungry,” he said, pulling his keys from the ignition. He removed his seat belt and Joseph did the same, moving to open his door. Before he could get out, though, Will shifted toward him and spoke again.

  “Look, Joseph, we’re partners in this thing. I’m not driving you all over the place because I didn’t feel like finishing a science project in school. I know something’s going on in your head. I’ve seen you do this before. You kinda owe it to me to tell me what it is.”

  Joseph had marveled at the teen’s commitment to this quest before, but this was the first time he’d heard Will say anything about their being “partners.” This jogged his mind a little further – but still not enough to discuss the wild notions that were going through his head.

  “You’re right,” he said. “I am thinking about something and I owe you an explanation. But this isn’t like the woman in the store or the conversation I had with my wife. I think it’s bigger than that, but it’s also much more vague. I can’t talk to you about it until I figure out a way to put it into words.”

  Will seemed satisfied with the explanation, though it sounded like empty evasion to Joseph’s ears. The teen studied Joseph for a few seconds and then turned toward his door and got out of the car.