Stir

by Jessica Fechtor

  Scatter the salt evenly over a dry, well-seasoned 10-inch cast-iron pan. A stainless steel pan will also work. If you’re using a stainless steel pan instead of cast iron, brush the pan lightly with oil before adding the salt. Place the pan over medium-high heat for 3 minutes.

  While the pan heats, dry the fish fillets well with paper towels and lay them flat on a large plate. Brush with olive oil on both sides.

  Place the fish into the hot pan, skin side down. Turn the heat down slightly if the crackle sounds too loud and sputtery. Cover with a lid. If you don’t have a lid that fits your pan, a metal baking sheet will do the job. Cook without moving the fillets for 3 to 5 minutes, until the skin is brown and crisp, and releases easily from the pan. Flip the fillets and cook them uncovered for another 2 to 4 minutes, depending on their thickness. The fish is done when the flesh deep inside is still faintly translucent and the internal temperature reads 125 degrees.

  Serve with freshly ground black pepper and lemon wedges.

  Serves 2.

  CHAPTER 8

  Just in Case

  The summer before my junior year of college, I got a job as a resident adviser on campus so that I could afford to stay in the city (free housing!) and worked at a literary agency down in SoHo during the day. The money I made would have to stretch for course books and food that year, so to cut costs, I’d buy a head of celery and a jar of peanut butter and eat it for as many meals as I could stomach. Totally worth it for a summer on my own in New York.

  On Sunday mornings, I’d strap on my Rollerblades and take off. I’d weave through street fairs, get lost in Central Park, loop around the reservoir, and pop out on the East Side. I’d stop at Fairway on my way back up to school and treat myself to a single soft-ripe peach and a couple of firmer ones for later in the week. In the evenings, I’d work on musical arrangements for the coming year. I was taking over as music director of my choir. The incoming business director was Eli.

  He was in the city that summer, too, living down on Mercer Street and working as a software engineer, but for whatever reason, we didn’t hang out, not once. Until one night in late August, when he met me outside my dorm to discuss choir stuff. He was sitting on the stone banister of the entryway, reading a section of the paper as I approached, and hopped down to give me a quick hug. Then he swung himself back up there, skinny legs dangling, folded the paper under his arm, and we talked.

  We were pumped. He had big plans: a new website, more gigs than ever, an international tour, an album. As for me, I wanted to really push that year, get us sounding better than ever. I told him about the new music arrangements I was working on, and what I had in mind for auditions. This thing mattered to us a lot. We wanted to kill it. We were total psycho choir dorks—and we thought that was awesome. It was an amazing feeling, our mutual intensity, our desire to make something great. I climbed the stairs to my room later that night, surprisingly giddy. All I could think was, This is going to be so good.

  It was. Eli had said right off the bat that it was his job to think of everything that needed thinking of so that I could focus on the music. He responded to e-mails, booked performance spaces, organized travel to and from gigs, and arranged for hotel rooms and home stays. We did a lot of weekends away, performing and doing music workshops with school kids, and I admired the warm, professional way he communicated with our hosts. He was so competent. So smart. I loved how much he cared. He did things exactly as I would have hoped to do them had I been running the entire show myself. No, scratch that. He did them better. Whatever I said—whatever I didn’t say—Eli knew exactly what I meant, and vice versa. Someone in the group once told us that we operated like two sides of a single brain. It was true.

  For two years we led the group, working hard to make music and put it out into the world, signing e-mails to each other, “your partner in crime.” We’d sit next to each other on the bus rides to gigs, reviewing itineraries and set lists, then again on the way home, talking late into the night while the others dozed. “You know,” his girlfriend Rebecca once said to me, “he thinks you’re amazing. Beautiful, smart, fun. I mean, it’s totally platonic. You never need to worry about things getting weird.” I know what you’re thinking. She was his girlfriend. Of course she’d say that. But Rebecca, she’s kind of an oracle. Rebecca knows. I thought Eli was nuts when he broke things off with her.

  By April of senior year, Eli had been single for a while. Things with my relationship were, well, what they’d always been. Justin felt certain that I was “it.” I felt certain only that he was terrific, and after three and a half years together, it was beginning to dawn on me that terrific was maybe not enough. He was shipping off to medical school in the fall, and I was moving to England for graduate school, so I said those famous last words: “Let’s take a break.” And, you know, stay in touch. Visit each other on our respective continents, date some other people, see where things stand in a year.

  He asked if we could carry on for the remaining few weeks of school as though we were entirely together, do all that fun senior stuff as the couple we’d always been, and I didn’t see any harm, so no one knew. Except for my roommate Rachel, who also happened to sing in our choir. I’d had to tell someone.

  When I explained about the sort-of split, she got quiet. She didn’t mean to complicate things, she said, but had I ever thought about Eli? Was there maybe something there? I laughed until I realized she was serious. “I think he’s in love with you,” she said. Eli had just accepted a job in Seattle, and that’s a very long way from England, Rachel pointed out. She felt she had to say something. Just in case.

  Just in case what? No, I hadn’t thought of it; no, there was nothing there; and no, please no, he couldn’t be in love with me. Things would get complicated, and strained, and eventually, telling ourselves it was for the best, we’d lose touch. This was not okay. If Eli felt as Rachel suspected, we’d have to talk about it. That, or our friendship would self-destruct. I just had to get him to say it out loud. Then we could fix it.

  It was a horrible plan. Not to mention cruel. Lure a friend into confessing his love for you, a friend who seems to be doing just fine keeping quiet about it, with the express purpose of rejecting him on the spot? And then what? Somehow convince him that whatever he thinks he feels, he doesn’t? Yep, horrible. But never mind. Rachel was wrong. I’d confirm with Eli what I already knew—we were buds!—and we’d have a good laugh. That was what was going to happen.

  I asked Eli to meet me for dinner that night at Café Pertutti on Broadway. He’d been working on a new photo project and sketched out the idea for me on a napkin while we waited for our pasta. He sucked down his water, chomped on the ice. And then slowly, casually, I started in on my search and destroy. I waited for moments when I could steer the conversation toward talk of our friendship. I tossed out line after line, setting him up to make a move. He didn’t bite.

  Finally, after we’d asked for the check, I told him about the thing Rebecca had said way back when, how he and I would never be more than friends. He closed his eyes for a moment, and I thought his expression half crumpled, but no, I must have imagined it, because then he looked at me straight-on and said, “Yes. That’s right.”

  Okay, then. It was settled. We were just good friends, exactly as I suspected. Nothing would change. Perfect. A win.

  Then why wasn’t I relieved?

  I loved him. I’d never once considered it, but there it was. I felt insane. I felt sure. I felt devastated that he didn’t feel it, too, but only for a moment, because I was suddenly quite certain that he did. We paid the bill. I mumbled something about needing to pick up some sheet music from his room, and we started walking.

  “Who do you think is braver?” I asked, as we approached his apartment. His cheeks flushed, and I knew he understood what I’d been asking all night long. After a pause, he said, “Maybe. With different timing, if there were no Justin, maybe there might have been
something between us.”

  “And what if I told you that Justin and I are no longer together?” I spoke carefully. We were sitting on his front stoop by now. He took off his glasses and folded them in his hand. I watched him close his eyes, squeeze the bridge of his nose, and flush redder still. It was a minute or two before he spoke.

  “Then I’d say I want to do my life with you,” he said.

  And there it was, the relief I’d been hoping for, just in a different package from the one I’d expected.

  I swallowed. “Me, too.”

  Everything I’ve just said about that night, I don’t believe any of it. I don’t believe in feelings that sweep you away in a flash, or love without doubt, or destiny. We humans have agency. We think, and we decide, and we act. Yet that night—and I know this sounds crazy—it felt as though we had nothing to do with it. Our conversation on the steps, my words, his, they seemed to happen to us. It was as though we’d been setting up invisible dominoes for years without realizing it. The slightest tap, and here we were.

  We stumbled around campus wide-eyed, smiling. He walked me home. The next morning, I found an e-mail from him with a single line:

  “1, 2, 3, GO . . .”

  And we went.

  Kale and Pomegranate Salad

  My mom still pokes fun at me for a phone call she received one night that week, after Eli and I made a salad together for dinner. “Mom,” I said, “he cut the mushrooms just right.” I had found a guy who shared my salad aesthetic, and while I admit that salad compatibility does not necessarily correlate with romantic compatibility, there is something to be said for standing at the counter together, rinsing, drying, slicing, talking about whatever, and ending up with a big bowl of salad that suits you both to a T.

  Here’s a salad we make as often as we can each fall while pomegranates are in season. The dressing gets its zing from pomegranate molasses, something I first tried at a Seattle restaurant called Sitka and Spruce, where they drizzle the sweet-tart syrup over yogurt and sautéed dates. The dish was genius, and I was hooked. I bought a bottle of pomegranate molasses when I got home—you can find it at Middle Eastern markets and a lot of mainstream grocery stores—and I’ve kept some on hand ever since. I brush it with oil over carrots and beets before roasting, add it by the tablespoon to glasses of sparkling water, spoon it over hot oatmeal, swirl it into yogurt, and whisk it into dressings like the one here.

  I like my dressing on the sharp side, especially in a salad with such strong, sturdy ingredients. If you want to tone it down, add more olive oil by the teaspoon, whisking and tasting between each addition, until the balance is right for you.

  One more quick note: This salad calls for dinosaur kale, the flat, dark green kind also known as lacinato or Tuscan kale. I prefer it in its raw form over curly kale, which can be tougher and harder to chew.

  For the salad:

  12 leaves dinosaur kale, stripped of their stems and thinly sliced

  ½ head of radicchio, thinly sliced

  4 radishes, thinly sliced

  Seeds from half a large pomegranate (about ½ cup)

  A handful or two of roasted and salted pistachios, shelled

  For the dressing:

  5 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil (plus more to taste; see headnote)

  2 tablespoons red wine vinegar

  1 tablespoon pomegranate molasses

  ½ teaspoon Dijon mustard

  Put all the salad ingredients in a large bowl. Shake or whisk together the dressing ingredients in a jar or mixing bowl. Depending on how heavily dressed you like your salad, you may end up with more dressing than you need. Start with half, toss, taste, then add more, as needed.

  Serves 4.

  CHAPTER 9

  A Home Run

  The morning of the surgery, I made Eli promise he would leave me. It was the most important thing I could think of to say in those strange few minutes alone before Patty wheeled me down. I mean, what the hell are you supposed to say, anyway? The real message, the only message, of course, is “I love you.” That’s all. But the weight of that moment contorts the words, makes them sound too much like “good-bye.”

  There was something more pressing I needed Eli to hear.

  “After the surgery . . .” I began, the thought of what I was about to say tightening around my throat. “If I . . .”

  “Jess, Jess—” Eli tried to cut me off.

  “No, listen to me. If I wake up not me, you have to go.”

  I was terrified. Not of being dead, though I preferred very much not to be. The thought of death, of missing out on my life and my people, made me sad, not afraid. What I feared was something worse: being trapped in my body, being trapped outside of my own right mind, Eli feeling he must stand by me and ending up trapped as well.

  “If I wake up not myself, you cannot stay.”

  “It’s okay,” he soothed. “Shhh . . .” But I knew he was with me on this. I knew he would be okay. I placed my forearms on his shoulders, locked my fingers behind the back of his neck, and as I pulled his face close, a strange mix of anguish and elation surged through me. “I love you.” I was smiling and crying. “I mean it. I love you, El.” That part was safe. Nothing could touch it.

  Eli left the room the way he always does, opening the door just enough to slide out sideways. Patty put her hand on my back.

  “You’re going to be fine.”

  • • •

  I was still unconscious when Dr. Tranmer told my family that all was well. He and his team had done just as they’d planned, sawing a several-inch hole in my skull above my left eye, locating the aneurysm, and sealing it off with a tiny clothespin of a clip like the one he’d handed me in my room. “A home run,” he called it. There were hugs and high-fives all around.

  • • •

  When you’re coming out of general anesthesia, no one takes what you have to say particularly seriously. Credibility is at an all-time low when you’ve been out cold for ten hours, during which time surgeons have been poking around in your brain. But something was wrong, and no one knew it yet but me.

  I had opened my eyes, at least I thought I had, but the world to the left of my nose remained black. I must be bandaged up, I thought. Gauze and tape must be blocking the light. I reached through the blackness for my left eye and felt the tickle of my lashes against my finger. I blinked. I felt it again. There was no bandage, only darkness.

  “I can’t see out of my left eye.” I said it as loudly and clearly as I could to no one in particular. A nurse came over, and I said it again. I don’t know if she didn’t believe me or if she didn’t understand me. Either way, she didn’t seem terribly concerned. There were other people somewhere in the recovery room; I could hear them. I tried to sit up. “Please. Hello? My left eye. I can’t see.”

  Patty met me back in my room. “You’re okay, Jess,” she said. “This happens sometimes. It can be hard to see when you’re first waking up.” She was as calm and kind as ever, and I wanted to trust her, but my vision in that eye wasn’t blurry or dim. It was gone.

  “No, Patty. Really. Something’s wrong. I can’t see.” She believed me.

  No one knows exactly what happened, whether my skull snapped in an awkward direction when Dr. Tranmer first went in or if, when he sealed me back up and replaced the piece of bone, it sank a little too snugly into position. What we do know is that my left optic nerve was somehow “compressed,” a word that always reminds me of one of those handheld citrus presses. I’ve seen scans of my compressed optic nerve, and photographs of healthy ones in medical books, but I still have trouble picturing what a three-dimensional optic nerve looks like in actual space. The best I can figure is something like a peeled grape. In my case, a peeled grape now squashed between the nested cups of a citrus press.

  Unlike other nerves in the human body, the optic nerve rarely heals. When it does, recove
ry is far from complete, but surgery to decompress the nerve can increase the chance that at least some vision will return. And so, after only an hour of consciousness, maybe two, I was back on the operating table. It would be impossible to know right away if the decompression surgery had had an effect. Any improvement would happen gradually, over months. At least this time I awoke without panic. Whatever could be done had been done.

  My parents were standing over me.

  “Levi,” I said, “Levi.” That wasn’t right. That wasn’t his name.

  My father leaned in. “What, honey?”

  I hesitated. “Eli.” That was it.

  “He was with you when you woke up. You don’t remember,” my dad explained. “He’s in the waiting room with his parents. I’ll get him.”

  I breathed in, acutely aware that I could, and when I exhaled, I felt a rush of gladness, as though a dam had broken. My own conscious mind surged out from wherever it had been, filled me to the brim. I could hear my thoughts again. That familiar internal voice, the one that chirps away at each of us, narrating our every move, I could hear it. It was me. I was me. There would be test upon test later on designed to uncover any cognitive or neurological deficits, tests that would confirm what I already knew right then: In all the ways that mattered, I was fine.

  “You did great, babe.” Eli was with me now. The anesthesia was wearing off. I could feel the mounting discomfort as the swelling set in and my body began the painful process of knitting itself back together. My father says that for the next twenty-four hours, I whispered only two words, “water” (to drink) and “ice” (for my head). I opened my eyes at one point to find him sitting beside me, on my right side, where people sat now so that I’d be able to see them without turning my head. My dad sat very still, just looking at me. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “I wish I’d had you sooner so I could know you for longer.”