Stir

by Jessica Fechtor

  Preheat the oven to 475 degrees.

  Place a 10-inch cast-iron or stainless steel skillet over medium heat for 4 minutes. Set the chicken breast-side up in the pan. You should hear it sizzle. Transfer the pan to the oven. If the skin doesn’t begin browning within 20 minutes, raise the temperature to 500 degrees until it does. If, on the other hand, the skin begins to blacken or smoke (blistering is fine and welcome), lower the temperature to 450 degrees.

  After about 30 minutes, turn the bird over and roast for another 15 to 20 minutes, then flip one last time and roast breast-side up for another 5 to 10 minutes to recrisp the skin. The chicken is done when a thermometer inserted into the hip meat (between the leg and the breast) reads 165 degrees. Transfer the bird to a large plate or carving board, and let rest for 15 minutes before cutting it into pieces.

  Serves 3 to 4.

  CHAPTER 18

  A Certain Kind of Best

  I’d been promoted. For weeks I’d been a professional sick person. Now I was a professional recovering person. In some ways, it was a lateral move. I still slept a lot, stayed mostly indoors, and ate food that other people prepared, but I appreciated the new title. Plus, there were perks. My own bed, for example, and a dresser full of clothes.

  Before I was discharged from the hospital, a nurse, or maybe a social worker, had come to talk to me about this mysterious thing called recovery. Even after rehab, she explained, there would be a ways to go.

  “Each day, you’ll be able to do one thing, and it will totally wipe you out. That might be the case for a while.”

  “What do you mean by ‘one thing’?” I wanted to know. I envisioned a trip to the grocery store or baking a cake.

  “That’s hard to say,” she said. “It might mean a phone call with a friend. A shower.”

  Not possible, I thought. But she was right. In fact, forget a shower, an event which to me includes washing my face, scrubbing my body, shampooing and conditioning my hair, plus, because I do some of my best thinking in there, a few minutes of standing around. A shower means all of these things. When I first got home, though, I’d get in and have to choose. I could wash my hair or my body, not both, before exhaustion sneaked up and kicked me behind the knees. I’d call through the wide-open bathroom door to Eli, who’d wrap me in a towel and help me to the bed, where I’d sit with my heart pounding, sipping cranberry juice until the waves of nausea passed. Then I’d need a nap. This “one thing” thing was no joke. Apparently a healing brain takes its sweet time. A physical therapist came a couple of times my first week home and we practiced climbing stairs. That counted as a thing and a half, at least, as did a visit from a friend.

  If I was feeling physically better each day, I couldn’t tell. I was wiped out. Sometimes my body ached, like at the beginning of a flu. That was new. No wonder, though, I figured. Recovery was hard work.

  “You know what?” I said to Eli one morning. “It’s okay that this happened to me.”

  “Is that so?” he said.

  What I meant was that I felt—I was suddenly quite sure—that I could handle this. That my life could handle it. An energizing gratitude crept into my bones.

  • • •

  “Does my face look swollen to you?” I asked Eli. I was standing in front of the mirror in our bedroom.

  “Does your face look swollen?” Eli has a way of repeating a question before he responds.

  “I asked you first,” I said. “I mean, more swollen. Differently swollen.”

  He looked at me. “Nope.”

  I wasn’t so sure. I’d been home for a week, and I thought my left eye looked strangely, I don’t know, buglike. Only sometimes, though. On and off. A lot of the time my eye looked normal. Or maybe all of the time it looked normal, and I was imagining things. Probably.

  “You can call Dr. Tranmer if you’re concerned.” Eli obviously wasn’t.

  “Yeah, okay. Maybe.”

  Before I had a chance to, Dr. Tranmer called me to check in. I mentioned the bulging eye and the body aches that came and went.

  “A little bit of swelling is still normal this far out,” he assured me. “But otherwise you should be feeling pretty darn great.”

  I wasn’t.

  • • •

  My father arrived from Ohio late that afternoon with my youngest sister, Anna. Half sister, technically, but we’ve never emphasized the half. I have a half brother, too, named Caleb. My stepmom, Amy, is their mom and we share a dad. My younger sister, Kasey, and I share a mom and a dad. In descending birth order it’s me, Kasey, Caleb, and Anna, and now you know the whole family.

  Anyway, Anna. She was fourteen then, and through the hospital system she’d sent me e-mails bursting with exclamation points and all the latest very important news about her classes and the JV tennis team. “I know that you have been hearing nothing but stuff about your brain, so I’m gonna try to keep it as non-brainy as possible,” she wrote, which was excellent. She hadn’t seen me yet.

  I opened the front door myself when they arrived. I was wearing the new clothes my mother had picked up for me in Burlington—jeans one size down that actually fit and a short-sleeved, dark green turtleneck with three buttons along the collar and pleats across the chest. I caught a glimpse of Anna’s wide eyes and nervous smile in the doorway, then watched relief register and her face relax. Good, I thought, I must look okay.

  Anna, Eli, and I sat down on the green sofa and my dad placed a cardboard box on the coffee table in front of us.

  “Mom made you these,” Anna said as I folded open the top flaps. Chocolate chip cookies. Eli took one bite and said, “Toll House.” He’d called it right: the recipe from the back of the yellow chocolate chip bag. Toll House cookies are chewy and flat, faintly rippled like unsmoothed bedsheets, with a sugary crumb and those unmistakable Toll House “morsels.” I recognized them, too. They were the only chocolate chip cookies I had ever baked. That’s because they were, in my mind, a certain kind of best. Not “best” as in the best in the world, or even the best I’d ever eaten, but “best” in the sense that I’d choose them, at least some of the time, over ones that actually are. They were “best” because they meant something to me.

  I made Toll House cookies for the first time when I was eleven years old, with Amy. My sister Kasey and I had met Amy a couple of years earlier, in 1989, at a Dairy Queen in Cleveland. (It is a wise man who stages his daughters’ initial encounter with his soon-to-be fiancée over ice cream.) She wore silver howling-at-the-moon coyote earrings and ordered a Blizzard. I liked her, which was good, because in 1991, she married my dad.

  They moved into an old house in Cleveland Heights, and that was where the cookie making began. Amy had a wide-mouthed yellow plastic pitcher, and we’d mix the dough in there by hand with a wooden spoon. I’d never used a wooden spoon before. My mother called them unsanitary, but I thought it was beautiful, and soft and warm, besides. Cookie making became kind of our thing, Amy’s and mine. I liked that we had a thing.

  I had baked with my own mother as a kid, but this was something new. My mother and I made sugar cookies, cupcakes, and brownies galore mainly as projects, fun things to do together that might have been replaced by any number of other fun things. Baking was special because it wasn’t part of our everyday. When we pulled out the mixing bowl and electric beaters, it was an occasion. With Amy, it was different. She baked all the time, whether I was around or not. When we baked together, she was sharing with me this thing that she did and loved. She was letting me in, and I her. We were becoming a family.

  At some point that weekend it was just Anna and me, and I asked her how things were at home. She told me how nuts it had been with Dad and her mom flying back and forth, how they were so annoying, always talking about me and the surgery, so stressed out, crying.

  “They made such a big deal out of it,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I mean, it’s not like you were going t
o die or anything.”

  I appreciated the vote of confidence.

  Whole Wheat Chocolate Chip Cookies

  While I will never turn down a Toll House cookie, a new chocolate chip cookie came into my life a few years back that instantly became my go-to. The cookie’s defining feature is that it’s made exclusively with whole wheat flour. That sounds annoyingly virtuous for a chocolate chip cookie, but the whole wheat’s not there to be healthy. It’s there because it tastes good. When I first discovered these cookies, I baked them for everyone I knew. My friends all had a guess about what was different in these cookies, but very few called out the whole wheat flour. They asked instead if I’d put ground walnuts in there, or oats, or an earthy spice of some kind. One person insisted I’d browned the butter. Nope. It was just the whole wheat talking.

  These cookies bake up fat, with a crisp, crustlike exterior. On the inside, they’re soft, even borderline flakey. The genius behind them is Kim Boyce, who published the recipe in her cookbook, Good to the Grain. Her specialty is taking whole grains, figuring out their particular powers of flavor and texture, and harnessing them in the service of baked goods that are astoundingly delicious. (If you ever visit her Bakeshop in Portland, Oregon, please have one of everything for me.)

  The only thing better than a Kim Boyce chocolate chip cookie is a Kim Boyce chocolate chip cookie made from dough that’s been aged for a day or two. I like to prepare the dough, scoop it into individual cookies, and store them in the fridge on a baking sheet wrapped in plastic. Then, when the mood strikes, I bake them off, a cookie or two at a time.

  3 cups (340 grams) whole wheat flour

  1½ teaspoons baking powder

  1 teaspoon baking soda

  1 teaspoon fine sea salt

  1 cup (2 sticks; 226 grams) unsalted butter, softened to cool room temperature and cut into ½-inch pieces

  1 cup (200 grams) dark brown sugar

  1 cup (200 grams) granulated sugar

  2 large eggs

  2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract

  8 ounces (227 grams) bittersweet or semisweet chocolate (I use something in the 62–72 percent range), roughly chopped into ¼- and ½-inch pieces

  Sea salt flakes, like Maldon

  Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

  Whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and fine sea salt in a large bowl. Put the butter and sugars in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, and mix on low speed until just blended. Scrape down the sides of the bowl with a spatula. Add the eggs one at a time, mixing well after each addition. Mix in the vanilla.

  Add the flour mixture to the bowl, and blend on the lowest speed until the flour is just barely incorporated. Add the chopped chocolate, and mix with a rubber spatula. If there are any small pockets of flour lurking in the dough, rub them in with the spatula or your hands. (Better to leave off using the mixer at this point so that you don’t overwork the dough.)

  Scoop the dough, 3 level tablespoons per cookie, onto the prepared baking sheet. I use a 1½-tablespoon cookie scoop and pile one level scoop on top of another. You can crowd the mounds of dough shoulder to shoulder on the single sheet so that they won’t take up too much room in the fridge. (You’ll move the cookies to a separate sheet when you’re ready to bake them.) Wrap the dough in plastic and chill for 24 to 48 hours.

  When you’re ready to bake, heat the oven to 350 degrees and line another baking sheet with parchment paper. Place 6 to 8 mounds of prescooped dough onto the prepared pan, leaving about 3 inches between each cookie. Press a few sea salt flakes into the top of each mound.

  Bake for 16 to 20 minutes, rotating the sheet halfway through, until nicely brown but still soft. Slide the parchment paper with the cookies onto a rack and cool completely. Repeat with the remaining dough, making sure to begin with a room temperature baking sheet.

  Makes about 20 cookies.

  CHAPTER 19

  Medium Dreadful

  That Sunday, in the last hours of my dad and Anna’s visit, a full-fledged fever came on and stayed. We called Dr. Tranmer, who said it sounded like I’d picked up a bug, and to feel better soon. I got into bed.

  My head throbbed and the coming-and-going swelling thing I thought I’d noticed became the coming-and-going swelling thing I noticed for sure. Eli saw it now, too, but perhaps this was just what recovery looked like a few weeks out from brain surgery?

  The next morning I felt no worse, and maybe even a little better. My fever returned to a low-grade something or other that was questionably a fever at all. Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, was beginning that night. Friends of ours knocked on our door to deliver a holiday meal.

  Then things got bad fast. My fever spiked to 104 and wouldn’t come down, and the swelling was no longer going. Instead, it was spreading; it was in my forehead and temple now, too. Eli folded me into the car with an ice pack for my head and we drove to the ER.

  They brought me back right away, which didn’t make me nervous but should have, and paged a neurosurgery resident. That got my attention.

  “Why?” I asked Eli. “Why?” I was scared. “I’m afraid they’re going to cut into my head again.”

  “That’s not going to happen,” he said. I knew it was improbable. I’d said my fear out loud in part not because I believed it could happen, but to make sure it didn’t. Magical thinking: To say it was to ward it off.

  The next hours and days get swimmy in my mind. I know that there was an MRI, and that soon after, I was admitted. My fever stayed high. My head continued to swell. None of the doctors knew for sure what was happening to me, but from what I understood it was one of two things: a cerebral spinal fluid leak or an infection. There was also a third option: both. A neurosurgery resident told me that they would operate, then a few hours later said that they wouldn’t and disappeared.

  Next came a trip to a neuro-ophthalmologist in the building next door. Someone carted me over in a wheelchair in my johnny with a blanket around my shoulders and one across my lap. I hadn’t been allowed to eat or drink since I’d been admitted—was surgery a possibility still?—so I was hooked up to an IV. It rattled along beside me. The office was in the hospital, but regular people went there, fully clothed ones who’d walked or driven there alone. I sat in the waiting room right along with them while they read their magazines and tried not to look. I was too sick to care if they did.

  “Oh no,” the doctor said when he saw me. By now my face was contorted from the swelling. My left eye bulged and my temple was a giant pillow of a thing, yanking my cheek up with it; my skin stretched unnaturally across my forehead, a hard, protruding ridge. I was flushed and sweating from fever, and my Frankenstein scar peeked out from beneath my matted hair. I’m not sure what this doctor was looking for, but he must not have found it, because he sent me back to my room and I never saw him again.

  I was doing that thing now that I’d practiced in Burlington when the pain had been at its worst. I pictured it not inside me, but right alongside, and shut myself down to increase the space between us. Sometime in the night, I had to use the bathroom. I pressed the red call button, as I’d been instructed, and an unsmiling nurse came to help me along. When I was through, I realized my gown was wet.

  “It must have dropped into the toilet,” I told her.

  “It will dry,” she said.

  I got back into bed.

  Morning again. A test. I lay on a table and someone strapped my ankles down. Slowly, the table tilted back, farther, farther, until I was hanging upside down. The pain and the pressure were too much and a roar, half scream, half sob, came barreling out of me. The doctors lowered me down and into the waiting scanner so they could snap their shot right away. “Almost there, almost there, almost there . . . Done,” I heard one of them say. I strained to lift my head up from the table and green vomit shot out of my mouth. Then I lay there, sobbing
and heaving, until someone wheeled me away.

  An infection? A leak? They still didn’t know. But yes, they would operate. They’d slice back in along my old incision, peel my forehead down once more, suck some fat from my belly to plug up the hole if there was one, and deal with the infection if that was what they found.

  I didn’t care. I just wanted them to fix it.

  • • •

  Waking up from surgery is rapture. Nurses and doctors will tell you that you won’t remember it. Some people must not, but I always do. I love the first breath, how it feels spiked with extra oxygen sneaked into the atmosphere when no one was looking, like rum in the punch bowl at a high school dance. Along with it comes the awareness that I’m alive and not dead, then the druggy realization that I have arms and legs and a body and there is no pain. I feel cured. A pleasant heaviness pins me to the gurney, and at the same time I’m so light, I think I might float away. Through the haze of anesthesia, the fluorescent bulbs are beautiful, the way they glow and light up the hospital corridor. I feel warm and safe, and I am only glad.

  As far as I was concerned, the worst thing had happened—another surgery—and I had made it through. It, whatever “it” was, was over. Someone wheeled me from the recovery bay to my room and I waited for Eli to be allowed in so he could confirm what I already knew: that all was well and we were done and I’d be going home soon.

  But something was off. I could tell when Eli walked in. He sat down on the bed and put his hand on my leg. Why did he look so sad?

  “Jess . . .” he started. It was a voice I’d only ever heard once, five years earlier, when he’d called me from the other side of the world to tell me my grandmother had died. Was that what was going on? Was I dying? They must have found something when they went in. I studied his stricken face and waited for him to go on.