From the Kitchen of Half Truth

by Maria Goodin

  “It’s for your mother,” he interrupts. “I’ve been out gathering herbs from the garden. Everything’s so overgrown, though, that it took forever to find what I wanted.”

  I peer suspiciously at the boiling yellow liquid in the saucepan. “What on earth is that?” I ask, thinking there is no way I am letting my mother drink some gypsy concoction full of leaves and twigs.

  “Mint to ease her headache, marjoram and thyme to give her strength, and lemon balm to help her relax.”

  I sniff it doubtfully.

  “And before you say anything,” he adds, “no, this recipe has not been scientifically proven, and no, I don’t have a PhD in the medicinal properties of plants.”

  “I wasn’t about to ask you either of those things,” I say defensively, wondering how he read my mind.

  He pours the steaming liquid from the saucepan into a cup.

  “You do know what you’re doing, though, don’t you?” I ask cautiously. “It won’t hurt her, will it?”

  He turns to me, his face serious with no trace of his usual cheeky smile. “Why don’t you just stick to your science and leave me to mine?”

  And before I even have a chance to argue with him, he has picked up the cup and walked out of the kitchen.

  ***

  When I was little and I’d done something wrong, I’d go to the garden and pick my mother a bunch of flowers. I’d leave them on her bedside table in a jam jar, and not another word would be said about it. The awkward silence would be broken, the crime and punishment forgotten. The flowers I take her this evening, though, are not only to say sorry for snapping at her; they are for so many other things that I can’t find the words to say.

  Ewan is sitting on the chair by her bed in grubby frayed jeans and an old red T-shirt that bears the slogan “Max Out.” I have no idea what it’s supposed to mean. Outside, the light is fading, casting a serene yellow glow into the bedroom. He has opened the window a little bit, just the way my mother likes it, and a cool breeze is blowing a ripple through the net curtain. I hover by the doorway, unseen by them both, and listen. Ewan is telling her a story, his voice deep and soothing.

  “In the beginning there was only blackness, and because nobody could see anything, everybody kept bumping into each other. So they said, ‘What this world needs is some light.’ Fox said that he knew some people on the other side of the world who had plenty of light, but they were too greedy to share it with anyone else.

  “‘I’ll go and steal it and hide it under my bushy tail,’ said Possum.

  “So Possum trekked to the other side of the world, and there he found the sun hanging in a tree. He picked out a tiny piece of light and hid it in his tail, but the light was hot and burned all the fur off, revealing him as a thief.

  “‘Let me try,’ said Buzzard. ‘I’ll carry the light home on my head.’

  “So Buzzard flew to the other side of the world, grabbed the sun with his claws, and put it on his head. But it was so hot that it burned all the feathers off the top of his head and he dropped it.

  “Grandmother Spider, thinking both Possum and Buzzard were useless, said, ‘Get out of my way and let me try.’

  “She made a pot out of clay and spun a web reaching right across to the other side of the world. She was so tiny that nobody noticed her coming, and quick as a flash she snatched up the sun, put it in her pot, and scurried back home. Now her side of the world finally had light, and there was a huge party to celebrate. The Cherokee Indians say that this little spider brought them not only the sun, but also the art of making pottery.”

  I hear my mother laughing quietly.

  “What a wonderful story!” she says, her voice sounding weak but full of enthusiasm. “I will never look at a little spider in the same way again!”

  I enter cautiously.

  “Oh, hello, darling.”

  My mother’s auburn hair is splayed out across her pillow, and her cheeks are tinged with pink. Her eyes look brighter than they have for a while.

  “How are you feeling?” I ask.

  “I feel rather good, actually,” she says with a smile. “My headache’s completely gone.”

  I spy the empty cup on the bedside table. The little bunch of flowers I am clutching in my hand suddenly seems rather pointless in comparison to Ewan’s healing tea. I stand awkwardly, feeling useless.

  “Ewan’s been telling me some wonderful stories,” says my mother, quickly filling the silence.

  I smile meekly at Ewan, a peace offering, but he looks down at his feet, wriggling his toes in his threadbare green socks. My mother looks from me to Ewan and back again, trying to gauge the situation.

  “I should go,” he says. He stands and hoists up the waistband of his jeans.

  My mother smiles up at him. “Thank you for the tea.”

  He nods. “No problem. I’ll leave the garden this week, give you some peace and quiet. I’ll come back next Wednesday if you like.”

  “Wonderful. Thank you.”

  He passes close to me at the foot of the bed but doesn’t look me in the eye.

  “I think this belongs to you,” he says quietly as he passes, holding out his clenched fist. He pushes something against my palm: the twenty-pound note I threw at him earlier.

  “Keep it,” he says, walking out of the room. “I don’t want it.”

  I feel tears of shame welling in my eyes. How could I have been so rude as to throw money at him? Who am I to treat him as if he is beneath me? What on earth is the matter with me?

  I swallow hard, listening to his steps disappearing down the staircase.

  “These are for you,” I say quickly, pushing the small bouquet of flowers into my mother’s hand, trying to prevent the tears from coming. For one horrible second I have an image of her handing them back to me. “Keep them,” I imagine her saying, “I don’t want them.” I’m sure it would be no more than I deserve.

  Instead, she touches my hand and smiles. “Thank you, sweetheart.”

  ***

  “Are you in love with Mark?” my mother asks me.

  It’s late now and I have drawn the curtains, switching on the little lamp that sheds a reddish glow over the room. I am sitting in a ball on the end of my mother’s bed, my feet entwined with hers underneath the covers. We have been chatting for almost an hour, discussing barometers and cheese and cats and glassblowing. We can talk for hours like this, my mother and I.

  “I think I am certainly learning to love Mark,” I say earnestly. “I respect him. He’s kind to me. We get on well. We never argue. He’s very interesting and intelligent and handsome.”

  My mother looks at me curiously, as if she asked me the capital of Spain and I told her it was Bermuda. I know this isn’t the answer she wants, but life is no fairy tale.

  “I don’t believe in falling in love,” I tell her. “Not in the fireworks and stars-in-your-eyes kind of way, in any case. It’s just not realistic.”

  She plays with a piece of her auburn hair, twisting it lazily around her finger, and gazes up at the ceiling from her pillow.

  “I saw stars in your father’s eyes the evening we met,” she says, “thousands of them, twinkling away. At first I wondered where they all came from, but when I looked up at the night sky—”

  “—it was empty,” I interrupt. “I know, you’ve told me a hundred times.”

  “I could hear his heart beating from three feet away, pounding like a kettle drum. And the moment he kissed me a bolt of lightning shot across the sky, leaving crackling electricity in its wake. A nightingale burst into song, and a glittering cloud of stardust engulfed us both. He tasted of cinnamon and strawberries, the most delicious taste you can imagine. And afterward, when I licked my lips, I found they were—”

  “—covered in sugar, I know.”

  “They call it falling in love because that’s just wha
t happens, you know; you fall slowly for a long, long way. I started falling the moment your father held me in his arms, and I carried on falling for days. I thought I’d never feel the ground beneath my feet again. You feel weightless and free, like you’re sailing through the sky, but it’s also frightening because you don’t know when it will end.”

  Her eyes are vacant, her voice dreamy. I have heard these stories so many times before, and every time my head fills with questions. In a bid to make the facts fit, I want to stop her and ask about dates, times, and places. I want to point out all the inconsistencies. And yet, for some reason, I never do. Instead, I hug my legs to my body and lay my head on my knees, listening to her talk. I see my parents’ first evening together just as my mother describes it: the full moon shining overhead, a nightingale singing in the trees, the scent of apple blossom and ripe cherries lingering in the air.

  “At night, I used to stand just there,” she says, pointing at the window, “and wait for him to appear on the lawn below. If the breeze was blowing in the right direction, his scent reached me long before he did: honey and cinnamon, sugar and vanilla, toasted almonds, and warm spiced wine. I would run downstairs and sneak out the back door as my parents slept. He would take my hand, leading me into the fields at the end of the garden, where we would lie among the wheat, feeding each other Turkish delight.”

  She gazes at the narrow sliver of white moonlight that is piercing through the curtains.

  “The day he returned to Paris, I cried tears as bitter as the juice of any lemon. I longed for his return, and yet I knew he had died before they even told me. Everything had already lost its taste, you see. I couldn’t tell sweet from bitter, salty from sour. My taste buds never tingled, and my mouth never watered. That’s when I knew he was gone.”

  She turns to me. “That’s what falling in love is like, and one day it will happen to you.”

  I try to imagine this feeling of weightlessness, of being outside of yourself, of seeing stars where there shouldn’t be any. But that’s just not how I’ve found meeting the man of my dreams to be.

  “When I first saw Mark,” I tell her, “he was giving a talk on developments in cryogenic technologies. I’d stumbled into the wrong lecture, of course, but by the time I realized it, I was already hooked. He spoke with such absolute confidence and conviction, such clarity and understanding. Here he was talking about something so complex and potentially confusing, and yet he made it sound like it was the simplest thing in the world. He has this ability to make everything sound manageable, reducing it down to categories and rules and facts. Above all, I thought, here is someone who understands the way the world works.”

  I lean my head back against the wall and study the shadows on the ceiling. “With Mark, it’s not like falling; it’s the opposite, in fact, like being picked up and set firmly back down on the ground. Everything is suddenly clear. Every why has a reason, and every mystery has an answer. It’s like being found when you’re lost or given the solution to a puzzle that has baffled you for ages. The earth doesn’t spin; it stops spinning.”

  I look at my mother, who is watching me intently, slightly sadly.

  “Maybe falling in love can be like that, too,” I say.

  ***

  Later, while my mother sleeps upstairs, I call Mark to tell him about my mother’s collapse.

  “The doctor agreed it was probably just too much sun. Although I’m starting to think he’ll agree with anything she says just to keep her quiet.”

  “You don’t think it was that?”

  “Well, she’s getting weaker. Maybe things like this are just part of the illness. I really don’t know.”

  I can hear the weariness in my voice. I feel absolutely drained. “And then there was the flier. I thought maybe it had upset her for some reason, but then I thought maybe that was just in my head.”

  “The flier? The one from the suitcase?”

  I rub my eyes and try to suppress a yawn. “Yes. I showed it to her and she went quite weird. But then, she is quite weird anyway, so it’s hard to tell—”

  “Weird how? What did she do? Do you mean she seemed defensive? Like she was disturbed by it?”

  My feeling of exhaustion doubles. Why on earth did I mention the flier? In all the stress and commotion of my mother collapsing, I had actually forgotten all about it. I’m not sure I really want Mark setting an agenda for me right now on how to harangue my mother into a confession.

  “I don’t know, Mark. It was probably all just a coincidence.”

  “You mean you showed it to her and about five minutes later she fainted?”

  “Well, no, I showed it to her and she started to get dizzy. And very confused. And then she fainted.”

  “And you think that’s a coincidence? Meg, that’s not a coincidence. That’s evidence!”

  I really, really wish I hadn’t mentioned the flier.

  “That address clearly means something to her. It’s a clue, Meg. You need to find out what’s behind this. You need to get to the bottom of it.”

  “But it’s not that easy. I’ve told you before—”

  “Nothing in life that’s worth having is easy, Meg. DNA wasn’t discovered by people just waiting for it to fall into their laps, was it? You have a clue here. It’s a starting point. You need to think methodically about how you’re going to pursue it. You’re meant to be a scientist.”

  “I am a scientist.”

  “Then think like one. Think about how you’re going to use this—”

  “But, Mark,” I interrupt, wondering why I brought this up, “she’s ill right now. If her fainting had something to do with the piece of paper I showed her, then the last thing I want to do right now is—”

  “What do you mean, if it had something to do with it? It clearly did. In fact, she was probably just faking. She probably pretended to feel dizzy just so she wouldn’t have to discuss it any further with you.”

  “Oh no, I don’t think—”

  “This is a woman who is capable of lying to her daughter day in, day out, and you don’t think she’s capable of feigning a fainting fit?”

  “But she was unconscious. And the ambulance came. And even Dr. Bloomberg said—”

  Mark sighs as if I am completely missing the point.

  “She caused a commotion, in other words. And what happens when there’s a commotion? People get distracted. I bet you forgot all about the flier, didn’t you?”

  I don’t answer him, but my silence clearly says it all.

  “Exactly. She’s the greatest liar who ever lived. There are trained spies who have given more secrets away than your mother. She’s cunning, Meg. Very cunning.”

  Cunning? My mother’s not cunning. She’s strange and confusing and exasperating, but she’s not cunning. And she couldn’t have feigned being ill. Could she? No. Absolutely not. But I suppose Mark’s right, I did forget about the flier. I rub my tired eyes, feeling confused, and do what I often seem to do these days when my head is in a muddle.

  “What should I do, then?” I ask Mark.

  “Cut to the chase, Meg. If she’s not going to talk, then go to that address. Find out who lives there. Who lived there at the time. Find out whatever you can.”

  “Do you think so? But it feels so deceitful. I’d rather she just told me—”

  “Deceitful! You think you’re the one being deceitful?”

  I can see his point. “Maybe I should try talking to her again. Maybe this time…”

  I leave my own sentence unfinished, knowing I am only fooling myself. I lay my head down on the kitchen table, exhausted by the effort of thinking, and watch as a tiny spider scurries past me toward the fruit bowl. Of course spiders would be good at pottery, I find myself thinking sleepily. All those arms to smooth the clay. And such lightness of touch.

  “You need to do something, anything,” Marks tells
me, “to bring this ridiculous situation to an end, Meg. And you need to do it now. Because soon—”

  “I know,” I interrupt him.

  I can’t stand for him to say the words. But Mark doesn’t avoid the truth. He doesn’t allow for excuses, or evasion, or shying away from the facts.

  “Because soon it’s going to be too late.”

  chapter eight

  There are carrots as pallbearers and zucchinis as choirboys. The vicar is an eggplant, complete with dog collar and an ill-fitting toupee. I watch from the pews as the carrots, their green hair neatly slicked back, carry the coffin down the aisle of the church and lay it gently on the altar. In front of me, a piece of asparagus reaches beneath her black veil and wipes her eyes with an embroidered handkerchief. The little zucchinis stop singing and stand solemnly, heads respectfully lowered, in a huddle at the front of the church. They look beautifully neat in their pressed white gowns, and I can’t help thinking their parents would be proud.

  The vicar begins to speak, but I can’t understand what he is saying. All the other members of the congregation are listening intently, nodding in agreement, wiping at their eyes. I strain to understand the vicar, but the words all blur into one long, monotone sound. I turn to the figure next to me, a fat potato in a black jacket, and ask him, “What is he saying?”

  The potato whispers something to me, but I can’t understand him. Before I can ask him to repeat himself, he pulls a handkerchief out of his pocket and blows his nose loudly.

  Then there is a mass movement toward the front of the church. The coffin lid is open, and everyone moves forward to pay their last respects.

  “I should be first,” I say out loud, but nobody listens.

  I try to work my way toward the front, becoming increasingly desperate to have a glimpse inside the coffin, to lay down the flowers that I now seem to be carrying, but suddenly I am engulfed by a wave of vegetables. They are all clamoring to reach the front, shoving me out of the way. A turnip elbows me in the ribs, and a stick of celery wearing high heels steps on my foot. Neither of them even bothers to apologize. I am almost crushed between an inconsolable cauliflower and a sobbing cucumber before being tossed around among a group of hysterical mushrooms. Suddenly the noise is unbearable. There are hundreds of them, all wailing and crying, pulling at each other’s stems in an attempt to reach the coffin while I seem to be getting pushed farther and farther back.