“Is she okay there?”
“I just left,” Frank continued. “And visiting hours don’t open again until 2 p.m. But I have to go back to work. We have this huge client meeting I just can’t miss. Basically, I was wondering if you could go sit with her at two? I’d ask one of her friends, but they’re so—”
“Of course, brother,” said Santiago. “I’ll be there. Can I bring anything?”
“No, no. I dropped off her clothes this morning. Just bring yourself.”
“And how are you doing with all this? Are you okay?”
Frank gave a dry, scraped laugh down the phone.
“To be honest, I could use a drink. But I’m fine, I’m fine. It’s Cleo I’m worried about.”
“Remember to take care of yourself too,” said Santiago, repeating something Dominique had told him. “You owe yourself the same care you give to others.”
“You won’t tell anyone, will you?” said Frank suddenly. “About Cleo? It was a mistake, and I don’t want anyone thinking … the wrong thing about her.”
“I would never say anything that hurt you or Cleo.”
“I know, man. Thank you. You’re a good friend.”
Santiago had unwittingly stopped walking; as he hung up, he suddenly became aware of the people streaming around him, nudging his girth with their elbows and bags. He was sick of taking up so much space. He stepped into the bike lane to avoid them and checked his phone again. It was midday, a couple of hours before visiting hours started. The thought of going to the restaurant to talk about barstool designs and table arrangements was incomprehensible. He would have liked to eat something, but he had already had his muesli breakfast and allotted morning snack that day, a single apple with a tablespoon of almond butter. Just across the street was the tantalizing orange and pink of a Dunkin’ Donuts. He imagined biting into soft, warm dough, the powdered sugar coating his mouth, quieting his mind. He looked down at his yellow tote bag. He couldn’t throw this week’s progress away, not when Dominique had said she was proud of him.
If he couldn’t eat, he could at least cook. He went home to make something for Cleo. He decided to prepare his favorite comfort food, arroz con leche, or Spanish rice pudding. It was what his grandmother made for him back in Lima when he’d had a hard day at school, “to sweeten your grief,” she would say. He boiled the rice in milk and added a cinnamon stick, watching the thick, creamy mixture swirl against the wooden spoon. His grandmother told him that his ancestors in Babylon had made this same dish thousands of years ago, sweetening the mixture with honey and dates. Today, he would make it the way she had taught him, with vanilla and orange peel. He added the condensed milk and inhaled the cloud of sweet steam that enveloped him.
And there, in that fragrant fog, he thought of Lila, the woman who had once been his wife. Lila was from Bogotá, five feet to his six and a half. Lila spoke Spanish like she was cutting tall grass with her tongue. She could walk on her hands and cook a perfect chicken. She was always cold and never wrong. Lila won first runner-up in her local beauty pageant but had the most prized possession of all, an American passport, endowed by her half-American father. At fifteen, she was sent to high school in New York to learn to speak English like a white American and, upon graduating, dismayed her family by enrolling at Alvin Ailey to learn to dance like a Black American.
Santiago met Lila when he was still in culinary school, clearing tables at the diner on Fifty-Sixth Street. She would come in after class with the other dance students, all lithe as panthers in black leotards and sweats, all smoking cigarettes and drinking black coffee and talking reverently about people he’d never heard of. He’d catch the names as he cleared away plates of smeared ketchup and discarded burger buns, try to memorize them so he could look them up later. Martha Graham. Merce Cunningham.
He noticed Lila, of course. She demanded to be noticed. One evening, perhaps on a dare, perhaps because someone had simply suggested she couldn’t, she jumped up from the table and did a series of backflips down the linoleum aisle while her friends whooped and hollered, her slim body arched like a tiny, turning rainbow.
She had noticed him too. Back then, he was lean and muscled from carrying heavy food deliveries, with a head of thick, curly hair women went wild for. It was she who first spoke to him in Spanish, under her breath, like she was sharing a secret with him, who invited him out with them one night to a club where the boys dressed as girls and everyone was high on E, who kissed him under the Brooklyn Bridge, who lay naked on his mattress and asked him to warm her up, who moved into his studio apartment above the laundromat and filled it with dry flowers and wet leotards.
It was Lila who married him so he could get his first legal job in a kitchen, who took him to dance performances that made him weep in the dark, who taught him that the body has its own kind of language that expresses what words cannot. And it was Lila who introduced him to heroin, who shot them both up for the first time with gear given to her by a choreographer who swore it was like being cradled by God. Santiago got sick that first time and didn’t have the stomach to try it again. But Lila didn’t get sick. She fell back into his lap, smiling, and said that she finally, at long last, felt warm.
Sometimes, when the restaurant was busy, whole weeks went by without him thinking about her at all. But ever since Frank and Cleo’s wedding, she’d begun visiting him in his dreams again. Sometimes she was dancing, but mostly she was just there, watching him. Now he wondered if she’d come to warn him about Cleo. She was trying to tell him that Cleo was hurting herself like Lila had before her, for reasons he had failed to understand, in ways he had once again failed to stop.
With a start, Santiago realized that the rice pudding was beginning to stick to the bottom of the pan. He scooped the creamy mass into a glass bowl and sank two cinnamon sticks into its center. He bent over it, inhaling the familiar vanilla scent, then turned away. He would not ruin it by salting it with his tears.
Santiago took a cab to the NYU hospital on Thirty-First Street, the rice pudding balanced like a favorite child on his lap. He followed the signs past the lobby and the gift shop to the elevator, where the psychiatric ward was listed on the sixth floor. The doors opened onto a small waiting area with a row of seats on one wall and a stack of lockers on the other. Through the window of the locked steel door, he could see a long fluorescent-lit hallway lined with metal carts. He checked his watch—he was a few minutes early—and took a seat next to an older Jewish woman wearing a large purple coat. She nodded at the wall of lockers in front of them. The numbers appeared to have been assigned at random, with locker 1 located between 45 and 12.