Emma smiles at me when I approach, and Reggie steps aside to make room for me. They’re talking about some show that I haven’t seen the newest season of, since I’ve been watching nothing but the Food Network. It takes me all of three minutes before I butt in with another stupid joke, and the looks I get make me long to be ignored again. I urge my body to get back to that whole disappearing thing. After making an excuse about needing a beer, I go rejoin Felix by the glass door.
“Hey, I thought it was funny,” he says with a wink.
“No, you didn’t.”
“Okay, no, but I give you points for trying.”
I look back up at the party, and Emma’s talking one-on-one with one of the servers, a dude with eyes so blue I don’t believe them. I look down at my beer, fiddle with the tab.
Back when he was alive, Felix had a knack for providing comfort. When our uncle committed suicide, Felix sat with Mom on the couch all night, holding her hand and a box of tissues and letting her cry into his shoulder. He was fifteen. Whatever the reason Felix is still here, I guess I prefer this iteration of him rather than really losing him, like Mom and Dad and the rest of the world have.
“Tell me more about that last trip you were on,” I say. “You never got to.”
He smiles, gets up from his chair (image of a chair, hallucination of a chair on Matt’s sliding glass door, whatever). “Why don’t I show you?”
Felix steps off the glass, turns into a little cloud of barely visible condensation, lays himself down on the ground, where the drops of dew on the grass start to bounce around. They join together to get heavier and force a given blade down, or they scurry away and let a single particle rise to the top to reflect the lights coming from the house behind me. Before my eyes, a cityscape appears on the grass.
He tells me about crossing from Laotian villages into Vietnam. He reminds me that he usually didn’t prefer big cities—as great as some of them were, none could ever compare to Mexico City—but Hanoi was different. The drops of water rearrange again. A streetside café, tiny tables, chairs facing out, two electric fans pointed at the customers. Scooters parked everywhere, zooming past, honking often. “Everyone’s awake early, drinking strong, cold coffee,” Felix says. “The smell of meaty, spicy soups in the air. Government announcements coming from the speakers up on the street posts, interrupted by constant motorbikes. It’s loud and everyone’s in a rush, sure. But I knew looking at Hanoi what people mean when they describe a city as a living thing.”
I stay a little longer than I probably should, especially since I’m on the fringe of the party and not really in it. I don’t get drunk; Emma doesn’t take me anywhere to eat something cheesy. I think I see her arm linked through the blue-eyed server’s right before I leave. I’ve known her for a week. Why do my insides stir as if I’m mourning?
I tell myself I should be sleeping anyway. I should be talking to real people. I say this to Felix on the walk home, and for once he listens, lets me go on. It is a welcome consolation, talking to Felix like this. The magic he can conjure up. It keeps me from wishing for other things.
CHAPTER 11
ATOLE
5 cups water
? cup masa
2 cinnamon sticks
5 tablespoons piloncillo
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
METHOD:
The next morning I wake up knowing that if I linger in bed it’ll be one of those suffocating days where I can’t think about anything other than Felix and death. So I skip the shower and get dressed and bolt out the door toward the boardwalk. It helps to walk and watch people go about their lives. Tourists, most of them, here for a brief spell before they return to wherever it is they came from.
When I try to think about getting back on a ferry out of here, I think of the lake as Emma showed it to me. I think of the way light works here, as if it’s filtered by a cinematographer. I think of the sounds of the kitchen.
Then a pang of guilt hits me that I haven’t called Mom again, so I find a quiet place to sit. I’m on a bench within view of the lake, which is shimmering with an array of blues that feels impossible within such a small body of water. Birds flitter from tree to tree around me, red-winged blackbirds, cardinals and one that’s small and yellow and chirps relentlessly.
Mom answers within a couple rings. “Hey, honey,” she says. She asks how I am. I say I’m good, with a cheerfulness that is probably too forced. I can sense the next question on the tip of her tongue, begging to leap out. “Have you booked your flight back yet?”
I hesitate, wondering if I’m really going to say what I want to.
“Mom, I don’t think I’ll be back this week.”
Instant silence. If it was Dad instead of Mom, I’d be wondering if he hung up. But Mom wouldn’t do that. I’ve just tripped upon one of those things that steal the words from a parent.
“When, Carlos?”
“I don’t know,” I say, and those simple words are as satisfying as if I’ve confessed to something much bigger. I almost feel like Felix will disappear on these words alone. Like he led me here not for the meal but to stay gone from the life waiting for me in Mexico.
A cool breeze blows by, soothing the heat from the sun on my skin. “I got a job, Mom.”
On her end, Mom laughs. “A job? What are you talking about?” She pauses, waiting for me to explain myself. When a few seconds go by, she realizes I’m not going to elaborate. “You said a week.” Her voice falters.
“I know.” I’m so aware of the smell of saltwater, of the waves crashing gentle and steady a few blocks away. I’m aware, too, that Mom probably had a similar talk with Felix once. That at one point he stopped promising he’d be back and just chased after what he wanted. “I’m sorry, but I want to give this a shot.”
She’s about to cry, I can tell. She’s about to ask me what about her, or what about college, or what about a bunch of other things I don’t know the answer to. This, though, I feel sure about.
A week goes by. The sink I stand in front of for hours at a time becomes more and more familiar. The station is comfortable, even. I can reach for a new rag without taking my eyes off the pan in my hands. There’s a certain pleasure in figuring out the most efficient way to stack plates, in running pots and pans to the cooks before they come in to bitch about not having enough.
When I run dishes to the waitstaff, I’ll often manage to take a detour to see Emma. If I say something that makes her laugh, or if she starts talking to me, I find that I work that much faster when I get back. If she’s short with her words, or if I don’t see her all day, or if Matt’s got it in for me, the day doubles in length.