Loud Awake and Lost, page 13
“Okay, but I’m taking a break now.” I dropped to the mat and let my cheek claim its sneaker-smelling surface. “It sucks how much it hurts, but I’m really trying to force myself past the pain. It’s different than when I was at Addington—when I felt too close to broken. Now I feel like I can…endure.”
“This time next year, I bet a lot of what you’re calling pain will be more like a twinge. Like pain memory. And I’m not just saying that to psych you up.” Jenn knelt on the mat next to me. Her face was serious sunshine. “You’re so young, Ember, and you’re naturally in such good shape that your body’s snapping back like a rubber band. The prognosis is for a near one hundred percent recovery. In a couple of years, I’ll bet you that—with the exception of your scars—that horrible night, and everything that came after it, will be completely erased from your body.”
My smile was a cover, I hoped. I knew Jenn had meant everything she said in her most upbeat way possible, but as I left the Y, I could hear only that one word: erased.
Reflexively, I touched the scar on my forehead. It was like a secret monster, a hideous zipper beneath my bangs. No amount of scar gel and cocoa butter would erase the ugly rickrack of that mark. That night would take aim at me every time I looked into the mirror.
It was dusk when I walked up from the subway. Another cold snap, but this one meant business. Winter was on its way. The clocks had turned back this week and the sky was wolfish gray.
I stopped at Carroll Park, revisiting the scene of my nightmare. Rachel and I had played here a lot when we were younger, two kids on scooters with Band-Aids on our knees. My nightmare wasn’t waiting for me here, of course. There were no T-shirts on the trees. I lingered. The park was pearl-shadowed, luminescent. I watched different clusters of rowdy kids combine and separate, jousting for time on the swings or yanking for turns playing with grungy public toys strewn in the sandbox. There was a bench under a hunchbacked dogwood. I sat and found a curled piece of bark, rubbing it between my hands, letting it crumble.
It wasn’t until I leaned back and looked around that I saw it from across the playground. It was the mural that had been on Maisie’s Facebook page, the one that Anthony had posed next to. I must have known, maybe semi-subconsciously, that it was here.
The paint looked dingy and rain-weathered, and yet the beauty of the artwork—a canopy of green trees interlaced in blue sky—was still strong. But what caught my eye and stopped my heart was the lower corner. There it was, that sideways gunmetal A. Not as refined as the mural, yet it seemed to be a kind of signature. How strange that it would be here. I knew that it was all connected, somehow. I just didn’t have all the puzzle pieces yet.
I stayed for a few more minutes, until the darkness forced the mural into murky shadow, too dark to see. Leaving the park, I cut through to Union Street, walking loud, relishing the knock of my heels, each foot neatly packed and protected. I kicked a new path through the hundreds of tear-shaped, butter-yellow dogwood leaves all mashed up along the sidewalk.
It wasn’t on purpose. It wasn’t by accident. It was something in between that made me do it. I’d memorized the address, and so I knew right where I was directing my boots as they crossed Court over to Smith.
El Cielo was smack in the middle of the block, with a picture-window façade. I peeked in on a bustling view of dinner hour. It seemed to be one of those all-ages restaurants, a few families gathered together while up front was a happening cocktail scene, with many barstools claimed by couples on amped-up date nights.
Most of the space was arranged with square and round tables, many set with sangria pitchers and baskets of blue-corn tortilla chips alongside painted bowls of red and green salsa. Strings of colored Christmas lights and framed black-and-white photographs—a few depicting haunting scenes from Mexico’s Day of the Dead festival—made the wall space vibrant as an art gallery. But overall, the restaurant had the atmosphere of a beloved hangout that had withstood time and trends.
My heart was pounding repeatedly with a single question, a fizzy manic new thought that unnerved me but at least had replaced the meditative tone of my day.
Was Kai here? Was Kai here?
Of course that was a major leap. Even for me. Just because Kai had given me a matchbook from this restaurant didn’t mean he had any reason to be here now, this minute. Or at all.
But what if he was? What if?
I hovered at the hostess stand, checking out a waitress as she unloaded plates of smoking hot fajitas for a huge family. She was older than I was, maybe college-age, with a soft pink face and hard pale eyes and yellow hair skinned into a bun. She was being helped by a busboy who couldn’t have been more than thirteen. The boy looked familiar, too, sinewy and dark-haired, and when he noticed me staring at him, he stopped and turned away abruptly to haul an overfilled plastic tub of dirty dishes back to the kitchen.
I was being watched. I looked back at the girl, who now seemed to think she needed to deal with me. With her lips pressed and a quick “hang on” finger signal, she took the tub from the boy and lugged it away through a swing door to what had to be the kitchen in the rear. When she returned, wiping her hands, she seemed resolved.
“You can eat in back,” she said. “It’s okay.”
“Thanks.”
I hadn’t planned on eating. But after my ninety minutes with Jenn, plus the walk over, I probably should. I was famished. And then I remembered that I had a twenty-dollar plus ten-dollar bill on me, though the money wasn’t technically mine—Suzette Bodkin had owed yearbook for an ad. I’d tucked the bills into my jeans pocket, meaning to put them in the envelope in the business office. But I could use this money, and then I’d just bring in a replacement thirty dollars tomorrow from home. A sit-down dinner for myself at El Cielo seemed indulgent, but also exactly the right way to spend the next hour. Somehow I needed to be here.
My parents were out tonight with our neighbors. I wouldn’t be missed.
“Follow me,” said the girl. I had to move quickly to keep up as she led me through the narrow passage and to the rear of the restaurant, which opened into a festive kitchen of copper hanging pots and a brick pizza oven and one of those dinged brass bars that looks like it has seen its fair share of rowdy nights.
Then she left me to stand alone. Where was I supposed to sit? At this hideaway back bar? It felt presumptuous to just hop up onto a stool. I waited, watching.
At the stove, a tiny, grandmotherly woman was in full command of her kitchen realm. It included two younger male prep cooks, but she was clearly the leader, a dynamo who looked like she’d been shrunk while her clothing had stayed the same size—her silver hoop earrings nearly touched her shoulders, and her kitchen apron bagged at her ankles. She was all useful motion, moving in waltz-like grace as she bumped and reached from the sink to the oven to the chopping station. I couldn’t decide if I’d ever seen her before, or if it was more that she looked like a grandmother from the movies, she was so vibrant.
The kitchen spices mingled with deeper notes of browning butter, roasting garlic, sautéed yellow onion, and sizzling grilled meat. I hadn’t been to a restaurant since Serendipity, which had reminded me how much I loved to see all different people coming together for a delicious meal. It was what I’d always wanted my Follies to be about.
At first I had a distinct and unnerving sense that everyone working at El Cielo was aware of my presence. The feeling didn’t leave, even when nobody singled me out. But in the haze of smoke and clattering overheated kitchen, there was real energy, enough so that I couldn’t have been the true center of attention even if I’d wanted to. The old woman was lost in her pots and pans, the cooks were deep inside their shorthand dialogue, and everything was muffled by the roar of an electric range-top fan.
At the touch at my elbow, I turned.
The busboy stood in front of me. He was holding a rolled set of silverware. Wordlessly, he set me a place at the barstool. I hopped up.
“Tía Isabella,” he said, addressing the woman. “Ella está aquí. Para la cena.”
The woman raised her eyebrows as she officially took me in. The busboy darted to lift a pitcher and glass from the nearby busing stand. He filled the glass and brought it to me.
“Gracias.” I felt geeky using my classroom Spanish.
“De nada,” murmured the boy, before he slipped away again.
I went back to watching the cook. She was a real master, long trained in this kitchen. She was also so short that she’d invented a quirky choreography of kicking a stepladder along next to her as she went about her business, the better to leap up for cupboards or canisters, while muttering what sounded like “entonces, entonces”—words that I was pretty sure meant something like “and then, and then,” but in this case seemed to be Isabella’s own private magical incantation.
But there was a catch in her eye that I couldn’t decipher exactly, when she finally paused to let me know that she was considering me. Of course, a seventeen-year-old girl sitting all by herself on a barstool of a crowded restaurant was probably not her usual customer. Without a word, she found a menu under the bar and passed it to me before returning to her work, but every so often she’d stop and tilt her head, stealing a glance. As if I might be something that she’d put into storage, who now had turned up in an unlikely setting.
And when she finally smiled at me, it was quick as a flower tossed into an audience, and it disappeared just as fast. “What do you like?”
“Oh—it all looks great. I’ll eat anything.” True. My stomach felt scooped and empty and ready for whatever came my way.
It was the right answer. “Let me fix you something.”
As I watched, I could feel myself mentally shadowing the woman’s own movements, as she quickly heated a reserve of skillet oil for mushrooms and peppers, then added a couple of lethal pinches of chili pepper and a dried bay leaf to the sauce already simmering on the stove.
In no time, she’d served me up a platter of enchiladas, narrow as cigars, lightly drizzled in salsa verde and dolloped with sour cream, along with a side of black-bean salad and another of crispy fried zucchini.
Sinking in my fork, I had to resist the impulse to abandon utensils altogether and eat with my hands, and then to mop up the sauce with the extra plate of soft, warm tortillas. Stealthily, I let my boots drop to the floor, and I tucked my feet so that I could eat cross-legged, the way I loved to do when I was alone.
After a few minutes of relinquishing myself to what was easily my most amazing food experience in months, I could feel myself absorbing the enchiladas in a different way, as I imagined preparing them. I could feel my hand cover the spine of the knife blade, a technique I’d learned on a cooking show that had effectively demonstrated the cleanest way to chop and seed a jalapeño pepper. And there was, I remembered, a trick to the timing of the recipe, to juggling the sauce with the filling and the last-minute grating of the cheese—rough not fine—and yet this was a trick I’d forgotten.…
The dish was already spicy. My nose was fiery red and tears were slipping down my face. I’d doused it in hot sauce when it needed hardly any.
The busboy had reapproached me noiselessly and set down an extra napkin for me, which I used as a handkerchief. I watched him as he picked up a rack of dishes from a dolly, heaved them over his bony shoulder, and prepared to take them downstairs. At the same instant, another figure swung empty-handed around the corner. My heart stuck in my ribs. Kai.
18
Third Door Down
I froze. Kai didn’t see me at first. He had paused at the touch screen to place an order. But for me, everything stopped—the hour itself seemed to come screeching to a halt, along with my pulse, my thoughts, and every single half-prepared scrap of speech I’d ever recited to Kai in my head.
Stop…stop…stopped. Numb. I was scared to blink, to lose him.
Kai worked here? My brain reeled to make this seem obvious and natural. Of course he worked here—the matchbook had been his clue to me. He’d wanted me to find him. He’d been expecting me to find him. In his element. Because he looked good working here, too, dressed in his waiter’s tailored black pants and short black apron plus a golf shirt with the restaurant’s red and yellow logo emblazoned on the front pocket.
As soon as he finished punching in the order, I was sure that Kai was going to turn in my direction. But I was jolted to watch him coast past me toward the front of the restaurant.
He’d sensed me, though. Of course he had. Nobody who gets stared at as hard as I was staring at Kai doesn’t somehow figure that out.
So now what? Do I just wait for him to come to me?
I glanced down at the sauce and sour cream pooled on my empty plate. It was probably the lingering after-impression of all that spicy food, but I was heated up and close to tears; they threatened to wash out at any moment. Or maybe it was the old here-we-go-again panic slash exhilaration of being caught in another sort-of chance meeting with Kai. The matchbook had led me to him so easily. Too easily.
Okay, but now I was here. I’d found him. And he was less enigmatic now, right? Here was a huge new chunk of information. Kai worked here at El Cielo. As a waiter. Was anything less mysterious than that?
My heart thrumming, I kept my head downcast. I took tiny mechanical bites of the last tortilla, all too aware that Kai was wandering around in possible eye- or earshot. And when I twisted and craned, I caught him in angles as he tended to the tables, skirting between them, a purposeful back-and-forth from the wait stands and busing stations and then around again—to stack a high chair or bring a pitcher of beer. My vision of him was broken, occasionally, by the busy presence of the blond girl, who seemed to deal with Kai’s tables as well as her own. Maybe he was just a backup waiter?
After a few minutes, I could relax almost to the point of enjoying him. It was a new power, to watch while I remained unobserved. Kai looked more boyish in this setting, and more sweetly earnest while at work. His white shirt set off the dark tones of his skin—a color I could semi-achieve if I baked myself in the sun all summer—and his hair was different, comb-marked like a little kid’s on school picture day.
I stared, entranced, slightly dazed from too much dinner; plus my muscles were warm and now slightly achy from the physical therapy session. If there was ever a time to be equipped for another meeting with Kai, this was it. In one short month, I’d come a long way from my barely-rehabbed-odds-and-ends self. I didn’t need Dr. P to tell me I was taking better care not to be some shivering girl on a fire escape, or that I’d even learned a lesson from my Halloween trancing in darklight to a downtown club mix.
El Cielo might be Kai’s turf, but tonight I was strong enough to meet him on it.
I waited another couple of minutes, my heart racing faster than a Daytona mile as I thought up cute-but-not-cutesy ice-breaker lines. The tension was killing me and I could feel doubt start to creep in. What if I had this all wrong, and he never came over?
Because I had to talk with him again.
It really needed to happen. It was everything.
After another minute, I slid off my perch and back into my boots, and then went in pretend search of the bathroom, darting a quick look around the corner where the busboy had vanished. The threads of my nerves were pulling and tweaking at me like I was a puppet. The restaurant was now packed.
When Kai materialized around the bar in a few sure steps to stand right there in front of me, I was pretty sure he knew I’d been here all along. His smile was halfway in hiding, but there was concern in his face, too. He was guarded but not unhappy to see me. Not at all.
“Hey, you.”
“Hey yourself.”
“You found me.”
“No thanks to you.”
He raised an eyebrow as if this might not be true. “I want to talk.”
“Me too.”
“Not up here, though. Cold storage, basement. Third door on the left. I’ll meet you down there.” He tapped his bare wrist. “I’m on the clock. Though I’ve got some solid backup who won’t rat me out.” He motioned to the busboy, who’d reappeared and was refilling water glasses.
I nodded. “Okay.”
“You go first and I’ll join you. Give me two, three minutes.” Kai winked, hoisted a bar tray, and slipped past me as if we hadn’t connected at all.
I hovered another moment by the archway that marked the stairwell. My eyes sliding right left right to make sure no vaguely menacing eyes were doing any spying on me—though why would anyone care what I did?—and then I bolted down the terra-cotta tiled steps to El Cielo’s underground.
It was an instant atmosphere change from the warmth of the ground-floor crowd. Down here felt cooler, serene and unoccupied. It smelled musty, and I could hear a white noise—a water heater drum, maybe? Sound had shifted to a dull ocean roar. At the bottom of the steps I found myself in a hallway marked with opposing doors—one labeled DAMAS, the other CABALLEROS—plus two more doors on the left. I peeked in the next door, which was thinly cracked on a windowless office.
This third door was heavy, squared off like a vault. Breath held, I turned the knob and pushed. The icy air was almost menacing and the temperature seemed like a warning that this was a forbidden zone, that I wasn’t welcome here. I bit my bottom lip and turtled deeper into my jacket.
There was a fluorescent glare here, too. From floor to ceiling, everything in the room was marble or chrome, with wall-to-wall steel cupboards and a refrigerator that had an industrial lever handle, while the fridge itself looked big enough to hold Noah’s whole ark. Nobody else was down here, but I moved around like a burglar, anyway. The temperature drop made my brain and body sluggish, as the cold slipped and settled over me like a silk scarf.
The silence was lonely, too. I chewed at my cuticles. What if Kai didn’t come? What if he was upstairs getting raged at because the waitress had been watching us? Or one of the line cooks? What if I got caught? What if Kai got fired?
No, no, no. He’d be down soon. And then everything would be okay. Kai wouldn’t have told me to slip away and meet him here if he didn’t think we could pull it off.
