After two or three or four nights away, Felice would either come home by herself or the police would deliver her, followed by humiliating and protracted visits from social service counselors. But there were long, comparatively peaceful periods between these vanishings, during which Felice seemed to “return” to herself. As if she’d split into two separate girls. She settled back into school. She would be well-mannered; she helped Stanley with the dishes; she chattered with her father about soccer practice; she confided in her mother about her friends — but never about running away, why she kept leaving. Where she went when she was gone.
She tricked them — Avis thinks — every single time. They’d relax the curfew, relax their vigilance, enjoy a week, a few months, without incident. And just when Avis would tell herself (she wanted to believe it so badly) that their nightmare was ending — it would happen again.
Two months after Felice’s thirteenth birthday, Avis woke in the vinyl rocker in the den with dread like a slickness covering her skin. She knew, even as she was waking, that things weren’t right because she was in the vinyl chair — it sweated and stuck to her skin; it was where she waited and slept whenever Felice was missing. It was an uncomfortable chair so it helped her stay up late and wake early and it was a punishment place — for failing to keep her daughter at home.
Brian materialized out of the powdery dark, a pale face in gray pajamas, like a figure in a nightmare. The house felt hollow to Avis, despite the presence of husband and son. It seemed that some menace was lurking in the hidden corners, something worse than mere emptiness. “Darling,” he whispered. “Please. Bed.”
“Where is she?” Avis asked, almost conversationally. She stared at the blackly glinting night outside: she’d left the windows unshuttered just in case she might catch a hint of someone in the street, a single footfall, a child’s breath.
“You have to rest,” Brian said. “This isn’t helping anything.”
“She’s never stayed away this long before.” Avis’s voice sounded wrong.
“She’ll come back — she always does.”
Avis looked at her husband: it was like nothing she’d ever felt before — almost crystalline in its hardness and acuity. Grains in her blood, between her internal organs: her voice full of slivers as she said, “She’s only thirteen years old.”
Brian tried to put his arms around her, but Avis straightened up, turning deliberately toward the windows. She’d slept for an hour at most — the wall clock said 3 a.m. But Avis was trained to these black morning bakery hours. She went to the kitchen, shook out an apron, and pried the lid from one of the thigh-high canisters of flour. Deep, fluting emotions were a form of weakness. She’d seen the softening in her work over the years, she’d started making the lazy, homey treats like apple crumble, chocolate muffins, butterscotch pudding, and lemon bars. They were fast and cheap and they pleased her children. But she’d trained at one of the best pastry programs in the country. Her teachers were French. She’d learned the classical method of rolling fondant, of making real buttercream with its spun-candy base and beating the precise fraction of egg into the pâte à choux. She knew how to blow sugar into glassine nests and birds and fountains, how to construct seven-tiered wedding cakes draped with sugar curtains copied from the tapestries at Versailles. When the other students interned at the Four Seasons, the French Laundry, and Dean & Deluca, Avis had apprenticed with a botanical illustrator in the department of horticulture at Cornell, learning to steady her hand and eye, to work with the tip of the brush, to dissect and replicate in tinted royal icing and multihued glazes the tiniest pieces of stamen, pistil, and rhizome. She studied Audubon and Redoute. At the end of her apprenticeship, her mentor, who pronounced the work “extraordinary and heartbreaking,” arranged an exhibition of Avis’s pastries at the school. “Remembering the Lost Country” was a series of cakes decorated in perfectly rendered sugar olive branches, cross sections of figs, and frosting replicas of lemon leaves. Her mother attended and pronounced the effect amusant.
It was this training, the discipline, her instructors’ crisply starched linen hats and jackets, which she summoned in that seesawing darkness. She was ill, unbalanced from lack of sleep and food, and raw from crying. Avis yanked the apron strings twice around her waist: she ate a dry scone. She asked Brian, “Please, would you keep the boy out of here?” Then she dusted her pastry slab with jets of flour and began the daylong process of making mille-feuilles. She drove the flour and sugar before her on the slab, drew its vapors into her lungs, knowing that this work — the most challenging and imperial of pastry creation — might have the power to save her.
Avis remembers that time as a feeling, the sensation of entering a long tunneclass="underline" her dreams, when she slept, were night-curved; they wound around her. The police had urged them to “carry on” with their lives. Her reimmersion into classical baking stopped her from obsessing over her daughter’s possible whereabouts, whether she was hurt or hungry or in danger. Her peripheral vision burned away cleanly, like the edges of a crème brûlée. She built her business, garnered awards, had her photograph in magazines, was approached by publishers asking for her cookbook. She could charge almost any price and customers seemed to consider it a privilege to pay it. For a year, then two and three, she couldn’t quite see her husband, son, or assistants. It was like being a deep-sea diver — the cold pressure on her body, her hands waving through frigid darkness.
Sometimes, while she worked, she revisited memories of the prelapsarian days with Felice, of shopping and talking. After a morning of strolling through the open-air mall, they went to the café and settled down to cups of consommé and airy popovers with strawberry butter. Felice sat across from Avis, a black velvet choker around her neck, her attention drawn to the young women who entered the tearoom wearing expensive, formfitting clothes. Mother and daughter would discuss the outfits — which styles would look the most becoming on Felice. Avis’s mother was amused by their old-fashioned domesticity. She told Avis, “You’re teaching the girl to be an odalisque!”
After Felice had gone, Avis would admit to herself — much to her shame — that there were occasions when she felt as if she hadn’t known her daughter as she should have. Among the happiest memories were more difficult, even confounding recollections: changes that had come over Felice after the time she’d taken to her bed. How she stopped laughing. How the light had seemed to go out in her face. Depression? Drugs? One night at the dinner table, Avis asked if Felice was feeling all right.
“I don’t know,” she’d said. That was her answer. Avis turns it around and around, this memory. She has considered that tiny exchange many times over the years; each time she does is like running her fingertip along a blade, testing to see if it still draws blood. Because she didn’t ask Felice anything more. She put her daughter to bed and placed a cool washcloth on her head and read to her from The Magic Garden, but she never asked her what was the matter. Why didn’t she — Avis asks herself now. Why didn’t I ask her?