Avis thinks of her mother’s last days in the hospitaclass="underline" a shared room with a plastic room divider, a scrape of dry coughing on the other side of the divider. She felt brutal as a captor, refusing to bring her mother home to die. In her last days, her mother wouldn’t eat anything more than ice chips. She railed in one of her old languages, muttering over and over some sort of imprecation, something that sounded like haya kharra. When Avis noticed the way a young orderly turned his face away from Geraldine’s ranting, Avis stopped him, “You understand her, don’t you. What is she saying?” The young man hesitated. When Avis pressed him, he finally said, “Life is shit.”
Solange’s hand sweeps across the Formica as if straightening a tablecloth. “I believe in small rituals: cleaning dishes, minding the plants. Other such processes.”
Red-black petals, a wooden pencil case, a small purple satin sash, a string of beads with a delicate white cross. Solange moves around the house collecting and placing these items in a canvas bag. She asks Avis to take her to her own kitchen. They cross the yard again; Avis shyly leads Solange through the French doors and then the door to the right. She feels self-conscious over the cool beauty of the room, afraid she’ll be offended by such a display of wealth, and watches Solange as she turns, looking, not touching anything. But she simply asks, “Where are your husband and son? This would work better if they were with us.”
Avis imagines their reactions to Solange and her spell-casting — if that’s what this is. Brian, she’s fairly certain, would be mortified. And Stanley, it seems, would be curious, polite, and distracted. She extracts an old photo of herself, Brian, and Stanley on some sort of excursion. Solange studies it a moment, then includes it with the other items. “Now, what would you make for your daughter — if she were to come home tomorrow? What would it be?”
For a moment, Avis is motionless, intimidated, studying the cold tang of the stainless bowls, their perfect emptiness. Solange picks a small bowl out of its nest of bowls and hands this to Avis. “Don’t think so much,” she says — the voice of someone used to ordering a staff.
Avis takes the bowl, coolness on her fingertips. She has no mise, no utensils; she reaches into the flour and sugar with clean hands, running her fingers through powder. Her palm warms the butter; she pours in a drop of almond extract, then splits a vanilla pod with her paring knife, scraping in the seed caviar. One of the simplest cakes that she knows. Solange leans against the counter as Avis stirs wet ingredients into the dry, making the batter. “Where I grew up,” she says, “sugar is a luxury. Though I didn’t know this until I left the great house. Then I discovered — the people where I’m from, they live and die in these magnificent cane fields.” She idly turns one of the bowls on the counter. “Sugar is like a compass. It points to trouble. My husband used to travel to plantations across the border — the other side of the island. Until the new man came to power and then people began to find the cutters’ bodies hacked into pieces.”
Avis is afraid to look at Solange: the air is tinted with sugar vapor: it is, of course, the one irreducible element in her work — no matter what else is added or taken away. “Which is what makes it such a strong thing.” Solange’s tone is almost conversational. “Sweet in the mouth, terrible to the body. The cane cutters never get to taste it. Never like this.” She draws one finger through the sparkling crystals in the bin.
As she works, Avis feels as if the woman’s voice has set something loose in her, a private mourning. Her spoon turns a long, continuous ribbon through the batter: heavier and heavier. Avis’s private tragedy with all its pain seems to shrink. She begins to wonder if there’s any point at all to pastry work — it’s irrelevant, even absurd. Ease and comfort: lotus-eating, Stanley called it. Escapism, gluttony, corruption, self-indulgence. He never adds sugar to his coffee. Avis isn’t stirring correctly; her hands feel weak. Finally Solange takes the bowl and pours it into the cake pan. She slides it into the hot oven and lets the heavy door rumble shut.
when the cake is cool enough to box, they take it to Avis’s car, Solange on the passenger side. She says, “Where is the last place you saw her?”
Avis places her hands on the bottom of the steering wheel. The first time she saw her daughter after she’d run away for good, Felice was taller and slimmer, her hair longer: she’d been away from home for six months, long enough to be physically changed. A deep shaking began in the quick of Avis’s bones. She was torn between the need to touch her daughter, to hold her tightly, and the sense that even the lightest touch might cause her to flee back to her underworld. There was a new downturned shadow to Felice’s mouth and her lowered eyelashes cast crescents of shadow on her cheeks: she had a faintly exhausted quality which trickled through her posture. She could have been fourteen or twenty-eight — she was poised, self-possessed. As soon as she folded her long limbs onto the café chair across from Avis, she’d said, “I’d like to make a deal with you.”
Avis sat motionless, staggered by the moment, barely able to hear or think, while Felice explained the “deal.” Felice would agree to more of these meetings — occasional, entirely at her whim — but in exchange, Avis and Brian had to agree to stop.
“Stop?” Avis felt so slow, the word blurred and heavy. Here was her daughter before her, talking to her, as if nothing at all had changed. Here was Felice.
“Looking for me. Trying to make me come back. Hiring people to find me. You have to give up now.” Felice’s tone was like a chip of ice. “Because I’m happy with the way things are. And I am never, ever, coming home again.” Felice gazed at her mother with an expression so entirely frank — so separate — that it seemed to Avis that she felt a wave of particles rising and twisting; each particle was a bit of memory, every second that she’d held the child between her arms, inhaled the scent of her scalp, kissed her shoulders, pressed the drowsy face to her chest as she tilted a bottle to her lips, the consummate intimacy of feeding a child this way, all of it rising, curling, as this extraordinary face told her: stop.
Could it be that she’d always been a little afraid of her own daughter? That she simply didn’t know how to fight her? The terrible fact presented itself: Avis had no choice but to accept.
“the lady of the house — she did all she could to take me away from my mother. She told me my mother was ignorant and dark black like an African. But I saw how my mother knew every plant in the gardens and forests, like the lady of the house knew the words in her books.”
There’s rain on the streets and occasional ripples of light, high up overhead. Avis can only steal glimpses of Solange as she speaks, her profile nearly invisible beside the rain-streaked glass. “I was seventeen when I met Jonas. The lady sent me into Cap-Haïtien with the driver for some dried hibiscus for tea. We could have picked it right in the field, but she said that kind wasn’t good. Back then, Jonas worked in the market in town, selling spices in big cloth sacks. When she found out about him, the lady said, of course, that he was filthy and uneducated — same things she said about my mother. She wanted me to stay in the house. She said, ‘You are almost a daughter to me.’” Solange gave a laugh like a sniff, her head bobbing slightly. “My mother told me — If you’re lucky enough to know what you want, then you must chase it. I left the house and the gardens and the stone verandah that overlooked the ocean — places I’d known all my life — and I went to live with Jonas in a house with a cracked cement floor and a patched tin roof, no electricity. We had to take our waste out in pails and pour it into the alley that ran behind the house.” The rain tapers off as they approach Miami Beach; trails of water stand in the street, a mist thrown up between the cars, rows of bronze streetlights glow overhead, already coming on in the late afternoon. “It felt like my life’s door had opened. When my son was born, I began making my bush teas and medicines, to help him thrive. Jonas said these brought him even more customers at market than his spices did. My mother came to visit one time to see her grandson. It took her six hours to walk to us. She said the lady of the house was ill and she couldn’t stay away for very long. I understood. The lady was like a difficult family member — you might dislike, or even hate them a little — but you can’t leave them.”