The cake had a delicate, nearly vaporous texture that released a startling flavor. There was something, some ingredient, that tugged at the chestnut and lemon and opened the taste on her tongue — the chimera, as Avis thought of it — the secret in the maze of ingredients.
“Mmmm, Stanley — so good.” Felice was already cutting another piece.
Avis took another bite as Stanley waited. She could barely grasp her own response, the plummeting sensation that seemed to plunge through her. Why couldn’t the boy stay out of her kitchen? She wanted him to be more than a food worker. He didn’t realize what punishing work it could be — hot, monotonous, hazardous: it was true manual labor, but magazines and TV dressed it up in glamour. She wanted him to use his mind, not his back. “What is it?” she asked quietly. “A savory herb. Basil?”
“Some basil and some rosemary.” He averted his gaze, still too tentative to smile — as if he were afraid he’d done wrong. Felice was watching her.
Avis nodded, eyes closed. She wanted to praise his ingenuity, to say how proud she was. Why did that simple act elude her? She opened her mouth, struggling for words; she had said finally, “It’s fine, but it isn’t quite right.”
He took the rest of the cake back to the kitchen and disposed of it.
Five years later, after Felice was gone, Stanley built a raised bed in the backyard and grew herbs and vegetables. He worked in grocery stores. He cooked dinner for his parents — vegetable stews and roasted chicken — trying to make sure Avis in particular ate something beside cookies and tarts. He avoided sugar. He stopped baking.
THE CELL RINGS AGAIN Nina. There is the time stamp: she has to read it twice before she understands: 2:53. She’s been waiting for three hours.
Avis lays her hands and phone flat on the iron-grid table, gazing forward like a woman at a séance, staring past the streetlamp post and the gang of stick-shouldered boys with skateboards and the enormous black-and-white mural for Abercrombie & Fitch. When she recognizes the dark bounce of Nina’s hair, she feels mostly numb. Nina is overbearing, even caustic and punitive, but she has never said — like several others, “Oh well! They all eventually leave home, anyway, don’t they?” (Once, at a dinner party, a snow bird from Cincinnati, upon hearing about Felice running away, remarked dryly, “Lucky you.”)
Avis can see her assistant composing herself, chin lifting. Nina approaches the table with one hand on her chest. “I’m so sorry, dear,” she says softly. “When you didn’t answer the phone, I just — I thought I’d better…”
“Oh, she didn’t come, I guess.” A tiny smile on her lips. “Oh well.”
“Ah, sweetie.” Nina touches her shoulder, but Avis stands.
“No, it’s… No — no. It’s nothing.” Avis glances around for the waiter. “I should have — I don’t know.” Evidently she’d outlasted his shift. She can’t remember if she’d paid for the tea. Avis refuses to say that perhaps her daughter forgot, she got busy. These were the things she’d said last time while Nina looked at her with those kind, terrible eyes. Brian refuses to go to these meetings at all. We don’t negotiate with terrorists, he says, voice bone-dry, desiccated by anger. So it’s been nearly five years since he’s last seen his daughter. Stanley hasn’t seen his sister in that time either, as far as she knows. And ten months, now, for Avis. Not so bad in comparison with five years. Really, not bad.
Ten months, she reflects as she follows Nina. For some reason this is all she can hold in her head, like the refrain to a song. Ten months, as they pass the French bakery franchise, ten months, as they cross the street by the theater. They enter the parking structure, the air dim as a chapel’s. Perhaps if she clings to this clot of thought, it will hold her. Not so bad. She climbs into Nina’s big, empty car. Beyond the open ramparts of the garage, Avis sees the sky lowering, the damp air growing heavier. She will try not to wonder where Felice is: where she goes when it rains. She can’t be that far away.
Felice
OH FUCK THEM, WHAT DO THEY KNOW?
Felice is sick of the Green House, its stink of cat pee and old pot and cooking oil, and a kind of rot — as if losing youth or hope or just some idea of a future would have a smell. All the kids and bums and “musicians” who wander in and out of that place carry that odor somewhere on their clothes or hair. This morning when Felice wakes on the couch in the back bedroom, her stomach tightens and buckles at the smell.
She props herself up, surveying the room: two kids on the floor, another sleeping sitting up at her feet, his skinny neck tipped back against the cushion, mouth sloped open and a thread of saliva escaping from one corner — a skinhead in black jeans and lace-up boots. She’s awakened before to find other kids who’ve stumbled into the same room or corner as her: most of them are just looking for the comfort of another body: someone to crash next to, to feel a little safer through the night.
Some of them sit in circles at night, like around a campfire, in the immense, trashed living room (there’s even a big fireplace where they cook things sometimes, but eventually the room fills with smoke and they have to stop). Mostly they’re kids like Felice — a lot of them even younger — some like eleven and twelve years old. There are a few old people too — guys in their thirties — and those are the worst with all the psychologizing and talk, talk, talk. That’s all those guys like to do, suck on their wet joints, eyes watering, discussing their stupid ideas of how to take down the government or break into the mansions out on Star Island or Key Biscayne or South Gables. And Felice knows that some of them grew up in palatial homes on South Hibiscus Drive with private docks and gates and servants, and that many of the worst and dirtiest and smelliest kids will inherit enormous trust funds in five or ten years.
Not Felice.
She moves slowly, slipping on her backless sneakers, lifting her feet one at a time over the first skinhead, slumped on the floor beside the couch. But then she does something stupid — she knows it’s stupid even as she does it, yet she can’t resist lifting the half-pack of cigarettes from the lap of the propped-up sleeper. She doesn’t even smoke anymore, but it’s taken her longer to break the habit of stealing — every now and then she slips back into it — and smokes are useful and tradable among the street-poor. She might’ve gotten away with it too, but she’s hasty and the flimsy pack crackles in her hand. Instantly the skinhead seizes her hand — fingers, actually — crushing them together. Felice sucks a yelp back, furious with herself for getting caught.
“Look at you.” The skinhead’s name is Axe. These guys all have names like that—“Raver,” “Dread.” They hang out together — a tribe of thirty or forty massively stupid and destructive boys — Felice can’t keep track — their names and faces interchangeable. “So what the fuck is going on up in here?”
Pain knifes through the small bones in her fingers; it’s like one of those paper finger traps — the more she struggles, the more tightly he squeezes. “No.” She deliberately keeps her voice low. “Please, just… please, please…”
He pulls her closer, smiling to reveal gray translucence covering his teeth; she inhales an acrid effluvium — as if he’s been drinking vinegar. “You’re so fucking polite—please, please,” he minces. “Don’t you know not to steal, girlface? Someone might fucking tear your hand off.”