North Of Happy

I wonder how I could possibly explain my arrival without sounding nuts. Revealing a single detail could unravel my whole story, and my whole story begins and ends with Felix bleeding onto the sidewalk. “I guess I couldn’t wait.”

She looks back down at the scheduler, biting her bottom lip as she flips a few pages back and forth. We fall into silence, and I look around as if it might all disappear at any moment. I can hear faint music coming from the kitchen. It’s hard to believe that I’m standing in a place Felix never got to.

“Looks like you’re going to have to wait,” she says. “Earliest I have is Tuesday.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, summer’s busy for us. All these tourists.”

A wave of disappointment washes over me, made worse by the fact that I recognize it as disappointment. This is nothing. Any sane person wouldn’t bat an eye at this. So why do I feel like my whole journey has been thwarted, like I have to find a bed immediately and disappear beneath its covers?

“I mean, you could always come back and check for cancellations?” the girl says. “Those happen sometimes.”

It takes me way too long to say, “Oh, okay. Sure.” She takes my name for the Tuesday reservation and then I stand there for a while, not wanting to go back outside but realizing there’s nothing left for us to say to each other. “Bye,” I say. The girl holds a hand up as she puts her earphones back in.

“Nice meeting you!” she calls out when I’m halfway out the door.

Outside, the world looks empty again. The sun’s bright and hot, and everything looks white, drained of color. I’m on an island with no place to stay, no one to go to if I need something. It sounds comically childish, but I want to call my mom. I told her I’d be gone a week; it hasn’t even been twelve hours, but I don’t know what else to do.

“Si sabes,” a voice says.

“No, I don’t,” I say out loud, though I have to remember that just because I’m here on my own doesn’t mean I can start talking to myself. I grab my phone and hold it to my ear.

“You know that Winston Churchill quote, right?”

“Felix, you know damn well I don’t.”

“‘If you’re going through hell, keep going,’” he says through my phone. “Not that I think you’re going through hell. Far from it. This place is nice.”

Yeah, okay, I think. Still kind of having a conversation with my dead brother via a cell phone that doesn’t actually work. “What do I do until Tuesday?”

“Keep going,” he says. “Find a place to stay. Wait for a cancellation. Explore.”

It seems like a typical Felix oversimplification, but at least it’s an idea. A set of instructions to follow. So that’s what I do. I wander the streets until I find myself on a stretch of hotels and motels set up along the beachfront boardwalk.

I check the first few hotels (big-name chains, families of four wading in the pool, lit with joy) but there’s no vacancy. Eventually, I find a room on the far end of the boardwalk, at a motel that definitely wouldn’t meet my parents’ approval. I unpack my suitcase, take a quick shower, emerge into this strange and sad little motel room.

What the hell am I doing here?

In the months since the Night of the Perfect Taco, solitary rooms have been the hardest to inhabit. I find myself sitting down, standing up, opening the cupboards, feeling the strangeness of having a body. I’m moments away from that now, or from seeing Felix, or burying myself under the covers for the rest of the day.

So instead, I bolt. I leave my phone behind, grab the single key for the room, exit the motel. Head out on a mission. The motel room’s half kitchen has a couple of shitty saucepans, one medium-sized pot, a casserole dish, a stained wooden spoon, an ancient blender. It’s a sad little space, but at least cooking will give me something to fill the days with.

“Fuck,” I say when I enter the grocery store. I forget how incredible US supermarkets are, how the smell of herbs lingers in the air like a perfume. I head straight for the produce, pick up a bunch of basil, the leaves impossibly big. I take a lap around the store, taking in the ingredients. I remember going on trips to the store with Mom and Felix when I was twelve. Felix would insist on pushing the cart, running and taking his feet off the ground, letting the cart carry him down the aisles. I’d wander behind, dragging my feet to prolong the trip. I didn’t know a thing about cooking back then, but I was drawn to the ingredients in a way I didn’t understand yet.

I’m not sure why, but my instinct today is to go with the taste of home. Some chicken thighs, some poblano peppers, a bag of rice, Mexican crema (I’m surprised to find the real stuff, not that whipped-cream-looking shit they serve in Tex-Mex restaurants). Tortillas and Oaxaca cheese. I lose myself in the aisles, fingers trailing over heirloom tomatoes, herbs and produce and packets of exotic spices I can never find at home.

Back at my motel, I wash the vegetables, set water to boil for the sauce, roast the poblanos the way I’ve seen our maid Rosalba do time and time again, on the open flame of the burner. But I didn’t buy tongs, so I’m doing it by hand, turning the pepper to char the skin, trying to keep my fingertips as far away from the heat as possible.

Put those aside, boil the tomatillos, clean the chicken, preheat the oven. I keep the workspace tidy, not just because the counter can hold little more than my cutting board, but because it feels good to work without clutter; it makes things easier. Felix taught me that. He taught me how to hold a knife, how to trim the fat off a thigh, how to pursue knowledge of this thing I love. I take a look around the kitchen, waiting for him to show himself, make some stupid joke. It’s just the memories, though. I’ll take them over worrying about Dad, and Mexico, and what my life will look like after this trip, if I’ll ever feel like myself again.

I serve myself a plate, sprinkle some chopped cilantro on top. There’s enough left over for at least four more people. Not wanting to eat in my sad little room, I take my plate and a chair out onto the breezeway overlooking the parking lot. It’s almost two in the afternoon, the sun hot in the sky, making the emerald trees practically shimmer.

I thought maybe this would feel triumphant, a real fuck-you to Dad, to the thing in me grief has erased. But it’s not quite that.

Despite his relentless presence, I miss Felix. I wish he were around to see this moment. Not hallucinatory/ghost/whatever Felix, but the real version. My brother. He would have appreciated the cheesiness of a beautiful view and a traditional Mexican dish to celebrate my escape from home. He would have been proud of me.

A young couple squeezes past me in the corridor, beach towels slung over their shoulders. “Smells good,” the guy says, and for a crazy moment I want to tell them that I made way too much and that they can join me. Then of course they pass by, hand in hand, leaving me alone before I can say anything.

CHAPTER 4

PEACH CARDAMOM ROLLS

1 cup butter

1½ cups sugar

1¾ cups boiling water

1 tablespoon salt

2 teaspoons ground cardamom

.75 ounces active dry yeast

2 large eggs

1 can of peaches, drained and diced

7 cups flour

1 teaspoon vegetable oil

1 handful slightly cracked cardamom pods

½ cup powdered sugar

METHOD:

I wake up in the breezeway, more than a little disoriented. The scenery around me is jarring. The plate is by my feet, half the food spilled onto the floor. Families returning from the beach walking through the parking lot. I remember the hostess’s suggestion to check back for a cancellation, so I go inside to clean up and then walk the half hour back to the heart of the town. It’s all hills and trees, gently humid air alive with bugs and scents and color. I like breathing it in, this different world.

When I enter the restaurant, I’m surprised to see the same girl working at the hostess stand. It’s hours later, and though it’s early for dinner—even for Americans—the dining room is packed with people. Eager middle-aged couples crowd by the hostess stand, standing like people waiting to board their flights. The girl makes eye contact with me, and to my surprise she smiles with recognition.

“You’re back,” she says, so quickly that I wonder if we had a longer conversation than I remember. I do that classic look-behind-to-make-sure-it’s-me-she’s-talking-to thing. “Hoping for a cancellation?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Didn’t have anything better to do.”

She gives me a long look, and I wonder if what I said came across weird in some way. Her glasses are perched on her head, loose strands of hair coming out from her ponytail. Something about her feels familiar, but that’s a stupid thought because how could it? I’m in a different world.

“Why don’t you take a seat?” she asks, eyebrows raised. For the second time today, I’ve been staring at her, because clearly I’m not a fully functioning human. I sit down at a nearby chair, wondering if this is just how it’s going to be for me from now on. This is who I am now, the dude who stares and doesn’t know how to interact with strangers.

Her phone rings, and as she picks up the receiver she tucks a pen behind her ear.

I raise my eyes up to take a look around the restaurant. Servers in black shirts carrying plates of artfully arranged food of all shapes and colors, food in all its limitless forms. Everyone in the dining room is the picture of happiness. A table of hip-looking twenty-somethings laughing as they listen to their friend’s story, a woman with orange hair closing her eyes as she savors a dish’s last bite. Felix seats himself next to a couple on the patio, clinks wineglasses with them. Golden light washes over everyone.

I wait. I try to settle in. It’s Sunday evening. My phone is still on airplane mode, so who knows how many calls and texts have come my way over the last twelve hours or so. Right now Mexico City is a world away, an entire life away.

Every now and then, my eyes flit toward the hostess. She greets customers with a brilliant smile, leads them to their tables, rolls her eyes at the jerks when she thinks no one is watching. She answers her phone and chats with another hostess, every now and then looking at me and offering a smile.

It makes me feel a little less see-through, even though I’ve been sitting for nearly an hour like a weirdo, and Felix keeps running around trying to make me laugh or talk.

After a long stretch without a phone call, the hostess comes back from seating a couple and says, “You want some coffee?”

I smile, rise to my feet, though I’m not sure if I should so I kind of end up squatting. “Sure. But aren’t you working?”

She laughs. “Yeah, dude. Just gonna grab some from the back. I figured since you’re sticking around you might want some.”

“Oh. Yeah, thanks.” I’m still standing up, not sure if I should offer to help or what. “I’m Carlos,” I say, holding out my hand, thanking god that I remembered no one does the whole cheek-to-cheek kiss thing here.

She shakes it. “I’m Emma. Now sit,” she says. “If the phone rings, just pick it up and shriek into it, will you?”

I sit down. “You want one continuous shriek or multiple bursts of shrieking?”

“Either way, they’ll complain,” Emma says, maybe a little too loudly for how many customers are standing around waiting for tables. I watch her head to the back of the restaurant, and before the double doors that lead to the kitchen swing shut I can see the cook with the tattooed arms walk past, carrying a slab of meat. I think I even see Felix back there, a frying pan in hand, flames licking out at him. God, what it would be like to inhabit that world, food surrounding you.

Emma comes back out, two coffees in paper cups in hand. “One’s black, one’s sweetened and creamy. I don’t care which I get.” I grab the sweetened one, thank her, stand and then sit and then stand again.

She takes the lid off her coffee, sets it next to the phone that’s been ringing so constantly that I’m pretty sure this place is booked for the next year. She blows away the steam from her cup. “So, have you always lived in Mexico?”

“Yup. Born and raised.”

“Your English is really good.”

“Only when I’m speaking. You should have heard me screeching at your customers a second ago. My accent’s embarrassing.” Whoa. Was that my second joke already? I don’t think I’ve cracked so much as a pun since the Night of the Perfect Taco.

“You screeched?!? I said shriek. Shit.” She takes her glasses off, rubs them clean on the hem of her sweatshirt. “If we go out of business, I’m telling the chef it’s your fault.”

“That probably lowers my chances of sneaking in on a cancellation, right?”

“I’d say so.” Emma sips again from her coffee and then gives a chuckle. The phone rings again, and now, while she’s on it, I’m not looking around the restaurant but rather opening my mouth like I’m shrieking and trying to make her laugh. I’m not sure why I am so at ease all of a sudden. Joking around in the last few months has felt like pretending, even if I’m doing it with my friends. But her laughter makes me want to try for more.

When she hangs up, she throws her coffee lid at me. A woman wrapped in a silk shawl glares at her, but Emma ignores the look. “So, is that really why you’re here? You decided to take an international flight for one meal?”

For a moment I consider just telling her everything. Felix is dead and this is a link to him. We loved food together and he wrote the name of this place in a notebook once, so now I’m here. To eat on my dead brother’s behalf. There’s an icebreaker for you.

I do think about how good it would feel to finally tell someone that I can see him. Maybe that’s all it would take to get him to leave. Instead I shrug and say yes, and Emma gives me another long look before she turns to help some customer.

I end up staying at the restaurant far longer than I planned to. I thought maybe I’d stick around an hour or two and then go exploring like Felix suggested. But the wider world doesn’t call out to me. I just want to wait, watch the food go by, sit in this little corner of the world and not worry about anything else.

“You are the most patient person I’ve ever met,” Emma says at one point. The sun’s set over the horizon; the restaurant is aglow with soft lighting from scentless candles and the twinkling bulbs in the patio. “You know you have a reservation for Tuesday, right?”

“I’m kind of enjoying myself, though,” I say.

“That’s a little weird.”

I sink into my chair, blood rushing to my cheeks. I go the next hour without saying a word. A dozen different Felixes show up. He’s a server carrying one plate in each hand, thumbs off the edges, a customer checking in for a reservation. Some versions of him make a little less sense: a miniature version swimming in my coffee, telling me to relax.

Emma greets a party of six and as she walks them over to their table, I think I see her glance over her shoulder at me as she goes. She’s probably noticed me staring at people, trying to suppress the urge to talk back to Felix.

At ten o’clock, the restaurant is seating its last reservations. Emma’s wiping off menus with a napkin, and she jokes that I’ve been here so long I should have gotten paid. I try to act normal as a thought bubble sprouts out of my head and Felix shows me a flashback of the Night of the Perfect Taco: us at the stand in that one market, Felix teasing me that I should work with food.

“Yup, I’m for sure qualified to work here,” I tell Emma. “I watch the Food Network.”

“Don’t tell anyone in the kitchen that. They keep special knives to stab people with just for that occasion.”

I laugh, she laughs and we fall into a silence that lasts until I finally say good-night. “See you Tuesday,” she says.

CHAPTER 5

CHERRY MOON PIES

6 ounces unsalted butter

1 cup sugar

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

1 cup flour

¼ cup graham cracker crumbs

2 teaspoons baking powder

2 teaspoons baking soda

2 teaspoons cherry extract

1 teaspoon cinnamon

¼ cup whole milk

1 pound bittersweet chocolate

2 tablespoons coconut oil

METHOD:

The next day is Monday and the restaurant is closed, so I spend the whole day roaming the aisles of the grocery store and cooking, kept company only by Felix. Every time he shows up, he undoes a little bit of the joy I’d built up yesterday.

Every now and then, I think about calling my parents. I think about Isa on her way to Buenos Aires, Danny and the rest on the way to Europe. Mostly, I just hole up inside my room and wonder whether Dad’s already washed his hands of me.

On Tuesday, I wake up late, without enough energy to do anything but lie in bed. When I emerge from my room, it’s practically evening, and there’s a fog creeping in from the beach, more white than gray. It stretches itself across the motel parking lot and slips in between the trees across the road. The sun, well on its way to the horizon, doesn’t do much to heat the day, and I have to warm my hands with my breath on my walk downtown.

Joggers rule the island at this hour, it seems. Brightly colored spandex and arm-strapped phones greet me at nearly every turn, sometimes emerging from the fog like ghosts. I walk past Provecho once or twice, knowing that it’s too early for me to show for my dinner reservation. Felix shows up at my side in jogging gear, comically fluorescent. “Let’s go exploring, man. You’ve been sitting around for almost two days. It’s not healthy,” he says, his fractured English making the h sound like a loogie being hocked up.

He leads me to the beach, which is frankly a little lame. Everyone brought their own towels and coolers and stuff, and there are no restaurants with lounge chairs and palapas set up along the beach, a staple of every Mexican beach I’ve been to. There should be unfettered beers and music, not the surreptitious pulls from Solo Cups I see here, the Bluetooth speakers.

“I just want to go to the restaurant,” I say, watching people brush sand off their belongings, parents trying to corral their sunburnt children.

“You came all the way here. I’m excited about the meal too, but there’s more to this place, don’t you think?”

I don’t say anything.

Eventually we head back to the restaurant. I regret it a little when I see that Emma’s not at the hostess stand because I liked how it felt to talk to her the other day. But I don’t regret it enough to go back out into the world. The new girl at the hostess stand gives me a strange look when I say I’ll wait three hours for my reserved table, which I guess is a reasonable reaction. I watch the servers go up to the kitchen window, watch the looks on people’s faces when they get their food, when they take their first bite.

Suddenly, I’m thinking about all I didn’t know about Felix’s life. What he ate at the Israeli restaurant, for example, the meal that made him want to come here.

“Endive salad with creamy yuzu dressing, followed by three-chili shrimp scampi,” Felix cuts in. “For dessert: white chocolate gelato with fresh pomegranate and a passionfruit drizzle.”

I sigh loudly, which is another tactic I’ve had to develop to stifle the urge to respond to him in public. Hallucination or ghost, I’m not sure whether I should strictly believe anything he says since he’s died. If they’re somehow his memories or just what I think his memories would sound like. Easier just to sigh.

The hours go by, surprisingly easy. I don’t have to talk to anyone, don’t have to interact with Dad’s business partners, don’t have to force jokes so that Mom and everyone else will believe I’m okay. I can just look at food, and people, and a world unlike the one I’ll eventually go back to. My normal life will consume me soon enough, so for now I want to dive into this. I will honor Felix and then cast him away. Then I’ll be okay.

Finally, the hostess calls my name and leads me to a table in the back, near a window looking out at the patio. If I tried, I could easily eavesdrop on half a dozen conversations around me. The hostess places a black leather menu on the table, says someone will be around shortly to take my order. I’m shocked I hadn’t thought to open a menu up until this point. It reads like a dream.

When I put the menu down, Felix is sitting in front of me in a tuxedo.

He conjures up tears to his eyes. “I can’t believe you brought me here. You’re such a good brother.”

“Shut up,” I mumble, pretending to take a sip of water so no one sees my lips move.

Felix holds his hands up in surrender. “Okay, okay, we won’t get emotional.” He opens a menu, though there’s only one on the table and it’s under my elbow. “Please tell me you got the sweetbreads for us.”

I look out at the patio. A full moon’s reflected in the water, and the other islands in the distance are impossibly easy to see through the darkness. “I got the sweetbreads,” I say, hating him for making me say it out loud, for knowing damn well that the sweetbreads are not for us.

He starts off on some story about his travels, and I just stare out the window until my food arrives, listening. It’s easy to forget myself. Andouille-spiced sweetbreads, pork belly ceviche as appetizers, something called Duck in a Jar for my entrée, a side order of squash poutine. The descriptions alone were a fantasy, and I was sure that there’d be no way the dishes could match up to my expectations. I was wrong.

Felix eats too. Twin plates show up when the server sets mine in front of me. Felix lays out his napkin across his lap and rubs his hands together like a cartoon villain planning his takeover.

He takes a bite of the duck breast and dips it in the sriracha au jus. “Que jalada,” he moans with pleasure, scoops out some more. Except I know there’s nothing there across the table from me. It’s just me eating. One meal, not two.

These bites are what I’m here for, I remind myself. I try to savor them instead of diluting them with my thoughts.

For dessert: dulce de leche fondant cake with banana-cardamom gelato and orange-zest white-chocolate chips. My brother eats a spoonful as slowly as he always did when he was alive. He used to eat desserts so glacially that he could never get ice cream in cones. They’d drip down his arm, half the scoop wasted on the sidewalk.

The gelato on his plate is pooling right now, but it’s a fucking lie. There is no gelato. This has been one of the best meals of my life, but it’s been a solitary one. My brother isn’t sitting in front of me. I’m alone in this restaurant, on this island. I came here to honor some unrealized dream of his based on a journal entry. A stupid journal entry, as if it could have told me what Felix would have done with one more day. As if he’d be here if he really could. As if this undoes anything, fixes anything.

“Hey,” I hear him say. Soft clink of his spoon hitting the plate. “I would be. I am.”

But I can’t bear the sight of him/not him. I never wanted him to come back. I never wanted him gone.

My breath starts to come quick and shallow. I can see Felix in the reflection of the window but somehow can’t see myself. The background noise of the restaurant, so manageable when I sat down, is suddenly building to a roar.

“How was everything?” My chipper server has the bill in her hand. If I hand her my credit card, sign my receipt, my little mission here is over.

I try to smile at her, but it’s just not happening. To keep from revealing myself as completely out of my mind, I manage to stammer out: “Bathroom?”

She points the way, and I speed-walk to the privacy of a stall as if I’m about to be sick. Inside, I take a seat, doubling over, trying to take deep breaths but failing to. It feels like the opposite is happening, like air is being squeezed out of my lungs. My hands are gripping at my knees, but I can’t even see my fingers doing it, just the little indents in the fabric where I know my fingers should be.