The Lost Recipe for Happiness (27 page)

THIRTY-THREE

E
lena felt overcome by nausea for several long minutes. Each time she tried to move, she was overwhelmed and threw up again, until there was absolutely nothing left in her stomach. Julian slipped into his jeans after he called the police, and he made the boy stay still—“You have no idea what else might be wrong with you”—while he found some clothes for Elena to put on. Shakily, she managed to shimmy into some heavyweight yoga pants and a sweatshirt. Given the amount of glass on the floor, she asked him to find her shoes, too.

“Was anyone with you?” Julian asked the kid.

“No. Just me.” He turned a little green when he looked downstairs. The smell of beer filled the room.

“Thank God.”

Elena had to pee. When Alvin trotted downstairs, she gingerly made her way to the bathroom, her body revving with adrenaline. The bathroom was a mess. As in the bedroom, the window had shattered, but the impact had also knocked loose some of the glass brick around the shower, and the door to the steam shower was shattered as well. She peed and brushed her teeth and looked at her face in the mirror. Behind her in the reflection was Isobel, and it had been so long since she’d seen her that Elena whirled.

She was gone. She looked back to the mirror. Still not there. Elena put her toothbrush back in the holder and realized she probably wouldn’t be sleeping here tonight.

Another home wrecked.

And today was their grand opening!
Fuck, fuck, fuck.

Irritably, she stomped back into the bedroom and glared at the boy, who lay on her bed looking sick. “Has it started to sink in yet?” she cried. “That you should be dead right now? You got thrown out of your car and you could have landed on the roof, or in a tree or drowned in the river. And where did you land? On my fucking
bed.
With me in it! On the day that my restaurant has it’s grand opening, you stupid little bastard!”

Julian touched her shoulder. “Come on, Elena. Let’s go downstairs. The EMTs are here.”

And she saw that they were, indeed, right there. A young man and a hard-looking woman with a stretcher, blinking at her. “Sorry,” she said, suddenly ashamed. “I’m just mad.”

They didn’t say anything, just came upstairs and moved by her and knelt next to the kid on the bed.

“Let’s get some of your things together, Elena,” he said, giving her a small carry-on bag she kept in the closet.

She looked at the dresser, lying on its side, and her underwear scattered out of one drawer and onto the floor, and she couldn’t even think of what she might need. Where would she go? Where would she live? “I really liked this place,” she said plaintively to Julian. “I hate this.”

“I know.” He gently took the bag from her and put it on the floor, then gathered up a handful of panties and bras and tossed them in. “What else? Which drawers have socks?”

Elena knelt and pulled open the drawers methodically, grabbed socks, T-shirts, sports bras for work because they absorbed sweat and let her move freely and also bound her a little more fully in the active environment. From the closet, she took her black jeans, her good boots, a pair of other jeans.

“That’s about it for clothes,” Julian said, pressing neatly folded jeans into one corner of the suitcase. “Toiletries?”

Robotically, Elena moved into the bathroom. Beneath the sink was a makeup bag and she filled it with her small cache of cosmetics—face lotion and cleansers and heavy-duty hand cream and bag balm for when the splits got worse in winter, and cotton gloves she slept in, and a cache of prescription pain pills of varying strengths and a brush. And her toothbrush.

“Come on,” he said. “The police are here, and then we can go get some breakfast.”

“Is he going to be okay, that boy?”

He rubbed her back. “Yeah. He’s fine, Elena. Scared. But fine.”

“That’s good,” she said, and swallowed back a weird swell of tears. “Let’s get this over with.”

After a shower at Julian’s house, Elena shook her head, wincing at Julian’s offer of food. She couldn’t even drink a cup of coffee yet, not until her stomach got over this—whatever it was.

In the meantime, she had to get out of here. Out of Julian’s house. She’d put her bags in the back of her car, had only brought in a change of clothes and her makeup bag. It might be hard to find a new place to rent at the moment, but she knew Patrick had a spare bedroom.

Carrying her cell phone to the snowy deck, she wrapped her scarf around her neck and blew a soft foggy cloud into the sharp morning.

“Good morning, Chef Alvarez,” he answered in a round, orange voice, all juicy happiness. “Are you ready for your big day?”

“Hello, Prince Patrick. I am
so
ready. How about you?”

“Yes, yes, yes.” He muffled the receiver and spoke to someone in the room with him. A chuckle. She thought she recognized Ivan’s low drum voice, and that made the whole reality of what she was thinking—that she’d just go stay with Patrick in his two-bedroom house—completely unthinkable. Not with a love affair going on between her sous chef and her best friend.

She shuddered faintly, thinking of the night she’d glimpsed Ivan licking Patrick’s face, his long fingers curling up around his skull, as if he were getting ready to devour him, one long lap at a time. No. Not when she had to look at them both at work all day.

“Ivan says hello,” Patrick said. “And asks what time you’ll be getting in this morning.”

“Well,” Elena said, improvising madly, “that’s why I’m calling, actually. There’s been an—uh—incident and I’m running behind. I need Ivan to get over there and make sure the kitchen staff is there and functioning. I called a little while ago and nobody answered.”

Patrick repeated her request, then said, “He said it’s still early, really, but he’ll head over in just a little while.”

“Thanks.”

“What incident, Elena? Are you okay?”

She took a breath, feeling a thick, primeval shudder nudge her bowels, the bottom of her stomach again. “Yeah. My condo is gone, though. Some kid drove into it, right through the front window.”

“No way!”

“Bizarre, huh?”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, Alvin’s fine. Ju—we’re all fine,” she said. “The kid isn’t even hurt badly, because he was thrown over the railing of the loft onto the bed.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No,” she said, crossing her arms. A slithering feeling ran down her back, settled into her hip. She shook her shoulders, trying to loosen it all, but the cold was making her hunch. “Look, I’ll give you the rest of the details later. I’ve got to get some more stuff and make sure everything—that I—” She took a breath. “I’m freezing, Patrick, my love. I’ll talk to you later, okay?”

“Elena, are you okay, honey?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Really. I’m fine. See you in a couple of hours. Call me if there are any problems.”

She went back inside, letting go of her breath. Julian was typing on his laptop at the kitchen counter, looking slightly disheveled and ordinary with his black horn-rimmed glasses and a heathery blue long-sleeved T-shirt. He looked both ordinary and not quite—like a record executive maybe, or the publisher of some alternative, hip publication, or maybe a hotshot doctor that all the nurses lusted for secretly. He looked like a husband, with his flat wrists brushed with black hair, and his focus so intently on the screen, and a cup of coffee sitting at his elbow.

Fuck,
she thought, emphatically.
I cannot stay here. I cannot start wanting
this.

Tossing her hair out of her eyes, she marched across the room and made a show of sipping her coffee. “I’m going to head over to the apartment and see if they’ll let me get some of my kitchen stuff,” she said. “I guess I’ll see you at the restaurant later, right?”

He looked at her without speaking for a moment, his jaw newly shaved. “Have you eaten?”

She waved a hand. “Too nervous about the grand opening. I’m sure I’ll be nibbling all day.”

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

It was at least the twelfth time he’d asked her. Annoyance snapped at the back of her neck. “Yes,” she growled. “I’m pissed off at losing my home and worried about finding a new place on the opening day of ski season and nervous that we’re surely going to attract some reviewers tonight, but I’m fine over the fucking accident, okay?”

He didn’t wince. “Do you know how many times you’ve said ‘fuck’ this morning?”

She rolled her eyes, picked up her keys. “I’ll see you later.”

He clamped a hand over her wrist. “You can stay here, you know.”

Elena bowed her head, suddenly afraid she might cry and he would see it, and she just couldn’t stand that right now. “Thank you, but no.” As gently and firmly as she could, she yanked her hand away and headed for the door. Sitting on the top step, pale and thin as smoke, was Isobel, her eyes wide and solemn. Elena ignored her and headed into the cold winter morning. She had work to do, and she’d left her knives at the apartment.

At the condo, there was still a lot of commotion, of course. The car had been hauled out, and a construction crew was stacking and organizing the debris. “I just need to get to my kitchen,” she said to a burly man who seemed to be in charge. “I’m a chef, and my knives are in there.”

He lifted a finger, signaling her to wait, and listened to a walkie-talkie. “How many?” he barked, his Irish eyes the color of the mountains over cheeks that were red from anger or cold or both. “When did it happen?”

He listened and swore. “Ah, goddamn it. Who do these guys think they’re kidding? This whole goddamned county is going to go to hell. It’s the first goddamned day of the season!” He acted as if he was going to lob the device toward the ditch, and halted just in time. “Right, Walter. Get back to me when you get the numbers.” Shaking his head, he clicked it off and looked at her. “Sorry, sweetheart. What did you say?”

“I live here—lived here. I’m a chef and need to get some things from the kitchen.”

“What a deal, huh?” He looked at the yawning hole in the condo. “That was one lucky kid. Let me get somebody to go inside with you.” With a burly arm, he gestured at a worker in a hard hat. “Harry!”

Harry loped over. “Take her inside to the kitchen through the back so she can get her stuff. And who do you know who can come to work tomorrow? We got labor troubles.”

“I’ll give it some thought.”

The back of the condo was fine. Elena pushed open the gate and went in through the patio door. Her knives were in a bundle on the counter, and she picked them up protectively, and quickly filled a small box with a few other things—her stained notebook of recipes, her favorite bowl. Glancing over her shoulder, she didn’t see Harry anywhere, and rushed over to the living room to see if she could grab her grandmother’s geranium. It had lived through a dozen moves, being neglected by Mia and ignored by others, and being smuggled into three countries. Surely a little car wreck couldn’t do any damage. If she had so much as a leaf, she could propagate it.

But it wasn’t there. It had sat in front of the picture window, the window that was now completely gone. The car had pulverized the entire area just inside the condo, and whatever had been left had been dragged out when the tow truck hauled the car out. She looked at the floor carefully. One leaf. Just one.

Nothing. The pot was gone, though she saw shards of the red clay. There was a scattering of dirt. And there—she dove for it. But not even she could pretend this leaf would survive. It had been crushed to nothing.

“Oh, grow up,” she said aloud. “Go to work.”

“Ma’am?” said Harry from the door. “You ought not to be in there. The structure is unsound.”

Elena nodded, and stepped over some shattered wood left from her sideboard. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

As she pulled into the parking lot of the Orange Bear, she took a moment to breathe. She felt hollowed out, as if all of her organs and feelings had been sucked from her body.

But she was absolutely not going to let this freak accident interfere with what was a hugely important day in her life. Pulling on her gloves and twisting a scarf around her throat, she carried the box of kitchen things up to the back door.