The Lost Recipe for Happiness (34 page)

“Just read it,” he said. “Give me a chance.”

Afraid she’d fall apart right there, Elena yanked open the door. “I’ll call you when I get back.”

He leapt out of the car and came around. In the bright cold, in front of God and everyone, he said, “I love you, Elena.”

She nodded, and ducked away, tucking the script under her arm. She knew she was being cold. She heard Patrick and Mia and everyone else telling her to let her guard down. But it was her guard that had held her together.

This one time, though, she turned around and made her lurching way back to him. “I’ll read it,” she said. “But I am who I am, too.”

“I get that.”

It was a wildly expensive but fairly short commuter flight to Santa Fe, bumpy and probably dangerous. Elena recognized a famous actress behind giant sunglasses, and in the front of the plane was an Arab businessman in a five-thousand-dollar suit. He wore heady cologne.

Elena wore her sunglasses as well, to cover the ravaged swollenness of her eyes. She was exhausted, emotionally, physically, and mentally, but this was her one and only day off, and she didn’t have any time to waste. She didn’t read the script, not yet. It sat in her lap, burning hot, but she didn’t let herself think, a trick that had worked for her for twenty years, the only way she’d found to cope with her losses.
Look forward, never back.

The propellers were very loud, and she leaned against the window and watched the mountains zigzagging away beneath the plane, thickly coated in white. Here was a land where you could still find isolation if you wanted it—there was a single house, with a plume of smoke drifting into the sky, so still it looked as if it had been painted there. There were tiny ribbons of road in places, and sudden, open vastness of valleys that stretched for miles and miles and miles between ridges of mountains. It was rugged, dramatically beautiful country, the blues and whites so calming. The beauty gave her rest. She dozed.

The plane landed at the tiny Santa Fe airport, and Elena went to the ladies’ room to wash her face. She looked a little better than she had this morning, the mottled marks of heavy weeping faded, but she still looked tired and wan. She washed her face in cold, cold water, feeling it wake her up a lot, and then, from her purse, she fished out a makeup bag and repaired the damage as well as she could. A little cover to hide the dark circles, some mascara to make her look like she cared about herself, a touch of blush to cover the sallowness.

Every bone in her body hurt, and that pain showed. It was turning her into an old woman. Taking a breath, she squared her shoulders, then combed her hair and marched out to rent a car and drove into Santa Fe proper for breakfast. She was starving.

It had been a long time since she’d been in the sophisticated little town where she had spent so much of her time as a kitchen slave, learning the basics of a kitchen, the arrangements and the hierarchy and the toughness she’d need. It came easily to her. She worked hard, harder than anyone, because she had no other life, and only this chance. She never complained. She spoke Spanish. She knew food and understood it. When the male quadrant tried to intimidate her, she donned an icy aplomb and gave back as good as she got, winning their respect.

To stretch out her spine and hip, she walked around the still-quiet plaza and surrounding side streets, ambling by the places she’d worked. Some were still there. Some were gone, replaced by some other up-to-the minute hot spot.

The wintertime sun was warm, and the walking eased her body, and she circled the shops around the plaza peacefully, stopping happily in a drugstore she’d frequented to buy a postcard, and ducking beneath the roofed and ancient porches. Indians set up their wares along the Palace of the Governors. A woman in her sixties with dreadlocks and sandals walked by, bracelets by the thousands weighing down her skinny wrists. A pair of homeless people, young, unidentifiably male or female, smoked on a bench in the center. Not many others on a January Monday.

She ducked into the Plaza Café for a breakfast to fortify herself, and was slammed, hard, by the heady scent of chile and pork and eggs, all made the New Mexico way. She heard the sound of her accents, her home, the sound of Spanish and Indian layered over English, and stared, stunned and hungry, at the shapes of faces she had missed, the broad cheekbones and particular grins. Dark-skinned men with long hair falling down their backs, clad in worn jeans and boots and checkered shirts, sat next to a knot of locals in their sixties, speaking ancient, colonial Spanish, next to a well-tended Anglo couple in their sixties dressed in golf casual. The wife wore a huge yellow diamond on her finger.

Elena felt dizzy and pulled the sunglasses off her face, breathing in. “You okay, honey?” the hostess said, coming over. She had black hair worn in a style not worn by anyone but old Mexican or Italian women of a certain age, curled tight to the head, neatly done by the beauty parlor every week.

“I will be,” she said in Spanish, “when I’ve had a good breakfast of my own kind of food.”

The woman grinned and replied in kind. “You been away, then, huh?”

“Long
time,” Elena said, settling into a seat by the wall, with a view of the restaurant all around her. She ate carnitas and blue corn tortillas and drank two big mugs of coffee with sugar and cream, letting the sound of home wash over her like Chinook winds, restorative and warm. The Spanish, the Indians, the Anglos. The smell of onions, the bustle of glasses and silverware clanking.

She sat a long time, feeling lost pieces of herself thawing, flowing back into place. She watched a trio of Indian men with thin long legs and barrel chests rib each other and the waitress and the busboy. The table of Mexican couples, exceedingly well tended, as clean and pressed as fresh laundry, who had obviously been meeting every Monday for a long, long time, maybe decades, talked about somebody’s funeral in a cheerful way. The CEO and his I-don’t do-casual wife paid with an American Express card. One of the Indian guys pulled a wad of crumpled bills from his pocket and counted out the ones, smoothing each one as he laughed over something one of the guys said to him.

In her stunned and exhausted state, she could make no sense of the well-being that flooded her, the feeling of alignment that fortified her for what lay ahead. But she didn’t have to make sense of anything. She just had to take one step and then another. She felt oddly disconnected, as if some fake front person had taken over, or maybe her ghosts, and she was just along for the ride.

The next step was climbing into her car and driving north. She took it.

FORTY-TWO

C
ARNITAS

MARINADE

Juice from two fresh limes

1 T lime zest

1 tsp fresh ground pepper

1–2 garlic cloves, peeled and whole

1 cup water

MEAT

2 lbs. pork butt

2
¹
/
₂
lbs. lard

¹
/
₂
cup water

1 large onion, cut into quarters

2 garlic cloves, slivered

1 T ground cumin

1 tsp salt

1 tsp black pepper

3 long strips lime peel

2–3 New Mexico green chiles, roasted, peeled, and cut into strips Water

MARINADE:
Mix all the ingredients except the water in a glass bowl. Put the meat in the bowl and add water to cover meat lightly. Marinate for 2 hours or overnight.

MEAT:
When ready to cook, pour off the marinade. Place the lard and water in a deep heavy pan like a cast-iron Dutch oven and add the onions, garlic, and spices. Warm over medium heat until the lard is melted, then add lime peel and the meat. Reduce heat to medium low and let the meat simmer until it is stewed through, but not browned. Take out the meat and skim the onion and garlic from the fat, then replace the meat, turn up the heat to medium high and let the outside get nicely browned and crispy, about 15 minutes.

Serve with fresh cilantro, pico de gallo, lime wedges, avocados, grilled onions, and, of course, fresh tortillas.

FORTY-THREE

I
t was a blustery day, with wind scudding in blasts over the road. A tumbleweed the size of a tractor tire danced and bounced along the length of a fence. A plastic grocery bag swooped and sailed on a current, then fell abruptly to the ground. Elena felt the gusts against the side of the car, bumping her first to the left, then to the right. Correcting for the wind, she would have to correct again when it stopped.

“I hate wind!” she cried aloud. Then more quietly, “Hate it.”

Espanola had grown a little since the last time she was there, but not very much. A Wal-Mart had sprouted in what used to be a field, and the main drag now boasted a couple of fast-food chains, but mostly it was the same weary-looking gas stations and liquor stores and farm stands now closed for the season, everything all the more bleak in January, when the color was leached from the grass, and the sky wore a thick sweater of eggplant clouds.

Once she could have named nearly everyone in town, Spanish, Indian, or Anglo. She would have known the cousins of cousins and who loved who and what they did on Saturday nights and whose grandma was sick. At any given function, from county fair to church potluck, she would be related to at least a half-dozen people, often many more.

After the accident and her long, long hospital stay, she’d come home for a short period, but by then, the town, her family, everyone related to the accident victims, had moved on. Elena, hobbled and vividly scarred, was a painful reminder of what they had lost. Conversations died when she entered a shop. Everyone was excruciatingly polite. Even her family seemed like strangers, so solicitous and focused; they didn’t seem to know what to do with their eyes when she sat with them. It was as if she were a giant, life-sucking shadow, and no one could be happy while she was in the room.

Her mother wept when she left for a job in Santa Fe after only a few weeks home. “There’s work here,” she said. “Stay and Uncle Glen will help you find work in a restaurant if that’s what you want.”

But you couldn’t go back in time. Elena had to move forward.

Each time she returned, never for more than two days, usually only one, she felt as if she were driving under a heavy rock of emotion that squeezed all the life out of her. It was hard to get a full breath in Espanola, and today was no different. She felt as if there was some curse hanging over her, a spell with a ticking clock—if she stayed longer than forty-eight hours, the clock would run out and something terrible would happen.

Her mother’s house was down a dirt road, a frame house painted white, with faded green trim. An elm stood sentry over the small, neat square of lawn, carefully enclosed by a chain-link fence covered all summer by sweet peas. Elena parked. A black and white dog, fluffy and friendly, rushed to the fence to bark a welcome. For a moment, Elena was startled—her mother had raised enough children, she always said, what would she want with a dog?

And yet, that was undeniably Maria Elena’s ’88 Buick parked precisely under a fiberglass carport. It probably had all of thirty thousand miles on it. Mama drove it to mass and the grocery store.

As Elena got out of the rental, the dog sat down expectantly, black button eyes and soft curly fur, as adorable as a toddler in mittens.

“Hey, you. What’s your name?” she said, chuckling. “Is it okay if I come in?”

The dog barked politely in return. Shifted foot to foot and waited as Elena came up the walk, reached over the gate, and petted its head. “You are adorable!” She opened the gate and squatted down to scratch the wiggly, ecstatic creature.

“Who’s there?” said a voice, and Elena straightened. A figure came out onto the porch, a very, very old woman in a flowered blouse and neat blue slacks. Elena’s heart caught. Her grandmother’s hair was completely white, wispily pulled into a long braid that hung over one frail shoulder. Her hands were misshapen, twisted with arthritis. She wore giant, very dark sunglasses—she had macular degeneration and couldn’t see very well.

“It’s me, Mama,” she said, coming closer. “Elena.”

“My daughter?” the old woman said, peering, and Elena realized she couldn’t see her. With a pang, she rushed forward and put her hands out, taking her grandmother’s cool, veiny hands into her own to kiss them, then raised them to her face. “Yes,” she said, “your daughter Elena.”

The elder Elena made a tiny noise and began to cry. “Oh,
m’ija
! Oh, I am so glad to see you!”

“Let’s go inside, Mama. I brought doughnuts. You want some?”

“Sure I do! Let’s go have some coffee, too! Did you meet my little dog? That’s Henry. He’s such a good boy. He sleeps with me and everything, can you believe it? Come on, Henry.”

“I have a dog, too,” Elena said. “Alvin. He sleeps with me. Or, well, he did. He sleeps with a young woman I know. She lives with me.”

Mama settled Elena into a chair. “Tell me everything.”

Sitting in the kitchen of her childhood, still painted a cheerful yellow, the table covered with an oilcloth that was probably as old as she was, Elena took the dog on her lap, feeling the terror and sorrow fly away from her. Here in her mama’s kitchen, she was safe. This was where she had learned to cook. In this tiny room with its tiny stove and deep sinks, with this tiny woman.

Safe.

When they’d eaten and gossiped and laughed over the shenanigans of the dog, Maria Elena finally said, “Tell me why you came today,
m’ija.”

“Mom, I need to go to the place where we were in the accident. I don’t think I can go by myself. Will you come with me?”

Mama didn’t even hesitate. She nodded. “Sure. We can take Henry, too. He’ll like it.” For a minute, Maria Elena sat in the chair with her hands folded in her lap, peering at her daughter. “You sure? You got sick last time.”

“I’m sure. I need to—” She paused. “Say goodbye.”

Maria Elena nodded, patted her hand. “It’s about time.”

The night they wrecked, Elena, Isobel, Edwin, Penny, and Albert had gone to see a movie. Isobel smuggled in a bottle of rum she stole from somewhere, and Elena drank some of it, but not very much because she was pregnant and didn’t want to hurt the baby. Edwin promised to drive them home and left it alone. Penny and Albert poured some into their Cokes.

After the movie, Elena was very sick to her stomach and curled up in the back seat. Albert, who worshipped Edwin, sat in the front passenger seat, scorning his seat belt. Isobel and Penny got in the back with Elena.

Twenty years later, on a bright January day, Elena and her mother drove down the narrow road toward the site. It wasn’t hard to find. It was on a narrow strip of road leading east from Espanola into the mountains, curving and dangerous and utterly ordinary. She drove beneath the long stands of cottonwoods that grew along the road, bare now, but in the summer, this was a deep tunnel of shade. The trees were nourished by the water in the acequia that ran along the road, carrying irrigation water to the farmers who grew melons and chiles and tomatoes in the sunny fields.

There was a small café at a junction, and Elena parked the rental car there. A dog trotted along on an errand, skinny and cheerful, and overhead, a magpie squawked, then lifted off, showing off his black and white splendor.

Elena turned off the car. Mama, holding Henry on her lap, said, “You go. I’ll stay right here and wait.”

Elena nodded. Zipping up her jacket, she got out. The quiet stunned her. The only sound was a thin finger of wind rattling leaves from last season that clung to the bare branches of cottonwood trees.

She headed up the road a little way. It wasn’t far. Four crosses marked it, two very well tended, one less so, one nearly completely faded now. Clusters of pink plastic carnations were twisted around the base of one wooden cross, painted white. Names had been varnished into each one, with dates and other little markers. Elena stepped between the prongs of the barbed-wire fence alongside the acequia, then gathered her aching parts and jumped over the ditch to an enormous, old cottonwood tree.

At shoulder height, a deep gouge in the shape of an uneven star showed in the creasing of bark, and she put her fingers to it. Her palm fit it exactly. Here the car had hit and come apart, exploding like a rocket into a dozen pieces. Her brother had told Elena it took days to find all the pieces.

So many years, so many many many years, she had blocked this moment. Now she reached back trying to bring it forth. Beneath her hand the tree was a living being, pulsing with sap drawn from the earth. It had memories. Surely it could give forth the violence of that single, horrific moment so many years ago.

But the air remained undisturbed. Elena’s memory offered nothing but the same things she’d thought of a thousand times, that single, clear moment when they went airborne, when they sailed as if in an airplane, high into the night sky. She saw stars and held on to the edge of the seat. There wasn’t time to be horrified, only curious, and slightly protective. She clung to the door handle, watching the sky and branches entwine, and then there was a huge explosion of noise.

There was the gap. She was flung from the car and landed in the ditch. The next thing she could remember was the depth of silence, the only sound the tick-tick-tick of cooling metal. Her body and mind were strangely separate, as if her head was in some entirely different location than her arms and legs. She could feel, far away, the cold on her feet, and across her belly was the sinuous movement of water, but she couldn’t seem to communicate with any part of her body to change the circumstances. She drifted. She thought perhaps she might be dead.

And yet, there was a woman singing to her, brushing her hair from her face—La Llorona, the weeping woman, tending Elena until someone could come.

And after a time, there was Isobel, sitting next to her. “I couldn’t find you at first,” she said, and took Elena’s hand. “There’s a man coming. Hang on. He had to go back and call an ambulance.”

Elena tried to speak and could not. La Llorona stroked her forehead and hummed. She patted cool mud into the bleeding cuts on her back and Elena did not mind. Her sister sang an old song that one of their brothers liked to play on his guitar, about a man who chased his wife into heaven to kill her and her lover a second time.

“Where’s Edwin?” Elena asked, or thought she did, but no one answered. There was no sound at all except that soft, gleefully mournful tune. High, high in the darkness, four stars shot across the sky, and the next thing Elena knew there was a man bending over her, swearing in Spanish.

So long ago, Elena thought. Her spine felt watery and she bent to press her forehead against the tree.

After a time, she sensed the presence of her sister.

Isobel stood nearby. “It looks different in the day,” she said, looking around. In the bright noon light, her braided hair had a sheen like a waxed floor. “None of us knew a single thing. It was so fast. It made it hard for us to know what happened.”

In the middle distance, where the acequia bent toward the fields to the south, there were four other figures. Waiting, Elena knew. There was Edwin with his fall of shoe-black hair, and Albert and Penny, as chubby as always. A little girl, watery, holding Edwin’s hand. Elena found herself sinking to her knees, in the cool mud that saved her life.

There in the dark, she’d held on to her sister’s hand with all her might. “Don’t leave me alone, Isobel!” she had cried.

“I won’t leave you,” Isobel had promised.

And she had not.

“Why did all of you die and I didn’t?” Elena asked now.

“It wasn’t your day,” Isobel said simply.

“It shouldn’t have been yours.”

Isobel smiled softly. She bent and kissed Elena’s head, right at the part, and tears like a volcano gushed up through Elena’s esophagus. “I have to go now, Elena.”

“Please,” she said, and held out a hand. “I don’t want to be alone!”

“You aren’t alone anymore.” She moved away on strong sturdy legs, wearing the striped shirt she’d borrowed from Elena’s closet that night. Elena watched them through a wavery glaze of tears, the family that had stayed with her until she found her own—brothers in Patrick and in Ivan, a sister in Mia, a daughter in Portia. And her mother, waiting there in the car.

And Julian.

Julian.

Elena bent her head to the earth and let her grief pour out, her sacred tears watering the ground. She wept and wept and wept, all the tears she’d been holding for a lifetime. Then, when she was finished, she lay on the ground and released it all to the earth. To the heavens.

When she could breathe again, she stood and brushed herself off. At the line of crosses, she paused and tidied it up, plucked away a stray weed, and straightened the flowers, then went back to the car.

Maria Elena had fallen asleep with her head against the glass, her dog curled in her lap. With a vast tenderness, Elena bent and kissed her cheek. “I love you, Mama,” she said. “I’m sorry I have stayed away so long.”

Maria Elena opened her eyes, and for a long moment, she blinked in confusion. “Elena? I wasn’t dreaming?”