The Halo Effect

23

That night after Dulcie went to bed, I went into the kitchen. If I was going to help Elias figure out who might have had a reason to hurt Cleo, I was going to have to really study Cleo’s book, and to do that I was going to need help staying up. The strongest stimulant I’d indulge in was coffee. While I waited for the water in the kettle to boil, I measured out six tablespoons of espresso and poured them into the French press.

My kitchen was testament to my fantasy of being one of those women who could do it all. It looked like something you’d see in an issue of Martha Stewart Living. Stainless-steel stove with six burners, plus a double oven, a state-of-the-art refrigerator and dishwasher, also fronted in the same brushed silver. The countertops were black granite. The cabinets were glass and showed off two different sets of dishes and glasses-everyday thick white stoneware and an indulgent set of Limoges. Underneath the counters were more cabinets, but these were painted a glossy black to match the black-and-white-tiled floor. You would think I knew how to cook. You would think I baked pies and knew how to ice a cake and squeeze butter-cream rosettes out of a pastry bag. You might imagine huge turkeys, golden-brown and still tender, coming out of those ovens and being carved with one of the German knives from the butcher block sitting on the countertop. And the stuffing would be oyster-and-chestnut and the gravy would be homemade.

But I was only a dreamer in my own apartment. I wanted to bake and sew and cover walls with photographs hanging from grosgrain ribbons. I yearned to set the table with handpainted napkins and create centerpieces inspired by Japanese simplicity. But I was a fraud.

The water boiled and I poured it over the ground beans that I did not grind at home but bought at Starbucks. Fitting the filter into the glass beaker, I sat down at the marble-topped table on one of the French bistro chairs and waited for the muddy mess to brew.

My apartment was indicative of what happens when you grow up with a mother who feeds you TV dinners or canned soup and steals you away in the middle of the night and takes you on a road trip to hell and then dies before she ever makes it back home.

When I was eight, my father came and rescued me from the two-room walk-up on Avenue A, bringing me home to his luxurious apartment on East End Avenue in Manhattan. I’d only been a few miles away, but he hadn’t known it. He blamed himself for not finding me sooner. For not keeping me safer. But it wasn’t his fault. My mother took me when he wasn’t watching. She didn’t register me for school for that year we were gone. She didn’t ever venture uptown.

The only person we saw from our old life was Nina. My mother cleaned up when her friend came over and tried to act as if our new life was working out. Nina knew better, but she never knew how bad it was. No matter how far my mother fell, she was still a good actress.

That last day, when I found my mother, I called my father on the phone. And he called Nina to find out our address. I didn’t know it. They both arrived within fifteen minutes of each other.

After she died, my father took me back to the place I’d grown up in. My old housekeeper, Mary, was still there. I begged her that year to let me watch her cook. To stay in the kitchen. I suppose I yearned for something that I could only get from watching butter melt in a pan or smelling chicken fry or licking the bowl of brownie batter. But Mary was elderly and ornery and she cooked while I was at school and didn’t want me in her kitchen.

Eventually my father remarried, but Krista was not much better in the kitchen than my mother had been.

Longing to be the kind of mother I had not had, I invested in every gadget I read about in the pages of lifestyle magazines and looked at them lovingly. But when it came time to use these clever apparatuses, I was inept.

At twelve, Dulcie was a better cook than I would ever be. She loved to impress me with her skill, and have me taste and “ooh and aah.” She even tried to teach me.

My miniature little woman, who already could cook certain things without recipes, tried to show me the ropes that her grandmother, Mitch’s mother, had taught her. Sarah had handed down the time-honored traditions of women in the kitchen to her granddaughter. But it was something the two of them shared without me.

I still attempted adventures in this kitchen that if they did not lead to delicious dinners, at least led to laughing fits. We never went hungry, but that was only because we both learned to suffer through my pathetic attempts to be creative, or else my daughter took over.

The rest of the apartment was indicative of the same homebody yearnings. I had projects started but never finished in every room. Attempts at needlepoint, quilting, knitting, the materials to make my own frames, to stencil my own walls, to hook my own rugs.

What was it about homemaking that kept calling me back and enticing me? This time, I would think, I’ll be able to get the hang of it. So I couldn’t knit, but I’ll be able to learn to arrange my own flowers. If I can’t baste a turkey, I’ll be good at staining a wall.

But I wasn’t. Nothing ever turned out the way it did in the glossy pages of the magazines I pored over late at night while I watched the Food Channel and sipped burned hot chocolate made from the finest Valrhona the way the diva on TV said Angelina’s in Paris had been making it since the nineteenth century.

But after I filled a mug with steaming coffee, it wasn’t a magazine I opened. I had work to do. I pulled out Cleo’s manuscript. This was one thing I had started I would finish. Someone’s life might depend on it.