The Lost Recipe for Happiness - By Barbara O'Neal Page 0,83
eyes were black as coal.” She paused. Like yours.
“Go on.”
“We grew up discovering things about each other. He was going to go into an apprenticeship with an electrician out of Santa Fe, building all these fancy houses. He was supposed to start the week after the accident.” Her chest ached faintly. “He and my sister Isobel were on the left side of the car. They were both decapitated.” She thought of the ditch, of Isobel’s hand in hers. Of Edwin cracking jokes in the dark. “They say it takes twelve seconds for your brain to die when your head is cut off. That’s what I can’t think about very much. I hate to think of them having any consciousness of that.”
He blanched, handing back the photo. “Is that Isobel?” he asked, pointing to the picture of Isobel wearing the tiara.
She nodded. “Yep. When I came to live with the family, she was the one who made room for me. She shared her bed. She shared her mother. She was just happy to have a sister so close in age to her. It was like finding my twin. Like we should have known each other from birth.”
“Mischievous,” he said.
“Very.” Elena took the photo. “I laid in the ditch for almost two hours. I thought Isobel was with me. I thought she was holding my hand. So, when I woke up in the hospital, weeks and weeks later, I didn’t believe them that she was dead.”
“Elena, I’m so sorry that happened to you.”
She nodded. “Me too. But I’m alive. I have to believe there’s a reason.”
“Do you know what it is?”
“No,” she said simply, and put the picture back on the altar. A ghostly hand nipped a piece of cake. She wondered if Julian noticed.
But he was stricken and airless, and Elena thought of his mother. “Now you, Julian.” She sat down on the couch and patted the spot beside her. “Tell me about your mother.”
He stood in the middle of the room, looking at her. “What should I say?”
“How old were you when she was murdered?”
He looked as if the light bled from his body, leaving him gray. “Twelve.”
Elena said, “Come sit down, Julian, and tell me about your mother. Then we’ll make something for her and put it on the altar.”
He seemed suddenly to lose all supports in his body, and slumped to sit on the couch, his limbs falling forward, his head with the thickness of black glossy hair tumbling forward around his brow. “I was twelve,” he said again. “She went to the grocery store and never came back. Two men saw her in a parking lot and grabbed her as she headed for her car. She had groceries in the cart, you know. Eggs, milk, flour, apples. Just stuff. Capt’n Crunch.”
Elena folded her hands in her lap. Waited.
“They raped her and killed her, and then dumped her body in a field.” He raised a face wiped clean of expression. “Some boys on bikes found her naked and dead. They were close to my age.” His voice was hushed as he added, “I hated that, so much, that those boys saw her naked. It bothered me for months.”
She thought of his movies, the slasher images. Knives. Broken glass. “How terrible, Julian. I’m so sorry.”
He took her hand and clasped it between both of his, pulled her arm across his lap. “My dad never got over it.”
“Well, how could you, really?”
“I guess. But how does it help to stop living?” He spread her palm open, touched the heart of it with his fingers, brushing and brushing, touching the pads beneath each finger, the little marks and scars and dried-open wounds at the tips of nearly every finger. “Don’t these hurt?” he asked.
“Sometimes.”
He lightly stroked the open spot on her index finger then raised her hand without looking at her, and pressed his mouth to her palm. For a moment, Elena hardly knew how to respond. The wet clasp of his tongue, his lips, jolted right up her arm, blistered through her body.
This.
Now.
She let him kiss her fingers, one at a time. Let him press his mouth to her palm, to each small pad beneath each digit, and sweep his tongue over the wounds. It tickled and sizzled and she let him just do what he would, pressing his mouth to her wrist. She spread her fingers on his cheek, feeling the pockmarks from long ago, the little prickles of a missed patch of beard. Beneath the pad of her