She inhales, releases, then says, “Is it normal for a guy you’re kind of chatting to and getting to know… I mean, is it weird that he asks about your friend a lot? Like too much?”
Ah, sí. “Not only weird, it’s what we call a red flag at home.”
“Same here.”
I face her directly. “I think you know the answer.”
Her next bite leaves a dab of butter on her chin. She wipes it clean. “So, yeah. Will. I’m afraid he’s been using me to get close to Jules. Maybe to slide into our group for Roth’s sake. Not mine.”
My fifteen-year-old self aches for her. I look inside my heart, at my own truth. “Anyone who’s lucky enough to hang with you needs to be all about you. You know, more thoughtful.” I sip coffee and bite off more than flaky pastry. “Like, say, Gordon.”
“Gordon?” She whips around with a look as blank as an English morning sky. “Gordon?” She actually laughs. “God, no. I’ve known him since I was in nappies. And he’s a good mate and all. But not more.” She shakes her head to seal it. “Could you imagine…”
I could, but I am no one’s forceful matchmaker. “Okay, but whoever it is needs to make you to feel the most special.”
“Now that, I’d like.”
“And you’ll have it. But really, there’s no rush. Enjoy the friends you have now.”
“I do have friends. But sometimes they just go along with things. So, if your sister heard about a guy like Will doing that to you, she’d probably get on you?”
I laugh, shaking my head. “So, so much.”
“I was thinking, that time you told me about your prom. I’d like to have someone who’d go into my room, and not Orion. Someone who’d clear my space of a boy who’d hurt me. Clear out all the things before I saw them.”
“I think Jules would do that if you’d let her.”
“True. She’d throw out all sorts of shit from my window. Then she’d write a rager of a song about it.”
“The ragiest.”
We laugh, and then Flora whispers into the belly of her cup, “You’d be good at that too. Not the song part. All the other parts.”
The oven timer chimes over my heart-ping. “Your turn.”
Flora jumps up for the oven mitt. “Eww! What the devil?” she cries after shoving her hand inside. She pulls out a frothy white mess and licks her fingers. “Whipped cream?”
I’m already at the oven, killing the heat and using a thick towel to remove the pan.
Flora dashes to the sink. “Someone booby-trapped our oven mitts?”
A twitchy noise whips our heads to the swing door. It’s cracked open, a patch of red hair curling around the frame. The door releases and hasty footsteps slap.
“Gordon!” we yell in unison.
Flora’s brows drop as she points to the fridge. “He was in there twice for one dish of pudding?” She lunges for the stainless-steel door and pulls out a spray can of whipped cream. Holds it up.
I take the can, snarling. “I don’t know what’s worse, his prank and sneaking back around to spy on us, or that he dared to bring this processed, fake shit into my kitchen.”
Our faces volley from the can to scheming expressions.
“I know his hiding spot. He’s already out the front door, trust me,” Flora says.
I plunk the can into her hands before we shoot onto the patio. “He has a head start, but we’re smarter.”
Flora’s grin, her sunshine hair after the rain. “He’s gonna look amazing in white.” We run St. Cross like my cousins stealing bases.
29
Instead of Millie, we take Orion’s dad’s Volkswagen to visit his mother. We’ve piled backpacks and insulated totes onto the vintage motorbike many times. But Millie wasn’t built to carry a huge white bakery box.
I bring scones, strawberry empanadas, and cheese pastelitos for the staff, fortifying myself with the lidded box like a makeshift shield. Isn’t this what I always do? Hide behind bread and baking?
It’s not that I don’t want to come to Elmwood House. I want this crucial piece of Orion Maxwell. I want to see the part of his heart that lives down one of these blue painted corridors.
“Sara,” Orion says to a receptionist behind the welcome desk. “My friend Lila made treats for everyone.”
While the grateful clerk sends Orion to the manager’s office to grab some paperwork, the staff swarms like humans usually do around sugar. Nurses appear, followed by a couple of medics and maintenance workers.
Waiting in this reception room with its potted plants and periwinkle wallpaper, I watch as family members are reunited by long-awaited visits, and once again separated by departures that come too soon. My heart tightens as one woman wipes away tears as she leaves.
But she can come back again. I can’t stop the thought. I will never visit Abuela in a home like this.
Recipe for a Funeral
From the Kitchen of Lila Reyes
Ingredients: One grieving family. One coffin (it must be white like flour and sugar). One cathedral. One white apron. One abuela, gone, dressed in her favorite blue vestido.
Preparation: Sit between your boyfriend and best friend as they try to hold you upright in the pew. Clutch a white apron tightly on your lap. Watch your parents weeping one row ahead, and your sister leaning on your mother’s shoulder. Look back once over the massive cathedral, marveling at the crowd that came for her.
*Leave out actually seeing your abuela laid out so lovingly in the white coffin. She is not there. Instead, cry, kneeling during the private viewing with your eyes secretly pressed closed.
Cooking temp: 100 degrees Fahrenheit. The coldest your oven goes.
Months later, no one knows that I never saw Abuela in her blue dress that March day. Is there some ancient Cuban mourning code I’d broken with this behavior? Probably. But I didn’t care. For me, she had to rest where I could hold her forever, a heart-home warm and worthy of her. I decided to leave her where I found her. I left her where she found me as a toddler, at her feet with a clanging set of measuring spoons. I left her where she grew me. No, not a white coffin. And not a long-term care facility. I left my abuelita in the kitchen.
“Lila?” Orion’s voice brings me back to this home, and this day. “Everything okay?”
I nod. The sweet concern in his eyes and his palm curled around my shoulder make it true.
I fortify myself with his hand threaded into mine as we enter the wide hallway. Evelyn Maxwell, the sign at her door reads. Before we enter, Orion takes a moment inside himself. He looks down and away and I wonder if he does this every time. Only a blink or two before he’s back with a soft smile. “Don’t be sad. I mean, for me.”
“Okay,” I promise. Pity, sadness, and grief are not what our visit is about and not what he needs from me.
A nurse in green scrubs exits before we enter. She types into a tablet then says, “Orion. Good afternoon, then. I’m headed to reception. Heard there’s pastries.”
He introduces me, the pastry chef, to Kelly and we learn his mom has just eaten an early supper and she’ll go out to the garden after we leave.
Inside the cozy room, impressionist artwork hangs from pale green walls and a window with floral curtains looks out into a courtyard. A wall-mounted TV is on, but the sound’s muted. Then my eyes fall onto the neat single bed and a mother.
“Hello, beautiful,” Orion says to the blond in a pink long-sleeved top. Someone has colored her lips with tinted balm.
She moves, shifting and stirring, but doesn’t look at me or even her own son. We pull up two side chairs. He sits closest and reaches out.
“I always hold her hands or touch her face,” he tells me. Then, straight into the blue eyes they share. “Mum, I’ve brought Lila today. The girl from Miami I’ve been telling you about. And she made quite the stir at reception, bringing treats for everyone. I really wanted you to meet her.”
My heart balloons and he’s right, sadness isn’t the biggest emotion I want to feel. The room
is full of love and quiet acceptance. Orion tells stories, bringing life here, pulling bright pieces of it from himself, from me, from music and motorbikes and friends. He pours living into her and fills her with a world she can’t fill herself with anymore.
“Did you tell her about the batter bowl incident?” I ask.
“That same week. And how you got after me—God, your face.” He smiles. “Figured she should know about that.”
He slips into more updates about taking me to see my first castle and us romping around London. A few times, his mother mumbles or nods randomly. Orion notes and savors these sparks of reaction before moving on to more adventurous tales. Is this the room where my storyteller was born?
Soon, I feel comfortable enough to join in. “Flora’s been learning to make bread. She loves kneading it the best because she gets to boss the dough around,” I say, then I tell her more about how proud she should be of her daughter. No matter what, every mom likes to hear that. “And Orion’s the best at knowing when you need a cup of tea or a really big hug. Well, it would actually take me until bedtime to tell you all the things he’s the best at.”
But as our visit lengthens and the sunlight thins, the world between Lila Reyes and Evelyn Maxwell changes. I find myself drifting then falling into full Spanish, letting myself tell Orion’s mother things I can barely tell myself. Los secretos. She gets my secrets as her son splits his gaze between the both of us. I know she can’t comprehend a word. But I don’t give her my mysteries and heart puzzles to make her understand them. I can’t understand them and speaking them is all I have.
So I do, until I’ve said all I can.
Suddenly too aware of myself and Orion, I turn to him, heat filling me. “Sorry. I kind of got carried away.”
“No. Don’t be.” He kisses his mother’s hand then takes mine. “If a Brit tells you not to be sorry, then you’re really, really not supposed to be sorry, okay?”
My mouth jerks sideways. “Right.”
“About what you said, I think I caught the words sister, abuela, airplane, mother, and bakery. And my name’s the same, so…”
Not sorry, but still feeling like he can see right through me, I shift my gaze out the window. “Then you caught the gist.”
* * *
It’s unspoken where we both want to go after Elmwood House. A few visitors picnic on the grass or throw balls to dogs on St. Catherine’s Hill, but we settle inside the shady thicket. Plum-sky dusk bumps into the last stretch of afternoon. We spend ours on the fallen tree log bench, quiet.
“I’ve been watching you shamelessly and verging on creepily,” Orion says after long minutes. “The way your face twitches all sorts of ways, and you move to speak then twist your mouth sideways. Is it about Mum, then?”
“Yes and no. My plane ticket came today, right before we left. I told your mother about it.”
“Oh,” he breathes more than voices. We’re hip to hip, soul to soul. We both knew the date, but I can’t stop seeing the official logo in the e-mail. British Airways LHR—MIA.
“And I also told her—” Eye roll at myself. “Never mind.”
His chin tilts, gaze narrowing. “Don’t you know there’s literally nothing you can’t tell me?”
“Not this, trust me. It’s horrible. Terrible.” Desgraciada—I am wretched and wicked. “Don’t make me say it.”
“I’d never make you do anything. But I’m well used to terrible. I can handle yours.”
Sadness isn’t here, either. Rage taints my blood, reddens the words trapped behind my throat. I dig my fingers into the rough and rigid tree bark. “Fine. I wanted to know, okay? What’s worse: Walking into your kitchen after school and finding your grandmother, your everything, on the floor in front of the sink. Already gone.”
“Christ.” His arm pulls me in. “I didn’t know you found her. Bloody hell.”
“Yes… so that, or loving a mother who’s still here but not present. Watching her lose a little more each month, preparing yourself. I hate throwing your life into your face right now. And I still have my own mother. But… Abuela—I never got to say goodbye.” I bury my head into his chest in shame. “And I don’t know what’s worse, not getting to say goodbye, or saying goodbye to a little more every year.”
“The tidal wave or the hourglass.”
“Yeah.”
He threads his fingers through my hair. “Does one have to be worse? Or can’t they both be the same amount of terrible? They change us and make us stronger, and we do our best to go on, all the same?”
“We do,” I tell him, letting his words rise and swell into cracks. “And you’re right. It’s amazing the way you handle what life hands you, how you deal. But don’t you ever want to fight back a little? Cheat the universe? Take a moment just for you and not wait for life to plan the rest of it?”
Glazed blue into my brown. “Or take it away?”
“Or that.”
“Every single day.”
“But you still… can’t?” And I can’t look at him anymore.
“Lila,” he says, his hand clamping around my forearm so quickly, I flinch. “Am I such a total dolt that you have no idea of my feelings? For you?”
Do it. Look at him. Face him. I lift up and find another kind of storm—the longing of warm drinks and warm sweaters, but the coldness of being bare. “I feel them more than anything. And I wish…” I shake my head. “Does it even matter? Do we not get to do that anymore? Wish? On stars or for moments just for us?”
He fits his hands into both of mine. “What’s your wish, then?”
“Um, no. No. Your superstitious self should know better than to ask for details. There’s already enough in the universe fighting against my wish coming true.” I straighten my spine, sniffling. “And if you don’t already know then I’m the dolt at—”
Orion knocks my words aside, stealing my space with his mouth over mine. A low-toned oath strums the back of his throat. Holy. This is new and what are we doing? We do it anyway, figuring it out as we go, a chaotic mess of flailing movement—teeth scraping, noses bumping, loose-limbed and greedy.
He rips backward, breathing like a winded runner. “I was right, then. Same as mine, you know, if I was a wishing kind of bloke.”
I make some sort of agreeable noise.
“But I can do better.”
Dios, he does. He does he does he does. My cheeks caged in his hands, Orion looks at me like I’m the finest dessert I’ve made yet. He thumbs my jawline and slides his mouth lazily over mine. Takes his time like we have it to spare.
His hands travel down, down, and lower still until they’re clasped behind me, lifting me onto his lap. He tastes of fruit and sugar. Then his smile—sweeter—before he dots his lips along my forehead and the rise of my cheekbones.
I drag him back down. Golden sparks from all the city lights we’ve seen tunnel through me, across all my avenues. I can’t stop touching him. Can’t get close enough. I push my body into his, the lean strength of his muscles and bones teeming around me.
Keep me? Another wish I can’t even trust the stars with. What language do I use to wish for continents and cultures to bend? Keep me impossibly. I wish this with my hands, my nails marking a star-named boy with half moons.
Tonight, I kiss him under a beech tree canopy and learn the pattern etched across a twilight sky doesn’t matter. Orion Maxwell is all the northern lights, the North Star—my true north—even when my legacy calls me southward.
Southward. Miami.
Clocks strike home at that, and phantom wheels touch the tarmac. We both sense the shift and ease away at the same unspoken moment. I’m still in his lap, wrapped around him like wool. My forehead tips against his with four thousand miles between us.
“When you first came here,” he starts, his voice full of gravel, “your heart belonged to another guy.” When I nod he says, “But even now, you still belong to another place. I can’t even think of being with you in Miami for years. Not with Mum and Flora—”
“I know.” I’ve always known.
“So much is goodbye and fleeting in my life. I’m losing people and I’m so tired of that feeling. And you…” The single word reflects in his eyes. “You couldn’t be just some quick fling. See, I can’t do that—weeks of summer shags—with an end date in my head. I can’t and then put you on a plane, and only get to keep the memory of it. Of you.”
My breathing staggers, understanding and knowing he’s right. Hating his rightness. Loving him being all about me in this terrible-beautiful way. “We can’t do this again, can we?”
Eyes glassy, he shakes his head. “It’s just too bloody hard. For now, let our time here be our moment.”
The moment we cheated worlds and lives and universes for.
They still win. Por ahora.
For now.
30
On the night of my eighteenth birthday, I’m told to wear my nicest dress and stay in my room until someone comes for me. I do have a new dress, a short wispy number Victoria at Come Around Again said was perfection a couple weeks ago. The price was also perfect, and so is the fit. Black floral chiffon skims just off my body and rises to a square neckline framed with thin straps.
I add finishing touches to my look while starting my packing. Two days left, but I’m focused on finding all the celebration I can, not fumbling over what, and who, I have to leave. To get myself through, I had to take a perfect, cheated moment with Orion in a twilight thicket, locking it in a treasure box inside of me. For now.
But Orion was not without other treasures and gifts. Earlier, I got more London for my birthday, this time, the inside parts. I spent all day ogling the crown jewels and dragging him through every floor of Fortnum and Mason’s food hall and department store, fawning over gourmet ingredients and picking souvenirs for Mami and Pilar. But my real surprise was Orion treating me to a splurge-worthy tea in Fortnum’s Diamond Jubilee Tea Salon. We ate through the afternoon, surrounded by white tablecloths and robin’s-egg-blue china. We drank their signature Royal Blend and stuffed ourselves with finger sandwiches, scones, and fancy cakes.
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