The Girl Who Can Cook_A Novel of Revenge and Ramen Noodles

by Mike Wehner

  She slept with her back to me but hooked one foot around mine to keep us together. I had no idea how to maneuver her around the post-drunk watchman just outside the door. Her face was carved into Charlie’s memory, he couldn’t so much as open his eyes. I was not optimistic.

  Zeke barked from the floor and scared me, not because he heard something but because he wanted to let me know it was bullshit that he wasn’t on the bed. Erin shifted and the scum on her lips split and formed tiny white bars as she jawed up and down. The sun was risen. I had to make some attempt to get her out of the house.

  My first thought was to knock her out, sling her over my shoulder and let her wake up at the ER. I’d tell her she fell out of bed. I paced the room for a bludgeon. The TV remote? too light. The laptop? too valuable. The lamp? too noisy.

  When I jostled Erin’s shoulder it made a ting sound, like toasted glasses. I touched it again and realized it was the door handle behind me. The heel of the brown oxford under the door was stomping up and down.

  Charlie smacked the door.

  “Where’s the bathroom, let me in.” He smacked the door three more times. The only bathroom was through my bedroom, and Charlie would need to pee badly after a night of heroic drinking. I said nothing and hoped he would move the dishes aside and go in the sink, or trot outside and scare poor Annie to death pissing on her petunias.

  Erin flipped her eyes open and tried to catch up to what was happening. She grabbed at pillows and blankets to cover bare spots of skin.

  “Hang on a second,” I said.

  I had no choice but to open the door, I stood as far away as I could. Charlie banged three more times.

  “Open the fucking door.”

  I pushed my butt back, hamstrings burning with the stretch. I batted at the handle with sweaty fingers. Charlie fired into the room and took three giant steps before began puking. Heavy chunks hit the bathroom linoleum and Erin ripped the sheet up over her head, giggling. Charlie zombied out into the living room mumbling for water when he was finished.

  “Hi Charlie!” Erin said. He grumbled.

  “He’s a showoff drinker,” I said.

  Erin swashed her bangs to the side. “I’m still mad at you.”

  “I told you I’d get him back.” More groans and splashes of water echoed in.

  “I don’t care about that, it was the way you ignored me.”

  Life was a lot easier when I was younger and avoided confrontation. I tucked my nose behind her ear and kissed at her neck, sweet at first and then fat puckers that made her laugh and shove.

  “You were going to be mad either way, don’t act like you want me to be the guy fighting with his girlfriend at the dinner table with the guys. That guy sucks.”

  “I wasn’t aware I was your girlfriend.”

  “I didn’t mean to presume, I’ll be whatever you want me to be.”

  “Keep being complicated, Alex. I have to go, there are deliveries this morning and one of my vendors has been hiding rotten eggplants in the bottom cases that don’t get inspected. You guys should come by the restaurant tonight if Charlie feels better.”

  “That’ll be fun, maybe he’ll find something in the bathroom to put in your food.”

  “You aren’t funny when I hate you.”

  Hate wasn’t enough. She had to want me dead to be evenly in love. A wave of hot air helped Erin pull open the door and on the third stair her footstep clicked in unison with Charlie’s final hoark hitting the kitchen sink. Charlie ran back into the bathroom.

  I filled a plastic cup with water and took it to him. His cheek was pressed against the toilet. “The cold is nice,” he said.

  Charlie opened his mouth and waved me to tip the cup into his face. Water splashed up from the seat and he gulped at the air like a goldfish who’d jumped out of the bowl.

  “I’ll be fine in an hour,” he said, “let’s go climb something.”

  ◆◆◆

  Two hours later we headed to Mount Diablo at Charlie’s request. It was a grass hill covered with trees, the name didn’t make any sense. At a few thousand feet tall it took us an hour or two to get to the top. Charlie charged ahead while Zeke and I lagged behind, sniffing, peeing.

  The switchback trail to the summit was open and the sky was the color of the Aegean Sea. The cobbled sandstone tower at the top looked like it was covered in gems as we climbed, shine from the verdigris aging of oxidized copper on the roof. At the top was a vantage point and we gazed north into the scoop of the valley.

  “This is what I picture when I think of California,” Charlie said.

  “They should change that to the state motto.”

  “To what?”

  “California, the land of ridiculous expectations.”

  “Tell me what you see out there.”

  I saw food. Rolling hills lined with artisans and farmers. Growers who took great pride in what they made. I saw olives, grapes, avocados, cows with names, and little spotted pigs who ran happy in slopped forests. I saw the chutes and ladders and causeways that funneled it west towards the concrete heartbeat and into my and so many other hands to decode from our little boxes of flame and freeze and every degree between.

  Charlie looked back and forth at the other people on the peak as if they were listening in.

  “I have something to show you,” he said and started to flip through the map on his phone. He walked to the west ledge and pointed, eyes down on the screen. There, right there. He pointed at the East Bay, down towards the water somewhere. “What do you see?”

  “I see an abandoned prison, a hazy bridge and a bunch of water with lions in it.”

  “That’s not what I see,” Charlie said and belly danced towards me. “I see her. She’s down there Alex, I found her.”

  I don’t know if it was fate or chaos theory or dumb fucking luck at work that led Charlie to Erin. He was a talker. He’d blab with anyone about anything. On his way here he was blabbering in the airport about coming to the East Bay and hey you ever been there? And hey where do you like to eat? A guy gave him a tapas bar, a girl gave him a wood fired pizzeria. Those weren’t going to impress Alex, so he flapped on and on until someone said they went to a German place and it had a funny name and I’m sure you could find it. Oh hey, the friend I’m going to see is German and isn’t that funny and he would probably like that. Then one click and a two clicks and there she was on his screen in her gray linen apron, leaned sassy against the wall with her arms crossed and a chef’s knife in her hand.

  My heart tumbled down the mountainside and I wanted to chase it. Gravity was less consistent than Charlie, single minded, a loyal arrow. He didn’t want to do this only for John, he wanted it for me too. To bring me a piece of her and wag his tail and get a pat on the head.

  “Who?” I said.

  “Erin Rhodes, the cunt that killed John.” His mouth changed, it moved in small yaps from his four front teeth instead of the normal gaping claps. He put his butt up on the wall and bounced the soles of his shoes off the stone facade. “She deserves to die, we agreed that if she was set free she had to go, we agreed, I need your help.”

  “Charlie,” I said wavering, “killing her won’t change anything.”

  “You pulled back pretty hard last night too, what the fuck is going on with you?”

  I stepped to him and put my nose to his.

  “I’ve grown up and learned that life isn’t the sum of my assumptions,” I paused, “that it’s hard to see someone for what they really are when you love them.”

  “So let’s give her a pass because you figured out the world is complicated and John wasn’t perfect, fuck that, she killed our best friend, Alex. He didn’t hit her, he didn’t rape her. She picked up a gun and killed him.”

  “Do you think that girl wanted to kill him? That John was the paragon of morality that his family’s lawyers painted him to be? Who was he Charlie, I loved him, but tell me who he really was, not with you or with me but with women.”

  Charlie paced ba
ck and forth, he dug deep to bring me to his side.

  “He was picky,” he stammered, “he was critical, he wasn’t always nice to girls.”

  “Is that all? Don’t let the hurt mask your memory.”

  “So the fuck what, he toyed with them, he was moody. He didn’t deserve to be murdered because he was a dick. If that were the case than any woman could shoot any man, because newsflash, we’re all dicks, even you Mr. I-like-them-all.”

  The wind picked up and a colored pamphlet for the park flew from one stone wall to the next. The argument made a middle-aged couple in matched khaki shorts turn back before they got up the stairs.

  “You can’t stop me,” he said.

  “Oh yes I can.” I said it but didn’t know how to make it true. I had to make it true before I sent him back into the wilderness where he bore witness to and preserved the savageness of nature. Before he flew north, he had to tell me she was safe and I had to believe him, otherwise I was going to have to kill someone after all.

  With and Without You

  PAGE 216

  The end began on the toilet. I was sitting on top of it with the seat closed desperate for information when John burst in and asked “is that my phone?”

  It wasn’t right to go through his phone, especially for someone so fiercely private. I was looking for a way out, hard evidence that we should split. He’d become erratic and distant those last few weeks, I wanted to leave but I needed justification. It’s a tricky thing to leave someone you care about when you don’t have any solid reason to give them. The lingering feeling that something is wrong bothers you but never forces your hand.

  I would come over right after work and get in the shower and he’d close the door to his bedroom and go to sleep before I shut off the water. This is a type of abuse but it’s subtle, the way someone can undermine your feelings but not really do anything wrong. Mental tyranny like this is cumulative, like being in chronic pain, sure, it doesn’t hurt that much but it adds up and eats at you and makes you act crazy. That’s why I took his phone.

  John stood in the doorway and waited for an explanation, knowing whatever I said was going to be inadequate.

  “I know this looks bad, I needed to know what was going on with you.”

  He took me by the hand, pinching my thumb to my palm. I’m not sure how hard he grabbed, a chef’s hands go through a lot and nothing seems to hurt them. This was the first time he ever laid a finger on me but for some reason I wasn’t surprised.

  “What’s going on?” he repeated.

  John shoved me onto the hallway floor. I was scared but it made sense, he was such an intense person. He did everything with twice as much gusto as everyone else, being angry shouldn’t be any different.

  “Stop it,” I begged, looking up at him. He was so much taller from the floor. This was the moment I understood we were different. It didn’t matter if I had a knife, a board, a lifetime of self-defense classes—nothing could keep that man from doing whatever he wanted to me. Impending doom ran through my veins, an icy reminder skittering inside me that this was the end of something. Maybe the relationship, maybe my life, I wasn’t sure.

  “You aren’t smart enough to lie to me, so don’t try. If you’re ferreting through my phone it means you feel guilty. It means you want to justify something you’ve done. Tell me.” He got on one knee and cupped the back of my neck. “What did you do?”

  I was on my back, propped up on rug burnt elbows. My feet were nearest him and my instinct was to bash him in the face with my heel and bolt out the front door but I thought I could talk him down. “There’s nothing to tell, you’ve been acting crazy, you are acting crazy.”

  Eyes on fire, he collapsed on top of me while I fought. My fists deflected off his chest like waves break against giant stones. I shut my knees together and he sprawled out with his full weight on top of me. “Crazy?” He batted my hands aside and rolled down onto the floor, cradling my neck. I closed my eyes and hoped that death wouldn’t hurt, that it would take me far away in the arms of something beautiful, something constructed of pure light and love. The animal part of me wasn’t ready to join with the light and without thinking I flipped over onto my stomach and tried to scurry out.

  John clasped the middle of his arm underneath my throat and set his knees on each side of my torso. This is what I’d later find out was called a rear naked choke.

  Every time John flexed his arm my windpipe shut. I was unable to move and he lectured me for what felt like hours, but was probably seconds. At the end of each monologue he’d squeeze hard enough to keep me from catching any air for ten or fifteen seconds and when he let go I didn’t dare open my mouth until I was sure he wanted me to.

  “I’m not going to hurt you, but you brought this upon yourself. If you aren’t going to respect me then I’m not going to respect you.” He rose his voice to silence me if I tried to reason with him.

  “If we can’t respect each other then we can’t love each other, so we have to respect each other. Close to perfect isn’t good enough. We must be perfect, both of us, together.” Again, no air. The light was sucked from my eyes and the world became dark, hopeless. Each time he choked me I went through the same process of dying. First I’d fight to sneak in a little air, then I’d give up and the darkness would come with nausea and pain and despair, then as the world went black I’d accept that I was dead. The second I was certain I was gone he’d let go and my mind would fast forward the world back into being. I must have died a dozen times before I figured out he wasn’t going to kill me.

  “We are symbiotic, one can’t exist without the other, not anymore.”

  After a while I began to think that the choking was going to be the easy part, maybe he was warming up his arms for something much, much worse. Too terrible to imagine. I lay silent and listened to him say hateful, evil things to me. Eventually he got tired of talking, walked into his room and closed the door. I didn’t waste time crying on the carpet. I jumped up and ran out the front door without my shoes or purse. I made my way to a convenience store and used a stranger’s phone to call my sister to pick me up.

  I didn’t tell her what happened or why I didn’t have shoes. I told her we were over and I cried with my head on her lap all the way home. The next day I found myself in a sandwich shop with John, getting my purse and belongings, talking it out.

  He put his hand on my neck, stroking over and back. “Love, I know I was wrong, I know it, but there’s not even a mark. Even when things go sideways and I lose control I can’t scar your skin. You know I’d never really hurt you right?” He said this and so many other things, I let him talk and talk. Eventually, he wore me down.

  As sad as it sounds, the fact that he didn’t kill me was one of the reasons I came back, one of the reasons I held on to hope. He could have hurt me a lot more than he did, he’s obviously in control, he’s got problems, but in control. I figured it was an episode, something to work out in therapy. Over the next week my excuses became more convoluted. His medicine could have changed. A drug interaction with something he ate. Work stress, fear of success. Then it became my fault, I was the one who invaded his privacy. Tit for tat, I invaded his space so he invaded mine. If don’t do that again then I’ll never have to be on the floor.

  Twenty-nine

  Back at my house it smelled like rain, the late afternoon sky was spattered with thin cloud puffs that each held a few glasses of water they refused to release. I sat Charlie down in the backyard at a white table surrounded by ugly, painted stones. A decorative spot whose only purpose was to beg awws from Annie’s bingo friends that sometimes came over for coffee.

  Charlie was as sticky from the hike as I was with panic. I set two glasses and the only bottle of booze I had, gin, in front of us. I retrieved Erin’s book from under my bed and tossed it atop the unstable wire table. The pages were rippled and blue from the wiper fluid I’d once dunked it in. The gin tipped over and fell into the mulch.

  “Do you know about this?” I
asked.

  “No, I didn’t spill anything blue.”

  “I meant the book itself.”

  A window at the back of the house buckled a few times and then opened a crack. Annie stuck her face sideways and shouted through the hole. “You boys staying in for dinner?” I wagged the bottle at her, mulch fell off the bottom and she gave me a head toggle that would have been a nod if she were standing up straight. “What is that, rum?”

  “Gin,” I replied, “dry.”

  “I’ll make lemon squares, save me a taste.”

  Charlie crossed his arms and leaned back, unconvinced by whatever I was about to say. He had to vibrate some part of his body when irritated, which that moment was his knee.

  “This book is a memoir of how Erin came to kill John,” I said, “I tracked her down a year ago after I found out about it. I thought she was trying to profit on John’s death. I went mad, I wanted to kill her.

  “I know we said a lot of horrible things during the trial but I didn’t mean any of it, not then. Some part of me knew that John wasn’t guiltless in all this but I refused to see it.”

  Charlie stood up, rammed his palms into his face.

  “A fucking year!” he said.

  “Sit down,” I poured him three inches of gin. “I went nuts, I was consumed with finding her and killing her myself. I stalked her restaurant and broke into her car while she was at work. I was going to strangle her, watch her die. I hid in the back seat and when she got in I snapped a zip tie around her throat.

  “I was happy until I realized I was choking the wrong girl. Turns out it was her little sister.” A drop of rain hit my side of the table, then another splashed into my cup.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because if it had been you that innocent girl would be at the bottom of a lake. Hate is multiplicative Charlie, together it’s far more intense then when we’re apart.”

  “Why tell me now, you know I’m not going to read her fucking lies.”