North of Happy

by Adi Alsaid

  Sure enough, there’s the same group as last night hanging outside. I stand at the periphery, hoping for someone to notice I’m there and step aside to make room. The restaurant’s closed tomorrow for a holiday, and despite the long hours we’ve all pulled, no one wants to pass up the opportunity to party all night and sleep the day away. Matt suggests a late-night barbecue at his place, and everyone chimes in with their approval. They disperse to pick up beer and things to grill. Matt doesn’t even look at me, much less offer me an invite, banishing me to a night in that motel room, with nothing to do but try to beat back panic attacks, trying to figure out why I’m still seeing Felix, why I’ve started looking forward to his company.

  Then Emma appears at my side, work shirt unbuttoned, a baby-blue tank top underneath. She smells like lavender and lemongrass, like a morning spent in bed, drifting off into pleasant dreams. “Thanks for those quesadillas last night. They saved my life.” She bites her lip in that way that’s probably already settling itself deep into the folds of my brain. I’m going to start missing her in little moments of the day, I can tell. “Walk with me?”

  I look over at the group making their way down the street. “I don’t think Matt wants me there.”

  “Matt’s an attention whore. The more people are there the better he’ll feel. Plus, he’s really an okay guy once you get to know him.” Emma nods her head in the group’s direction. “Come on, walk with me. Please?”

  I can’t find it in me to resist that. We turn down the street away from the restaurant, and I let Emma lead the way. We walk along the shoulder, grass at our feet, fireflies flickering at the edge of the woods. Emma sheds her work shirt and folds it into her bag.

  “So,” she says, crossing her arms, “I vaguely remember falling asleep on your counter last night. Did I do that mid-conversation?”

  “More impressive: you did it mid-quesadilla.”

  She laughs, makes a face. “Oh man, sorry. That’s lame.”

  “And dangerous. You have no idea how many people die choking on their own quesadillas when they’re drunk. There are PSAs in movie theaters in Mexico about it.”

  Emma smacks my arm. “Shut up.” She laughs again. Every time she does I get the feeling that a little part of me is coming back; my skin becomes less translucent. Since the Night of the Perfect Taco, I haven’t really been able to make anyone laugh. Dad even pointed it out a few times. “You used to be funny,” he said once, as if he couldn’t think of any possible reason why I may have lost my sense of humor.

  I try to forget about Dad. “Did you feel okay today?”

  “Yeah, I wasn’t really that drunk,” she says, shrugging. She’s kicking at pebbles, a quirk that I find oddly charming, maybe because in Mexico City it would be a pointless endeavor. The cracked and crowded sidewalks would make you lose track after a kick or two, but here Emma kicks the same gray pebble for a mile. We walk for twenty minutes or so, following the sounds of the staff ahead of us, the wind blowing in such a way that it carries their conversations to us.

  Matt’s house is on the opposite side of the lake, in a part of the island that I haven’t been to yet. It’s a fairly small house with a huge backyard, surrounded by trees. By the time we arrive, there’s about twenty people sipping on beers. Half are from the kitchen, the other half the bonfire crowd from the other night, kids around me and Emma’s age, still in high school.

  Emma leads us directly to the non-restaurant crew. There’s about ten of them standing in a circle around the back porch, a couple more seated on the stairs. Brandy says hi, and Emma introduces me to the rest of the crowd. I wonder briefly if one of the guys (Reggie, Paul, Ben) was at the bar last night, if one might be the Faceless Wad of Flesh. I try to suppress the jealousy, set my mind on just making Emma laugh, chasing after that feeling.

  Emma appears at my side with a beer almost as soon as I notice that she stepped away. “If you get drunk tonight, it’s now my turn to make you something to eat,” she says. “Preferably cheesy and salsa-y and not so insect-y.”

  I immediately start chugging the beer, and her laugh unravels a knot that’s been in my stomach all day.

  I stand in the circle, laughing occasionally, sipping on a beer just to keep myself busy. I try to contribute to the conversation, but it comes out as a stupid joke. I think maybe, in my exhaustion, I got confused and made the joke in Spanish so I repeat what I said. They all stare at me like I’m insane. Emma too.

  So I slip away toward the grill.

  Isaiah’s working on getting the coals started, while Elias and Matt sit on nearby patio furniture, putting dishes together on the glass table. Elias is skewering vegetables and pieces of marinated chicken, and Matt is concocting a sauce in a stainless-steel bowl. I wish I would have stopped by the store or the motel room so I could contribute something, or at least have something to do. I ask if I can help, but no one really needs it, or no one hears me ask.

  Back and forth I go, trying to make myself a part of either group. Kitchens or the island, I don’t have enough experiences to talk about so I’ve got barely a toe in each little pool. The night pushes on, a chill coming in from the ocean.

  As the temperature drops, dew forms on grass and fogs up the sliding glass door that leads into the house. Felix shows himself there, waving goofily, and since there’s no one else for me to go to (Emma, occasionally looking over, smiling, is deep in a one-on-one with Brandy), I pull up a chair next to the door, sit down with a plate of food on my lap. It’s like I’m a shadow, visible but easy to miss.

  There’s a surprising amount of detail in the cloudy window. Felix’s stubble is visible, the exact way he would put his arms behind his head when relaxing. The gunshot’s not there, but I can tell he’s wearing that shirt again. “It hasn’t been a bad week, huh?”

  “I guess not.”

  The little particles of condensation that are acting as Felix try to reach out to smack me on the arm, with obviously no results. “Relax. What, you want to be best friends with everyone already? These things take time. New experiences are lonely. You should have seen how it went for me sometimes.”

  I bring a chicken skewer up to my mouth to hide the fact that my lips are moving. “Really?”

  “Really. When I was in that kibbutz in Israel I sometimes went days without talking to anyone.”

  “That’s pretty shocking, since you never shut up.”

  “Funny,” Felix says. He reaches out on the glass, makes three snowballs out of the fog, starts juggling. “If you think loneliness goes away because you’ve effectively started your adult life, you should think again.”

  I take a bite, chew purposefully, trying to pick out the flavors in the marinade. Almost like a chimichurri, lots of herbs. Elias and Memo are smoking cigars; Emma’s friends are passing around a joint. Paper plates with crumbs and sauce puddles are strewn around the yard, on tables and chairs and at people’s feet. Clouds overhead cover up the moon and stars that I am growing accustomed to seeing every day. I must be covered by a cloud too, because I’m speaking freely to a door and no one seems to notice.

  Felix splits the balls he’s juggling into four and then five and then ten. I fight the urge to reach out and wipe away the condensation from the glass. I don’t want to be alone again. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Felix chuck a ball at me. I flinch, and then I have to pretend that I’m swatting away a mosquito in case anyone’s watching.

  “I can’t believe you fell for that,” Felix laughs. “On so many levels.”

  “Shut up,” I say.

  He does for a sec. Emma looks over in my direction. Her glasses are slightly smudged, her cheeks rosy and her hair in a messy bun. She doesn’t wave me over, but she does smile, and I smile back, happy for the acknowledgment.

  “Hey, Carlos?” Felix says.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m bored to death.” />
  I want to roll my eyes but keep it to myself in case anyone’s looking. I get up to make myself another plate of food, even though I’m too tired to be hungry. Another chicken skewer, some roasted veggies, Argentinian choripán.

  I attempt mingling one more time. Matt, Morris and Boris are smoking those flavored mini-cigar things, chairs gathered in a semi-circle, facing the rest of the party. I’m maybe twenty feet away, already losing my nerve, when all three of them stop their conversation and just watch me approach. I take an immediate turn toward Emma’s group, and I can hear them burst into laughter.

  Emma smiles at me when I approach, and Reggie steps aside to make room for me. They’re talking about some show that I haven’t seen the newest season of, since I’ve been watching nothing but the Food Network. It takes me all of three minutes before I butt in with another stupid joke, and the looks I get make me long to be ignored again. I urge my body to get back to that whole disappearing thing. After making an excuse about needing a beer, I go rejoin Felix by the glass door.

  “Hey, I thought it was funny,” he says with a wink.

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Okay, no, but I give you points for trying.”

  I look back up at the party, and Emma’s talking one-on-one with one of the servers, a dude with eyes so blue I don’t believe them. I look down at my beer, fiddle with the tab.

  Back when he was alive, Felix had a knack for providing comfort. When our uncle committed suicide, Felix sat with Mom on the couch all night, holding her hand and a box of tissues and letting her cry into his shoulder. He was fifteen. Whatever the reason Felix is still here, I guess I prefer this iteration of him rather than really losing him, like Mom and Dad and the rest of the world have.

  “Tell me more about that last trip you were on,” I say. “You never got to.”

  He smiles, gets up from his chair (image of a chair, hallucination of a chair on Matt’s sliding glass door, whatever). “Why don’t I show you?”

  Felix steps off the glass, turns into a little cloud of barely visible condensation, lays himself down on the ground, where the drops of dew on the grass start to bounce around. They join together to get heavier and force a given blade down, or they scurry away and let a single particle rise to the top to reflect the lights coming from the house behind me. Before my eyes, a cityscape appears on the grass.

  He tells me about crossing from Laotian villages into Vietnam. He reminds me that he usually didn’t prefer big cities—as great as some of them were, none could ever compare to Mexico City—but Hanoi was different. The drops of water rearrange again. A streetside café, tiny tables, chairs facing out, two electric fans pointed at the customers. Scooters parked everywhere, zooming past, honking often. “Everyone’s awake early, drinking strong, cold coffee,” Felix says. “The smell of meaty, spicy soups in the air. Government announcements coming from the speakers up on the street posts, interrupted by constant motorbikes. It’s loud and everyone’s in a rush, sure. But I knew looking at Hanoi what people mean when they describe a city as a living thing.”

  I stay a little longer than I probably should, especially since I’m on the fringe of the party and not really in it. I don’t get drunk; Emma doesn’t take me anywhere to eat something cheesy. I think I see her arm linked through the blue-eyed server’s right before I leave. I’ve known her for a week. Why do my insides stir as if I’m mourning?

  I tell myself I should be sleeping anyway. I should be talking to real people. I say this to Felix on the walk home, and for once he listens, lets me go on. It is a welcome consolation, talking to Felix like this. The magic he can conjure up. It keeps me from wishing for other things.

  CHAPTER 11

  ATOLE

  5 cups water

  ½ cup masa

  2 cinnamon sticks

  5 tablespoons piloncillo

  1 tablespoon vanilla extract

  METHOD:

  The next morning I wake up knowing that if I linger in bed it’ll be one of those suffocating days where I can’t think about anything other than Felix and death. So I skip the shower and get dressed and bolt out the door toward the boardwalk. It helps to walk and watch people go about their lives. Tourists, most of them, here for a brief spell before they return to wherever it is they came from.

  When I try to think about getting back on a ferry out of here, I think of the lake as Emma showed it to me. I think of the way light works here, as if it’s filtered by a cinematographer. I think of the sounds of the kitchen.

  Then a pang of guilt hits me that I haven’t called Mom again, so I find a quiet place to sit. I’m on a bench within view of the lake, which is shimmering with an array of blues that feels impossible within such a small body of water. Birds flitter from tree to tree around me, red-winged blackbirds, cardinals and one that’s small and yellow and chirps relentlessly.

  Mom answers within a couple rings. “Hey, honey,” she says. She asks how I am. I say I’m good, with a cheerfulness that is probably too forced. I can sense the next question on the tip of her tongue, begging to leap out. “Have you booked your flight back yet?”

  I hesitate, wondering if I’m really going to say what I want to.

  “Mom, I don’t think I’ll be back this week.”

  Instant silence. If it was Dad instead of Mom, I’d be wondering if he hung up. But Mom wouldn’t do that. I’ve just tripped upon one of those things that steal the words from a parent.

  “When, Carlos?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, and those simple words are as satisfying as if I’ve confessed to something much bigger. I almost feel like Felix will disappear on these words alone. Like he led me here not for the meal but to stay gone from the life waiting for me in Mexico.

  A cool breeze blows by, soothing the heat from the sun on my skin. “I got a job, Mom.”

  On her end, Mom laughs. “A job? What are you talking about?” She pauses, waiting for me to explain myself. When a few seconds go by, she realizes I’m not going to elaborate. “You said a week.” Her voice falters.

  “I know.” I’m so aware of the smell of saltwater, of the waves crashing gentle and steady a few blocks away. I’m aware, too, that Mom probably had a similar talk with Felix once. That at one point he stopped promising he’d be back and just chased after what he wanted. “I’m sorry, but I want to give this a shot.”

  She’s about to cry, I can tell. She’s about to ask me what about her, or what about college, or what about a bunch of other things I don’t know the answer to. This, though, I feel sure about.

  A week goes by. The sink I stand in front of for hours at a time becomes more and more familiar. The station is comfortable, even. I can reach for a new rag without taking my eyes off the pan in my hands. There’s a certain pleasure in figuring out the most efficient way to stack plates, in running pots and pans to the cooks before they come in to bitch about not having enough.

  When I run dishes to the waitstaff, I’ll often manage to take a detour to see Emma. If I say something that makes her laugh, or if she starts talking to me, I find that I work that much faster when I get back. If she’s short with her words, or if I don’t see her all day, or if Matt’s got it in for me, the day doubles in length.

  The work itself doesn’t get any easier, but I learn little things that make the job go by faster. I buy comfortable shoes that are mostly rubber and won’t get soaked throughout my shift. I get a stack of shirts at a thrift store that I won’t mind staining. I learn to bring a change of clothes, so that I won’t smell like garbage if people are going out after shift, or if Emma and I take a walk to the lake, which happens once, early in the week.

  It’s just the two of us. She shows me more secret passageways through the woods until the trees clear to reveal a large, moonlit meadow. We stop at the edge. Emma’s looking at me expectantly, and at first I
’m not sure what I’m supposed to see. I see tall, unkempt grass surrounded by trees. Then, like my eyes are playing tricks on me, fluorescent green lights flash on and off in the field, some of them rising up like bubbles in a pot of boiling water, some shooting across and lighting up the ground below them.

  “Whoa.”

  “Pretty, right?” Emma says, turning her neck slowly from me to the meadow.

  “I almost never see fireflies.”

  “I did some research, and they’re not even supposed to exist west of Kansas. I have no idea why there’s so many of them here.”

  We walk through the field together, and in the blinking green lights I see Emma’s hand inches from my own, I see the curves and dips of her face in profile and I wonder how it is that I can find the space between things beautiful.

  Emma stops for a second and reaches into the waist-high grass, her hand disappearing in the dark. She pulls it back out to reveal a berry I have never seen before, not in the smorgasbord of rainbow-colored fruit at American grocery stores and definitely not anywhere in Mexico. It is the size of a child’s fist, and the skin is prickly, like a lychee’s.

  “When I was a kid, if I was mad at my mom, I’d hide out here for the day, picking out berries,” Emma says. “I had no way of knowing if they were poisonous, but I’d feast on them anyway.” She digs her thumb into the skin to reveal a pulpy white interior. She takes a bite out of it and then hands it to me. It’s sweet and tangy and would be great in a vinaigrette, as a sauce, maybe along with some roasted duck. “I don’t even think anyone else knows about these, because I’ve never seen them anywhere else. I’m sure she’d put it on her menu if she found out about them, but I like keeping this one thing to myself.”

  We grab them by the handful, take them with us down the hill toward the lake. Sitting on the shore, gentle waves lapping at our ankles, we peel the berries one by one. A day or two ago, I thought of Emma as pretty. Tonight, her profile outlined by a full moon, she looks beautiful to me. I wish I could drive the thought away, but there it is anyway. The water—or something else about these nights—really does feel like it can cure hopelessness.