Kiss (8 page)

“HOW ARE THE POTATOES COMING, Sam?” Mrs. Gannis's voice floated into the kitchen.

Sam looked up from the huge aluminum pot. He felt like a wolf with its leg caught in a trap. He finally understood the wolf s perverse temptation to chew off its own leg.

Why had he insisted, in that breezy, thoughtless way, that he would take care of the mashed potatoes? At the time, mashed potatoes seemed like the simplest thing on earth. You get potatoes; you mash them.

Besides, he'd figured this important job in the kitchen would keep him out of the fray of tense Gannis-family relations. It would give him a little breathing room from Heather, too, which they both needed. It had gotten to the point where every single thing brought them right back into the danger zone. A casual question from Heather's mother about what they'd done the previous night, an innocent reference to chess, a song on the radio about a girl with blond hair. Not being in the same room with Heather or talking about anything at all seemed the safest bet.

But Sam now understood that making mashed potatoes belonged in a category with particle physics, only harder. Before you mashed them, you had to cook them to make them soft, it turned out. How were you supposed to do that? First he'd thrown the whole pile in the oven, but what was the right temperature, and how long would it take? Then he took a cue from the one meal he'd ever made successfully — spaghetti. You made hard noodles soft by boiling them. So he boiled up the potatoes. It seemed to take hours before they were soft.

Now he was beating the crap out of those poor, boiled potatoes, working up a sweat. On the table was a whole tool kit of discarded instruments. The dinner fork was too small, obviously. The plastic whisk was wimpy. The metal slotted spoon made a tremendous racket. At last Mr. Gannis had acquainted him with a tool called a masher. A masher! A holiday miracle. Who could have guessed there'd be an implement built for this exact purpose?

Now he was madly mashing. Only the potatoes still didn't look right. Mashed potatoes were supposed to be smooth and pale yellow in color. These were lumpy and riddled with brown skin. Oh. Something occurred to him. You were supposed to take the skin off first, weren't you? He tried to fish out the bigger pieces of skin. It was hopeless.

Well, maybe they tasted good. He took a taste.

They tasted slightly more flavorful than air. All right, well, that's what salt was for. He shook in a small blizzard of salt.

He cast an eye at the fridge. Hmmm. He took out a box of butter. He remembered his mom once saying that her motto for cooking was, When in doubt, add butter. He threw in a stick. He threw in another stick. He was still in doubt. He threw in a third.

He stirred, hoping his mother hadn't just been being witty.

“SO, GAIA, HOW LONG HAVE YOU lived in New York?”

Now Gaia remembered the problem with meeting strangers, particularly the parents-of-friends variety of strangers. They asked you things.

Gaia chewed a piece of turkey breast and tried to look agreeably at Mary's mother. She swallowed it with effort. “Well, I guess I — ”

“No questions,” Mary interrupted, coming to Gaia's rescue yet again. “No interrogating Mary's new friend, Mom.”

Mary's mom laughed, which Gaia thought was pretty sporting of her. She gave Gaia a conspiratorial look. “My daughter is very bossy. You may have noticed this.”

Gaia liked Mary's mom so far. She had dark red hair, sort of like Mary's but far better behaved. She wore cropped black wool pants and a bright orange velvet button-down shirt that clashed mightily with her hair. It wasn't standard middle-aged mom apparel, but it wasn't a grown-up person trying too hard to be cool, either.

The family's cook, Olga, appeared at Gaia's elbow with a steaming silver serving dish of baby vegetables. They were tidy and beautiful, not the creamed vegetable slop that usually showed up on Thanksgiving. Gaia guessed from Olga's accent that she was Russian and that she hadn't been speaking English for long. “Thank you,” she murmured, trying to serve herself without bouncing baby potatoes into her lap. Or Mary's dress's lap.

“The food's fantastic,” Mary's brother said to Olga.

Was he Paul or Brendan? Gaia couldn't remember. He was the cuter one, though, with light blue eyes and a quarter-inch of stubble on his chin.

“Absolutely,” Mary's father agreed. He raised his glass for at least the fourth time in the meal. “Let's give thanks for Olga, a godsend.” They all clinked glasses and agreed yet again. Gaia noted that there was sparkling water in his glass and not wine.

Olga seemed pleased with the attention. “Stop eet, Meester Moss,” she ordered coyly.

Out of the corner of her eye, Gaia saw Mary stand up.

“I gotta pee. I'll be back in a minute,” Mary announced to the table at large.

Mary's mom smiled in her forbearing way, and Gaia saw an emotion she wasn't sure how to analyze. There was something in the woman's face that struck Gaia as both worried and apologetic at the same time.

Suddenly Olga was back at Gaia's elbow, this time holding a basket of corn bread. It smelled like happiness. “Would you like some?” Olga asked.

Remotely, without really thinking about it, Gaia registered that Olga's words came out clear and crisp, without an accent.

“Of course. It smells delicious. Did you make this, too?” Gaia asked politely.

She served herself a fat piece of corn bread, and when she looked up, the entire Moss family, minus Mary, was staring at her. Olga was staring, too.

Gaia glanced from face to face. Oh, shit. What had she done now? These stares were too extreme to signify she'd used the wrong fork. She felt her mouth to see if she was wearing a mustache of cranberry sauce or anything.

“You speak Russian,” Mr. Moss declared.

“I do?” Gaia found herself asking dumbly. She looked back at Olga and realized what must have happened. Olga must have murmured to her in Russian, and she must have answered in Russian without thinking. “I — I guess I do. Some, anyway,” Gaia said, her fingers pinching and pulling at the napkin under the table.

Gaia felt badly thrown by this. Her mother spoke Russian to her from the time she was a baby, and Gaia grew accustomed to switching back and forth between languages hundreds of times a day. But those words gave her a feeling on her tongue that she associated purely with her mother. She hadn't spoken Russian in five years.

The table was still silent. Gaia felt her vision blurring. She stood up, keeping her gaze down. “Excuse me for just a moment,” she mumbled.

“Of course,” Mrs. Moss said.

Gaia walked blindly from the dining room and down the hallway. She hadn't meant to go to Mary's room, exactly. She just wasn't thinking.

The moment she opened the door to Mary's room, Mary froze. Gaia took two steps forward and froze, too.

Mary was bent far over her dressing table. Her eyes, turned now to Gaia, were large. In her hand was a rolled-up tube of paper. On the tabletop was a mirror, and on the mirror were several skinny rows of white powder cut from a tiny white hill. A razor blade winked at her in the light.

Gaia was naive and inexperienced, but she wasn't stupid. She knew what Mary was doing, and it made her feel sick.

She stared at Mary for another moment before she turned and left the room. She strode to the guest room and gathered her bag and coat.

She forced herself to take a detour on the way to the elevator.

“Mr. and Mrs. Moss,” she announced from the entrance to the dining room. “I'm so sorry, but I have to go. Thank you very sincerely for letting me come.”

She made her way to the elevator vestibule without a backward glance. She shrugged on her coat as the car descended. Yellow-green jacket. Red dress. She thought of Ed.

Outside on the street a siren blared, surprising her with its jarring unpleasantness.

“MY GOD, SAM, THESE ARE THE best potatoes I've ever eaten,” Mr. Gannis said heartily, serving up his fourth helping. Sam hoped he wasn't going to be responsible for putting the man in the hospital with a heart attack.

He looked at the other plates around the table. Each of the four underfed Gannis women still had on her plate an untouched pile of potatoes so calorie packed, they were bleeding butter. Heather met his eyes apologetically. “They're awfully, um . . . rich.”

Dear Ed,

I'm sorry not to be saying this to you in person, but good-bye. I have to leave New York for a while. Things got out of hand with Ella, and, well . . . hopefully I'll get the chance to tell you about it someday.

It's time for me to set up a new life. I'm almost of legal age to be on my own now. And with all of my useful skills and abilities — not to mention my sunny temperament — I should have all kinds of great job possibilities:

Waitress

Counter-person at 7-Eleven

Tollbooth attendant

Dishwasher

So before I go, I just wanted to tell you this one thing, and I hope you'll forgive me for being sappy. But as I wracked my brains to think of stuff to be thankful for, the only thing I felt sure of is you. You are a much better friend than I've ever deserved.

I will never ever forget you for as long (or short) as I live.

Gaia

He wheeled back and opened the door just wide enough so that he could toss the bloody scalpel into the trash can.

GAIA LOOKED UP AT THE BIG destination board that hung above the expansive waiting area of Penn Station. The board operated like the tote board on
Family Feud
— its tiles turning to reveal all the destinations. “Survey says . . . Trenton — Northeast Corridor — track 12 — 5:09.” “Survey says . . . Boston — New England Express — track 9 — 5:42.”

The place was ugly and crowded, and it smelled bad. And by the way, she wondered sourly, whose brilliant idea was it to call the train station smack-dab in the middle of New York City Pennsylvania Station? Hello? Ever take a geography class?

She felt tired and sad and cranky, no longer riding the powerful surge of anger and indignation that made it much more satisfying to run away.

She eyed the different cities, having absolutely no idea where she wanted to go. If she could go anywhere, she'd choose Paris. The Latin Quarter. She'd sit at the terrace of a quaint cafÈ across from the Notre Dame cathedral. Sip a double espresso as she read some poems from Baudelaire's
Fleurs du mal
. But that wasn't going to happen. Not today, anyway. She didn't have a passport, let alone money for the flight.

Hmmm. Maybe Chicago. She'd always wanted to visit the museum there. If she couldn't go to Paris, she could at least sit for an hour in front of Gustav Caillebotte's wall-sized painting,
Paris Street, Rainy Day.
She first saw it in an art magazine she was flipping through while waiting to have a wisdom tooth pulled. The dreary scene spoke to her. Ambling along a cobblestone street on a gray, rainy day. That was her.

Engine, engine, number 9, going down the Chicago line. If the train falls off the track, do you want your money back? Yes.
Y-e-s
spells
yes,
you dirty, dirty dishrag —
you
.

She waited in the Amtrak ticket line behind a twenty-something couple from Jersey who — Gaia gathered from overhearing — had met the night before in an East Village club. They couldn't keep their hands off each other. Pinching, groping, giggling. It took everything Gaia had not to gag before she finally reached the window, where she came face-to-face with Ned, the ticket vendor.

She leaned forward to speak into the round voice amplifier.

“Chicago. One way.”

He visibly perked up at the sight of her. His eyes leered at her from behind the thick Plexiglas.

“Going all by yourself?”

“Yeah. Is that a problem?”

“No . . . I just thought . . .” He raised his eyebrows suggestively.

“Thought what?”

“I don't know, a girl as pretty as yourself. Just seems like you'd have a . . . companion.”

She sighed. “Well, I'm alone. Is there a sleeping car on that train going to Chicago?”

He swiveled on his seat and clacked a succession of keys at his computer. “Not until nine-thirty tonight.”

“How about another train, then? Is there any train with a sleeping car leaving soon? Doesn't matter where it's going.”

He looked at her. Then back at his screen. Ten more seconds of clacking. “There's a train to Orlando leaving in about an hour.”

Gaia took a moment to ponder Orlando. It was a light-year away from this rainy day. It was an artificial city populated by tourists and the people who served the tourists. It was the land of water slides and theme parks, of Mickey Mouse and Jaws: The Ride.

“There's definitely a sleeper car?” Gaia wanted to confirm.

“There is a sleeping compartment, yes,” Ned replied.

“I'll take it.”

What the hell. She needed a vacation. And a little sun never hurt anybody. If it was warm enough, maybe she'd even buy a bikini. Hit the beach.

But she still had a whole hour to kill. After Ned slid her ticket under the window, she leaned a final time into the voice amplifier.

“Is there someplace that sells stamps around here?”