Page 46 of Aftertaste
FOOD POISONING
KONSTANTIN CALLED. HE texted. He emailed and even—was it possible to hate himself more?—slid into her DMs. But Maura never replied.
He tried her apartment, too, but she wasn’t there, the spare key she normally kept above the door gone, which he took as a sign that she really didn’t want to see him. His best guess was that she’d watched him cave to Viktor, fold like the coward he was, promise to raise oodles of ghosts after she’d begged him not to. She was probably too pissed to talk.
Well. It wasn’t like he’d be overjoyed to see her either. He was still angry. Still felt used. And lied to. Hurt. It was just that he also wanted to make sure she was okay. You know, alive. Breathing.
He finally slipped a note under her door— Hey. Just wanted to make sure you made it out of the subway. LMK.— and went home, a mix of emotions simmering inside him.
What a fucking night.
WHEN HE GOT to his apartment, he heard the faint sound of the TV behind the door and felt the tension in his chest unspool. Had Maura gone to his place? Was she inside right then, waiting to talk? He fumbled with his keys.
“Shit, you really had me—”
But instead of Maura, it was his mother seated on the couch, the blue light of the screen casting shadows on her face. She turned at the sound of him, her cheeks damp with tears.
“Mama? What’re you—how did you get in?” he began, but stopped when he heard his own voice chuckle through the speaker. A fake laugh. A TV one.
She was watching his interview.
“Actually,” the TV him was saying, “the DUH concept came out of my own experience with food, and with death. I lost my dad as a kid. And my best friend, Frankie—Chef Francis O’Shaughnessy, of Wolfpup—earlier this year.”
He watched himself on-screen, in hair and makeup. Confident. Cool. Even a little handsome. The tattoos—visible from his elbows down, where the stylist had tucked his sleeves—an extension of him, no longer just an imitation of an actual chef. He was owning the room, this other Konstantin, this stranger who looked more together than he’d ever felt, certainly more together than he felt right now. But what he was saying was his truth, Kostya’s own words. The one part of the interview unscripted by the media trainer. Unvetted by the publicist.
“Food is how I found my way back to them. Eating the food they loved, the things they cooked. Someone told me once that grief is like having leftovers, with no one to serve them to. So the things I still had to say, all the moments we never got to have, the love I never got to give them—I put it all into my kitchen. I used it to feed other people.”
His mother paused the DVR. He waited for her to tell him he’d given a great interview. That she’d been moved to tears by the power of his words. That he’d looked good on-screen. To congratulate him on the opening, or maybe tell him he’d lost some weight. Instead—
“You trying give me stroke?”
“What?”
“Why you not answer phone? I call! I text! What you wanting, carrying pigeon? I’m so worried I come myself to make sure you alive!”
“Jeez. Okay, Mama. I’m alive.” He pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to divert the oncoming headache. “Listen, I really have to get to bed; the opening’s tomorrow and—”
“ Nyet. I’m not leaving now! You just get here. You ignore me and ignore and ignore and now I see you opening restaurant with mafioso!”
A few days ago, he might have argued the point, but now, well. Touché.
“Yeah… I know he’s not exactly a model citizen. Thank you for your concern. But I’ll take care of it, okay? It’ll be fine.”
“ Nyet! ” She stomped her foot on the floor. “ Nyet , you not taking care of nothing. You take my help this time.”
And maybe it was just the culmination of an unbearable few hours—of feeling utterly betrayed by Maura, who was supposed to be the love of his life; of discovering Viktor’s two faces, one of which was decidedly bloodthirsty and unhinged; of finding out that everything he had worked so hard to create was more than likely a Chekhov’s gun with a kickback like Chuck Norris—but his mother, sitting in his living room, force-feeding him help of the wrong variety, trying to pretend she suddenly cared after two decades of judging and nagging and shipping him off to a psych ward, was absolutely the last straw.
“Are you serious right now?” He could hear the acid in his own voice.
“Yes. Very serious. I am here to help.”
“In what possible reality”—he dripped venom—“do you think I’d ever want your help? After what you did?”
“What, Kostya!” she shouted back, hurt. “What I do? I care about you! I love you! I try and try to talk!”
“You abandoned me.” He let himself go off. “In a lunatic asylum! I didn’t even think they made those in the modern world, but let me tell you, that shit hasn’t changed since the fifties. Sedatives. Restraints. No fucking socks! I trusted you, Mama. And you gave me up. You. You did that.”
In all those years, he’d never let it out, a kettle boiling away, exploding now, under pressure. It hurt to tell her; it hurt to remember.
“And when I came home? When I finally managed to lie my way out of that fucking monstrosity? Papa was dead and it was like I didn’t have a mother anymore either. I was ten , Mama! I couldn’t even fry an egg! And I had to take care of me and you. My whole childhood, I had to be your parent. Figure out keeping food in the fridge, and the rent paid, and the heat on. Figure out how to make you happy—or at least make you not sad all the time. I had to be the adult because you were too fucking selfish to pull yourself out of your own grief and realize I was hurting, too.”
The aftermath of the room was so still. She pressed her lips together.
“Kostya—I—”
“Save it.” He swallowed the lump in his throat, tried to blink away the tears that had begun to form. He shoved his keys back into his pocket, turning to go. If she wouldn’t leave, then he would. “I’m done. I don’t need your help. And I don’t need to tell you anything, okay? You don’t get to be in my life. You never wanted me in yours.”
“Kostya—stop!” His mother looked so small now. So much older. Grey salting her hair, her eyes pruning at the edges. It had been a long time since he’d looked at her, really looked, and time had not been kind. “You know where I was, when you staying with Natasha?”
“Who cares? You dumped me with her for a month! Every day, I thought Valerik was just going to leave me at the boardwalk pool and never come back. You weren’t with me, Mama. Didn’t even call once. I was a little kid! A baby! You left me to rot. To watch all the kids and their dads, all summer long. And right after Papa died.”
“I—” she sobbed, burying her face in her hands, “I try dying, too, Kostya! I left you with Nata, and I try. Tamara find me, full of pills.”
Something in him stopped. Her words weren’t rendering. He didn’t understand.
“Tamara? The neighbor?”
His mother nodded. “She take me to clinic where her son work.”
“You didn’t go to a hospital?”
She shook her head. “Tamara say they take you away, if I go.”
“Who? Who’s they?”
She shrugged. “America.”
Kostya could feel pins coming into his fingers.
“So, what? You were suicidal and that makes it okay to institutionalize me? You wanted another couple weeks to yourself?”
She shook her head, no fight in her. “You tell me you taste Sergei, and I think that he trying to call you, too. That”—her voice broke—“you have same sickness I have. And you deserve real help, not dark Russian clinic without license.”
“You—you thought I was suicidal?”
She nodded, tears rolling down her face.
“Wait,” he said slowly. “What do you mean, too ? Did you—could you taste something?”
She looked at him, stricken, her eyes asking if maybe they were both crazy. “In weeks after he die, when I think of him, I taste pechonka .”
“Oh my God. Mom. ”
“The pills I take—while you with Natasha—I take to make it stop.”
Kostya’s eyes burned. He blinked and felt hot tears fall. Of all the people in the world who could actually understand what he’d gone through, who might relate to how it felt to have your most painful moments synesthetically, magically, impossibly punctuated, inescapable in their strangeness—his mother had known. But unlike him, she hadn’t thought the tastes had come from his father; she’d been sure it was the distress of her own mind, the deterioration of her psyche, a nervous break at the loss she couldn’t handle.
“Oh, Mama.” He hugged her, a real hug, the kind he hadn’t given her since before his dad died, no withdraw to it, no itch to move away. “Do you—can you still taste him?”
“No,” she whispered. “Not since pills.”
And Kostya seemed to understand. When his mother had tried to end the aftertastes by ending her life, his father had backed off. Had stopped trying to make her feel him. He’d moved on to Konstantin. And somehow, other spirits had followed.
“I’m sorry, Mama. And Papa—I’m sure he’s sorry, too.”
She gave a weary sigh.
“Sometimes the people you love hurt you. Sometimes they mean to. And sometimes they don’t mean, but cannot help. It is you who must decide to keep loving them anyway.”
Kostya thought about his father, the way he’d driven his mother almost to madness, right up to the edge of death, and she’d still forgiven him. Had kept loving him, all this time.
He wondered how much of his own pain he must have inflicted on her over the years. And she had kept loving him, too, had kept trying. No matter how caustic he had been.
He thought of Maura. Of what she’d put him through tonight. Of the way she’d hurt him, bone deep, but without meaning to. He wondered if he could forgive that.
His mother put a clammy hand over his. “You still tasting him?”
“Sometimes.” Kostya shivered, a draft in the room like someone had left the fridge open. “The pechonka —the burnt one—it happens when I miss him most.”
She nodded, and he knew she understood. And like he had been listening, had been waiting in the wings, Kostya’s father materialized in his mouth.
Rich morsels of liver, the texture too firm, overcooked. Onion so sweet it melted between his teeth. Crystals of salt, crackling on his tongue. The bitter char in the back of his throat.
The liver had been burned the way Kostya burned now, itching to prepare this dish, to share it with his mom, to bring his dad back. He knew in his gut that this was the time, that if he made this dish now, it would absolutely work. All the components of the recipe were right here, in this room—his father, their shared grief, the best memory of his dad’s life.
“They say on TV that you bringing back Dead with your food.”
He looked at his mother, the subtle way her eyes grew wide. She believed it, believed in him. It was right there, everything he’d wanted. Everything he’d spent the last year working for, that had all come unraveled tonight. He wouldn’t get the girl, or the dream, but maybe— maybe— he could still have this.
“I can bring Papa back, Mama,” Kostya said softly. “Right now. We can say goodbye.”
His mother looked at him for a long moment, tempted. Then she shook her head.
“ Nyet , Kostya. That’s only for us. Best thing for Papa is to let him rest.”
“But—”
“It’s twenty years. We holding him back long enough.” Her eyes glazed with tears. “Now real love is to let him go.”
She was right. Of course she was.
All the spirits ever wanted was to rest. To make peace. All this time he had been holding on, Kostya never once stopped to wonder whether he had been holding his dad back.
Was this what Maura had meant? Had she been telling the truth? That there were ghosts stuck in his apartment, tethered by their Living? By his food? Waiting to be let go? He still hadn’t seen them for himself, but then, he knew better than anyone that he didn’t have to see them to know they were there.
His mother suddenly laughed, breaking his train of thought. “You know, you so much like him. You looking like him now. Same expressions! And cooking; oh, how he love food! And,” she teased, “leaving house in mess, for anyone to walk in!”
“What mess?”
“Coffee mug on floor! Glass all over, in kitchen. But don’t worry. Cleaning girl pick up when she let me in.”
“What cleaning girl?”
“With purple hair.” His mother sniffed. “I normally don’t like this color, but she is single? Maybe you ask out?”
“Shit. Mama, did she say anything?”
His mother frowned, thinking. “She leave you note, I think, in kitchen. And she take notepad. Say she needed borrow recipes.”
KONSTANTIN TORE HIS kitchen apart, searching. Maura had taken his Saveur Fare order pad, all the recipes he’d recorded—a complete inventory of every aftertaste he’d ever made. Not that it mattered for the opening; every cook at DUH could make those dishes handcuffed and blindfolded. But what did Maura, who couldn’t cook to save her life, plan to do with them?
Her note said she’d found a solution, one that didn’t require him. But maybe it required his food. His instructions. His way of summoning the Dead.
He read and reread it.
Her words wore away at him, the things she said about her love, about her Hunger. They made him text her again, call, wish she’d call him back. She didn’t.
He stayed up all night praying she wasn’t doing anything foolish.