I watch Tad pad into the kitchen and start to make what I presume is breakfast. “You really don’t—”
“Happy to,” Tad says. “You’re exhausted, I’m sure. After a long night of packing.”
I look at the opened basement box from the shop sitting in the middle of the living room, which is as far as I got yesterday before I put on those red shoes. Now Anjelica is sitting on top of the mound of dolls, yawning.
“And you’ve got another big day today, I’m sure. Need your protein.”
I watch his back for a while, stupefied. He pulls a frying pan from the cupboard. Spatula from a drawer. Eggs, berries, and greens from the fridge. He tips the fruits and greens into Mother’s Vitamix like he’s done it a thousand times before. It roars to life with the push of a button.
“You really know your way around,” I say to his back, over the roar.
He goes still. Then he turns and grins. “Yup,” he shouts at me. Winks. I drink the coffee. It’s in a bowl that says café au lait on it in five hundred different fonts. I remember Mother’s look of hurt the last time I visited, when I refused the café au lait she’d made for me in this very bowl. Since when did you switch to black coffee?
Since now, I said. And she gaped at me like I’d slapped her.
I don’t understand why you’re freaking out, I said. It’s just coffee. I looked at her over the untouched bowl. She’d given it a mountain of foam, shaved chocolate curls into it just like I’d loved as a teenager.
Just tell me it isn’t some SKIN thing, she muttered at last, clearing the bowl away.
It’s not, I lied.
Never mind, she said, holding a hand up. What else should I expect, right?
Now Tad sets a plate proudly before me. Two sunny-side up eggs that regard me like eyes. A vegan bacon strip for a mouth. Strawberry nose. Beside it, a smoothie so blue-green it looks radioactive.
“That’s the spirulina and blueberries,” Tad says. It’s the exact smoothie I made for myself when I was here, the one Mother mocked and called my skin sludge.
“Where did you learn to make this?” I say, pointing to the smoothie.
“Oh, your mother taught me a while ago. This was her favorite.”
“Her favorite?”
“She had it every morning when she remembered. With two scoops of this stuff too.” And he holds out the blue tub of collagen powder that I left here, that she wrinkled her nose at. You’re drinking BONE gelatin now?
“What’s wrong?” Tad asks me.
“Nothing,” I murmur at the eggs. He pats me on the back gently like he’s my father. This shirtless man who is at least five years younger than I am. I stare at the eggy eyes, the leering bacon mouth. One of the yolks is oozing now like it’s weeping.
“Tad? What would you say my mother’s mental state was?”
“That’s a good question,” Tad says. He thinks for a while, scratches his neck. “Overall, I’d say it was… great.”
“Great. Really?”
“Sure. I mean, she was really upbeat. Sunny-side up,” he says, looking at my weeping eggs. “Always.”
“Upbeat?”
“Oh yeah. She loved looking out of windows. She loved looking at flowers.”
He grins and stares out of the windows. “Sometimes she’d look over there.” I watch him point happily through the glass at a row of carefully clipped shrubs outside.
“And sometimes she’d look that way,” he says, pointing straight ahead at a row of palm trees near the shore. “Sometimes”—he looks at me in wonderment—“a pelican would fly by. Or a dolphin would jump up from the water. Leap right out of the waves. She loved that.” He smiles at me. “So much.”
“Really.”
“Sure.” He moves in closer to me. “But do you know what I think she loved most?” I look at Tad in his cutoff jeans. He’s wearing a necklace made of seashells. There’s a tattoo of a grinning dolphin leaping from green waves on his upper arm. The green waves are the exact same color of the waves outside and the exact same shade as Tad’s eyes.
“What?”
“That she never knew what she might see.”
I catch a whiff of his sunscreen. And Mother’s own perfume, could he be wearing it? Tad’s eyes, Tad’s cheekbones, Tad’s exceedingly white teeth. Framed by his sun-bleached straggly hair. I think of Mother walking along the beach at midnight. Falling onto the rocks. For a moment, I have a dark thought. A very dark thought.