Darkest Fear (32 page)

“Yeah. My dad was so relieved. He's pretty traditional.”

Had my dad been disappointed that I was a girl and they'd never had more kids? I would probably never know. Rafael had four sisters. I tried to imagine him younger, surrounded by girls, but it was impossible to come up with images.

“How come you're not going home for Thanksgiving?” he asked. “Are your parents coming to your cousin's?”

It had been only six months, and it still caught me off guard. It had been six months.

“Um . . . my parents . . . uh, died in an accident last May. I don't have any siblings,” I said, getting the words out. “It was just me, so I came to stay with my cousin for a while.”

“I'm sorry,” Rafael said, frowning. “I'm really sorry. That's awful.”

“Mm. Well, I'm glad I have Matéo, and Aly.”

“Yeah. And you have to cook.”

“Uh-huh. So it's okay if I take Wednesday off?” Just like that we were back to boss and employee, but I'd had a vision of him that was completely new, and I intended to savor it later.

“Yeah, of course,” he said. “No problem.”

“Okay.” I looked at the door that he was still blocking and hoped he wouldn't do anything that would cause me to completely disgrace myself. Like if he made the slightest move toward me. That would be bad.

After a moment of hesitation he turned the doorknob and got out of the way. I went through before I had a chance to change my mind.

• • •

“This looks incredible,” Tink said, and Peter nodded.

“Everyone find your name card,” I instructed. Suzanne had gone Martha Stewart on us and made beautiful calligraphy name cards that she had cunningly stuck in slits in tiny lady apples. She'd also made the amazing centerpiece of pine cones, pomegranates, orange persimmons, and dark purple grapes.

Matéo had searched for and found his mother's best tablecloth. He'd also found crystal candlesticks and other holiday serving pieces in the big credenza in the dining room. I got the impression that last Thanksgiving they hadn't done anything—it had been the first one since his parents had died, and he wouldn't have felt very thankful. Gods knew, if I had been at home by myself, I'd have been doing nothing.

“Can we dig in?” Dana asked. Her friend Michelle was from Mississippi and seemed nice but very shy. I assumed she was a haguara, and I couldn't imagine the delicate, timid jaguar she would become.

“First, let's all sit down, join hands, and say what we're thankful for,” Coco suggested. “Then we can make a line and load up our plates.”

My seat was between Matéo and Peter, and Suzanne had written my whole first name, Viviana, on my card.

“Vivi, why don't you go first,” Aly suggested, “because this was your idea?”

“Um, okay.” Deciding to keep it short and simple, I said, “I'm thankful for family.” The irony was not lost on me.

Next to me, Matéo squeezed my hand. He said, “I too am thankful for family, newfound and old. I'm thankful for friends. I'm thankful to be with the most amazing woman I've ever met.” Across the table, Aly blew him a kiss.

Next was Charlotte. “I'm thankful for love, for food, and for friendship.”

We went around the table like that: Coco, Tink, Michelle, James, Aly, Dana, Peter, Charlotte, Alex, and Suzanne each gave thanks.

Everything turned out better than I'd expected. Matéo had made special Thanksgiving spiced hard cider. I tried half a cup and it was delicious, but I stopped there. Coco and I had cooked. Tink's boyfriend, Peter, had made bourbon whipped cream for all my pies: sweet potato, pecan, and apple-raisin, two of each. The turkey that Coco had brined and roasted was perfect and beautiful.

As I looked around the table at people talking, laughing, and eating, I realized how truly thankful I was to be here. Last summer had been the worst summer of my life, and I was including all my
future summers in that. But I had been offered a new home here; I had a new family in Matéo and Aly.

True, we still didn't know who had killed our parents. We didn't know who had attacked Tink. We hadn't gotten any more information about the person killed in New York. The reporter had never returned my e-mail, and when I'd finally called the
New York Times
, they'd told me that Nicholas Tareynton was away on assignment and they didn't know when he would be back, or if he was checking e-mail. So that seemed like a dead end—very frustrating. And we didn't know for sure what had happened to split Matéo's family from mine.

But in forming our own relationships, I had to admit, we'd made the answers a little less scary.

And I was thankful for that.

• • •

“It's Thanksgiving there, no?” My tia Juliana sounded very far away.

“Yes. I think I'm gonna die.” I lay on my bed, feeling like a blood-filled tick and wishing I had made better choices in terms of desserts. And seconds. And thirds.

Tia Juliana laughed. “You feel like that every year.”

“True.”

“I'm glad you celebrated Thanksgiving with friends, darling,” she said. “I was worried about what you would do today.”

“Well, I thought about getting a Hungry-Man turkey dinner and eating it by myself in front of the TV,” I said. “But then some friends were getting together, and I decided to force myself to go.”
It was not fun lying to my only aunt, pretending I still lived in Sugar Beach. I felt even more guilty about being glad that she lived all the way in Brazil so it was less likely that she would discover my lies. Every once in a while Matéo and I talked about simply coming out and asking her, introducing her to Matéo and seeing what happened. So far we had been total chickens about it. But we really needed to do that. And soon.

Tia Juliana laughed. “You made the right decision.”

“How are things there?” I asked, and for the next twenty minutes we talked about my young cousins, my tio Marc, the crazy weather there, her new manager at work. Until now, she'd always been my tia, my mother's sister, someone I loved but didn't really know that well. Now we had our own relationship, and I was thankful for that, too.

• • •

Around the beginning of December, the weather turned dank and wet. It wasn't super cold, only in the forties, but somehow the chill cut right through everything. Matéo's house, like most houses here and at home, wasn't very well insulated. The tall ceilings that handled hot summer air so effectively did just the opposite in cold weather: Any bit of heat immediately went above head height, leaving us all shivering. Sometimes the only way to feel warm was to sit under a hot shower or by the fire that was usually burning in the parlor fireplace.

Work, however, was comfortable physically, if not emotionally. For the most part, Rafael and I stayed out of each other's way—the
closest I got to him was his signature on my paycheck. We didn't have any more personal talks, and though I'd spent hours thinking about his sisters, about what he would be like as a brother, outwardly I remained casual and a little standoffish.

The first week of December he brought in a tall, beautiful Christmas tree and set it up in a corner by the windows. Hayley went to the storeroom and dragged out several boxes of Christmas and Hanukkah decorations, and we all helped decorate. Rafael programmed holiday music into the sound system. It was chilly and rainy outside, and it felt unbearably cozy to be putting up Hanukkah streamers and dreidels. Kathy and Joey hung Christmas streamers and big ornaments from the ceiling. When the tree was decorated and covered with lights, all the customers clapped.

My parents had celebrated Christmas, but just the secular part—the decorations and presents and Christmas specials. We didn't go to church or talk about baby Jesus or anything. Apparently Matéo and everyone at our house did pretty much the same thing: Aly had decorated the altar where Tzechuro and Tzechura stood guard, but had also decorated the stairs and the front of the house with Christmas bows and lights and greenery. I loved the scent of the evergreen wreaths and garlands, but tried not to think about having Christmas with my parents. For the tree, Suzanne and James were heading to Texas for a brief camping trip, and they planned to stop at a cut-your-own Christmas tree farm on the way back.

“Get a big one,” Aly said.

“At least ten feet,” Coco agreed. “And when you get back, we'll
have a tree-decorating party. Vivi will make cookies.”

“Oh, can you make extras?” Aly asked me. “I'd love to bring homemade cookies in to the office.”

“Make extras for me too,” Tink asked. “I need to bring some to Peter's parents.”

So I had been elected to make twenty gazillion cookies. It was going to be great—and a good distraction from this first Christmas without my parents.

That Thursday night work was slow, and I was looking forward to having the next two nights off for Cookie-Mania. I'd stocked up on supplies and planned to basically hole up in Matéo's kitchen, watch Jane Austen movies on the little kitchen TV, and bake, bake, bake. I was going to make some to bring in to Ro's also. Who knew, maybe Rafael would want me to make cookies for the shop. Maybe he would be bummed that he'd rejected me—twice—when he tasted my espresso meringues.

Maybe I was unbelievably pathetic. Wishing that a guy liked me for my cooking skills was going to set the feminist movement back about fifty years.

“Did Rafael come in today?” I asked Talia that day at work.

She shook her head. “Hayley said she didn't see him this morning.”

So maybe he'd be in later. He usually made some sort of appearance, which gave me the satisfying opportunity to ignore him while he seethed quietly at me. Yep, a couple of cookies were going to clear all of that right up.

I was cleaning the display-case glass and thinking about how the
scones I made at home were better than the scones we bought when the doorbell jingled. I turned to see old Mrs. Fontenot, dressed all in black as usual, her winter coat engulfing her tiny frame. A big shiny car was parked in front of Ro's, and a chauffeur in an actual uniform held the shop door open for her.

“Hi, Mrs. Fontenot,” I said cheerfully as Talia slunk quietly toward the back. I made a mental note to say, “Bawk, bawk, bawk,” when she got back.

“You! Girl!” the old woman said, waving her cane at me.

“Can I make you some coffee?” I headed behind the counter.

“Yes! Like you always do. Don't cut corners! Don't try to sneak that modern junk in there!”

“You know I don't do that to you,” I said, getting to work as she pulled out a chair and sat down at a table, her feet barely touching the floor. I wondered if she had been taller when she was young, and had shrunk in old age. As I made the coffee in one of our little French presses, I thought that Mrs. Fontenot seemed anxious, kind of fidgety. I guess she always was, but there was an alert nervousness to her that was new.

She always liked our palmiers, so I put one on a plate, wishing again that we had a toaster oven instead of just a microwave. When her coffee was done I carried it all over to her table.

“Here you go. I got you a palmier, too.”

The tiny old woman sniffed the coffee, inhaling deeply, then took a sip. Her whole body seemed to relax, and she drank more.

“You,” she said, not looking at me.

“Yes?”

“Has my grandson been in today?”

“I don't think so. Not yet.”

Mrs. Fontenot frowned fiercely and bit into the crisp palmier, unable to avoid a rain of sugary crumbs landing on her plate.

“If you see him, you tell him to come home.” She seemed upset, not looking at me.

“Yes, of course, Mrs. Fontenot.” I was surprised—had he not been home in a couple of days? When had I seen him last? Yesterday? Tuesday, maybe?

The old lady tipped the cup and drained the rest of her coffee, then stood, almost a foot shorter than me. “Thank you,
petite fille
,” she muttered, and then walked stiffly to where her driver waited by the door.

Little girl?
I thought, trying to remember my eighth-grade French.

“Come back soon,” I told her. Her driver took her elbow gently and helped her get into her big black car. It was gusty outside, bits of leaves and paper skittering along the sidewalk. The other businesses on this block had also decorated for the holidays, and Mrs. Fontenot's shiny black car reflected red and green lights as it drove away.

I walked to our hallway and called, “You can come out now, you big chicken!”

Talia immediately poked her head out of the former kitchen. “She's gone?”

“Yes. I don't know why you don't like her. She's perfectly fine,” I said innocently, aware that Mrs. Fontenot had pretty much made
everyone who worked here cry at one time or another.

Talia rolled her eyes. “Good. I'm glad you think so. You can deal with her all by yourself, till kingdom come.”

“She seemed odd,” I said, replaying the visit in my mind. “She said she didn't know where Rafael was.”

Talia shrugged. “He's probably off drawing or painting somewhere. Maybe someone hired him to do a mural or something.”

Or maybe he had met someone. Someone who would take him home to her bed, like he had asked me to. “I guess. Well, he'll turn up.”

• • •

When I got home that night a little after one, I was surprised to see lights on and people moving inside the house. Sometimes someone was awake when I got home, but more often people were either out, or at work like Matéo, or asleep.

“Vivi.” Aly looked upset.

“What's going on?”

She shook her head. “We've all been so busy, but this afternoon I realized that Suzanne and James should have been back yesterday.”

“Oh.” Automatically I felt a little jolt of fear—the attacks had receded a lot in my mind but would never disappear. Trying to think clearly, I said, “They left, what, four days ago? Maybe they decided to stay for an extra day?”