North Of Happy - Adi Alsaid

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and then snaps his fingers at a passing waiter and asks for another shot of tequila. He thanks everyone for coming, cracks a joke about how this isn’t a party for my graduation but a party for him not having to pay for tuition anymore. The crowd responds with alcohol-boosted laughter.

      “He made the same joke when I graduated,” the pigeon grumbles. Then he offers one last coo and takes off, disappearing unceremoniously into the night. For a second I feel relief. Maybe he’ll stay gone.

      “Hijo, I want you to look forward now,” Dad goes on. “Forget about the past, about what we’ve lost.” He pauses and looks down at the floor for a moment. He bites his lip, like he’s struggling to keep back tears. “I know you miss your brother, and I miss him every day too. Life isn’t fair.”

      The performance is impressive, but it makes me want to throw something at the stage. Dad basically wiped his hands clean of Felix long ago, and not even death has undone the forgetting. To him, Felix has been dead for years. Only for appearances will he pretend to be broken. He wants all these people to just go quiet for a moment or two, to think that he’s trying to move past tragedy, instead of completely unaffected by it, like I know he is. It’s what I see every day: Dad talking about work, Dad talking about my future, Dad going on like nothing’s happened.

      Then, after all these months, something within me clicks. An understanding. Felix has it right. Escape. Yeah, I know it’s probably not a great sign that I’m thinking a pigeon is my dead brother, and I know that everything I heard Felix say was maybe not real, just my grief doing strange things to my head.

      But he had that part right all along. I shouldn’t be here.

      As Dad keeps up the charade, talking about my future and my prospects while he’s got a son in the grave, I step away from the edge of the party, cut through the crowd. Most people probably think I’m going to grab myself another drink. They don’t see my hands shaking at my sides; they haven’t noticed that my shadow disappeared when Felix did, that I’m not whole anymore. No one tries to stop me. Maybe they don’t even see me.

      It’s only when I exit that I hear the murmurs start to build, and Dad’s speech get derailed.

      I smile the whole elevator ride down.

       CHAPTER 2

      MEDITERRANEAN OMELET

      3 eggs

      2 tablespoons butter

      2 tablespoons sundried tomatoes

      2 tablespoons fresh basil

      1 tablespoon goat cheese

      Sea salt, to taste

      METHOD:

      When I get home, I don’t know where I’m going, but I know I’m leaving.

      Mom and Dad are probably on their way home too, but they’ll have to make a few explanations, give some instructions to the caterers or whatever. I have some time, but as soon as I’m in my room, I pull the suitcase from the top shelf in the closet, toss it open onto my bed. Out of habit, or maybe to distract myself from what I’m doing, I turn on the TV.

      A commercial pops up: Tupperware, and then cars, cleaning products. I throw all my underwear into the suitcase, along with some socks, two pairs of jeans. I’m actually doing this? On the screen, out of the corner of my eye, I recognize the show. It’s called Today’s Specials. They profile different restaurants across the world, spend an episode with each one.

      The show starts with a female chef in the kitchen at dawn, a single burner lit. The camera pans to a quiet morning in the San Juan Islands off the coast of Washington State, golden sunrise over the water, a hummingbird gorging on sugary water from a feeder. “How this is cheap real estate is beyond me,” the female chef says on voice-over. They show the name of the restaurant: Provecho. Then the name of the executive chef and owner: Elise St. Croix. Something feels familiar about that, so I keep watching.

      A shot of what she’s making: perfectly golden omelet. Sundried tomatoes, fresh-picked basil, goat cheese. I want to step through the screen and watch her every move, so I can make it for myself. Felix and I have been watching this show for years, drooling on the couch and then scurrying to the kitchen as soon as the credits roll so we can try to recreate the dishes.

      Since he died I haven’t been able to watch the show at all. Especially when he shows up on the couch next to me and begs me to change the channel to it, or hijacks whatever it is I’m watching by putting himself in the screen.

      They cut away, show the thirty-table restaurant. Chef Elise sits at one of the six patio tables and eats calmly, looking out at the scenery. She’s in her late forties, light brown hair in a ponytail. The green of the surrounding islands pops on the screen, the morning ferry from Seattle discernible in the distance. They probably booked the restaurant solid for a month on the strength of that one image.

      Then, my favorite part of the show. The kitchen comes alive. Knives coming down like they’re machine-driven, flames licking at liquids in saucepans like they’re trying to get a taste. The kitchen jargon that sounds like an exotic language. Onions are diced in seconds, herbs chopped and thrown into small plastic containers. A cook cracks a joke, and another one looks up from the meat he’s butchering, laughing without even stopping his work.

      The staff gathers around as Chef goes over the menu, like soldiers at the ready. Her white chef coat is spotless, a tasting spoon tucked into that tiny pocket in the upper sleeve. She speaks like a general in peacetime, calm but commanding. The guests arrive. Attractive servers bring out black leather menus, smiling widely, the day’s specials on the tips of their tongues. Cooks begin poaching shrimp, flipping steaks with tongs.

      I’m holding a stack of T-shirts in my hands, transfixed. Then I remember Felix’s stack of notebooks.

      He kept track of every day of his travels and would send me each filled-out journal for safekeeping. I drag my nightstand over so I can reach the top of my closet, where I’ve been storing them in a cardboard box. I think I know why this restaurant feels familiar to me.

      The notebooks are mostly in Spanish, the rare English word marked by stray accents, as if Felix wanted to bend it to his preferred tongue. It takes all my effort not to thumb through each notebook, to not get lost in Felix’s adventures. He never bothered to date them, but I always marked down what day I received them. I know the entry I’m looking for, can recall the words as if I was there too. It was about a year ago, when Felix was in Israel. He’d saved a bunch of money while living on a kibbutz for a while and had treated himself to a nice meal, at a fancy restaurant called Mul Yam.

      I usually believe the best meals are to be found in home kitchens, Felix wrote. This time, I was wrong. Below, he’d listed restaurants he wanted to eat at in his lifetime. A few of them had been crossed out with blue or black or red ink. I don’t allow myself to think of all the ones he didn’t get to, but my suspicion was right. At the top of the list is Provecho.

      The show comes back on. I’ve been watching scenes like these so often the last couple of years. Chef Elise walks down rows of planted herbs and vegetables, rallies her troops, the kitchen comes alive, mise en place, the guests arrive, twinkling lights on the patio.

      It might be a simple coincidence. There are constantly reruns of this show, and there’s a good chance Felix watched this same episode years ago. But it feels like so much of a sign that I look for Felix in the screen, some acknowledgment that this is his doing.

      I pull my rain jacket from the closet, though I don’t really know what the hell the weather will be like, just that the island is near Seattle and Seattle is rainy. I fold the jacket neatly on top of the other clothes. My heart is pounding.

      I’ve never acted impulsively in my life. Felix got all those genes. It feels like I’m borrowing his disobedience, like I’m stealing something, acting Unlike Myself. But that doesn’t keep me from putting a knee on the suitcase to force it closed.

      In

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