This time, she’s done it. She just knows she has.
They’re perfect. Soft but not chewy. Crumbly but not sandy. The right balance of sweet and buttery. Baked until the bottoms are golden brown and the tops are kissed with color.
She breaks open one of the cookies and wafts the sweet cloud of its scent. Places a morsel of it delicately on her tongue. Notes its slight heft—approximately ten grams. It takes about twelve seconds to melt completely. She scribbles her findings in her notebook.
“How do you feel?” Naomi asks, swallowing the lump of sugar cookie, pencil poised above her notebook.
Deb shrugs. “Normal, I guess.”
Naomi huffs. “You were a psychologist weren’t you? Can you get a little more specific?”
“I was in research psychology. Not a clinician.” Deb pauses, considers. “I feel a little lighter, maybe?”
“Lighter how?”
“I don’t know. I guess less weighed down?”
Naomi looks at Deb frankly. “You’re a ghost. You have no weight to begin with.”
“Thanks for the reminder.”
It has been two weeks since Deb became an impermanent fixture in Naomi’s home. Two weeks of Naomi trying to understand and sever the psychic link between them.
Deb mimes smacking her lips together. “I swear I can almost taste them,” she says. “Maybe you could try adding some lemon zest? Or orange marmalade? Something with a little zing.”
“Did you use lemon or orange in your original recipe?”
“No.”
“Then, no.”
In Naomi’s best estimations, Deb became linked with Naomi when she baked that first batch of cookies from the cemetery. She’d done it wrong. So, logically, it follows that if Naomi figures out what that original recipe was, if she follows the experiment to a successful end, a perfect cookie, the link between her and Deb will be severed.
It’s ridiculous: a perfect cookie. Her experiments usually have more heft. A promising medication for difficult diseases. The mutational effects of viruses on human hearts, human lungs.
Still, Naomi buys fifty-pound bags of flour. Her cupboards contain three types of sugar: cane, coarse, and brown. She buys butter by the pound and has researched different types of cookie presses. She orders the most classic shapes from Amazon: Christmas trees, wreaths, swirled stars. She has even roped Sal into researching classic presses from the nineteen thirties and on, when Deb would have made the cookies each holiday season. “A new hobby,” she tells him when he asks why cookie presses. She tries not to look guilty when he looks relieved, like this is a new hobby, and a new hobby has to be a good sign for a grieving person. As if this hobby is anything but madness. He gifts her with a vintage press the next week.
She looks up instructions online and adjusts. She makes sure the butter is softened but not melty. She refrigerates the dough in long, slender, plastic-wrapped logs that she I.D.s with the batch number, notes, and the date. 04: all cane sugar. 11: dough softened fifteen minutes. 25:half butter half margarine.
She’s learned a few tricks along the way: make sure the pan is completely cooled between batches or the cookies will stick. Leave the dough to warm for a minute or two to make pressing easier.
Deb has been no help at all. She claims she doesn’t remember the recipe, it was from so long ago.
How does a person forget the recipe that’s printed on their grave, Naomi wants to ask her. But she knows this line of questioning will go nowhere. Deb has been dodgy about the whole thing, only half-heartedly following Naomi’s progress, answering Naomi’s questions with a word or two before floating off to the newspaper which Naomi keeps spread across the kitchen table.
“Fascinating,” she hears Deb say, eyes scanning the length of the newspaper. When she gets to the bottom of the page, she looks up. “Could you give me a flip?”
It is a measure in patience, Naomi realizes. The cookie baking. And the ghost supervising. Just like her work at the lab. One experiment after another. Hours of nothing, then suddenly something.
She rinses her hands at the sink before going to the kitchen table and flipping the page over so Deb can continue reading. “What’s fascinating?” she asks, eyes darting quickly down the page. A column about the high school baseball team. A pothole problem in a neighbor a few over from Naomi’s. An article about a little girl who is collecting backpacks and school supplies to hand out to needy kids. The paper calls her a hometown hero. The girl is young, dough-faced, tender as sugar. Naomi’s heart clenches momentarily before she flips the page. When will every young girl she sees stop yanking her body with memory?
“Newspapers!” Deb says. “They’re completely different from when I was alive.”
“How so?” Naomi returns to the kitchen and slicks butter onto a clean pan. She pops a cookie from an old batch into her mouth and leans her elbows against the counter, listening while the oven preheats.
“First of all, the ads.” Deb makes a face. “You can’t read anything without being bombarded by alcohol and lawn equipment.”
Naomi laughs. “You’re not wrong. Did newspapers not have ads in the forties?”
“No, they did,” Deb says, frowning at the pages in front of her. “But only a few. And a lot less flashy and distracting. This thing is filled with fluff. Mostly soft opinion pieces. And a whole section dedicated to cartoons and games!”
“You like the games,” Naomi says. Every now and then, Deb will call her over to fill in the numbers of the Sudoku puzzle or to help her with a particularly tricky cryptograph.
“Yeah, well,” Deb mutters, eyes shifting to the newspaper again.
For a moment, something tickles the back of Naomi’s mind. “Oh my god,” she says. “You know who you sound like?”
Deb looks up.
“Me!” The grumbling, the muttering. The way Deb says “Christ!” at every minor inconvenience.
“Well I shouldn’t wonder, seeing as how you can’t keep your feelings to yourself.”
Naomi grins. She’s not sure whether it’s the sugar jittering in her veins or the middle-aged scowl darkening Deb’s baby face, but laughter bubbles in Naomi’s gut and lifts in a sound that has become foreign in its lightness.
May I add this to my review article for Fiction Friday?