Secret Ingredient

I’m not the type to pretend like what is happening is not happening. I’m a pragmatist and fantasy is counterintuitive. So when my sister stopped calling out of the blue, I thought it best not to ask anyone else or speculate and just drive the two hours down to San Diego to get the answers myself.

I texted my boss the night before that I would be working remotely on Friday and he texted back “got it” with the mutual understanding that remote work meant no work at all. At the office, it was a form of “don’t ask don’t tell” that, as long it was not excessively abused, created a work-tight bond. Kid sick? Remote work. Dentist appointment? Remote work. Sister disappeared? Remote work. The list goes on and on.

I arrived at her apartment at six in the morning because I knew she had shifts at the hospital at eight and like everyone else in our family she couldn’t help but start the day at four, work or not.

I knocked on her door and when that didn’t generate a response, I rang the bell over and over again until I heard her rapid footsteps reach her entrance and open it at the chain.

“What the hell?” She barked. In the sliver of her doorway, her eye looked me over in dreary recognition. Her hair was wet and wrapped in a towel, and she wore one of the pink robes our parents got for us from a trip to The Madonna Inn.

“You look well. Can I come in?”

“What is this?” She probed and unhooked the safety lock.

I wasted no time and hurried into her living room. I could hear her sigh after me as she locked her door.

“What does it look like? You’ve been MIA.” I said, settling on her couch, putting my feet up on her coffee table. It was empty except for the remotes to her TV and cable box neatly coupled on the right corner. Nothing looked out of the ordinary. There were all the same pictures on the wall. All the same grooves on the couch. All the same annoyances to her voice.

“So? Can’t I just not talk to you sometimes?” She said and went into the kitchen.

“Did you talk to mom and dad?” I spoke up after her, talking in her direction, a wall between us.

“No. Why? Did they ask you to check on me?” She asked, coming back with a tumbler of water.

“No. No water for your guest?”

“What guest?” She said and took the seat opposite me on the couch. “All I see is an intruder.”

“Ouch.” I crossed my legs and arms. “I was worried about you.”

She sipped her water and looked across the table. “I’ve got work in a couple of hours.”

“You’re still going to work?”

“Of course, I am.” She said and stood up with a sudden fire in her eyes.

“But I’m here. Call off. It’s early enough.”

“It’s not that easy!” She huffed and went to her room and continued talking from inside. “Had you called I would have made arrangements.”

“But I came all the way down here!” I said and pouted as if she could see me.

“Not my problem.”

“You would do this to your own flesh and blood?”

I waited for a reply and when she didn’t say anything I repeated it again.

“Just wait here, all right? I’ll try to get off early and we’ll hang out.”

“Sounds good to me.” I said and kicked off my shoes and put my head down on her couch. “Are you really all right?”

“Yeah,” she said from her doorway, “I’m going to close this and get ready. Help yourself to the fridge for whatever.”

“I’m going to take a nap.” I said and, when I heard her door latch, I dozed off and dreamt of going door to door selling useless globes of other planets. At the fifth house, my sister tapped my shoulder.

“Hey, I’ll be back. Don’t go in my room, all right?”

I opened an eye and looked up at her in her scrubs. Her badge dangled down above my nose. “Would you like to purchase a globe of Uranus?”

“Shut the fuck up.” She laughed and headed out the door.

Back to my dream, an interspecies couple of a cat and a dog ended up buying my whole stock and by the time I was on the rocket ship home I was awake in my sister’s apartment again.

I got up and washed my face in the bathroom. Nothing was out of the ordinary in there either. No extra pills in the cabinet. No extra toothbrush. No different colored hair.

The kitchen was also just as ordinary. In the fridge, there was leftover adobo and rice which I pulled out and put on a plate. The sauce had coagulated into a brown jelly with peppercorn. The rice was dry and hard. I decided not to take my chances with either and threw them away. To be a good sibling and not an interloper, I washed her dishes and containers.

I found the rice and made a new pot in the rice maker. I unearthed a carton of eggs and bag of cheese that were not past their expiration date and managed an omelet. When the rice was done, I scooped some of it on the plate I just washed and put the omelet on top of it.

However, when I put it down on the table and searched the shelves and refrigerator for my sister’s banana ketchup to finish the dish and returned empty-handed, I was surprised to find the plate empty. I looked at the pan thinking I had forgotten it by mistake, but it was missing from there too, and the sandok for the rice maker clearly had grains on it from a fresh scoop. I did not know what to make of it until I saw the door to my sister’s room ajar.

Of course she had been hiding someone, I thought, why wouldn’t she want me in her room if she wasn’t. Expecting a boyfriend or a girlfriend, I called out to whomever was there in a cordial but stern matter. I had to hold my station as the older sibling after all. “The jig’s up. Come on out.”

After no response, I came closer to the door. “Don’t worry. I don’t bite. My sister’s a grown woman. She can have anybody stay over she wants.”

A minute went by and only the sound of my stomach growling echoed in the apartment. I decided to ignore my sister’s wishes and pushed myself toward the open door. “I’m coming in. Don’t freak out.” I said before the doorway and slowly edged myself in.

To my surprise, sitting on my sister’s bed was an old Filipino woman. She had a red and brown patterned robe on, and her grey hair was intricately wrapped and decorated with beads and shells. But, perhaps the most unique aspect of her was her skin. Every part of it that was exposed was covered in tattoos of patterned lines. She looked up at me with milky-blue eyes and smiled.

“Hello,” she said. I expected an accent but there was none. Well, at least not a Filipino accent. There was something New York to her voice. She crossed her legs and exposed more lines. Every other toe was adorned with a ring. A bracelet of dried vine hung from one of her ankles.

“Hello,” I managed to say after what seemed like an eternity of gawking.

She moved over and patted a space next to her on the bed. “Come, sit.”

“Yes,” I said and sat down. I looked around the room but besides the presence of this woman nothing was different in there either. Up in the corner was the altar I helped my sister install. The Santa Nino my parents bought her stared vacantly to the opposite end as if ignoring us.

“Your sister has told me so much about you. I knew you would come.”

“What did she say?”

“She said that you’re stubborn. That you wouldn’t understand my being here.”

“I think it’s fine! It doesn’t matter what kind of relationship you have, as long as you love each other.”

The old woman laughed and squeezed my knee like my mom always did when I said something funny or stupid. Even when she was a stranger, the touch felt familiar.

“Tanga! I’m not her girlfriend. I’m your relative.”

“Oh,” I said and laughed with her. We laughed a long time until there were tears in our eyes.

“So, what are you doing here?” I asked, starting to see the resemblance between us. There was a dip here. A curve there. Even the way she breathed. Air flowed through us the same way.

“Your sister summoned me here.”

I winced at the word “summoned” knowing it meant some kind of eldritch trouble. No one used the word “summon” anymore unless it meant something strange.

“What do you mean by ‘Summon’?”

“Oh, it’s not like she knew she was doing it. Most of my descendants don’t know about me until one day, poof, I’m there and I have to explain the whole thing to them. Thank God, I learned English.”

I stood up. I reached for my phone ready to call someone, but I couldn’t decide if it was going to be the police or an exorcist. “Whose side of the family did you say you were from again?”

She looked up at me, her smile not wavering. “It’s hard to say. The blood goes back hundreds of years. That’s a lot of generations to track down. A lot of people I met through the years. I used to be summoned once a year, but now I’m being summoned every day, at different places at the same time. Hard for the living to do, I know. But, when you’re a spirit, you can swing it, I guess.”

While she talked, I backed out of the room and typed 911, but, right before I was about to hit dial, my phone went dead the old woman was no longer sitting on the bed.

“It’s hard to explain how this works,” The woman sighed. I turned behind me and found her sitting on the couch. “Sorry, I don’t even understand it myself. I just go with the flow. All I know is what brought me here and what I’m supposed to do.”

I let out the chill in my chest and put my dead phone in my pocket. I was at the mercy of this old woman or whatever she was. “What did my sister do to summon you here?”

“Human sacrifice.” The old woman said matter-of-factly. As if human sacrifice could be compared to clipping a nail or skipping a song on a playlist.

“My sister would never do that!”

“Well, she did. There’s no way to deny it. That’s why I’m here. When the sacrifice is made, I appear to grant the wish to the one who sacrificed the sacrifice. That’s a funny way to say it, right? Sacrificed the Sacrifice. It just sounds wrong, but it is what it is.”

I went around the couch and sat down next to the old woman. She looked at the TV fidgeting over the remotes like she wanted it on.

“Did you want to watch something?” I asked, picking up the remote for the smart TV.

“We were watching Iron Chef America on Netflix,” she said, watching my hand expectantly.

I found the App on the TV and played the next episode. We watched for a while and, when Mark Dacascos unveiled the secret ingredient (it was Alaskan King Crab), I spoke up. “So, you’re here to grant my sister wishes like some Tooth Fairy?” I said, thinking Tooth Fairy was more appropriate to say than genie because what had transpired between them was an exchange rather than happenstance.

The old woman didn’t take her eyes off the screen. The Iron Chef Bobby Flay cut off the legs of one crab while his opponent hammered open the claw of another. “Yeah. I told her I can give her one wish, but the girl doesn’t want anything.”

“Why not?”

“She feels guilty.”

The opponent whisked some cream with the insides of a crab until it became coffee like. Alton Brown called it a French technique but didn’t know the specific word for it.

“Who did she sacrifice?”

The woman made a slight squeal of awe as Bobby Flay’s assistant chef pulled the red legs from a pot of bowling water and onto a tray. “She killed a patient of hers. The lady wanted it. She was suffering. If anything, she did her a favor.”

“She killed someone?”

“Not in a malicious way, but yes. It is what it is.” She said like before. Sacrificed the sacrifice.

“And what makes it a sacrifice?”

Vegetables and steak went on a grill. Both chefs were going for Surf and Turf.

“When you give up something you don’t want to, it’s a sacrifice. Doesn’t matter who it’s for or why you do it. When it happens, I appear.”

“And you say you appear a lot?”

“Yup. Especially over here on this side of the world. They’re mostly people just like your sister. I’m proud that so many of my descendants became nurses and doctors!”

It was hard to imagine my sister ever killing a person, let alone killing anything. She prayed for the frogs we dissected in science class, nursed pigeons and ravens with broken wings back to health. She even volunteered once a week at a free clinic. In my eyes, she was a saint.

“Are you disappointed in your sister?” The woman asked, leaning forward, resting her chin her hands, her elbows to her knees.

Before I could answer, the door opened and my sister came into the room. She looked at the two of us and then at the screen.

  “You’re watching without me!” She exclaimed and sat between us on the couch.

The woman stuck out her tongue. “I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist.”

My sister snatched the remote from my hands and threw her keys on the coffee table. “So, I guess she told you what happened.”

I watched the episode go in reverse. The food uncook, the crab become whole and come back to life.

“Yeah.”

“And?” She asked, waiting for some sort of comment from me. The episode started again and everyone was reintroduced, the secret ingredient was re-revealed.

“I think you should make a wish.”

My sister paused the show and turned to me.

“What?”

“I mean, there’s no use denying yourself something when you’ve already got it.”

The old woman chimed in. “That’s what I’ve been saying all along!”

“Shut up!” My sister said and the old woman clicked her tongue at her in disappointment like our father did when we got upset. “I can’t forgive myself for what I’ve done. No matter what I tell myself, it doesn’t change things. I can’t change how I feel about it.”

Seeing my sister in such despair put me in despair. Her pain felt like my pain. Her guilt was my guilt. And somehow, in that filial exchange, an epiphany dawned upon me. It was then I proposed the wish. “But you can change it. You can wish for the woman to come back, right? You can reverse the sacrifice?” We turned to the old woman. “Is that allowed?”

The old woman rubbed her chin. “I guess. But it’s not like she’ll come back from the dead. Time will reverse to before the deed was done. The woman will suffer and die anyway. Only your sister will remember what could’ve been.”

My sister was quiet. She pushed a button and Bobby Flay ripped the limbs from a crab again. His opponent resmashed open another’s claw.

My sister looked at the old woman as things unfolded as it did before. “But I won’t kill the woman then?”

“She will suffer, but you will not kill her.”

My sister looked at me. “I don’t want her to suffer but I don’t want to kill her either.” My sister said.

“How about changing how you feel about it?” I suggested, but my sister responded to my words with a look of disgust.

“So, is that your wish?” The old woman asked, turning from the parts we had already seen. “You want to take what you did back?”

My sister didn’t answer. Instead, she watched the screen. One after another, the crabs were taken apart and turned into something new. Iron Chef Bobby Flay presented his crab miso to the judges first: a departure from his usual American cooking. Then, the challenger countered with an indistinguishable crab foam which one judge commented as “surprisingly rich in flavor” despite how light it was.

“That just means it’s salty.” The old woman commented, sticking her tongue out. It was gray in the glow of the television. “Is that even crab anymore? You do too much to something sometimes and it’s not what it was anymore. It’s just everything else but.”

My sister made a noise as if she agreed then she paused the episode before the next dishes were introduced. She sighed. “All right. I got it.”

The old woman looked at my sister. In her eyes, in her lines, I could tell whatever was going to happen was happening already. She got up and stretched, then she sat on the coffee table in front of us. She held out her hands. “Put your hands in mine and tell me your wish.”

Without any more hesitation, my sister leaned forward and did as the woman asked. I looked at her mouth in anticipation of her words until she finally said them to us and the frozen screen.

For a few seconds, nothing happened. The room was still and the TV buzzed. Then, in waves, everything folded in on itself. The walls came down on us, then the streets lifted up, then the sky came down, then the sun and stars engulfed us in their light. Time stopped then reverted.

Then Years passed. Then Millennia.

I woke up two weeks before the time my sister stopped talking to me. I called her and asked her how she was doing and called her everyday after that. She always picked up. She never mentioned a woman suffering or a woman who could grant wishes.

But she never did mention her patients anyway. Hike it up to patient-hospital confidentiality. Patients got well, suffered, and died all the time. You couldn’t talk about it and there was no end to it. All anyone could’ve done was their best.

As for me. I’m no doctor, but I eke out a living like everyone else. And I sacrifice too. Not as much as others do, but enough that it’s worth noticing.

The old woman is with me now. She and I have breezed through season 1 of Iron Chef America and are midway season 2. I can’t think of anything I want that matters and she’s fine with sticking around as long as I got Netflix.

She tells me, if we keep at this for long enough, we’ll be able to make what they make ourselves, but I don’t believe in that sort of thing. No way am I going through the trouble. It is what it is.