Everyone offered Cristal sympathy for the loss of her mom. People she barely knew were practically crawling out of the woodwork to offer their Tupperware meals and “Oh you poor thing”s and “If you need anything at all, don’t hesitate to ask”s. Honestly, it was kind of impressive, because most of those people kept their distance from Mom when she was alive. She was the type of mother who other moms in the elementary school PTA judged because she dressed “flamboyantly” and let her kids eat raw cookie dough. Later, she was the kind of mom who made Cristal a little proud but also a little embarrassed to bring friends home from school to meet. She volunteered at the soup kitchen every week and brought the best baked goods to every fundraising bake sale, but she was not the kind of mom who could accurately be eulogized as “a universally respected and loved pillar of the local community.”
In Cristal’s opinion, a better obituary would go something like this: “Isabella Sorgina was a free spirit to the end, who would’ve gone dancing into the grave if cancer hadn’t taken her down like an NFL linebacker who ought to be penalized for unnecessary roughness. Although people looked at her funny for singing out loud in the produce section at Trader Joe’s and she definitely would’ve been murdered in the 1600s for witchcraft, she was an excellent and loving mother who would’ve done anything for her husband and two daughters—well, except stay alive. She always said that ‘not all who wander are lost,’ which was a great excuse because she got lost all the time and was late to literally everything. She is probably getting lost in the afterlife as we speak.”
Somehow, none of the responsible adults wanted to publish that one.
But “irreverent” or not, Cristal was absolutely right about her mom—specifically about the part where she always got lost. Even in an urn, Isabella Sorgina had a mind of her own. And somehow, Cristal had the feeling that nobody would be quite as sympathetic the second time she lost her mom, which was unfortunate, because she’d searched the entire house three times over and had no idea where that damn urn was.
It wasn’t in its place of honor on the living room mantle, next to the framed family photo and the candle that smelled like Mom’s favorite pumpkin spice. It wasn’t in Mom and Dad’s bedroom, or in their bathroom, or in Rosa’s closet. It wasn’t in the basement by the litterbox. In her search of the house, Cristal found three lost cat toys and several Polly Pocket shoes. She swept up enough black hairs to knit a sweater—the combined effect of two long-haired girls and one black cat (Isabella’s own dark hair was long gone after the first round of chemo). Cristal found her dad’s reading glasses that had been lost for months. She did not, however, find her mother’s ashes.
She had given up on the search and was trying not to dwell on the fact that even in death, she couldn’t seem to keep her mother close when Rosa got home from seventh grade soccer practice. Cristal kept her eyes on the college applications she was filling out at the kitchen table so her little sister wouldn’t notice her smudged mascara and runny nose.
“You look like you’re crying,” said her little sister.
“Hello to you too, Rosa. My day was great, thanks for asking. And yours?”
“You also sound like you’ve been crying.”
“Well, you sound like you’re being nosy.”
Rosa stuck her tongue out at Cristal and produced a bag of cat treats from her pink and purple backpack. She was on a mission to become Jinx’s new favorite person—an elaborate five-step plan involving cat treats at strategic times of the day. So far, it had made the cat fatter but not more affectionate. Instead, Jinx seemed to have transferred his allegiance to Cristal since Mom died. Everywhere she went, the cat followed her like a shadow that meowed for dinner every night promptly at 5:30.
“Mrs. Whitt gave me another casserole,” Rosa said. “When she dropped me off she told me to, and I quote, ‘Make sure that beautiful big sister of yours is eating enough so she doesn’t lose those curves.’” She finished the imitation off with an uncomfortably realistic vomit noise.
“Ew,” said Cristal, “why is every mother in town obsessed with my eating habits?”
“Throw it out and have Dad pick up Chipotle after work?” Rosa suggested.
“Absolutely. Wait—can you also grab the rhubarb pie from the Browns and take it out too?”
Cristal was still intent on her career goals and aspirations, so she was only paying partial attention as her sister dug out some well-intentioned Tupperware from her backpack, opened the fridge for the pie, and stopped short.
“Crissy, why are Mom’s ashes in the fridge?”
Suddenly, career aspirations were the last thing on Cristal’s mind.
During her pregnancy with Rosa, Isabella developed an intense affinity for rhubarb. Dad, who was a professor and did not believe in simplifying language to talk to children, had told Cristal privately that Mom “was experiencing a lot of hormonal cravings right now” and that it was best for them to “accept that the miracle of new life being brought into this family entails the consumption of an uncomfortable amount of strange and inexplicable dinner foods.” Cristal, at age four already an expert in detangling his complicated syntax, took this to mean that it was rhubarb or bust until the baby came. She loved her mom, and she was excited to have a little sister to play with, so she ate her rhubarb and was very brave about it for months and months on end. But a four-year-old can only be brave for so long.
“Mama, I’m tired of rhubarbs,” Cristal groaned, leaning around her mother’s pregnant belly to peer despairingly into the fridge. “Won’t the baby be tired of rhubarbs, too?”
Isabella looked down at her daughter with dismay. “I thought you loved rhubarb.”
“I’m tired of rhubarbs.” Cristal did not whine, because she was four years old and four-year-olds were too grown-up to whine. However, her tone may have been less than optimistic.
“Well, mi brujita, I have a strawberry rhubarb pie planned for this evening, and all the ingredients are measured and laid out already. But maybe I can work a little magic and make it taste like something different,” Mama promised with a wink.
Dessert that night was pumpkin pie.
About a week after the fridge incident, Cristal found the urn in the back of her closet, hiding behind the amazing Elphaba costume her mom had made for Halloween four years ago. Next it was in the pantry, neatly in line with the sixteen extra cans of expired pumpkin from last fall. Pumpkin bread was Cristal and Rosa’s absolute favorite food of all time, and nothing in the world could compare to their mother’s secret recipe. Every year as soon as the aspens turned gold, Isabella would bake loaf after loaf of warm spicy bread. Cristal and Rosa took it in their lunches to school every day, like a warm hug from their mom over the lunch hour; eventually they started bringing extra for their friends by popular demand. When the school year began, Mom started stockpiling the ingredients so she wouldn’t buy out the whole store at once. Last fall, however, Mom had been too sick to cook batches and batches of bread—and too stubbornly secretive to help Cristal out in her quest to fill her mother’s inimitable footsteps.
“Mom, just give me the recipe. I already tried baking it myself once, and it tastes nothing like yours. How do you make it so good?” Cristal had asked desperately.
“It’s magic,” said her mom blithely, ignoring Cristal’s eye roll and frustrated huff. “I can’t share it with you yet.”
“If not now—”
Cristal stopped. She had been about to say, “If not now, when?” but nobody liked to verbalize the fact that Isabella would probably not live to see the next fall.
Sure enough, the next fall arrived and brought with it everything that made fall wonderful except the person who loved it most. Cristal stared at the urn, which looked inexplicably comfortable in the pantry, and wished desperately that the counselor at her school had given better advice than “take deep breaths, live in the feeling, and know that it will pass.”
She did not think too hard about how, exactly, the urn had developed free will, powers of mobility, and an inexplicable wanderlust. Around the time of her mother’s diagnosis, Cristal decided that some things about the world just made no sense and that the best way to deal with them was simply by continuing to live life without contemplating questions that had no good answer. So Cristal did not worry about how the urn made its way into the pantry as she picked it up and moved a can of pumpkin to cover the space it left in the row.
Under that can of pumpkin was an index card crammed with her mom’s looping handwriting.
Somehow, Cristal managed to keep her hands from shaking while she still cradled the precious urn. But by the time she had returned the urn to its proper space on the mantle, retrieved the mysterious recipe card, and settled at the kitchen table, the faded orange card was trembling in her hand like a leaf. She skimmed the recipe card quickly: pumpkin, eggs, flour, baking soda, nutmeg . . .
The ingredients looked exactly the same as all those internet recipes that she’d tried and found disappointing. But something in her mom’s handwriting called to her. Just try it, some voice in her head urged. Maybe it’ll be different this time. She settled in for a closer read.
A few minutes later, Cristal began seriously entertaining the previously sacrilegious suspicion that her mother really had been a bit crazy. Although the ingredients looked normal, the instructions to bake Isabella Sorgina’s Famous Pumpkin Bread were, to put it mildly, extremely eccentric.
1. Mix the dry ingredients in the turquoise bowl (stored in the cupboard by the window). While you stir, think about the spiciest parts of life.
2. In the big orange bowl (under stove), cream butter and sugar; beat in eggs (all mixing should be done by hand and with a personal touch). Make sure you aren’t taking your frustrations out on the batter, only disciplining it with love. Beat for a few minutes—sing Ella Fitzgerald to pass the time.
3. Add the pumpkin and all your love. Mix.
4. Practice conflict resolution skills when introducing the dry ingredients to the wet. Remind them that we all have our strengths and work together to live in harmony. Singing helps ease the way in this step, too.
5. Be sure to butter the pans up (tell them how great they are, how much you appreciate their service, how important their role is in the baking process, etc. They tend to be overlooked) before you add the batter.
6. Bake with a warm heart until the cat tells you to stop.
7. Take a deep breath. Stretch your arms over your head. Cool off. Remember that everything is going to be okay and that I love you.
8. Do not worry about your eating habits; your body is completely fine and Mrs. Whitt needs to mind her own business.
Only her mother could’ve written a recipe this maddening. Sure, it was funny (Cristal would admit to huffing a laugh at the line about buttering up the pans), but what did it mean? What practical use was there in it? This recipe card seemed just like all the advice Cristal had craved and never received from her mom: amusing, but useless.
As her mother grew sicker and sicker, Cristal grew more and more tired of her ambiguous answers and artificial light-heartedness. What was there to laugh about? Chemo and pain and bills to pay and Rosa crying when she thought nobody would hear. It was so frustrating when Cristal would ask her mom a question and be greeted with some utterly incomprehensible absurdist answer, and then Cristal would feel bad for feeling frustrated because here her mother was, dying and coping as best she could—but why did her coping mechanism have to be so impractical?
Deep breaths. Live in the feeling and let it pass. Cristal had actually smiled at the last few instructions. How and when had her mom written this card for her? There was no question in Cristal’s mind that she was the intended audience; and her mom may have been weird, but she usually was right about things, even when Cristal hated to admit it. And Rosa’s appetite had been worryingly small lately, and pumpkin bread was her favorite . . .
Cristal fetched an apron, suspended her disbelief, and baked.
Rosa and Cristal polished off the pumpkin bread before Dad even got home for dinner, and then Rosa insisted that Cristal bake another loaf right away so Dad could try it too. At the first bite, his eyes grew very bright—not in the teary way that the girls were familiar with, but with a joy that Cristal hadn’t seen in a long time. “You really are your mother’s daughter, Cristal,” he said, and kissed her head when she buried her face in her arms and groaned at the compliment, overwhelmed by a mortifying wave of happiness and sadness and pride.
Over the next week, she baked through all sixteen cans of pumpkin. She had felt stupid following Mom’s strange instructions to the letter, but something about the result had the magic that their family had lost. Even stranger, Cristal’s newfound baking prowess didn’t just apply to pumpkin bread.
Most of the baristas at Sugar & Spice were college kids, and Cristal had always suspected that she had her job not because she was a competent barista, but because her boss felt bad for the seventeen-year-old who was picking up a job because the hospital bills were adding up and the family couldn’t afford her little sister’s club soccer fee. But ever since the Weird Pumpkin Bread incident, Cristal put a little extra thought and care into the caramel frappes and pumpkin spice lattes. The first time someone complimented a drink she made, she was stunned.
“Excuse me?” said a customer wearing an ACAB beanie who had ordered a dirty chai with oat milk and extra foam. “Did you make this drink?”
Nodding, Cristal braced herself for some complaint—maybe she had forgotten a biodegradable cup? But instead, the woman’s flawlessly made-up face was practically glowing.
“I just wanted to say, this is like, the best drink I’ve ever had here. Like, this is giving exactly what it needs to give. You’re killing it, chica.”
This interaction left Cristal with several questions, so she chose to focus on the immediate one (was being called “chica” by a semi-woke white girl with a septum piercing a microaggression?) over the difficult one: how was it that ever since finding her mom’s pumpkin bread recipe, everything she made was inexplicably awesome?
When Rosa turned eight, Cristal ruined her birthday cake in the oven. Mom had told her to keep an eye on the clock, because the old kitchen timer from the 90s that only worked through some sort of dark magic was already set to mind the main course. To her credit, Cristal did keep an eye on the clock—but she forgot almost instantly whether she was supposed to take the cake out at 5:06 or 6:05. And then she forgot to ask Mom to clarify the time because she found Mom in her room, reading intently from some old-looking book and making her own notes in the margins, and Mom distracted her from questions about the book with an anecdote about Jinx as a kitten, and suddenly the smoke alarm went off.
“Rosa, I promise I didn’t mean to burn your—mmh!”
“We’re going to have your birthday dinner outside for a special picnic!” Isabella said, greeting Rosa as her best friend’s mom dropped her back home and squashing Cristal’s panicked confession. “Why don’t you go around to the back patio and see if there’s a surprise waiting for you?”
Rosa’s delight at the beautifully spread table on the fairy-lit patio was only matched by Cristal’s confusion and relief at the flawless cake that Mom brought out for dessert.
“Excellent cooking as always, Isabella,” said Dad, pressing a kiss to her cheek. “I don’t know how you do it.”
“Oh, let me keep my secrets,” laughed Mom, and went in for a real kiss.
The sisters exchanged horrified glances and groans at their parents’ PDA.
“Ew, not on my birthday,” Rosa protested. “Why are you laughing at me?”
“If you think your parents kissing doesn’t have anything to do with your birthday, then I have some news for you,” Isabella chuckled, ignoring Cristal’s mortified blush. “But of course you are right. Today is your birthday, so everything must be about you.”
According to the newly eight-year-old Rosa, everything ought to be about her every day, but Cristal kept that observation to herself. After all, Rosa might be kind of self-centered, and she always hogged the couch to an extent disproportionate to her tiny frame when they watched movies, but she was also cute and funny and not bad to have around. Cristal watched her mother joke and her dad take awkward flash photos of Rosa with every present she opened, and she thought that this was a pretty good birthday dinner, even if she had burned the cake.
Mom was in the hospital on Rosa’s twelfth birthday and couldn’t eat a thing without throwing up. Cristal was sixteen and felt like the oldest person she knew—well, maybe not older than Dad. Her father had called her into an “adult emergency meeting” when, two days before Rosa’s birthday, they had nothing planned. But the meeting got nowhere because Dad couldn’t stop choking up and brokenly apologizing for the weight of responsibility that was now resting on Cristal’s shoulders. Cristal hated seeing her father cry almost as much as she hated watching Mom puke, so she awkwardly patted his shoulder, said, “Don’t worry about it; I got things covered,” and hid in her room to have a small panic attack.
Cristal was better at some parts of the surrogate-mother-to-Rosa act than others. Sure, she could help her little sister with her homework and drive her to soccer practice on time and tell her “no” whenever she asked for an iPhone. But she hadn’t baked a cake since the disastrous smoke alarm incident four years ago, and she had no idea what to give Rosa as a gift. She thought about asking Mom for advice or input, but decided against it.
Talking to Mom was hard, lately, and not just because her voice was always froggy and weak. Cristal didn’t know how to say anything to her mother anymore—there were so many things to say, and so many things that Cristal knew should never make it to the open; things like, “I don’t understand why you can’t love us hard enough to get better” or “I wish you’d just acknowledge that this is shitty instead of pretending everything will be ok” or “I can’t find the version of you who I could tell anything to anymore, and I can’t find the version of me who needs you unabashedly anymore, either.” So those were all things Cristal was determined not to say, and they clogged up her throat so much that every time she saw Mom, conversation was painfully stilted. But Cristal didn’t know how to fix any of that any more than she knew how to bake a birthday cake.
So instead, she took the car keys without asking and drove to the supermarket to buy a cake that some competent cook had made. Her mom’s scent still filled the car, although she was taking too many narcotics to drive anymore. Spices and sugar and something intangible surrounded Cristal as soon as she sat down and jammed the keys into the ignition. She flinched at the explosion of jazz as the speakers came to life—Ella Fitzgerald, her mom’s favorite, extolling the virtues of that old black magic called love. Cristal gritted her teeth and listened to the song as she drove, but in the parking lot of the supermarket it all got to be too much, too loud, too happy, too Mom, and she slammed the eject button. A CD slid out reluctantly. Cristal gingerly pulled out the disk to read Isabella’s handwritten label: lost & found. She stared at it for a long moment. She felt the urge to snap the CD, or scream, or hide it away in her room forever. She did none of those things. She put it back in the envelope, which, like all Isabella’s mixtapes, had the tracklist scrawled across the back. She went into the store and bought an unnaturally bright cake and balloon. She narrowly avoided being rear-ended in the parking lot, and she drove to the hospital to cut store-bought cake for her little sister’s twelfth birthday.
Later that night, she gave Isabella’s mixtape to Rosa under the covers by flashlight, trying not to remember how the sight of the store-bought cake emerging from a plastic bag had made her mother’s smile dim before coming back twice as bright, like a lightbulb on the edge of extinction.
Almost a year later, the CD slipped from the pages of Mom’s old cookbook as Cristal frantically searched for recipes that she might be able to pull off for Rosa’s thirteenth—anything to avoid a repeat of last year’s depressing store-bought cake. Cristal wasn’t surprised by much these days, but she still flinched and barely caught the disc when it seemingly materialized in front of her.
“How did you get here?” she asked it.
It did not answer her. 1. That Old Black Magic 2. I’ll Be Seeing You 3. Remember Me . . . the tracklist read.
Cristal didn’t dig out the CD player to put it in. She wasn’t sure if she could think about her mom today without crying.
The final straw broke the camel’s back on a Saturday night when Cristal came home from work to find her battered copy of The Crucible from sophomore year English class sitting on her pillow, taunting her.
It had been fine that her mom was dead but apparently not gone. Cristal had accepted that something about her life since the funeral was a bit weird, and not just in an “I’m seventeen and dealing with the death of my mother while also applying to colleges and parenting my little sister because my father has been staying late at work to avoid the empty space at home” way. The urn that moved of its own volition like some sort of morbid Elf on the Shelf, Cristal’s new and unearned baking prowess, the way Jinx followed her everywhere she went, even when it wasn’t mealtime—none of it made sense. But suddenly, Cristal was fed up with things that didn’t make sense.
“I don’t understand,” she sobbed. When had she sunk to the floor like a Disney princess dealing with bad news? When had she started crying? When had Jinx appeared, and why was he sitting in front of her now, head cocked like he was listening? More answers she didn’t have. “Why the stupid Crucible?”
The Crucible wasn’t just boring, creepy, and hard to understand; it was also the subject of Cristal and Isabella’s first big fight—the beginning of the end.
It went something like this:
Cristal, dutifully sitting at the kitchen table to do her homework while her mom cooked stew for dinner, was ranting about the Salem witch trials. “The whole situation just seems so dumb to me.”
“What makes it dumb?” asked her mother, stirring the pot ominously.
“I mean, these girls are just acting plain stupid, and it’s so obvious they’re faking it. And like, for what? Because Abigail is feeling petty and slept with her married boss? I don’t understand why people fell for it and made such a big fuss.”
“Isn’t that a bit unsympathetic, brujita? So many people died horrific deaths based on these accusations of witchcraft. Calling it ‘stupid’ or ‘petty’ doesn’t seem to capture the gravity of the situation.”
“Okay,” Cristal conceded. “So a bunch of little girls decided, for whatever reason, to accuse all their least favorite people of having magical powers, and then an entire community was dumb enough to believe them.”
An exaggerated sigh from her mother. She reached over to turn the temperature higher. “But it’s way more complex than you’re making it seem. Have you considered how thoroughly society discredited women and their voices back then, especially young women? Witchcraft must’ve felt like the only way a girl could assert her power—either by using it or weaponizing the fear of it against others.” Smoke was beginning to rise from the stew. “The Salem witch trials are still relevant today because they show how a weakened society can collapse in on itself, and how women without a voice—“
“But Mom,” Cristal interrupted, “aren’t you missing the point too? All this fuss over something that isn’t even real.” Isabella dropped her spoon to the floor with a clatter. Foolishly, Cristal continued to press the issue. “Like, all their ideas of magic are just so dumb. I can’t believe anyone would ever—”
“Well, I can’t believe that any daughter of mine would be so cold-hearted and closed-minded,” Isabella snapped, eyes blazing dangerously. “If this is the way you’re going to engage in learning, you might as well drop out of school right now.”
Dinner that night was burnt stew; conversation was carried mostly by Dad and Rosa.
That was only the first in a series of many arguments between mother and daughter, over anything and everything from oujia boards at Halloween parties to hospital care packages. The growing pains of being the teenaged eldest daughter of an eccentric and strong-willed mother were only compounded when that mother became sick and in pain and irritable all the time, and when the money got tight and Dad was always working and Cristal felt like she had no right to be upset with her mother who was dying, but her mother continued to die in such an excruciating and unreasonable way, and it went on for so long, and everyone was just so tired and grouchy, and by the time Cristal officially lost her mother, it felt like she’d been gone for months already.
That’s the part about your loved one dying of cancer that nobody mentions in the obituaries, Cristal realized: that you lose them many times before the final blow, that your relationships are indelibly overshadowed by the ticking clock, that the spark in their eyes seems to flicker and dim many times before it burns out completely. And when the Tupperware and sympathy run dry, and months pass, and it’s mid-October and everyone is too busy with the semester to be nice to the poor strange family who lost their poor strange mother, what remains?
Just a lonely girl and her cat, who sits remarkably still and listens like a therapist who judges you openly and also keeps breaking eye contact to wash his paws.
“I don’t get it, Jinx. All of these strange things with the urn and the pumpkin bread have been reminding me of good memories with Mom. So I thought, okay, maybe we’re haunted and that’s fine, super in character of Mom to haunt us, but at least she’s sticking around to comfort me. But why would she bring up the memories of all our fights? Or the CD from Rosa’s birthday last year when I was trying so hard to be Mom and failed? Why does she keep reminding me of all the bad times? That’s like, the opposite of comforting.”
Jinx blinked very slowly. Think again, he seemed to be saying.
“And I’ve been feeling something really strange going on since Mom died, but I just thought it was grief. But these all these objects moving themselves and appearing out of nowhere can’t be grief—I mean, that sounds more like schizophrenia when I say it out loud. But even mental illness can’t have made me this good of a cook.”
What if it’s not just grief?
“I mean, grief shouldn’t magically give me the ability to—”
Jinx reached out and politely tapped her on the ankle with his paw.
There was no way this was happening. She was not having a coherent conversation with the cat. The cat was not prompting her to continue on a train of thought about magic.
“The pie that transformed from rhubarb to pumpkin . . . the way everyone loved everything she cooked . . . the urn that keeps moving—itself?”
Jinx gave her a slow wink, then stood up, arched his back like a Halloween decoration, and stalked off, as if his job was done now that his dense human had finally figured out the obvious. Something in Cristal’s swirling thoughts clicked into place and settled in. “Maybe Mom really was something special—and she’s been trying to tell me something.”
On Rosa’s thirteenth birthday, Cristal invited the soccer team over for cake and a movie.
“Crissy, I thought you couldn’t cook,” Rosa had said when Cristal suggested the party. “Like, no offense, but we did not eat well this summer.”
Cristal, who wanted to be offended but also knew that Rosa was correct, huffed at her little sister. “Maybe you just had, like, a horrible taste palate this summer. Maybe now that you’ve turned thirteen, you have big girl taste buds and can appreciate my culinary genius.”
“That’s dumb,” said Rosa. “Can you make a pumpkin cake for the party?”
Cristal could indeed make pumpkin cake for the party; her recipe repertoire had grown along with her confidence.
A few days after her revelation about Mom’s magic, Cristal had opened her laptop to Google an ingredient substitution and found her embarrassing first email account from sixth grade (magical_messages@outlook.com) already opened in the browser. An unread email dated over six months ago was waiting for her; the subject line was “cooking tips.”
Hello my love!
Smart, capable girl. If you’re reading this, you’ve figured some things out—and I knew you could. I know you have a lot of questions about who I was and what I left to you, but I trust that you’ll figure out your own path with only a little more help from me. For now, let me share the secret ingredient to one of our favorite autumn meals . . .
–
A lifelong lover of words and music, Laura Smith wrote her first full-length novel at the age of ten. Currently she is pursuing a degree in pipe organ performance at Baylor University, where she spends her free time reading, writing, and loudly singing the praises of her Waco Public Library card. She is a big fan of cats and her mother.
© 2023, Laura Smith
Halfway Down the Stairs 
Beautiful story, well done!
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