Brass

by Xhenet Aliu

  “Here, here,” I whispered to Luljeta, but she kept crying, refusing to latch on. I moved her from one arm to the other, from one breast to the other, but she writhed no matter how I held her, until a nurse popped her head in.

  “Everything all right in here?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “She’s just being fussy.”

  I bobbed her up and down in my arms, and I kissed her tiny fuzzy head, just barely grazing it with my lips, afraid that the fontanel might collapse if I pressed too hard. She kept crying until I joined her, my hospital gown sopping with tears and milk that was sustaining nothing.

  “You’re going to have to trust me,” I told her. “It’s just the two of us, you know.”

  Eventually she quieted down, and eventually she latched on and drank until she was full. We both fell asleep and when she awoke she was startled, as if she’d forgotten who I was, and when I tried to feed her, I had to convince her to trust me all over again. It went on like that until we were released from the hospital, and even sometimes in those first days back home. She was a suspicious little thing, cynical by nature. She’d cry and she’d follow me with her barely open little eyes and wrap her tiny little fingers around one of mine as if she thought I would let her go. I didn’t blame her; what had I done in all those months leading up to her arrival to convince her I had her best interests in mind? I’d have to spend the whole rest of our lives convincing her I cared about her well-being, I thought, but that was okay. Eventually she would believe me.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Luljeta

  Your audience is rapt. Adnan at the table, his kid brother and sister, all of them watching you and your mother, waiting for the silence to break. Only Aggie looks away from the soap opera playing out in her dining nook, a rectangle carved away in a corner of the living room, where an actual prime-time soap opera plays on a flat-screen television that balances precariously on the dirt-brown shag carpet. She walks into the kitchen and begins opening drawers and cabinets, clanking things around, obviously looking for nothing in particular except for perhaps a way out.

  For what feels like minutes you try to ask, How?, even though you must realize that you’d left a trail of bread crumbs all the way to Texas. Ahmet probably called her last night, or he called Yllka, who called her, and your mother drove straight to Bradley International and booked a direct flight with the ticket agent, which she probably didn’t realize isn’t really how one purchases airline tickets. She probably paid thousands and was too distraught on the plane to eat the surprisingly delicious Delta cookies or watch the second-run coach-class movies. It would have been her first time ever on an airplane. Her first time, as she’d described it to you more than once, was supposed to have been en route to the Bahamas, to an all-inclusive where she would spend a week once you’d left her for college. She was supposed to sip from fishbowls of banana daiquiris instead of shrunken Solo cups of diluted orange juice. You were supposed to be in a dorm room in Manhattan, perfecting your cat-eye lining technique and reading Les Misérables in the original French, which you’d somehow mastered in a semester despite having taken Spanish for six years without ever being able to so much as correctly order a burrito.

  Instead, look at the two of you, not looking at each other.

  The other kids look, waiting for some kind of action. This dining room soap opera had started promisingly, teasing fraught confrontations and ticking time bombs, but now seems to be fizzling into some atmospheric, broody drama that overutilizes silence and shadow. They’re just kids, and haven’t yet mastered things like theme and subtext. And even if they weren’t kids, you haven’t provided enough context for anyone to make sense of you. You don’t even make sense to your mother, who appears neither angry nor relieved to have traced you to a carpeted living room rather than the stainless steel gurney in some coroner’s cold medical building, which was the worst-case scenario she both refused to entertain and could not keep from entertaining. She looks embarrassed, as if she were the one who had brought this mess on.

  And hadn’t she, in a sense? Her lies and cover-ups, her clumsy maneuvering of the marionette strings that she nonetheless refused to relinquish, that was what had pushed you out. You were pushed, you remind yourself. Right? Right.

  Or wait. Were you pulled? Wasn’t there also a pull involved? Wasn’t there something you were forgetting?

  There’s also a pressure involved. Not in the room so much as in your own body. The pressure is so real that it’s physical, and then you realize that it is indeed physical, and is coming from your bladder. It’s painful, yet it’s a relief, because you know the solution to this problem, and it gives you some kind of hope that maybe you could stumble on some other answers, too. “Bathroom?” you ask no one in particular, and the little girl answers, or rather silently grabs your hand and marches you down the hall, like a teacher dragging a naughty student to the dunce corner. You step into the room she leads you to and lock the door behind you. There’s no window. You won’t be getting out of this one.

  The question will be coming soon—Why?—and you have to come up with an answer. You think, maybe, that you have been too good for too long, and the pressure of acting good when you are so obviously not finally became combustive. You’ve been good because you’d been promised some reward at the end of it all: college, let’s say, the reason for and solution to everything, but that dangling carrot has been snatched away from you in one two-hundred-word email, a rejection driven home with a punch to the head. And then you realized that the prize wasn’t ever really a prize anyway, but rather a door that opened up to a long, hard road to some other destination unknown, and it was like you lost something and had to retrace your steps all the way back to when you last remembered having it. Before you knew it, you were all the way back at the beginning.

  It sounds good, and it briefly makes sense in your head. But then it doesn’t make sense, because how is this your beginning? The people out there are your family, kind of, but except for your mother, it feels so wrong to use that word. They aren’t your origin. This isn’t your home. You look around and none of this is familiar to you, not the pink carpet in the bathroom or the lavender-scented everything or the men’s yellow Bic classic razor with soap and dark stubble découpaged onto blades that are rusted into the same hue of sunset orange you and Ahmet had chased down I-20 only yesterday.

  But wait a second.

  That hair belongs to your father. You’re in his house, sitting on the same toilet on which he sits, possibly staring at the same spot of dirty caulk he stares at when wondering how he, too, had fucked things up so impossibly.

  That’s it. You’ve been in his house for ten minutes now, you’ve caught the electric rabbit you’d been chasing, and yet you’ve forgotten to even conjure his name.

  You flush and don’t bother to run the faucet water to pretend that you’re washing your hands. “Where’s my father?” you ask before you reach the end of the hall. “Bashkim?” you say, when you arrive back in the dining area, in case they don’t understand what you mean by father, but nobody responds, other than to glance at each other or stare at you blankly.

  “Is he here? Is he mad?” you ask.

  Finally Adnan shakes his head.

  “He’s not mad?” you ask.

  “He’s not here,” Adnan says. “He’s dead.”

  “You don’t have to say it like that,” the younger boy says.

  “Dead?” you repeat. “Like, dead?” you ask their mother, who responds by getting up to put water in the kettle for more tea. The little girl clings to her side, though she seems a little too old to do that kind of thing.

  “She doesn’t speak English too good,” Adnan says.

  “Dead,” the woman repeats anyway.

  Your mother hasn’t said a word the whole time, not since you walked through the door, and you don’t know why the woman is bothering to make more tea because your mother hasn’t taken so much as a sip of hers. She’s so mad she can’t even look at y
ou, and suddenly you’re so sorry that you can’t look away. All of this was for nothing. This intangible thing that you’ve been chasing because you decided the tangible things you started from were worthless, and this is the final nothing. All you’ve accomplished was getting two thousand miles closer to someone who would always be a million miles away.

  The end.

  But really?

  Maybe not. What now? Do you quit, or cry, or leave, or keep running, or what? You can’t just end things by being sorry. That’s not an ending, it’s just a feeling, but it’s the one that consumes everything else.

  Fuck. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, you think, but you don’t have the guts to say something so puny out loud. Instead you look over at your mother and hope she sees it on you, or that she can pierce into your skull and let it out that way. You want to tattoo it across your forearm so people will know it when you wave to them in greeting: Oh, that’s the girl who’s sorry.

  “I’m so, so sorry,” your mother says, and you’re shocked that it worked, that you managed to convey it strongly enough simply through breathing that she can read it off of you. Except she’s crying, and slowly you realize that she’s not translating what you’re thinking but saying what she is. You don’t understand it. Why is she crying, why is she the one saying she’s sorry, when you’re the one who fucked up her life and these people’s lives and Ahmet’s life and maybe even whatever life an already dead man had left behind? But even if you don’t understand it, you’re grateful that she’s able to say it, because it feels good to hear. It makes you think that maybe you don’t understand much of anything at all, which feels awful and a little hopeful at the same time.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Elsie

  The helium It’s a Girl! balloons that danced in the kitchen for days began to droop, skirting the room like trapped birds looking for the way out. There were people around constantly at first—Mamie, Yllka, Greta, Deena, Rini, Margot, Dardata, the rest of the wives whose names I still hadn’t figured out—and then, because they needed to preserve their vacation days for their vacations and their sick days for their sicknesses, they started dropping by just for a few minutes after work, and then just calling to see how we were doing, and then telling me just to call them if I needed anything. Gjonni had fixed the phone, wouldn’t let that kind of disaster happen again, though it couldn’t actually happen again, not to me, anyway. Don’t be shy, call! they said, but I didn’t call, and it wasn’t because I was shy. I was grateful and didn’t want to ask for more from them. I had to figure out how to do things for myself, and not just for myself, but for you. I needed food because you needed food, so I filled out the paperwork for WIC and vowed that your milk wouldn’t always be reconstituted nonfat powder that nobody could swallow without some added cocoa and sugar. Who’d have known that by the time I could buy us cartons of the actual stuff at Stop & Shop you wouldn’t even want milk anymore? It’s for the babies of the animals that gave birth to them, you say now. You say, That milk is not meant for me.

  I gave you my milk as long as I could, but because of all of the other things you needed, eventually it had to come from somewhere else. Once I went back to work at Ferrucci you spent your days with Aunt Greta, and she gave you bottles I prepared, half asleep, while listening to Led Zeppelin on the lowest volume that still carried sound. Once Greta left for New York and my milk dried up—I wasn’t pumping enough, they said, or wasn’t hydrating enough, or was thinking too much about it, or worrying too much about everything—the ladies at the daycare fed you formula the state provided, along with the child-care vouchers that paid their salaries when the low-income mothers of Connecticut couldn’t.

  How’s that line go? I have always depended on the kindness of strangers. All those kind strangers grumbling about us come payday, when a few of their cents trickled down to us by way of food stamps and Section 8 credits. I do thank them now, even when I grumble the same way when I look at my paychecks, and I have to remind myself about all those years. Funny when you have to remind yourself about things that, not long ago, consumed your every thought.

  Yllka didn’t understand why I wanted to move out, especially not to the townhouse apartments the developers called a village, which everybody knew was code for “the projects.” She forbade it entirely, even stood at the bottom of the steps refusing to budge on the day that Deena’s husband came with his pickup to help move our stuff. She cried and tried to get Mamie to talk some sense into me, but Mamie just threw up her arms and said, “Do you think she’s ever listened to anything I’ve said?” I’m sure she also said something like I hope someday you have a daughter just like you, and I probably rolled my eyes about it, that oldest of curses that, it turns out, is also the only one you need to be afraid of.

  Yllka was right: the apartment in their building was nicer, quieter, and free for as long as I needed it to be. Yllka and Gjonni offered that to me, but I paid them the last month’s rent by returning the crib and the changing table Bashkim had bought before he left. I could change you on a towel on the floor, and you could sleep with me until I saved up enough for something from a tag sale or a classified ad.

  I never did get another crib, by the way. We shared a bed until you refused, and then you moved straight to the twin mattress you sleep on still, in the triple-decker we moved into when I no longer had to look to others to subsidize the place we call home.

  Yllka asked me, before I drove off in the passenger seat of the pickup that day, you on my lap with the seatbelt around both of us as if we were still one thing, what she was supposed to tell Bashkim when he came back.

  “Don’t tell him anything. He’ll know,” I said.

  —

  He already knew. I hadn’t told Yllka, but Bashkim had called two weeks after we were released from the hospital. Somehow Yllka and Gjonni had gotten a message to him, which seemed impossible, because nobody even knew what country he was in at that point, if he was even in a country at that point. As far as I knew he’d drowned in the Adriatic on the ship of refugees that sank off the coast of Italy, or he was trampled by an angry mob in Tirana, or he never made it back to Albania in the first place, and was in some kind of UN holding purgatory where they kept people who were citizens of nowhere. I pretended I didn’t care, but I kept an eye out for any article in the World section of the newspaper that might have some information. If there was any news on what was happening in Albania, it was usually an inch of copy nestled between ads for discount produce and discount three-piece suits, but usually there was nothing, and never was Bashkim mentioned by name. Of course he wasn’t. He was a man who barely registered from a country that was more a punch line than a place. If he died, where would the obituary even run?

  I alternated between wishing him dead and wishing him back. I alternated between wishing him back so that I could seek vengeance and wishing him back so that I might, maybe one time out of ten, not have to be the one who woke up to feed you, because I thought I could take being strangled, robbed, and drawn and quartered more than I could take one more sleepless night of nursing, terror, and filling out forms to apply for charity hospital bed funds. I alternated between forgiveness and apology and unadulterated hate. I alternated between thinking I could do it all alone and thinking I could do nothing at all.

  Yllka and Gjonni were people who could get stuff done. They’d managed to get the message I never asked them to send through to Bashkim, wherever he was. They sent word by carrier pigeon or something, message in a bottle, smoke signal. He called one afternoon as I tried to nurse you, tried to convince you, once again, that the well was safe. I picked up the phone, and right away I could hear every single one of the miles between us. Our voices were thin after traveling the long line of string beneath the ocean, and the constant echo and delay made it feel like we were having parallel conversations with ourselves instead of a single conversation with each other.

  “You had the baby,” he said. There was no hello.

  “Yes,” I
said.

  There was static on the line, which covered what I imagined was a sigh.

  “You couldn’t wait?”

  The delay on my answer to that was so long that the words never came through at all.

  “It’s a girl,” he said, finally.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Luljeta.”

  “Yes.”

  More static, a cover for the silence that was obviously lurking beneath it.

  “Where are you?” I asked.

  “In Greece for now.”

  “With Aggie?”

  “Yes.”

  “Everyone is safe?”

  “No, not everyone. It is still bad there.”

  “I didn’t mean everyone, I meant you.”

  “Oh. Then yes. We are safe.”

  “Okay.”

  Silence.

  “I don’t know how long I will be here,” he said, finally.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I have to take care of some things while I’m here. It just makes sense.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  “Yes.”

  Static.

  “Are you okay?” he said.

  “We’re fine.”

  “ ‘We’?”

  “Me and Lulu. That’s what I’ve been calling her.”

  “Oh,” he said. “That’s good.”

  Static.

  “I’m sorry I was not there,” he said.

  “I’m not.”

  “I’m sorry for the money. I will pay you back.”

  “It wasn’t my money.”

  “It wasn’t my money, either, but I needed it. It’s not that much. I will pay it back.”

  “Send it straight to my sister. It already did what it was supposed to do. It got you away from me.”

  “You are mad,” he said.

  “Yes, but that’s beside the point.”