Brass

by Xhenet Aliu

  “We will talk about it later.”

  “No we won’t.”

  “You are very mad.”

  “Yes, but it doesn’t matter.”

  “I should go,” he said. “This is very expensive.”

  “I don’t want you back, is what I mean.”

  “What?”

  “When you come back here, I mean. If you come back. I don’t want you back with us.”

  The line was getting really bad. Maybe he couldn’t make out what I said. Maybe that had been it the whole time, not that he didn’t care but that he didn’t understand, because I was expecting more fight from him, a threat, a plea, something that would give me the bravery to follow through. But all he said, after a pause, was “I have to go.”

  “Okay. Bye,” I said. I didn’t wait for a response to that. I just hung up and waited for the phone to ring again. When it didn’t, I took it off the hook so I didn’t have to hear it not ringing.

  For seventeen years now, the phone’s been off the hook.

  I’m supposed to say that I did whatever I had to do to keep you safe, but the truth is, it wasn’t all my decision. In a sense I got what I asked for, in that I didn’t have to do everything alone. He helped make the decision. He didn’t call back. If he had, it might have been possible that he would have convinced me to stay in that apartment waiting for him to return. He might have convinced me that loneliness was a bigger threat than hunger or terror, that giving up on him meant giving up on everything, which meant that everything was hopeless, a feeling I would have passed on to you through my milk, a bigger threat to you than any virus or food allergy or secondhand Rossi you could’ve been exposed to through me. He could’ve taught you to say hello, goodbye, and sorry in a whole different language. He could’ve taught you the value of a dollar, that the things we think constitute suffering don’t even qualify for an inch of space in the newspaper, and what kinds of guys to stay far, far away from.

  But he didn’t call back, so that was that. By the time I heard from Janice, who still to this day slings food at the Ross, that he eventually made his way back to the States, it didn’t matter. We no longer lived in the same world, never mind the same country.

  You latched on that night and drank like you’d just discovered it was necessary for survival. I was glad. Everyone talks about hunger as primal, as if having it and knowing how to manage it are the same, but sometimes even instinct fails us. It was okay, though. It didn’t have to come easy. Don’t ever listen to the person who tells you that it will.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Luljeta

  The younger son is Tarik, the daughter is Mirlinda. They’re your brother and sister, like Adnan is your brother, but none of you use those words to describe each other. Their mother is Agnes, and she’s dressed head to toe in black like the middle-aged manager of a Hot Topic, though even you, who have not even buried a pet, know that she’s simply donning the universal uniform of mourners. The dress isn’t what sells it, though. Agnes exudes mourning. It’s all over her face like a rash. Her eyes are dark and always wet and her face is cast downward as if gravity has always worked extrahard on her, and not just since the death of her husband. Sometimes she says something that Adnan translates for you and sometimes she says things that Adnan keeps to himself, but mostly she fiddles with things on the counter or in the cabinets, tidying things that were never messy, dropping fresh sugar cubes onto a dish that’s already spilling sugar cubes. She looks as if she’d been caught eavesdropping, even though she doesn’t understand most of what you’re saying and even though you and your mother are the intruders in her home, making her bear witness to a scene she never asked to be a spectator to. You’re the one who should be contrite, who should offer condolences and atonements in equal measure, and maybe later, once you aren’t so goddamned tired, once you’re back at home thinking about all of this from your own familiar bed, you’ll be able to muster it. But your bed is far away, so for the time being you sit in someone else’s uncomfortable chair and let yourself be a quiet spectacle. It’s already gotten old to Tarik and Mirlinda, who’ve gone off to the living room to play some game on some half-shattered electronic device. To them, even math homework would be more fun than the sorry group that took over their kitchen. Sometimes Mirlinda slides back in to take a look at you and whisper something into her mother’s ear, but she disappears quickly, which is fine, because you have no idea what to say to a kid sister anyway.

  “Shy,” Agnes says, and it’s hard to discern if she’s talking about Mirlinda or herself.

  You learn that you’re three months too late. A year ago your father began coughing. Nine months ago he began coughing blood, six months ago he was whittled down to ninety-eight pounds, and not long after that it was clear to everyone but himself that he would die of the always fatal combination of lung cancer and denial. Adnan tells you he smoked Marlboro Reds until almost the day he died, oxygen tubes and all, and while he exhaled he talked about buying out the pizza joint he ran for his brother-in-law once he was back on his feet.

  “He could blow perfect smoke rings. A lion could jump through them,” your mother says.

  Adnan looks embarrassed by that, that a stranger would know that kind of private information about his father. He’s polite, a good enough kid, it seems, but he’s not yet old enough to hide how much he wishes he didn’t have to be there, translating and explaining things even the older ones among you can’t find the right words for in your native tongues. He shrugs his shoulders almost constantly as he talks, as if trying to shake off someone’s grip from them.

  “Did you guys even know about me?” you ask.

  Adnan shakes his head. “He never said anything about, like, other kids.”

  Your mother looks down at her hands. “It’s not that I didn’t want you to exist to him,” she says.

  “Then what did you want?” you ask.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “I need some time to think about that.”

  “Seventeen years hasn’t been enough time?”

  “No, not really,” she says. “I was doing other things.” She takes a deep breath and says, “But I’ll try, okay? I’ll try. I know that’s not what you want to hear, but I have to figure out how to make it make sense.”

  Adnan squints his eyes, like he’s trying to make out some tiny figure off on the horizon. “There was this time, though, with Mirlinda. I forgot about that,” he says. “Mirlinda walked in and he just started crying, and he was like, ‘You’re here, you’re here.’ He was all drugged up and stuff, so we didn’t think too much about it, you know? But maybe, I don’t know, that could’ve been something.”

  You nod. Maybe it was something, maybe it wasn’t. You’ll never really know, as you had never known, and so it isn’t as devastating for you to hear as you think it should be. Maybe it’s even a privilege of some kind, that someday you’ll get to decide for yourself what it meant. You can tell the story and make it beautiful or sad or stupid or pathetic, and who will possibly ever challenge it? You have a great big blank that you can fill in however you see fit. These kids, meanwhile, are left with the memory of a man in a father mask that fell off once he was dead. You’re the oldest of them and should feel an instinct to protect your siblings from that kind of pain, or reserve it for yourself to dish out when you feel like you have to put them back in line, but you have no idea how to be a big sister. It would be nice, you think, to not be an only child, but you’re thinking you’ll probably have to settle for this in-between thing, not an only and not part of a whole.

  You stay longer than uninvited guests should. It seems like there should be more to say, but each one of you expects the other to be the one responsible for it. Nobody save for a single housefly touches the crackers Aggie spread out on a dish a couple of hours ago, and you think that you should send her something when you’re home, one of those epic gift baskets from the Italian shop, to make up for the tea and snacks and time she wasted on you.

  “Can we go?�
�� you ask. You realize how rude that must sound, but nobody seems offended. Everybody, in fact, seems relieved.

  “Yes, yes, yes, we can go,” your mother says. She stands up and picks up the plate of crackers like she’s going to help put it away, and then realizes she doesn’t know what to do with it and sets it back down. She wipes a few crumbs on the table into her open palm and then, not knowing what to do with the crumbs either, balls up her hand into a fist and shoves it in her pocket. Nobody else notices, but you notice, and you aren’t sure why, out of everything that happened that night, this is the thing to break your heart.

  At the door you all look at each other, wondering what’s the most appropriate send-off, handshakes or embraces or a nothing that would reverberate all the way back to Connecticut.

  “Okay, then. Mirupafshim,” your mother says, and Aggie even smiles a little, with the kind of smile she could muster, a smile coated with grief.

  “Mirupafshim,” Aggie says.

  “And sorry,” your mother says, but Aggie doesn’t respond to that word the same way.

  —

  In the car, a rented subcompact ten years newer than her car at home, you ask her what that word she said meant.

  “Mirupafshim? It means goodbye,” she says.

  “How did you know that?”

  “There are a few Albanians at work,” she says. Then she sighs. “And I don’t know, it’s just one of the things I remember from back then.”

  Robbie is at the motel waiting for you. You open the door and scream when you see his six-foot-three figure draped over the floral coverlet, lit up from the light of the TV, until you make out the black plastic eyeglasses and the amber bottle of some craft beer or another on the nightstand.

  “Oh my god,” you gasp. “Sorry, I didn’t know you were here.”

  “I can go somewhere else for a while if you want me to,” he says.

  “I meant to say something on the drive over, but it slipped my mind,” your mother says. “Robbie offered to come, and you know, I didn’t want to be alone.”

  Of course she didn’t. She’s never been alone. She’s always had you following her around, asking stuff from her, needing stuff from her, telling her that you didn’t need anything from her. Or maybe that means she’s always been alone, since it doesn’t really seem like togetherness if you never get anything back from the person you’re with. Either way, you know that you should thank him for being there, and you know that he’s one more person to add to the list of apologies due. He’s taking time off from his job, paying for all this nonsense, and he gives enough of a shit about your mother that you know he never even thought twice about those things.

  “You should stay” is what you manage to get out. And “I feel really, really stupid.” He nods, and with all his education you hope he’s able to read the subtext, at least until you’re able to find some better words.

  Your mother doesn’t ask any of the questions you’ve been trying to prepare answers to. Everybody’s too tired. You’re going to need a full recharge before you can even begin to work this out, but the motel parking lot is lit like high noon, which is confusing to your bodies and makes it hard to sleep. It’s a cheap motel, but not that cheap. This whole thing is costing a fortune, the plane tickets and car rental and motels, the fast food and data usage surcharges. You’ve fallen into deep, deep debt, and tomorrow you’ll have to begin climbing out of it.

  But that’s tomorrow, not tonight.

  Robbie volunteers to take the cot, so you and your mother are together in the queen bed, each of you feeling every restless twitch as the other tries to fall asleep. Even so, there’s no confusing the feeling when you settle under the covers. It’s relief, a little break from all that happened and whatever’s going to come next.

  TO MY MOTHER: THIS BOOK IS FOR YOU,

  NOT ABOUT YOU, I PROMISE.

  Acknowledgments

  Huge gratitude to my agent, Julie Barer, for never saying good enough, especially when those were the words I most wanted to hear. Also for her mondo patience, because getting me past good enough took as long as getting a child from the womb to the first grade.

  To my supereditor, Andrea Walker, for her advocacy and enthusiasm from the very beginning, for laughing in the right places, for gently pointing out the wrong places, and for hopefully sporting a Hartford Whalers beanie. The publicity and marketing superstars who got this book into so many hands deserve more drinks than I could possibly ply them with: Jennifer Garza, Andrea DeWerd, Avideh Bashirrad, and Emma Thomasch. Thanks also to many others on the Random House team, including Andy Ward, Susan Kamil, Leigh Marchant, Emma Caruso, Jennifer Rodriguez, Toni Hetzel, and many others working behind the scenes whose names I wish I knew. Further props to Nicole Cunningham at The Book Group for keeping this machine well-oiled.

  To a few critical early readers, who also happen to be dear friends and brilliant stars themselves, and whose input and insights helped this manuscript find its way from desktop clutter to real-life book: Jennine Capó Crucet, Gwendolyn Knapp, and Christopher Rhodes. Your suggestions were invaluable and you were far nicer about them than you had to be.

  Big thanks to the Djerassi Resident Artists Program for providing shelter, food, a surrogate dog, and the company of damn cool humans during a critical revision period. Particular shout-out to Lunch Club and Barn Burn members Mark Conway, Brittany Powell, Chris Robinson, and Susanna Sonnenberg. Everything I’ve written since 2008 owes its existence in some way to the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, where I met so many people I wanted to impress that I had no choice but to become a better writer and sharper dresser. Thanks to the faculty and students in the creative writing department at UNCW, where the characters of Elsie and Bashkim were first born.

  Many, many other friends provided inspiration, support, respite, fantastically inappropriate jokes, meals, beds on which to crash, and a reason to keep going, among them Patricia Engel, Ru Freeman, Susan McCarty, Matt Kirkpatrick, Dawn Lonsinger, Jacob Paul, Esther Lee, Davy Gibbs, Lauren Knowlton, Jessie and Thomas Wilcox, Bob Glass, Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes, Jason Labbe, Steve May, Tim Parrish, and others whom I’m being an idiot for not thinking of as I write this. The fact that there are enough amazing people in my life for me to not be able to come up with all of their names in one sitting is something for which I’m profoundly grateful.

  To Timothy O’Keefe: thank you for letting me work and making me want to. Thank you for the noise that comes between the quiet. Thank you for the manhattans, the pad see ew, for walking the dogs, and for not getting mad when I ask you if you’ve done the things around the house that of course you’ve already done. Thanks to the rest of the O’Keefe family both for making someone like Tim and for being as gracious, generous, and kind as you are.

  Finally, I owe the biggest debt to Mom, Chuck, Kyjtim, Michael, Sarah, Kim, and Kristen (and now their spouses and kiddos). We may not all share the same blood, but we shared things that I think made us even more of a family: a single bathroom for the eight of us and a fleet of Dodge K-cars. You taught me how to laugh at adversity and just about everything else. Without you, I wouldn’t have bothered with any of this.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  XHENET ALIU’s debut fiction collection, Domesticated Wild Things, and Other Stories, won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction. Her stories and essays have appeared in Glimmer Train, The Barcelona Review, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the University of North Carolina Wilmington and an MLIS from The University of Alabama. A native of Waterbury, Connecticut, she was born to an Albanian father and a Lithuanian American mother. She now lives in Athens, Georgia, and works as an academic librarian.

  xhenetaliu.com

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  Xhenet Aliu, Brass