“I’ve often wondered if she ended up going or not,” he said, glancing at me before my silence reminded him that I knew even less about Elza’s fate than he did. “And this whole college thing . . . Your folks must be a mess now. After losing one child, they probably never thought the second one would leave too.”
“Maybe that’s why they had me in the first place? Insurance against loneliness, once Elza grew up.”
“Don’t dwell on it. People have children for all sorts of reasons, even later in life. Gives them a chance to fix everything they did wrong the first time.” He smiled and stood up from the bench. “I’m sure they did their best to keep you out of trouble. And yet—here you are.”
As we were saying good-bye, I asked if he had a picture of Elza. He went to check in some old albums but came back shaking his head.
“Sorry, no luck. The good news is, though, you can just look in a mirror. When I saw you standing here earlier, I thought it was her ghost, I swear.”
“Am I . . . ethereal?”
“I sure hope not!” He chuckled. “You’re a real girl, flesh and blood. Make sure it stays that way.”
I thanked him and promised to send them a card from America. But I wasn’t done yet. I had one more stop to make before leaving Tsarevo.
THE CHURCH WAITED, PATIENTLY, ON the bare rocks above the Black Sea. A sunset sky bled all over it, bursting off the windows in deep pomegranate hues as if the entire building had been set on fire from within.
I sat in the car.
What now?
Walk up the hill . . . Open the door . . . Go in and light a candle . . .
Or just drive off and never come back?
Not that it mattered. I felt betrayed—by everyone, especially my parents. And now that the truth was out, nothing could change it or give me a clue what to do with it.
I had a sister.
Possibly a crazy one.
Was she still alive? If not, how had she died—an accident? A suicide? Or something even worse, sealing everyone’s lips for so long?
I left the car by the road and headed uphill. A path led to the entrance, curving only once, halfway up, to avoid contact with the old fig tree whose crooked branches sagged into the ground—an impenetrable dome of fruit, bark, leaves. The way you danced under that tree, white beauty in the moonlight . . .
I shut the voice out of my head: just an old woman, spicing up her story with the stuff of legends. But other voices took its place. Acquaintances. Strangers. People who knew more about my past than I did. I could imagine their conversations. Years of hidden glances. Gossip disguised as pity, heads shaking as soon as I would turn my back:
“That poor family. Trying their best to keep at least the younger daughter from sliding off the deep end.”
“Why, what happened to the older one?”
“You haven’t heard? She was into witchcraft. It’s a shame, really. To be so smart and yet get caught up in that sort of thing!”
“And the Slavins didn’t know?”
“They must have. Why else rush to have a second child fifteen years after the first one? Saddest part is, the problem might even be genetic . . . But let’s hope for the best. So far, little Theodora seems to be turning out just fine.”
As I climbed higher up the hill, I could hear waves hurling their fury at the rocks below. The air was densing up with salt, with cries of seagulls, with an odor of dead clams and seaweed (baked by day, rotting off by night). From a distance, the church had an austere, minimalist charm—almost a natural extension of the rock. But up close, the simplicity was striking. The walls seemed thrown together by chance, out of whatever materials had happened to be lying around. Stones of all shapes and colors balanced under the spell of an invisible hand, ready to collapse back to nature’s chaos.
The front door was locked, so I circled to the back, where a terrace opened out above the sea. It was impossible not to feel small against such vastness of water. But I also felt its indifference—the crushing indifference of a world whose territory began where my home ended. Somewhere in that world, thousands of miles away, abroad already waited. The dream. The unknown. My bet on a supposedly fantastic future. Now, for the first time, I wondered if I was ready for it. How could I be, if I no longer even knew who I was? “Ghost child” (a term I had seen in a book, once): someone raised in the shadow of a dead sibling. All my life, without realizing it, I had been a substitute for another girl. Getting her hand-me-downs. Her piano. Her looks. Whatever else allegedly ran in our blood. I probably acted like her. Spoke like her. It had been just a matter of time before America, too, would beckon . . .
Distracted by these thoughts, I didn’t notice nightfall. The distant hills had disappeared. The dark was quickly creeping in. I stepped back from the railing, turned around, and walked over to the next corner—
It took a second to realize my mistake, but by then it was too late. In front of me, directly at my feet, was the graveyard. Crosses. Tombstones. Thistles. Swaying at me, blocking my way out.
Don’t go near the church, it’s by the cemetery that they’ll get you!
I hadn’t listened, and now had walked into a trap. Suddenly the wind was gone. The sound of waves had altogether vanished. The air turned so still I began to hear my breathing. Terrified, my eyes traced the darkness in a semicircle, back to the middle of the terrace. And there, ineffably real against the black canvas of the sky . . .
a girl—
dressed in white
thin, so thin she appeared almost weightless
facing the sea, feet barely touching the ground, arms lifted in the air, slowly moving—
I ran through the graveyard, stumbling, fighting the urge to look back for proof that I wasn’t being chased, then shortcutting downhill—away from the path, from a black shape that could only be the fig tree.
As soon as my feet reached asphalt, I dived into the car, slammed the door, and released my panic on the pedal.
HOW DO YOU TELL THE two people you love most that you just lied to them? I dreaded the return home, the inevitable face-off. Not that I needed excuses—the penchant for secrets apparently ran in the family. Besides, given what I had uncovered, my parents had much more to explain than I did. But none of this made things easier. The drive back from Tsarevo. The first steps into the living room. The alarm on their faces when I admitted that I hadn’t been on a trip with friends, after all. And finally the hardest part, the one about my sister.
I wanted to know everything and they gave in reluctantly, as if each detail would feed me poison. Elza had been their pride. The perfect child. A brilliant little devil, very early on. Learned to read when she was three. Started piano at five. English at seven. Went to the best high school. Won awards. Then a full scholarship to America.
So far—a lot like me. But this was just the surface.
“What happened to her?”
My mother said it first: Elza left for college and never came back.
“I need to know what really happened, Mom.”
The two of them locked eyes—accomplices for life, trying to outwit grief. Then the vast quiet of their sadness poured out, the dam suddenly released after so many years.
Elza used to write home once a week, called every Sunday. Then for two weeks in November—nothing. My parents had given it a few more days before they called the school and were assured that their daughter was attending to her schedule, as shown by scans of her ID in cafeterias and academic buildings.
On the tenth of December, two weeks before Christmas, a phone call delivered the distressed voice of a university official. Something terrible had happened: Ms. Slavin’s body had been found on a nearby hiking trail. Not a sign of violence, thank God. And no, there was no doubt as to the girl’s identity. The school was going to take care of the funeral arrangements (or air transport, if the family preferred to bury her at home) as well as other incidentals, including round-trip tickets for the parents.
“So you went to America?”
My moth
er shook her head. “We received another phone call, Thea.”
That second call had brought news of the strangest kind, a turn of events beyond comprehension:
Elza’s body had been stolen from the funeral home. Overnight. Just like that.
“We are deeply sorry, Mrs. Slavin, but despite the joint efforts of university security and town police, at present there are neither leads nor suspects.”
The newspapers proceeded to speculate about a possible break-in, but the funeral home was found safely locked in the morning, exactly as it had been left the night before. Not to mention the obvious—why would anyone abandon the body by a hiking trail, only to bother with stealing it back later?
“The school reiterates its condolences. Our office will update you immediately on any progress, but for the time being we suggest you postpone your trip.”
More calls had followed. Many more. But none of them brought a single answer. To this day, my parents had no idea who—or what—had taken the life of their girl.
THE YEARS HAD WASHED THE Polaroid out to a nondescript beige—everything except the eyes. For a brief moment, they had bewitched the camera with the dark blue of winter seas. Then, gradually, the sky had withdrawn its storm. The waters had breathed out and cleared. And now these same eyes streamed their pale luminosity down on you as if, in the last second before she forgot ever having seen you, Elza had reached every corner of your mind, all the way to the bottom.
That evening I lay in bed, staring at the girl who would have been my best friend. We did look alike. If we had been closer in age, we probably could have passed for twins. Yet I didn’t see it in me, the spell of that stunning creature whose name still lit up the eyes of everyone who knew her. She had been ethereal, a dandelion: the flower of wishes. Of all flowers, this was the only one that began bright and ripe (like the sun), then paled to a weightless silver (like the moon), letting you blow it off into the wind—a constellation of scattered seeds—so that your wish would come true. Like every girl, she must have had her own wishes. The piano. The faraway school. The boy who maybe (or maybe not) had dared to break her heart . . .
A knock on the door made me slide the picture under the pillow—my father had come to say good night. But instead of the usual peck on both cheeks, he just stood by my bed, saying nothing.
“Should I not go, Dad?”
“Not go? So that’s what we’ve come up with now—defeat?”
“I’m serious. I don’t want you and Mom dealing with this a second time.”
“There won’t be a second time. Because you are coming home for Christmas.”
“Of course I am.” Although I wondered if, by then, his hair would be even whiter; whether people aged visibly in four months if you didn’t see them. “I meant everything else: seeing me off, not having me around, worrying about me.”
“Parents always worry. That’s part of the predicament.”
“You’ll worry less if I am here.”
“How did this get into your little head?” He sat down on the edge of the bed. “Of course you’re going. We’ll worry much less if we know you are happy.”
“I can be happy anywhere. No need to follow in my sister’s footsteps.”
His hand rested on my knee—a hand so big and warm I often wanted to curl up inside it, like a Lilliputian. “It’s fine to follow someone else’s footsteps, Thea. So long as you don’t follow someone else’s dream.”
I looked around, at everything that wasn’t going to fit inside the two suitcases. “My dream right now is to lift all this and plant it in Boston, with you and Mom in it.”
He tried to smile. “Your room will still be here when you come home for winter break. As will your mother and I.”
“But I thought you guys were against America?”
“Not against it, just . . . wary of it. Of one school especially.”
“Which one?”
The frown was instant. And very, very deep. “Princeton.”
In a flash, the past few weeks came back to me: the stress of choosing a college, my parents’ unexplained aversion to Princeton. Ever since the acceptance letters came, they had insisted on Harvard and I accused them of name snobbery—“Harvard is Harvard” seemed to be the mantra in Bulgaria, a no-brainer for anyone lucky enough to get in. But the deadline to decide hadn’t come yet. I still had a week to change my mind.
“Dad, do you think we’ll ever find out what happened to her?”
“No. And I don’t want you trying. You are going to college, not on a ghost chase into the past.”
“Why not? I was thinking what if—”
“There are no ifs, Thea. We did everything we could. And so did the police, the school, the press, our embassy. The case went even higher up the chain—and nothing. Trust me, it becomes a downward spiral very quickly.”
“Why?”
“Because you love her, and you want to know. You search obsessively. Press articles. School records. Nothing you haven’t seen already, yet you still go through the files a thousand times. What if I missed something? There has to be a clue . . . Years go by. Then one day the Internet pops up and becomes your daily drug. Just five more minutes, one more search. Until you start to realize that you aren’t getting any closer. That you never will.”
He looked devastated. At that moment I knew: I would be going to Princeton. Maybe my father was right, and there was no hope of ever finding out what happened to Elza. But how could I be certain unless I tried? Everything that I considered mine—my family, my home, the life I was supposed to leave behind—had crumbled, a scaffold built on lies. And in its place? Suspicions. Warnings. Fears that, just like my sister, I might become . . . what exactly? Unhinged? Delusional? A freak? Witch? Monster?
“So, no detective games. Promise?” He gave me a kiss and headed for the door.
“Dad—” When he turned around, his face was finally at peace. “What’s the story with the samodivi?”
THE AIRPORT IN SOFIA LOOKED like any other: white marble, steel, everything drenched with light through a glass ceiling, as if the entire terminal was designed to give those who stayed behind the illusion of being headed somewhere, into a sky of their own.
I had traveled abroad before for music festivals and competitions, and loved every minute of it—even the fuss at the airport, with my parents snapping pictures while I showed off the boarding pass as an official license for the next adventure to start.
This time was different. I forced myself to walk through security. Then passport control. Then down a hallway toward the gate. And I kept turning back—over and over, to catch a glimpse of the two figures quickly subsumed by the crowd, reduced to a pair of moving dots (their hands, still waving).
What a blessing she is, this little girl. Yet the Slavins will always remain broken people.
Years had passed since I overheard these words. But it was only now, on a plane to America, that I caught on to their meaning. There were probably all kinds of broken people. People who had lost a love. A home. A dream. And then there were also the wrecks, those who had gone through a loss more than once, their soul patched and torn and repatched until it resembled a quilt: each square a distinct color, proof that the heart would stay warm, ready for the next breakage.
Now, for the first time, I felt broken too. I tried to think of college, of the new life waiting for me there. Yet all I could picture were Mom and Dad, going back to an empty house. It had crushed them, back in May, to find out I had decided to go to Princeton. And not just decided, but made the arrangements without telling them—written to the school, booked the plane ticket, everything. It was their worst nightmare; fate laughing in their faces after eighteen years of struggle to avoid exactly this: me becoming like Elza. I tried to explain that I was different, that the past didn’t scare me and Princeton was as safe a school as any other. If by being there I could solve the mystery of her death—why not? Or even if I couldn’t, at least they would make peace with the place and finally take that canceled
trip from long ago, only this time for my graduation . . .
To get through the ten-hour flight, I started reading the book of legends. Its cover showed a girl in white standing by a well, looking up at the moon. Once upon a time, beyond nine lands into the tenth . . .
The tale of the samodivi had them swimming in the black waters of a mountain lake—naked, innocent like children absorbed in the oblivion of games. After the bath, once they got dressed again, came the magic of their dance, the hypnotic swirl of the horo: a circle of intertwined arms and flashing feet whose beat sent shivers through the forest.
Never before had mortals seen the wonder of such beauty. And of those ill-fated ones who did, of those doomed roamers of the night who set brave foot upon the moon-soaked samodivi meadows, not one laid eyes upon the dawn again, not one reached home to tell a tale of lovelorn sorrow.
Now a vagabond would fold his knee under the dome of oak-green branches. Now a thief would claim the fallen oak leaves as pillow for the night. A merchant, having chased elusive trades all day, would tie his horse around the rigged oak bark. Or a monk, astray, would hum his prayers to the oak roots, touching cheek to earth as summons for the mystic lull of sleep. But it was just as well: an equal end was destined for them all. An end of threefold joy and tenfold horror . . .
“What’s the story with the samodivi, Dad?”
He had turned pale, the defeated pale of a man who has suffered quietly for a long time only to realize that a disease has been eating him from the start. “Why are you asking, Thea?”
I summed up what I had learned in Tsarevo, without mentioning my church visit.
“Old Stefana, still living in her loony world! She used to fill your sister’s head with folktales too, which is why we didn’t want you anywhere near her. But the son at least could have shown some common sense.”
“He only told me what he knew.”
“And you believed all this?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“Because people have nothing better to do. They get bored, and they let their sick imaginations wander.”
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