by Lana Popovic
“Of course I sing, Riss,” he said as Niko stood and twirled Lina back onto the dance floor, Lina laughing as she tucked a damp curl behind her ear. “You know what they say about Roma.”
The band drifted into “Emina,” a haunting Hari Mata Hari song about the forbidden love between a Bosnian Christian and his Muslim beauty. Luka spread his arms open for me. I stood unsteadily, moving toward him as if through molasses.
“Actually, I don’t think I do,” I said into his shoulder as he took my hand and began gently guiding me back and forth. Dimly, I realized that I’d never really been close to him like this before, my breasts against his chest, his hand like an ember at the small of my back.”
I could feel him smile. “When you take a Roma’s wife, they say, he laughs. And when you take his horse, he cries.” He shifted against me, dropping his head so we were cheek to cheek, his hand sliding gently up my back as he whispered into my ear. “But when you take a Roma’s song, he dies.”
An electric warmth swept through me, like I’d swallowed one of the lightning bolts that still flickered above the water. This was Luka, I reminded myself sternly. My best friend, and likely owner of an entire harem of Belgrade girls with high heels, full lips, and shining hair.
“Lina’s the song,” I whispered. “Not me. So I don’t know about this metaphor.”
He snorted quietly. “That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”
I tried to slide my hand free of his. He wouldn’t let me go.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he murmured, swaying me back and forth. A few feet away from us, Niko was turning in a slow, sensual circle, her hips flicking beneath the tight band of her beaded skirt with each step. Lina was clapping the beat for her, cheeks flushed, one foot tapping in time. All the eyes in the restaurant were on them.
“Tell you what?”
“About the gleam. Lina told Niko. Why wouldn’t you tell me?”
His closeness was making my head swim. “Because I . . . because . . .”
“It wouldn’t have changed anything. I would still have—”
I stepped abruptly out of his arms. “I think we should head for home, if you’re all right to drive. I’m feeling a little dizzy again.”
Luka watched my face for another moment, the fine narrowing of his jaw below his winging cheekbones illuminated by the light from inside the restaurant. “Why don’t you head for the car, then. I’ll stay out here for just a little while longer, for a smoke. I’ll be right there.”
Before he turned away, I could see the flaring cherry of a lit cigarette as he settled down into one of the chairs, followed by a smoky exhale that sounded like a sigh.
FIFTEEN
LUKA DROVE US HOME IN SILENCE SO LEADEN THAT IT tamped down even Niko’s usual helium-light chatter. It was so quiet I could hear each of Lina’s unsteady breaths as she sensed the contained maelstrom of everything the rest of us were feeling. I couldn’t hear Luka like she could, but I knew how I felt: like the apex of a collapsed triangle, having failed him all these years by not telling him something so big, while Lina failed me terribly in turn by telling Niko.
They dropped us off by the bridge that led to the Old Town’s Southern Gate, Niko murmuring a subdued good night to both of us while Luka death-gripped the wheel and stared mutely ahead. I stormed up the bridge, taking deep lungfuls of the sweet night-and-river air while Malina scrambled to keep up with her shorter stride. Now that we were finally alone, the full breadth of my anger and betrayal had expanded and slid into full view, like a hidden planet inside me with its own mass and orbital plane. Even with that, I thought to glance at the crenelated fortification of the bastion up ahead, wondering if I would see Sorai there again.
But there was no one. Just the two of us, me and my wretched liar of a sister.
Beside me, Lina heaved a ragged sigh as she struggled not to cry. For once it made me viciously glad that I could hurt her with nothing more than feeling, that she could sense every iota of my pain.
“How could you do it?” I finally said through gritted teeth, letting us into Čiča Jovan’s garden. The gate wheezed rustily shut behind us. “How could you tell her? Don’t you think I wanted to tell Luka myself, a thousand times? But I didn’t, did I? Because Mama said not to, to keep us all safe. And all that bullshit you gave me how it was all right, it was better that I barely had any gleam left. It was what all of us needed. While you were singing for Niko, spilling out all our secrets to her.”
“It wasn’t like that,” she said, her voice shaking. “I swear it wasn’t. I just . . .”
“‘Pie,’” I broke in, rounding on her. “Is that why she calls you that? Pie, like cherry pie? Did you tell her Mama’s story about you and me, the fruit and the flower? Even that?”
“Yes.” Almost under her breath. “I’m sorry.”
“You are not,” I whispered furiously, my stomach hollowing. “You say that all the time, just throwing it around, like it means nothing. Sweet Lina who’ll do whatever she likes, but not to worry, she’ll be so sorry for it later.”
“Unlike you,” she mumbled, sullen and tearful. “Who never apologizes for anything, no matter what.”
“Apparently I don’t need to,” I snapped, slapping my hand on the wrought-iron table beside us, so hard my palm stung. “Compared to this, apparently I’ve never done anything to you worse than maybe a three, possibly a four, on the ‘accidentally flat-tiring someone’ to ‘breaking the most sacred of vows’ scale. Does that sound about right?”
“I just don’t . . .” She trailed off, running her hands over her face and into the thick, shining mass of hair backlit by the lantern light from the Bastion, her curls both brighter and darker than the clouded night above us. She looked so much like a tragic damsel in deep, melodramatic distress, as if she were the injured party, that the sight of her pissed me off that much more. Fuming, I turned away, fumbling with the door.
Inside, the lights were blazing and the doors to all the rooms flung open. I cringed inwardly at the thought of Čiča Jovan waiting for us for hours as the sun peaked and then sank, pacing up and down the gauntlet of the apartment and puffing at his cherrywood pipe. In the whirlwind of the day, we’d forgotten to worry what he might think had happened to us.
“Jovan?” I called out, heading for the studio. If he’d managed to settle anywhere, it would be there.
“Riss, wait,” Lina said, and the strained pitch of her voice stranded me in place. “There’s a note for us. It says he’s at the hospital. It says we need to go as soon as we get back.”
THE CAB RIDE to the hospital was the closest thing I could imagine to being trapped in purgatory. Lina kept reaching out for me, then remembering we were fighting and dropping her hand to twine it frantically in her skirt.
“Do you think she died? All the way?” she finally whispered hoarsely.
My insides contracted around my pounding heart. I was so queasy with twinned dread and anticipation that every bump and pothole made my stomach come climbing up my throat. “I don’t know.”
“Or do you think she—”
“Lina, I don’t know!”
We lapsed into quiet after that, both of us laboring just to breathe.
Čiča Jovan met us in the hospital’s dismal entryway, his haggard face flicking from relief to devastation and finally to fury, like a flurry of projector slides. “Where have you been?” he demanded, gripping me by the shoulders and giving me a shake. This was the angriest I’d ever seen him, his thick white hair rumpled from raking his hand through it, his eyes blazing beneath bushy white brows. “How could you go and not tell me, with who knows what maniacs out there waiting for you? And you too, Malina. I would have thought at least you might have more sense than this. One of you could have picked up your phone, or checked your messages. Given me a single moment’s thought.”
I bit the inside of my cheek, steeling myself for yet another lie. “We just . . . Luka offered to drive us to Perast to our Lady of the Rocks, so we c
ould leave an offering for Mama. A prayer and a love token, if it makes any difference to her now. Jovan, why are we here? What’s happened to her?”
Čiča Jovan closed his eyes for a long moment. When he finally opened them, they were bleak as quarry water. “It’s not a quarantine any longer. It’s a different secret they’re keeping now.”
“Why?” Malina whispered, the question like a wince. “What’s happening?”
“They don’t know, my girls. She’s gone. Someone stole her away from them. Apparently the hospital’s too godforsaken to afford security cameras, so they have no trace of what happened to her. The nurse maintaining quarantine swore up and down that no one slipped by her, that she saw nothing.” He hitched his shoulder at an attendant hovering several feet behind, hands clasped tight in front of her bleached-out scrubs. I recognized her from the last time: the same sallow-faced woman who had let Mirko pass with us in tow. “She’s the one I spoke to.”
“And nothing? She can’t remember seeing anything at all?”
His jaw worked beneath the muscle of his cheek. “That’s what she says, though I can’t fathom it. They had our Jasmina here, and now she’s gone. Someone must have taken her, by God. She certainly didn’t walk out of here on her own! So I’ve railed at all of them, my girl, all the way up to the hospital director; Mirko was here earlier, too, to interrogate them in turn. None of them have a thing to say for themselves.”
I could feel myself swaying from the inside, like some rickety stilt hut in high winds. Could Mama have somehow left by herself, in the state she was in? A shudder tore through me at the thought of her dragging herself out of the bed, eyes half lidded and twitching blindly, tubes trailing from her slack limbs, her chest concave beneath the papery hospital gown. But how could the nurse have possibly missed it? Lina and I exchanged frantic looks, and I could see her come to the same conclusion.
Someone would have needed to have been there with the nurse, to lure away her memories.
Someone like Sorai.
I squeezed Jovan’s shoulder. “Let me talk to her, Jovan. Before we leave.”
He nodded once, and held an arm out to Malina. “Why don’t you stay with me, sweetheart. I need someone to lean on for a spell.”
The woman’s narrow face folded in on itself as I approached her. Her gray-threaded dark ponytail was loose and scraggly, and her fingers flitted up to pluck nervously at it as she struggled to meet my eyes. I glanced at her name tag. “Jelena—it’s okay if you don’t know what happened. Really. I don’t think this was your fault. None of us do.”
She snorted a little, weakly. “Thank you for saying so, though it’s not true—they’re going to be rid of me for sure now. Someone has to take the blame for this. I was the one outside that door, how could I not have seen anything? It’s—it’s impossible. There’s only one way in and out of that room, and I was there, I swear I hadn’t left for a moment. I’d checked in on her just an hour before, and the next time I went in—gone. Vanished like a ghost.”
I pressed my lips together, pulled them through my teeth. “This might sound strange, but do you remember anything else at all? Something like a smell, maybe? Perfume, even?”
Her brown eyes flashed up to mine. “That’s—yes! I smelled peaches, strong, very sweet. Almost like there was a fresh-cut plate of them tucked somewhere close that I couldn’t see. I even looked around for it first, and then I was nervous that maybe I’d had a small stroke or the like. Phantom smells can happen after that. But I could see just fine, and move my hands properly. And there was another smell, something like flowers, then it faded completely too. I thought maybe . . . the vents here can be strange. There wasn’t any other explanation.”
Except for Sorai. She’d taken this woman’s memory, just like she’d taken ours years ago, siphoned out with the power of her scent.
And now she had stolen our mother whole.
BACK AT ČIČA Jovan’s, the three of us collapsed in the living room, Jovan in his massive, hand-carved rocking chair, Lina and me on the couch. “I don’t understand what’s happening here, my girls, I swear on my heart,” he said heavily, massaging his temples. “It’s beyond me. How could they have lost her, and why are they lying? Because it must be lies. Human beings don’t simply disappear into thin air.”
Malina shifted uneasily beside me. On the way out of the hospital, I’d quietly shared with her what the attendant had told me, and we’d both agreed there was no need to tangle Jovan in whatever spiderweb Sorai, or whoever else, was weaving around us. Involving Luka and Niko was already dangerous enough, given how little we knew of anything.
“In any case, we’re all worn out,” Jovan said. “If you’ve eaten already, it might do us all good to make an early night of it. Could be we’ll hear something in the morning.”
“I’m going to sit in the studio for a while, I think,” I said. “I’m not ready to sleep yet.” Or to be alone with Malina, especially now. I didn’t have any spare comfort to lend her, or the inclination.
In the studio, I sat on the little wooden bench across from the furnace, my back against the stone wall, breathing in the familiar, lingering tang of molten glass and wood shavings. It brought me back to the first time I’d slept over at Jovan’s. Mama had made me cry that night, two years ago. By then I almost never let myself cry in front of her, but I’d been so furious that it couldn’t be helped. Lina had been playing for us before it happened, and for once our living room was almost peaceful with the warm contentment of her song, a sleepy-sweet melody like a heavy-eyed pup curled by a fireplace.
And then one of her strings had snapped with a twang.
It wasn’t her fault. The violin was cheap and already old, but Mama had flown into one of her senseless rages over it, rolling in that storm front of fury Lina and I both knew so well. Why couldn’t Lina take better care of her things, why couldn’t she have a lighter touch with the rosin, why couldn’t she be more graceful? Even if the words weren’t aimed at me—and even if they were utterly false, given how much grace Lina had even then—I felt each one drop heavy into my stomach like a swallowed bullet, until I finally moved to shield my sister.
“Jasmina, just stop,” I said. “She didn’t mean—”
“Not ‘Jasmina,’” she hissed back. “I’m your mother.”
“Not really,” I retorted, chin quivering. “You’re not.”
She slapped me across the face. And without thinking, I hit her back, hard.
The shock on her face—the sheer hurt beneath it, the unfamiliar etch of betrayal—frightened me so much I burst into tears. She reached for me as I darted past her and out the door, into the humid, salt-laden August night. I sprinted all the way to Čiča Jovan’s house on bare feet, my sides throbbing with stitches and sobs. I pounded on his door like a lunatic, and when he finally let me in and gathered me into his arms, I could barely speak.
“She . . . she . . .” I sobbed into the silk-lined vest he wore even in high summer, that smelled of pipe tobacco, resin, and hot glass. My cheek still flamed with the imprint of her hand. “Why?”
He sighed deeply, his lungs creaking. “Oh, sweetheart. I couldn’t tell you why. Your mother is a fine, fine woman, but hard. Heavy as the earth, like they say sometimes. I think it may all be a bit much for her, that’s all.”
I pulled away from him. “And what about us? It’s not too much for us? You know what, I don’t care why. I just wish she’d die and leave us alone.”
His craggy face crumpled, eyes dimming beneath the overhang of his brow. “Don’t say that, my girl. Come, let’s go sit in the studio. Let’s make something together. Anything you want.”
I watched as he fired up the furnace, the crucible in which we heated the glass all the way to 2,400 degrees, a white sun-heat that looked like it might match the level of my fury. Then we cooled the piece down to around 2,000 degrees, still a bright, fiery orange but cooler enough to “fine out” or release the bubbles from within. By myself, I spooled the gather of glass f
rom the furnace onto my blowpipe, like honey twirled around a stick, and transferred it to the marver—his was the traditional marble slab, not the steel most people used these days for their working surface.
And when the cool skin formed along the blob’s glowing surface, the glass was mine to mold: to blow with short, sharp bursts of breath, tweeze and shape with straight and diamond shears. I slowly exhaled my fury as I turned the glass into my bougainvillea through cane and murrine, rolling the sticky, molten scraps in colored powders for their hues.
“Slow and careful with your hands,” Čiča Jovan murmured as I worked. “And careful with your breath. We can reheat each piece unless it cracks, but we can’t reskin your fingers.”
I worked with him for hours, building fractal offshoots from the leaves and petals of that primary flower, reheating glass when I needed to in the glory hole. I hadn’t known what that secondary furnace was called before, and it made me laugh when he told me. By the time we transferred the piece to the annealer, where it would cool slowly over the next day to keep from cracking or shattering, my rage and hatred had smoothed over and cooled as well.
Now, the studio’s heavy door scraped open, startling me out of the memory. Čiča Jovan shuffled in, offering me a mug purling with minty steam. I wrapped my hands around it and he lowered himself onto the bench next to me, grunting a little as his knees cracked.
“You’re bearing up so well, my girl,” he said, shaking his head. “Like a proper hero. It’s unbelievable how strong you’re being, both for you and your sister. Even when the world’s turned impossible on you.”
I leaned against his side, breathing out a laugh through my nose. “Hardly. It’s just that I don’t know what to do, and I don’t understand any of this. How could she be just gone, Jovan? Who is she, really? Or who was she, I suppose. I don’t even know how to say it.”
He gave a labored sigh. “I always wondered when you’d finally ask me that. Surprised you never did before, with that auger of a mind of yours. And I wish I had something to give you.”