by Sara Novic
When they were gone Laura would fling open a window to let out the smoke and Jack would sit on the edge of the couch, remove his glasses, and run his hands over his reddened face. Then he’d reach for his guitar and play until he returned to his normal color. Laura, who usually managed to put Rahela to bed sometime during the visit, would shoo me upstairs. I’d climb the stairs halfway, then sit and watch through the slats in the banister, trying to decipher the meaning of the visits, but all I could ever discern was an ongoing debate between Jack and Laura about whether or not asking the Uncles for help was a good idea.
I didn’t say a word for the first month of school, sat staring through class and spent recess trolling the perimeter of the blacktop until a piercing whistle demanded our return. Sometime in October, after weeks of patience, my teacher called on me to read out a paragraph from the chapter book we’d been studying. I produced a halting string of unrecognizable words and my classmates snickered. When I got home I ripped all the pages from the book and tried to flush them down the toilet.
Laura and Jack asked me if I wanted to join a soccer team. I didn’t know what soccer was but was pleasantly surprised to find out it was football when I arrived at my first practice. The excitement was short-lived, though—Americans had somehow managed to ruin the game with all sorts of rules: the coach put me on defense and told me I wasn’t supposed to cross the halfway line or try to score a goal. The neatly manicured lawn and fixed nets made my favorite game unfamiliar.
“I think I don’t like the soccer,” I told Laura.
“That’s okay,” she said. She leaned in, secretively. “I hate sports, too.” I thought about telling her that I actually liked sports but didn’t want to hazard a return to the soccer team, so I gave her a thumbs-up and we never went back.
I spent my free time writing to Luka. I told him about the strangeness of English and the desecration of football. I jotted notes on the backs of homework assignments during recess and sat in bed with sheets of loose-leaf paper, leaning on outdated volumes of World Book Encyclopedia. I couldn’t remember Petar and Marina’s address, so I wrote letters to them and sent them to Luka, too. I never heard back. Still I wrote and licked airmail stamps and pretended that Luka’s prolonged silence didn’t mean anything was wrong.
My teacher began sending home reports of my every move at school—how I spent my recesses scribbling, that I refused to socialize with other children and didn’t raise my hand in class. She sent me to the guidance counselor. Jack and Laura worried, and I felt awful, too, the sleepless nights getting me nothing but bluish circles under my eyes. Laura offered to take me to a doctor who she said could “look into my head” and help me feel better, but my grip on English figures of speech was tenuous and the thought of a doctor opening my brain was terrifying.
I knew my time for grieving was running short. People were getting impatient. It wasn’t their fault. It was near impossible, even for me, to contain Gardenville and Croatia in the same thought. So a few weeks later, when we were assigned a project about hometowns, I made a poster of New Jersey, transplanting the least offensive of my childhood memories into the apartment where I’d first lived with Jack and Laura, before the new house was finished. My teacher, who knew better, rewarded the lie with a good grade.
The more I lied, the closer I came to fitting in. Sometimes I even believed myself. People assumed I was just bookish or shy, and I was, or had become so. Nobody in the new neighborhood had ever seen Jack and Laura without Rahela and me, and had no reason to think we were anything other than a biological family. I threw out the book of news clippings. I stopped writing to Luka.
—
For the first two years I was away at college, my family had left my room alone. Now, slowly, others’ unwanted belongings were finding their way in—photo albums, Laura’s broken sewing machine, and clothes to be donated to the Goodwill formed piles in the corner behind my door. It was unfair of me to expect them not to use a perfectly good space, I knew, but I still felt a sense of loss for the place that had once been only mine. I surveyed the rest of the room, which looked the same—single bed pressed against the windows, shelves filled with my first books and a series of glass fishbowls containing the seashell collections I’d amassed from summers at the Jersey shore. On the wall hung a sequence of photos of Rahela, Laura, Jack, and me on Rahela’s fifth birthday at Disney World, and posters of terrible punk-noise bands I’d gone to see at the Electric Factory on Friday nights when I was in high school.
The remnants of a flower stencil peeked out from behind my desk, and I smiled with the thought that Laura and my mother might have bonded over their mutual distaste for my tomboyishness; Laura had put the blossoms on the wall and I’d promptly pushed my desk against the spot. When I’d chosen a denim comforter for my bed she’d sewn pink rosebuds in rows up the seams, and whenever she left the room I turned the comforter over to hide the flowers. Now, the roses were faceup again.
“Ana’s home, Ana’s home!” I heard Rahela shouting downstairs amid the heel-click of Laura’s cowboy boots. I slipped the envelope of my past life under my mattress and went downstairs.
“Hey, baby!” said Laura.
“Hi, Ma.”
The first time I called Laura “Mom” was an accident. I’d been playing with Rahela in the driveway when she fell and skinned her knee. The wound was filled with gravel and bled a lot and I scooped her up and ran inside, calling “Mama! Mom!” I found Laura upstairs folding laundry, the cordless phone tucked between her shoulder and chin. When I entered the room saying, “Mom, Rahel—Rachel got hurt,” she raised her head and let the phone drop.
“Sue, I have to call you back,” she said loudly at the phone now on the floor. I handed her Rahela and we went in the bathroom and bandaged her up, and Laura didn’t mention it, though she smiled at me for the rest of the day, as if she was wondering whether or not I had realized what I said. I had, and figured there was nothing I could do to take it back now. But for years onward, each time I said “Mom” or “Dad” a silent prefix of “American” existed in my mind. They were my American parents, and the distinction made me feel less like I was forgetting the other set I’d abandoned in the forest.
“I didn’t know you were coming home. I was just in town. I would’ve gotten you from the train.”
“I needed the walk.”
“Oh gosh, that’s right. How was your speech?”
“What speech?” Rahela said.
“Ana was giving a very important presentation at the United Nations,” said Laura. “Tell me everything! Did you take a picture?”
“Take a picture of myself giving a speech? No. It was no big deal.”
“Maybe if you had longer arms,” said Rahela.
“Huh?”
“Then you could take a picture of yourself.”
“But she wouldn’t have because she never humors her mother,” said Laura, feigning exasperation.
“You can have my name tag.” I dug the crumpled guest pass out of my pocket.
“Take what I can get,” Laura said, and stuck it to the fridge.
—
At dinnertime we met Jack for pizza and bumper bowling.
“What are you doing home, girlie?”
“Just visiting.”
“Remember, Ana was giving that speech today,” Laura said.
“I didn’t forget,” said Jack. He pulled me into a bear hug, and I liked that I would probably always feel little inside his embrace. “How was it?”
“Odd,” I said.
“Did they put sanctions on you? They’re putting sanctions on everyone and their mother these days.”
“I’m gonna give you all sanctions if you don’t come play,” said Rahela, squeezing between us on the bench.
“Surprisingly accurate use of the word,” I said. In the scorekeeping computer, Jack named us after Taxi Driver characters, and we all bowled terribly and laughed hard and for a few hours that was enough.
Going to bed was a diff
erent story. During my first months in America I’d tried to fend off the nightmares by avoiding sleep altogether. I sat up keeping watch, worried that someone would break in and slaughter Jack and Laura. Then when I tried to give in, I couldn’t get comfortable. A mattress and box spring was a stark contrast to the cushions of my Zagreb couch; my back hurt and I twisted beneath the sheets.
Most nights, I’d give up and tiptoe down the stairs, through the kitchen, and into the family room, where Jack would be playing the guitar. When I appeared at the edge of the room he would sigh, then motion with his head for me to come and sit. A striped blanket hung on the back of the nearby armchair, and I’d pull it off and trail it behind me on my way to the couch. Jack would continue to play, swaying slightly as if to console himself.
Spring nights he’d lean his guitar against the sofa and flip on the television to watch baseball. The Mets were his team, a vestigial preoccupation from a childhood played out in the Italian ward of Newark. Muting the volume, we’d watch the silent game and he’d tell me the names of the players and their batting averages, explain foul balls and strikes and ground rule doubles. He repeated himself when I didn’t understand, and when he sensed me getting overwhelmed he stopped, content to sit quietly in the television flicker. Baseball lingo permeated my vocabulary, and though I knew I didn’t need to talk to make him happy, I learned more English by discussing the specifics of the game. Baseball calmed me down; every play and mistake had corresponding consequences, each scenario governed by a set of regulations I could memorize. It was a game I imagined my real father would love as well, the steady cadence of throwing and swinging as rhythmic as a whispered song, the innings’ narrative arc like a bedtime story.
When the Mets invariably lost, Jack would switch off the TV and return to his strumming and swaying. I’d lie down with my ear pressed to the leather of the couch and match my breathing with the vibrations of my father’s music.
Now, though, it was both too early in the season and too late at night for baseball; even Jack was probably asleep, so I lay awake through the uneasy hours for as long as I could before the dreams set in.
“You sleep okay last night?” Laura said the next morning.
“Bad dream.”
“I thought I heard you yelling.”
“Sleep-talking.” When I was little, I’d wake her several times a week that way.
“Does it happen at school?”
“God no.”
“You sure you don’t want to talk? You never really told me how the UN thing was.”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said, though I loathed the disdain in my own voice. “I’m going out.”
I retreated to my room, pulled on jeans and a sweater, and made to leave, then caught a glimpse of myself in the hall mirror, disheveled, and doubled back for my brush. My hair hung down past my shoulder blades and had darkened with age, was the sandy brown color of my father’s. The freckles across the bridge of my nose were faded from winter, but they would multiply at the first hint of sun. My eyes, so dark they were almost black, had bothered me in my teenage years—incongruous, it seemed, with both my paleness and the blond, blue-eyed model in every American ad and magazine. But now I saw they were unmistakably my mother’s, perhaps the single feature we shared. I pulled my hair into a ponytail and went downstairs.
I spent the morning and into the afternoon in a coffee shop—built two years ago to look old—working on a paper about Wide Sargasso Sea and wondering how it was possible that whenever I was in one place I could feel so sure I belonged in the other. Brian had left a voice mail asking if I wanted to have dinner. I called him back but was relieved when he didn’t pick up. I pecked out a text message instead, saying that I had gone to visit my family but I would see him on Sunday, and I was sorry for not having called sooner. I left the phone atop my notebook for a few minutes, waiting for him to write back, but he didn’t.
Behind the bar a boy I’d had a crush on in high school appeared from the back room and began scraping coffee grounds from the cappuccino machine. I tapped him on the shoulder and we attempted an awkward, over-the-counter hug.
“You on spring break, too?” Zak said.
“Yeah,” I lied.
“But you’re not working?” He nodded in the direction of the Kmart across the lot, where I worked summers.
I told him I needed the extra study time, but that it was good to see him, and made a halfhearted return to my stack of homework.
“Well, I was about to take lunch,” he said, coming out from behind the counter. “Wanna go over anyway? Old times’ sake?”
Zak and I had belonged to intersecting circles of friends throughout high school, and had over the years flirted in sarcasm and baseball jargon. He loved the Phillies; I’d assumed the Mets as my own cause, and whenever we found ourselves at a party together we bickered about which team was worse. We became friends in our own right in the final year of high school, and took to sitting in the back of Zak’s car, listening to sports radio and kissing.
In the summer before we’d gone off to college, Zak had often trekked across the parking lot to visit me, and we’d played Wiffle ball in the back of the store. Now we slipped through the automatic doors and passed by Sporting Goods to collect a bat.
“You still dating that guy at school?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s too bad.”
We found some space in the patio furniture aisle, and Zak put on a show of pitcher’s stretches. “I’m glad you’re around. This town gets smaller and weirder every time I come back.”
“It was always weird,” I said.
“My parents are going gray.”
“That’s your revelation? Your parents’ hair?”
“You’re the worst.” He threw the ball with more force than he should have, and I connected bat and ball with a satisfying thwack. The ball careened out of Outdoor Living and into Health and Beauty, taking out the deodorant display in a domino-style cataclysm. From behind the rubble an arthritic, red-vested woman threw us a look of contempt.
“SECURITYYYYY!” she roared, a sound incongruous with her tiny frame. A fat man with armpit stains emerged from the stockroom; I recognized him, but he didn’t know me, or didn’t care. He stared at the deodorant, then at us, and adjusted his flashlight belt holster.
After we’d been searched for evidence of shoplifting and ejected from the store, I walked Zak back to work.
“I know what you mean, about feeling strange being here.”
“I know you do,” he said, and kissed me on each cheek.
“How European of you,” I said. In truth he had startled me. I tried to think of some tipsy exchange in which I might have revealed something about my past, but was sure I hadn’t. Back behind the counter, Zak mixed me something caramel-flavored, and I sat for an hour paging through notes and glowering at my blank notebook, producing a single sentence before I gave up and went home.
—
That night Rahela appeared in my doorway in her pajamas. “Whatcha doing?”
“Homework. What are you doing?”
“I had to pee. Can’t you sleep?”
“People don’t sleep in college,” I said, which was not exactly a lie. “Go back to bed.”
Instead Rahela pulled back my comforter and wriggled her way in. “I heard you yelling last night.”
“It was just a bad dream. Sorry if I woke you up.”
“Tell me about the night I was born.”
“Where did that come from?”
“I’m just curious,” she said. “I mean, you’re the only one who knows.”
Rahela knew, in theory, that we’d been adopted, had been told enough to account for her earlier memories of my accent, for the fact that our sable eyes didn’t match Jack’s and Laura’s dark green and watery blue ones. She knew, empirically, but she didn’t feel it. For her, there was no one before our American parents, and the loss of these other people, the parents of technicality, was objectively sad but
nothing more.
I thought of my father’s stories, the way he’d made my own birth sound so exciting. My parents had been in Tiska and had to drive two towns down, where there was a hospital: You were almost born cliffside—you just couldn’t wait to get out and go swimming!
“Once upon a time,” I said. “We lived in a little flat in the middle of a great big city.”
“What’s a flat?”
“Like an apartment.”
“A flat apartment?”
“Okay just listen.”
Rahela quieted.
“Our mom was going to have you very soon, but it was a cold winter and a blizzard hit the city. The snow was this high”—I swung my hand in the air to mark a meter’s height—“like up to your chin!”
“Up to your chin?”
“Yeah, I was nine years old. Our dad joked that if I walked on an unplowed road all that would be left of me would be the pom-pom on my hat.
“You waited until the middle of the night. Our godparents came running over from their apartment through the snow and dug out the car so Mom and Dad could get to the hospital. I had to stay in the house, and I was so mad about missing out that I cried like a baby. But then, just a few minutes after Mom and Dad had left, Dad came running back up into the apartment. It was so cold that he’d grown tiny icicles in his eyebrows!”
“What happened?”
“Everyone was screaming at each other. The car was stuck in the road!”
“Did you call an ambulance?”
“Dad didn’t think an ambulance would get there in time.”
“You just left Mom out in the snow?”
“They had to—there were no cellphones back then. So Petar and Dad ran and got Mom out of the car and carried her toward the center of town, where the roads had been cleared. Then they found a taxi driver who took them the rest of the way, though he charged them triple the price.
