by Aubrey Rose
“Hey, Mark,” I said. “Check this out.”
He leaned over to see my page.
“How did you get—wait, what? Holy shit, Brynn!” He pushed back his chair and stood up, the paper held inches away from his nose. “No way!”
“Check to make sure it’s right, first,” I said, but he was already pulling me up into a bear hug, a huge grin on his face. I couldn’t help but laugh, he was so excited.
“Of course it’s right,” he said. “Wow!”
“It’s just the first part,” I said, pulling back slightly.
“The part we were stuck on! You’re amazing!” He looked at the paper again, his eyes tracking each line. I saw him pause on the step where I had manipulated the equation into a solution. Tossing the page down on the table, he shook his head in wonder. He turned to me and placed his hands on my cheeks. His fingers felt warm against my skin.
“You. Are. Amazing,” he said, and kissed me.
At first I was too startled to say a word, and I froze under his embrace. His lips pressed against mine, insistent, and I was shocked to find myself responding to his kiss. My body began to lean forward just as Mark pulled back. His face was filled with joy.
“Amazing,” he repeated, but now his eyes darted back and forth to mine, searching me for an answer to the question he had just posed. We had been friends for so long, and I never realized that he might want anything more. Now I felt utterly confused, and my mouth dropped open, searching for the right words.
“Mark...” My words ran away from me. They always had.
A slight noise from the front of the library made me look up over Mark’s shoulder.
Eliot was standing not thirty feet away, and from the looks of it, he had seen everything.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
After hanging up the phone, Eliot became possessed with curiosity. They were only students, to be sure, but he knew what Brynn was capable of, and he was intrigued by the partial solution. He wanted to see more, and after some tossing in bed he realized that his brain would not let him sleep until he had satisfied his curiosity. He hopped into his car quickly and drove to the library, eager to examine their work. He hadn’t expected to find them still there, and he certainly hadn’t expected to find Brynn in the arms of that boy, Mark.
What’s more, he hadn’t expected the surge of jealousy that turned over in his stomach as he saw Brynn kiss Mark back.
Poisonous thoughts flooded his mind as he stood there, watching his hopes unravel in another man’s arms. He had not known how much he cared for Brynn, or maybe he had pushed the thoughts down again, suppressing his heart with his intellect so as to protect himself from hurt. As much as he rebelled against the feelings of hurt and rage that washed over him, he found his normally impenetrable inner defenses worn to a thin shield that buckled and broke even as he stood, eyes fixed on the scene before him.
Eliot could not bring himself to step out of sight until it was too late. Unable to think of anything to say or do, he simply turned and walked back down the stairs he came from. Initially he thought she might run after him, catch him, but he was at the bottom of the stairs and nothing had happened. Still in shock, he walked out to his car and drove away, and kept driving.
He didn’t know where he was going, and didn’t care. The city of Budapest loomed overhead, oppressively tall. People downtown swarmed the sidewalks, so he drove away, finding the less inhabited neighborhoods that stayed empty at night. Here the snow fell quietly under the street lamps, and only a few pedestrians bothered to wander the streets.
Spired churches and decaying walls loomed over him at every corner, and he soon came to the Danube, the dividing line between the two parts of the city. He parked at the side of a bridge and got out of his car. The cold of the night could not numb the hot rage he felt boiling inside of him. He walked to the middle of the bridge and stood there, looking out onto the river below him.
He remembered the last time he had been in Hungary. Over a decade ago, and every moment of that day stood out as clear in his memory as a picture in a frame. They lowered her into the ground, the coffin made out of fine polished oak. To last for years, the undertaker had said, and Eliot wanted to shake him by the shoulders and scream at him for the careless words. Years? What did that matter? The body inside of the casket would stay lifeless, forever, no matter how expensive the wood crate around it.
White rose petals covered the top of the coffin, and as the military men lowered it into the earth—Otto had insisted on a military guard—one corner had dipped down briefly a few inches lower than the others, sending a cascade of white petals over the dark glossy side of the coffin. The men quickly corrected the error, but Eliot could not erase the image from his mind. The petals like snow coming down like an avalanche over the coffin’s edge. The smell of the roses and the wet cold earth. The people around him crying, and his cheeks dry through it all.
When he returned home, sitting on the mantle inside of the house was another bouquet of white roses, sent from his brother; nobody else knew his address. A card of condolences tucked into the top, unsigned. Eliot had hurled the vase of roses against the wall and still felt nothing inside of him as he watched the glass shatter, the petals fall to the floor. There the shattered bouquet stayed for three days, the flowers wilting and turning brown on top of the burnished hardwood floor, until it as just another sweet dead thing. The housekeeper would sweep up the glass and the petals carefully when she came the next week, and then they would be gone too.
The day after the ceremony he stood on another bridge overlooking the Danube. Perhaps it was the same as the one he stood on now, but he could not remember. The winter had come on full force and the ice floes crackled, breaking and refreezing under the surface frosted in snow. An hour he stood there, looking down and wondering if the fall would be enough.
Sometimes all there was to live for—all he held onto—wasn’t enough. Numbness only masked the guilt that threatened to break through at any moment and send him over the edge, but still he stood, and stood, until someone called the police and an officer came to the bridge to see what the trouble was.
“Just sightseeing,” he said, when asked what he was doing.
“You don’t live here?” the officer asked. Eliot couldn’t tell if the man recognized his face.
“No,” Eliot said. “I don’t live here.”
As he said the words, he knew they were true. He couldn’t continue living in a place where the same ghost occupied every street corner, every sidewalk. He went to the airport and asked to buy a plane ticket to America. He wanted to leave the continent behind him, to start anew, and he knew that America would help him. In America, nobody knows or cares about ancestors. In America he would be able to look to the future, and let his past stay where it was, frozen under a layer of ice.
Now he stood again, looking at the Danube. The same, yet different—the water, all of it, different. How can we give rivers names when they change from right underneath us? The name points to the idea of the river, not the water. Not the river itself.
He had fled to America to escape the grief that he knew would haunt him here. He returned to Hungary buoyed by hopes and faint memories of wonderful things, icicles like lace on the rooftops and roses in the garden. But the roses had died back in the late chill of fall and would not bloom again this year; the icicles hung sharp from the entryways, pointed and dangerous. Dead and deadly things.
Brynn lured him with her beauty and snared him with her mind, and he had dutifully avoided temptation. He’d thought selfishly that she would wait for him until the time was right, but he could not blame her for her impatience. Beautiful as she was, she deserved a young man whose heart was not stitched up halfheartedly with still-festering wounds. His was a burden to carry alone, and he had no right to hope that she would love him, much as he desired it.
Eliot leaned out, hypnotized by the darkness of the frozen river below. The only way to stop a river from running was to freeze the water in it
. But under the ice he could still see the dark water roiling, turbulent. He felt lost, an outsider here as he was in America, an expatriate returning to a country that had long forgotten his place. How could he run away from the trouble that Brynn had brought about in his heart?
He had already run away from his homeland once. He did not know if he could escape the pain again.
I woke early in my room, guilt churning my stomach. The thin sun coming in through the windowpane reflected off of the motes of dust hanging in the air. They twinkled like snowflakes as soft invisible currents of air tumbled them. They turned randomly in my vision, but I was filled with a sense of purpose even as guilty thoughts invaded my mind. Today was special, not just another day.
Today was the day I would go to visit my mother’s grave.
Watching the sunlight twirl circles in the room, I felt detached from yesterday and all that had happened. I hadn’t meant to do whatever I had done that led to Mark’s kiss. Every step taken up until that point had been so normal that when he kissed me I did not know what I could have done to take it back, were I to do it over again. It had felt strange—his lips pressed against mine in the joy of discovery, nervous and desiring. Not anything like Eliot’s possessive and confident embraces And then he had looked at me expectantly.
I recoiled at the memory. Pleading sleepiness, I’d escaped from Mark’s company at last, but not before he had tried to get me to talk about it. I didn’t want to talk about anything just then—I had seen the look on Eliot’s face, and it had hit me like a punch to the stomach. That I could wound someone in that way was unthinkable, but his expression made it clear that my ill-timed embrace with Mark had not gone unnoticed. And Mark’s insistent glances only made me sicker to my stomach that I would have to hurt him too. I loved Mark as an intellectual equal and a friend, but no romantic feelings had ever turned my heart toward him, not even now after we had shared a kiss. Indeed, even remembering it made me feel uncomfortable and itchy under my skin.
How could I explain to Mark that I didn’t share his feelings? I had known unrequited love, but it had always been from the other side. Cute boys I crushed on would dismiss me without a second thought, or worse, insult me with pity. Knowing how terrible rejection felt, I didn’t want to hurt Mark, but I most definitely didn’t want to lead him on either.
All of that would have to wait, though, because I was not about to let some romantic attachments get in the way of the main reason I had wanted to come to Hungary in the first place. I pushed back the covers and slid out of bed quickly, pulling on my clothes in the quiet dim room. The other girls slept on. The first day of sleeping in came at the end of a long week, and everyone except for me was taking advantage of it. Some beds emitted the faint sounds of snores and sleepy murmurs, and others were silent as tombs.
An emotional pang shot through me as I walked out to the stairway where I had first found Lucky. I hoped that Eliot would be taking good care of him. Of course he would. Still, I missed the small, boisterous kitten.
Not wanting to be caught by Mark, I eased the doors open and then closed them behind me, tiptoeing down the steps and then walking briskly down the sidewalk. By the time I turned the corner, my thoughts had already turned away from Eliot and Mark and towards my family. My mother. In my pocket my fingers slipped over the scrap of paper where I had written directions to the cemetery where she was buried. I only hoped that I could find her when I got there.
The sky seemed bright as I walked quickly on, and I whistled the notes of the Satie that had been playing in my head all morning.
I’m on my way, mom, I thought, and smiled.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
As I walked to the cemetery snow began to fall softly around me. Arriving, I couldn’t believe my eyes—the place was huge, three long city blocks at least at the front of it, surrounded by iron fences taller than me. My Nagy had told me that my mom was buried in the back of the cemetery, to the right. I had imagined a small plot of graves, but now that I looked across the street at the cemetery, I thought I might be there for hours searching for the right grave. Maybe there would be a caretaker I could ask.
A street vendor outside of the cemetery waved me over, and I stopped to look at her flowers. Not a single other person was on the sidewalk, and the old woman was eager to see me. She spoke in Hungarian first before realizing that I was American.
“For the one you visit,” she said. “The one you love.” She held out bouquets for me to choose from.
The flowers had been wrapped in brown paper to shield them from the cold, and I picked out a small bunch of white roses. The woman accepted my money gratefully and smiled, showing a crooked grin.
“Bless you, child,” she said, and turned away, humming. I inhaled the delicate scent of the roses and walked on toward the entrance to the cemetery. Cypress trees lined the edges of the graveyard behind wrought iron fence that kept souls inside and vandals out. The metal bracing of the entryway arched over my head as I entered.
Passing through the gates, I heard nothing but the soft whistling of the wind through the cypress trees. I walked forward quietly, and snowflakes fell all around but never seemed to land on me. Rows of stone slabs marked the buried. Carved angels and wreaths stood eroded at their edges, proving true the saying that nothing lives forever, despite the hopes of those who commissioned the monuments that stood above their tombs. Many of the gravestones had lost their lettering already to time and weather, some slabs cracked from being frozen and thawed over however many number of years they had been there.
Ahead of the entrance, a number of private family plots clustered together, the tombs topped with huge statues. Famous people, I thought, or rich. I skirted the edge of the plots but as I walked by, my coat snagged on a low iron gate into one of the plots. I stooped down to free the fabric, and the name on the grave made my breath stop for just an instant.
Herceg.
Was this where Eliot’s wife was buried? I looked up at the plot, my coat now freed from its snag. Several graves organized themselves into rows, the stones above them carved ornately with scrollwork. The iron gate creaked at my knees as I pushed it open and walked in. I looked around guiltily, as though I was an invader.
I didn’t belong here. It felt wrong to be here without Eliot, to stand in this sacred spot. I stepped away but my eye caught on a small statue of an angel, its arms thrown up in the air as though dancing. I paused to look and saw the name carved into the top of the stone. Clare Herceg. I brushed the snow off of the rest of the stone. A few lines of Hungarian were written underneath, a prayer or a poem. The date of death was ten years ago.
It must be her. I looked around again, feeling like somebody was watching me from afar, but there was nobody else in the cemetery that I could see. I turned to leave, but then turned back. My fingers trembled as I pulled at the ribbon on the bouquet of white roses. I tugged the bouquet in half and laid the flowers down at the front of the grave. Whoever Clare was, Eliot had loved her and she had loved him. I felt a connection with her, standing there in the drifting snowflakes and looking down on her grave.
Then I left the plot, not looking back over my shoulder. My breath already was coming faster as I moved toward the part of the cemetery where my mother would be buried. It didn’t look like any caretakers were around, so I would have to find her grave myself. I walked on, my toes beginning to freeze as my feet marked a trail towards the places where snow had drifted into piles on the paths through the cemetery.
My hand hung at my side, white fingers clutching the remaining bouquet of roses. Row on row and still nowhere near the end. The trails here ran crooked at the edges, overrun by brown and deadened weeds no hands had torn out in the springtime. My mother had been laid there, among the paupers and the unknown, the homeless and the kinless. I ached with guilt for not having come earlier, but the anger at my father inside me had altogether disappeared. Emptiness took its place, a quiet space in my mind amid the grief threatening to flood my senses.
&
nbsp; The last row. I turned to the right and saw the slab, knowing it was hers before I read the inscription. The stone was whiter, newer, and the front glowed brighter in the daylight than any other around it. Dark patches of lichen crept up the uneven, pockmarked sides of the white slab, spiders crawling over stone. I knelt down and brushed the frost off of the front inscription.
Katalin Tomlin
1961-1992
Just her name and those dates. Nothing that mentioned she had been a loving wife and mother. Nothing about her, not a “Rest in Peace” or a “Forever in Our Hearts.” All of my vague memories, all of her life, reduced down to a name and number. Why hadn’t my grandmother’s family done something for her? It felt wrong.
“Mom,” I whispered.
When I touched the cold marble, it was as though the barricade that I had built up over the years, the dam that I had made, cracked and crumbled, swept away in a fast-moving river that was fed by some secret underground source. I broke down and wept: my face grew warm, then hot, then burning. The wind picked up and whistled among the cypress trees at the perimeter, the cold murmurings of a faraway tribunal.
“I’m sorry,” I cried. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, mom. I’m sorry.”
I did not know what I was apologizing for. For the years lost and taken for granted. For every mischief I got into. For waiting so long to grieve.
It had been too long. I didn’t even remember the sound of her voice. Slowly, but surely, the pieces of memory, so fragile and precious, had cracked and melted and ebbed away on the tides of time like so much glass being fractured, crystal by crystal, into sand. Her voice that had sung to me when I was young.
