by Lana Popovic
“How are you doing?” I said, trying to remember the last time I’d spoken to her so gently. “I think maybe you need some water.”
She shook her head once, like a decisive toddler. “No water.” Squinting one eye shut, she reached down and groped around the floor beneath the alcove. “Was a bottle there . . .”
“I think that’s all gone now. Why don’t we—”
I went rigid as she wrapped her fingers around my wrist, tugging at me until I stood from the bed, practically looming above her. Her face turned so soft as it tilted up toward mine that I barely recognized my own mother.
“Iris . . . ,” she murmured, stroking the inside of my wrist. Her eyes filled with tears, like water rushing over a frozen pond, and her face crumpled. “My hibiscus daughter. Why . . .” She shook her head and swallowed. “Why did you have to grow up so strong? Why did you have to make it so hard?”
With that, her arms circled me, locking around my waist, and she buried her cheek against my middle. I was so shocked that for a moment I stood stiff, arms lifted away from my sides.
“I don’t know what to do,” she whispered against my belly. “It wasn’t supposed to . . . it wasn’t supposed to go like this.”
“What do you mean?” I whispered, setting one hand cautiously on top of her head. Her hair was finer than mine, thick and silky, the crown of her head warm beneath my palm. I dug my fingertips into her scalp and rubbed, trying to ease her like I did with Malina sometimes. “What wasn’t supposed to?”
She whimpered against my stomach, her shoulders hunching, and I felt such a tremendous, unfamiliar flood of love for her I almost began to cry myself as I met Lina’s wide eyes above Mama’s head. “Let’s get you into bed,” I said.
She let me hook my hands under her armpits and heave her bonelessly up against me, Lina pulling down the sheets and gently tugging her toward the middle of the mattress. As soon as I moved away she bolted upright, her face taut with panic. “Where are you going?”
“Just to bring you some water,” I soothed. “I’ll be back in a minute. Lina will stay with you.”
Mama shot me a look halfway between pleading and suspicion, then sank back onto her elbows, letting her head fall against Lina’s shoulder. “My cherry girl, you smell so sunny,” I heard her mumble as I left. “Do you still love me? At least a little?”
In the bathroom, I filled a glass and ran a washcloth under the faucet, wringing it out. The girl in the mirror looked so much more in control than I felt. Her eyes stared back at me, water-pale, and in the dim light from the tiny window the bones in my face looked not just stark but beautiful, my lips fine and dainty as the negative space left behind by a paintbrush. I splashed water on my face, taking deep breaths until my hands stopped shaking. I could do this. I could always do whatever it took.
Back in the bedroom, I clambered carefully onto the bed, shuffling to Mama on my knees. I handed the glass to Lina, and she held it to our mother’s lips and fed her tiny sips as I dabbed at her face and the ruined front of her dress.
“Can you turn around for me?”
I unzipped her, tugging the dress down while she wriggled against it like an eel in a bucket until it finally slipped off. She let me work a T-shirt over her head, then lay back down, cheek pillowed on her arm and eyes half closed. “Will you lie down with me? You haven’t done that since you were so small . . . you so roly-poly, Lina, and you, Iris, such a scrappy thing . . .”
“Roly-poly?” Lina echoed, smoothing a strand off her forehead. “Are you calling me fat, Mama?”
Mama rubbed her cheek against Lina’s shoulder. “Never. Though no Linzer cookie was ever safe from you.”
I knew things hadn’t torn quite as jaggedly between them as they had with Mama and me—there hadn’t been that dangerous sense of rent iron between them—but I’d had no idea they still teased each other this way. They never did it in front of me.
“Riss,” Mama whispered, reaching for me. “Will you come, too, just this once? Please?”
Maybe the nickname was why I gave in. As unfair as it was that even this should be on her terms just like everything else, it was also like water to a cactus, parched even by its own low standards. There was so much I needed to ask her—about Dunja, and about what had driven her to this weakness—but I hadn’t even talked to Malina yet. And seeing her so vulnerable had bled off my fury, enough that I couldn’t bring myself to prick the thin-skinned bubble of this moment.
“Do you remember,” she murmured as I settled awkwardly against her back, jerking when she looped her legs over mine, “do you remember the cake I made you?”
I did. It was for Malina’s and my fifteenth birthday, and it had been a Sacher torte in the form of a roulade. Where there should have been just one layer of raspberry jam filling, she’d lined it with layer after layer of fruit alternating with chocolate, apricot-chocolate-strawberry-chocolate-peach-chocolate, into such a tiny central spiral that the sheets separating the core layers must have been thinner than rice paper. She hadn’t baked us a birthday cake in years by then, but that one must have taken hours.
“I do. It was incredible.” I hesitated. “You never told us why you did that.”
“Because that’s what your bougainvillea tasted like. I wanted you to know.”
She meant the glass sculpture I’d blown, of the twilight bougainvillea that grew in our yard. My fractal masterpiece, the smallest and most precise glasswork depiction I’d ever managed—barely two feet long, yet as close as I’d ever come to conveying that honeycomb sense of infinity. I’d given it to her for her own birthday, that same year. No matter how things curdled between us, I’d never stopped giving her gifts. I told myself it was out of the sweetest spite, killing her with kindness. But it wasn’t, and had never been that.
“Why did you hang it up at the café?” I asked her. “You always used to say the desserts were enough decoration.”
She turned to look at me over her shoulder, until we were nearly nose to nose. Even heavy-lidded and sickly pale, she was magnificent in the slanting afternoon light. When I was little, I’d imagined her as one of the Montenegrin queens I read about in my storybooks—like Queen Jevrosima, ethereal mother of Crown Prince Marko, the hero of so many of our folktales. Prince Marko was a dauntless, vengeful protector of the weak, and I’d loved him with a child’s fierce adoration until I read the story in which he tricked a Moorish princess into marrying him, then stole off with her gold while she slept because her dark skin startled him in the night. After that, I’d always wondered what he’d have to say about my own angled bones and eyes.
But in all the stories his mother had been wise and kind, and unfailingly devoted.
And the way my mother watched me now was exactly as I’d thought Queen Jevrosima must have looked at her own son.
Her eyes fluttered closed, and she sighed. “Because, my flower girl. Because you made it for me.”
SEVEN
MALINA AND I SPENT THE REST OF THE AFTERNOON AND evening taking turns watching over Mama while she snored, making sure she didn’t throw up in her sleep. I must have fallen asleep myself during one of my later shifts; it was the unfamiliar expanse of Mama’s empty bed that woke me. It felt like too much room without her and Lina in it.
I let myself laze for a few more moments, the events of the past night washing over me. Beneath the lingering shock, I felt a warm, new kernel of happiness, as if the years of frustration and fury rubbing me raw inside had finally grown a grain of sand into a pearl. I’d spent the night sleeping next to my mother, pressed back to back; she’d looked at me like she might learn to love me again. Maybe everything would be different now, somehow.
I propped myself up and peeked outside. The sky was still peachy and golden with trails of dawn, which meant Mama had probably already wrung herself out and left for the café. Stretching my arms above my head, I swung my feet over the side and headed to check on Malina and change out of the clothes I’d slept in.
My refle
ction in the armoire mirror froze me in my steps.
My hair was so straight it barely tangled even after sleep, and goose bumps stippled my skin as my fingers slid easily down its length, slipping over the colorful ribbons woven through it. They were arranged in asymmetrical sprays, and the effect was oddly striking, like fireworks bursting against a night sky. Each was barely thicker than a thread, slipknotted into place around the root of the hair, and every time I tilted my head they released faint wafts of leather, carnation, plum, and some sort of warm Arabian musk. I recognized the component scents—Mama used essential and fragrance oils in her cooking all the time, and Malina liked wearing them—but I couldn’t remember having smelled this combination on either of them before.
My scalp turned taut and prickly as I imagined Mama hunched over me for hours as I slept, still drunk yet braiding ribbons into my hair with a touch so deft she didn’t wake me once.
In Malina’s and my room, I found Malina sleeping on top of her sheets, curled tightly on her side; ribbons twined through her curls, too, and I felt a ridiculous twinge of envy that of course, of course even this would look prettier on her. I leaned over her and wound a few carefully around my finger, separating them from her hair so I could sniff at them—hers smelled different from mine, a top note of sweet pea over a rich vanilla base, pierced with a sharp and surprising nip of verbena.
Turning away from her, I shucked my stale clothes and rummaged in our cluttered closet for my favorite sundress: deep violet patterned with iridescent beetles, a treasure I’d found at the flea market. Then I threaded my favorite silver hoops through my ears, feeling the comfortable drag of their weight on my lobes, and winged my eyes with liner. Unnerved as I was by the image of Jasmina blank-faced and intent in the dark, her fingers flitting through my hair like an animal preening its young, I wanted to look nice for her today. Maybe the ribbons were some kind of apology for . . . for everything. Maybe they were her way of opening the door again.
By the time I arrived at the café, I’d decided I liked the ribbons. They’d fluttered in the breeze as I biked, and I’d caught myself straining to catch whiffs of that bright perfume, to separate it from the salty air and car fumes, the savory simmer of bean and sausage stew put early on the pot for lunch.
“Jasmina?” I called out as I stepped inside. “How are you feeling? And what are these ribbons—”
The door to the kitchen swung open so hard it thundered against the wall, and my mother simply dropped through it, like a rag doll tossed aside by a child.
Time shuddered, then slowed to a crawl. It seemed like hours that I watched her falling, the image of every moment sharp and hard like an insect caught in amber, each locking indelibly into my memory like the missing pieces of a terrible puzzle:
Her outstretched arms flung up above her head like a dancer’s, the incidental grace.
The streaming banner of her hair, sluicing through the air.
The droplets of her blood on the walls, spattered so bright and vivid they were almost pretty.
And then the bone crunch of the back of her head as it met the tiles behind the counter, out of my sight.
Just before I screamed and time snapped back into place like one of the rubber bands around my wrist, I heard the boom of the back door slamming, the distant staccato of running footsteps. The electric instinct to chase after whoever had done—this—to my mother juddered through me as I fumbled my way weak-kneed around the counter, as if my nervous system had brushed a live wire and caught fire. But I couldn’t run, I couldn’t go. I couldn’t leave her.
Once, years ago, I’d fallen off the chipped, rusting monkey bars in our schoolyard and knocked all the air out of my lungs. I remembered gasping desperately for breath, the air sparkling in front of my eyes as if I’d temporarily gained the ability to see oxygen molecules.
That feeling of breathlessness, of almost dying, couldn’t compare to the sight of her body, pale and curled like a pistil in the spreading pool of her own blood. I dropped down to the floor next to her, hard, a brilliant bolt of pain shooting up from my knees.
“Mama,” I managed, through the taste of iron in my mouth. “Mama, please . . .”
She couldn’t move her head—her neck was probably snapped, or her spine, or both—but her eyes slid sideways, unfocused, to meet mine. They were glazing over, jellied, and the lids twitched frantically with every slow blink, as if it was taking the last of her lifeblood to move even that much. Maybe it was; there was blood everywhere, the copper reek of it sickly sweet and overwhelming. I could hear it thick and gurgling in her throat as she tried to draw a drowning breath. It was sticky in her hair, and all over my hands where I touched her chest, to try to peel the sodden blouse away and see how she was hurt. For a moment, the way it had seeped through the fabric looked almost like a blossom, and my vision lurched, threatening to fracture the blood into something beautiful.
Then the impulse receded, because I couldn’t find a bullet wound or a stab mark. Nothing so clean or relatively kind.
Instead, beneath the blouse, her chest was smashed, entirely staved in.
My gut collapsed—what did I need it for, anyway, what was I ever going to eat again—and my own lungs wicked in on themselves. I made a smothered, keening sound as I caught her by the shoulders, trying to shift her head onto my knees, as if that could make a hint of difference.
“Iris,” she forced out, blood leaking between her lips. “Dunja . . . don’t . . .”
Then she simply stopped trying to breathe. I’d always heard there was supposed to be a last breath, a death rattle, but she didn’t even have the luxury of one. Her eyes slid shut, lashes curling over the hollows beneath. I could still see a sliver of white between her lids—and then they flickered like moth wings, lashes twitching. As if she were dreaming.
Frantically, I felt for her pulse at her throat—nothing. My insides clenching, I leaned in close to her parted lips, hoping fiercely that I’d feel even the faintest whisper of her breath against my cheek.
Still nothing. No heat. No heartbeat.
Just her eyes, still ticking back and forth beneath her lids like a metronome. Suddenly, all I could see was a shimmering net that had lowered in front of my own eyes. The last of my consciousness broke over me, and right before I went under, I looked up at the wall over the table and found it empty.
My glass bougainvillea was gone.
MALINA’S SCREAMS BROUGHT me back.
“Iris!” she was shrieking. “No, no, no, Riss, no!”
I thrashed my way back to her, sitting up so abruptly the world tilted and slid sideways. A rush of nausea swelled up my throat and I clamped my hand over my mouth, wrapping my other arm around my sister.
“Oh thank God, Riss, I thought you—I thought—” She buried her face into my neck, her shoulders heaving. “I thought you were gone too, there’s so much blood. . . .”
I looked down at myself. My front looked as though I’d been dipped in it, patches still shining slick. I trailed my fingers over the drenched fabric, feeling as though my hand belonged to someone else. It was sticky and cool, tacky between my fingertips as I rubbed them together.
Malina was crying more quietly now, but steadily, her nose streaming. “You were bent over her, and I thought maybe someone had attacked you both, and . . .” Her voice trailed off into a whimper. “She’s dead, Riss, she’s dead, oh my God. . . .”
I squeezed her hard against me. “But she isn’t. I know it looks like—it looks so bad—but she blinked earlier, and her eyes were moving—”
She shook her head once, a tight snap like a spasm, biting her lip. “She’s not breathing, Riss. There’s no pulse. I think . . .” Her voice broke. “I think she’s really gone.”
I shifted and folded my legs beneath me, but as soon as I tried to stand, the world grew blinding and trembly, as if I were inside a lightbulb filament. I let go of Lina and pressed both hands against my face until my cheekbones ached.
“I can’t stand up yet
,” I told her. “Call an ambulance. If there’s anything left, maybe they can still bring her back.”
THEY TOOK MAMA away from us; we weren’t allowed to go with her, not even as next of kin, no matter how much I fought the paramedics and the police.
Nev had arrived long before the police got there; I dimly remembered pressing my forehead against her freckled shoulder, her arms around me and Malina as they both shook with choking sobs. At some point, a detective had peeled her away from us and then walked Malina and me over to Čiča Jovan’s house, refusing to answer any of our frantic questions along the way.
I calmed down incrementally as soon as we were inside. I’d been in Jovan’s apartment so many times, for his family’s slava feast in November, other holidays, and my drawing lessons—the glassblowing, we did in his studio next door—that it smelled like home to me, apples and resin and aged wood. In the meantime, Čiča Jovan had seized control of the situation with the deft entitlement of someone who’d been at the household helm for a very long time, long enough to outlive everyone else. At his urging, Lina and I changed out of our clothes and into his late wife’s fine cotton nightgowns and cashmere sweaters. For one stupid moment, I mourned the loss of my lovely dress, the tiny insects drowned in Mama’s blood.
“What are we going to do about these?” Malina asked, fingering a strand of ribbons in her hair. “Should we take them out? Since Mama—since she put them in for us last night, maybe they’re evidence?”
“You can do what you want, bunny, but I’m keeping mine,” I said. “She might have meant them as a gift. I’m not letting anyone take them out.”
By the time Jovan came to check on us, Malina had lapsed back into tears while I stayed dry as a stone. He coaxed us into drinking some brandy-laced tea, followed by a slug of straight brandy for good measure, then led us back to the mahogany table in the living room to speak with the detective. We sat side by side across from him, our arms brushing. Malina knotted her fingers in her lap until they turned white, and I curled mine underneath the table’s lip, gripping it as if it could hold me. All I wanted was to feel tethered to the ground, and I was beyond grateful for Čiča Jovan’s strong, gnarled hands heavy on our shoulders.
