by Lana Popovic
“What’s wrong with you, Mirko?” he said in his quiet rumble. “I know all three of your grandparents living—and Petar too, God rest his soul—and what would they think of you refusing to let these children follow their own mother to the hospital?”
The detective shifted uneasily. He was an older man, with a pitted face and dark, hangdog eyes, and he looked almost as exhausted as I felt. “With all respect, Jovan, this is . . . an unusual situation. We can’t allow them there until the doctors have gleaned a better understanding of the, uh, the parameters of her condition.”
“Her condition? What are you even on about, boy?” Jovan rasped. “Jasmina was healthy as a plow horse, always has been. She’s been good as a daughter to me for seventeen years, and she didn’t have any condition I knew of. Why don’t you just get on with it and tell us how she is? If these children are about to be orphans, they have a right to know.”
The detective cleared his throat, a muscle ticcing in his jaw. “It’s, well. The problem is that we’re not sure.”
“Sure about what?” I lashed out. “You haven’t told us anything yet! There was so much blood, and I saw . . .” My mind flashed back to the mulched mass of Mama’s chest, and I couldn’t finish, my gorge rising. “What happened to her?”
“It’s not that we don’t know what happened, miss,” he said quietly. “We do. Your mother’s heart was crushed, by something slender but blunt, about like this.” He held up his hairy hand, palm down, so the bony side of it faced us. “Obviously, it would take a huge amount of force to strike the sternum hard enough to pulverize the heart and most of the lungs. And it’s still unclear what sort of weapon was used to exert this force in such a concentrated way.”
I dug my fingertips into the table until I felt a splinter bite into the soft flesh of my thumb. Malina let out a choked sound and shoved away from the table, her chair squealing against the floor as she sprinted toward the bathroom. We could hear her retching, and Jovan lumbered after her, shooting the detective a poison-ivy look over his shoulder.
I swallowed, forcing down bile. “So what are you saying? Is she dead? I thought I saw—I thought she might not have been all the way gone. . . .”
Mirko dragged one hand wearily over his face, his pitted features distorting. “I know how it sounds. I’m sorry to even have to describe it to you, but . . .” He glanced up as Malina slid back in next to me, still breathing hard and wiping at her mouth, Jovan’s hand landing firmly back on my shoulder. “The problem is that we’re still not sure whether to treat this as an assault or a murder investigation, or if the distinction even matters. Your mother—the doctors don’t understand what’s happening to her. None of them have seen anything like this before.”
A surge of static buzzed through my head. My tongue went dead and heavy in my mouth. “What do you mean?” Malina said, voice wavering. “What’s wrong with her?”
He steepled his stubby fingers, looking at us over them. “She is dead, miss. Or she should be—she has no vital signs, no heartbeat, no blood pressure. Yet she also isn’t dead. She opened her eyes several times in the ambulance, and she has detectable brain activity, that of a living person in a coma. It’s as if . . .”
He worked his jaw a few times, as if trying to release pressure with a click. “Listen, sine. I’m not a religious man.”
Sine. Son, a pet name for a younger person, boy or girl. Somehow hearing it made me feel even worse, the boundless sense of how baffled and sorry for us he was, this man who was supposed to solve things and protect us and neaten the world. Behind us, Čiča Jovan let go of my shoulder to cross himself.
The detective’s bloodshot eyes snagged mine. “And I haven’t been since I was younger than you both. But if I still were, and if I believed in such a thing as the soul, I would say that your mother’s was trapped, tied to a broken body that simply can’t sustain life. I don’t understand how that’s possible; none of the doctors do, either. They forbid us from even telling you about it for fear that it would get out, start a religious panic, people mobbing the hospital and shouting miracles and sainthood. But you girls go to school with my Goran. I couldn’t keep a thing like this from you, not about your own mother.”
He rubbed the back of his neck and worked his jaw again, and I could see again how much this pained him. “But she’s quarantined now, and until they have a theory of it—what kind of disease might mimic life this way, maybe, some genetic defect your mother might have—they can’t run the risk of letting you near her.”
I could feel myself expand with rage, boiling from me like a solar flare. “No.”
His eyebrows shot up. “Excuse me?”
The chair legs screeched as I pushed away from the table, my palms slick on the varnished wood, knees locked to keep me upright. “You can’t keep us away from her, not if she’s still alive. Or whatever she is. Even if she were . . . fully dead”—everything was insane—“you’d still let us see her one more time, have her body for a funeral at least. So you’ll take us to her. Now.”
His mouth tightened into a grim line. “I can’t do that, miss. I shouldn’t even have told you to begin with. As far as the police are concerned, your mother is dead. I can’t bring you to the quarantine, much less let you loose after.”
Certainty flooded over me, pounded against my insides like a rain-swollen tide. I could do this for us, for me and my sister. “You can. Because if you don’t, we’ll tell everyone what you just told us. Our friend Nevena Stefanović—she was our mother’s apprentice. She’s also the councilman’s daughter. Even if you detain all of us, you can’t lock her away somewhere. And she’ll do it for us, she’ll tell everyone, and whatever happens then will fall on you.”
I bit off the last of the words, forced them through chattering teeth. My entire body was trembling with just the effort it took to keep myself standing. Beside me, Malina rose and slid her arm around my waist, letting me lean invisibly against her.
“You wouldn’t have said anything in the first place, would you, Detective?” she asked softly, her voice warm as a hand to the nape of the neck. “If you hadn’t meant for us to force you to take us to her. You know what the best thing to do is, the kindest thing. I can tell you do. So just do it for us, will you? Please.”
He watched her silently, a hint of something like awestruck fear glinting deep in his pouched eyes. Finally he rubbed his chin with one hand, fingers rasping over the bristle of his stubble, and gave a single nod.
“Just the two of you, then.”
Jovan heaved a harsh-edged sigh. “Mirko . . .”
“No, sir. Not even for you. Even this could ruin me, end my entire career. I have Kristina to think of, and my boy. I’m sorry, but it’s the best I can do. It’ll have to be just the two of them.”
ALL THE HOSPITALS I’d ever seen had been grim, communist affairs, reeking of antiseptic and floored with curling linoleum or chipped tile. Like Mama, Lina and I had always been healthy enough to avoid everything but vaccines when we were little, so hospitals made us both nervous with the memory of the childhood fear of needles sliding under skin and the surrounding miasma of illness swampy in the air.
But this one seemed somehow worse than most, though it could have been the gloom of the rain-soaked night outside. The detective had insisted on taking us in late, long after hours, when the hospital depended on an underpaid and exhausted skeleton staff. In the dim, dreary hallway, we could hear the water beating on the roof like the rattle of dice in a cup, and even at this hour a few stragglers waited for attention in the seats that lined the corridor: a withered grandmother with mottled skin and scabs around her mouth, a little boy with a wracking donkey’s cough who buried his face in his mother’s lap when each bout got the best of him.
And then there was the moaning. It was faint but relentless, like the sound of the whistling witch-winds that sometimes stole through cracks in the walls in high summer, and it made all the fine hairs on my neck and arms stand on end.
After a brief
conversation with a sallow-faced, tight-lipped nurse in crisp whites—I could see his hand brush hers, and wondered if he’d paid her to look the other way—the detective led us down the hallway, cutting a right into a massive room lined with cots separated only by thin curtains. The distant moaning we’d been able to hear even from the hallway was much louder here. I had thought it might be the cumulative hum of the sick, but most here were asleep and silent, save for snatches of mumbling and phlegmy snores.
We followed the sound down two sets of stairs, until we were well underground, and Mirko unlocked a padlocked door and shouldered it open with a grinding metal screech, bringing us to a stop in front of a room encased in glass. There was a set of clear double doors set into the glass, the vestibule between for decontamination, I guessed.
And beyond, our mother lay like a deathbed princess under fluorescent lights.
It was the ugliest sort of light, the kind that usually made anyone beneath it look like a riverbank corpse recently fished out of the water. But with her ravaged chest covered by thin sheets, and all that bloodied, knotted hair tucked away into a surgical hat, Mama was gorgeous as ever, so transparently pale I could practically see the finesse of the facial bones straining beneath her skin. Her eyes strobed, unseeing—closed, then half open, then closed—and she emitted a keening, unceasing moan like a deflating bagpipe, both too high-pitched and too soft to be so pervasive.
The moaning never flagged, not even for a moment. It sounded like the quietest torture, something so drawn out and tormented that only sheer fatigue kept it tamped down.
“I’ll be at the stairs,” Mirko said tightly, “when you’re ready to leave.” His footsteps clicked down the hall, then faded.
Once we were alone with Mama, I could hear Malina’s breathing speed up beside me, and my heart began to pound in answer. “Riss,” she choked out, stumbling against my side. “I can’t stay here. I—I can’t listen to her.”
I wrapped an arm around her, clenching my other hand into a fist until my nails sank into my palms good and hard, slicing sharp. “Why?” I whispered, wanting and not wanting to know in equal and opposite force. “What does she sound like?”
Lina closed her eyes, her lips trembling, and the fine blue capillaries on her quivering lids reminded me so much of Mama when I’d found her that I wanted to thrust my own sister away from me, to cauterize the image from my mind. “She just wants it to stop. It all hurts so much, and she wants it to stop, and she’s fighting and fighting with nowhere to go. There’s nothing else, I can’t hear her like I usually can, I can’t even find her. It’s like something feral’s trapped inside her skin, Riss. Like a dying animal that just wants to finally die.”
It was too much to take. I could feel steel slipping in, my blood turning to mercury. I had to be both stable and fluid, made solely of strength. There couldn’t be anything warm or yielding to get in the way.
We had to find her, the woman who had done this to Mama. Wherever Mama’s mind and soul were stranded, she was the one who had ferried them there.
EIGHT
MIRKO DROVE US BACK TO THE OLD TOWN, AND ČIČA JOVAN insisted we spend the night with him; neither of us could face going back to our empty house with the pall of Mama’s absence, her death or undeath or whatever it was, hanging over it. And there was the horrible possibility that whoever had hurt our mother might be lurking somewhere near, waiting for the chance to strike at us too. It seemed ridiculous that anyone would want to hurt us, here where we knew everyone, but nothing was certain anymore.
Still reeling, I’d told the detective about Dunja, and my missing bougainvillea sculpture—he’d asked for anything we could think of that might help in the investigation, which he meant to begin no matter what was happening to Mama—and then assured us that officers were posted around the house to keep watch.
None of us knew what to do with ourselves after that. My insides felt clammy and numb, as if I’d been floating in icy water from the inside out. Jovan made sure we were comfortable in his guest room, but after we were settled I could hear him pacing the living room beyond our cracked-open door, murmuring “God, Jasmina, God, kuku lele” to himself, followed by a quiet rasping so low and terrible I didn’t immediately recognize it as tears. I closed the door with a soft click, pressing my cheek against the warped surface.
Malina showered first, so she was already tucked up beneath the quilts in the guest-room bed by the time I padded out of the bathroom. I slid in next to her, folding myself around her curled body, and she tucked her feet against my calves. We lay together in silence for a long moment, listening to the rise and dip of each other’s breathing until we finally matched up.
“What do you think is happening, Riss?” she whispered. “It has to be something like the gleam. Not exactly like it—nothing we do has ever been anything as terrible as that—but the same sort of thing. Some kind of magic. I mean, what else could it be?”
We’d hardly ever called it that before. “Magic” sounded like something out of one of my books, vast and impossible to reconcile with our world, gods and demons and creatures made from daylight or darkness but decidedly inhuman. The gleam felt more like a talent, a skill we’d been born with, if crafting beauty could be a genetic trait like the color of our eyes.
But it was magic. Mama had called us witches since we were little, to make sure we understood the danger and the secrecy we practiced, and witches worked with magic—that was their material, the fabric of their loom. And I remembered the sheer intensity of my fractals when I’d been at the height of my gleam. That girl hadn’t just been beautiful; she had been so strong. And Malina still was, no matter how she tried to spare me by hiding the fullness of her gleam.
“It must be,” I agreed. “But being alive when she should be dead . . . that’s an infinity apart from eating the moon.”
“And you think that woman you saw fighting with Mama has something to do with it?”
“Mama said her name right before she . . . stopped. She said, ‘Dunja.’ And then, ‘don’t.’ And that woman was so strange when I talked to her. The way she spoke, the things she chose to say. Why would Mama have said her name if she hadn’t been the one to do it?”
Malina let out a quavering sigh. “It’s all so impossible, you know? My brain just doesn’t want it. And either way—I don’t think we’re getting her back, Riss, not from whatever or wherever she is now. I guess it’s really just you and me. Like you always said.”
“But if it is magic, maybe it isn’t permanent,” I argued. “Maybe there’s some way to undo it, if we can find Dunja.”
“Maybe.” I could hear the anguished doubt in her voice. We’d both seen Mama; I couldn’t really imagine a magic that would bring her back from that, either, even if one existed that wouldn’t let her go.
“I just keep thinking . . . ,” I started.
“What?”
“I keep thinking, if she’s well and truly gone, now I’ll never get to ask her why. Why she was so hard on us, or on me, at least. No, don’t deny it, I know she wasn’t all cherry preserves and sugar water for you, either. But you know it was always so much worse for me.”
“I do,” she said softly. “I know. I think it might be because you kept stepping between us? Even when she wanted to take it out on me, you wouldn’t let her.”
“But still, it was always different with you. It never felt like she was sharpening herself on you just for the hell of it, like you were her whetstone.” The memory of last night, the almost playful banter between them, drilled deeper inside me. “It’s almost easier to think she never loved me at all, but then I have these memories of her taking us to the beach at Prčanj when we were little. We had swimsuits that matched hers, white with strawberries on them, and she’d tow us around in our floaties and pretend to nip our cheeks like snacks. Do you remember that?”
She nodded, her hair tickling my nose. I buried my face in her curls, inhaling her complicated scent—the sweet and oddly biting perfume of the rib
bons, above the white musk, cedar, and patchouli from the little tinctures she and Niko blended together.
“I used to think it was because having us kept her from things she wanted for herself. She could have been a famous chef anywhere she wanted, instead of raising us with no one but Čiča Jovan to help.” It was so hard to say this, even to her. “But then I wonder if that wasn’t it at all. If it was maybe just raising me that did it.”
She stiffened against me. “What do you mean?”
I bit down on the inside of my cheek until I tasted blood, enough iron that I was sure my voice wouldn’t break. “I know I’m not easy to love, sometimes. I hated her so much for taking the gleam away from me—I threw it in her face so many times—and I know I’m not very much without it.”
Not like you, I didn’t add. You who’d still be so sweet and perfect even if you couldn’t sing.
“So I wonder if maybe she loved me at first, but then . . . couldn’t anymore. Because I’m all harsh and sort of scabby, and I can be terribly mean. And I know how much she values—valued—beauty, and I’m not beautiful like you—”
“How dare you say that?” The outrage in her voice took me aback. “You think you made her stop loving you, like you weren’t good enough for her to love? I’m not going to lie—I’ve seen you taunt her even when you didn’t have to, and so maybe there was a circle you both fell into and then there was no way out. You haven’t called her ‘Mama’ in years and years; you did that on purpose just to bait her, you know she hated that. And the way you always talk about Japan . . .”
My shoulders tensed like a stitch drawn tight. “What do you mean?”
“Japanese flowers, Japanese food. Trying to learn to write kanji. Like you’re so desperate to get away from here—from me and Mama—that you’d latch onto anything and ride it as far away as it could take you.”
