Girl at War (10 page)

“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 different 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.

“You were stubborn and Mom was in labor with you for twenty-seven hours, so it turned out they should’ve just waited for the ambulance. But everyone called Mom
Cleopatra and the Queen of Sheba for months afterward because of the way they hauled her downtown, and Mom wouldn’t let Dad live down how nervous he was.”

“Can I see the picture?” Rahela asked after a while.

“What picture?”

“From yesterday. The picture of you that you said wasn’t you.” I felt foolish for thinking I had outwitted her and reached across her to tug the envelope out from under the mattress. I felt for the gloss of the photo among the other papers, but when I pulled my hand from the envelope I was instead holding the Christmas picture of our entire family. Rahela grabbed it before I could return it to the packet.

“This isn’t the one—” I watched the image pass through her eyes and register. “Is that…me?” she said. “And that’s, those are—”

“Our parents.”

“Does Mom…I mean—” She looked at the photo, then back at me. “Do Mom and Dad know you have this?”

“Of course.” Laura had been the one to talk me out of carrying the photos around in my jeans pocket, relegating them to their place in the file box, for “safekeeping.” “All right, let’s put it away for now,” I said. “You’ve gotta get to sleep.”

“I just wanna see it a little more.”

She held the photo so close to her face it looked like she was staring right through the paper. I thought of our parents and felt sorry that she could only see them blurred.

“Do I look like them?”

I examined her, the wavy hair and warm complexion. “You look a lot like Mom.”

She looked embarrassed. “Can I still see the pictures? While you’re away at school?”

“Sure. I keep them in the file box. Just don’t take them out of the house or anything. Don’t lose them.”

Eventually she nodded off, and I tucked the photo back into the envelope and carried her to her room. I stayed up most of the night reading
Austerlitz
. I had read many books by writers long gone but found myself lingering on the fact of Sebald’s death only three months before, and was fixated on the notion of holding someone’s final thoughts in my hand. I called Brian but hung up after two rings. I’d talk to him tomorrow, once I got back to the city and sorted out what I was going to say to him that night.

Brian was a year older, the kind of person I’d imagined meeting at college—sensitive, worldly, independent—and I had first developed a crush on his intellect. He had studied abroad in Tibet; he had been to the Louvre and the Uffizi; he read Chomsky and Saussure for fun. If anyone was going to understand my story, it would be him. Several times I’d come close to telling him everything, but each time I tried I’d gotten nervous and backpedaled the conversation another way.

“I missed you,” I said when we kissed in the street. “I thought maybe I’d finally take you over to my uncle’s place, if you want.” I could feel myself talking too quickly. Brian pulled away a little. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Just—”

“What?”

“You kind of blew me off this weekend.”

“I was home. I sent you a message.”

“You didn’t say goodbye.”

“I wanted to get an early start. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.” He conceded that I hadn’t missed much over the weekend, that he’d spent most of the time in the library working on his thesis, a study of universal grammar theory via Nicaraguan Sign Language. Previously isolated across the country, deaf students had been brought to a special education school with the intent of training them in spoken Spanish, but on the playground and in the dorms they’d rapidly developed a signed system of their own. Linguists flocked to the site, eager to witness the birth of a new language.

“It’s really amazing,” Brian said. “After only a few years they had developed subject-verb agreement and classifier systems.” I liked listening to him talk about the project, how he got so excited about the finer points of grammar, but I knew nothing of the topic beyond what he’d told me, so the conversation soon petered out. He saw
Austerlitz
protruding from my purse and pulled it out. “Oh, not Sebald again.”

Brian and I did not have the same taste in books, which led to a kind of intellectual jousting I usually enjoyed. But I did not feel like debating, not about this.

“Where are you getting this old-man stuff?”

“From an old man,” I said. “But I like him.”

“Ariel or Sebald?”

“Both.”

“What is it about him? Is it the loopy sentences? The man does know his way around a comma.”

“Maybe.” Really it was because of the feeling of grief that ran through his books like a subterranean river. But I didn’t want to say that aloud. Not yet.

“He’s a bit of a German apologist, though, no?” Brian said.

“I think it’s more complicated than that.”

“Of course it is. But if there’s ever a time you get to draw the moral line in the sand, it’s the Holocaust. I mean, his father was in the Wehrmacht.”

“That’s not his fault, what his father did.”

“It’s not. But it still makes things…thorny.”

“Which makes the book good.”

“Or ethically objectionable.”

I kissed him to make him stop talking. “You’re just grumpy because I’ve read a book you haven’t. Don’t worry—you can borrow it when I’m done.” I tried to smile and held my hand out to him.

“Fine, I’m stopping,” he said, and we locked pinkie fingers in what had become our signal for a truce. “But only because I’m starving.”

People’s use of the word
starving
when they obviously were not had always bothered me, but it was especially irritating at college, where every night was a buffet of excess. I
thought of the piles of roast chicken and potato salad and fluorescent yellow corn bread the school was likely serving for Sunday dinner, then throwing away.

In Croatia I had been a normal-size fifth grader. In America I was skinny. When I went for my first physical, I didn’t hit the minimum on the growth charts for weight and height. The doctor instructed Laura to give me nutritional milk shakes twice a day along with my regular meals, so that night after dinner she poured a cup of gritty chocolate liquid and sat me down on a stool at the counter. I told her I wasn’t hungry, but she put on her sternest expression and told me to drink. I saw a flash of my own mother’s impatience in Laura’s irises and drained the whole cup. But when I stood to place the glass in the sink I was alarmed by an unfamiliar bubbling in my stomach. My limbs were heavy and my throat contracted. I was suffocating. I ran out to the back porch and threw up over the railing.

“The doctor said that might happen,” Laura said when I’d calmed down. “You were just full.”

I told her feeling full was awful and I never wanted to do it again. I panicked and threw up every night for the rest of the week.

“Well, if you’re on the brink of death we can just go to the dining hall,” I said to Brian.

“Don’t you be grumpy now.” He squeezed my pinkie finger, a reminder of our pact.

We boarded the train, and he slouched picturesquely beneath the
DO NOT LEAN ON DOORS
decal, hands in the pockets of his army surplus jacket.

“Hey, I got you something,” he said.

“What for?”

“No reason. Saw it and thought of you. Some vintage store.”

He unfurled his hand to reveal a sun-bleached shell fragment strung on a bronze chain. He dropped the necklace into my palm. “It’s a piece of the moon.” He smiled the mischievous, crooked smile I’d come to love.

“It’s perfect. Thank you.” Fumbling with the clasp, I put the necklace on and tried to draw myself from the depths of my foul mood. We came up from the subway where the remnants of Little Italy converged with Chinatown, and headed to my uncle’s restaurant.

Uncle Junior had been called Junior for so long that Jack could not remember what the name of the “original” had been. Even
uncle
was an approximation of things; he was probably more like a great-uncle or second cousin. With his parents gone, no one wanted to admit to him that we couldn’t remember his name, so we never asked.

The restaurant was called Misty’s after his dead dog, a name everyone in the family did remember because of the time Misty took a shit under the table during Thanksgiving dinner. Inside Misty’s was dim and warm, and the hostess recognized me and let me have my pick from the row of
green leather booths along the wall. Junior appeared shortly thereafter in pinstripes, a red carnation pinned at his breast pocket.

“Hello, beautiful,” he said, kissing my forehead. “And who is your gentleman caller here?” I introduced them and Junior planted a wet kiss on his cheek while Brian tried not to look surprised. “Welcome to my place,” Junior said, and poured us red wine from a carafe. “The
seppia
’s fresh tonight. You want that?”

“Sounds great,” I said. Brian ordered pasta and Junior yelled something in bastardized Italian back through the kitchen doors, then pulled a Yankees cap from behind the bar and went outside for a smoke.

“So that’s the infamous uncle,” Brian said. “How have you never brought me here?”

I hadn’t wanted Brian to meet Junior; I had been keeping him away from all my family, afraid of what they might let slip about my past. But now I was half-hoping Junior would say something that would force me to tell the truth.

“I didn’t want to scare you off.”

“I didn’t realize you were
that
Italian.”

“I’m not,” I said. Then, when he looked confused, “I mean, he’s kind of exceptional.”

Brian made some Godfatheresque gestures and laughed, then kissed my hand.

“Watch where you put those lips,” someone whooped from the corner booth, where a group of men were hunched
over their tumblers playing cards. Brian gave them a sheepish smile and dropped my hand.

“I don’t know them,” I whispered.

The group laughed. Junior poked his head back in the door. “That sounded too happy. You up to no good?”

“No, Jun,” was the collective response, morose, like a pack of schoolboys in trouble.

“They bothering you, Ana?”

“We’re fine,” I said.

“Yeah, well, just knock it off in there or I’ll make you pay for the drinks this time.” The men returned their focus to the card game.

“You know,” said Brian. “Maybe next time you take off to go home you could invite me.”

“Why? I’ve told you how awful Gardenville is.”

“I don’t care about Gardenville. I’d just like to go with you. Maybe meet your family or something? You met mine last fall.”

“I know, but—”

“Why don’t you want me to meet them, Ana?” His use of my name made me feel like a child.

“Why do you want to meet them so badly?”

“Why wouldn’t I?” He was rubbing his temple the way he did when he was frustrated. He sighed, then grabbed at my hand again across the table. “Just—I don’t want to fight. I’m graduating in two months. I need to start applying for jobs.
Decide if I’m going to stay in the city. I was thinking, maybe, you might want to move in with me.”

Something was happening to my face, a tingling at my cheeks, and I couldn’t tell if I was blushing or going pale.

“We could find a place, a studio or maybe a loft, probably in Brooklyn, but we could look for something close to the train so it’d be easy for you to get to class—”

We had talked about living together obliquely before, but not like this. Not with a real plan.

“Brian—”

“You don’t have to make a decision right away. But I wanted to bring it up before your housing deposit is due—”

“Brian,” I said. He looked startled. “I just—”

“You don’t want to live with me?”

“It’s not that. I have to tell you something.”

My throat was dry. I slipped my hand out from under his, took a gulp of water, and tried to think rationally. Once, another time when I’d almost told him, I’d brought up the war, just to see if he’d heard of it. He had, of course, had even read a book about it, some journalist interviewing Bosnians in concentration camps. He knew what a bloody and complicated thing it had been. Surely he would understand why I’d kept it from him. Plus, he was my best friend; more than that, we were in love.

“Look, on Friday when I left your room I didn’t go straight to Pennsylvania.”

Now it was his turn to pale. It occurred to me that he probably thought I was cheating on him.

“I was giving a speech at the UN.”

“The UN? What for?”

“The thing is, I’m not actually—” I searched for a word. “Italian.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was born in Croatia. Zagreb. Well, it was Yugoslavia then. When I was ten, the civil war started. My parents got killed.”

“But what about your parents in Pennsylvania? And your sister?”

“We were adopted. Rahela—Rachel’s my real sister.”

I told him about Rahela’s illness and MediMission and Sarajevo. About the roadblock and the forest and how I’d escaped. About how the UN presentation had brought on the old nightmares. Our food arrived and got cold. When I finished, Brian was still holding my hand, but he didn’t say anything.

“Are you freaked out?”

“No,” he said. “I mean I am. Not for me, for you. But that’s not that point. Shit, Ana. I’m sorry. Are you okay?”

“I’m sorry, too. I should have told you sooner.”

“It’s okay. I’m still trying to process all this. But it’s okay.”

Junior appeared with the wine again and slipped into the booth next to me. “Heya, princess. It’s good to see you. You should come around more often.”

“Yeah,” I managed. “School gets busy. How are you?”

“Same shit, different day. I got some tax man so far up my ass it’s like my colonoscopy all over again. But fuck it. How’s the family?”

“They’re good. Rachel’s getting big.”

“I bet. I’ve gotta get down there for a visit. Your father always throws good barbecues. I’ll make more of that ‘lemonade.’ ”

“Definitely. This summer.”

“Well, sir,” Junior said to Brian. “Don’t want to steal this pretty lady away from you any longer.”

“What are you thinking?” I said when Junior had gone.

“A lot of things,” Brian said. “I feel so sad for you.”

“And?”

“And. And I know this is gonna sound bad, but I can’t help wondering if it changes things for us.”

“It doesn’t,” I said. “I’m still me.”

“You can’t tell me this stuff doesn’t affect you at all.”

“No, you know me.” I pulled my hands under the table, rubbed at the thin white rings of scar tissue at my wrists. Wounds I’d explained away with an invented bicycle crash. “We’re supposed to be happy right now. You just asked me to move in with you,” I said, though that moment felt far away.

“I know. I just mean it’s a lot to work through. But, Ana?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m willing to do it, okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

“Want to get out of here?”

“Don’t think you’re leaving without dessert!” said Junior, rounding the corner with two bowls of panna cotta.

“Thanks, but we’re really full,” I said.

“Dessert is a separate compartment,” said Junior and set the bowls down on the table. Brian, who intuited that it would be quicker to eat the dessert than argue with Junior, took a few big spoonfuls, and I followed.

“Uncle J, can we have the check?” I said between bites.

“Unfortunately I can’t help you. No such check exists.”

“Come on. We want to pay you.”

“You’re students. Forget it.”

“All right,” I said, willing to give in if it meant we got to leave. “Thank you.”

“No problemo. And tell your father to call me for chrissakes.”

Out on the street it was much windier than it had been when we’d gone in, strong gusts cutting through my jacket. Brian always sped up in the cold, and I struggled to match his pace.

“Have you ever thought about going back?” he said.

“Sometimes. But I don’t know what for.”

“It might give you some closure.”

“Oh, here we go.” Annoyed, I stopped trying to keep up.

Brian slowed, too. “Hey, don’t do that. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“You don’t know the first thing about dealing with this stuff.”

“I know. You’re right.” We were blocking the sidewalk, and he broached the gap between us. He tried to pull my hand from my pocket, but I jerked away.

“It’s cold.”

“Ana, I’m sorry. Just come home with me. Elliot’s still off at some design conference. We’ll have the place to ourselves. We can…decompress.” He was holding on to my wrist inside my jacket pocket, and I interlaced my fingers with his. I could feel myself relenting. I didn’t want to fight with him, and I didn’t want to be alone.