Page 11 of Slanting Towards the Sea

It was the moments in between these tentpole events that I lived for, when Vlaho was solely mine.

Walking down the hill to the pebbled beach nestled between the pines to play with each other’s bodies in the teal surf, and dive to find abalone shells, their inner side a shiny and slick mother-of-pearl.

Or driving to a beach farther away, where spectacular sunsets melted over Dubrovnik in the distance.

In the evenings, I’d put on a long summer dress, and Vlaho would come out of the shower smelling like lavender crushed between fingers, and we’d walk around the town that had come alive with music and tourists and the smells of seashell buzara and the briney breaths of the sea just before it falls asleep.

The yachts and sailboats, moored for the night along the promenade, cast lights under their prows that made the sea glimmering turquoise.

When we walked like this, sometimes he would stop and pull me into him, his face awash in that bluish light, his eyes intent on mine, as if he were checking to see if I was easing myself into this new knowledge of him all right. More of this , I wanted to tell him. More of you.

“There’s an old adage in the Dubrovnik region,” my father had told me as he was dropping me off at the bus station on the day of my departure for Cavtat.

“Be polite with everyone, and honest with no one.” I’d brushed it off—what did my father know about people from Dubrovnik?

I knew only Vlaho, but he was nothing like that.

And yet, this was exactly what his mother was like.

During my stay, she was polite but cautious around me, not showing much of either affinity or dislike, and as much as I tried, I was failing to catch any signals through her impenetrable veneer.

So when she asked if I’d like to help her make pa?ticada for lunch for what was to be the last day of my stay, I greedily accepted, even though I wasn’t great at preparing gnocchi and didn’t know the first thing about making the rich, silky gravy pa?ticada was famous for.

That morning, my phone rang as I was drinking my coffee alone in the garden. Vlaho was still asleep, his father had gone for his espresso, and his mother to the butcher’s to get meat for the pa?ticada. It was Tara calling. When I answered, she was crying so hard I could barely understand her.

“Ivona,” she choked on my name. “Ivona, I’m pregnant.”

Her words shot down the length of my body. We were not even twenty. “Are you sure?”

“I’m fucking sitting in my bathroom with three fucking positive tests, that’s how sure I am,” she said.

She told me it was with a guy she had met a couple of months ago, before summer term.

His name was Stipe, he was from Split, and he studied civil engineering.

“We slept together like three times,” she said through tears. “Fucking prick. He said he pulled out.”

“Tara, pulling out—”

“Don’t. Even.” She started sobbing again.

“I don’t even know him. I don’t know if I want to date him, let alone have a…

” She sniffled, checking herself. “I have to talk to my folks. When will you be in Zadar? I’ll need a place to stay if they kick me out.

” She let out a strained laugh. “My mom will hang me by my ovaries when she finds out.”

We hung up just as Frana peered from inside the house, announcing she was back and ready to start cooking. I followed her in, doing my best to retain my composure, but my shock must have shown, because as she was rolling the potato dough into a long snake, she asked if I was all right.

“My best friend’s pregnant,” I inexplicably said, and my face reddened at the glimpse of the simple golden cross swaying off Frana’s neck. I didn’t want her to think badly of my friend—and me by association.

“Oh,” Frana said, her face, as always, unreadable. “Unexpected?”

“Yes,” I said, and we worked without saying anything else for a while. She, rolling out and cutting gnocchi, and me shaping them into neat little ovals.

My own hypocrisy left a rancid aftertaste in my mouth.

Back in high school during those debates in Ethics class, all of us girls raged against the inequality between men and women when it came to sex, child-rearing, work, pay.

We had been so vehement and incensed, it had seemed impossible that any of us would fall prey to the same way of traditional thinking that was keeping women in that subordinate place.

But here I was doing just that. By feeling ashamed of Tara’s news, I was as good as judging her, and I was sure no one would judge Stipe with half as much scrutiny as they would Tara.

The reality of her situation sank in. Stipe could choose to be involved or not, but Tara couldn’t.

If she kept the baby, she would have to drop out or at least pause law school.

Her body would change and stretch and sag in places where it was supposed to be the tightest and most beautiful now in her early twenties.

She had barely learned how to take care of herself, and now she’d have to take care of someone else––a small, fragile being with a tiny pouty mouth rooting at her breast.

At that image, despite reason, a hot flash of jealousy lurched through me.

Tara was going to be a mother . She would have someone to love unconditionally, someone to be loved by her whole life.

I thought back to those days when I sat in my room while my parents fought, taking my babu?ka apart and assembling it again.

How I would cradle the smallest of the nesting dolls in the palm of my hand, a surge of protective love for it overcoming me.

How I’d imagined that one day I would have my own daughter, always a daughter, to give this love to.

And regardless of the less-than-ideal circumstances, Tara was getting just that.

Frana stole a glance at the credenza where two candles lit her daughter’s face.

“Children are a blessing, even when they aren’t planned,” she said.

“You… do want children one day?” She looked at me, her cheeks flushed, and I couldn’t tell if it was because of all the pots boiling around us, or the awkwardness of the question.

“Yes,” I said. “More than anything.” A vulnerable confession given that I was a young woman who should be wanting more from life than procreating.

My own mother would’ve cringed at this statement and reminded me to build a career first. And even more vulnerable admitting this to a woman whose son I was sleeping with.

But it was the truth, I did want children, more than a career, more than anything else, so that is what I said.

Frana squeezed my shoulder, leaving a flour trail on my black T-shirt. “Your friend will be fine.” She smiled, and it felt as though what she was really saying was that I was fine. Fine by her.

This is how Vlaho found us when he walked in to grab a glass of water, both of us smiling, the print of her floury hand on my shoulder a stamp of her approval.

In the afternoon, Vlaho and I headed into town.

It was my last night in Cavtat, the looming separation already sending twinges of nostalgia through me.

“There’s a place I want you to see,” he said, and no matter how much I insisted, his face remained cryptic, and he wouldn’t reveal where he was taking me.

The sun was still high in the sky, stringy cirrus clouds floating above us, the air filled with the scent of dried pine needles, the song of cicadas, togetherness.

We walked the stone streets of his hometown, which curled up the hill like the lines on a snail’s house.

Maybe because Cavtat lay on a peninsula like my own hometown, like Lovorun, a sense of familiarity crept up on me and nested under my skin.

Every once in a while, we’d stop to say hello to people Vlaho knew.

His accent thickened around his own, more melodious than I’d known it to be as he bunched his prepositions with his nouns and made even bigger amplitudes between syllables.

At the top of the hill, we reached a wrought-iron gate that led to a small, white-stoned building amid a cemetery.

Beyond it, the view shot over the azure Adriatic Sea, Dubrovnik gleaming in the distance in the golden sunlight.

Rows and rows of graves circled what Vlaho said was a mausoleum built by one of Croatia’s most famous sculptors, Ivan Me?trovi?, an octagon-shaped building with two caryatides guarding its entrance.

The monumental simplicity of the structure on the outside made me fall silent in awe, its whiteness pristine against the green of the pines and myrtle, and the blue of the sea.

On the inside, a sparse, elegant richness. The ceiling, covered with angel heads carved in stone, the marbled floor showing the stylized symbols of the four evangelists. At the top, a bell.

“I need to show you something,” Vlaho said, and this was when I noticed that he wasn’t his usual self, that there was a wistfulness about him. Even worse, a reticence. I followed him to a tombstone with many names carved into it, the last name always the same—the same as Vlaho’s.

Then, Ane Oberan, 1988–1991 , carved in silvery letters.

It punched me, the reality of it. Such a short life, such a futile death. I put my arms around Vlaho’s waist. “She was so young. I’m so sorry.”

His brown eyes darkened into the umber of falling leaves. He unclasped my arms from around him, as if he couldn’t stand to be touched, and crouched by the grave. With my hands empty, a surge of loneliness, akin to panic, shot through me.

He played with a blade of yellowed grass, growing against all odds from a crack in the stone pavement between the graves.

“The thing is… I don’t miss her.” He said it coarsely, with bitterness, or maybe self-deprecation.

“Not really. I know I should, intellectually, in my head, but in my heart, I just… don’t.

” He looked up, a challenge in his eyes. So, what does that tell you about me?

I held my own waist. “You were eight, she was three. I barely remember anything from when I was that age.”

He shook his head, like I’d misunderstood. I ached with the need to slide down to him and hold him, for a physical bond to bridge whatever it was he was putting between us. “The truth is…” He pulled his hands over his face. “I resent her.”

“Resent her? How? For what?”

He rose to standing, his gaze glued to his sister’s name. Her eyes, young but soulful, forever caught still before blowing out those birthday candles, pierced me, as if her name itself were watching me.

“Things changed after she died,” he said. “My mom changed. Ane died, and my mom was as good as gone because of it.”

With those words, everything I’d witnessed over the last few days rearranged itself before me.

I saw it then, the veil that hung above Vlaho’s family.

That atmosphere I’d thought was calm was actually subdued.

The laughter, stifled when it reached a certain number of decibels, both Frana’s and Vlaho’s.

At meals, the clock on the wall striking evenly through quiet conversations, its beat a metronome of grief.

I realized then, for all the love Frana had for him, Vlaho was second best, just as I was.

Whatever he did, no matter how good he was, he could never quite make his mother as happy as she had once been.

Striving was a hook in his chest too.

Vlaho locked eyes with me and I could see him more wholly, more truthfully than ever before. I need to show you something , he’d said when we came up here. And what he was showing me was the last piece of himself he hadn’t already surrendered.

In his eyes, a question, the same one I’d seen in the mirror so many times. Waiting to hear if he was still good enough, lovable enough.

I took his hand and pressed it into my chest, where there had once been a hole inside me, now welding itself shut.

I pressed my other palm against his heart, closing the circuit between us.

I could sense his yielding, the way his heart nestled into my hand.

With this final confession we had worked our way through our pasts, it seemed.

Now we were both free, like fennel seeds shaking from the stem.

Now we could look for a place to take root, and as long as we did it together, we would be fine.

We turned to the horizon. Below us, beyond the graveyard, the Adriatic Sea scintillated, as vast and as clear as our future promised to be.