Page 22 of Slanting Towards the Sea

TWENTY

MY MOTHER’S DEATH WAS sudden. It came on the heels of the diagnosis, not a full year after the doctor had handed me the cruel truth.

It was a stupid death. Mom fell off a ladder and hurt her head while she was cleaning a high window on our home.

It left us shell-shocked, Dad and me. As we arranged for the funeral, for Mom’s death announcement to be put up on the town’s notice boards to inform our acquaintances of her death; as we received the condolences and prepared the house for the wake, we were detached, suspended in the aftershock.

I did not cry. Not even when Vlaho held my shoulder so tight it hurt as they lowered her coffin into the grave.

Not even when they slid it on the ugly concrete shelf where she would forever rest.

I was not there.

I wasn’t anywhere.

It had been that way since the diagnosis.

For days afterward, I lay in bed, unable to get up.

Vlaho took sick leave and laid himself beside me.

We kept the curtains drawn, shutting out the spring and the susurrus of birds building nests and feeding their progeny on the outside, the illustration of the very type of family we would never have.

The darkness and silence were inky. If I closed my eyes and inhaled the familiar scent our bodies had left on the bedsheets, for a moment I could pretend that none of this had happened, that we were still in Zagreb, at the beginning.

Going somewhere, together. But the heart pain was too sharp, it always drew me back.

We burned through the options quickly. “We can adopt,” he said on one of the first days.

“Yeah,” I said. “If we put a rush on it, we might get a ten-year-old by the time we’re fifty-five.

” Adoption was often the hot topic in the news because it was one of the most preposterous, most obvious examples of bureaucracy ruining people’s lives.

The courts favored biological parents and rarely revoked parental rights even when children were openly neglected or abused.

The procedures took forever. For every child available, there were dozens of couples waiting.

Kids often spent their entire childhood in the system, while prospective adoptive parents’ arms went empty.

“We’re young,” he said. “We can wait. It’s bound to happen eventually. Even if the kid is ten when we get it.”

I wanted to punch him for the nonchalance in his tone.

“Maybe I don’t want that, Vlaho.” Meaning, waiting for a child for what could be decades, without a guarantee of ever getting one.

Relying on our toxic country’s bureaucracy to give me what I desired most in this world, when it had let me down in so many ways already.

“What about international adoptions?”

I huffed. “Oh, so you’re suggesting we fight the bureaucracy of not just one but two countries, one of which we’ve never even been to or know anything about?” I turned my back to him. I could feel him lift his hand, feel it hovering over my shoulder. And the exact moment he drew it back.

“We’ll use a surrogate, then. Your ovaries work, don’t they?” His voice was thin. He was begging me to grab hold of this absurdity, but I was so porous I couldn’t possibly latch on.

“There are no surrogates in Croatia.” Even if by some miracle we found a woman who would agree to carry our child for us, legally the baby would be hers, not ours. “ Mother is the woman who gives birth to a child ,” I quoted the Family Code to him with a cold voice.

No, there were no options.

I turned to Vlaho, his brown eyes floating with impotence.

“I want my own child,” I said to him. A child I would carry in my own womb.

A child that would be conceived between the two of us, born of our love, carrying within itself pieces of generations that came before us, the smallest babu?ka in the long line of babu?kas.

“I want to be someone’s mama,” I said, and when I voiced that truth, I couldn’t stop saying it.

“I want to be a mama, I want to be a mama, I want to be a mama,” I repeated through snot and tears.

This is what I had wanted all my life. My truest, deepest desire.

But there would be no children.

Inside me, I could feel my useless, stunted uterus.

Vlaho returned to work. I used to wake up before him, make coffee, sip it as I watched him go through his morning rituals.

Kiss him to taste the coffee and mint toothpaste on his lips, to brush my nose against his clean-shaven cheek, to press my body against his until I’d convinced him to undress even though he’d be late for work.

But in this new life, I pretended to sleep.

I would hear the wardrobe shriek as he slid it open, the sound of his shirt as he flapped it over his back, the squeak of his shoes against the tiles as he left.

Most days, he’d sneak out so as not to wake me.

But sometimes he would stop in the doorway, as if the weight of our problem had rendered him immobile, and I would feel him watching me.

It would last for a moment or two, and I would wonder if he knew I was only pretending to be asleep.

I’d steady my breathing, make sure my eyes didn’t move under my eyelids.

In those moments, there was nothing I longed for more than his touch.

There was nothing I dreaded more, either.

He’d never come over, though. Instead, he’d turn and go about his day, his relief almost palpable when he’d close the door behind him.

And with him, all the warmth spooled out from our apartment too. The space between the walls stood, heavy and devoid of life. I lay there, with nowhere to be, nothing to do, hours of emptiness ahead.

He was giving me time, I knew. He wasn’t the type to ever demand that I feel anything other than what I was feeling.

To convince me that I should be grateful or happy for the small things in my life when the life I had dreamed of had so wholly disintegrated.

He had spent his childhood with someone whose feelings he couldn’t negotiate but only coexist with, and he’d learned then that there was no point in trying to force grief out of people, not until it was ready to come out on its own.

A part of me was grateful. And yet! And yet, a part of me was screaming inwardly, wishing he would grab me by my shoulders, kiss my wet eyes, and say, Enough!

I would’ve resisted him if he’d done that, of course.

I would’ve pushed him away and retreated to my wallowing.

I had fallen too deep, too abysmal was my loss. But I still wanted him to try.

When he’d come back from work, we’d both make the appearance of an effort.

I’d make myself presentable. Brush my teeth, comb my hair, sometimes even shower.

I’d throw something in the pot, though it was obvious my heart wasn’t in it.

I used to love cooking for him. But in this new existence, my food was flat and so was his face.

We’d talk. There was always an anecdote up his sleeve to relieve the silence.

His tone would border on bright, so I knew he was faking it.

I’d poise a smile he knew I struggled maintaining.

He’d ask about my day. I never had anything to report, save for poring over the Employment Office ads, and sending occasional CVs for jobs I didn’t have a chance of getting.

I didn’t tell him about the hours spent staring out the window, overlooking the overgrown fields outside our building.

Scouring the internet for faraway places, not because I wanted to travel, but because somewhere else, maybe I could reinvent myself, be more than a Woman with a Faulty Uterus.

At night, I’d let him go to bed first, no matter how late it got.

He’d ask me to come with, but I’d tell him I wasn’t tired.

And I wasn’t. All I did was lie around. My body was weary of resting, my mind sluggish with under stimulation.

I’d watch vapid shows until he fell fast asleep, and only then would I sneak in next to him.

Most nights, I’d turn my back to him, but sometimes I’d torture myself by watching him.

He deserved more. This wasn’t what he’d signed up for. I despised myself for it.

And then I’d think about time. How it isn’t only relative to happiness, racing when you’re happy, dragging its feet when you’re miserable.

It’s also gender-biased. If things were reversed and Vlaho were the infertile one, all he would have to do is wait a decade or so, until my eggs dried up and we were barren together.

But a man’s fertility doesn’t have an expiry date, he can conceive a child until the day he dies.

Vlaho could promise to stay true to me. But the truth of the matter was, twenty, thirty years later, he could change his mind. If we hit a rough patch; if he fell for someone younger than me, he would still have a chance to father a child. He would always have that chance.

That truth loomed over me like a guillotine.

He’d lie there, the face I loved so much mellowed with innocent sleep. The only person who ever made me feel safe now held a blade over my neck. All I could do was wait for the rope to snap and the sharp edge to fall.

In early November, six months after the diagnosis, I got a teaching gig at a village school twenty kilometers outside Zadar. It was only temporary, covering for a teacher getting a hip replacement, but it was the only thing that had gotten me out of the house since May.

As I drove inland, the bura wind howled around my car.

It poured down Velebit mountain, picking up speed, lifting the particles of salt off the sea in Velebit Channel.

The bura has a way of getting through however many layers of clothes you’re wearing.

There’s something clinical about it, disinfecting, and I raised my chin toward it when I exited my car.