Page 23 of Slanting Towards the Sea

The school was a shabby old two-story building, yellow paint peeling off in stripes. But around it, there were olives, pregnant with fruits, their color a mix of green and purple. I stopped short when I saw them, as if someone had opened a door to let air inside the vacuum in my brain.

That weekend, I went to Lovorun for the first time since Baba had died.

The bura had subsided, leaving the air behind chilly and the sky clean-cut blue.

The olive grove was covered with weeds and brambles, some as high as my waist. The tops of the trees bulged thick as a lion’s mane, with hardly any space left between the branches.

I circled around them, inspecting the fruits.

Most had fallen off and lay rotting on the ground.

It had been so different when Baba was alive, the orchard groomed, grass cut short, branches hanging low enough to reach without using a ladder, each one trimmed as carefully as an old gentleman’s beard.

Driving back home, I made a promise. I’d restore this place to its rightful glory.

Come pruning season in February, I filled my thermos with boiling-hot tea, and my backpack with sandwiches. Vlaho leaned against the kitchen doorway. He had his gray hoodie on, the same one he wore the day we’d met, and the image filled me with tender longing I didn’t want to acknowledge.

“I can come with you,” he said. “It’s Saturday. I don’t have anything better to do.”

“No, thanks, I’m fine,” I said, stuffing the thermos in my backpack.

“I guess… What I’m saying is… I’d like to go with you.”

I zipped up my backpack. So hard to form the words, and harder still to admit the truth, even to myself.

And the truth was, the diagnosis had tanked me into a nameless, despicable place I was unable to claw myself out from.

And even though the source of my pain was within me, it had his face.

When I thought of infertility, when I thought of the children I would never have, it was Vlaho’s face I saw.

The olive grove served as the beacon of a faraway lighthouse, drawing me ashore. I needed the light for myself. I couldn’t bear to have him there. “I want to do this alone. I need some space to think.”

He walked over to me. In the sallow light of the kitchen hood, his skin looked pale, the circles under his eyes purple-blue like bruises, and it was the first time I noticed what a toll this situation was taking on him.

But instead of making me compassionate, it filled me with frustration.

He wasn’t doing anything to stop the pain.

The last nine months, all he’d done was hover there like an apparition, telling me, without the zeal of conviction, that everything would be okay.

Assuring me he would never leave me over this.

I wasn’t buying the first, and the latter I knew was true, but only because he didn’t have the guts to make that call.

Which I knew was unfair, because what could he do?

What could either of us do? But his inertia made me feel like I was the one supposed to find a way out of this mess somehow.

That his giving me time was in fact him waiting for me to snap out of it and fix us somehow.

I didn’t know how to fix us. The deadweight of his expectations pressed down on me like a slab of stone.

“It’s… I don’t know. I can’t remember the last time we talked,” he said. “Like, really talked.”

I grabbed the pot of tea off the stove and it burned me. “Fuck!” I turned to the sink and ran cold water over my hand. “You really want to do this now?”

“And when would you like us to do this?” His voice had an edge. “It’s been months.”

I turned to him, steadied myself by grabbing the back of a chair. “There’s nothing to talk about.”

“Ivona—”

“Vlaho.”

“Please.”

“Can’t it wait?”

He leveled his stare at me.

“I’ve been lying around this apartment for nine months. And when I actually want to go somewhere, that’s when you want us to bare our souls?”

“It’s not like I planned to bring it up now. And for the record, I wanted to talk to you all this time. I just didn’t want you to think I was pressuring you. Or blaming you.”

“Blaming me?” Bile rose up my throat, hot, hot, hot. “If you’re saying you’re not blaming me, then that’s exactly what you’re doing.”

Vlaho rubbed his face. “That’s exactly what I didn’t want you to think.”

“Well, kudos!” I hated myself for all the venom I was spewing, but I couldn’t stop. “Of course you blame me. It’s my fucking uterus that’s not working. It’s me who can’t have children, not you.”

“It takes two to have kids, last time I checked. It’s not just your problem.”

“Yeah?” I faced him off, challenging him. “For how long?”

Inside me, the hole reopened, throbbed. The pain was so bad that for a moment I wanted him to admit it, to eviscerate me completely. To end this agony once and for all.

“What does that mean?”

“It means that you can fuck someone else, and your problem is gone.” I lowered my voice, and added, “I wonder how long it will take you.”

He slammed the chair under the table. “That’s a fucked-up thing to say, Ivona. I’m not the enemy here.”

“You know what?” I took the backpack, flung it over my shoulder. “I really don’t want to talk about this right now.” I stormed out of there, riled up like a kettle about to boil. I’m not the enemy.

Oh, but you are.

When I got back home, he was waiting for me with a bowl of mane?tron, a hearty vegetable soup his mother had instructed him how to make over the phone.

I apologized. We held each other in bed that night, lying in the dent we’d formed in the middle of the mattress.

He whispered he loved me and that we would get through this.

I echoed it back to him, wishing for it to be true.

But how could it be true? How could we go on when the backbone of our world had broken in half?

The days got longer. The sun got warmer. The colors turned brighter.

The darkness inside me spread.

This was where my mother’s death had found us. This was where we were when he was holding my shoulder tight as they were lowering her coffin into the grave.

After the funeral, countless people came to our home to share stories about my mom over wine and charcuterie.

I wondered if that was the point of this whole custom, to keep the grieving family busy with entertaining so that they wouldn’t have the time to process the loss.

I couldn’t stand being around people. Couldn’t stand their pitying glances, their saccharine words of consolation.

I kept to the kitchen, arranging one plate of food after another.

Ten days beforehand, Mom had cooked a Sunday lunch in that very place.

She had outdone herself as she always did: roasted a rooster with potatoes and homemade mlinci, a type of baked dough she briefly cooked and then swirled in the gravy.

Salad, of course, and steamed broccoli. And rooster soup with semolina gnocchi, the kind that lifted you from the dead.

Vlaho’s mother came into the kitchen. She had traveled from Cavtat the previous day.

She stroked my back, and the tenderness of her touch reminded me of Mom and all the things I’d wanted from her.

Of all that I hadn’t told her, all the things I hadn’t asked.

All the things I’d resented that I’d never be able to talk out with her.

I turned to Frana, buried my head into her chest, and, for the first time since Mom had died, I cried.

And Frana kept me close and rocked me, the aquatic color of her eyes diluting behind the ripple of her own tears. “I’m so sorry, dear. I’m so sorry,” she said. “Losing a parent is hard. Almost like losing a child.”

She’d never mentioned losing Ane before, not to me.

It put me on edge, made my tears retract.

She inhaled, then let the breath go. “I wanted to die so many times,” she said.

“But I also had Vlaho. He was what kept me afloat. The fact that I’d see him finish high school one day.

Graduate. Get married. Have kids of his own. ”

Those words, a precise cut.

The air around us shifted. “Being a parent,” she said. “It makes you protective, you know?”

I didn’t know.

I would never know.

But I understood what she was saying. She could be a grandmother if it weren’t for me.

A simple truth we both understood lay between us. Vlaho would never leave me over my infertility. He was too good, too kind to do something heartless like that.

I knew this because I knew him.

She knew this because she had raised him.

“Please, Ivona,” she said, her voice strangled. “Please, set my son free.”

“How can you ask me that?” I rasped.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry for what happened to you.

But Vlaho… He deserves to be happy. He’s the type, Ivona, always has been.

He was never like those other boys, running around, partying, chasing adventures.

Always the happiest to be at home.” Her face closed up, and I could feel her detaching herself from me, from whatever feelings she might have had for me, her daughter-in-law of ten years.

As she recast me, from family to nemesis.

“This half life,” she said. “It won’t be enough for him.

He will never be reconciled to it, no matter what he says. ”

Our eyes held in a horrible lock I couldn’t withstand or pull away from. I was agony, burning from within. I wanted to hate her, but her face reflected all kinds of pain, all kinds of loss as she was begging me to revoke one of them. It was unbearable, the weight of the burden she’d unloaded on me.

On this of all days.

But that must be the thing you learn when you lose a child. You don’t wait for second chances. You don’t wait for the right moment. You act when action is necessary. It’s animalistic and natural, even when it’s completely inhumane.

“There you are, you two,” Vlaho said, entering the kitchen. Frana’s eyes and mine were still wrestling. I could feel myself faltering.

There was a slight dip in Vlaho’s tone when he said, “Everything all right here?”

Frana nodded. “Yeah, sure. Just refilling the plates.” She lifted one up and walked out.

I turned to the charcuterie, not breathing. Vlaho kissed my shoulder, rested his forehead on the top of my head. “What was that all about?”

“Nothing.”

“You sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine,” I said.

A dust mote, upon dust mote, upon dust mote of dishonesty. Until it gathered.