Page 47 of Slanting Towards the Sea

FORTY-FOUR

THE NIGHT IS ALWAYS the darkest before dawn, they say, but tonight it’s lit up, with the moon ablaze after the thunderstorm.

I stayed at Asier’s longer than I’d expected, waiting out the rain, and as I’m driving back home, slowly and carefully, I feel myself loosen, relaxed in a way I haven’t been in years.

Images rush back to me, of us arriving at his apartment, sticky with sweat and smelling of grilled sardines and wine and beer.

We took each other’s clothes off and took a shower together.

We left the lights off, allowing only the lightning to illuminate us through the small bathroom window, revealing us to one another in thunderous flashes.

He soaped me up with the shower gel that smelled of him, and I closed my eyes, letting myself be infused with his touch.

The whole night was a long foreplay and I ached for him so badly that we didn’t even get to bed.

We reached for each other in that confined space, the tiles cold against my back as he pressed me against them, his shoulders looking so beautifully defined as he held me up, as he pushed into me.

The water ran over us the whole time, washing away the smells and soot of the night while he was erasing Vlaho off me, until we came completely clean, smelling fresh, like laundered clothes.

I pull into the driveway and turn the key. The car exhales into silence. I sit for one minute, my hands on the wheel, allowing the sensory overload of this night to settle before I insert myself back into reality.

The air is humid and smells of wet lavender and rosemary from our garden as I exit the car. The remnants of stormy winds rustle through the hedge, and this is why I don’t hear him until he speaks. “What does he have that I don’t?”

Vlaho stands against the gutter that still trickles tiny rivulets of rain from the roof. He is soaked, his hair slicked against the side of his face, the olive-green T-shirt looking almost black. “God, Vlaho, you scared me. What are you doing here?”

He doesn’t answer, doesn’t move. The rain stopped at least half an hour ago; he must have been standing there for a long time.

Waiting for me. I see in his eyes that he knows, he knows what I’ve done, why I haven’t come home until now.

He knows and his face is broken, a mere mosaic of his beautiful features.

“You didn’t answer me.”

The accusation trills up my body. He has no right to call me out on anything.

He, who’s been sleeping with another woman for years now.

He, who’s made wonderful, beautiful babies with her.

Babies even I can’t help but love. A feeling I’ve never felt for him arises, something rotten that I can identify only as contempt.

A disdain for his hurt ego that can’t stand being dethroned, even after all this time, even after the horrible display of pining I’ve been offering him for years.

“You should go home,” I say. “To your wife.” I spit the last word out, the lack of sleep thinning my usual tact.

I regret it at once, because it reveals that I am still angry with him for marrying her.

For not choosing me and my flawed body over having children with someone else.

Which I know is not entirely fair; I’d left him years before he met her.

But right now, I don’t care about the order in which things happened, or my share of responsibility for it.

He walks over to me, pushes himself close until his chest is right in my face.

“You don’t know the first thing about my wife .

” His breathing is both loud and shallow, and for a moment I’m not sure if he’ll kiss me or hit me—which of course he’d never do, but his towering presence feels threatening enough for the thought to cross my mind.

He steps back and launches down the street, and all I see is his retreating back in the moonlight.

“What do you mean by that?” I yell after him, a shrill sound slashing through the sleepy street, but he doesn’t turn back.

I should let him go, but before I can be reasonable about it, I’m running after him.

I need to know what he wanted to say, what he meant by it, what he meant by holding my hand this evening. I reach him and turn him to me.

When he flips around, my heart folds in on itself, like origami.

He wipes his face and nose on the back of his hand and looks to the side. I want to turn his face to me and yell at him that I am his place, I’m where he can be his most vulnerable, but I know it’s a lie, it hasn’t been like that for a long time.

His hiding from me is the worst kind of punishment.

It hollows me out, and I reach for him to fill in the missing pieces.

He huffs as I wrap my arms around him, pulling him into me.

His arms, lifeless at his sides, slowly encircle me, then hold me closer, tighter, then so hard I can’t breathe.

But that’s okay, I don’t really need air.

The stale monotony of my room is weirdly stirred as Vlaho and I sit side by side on my bed.

After I’d held him to me outside my house, we stood in the middle of the road, suspended in a mute slow dance.

Until a car came careening down the street, casting its angry lights at us, and we moved to the sidewalk to avoid getting hit.

I pulled him inside the house and told him to wait for me in my room while I checked on Dad.

He touched the leaves of the weeping fig he hadn’t seen in nine years, now taller than him, and then he disappeared down the hall.

I went to press my ear against my father’s bedroom door, relieved to hear his loud snores.

When I came to my room, Vlaho stood by the shelves, holding the babu?ka.

I told him once that I’d lost the two smaller dolls inside.

Babies, I called them. Like me, the babu?ka is now an amalgam of only three women—a grandmother, a mother, and a daughter—held within each other.

For her too, the future generations are lost. Vlaho cast me a somber glance, and it was as though he had struck a match, a flicker of light illuminating me from within.

I’d forgotten how it was with him, being seen without saying a word.

I sat on my bed, and he put the babu?ka down and sat next to me, and here we are, minutes later, disoriented. A delicate soap bubble is enveloping us, and neither of us wants to burst it with words.

He shudders in his wet clothes, and I get up to fetch him a towel from the bathroom.

He catches it when I throw it to him, and haphazardly wipes his face, his arms, his hair.

Outside, the birds are starting up with their banter.

Soon, a strip of blue will form above the rooftops, and broaden, until it overtakes the darkness.

Cicadas will start shaking their rattles, slowly at first, sleepily, then faster and more cheerful the higher the sun rises.

“The room smells like you,” he says. “I thought I forgot your scent because I can never willingly recall it. It always floats just beyond my reach. But here… it’s everywhere.”

“Why are you here, Vlaho?” I ask more softly than I did the first time, when we were outside.

It occurs to me that we might have set in motion a horrible streak of events when I first allowed his hand to rest against mine, and then accepted his grip. That indefinite future looms above us, holding everything in balance. His marriage, his kids’ childhood, my own new beginning with Asier.

He lets a lungful of air out, looking away from me.

His back is curved, as though his arms, rested against his thighs, are weighing him down.

“Two days ago, I wanted to go along with it. I mean, I knew this day would come, that you’d find someone new.

I thought I could handle it, and two days ago, at dinner, I did.

A part of me was even glad that you’re not alone anymore, I’d felt guilty that the ground wasn’t even between us.

But tonight, when—” He takes my hand in his, intertwines our fingers.

“You squeezed back. And I thought—” A sharp inhale.

“But then you stayed with him. And we went home, and all the while these images kept churning in my head. Images of our hands. Of his arm around you. And when Marina and I reached our building, the sky opened above us, and something… something…” He swallows, lets go of my hand. “I couldn’t go inside with her.”

He looks at me, his face a collage of soft shadows and the type of pain I know so intimately. “I had to find you. To ask you, why?”

“Why I stayed with him tonight?”

“Why you stopped loving me.”

The secret I’ve kept for so long pounds inside my spleen.

What to disclose? What to withhold? Long ago, we sat in our kitchen, in our bedroom, in our car, in the courtroom as I slowly chipped away at both his heart and his confidence, telling him I didn’t love him anymore.

I never admitted to the truth, that I was leaving him because of the weight his mother had put on me.

Because of my own weight that I had been putting on him.

Because I was so tired of pulling him down like a boulder, making his life miserable.

Because I was so tired of waiting for him to get tired of me, of waiting for that guillotine above my neck to snap.

Tonight, my hand admitted to the lie. And if I put the truth in words too, where will that lead us?

I can’t think. Being rational after a night of alcohol, emotional turmoil, and lovemaking is proving impossible.

I’m hungover in more ways than one, weakly aware of this lack of usual prowess, of my mind’s inability to play out a million different scenarios at the same time, so that I can choose the one that’s safest for everyone.

“I think we shouldn’t go there,” I say. “What happened tonight between you and me… It was—”

He takes my hand again, traces the lines on the inside of my palm. “Everything.”