Page 49 of Slanting Towards the Sea

FORTY-FIVE

THE FIRST RAYS OF sun sneak in, dust motes lighting up like fireflies. Vlaho shivers against the cooling air. His T-shirt is sleek against his torso, still fully soaked.

“You should take that off, you’ll catch a cold,” I say. “I’ll find you one of my dad’s T-shirts.” As I’m getting up, I remember that all my father’s clothes are in his wardrobe, in his room. He sleeps lightly and my going in might wake him.

But before I voice this, Vlaho gets up too, takes his shirt off in one swift move, and stands there looking at me.

All of him—his eyes, his skin, his intentions—is an invitation.

I take the wet T-shirt from his hand and spread it over the back of the chair to dry.

My body drums as I turn to face him. This new Vlaho is bolder than he used to be, a satisfying change.

This new version might not have let me go back then.

We were both such children, I think, and for a moment a profound sadness makes my heart ache for those two young people who first healed each other, only to rub coarse salt into each other’s deepest wounds.

I walk over to him and put my hand on his chest, the way I did all those years ago, at the Cavtat cemetery.

His heartbeat is strong and fast, pushing into my palm.

I close my eyes and trace his shoulders and back with my fingertips, willing the muscle memory to show him to me as he was then.

That way no time would be lost, other people wouldn’t stand between us.

It would be just him and me. But his body has changed, it’s grown sturdier, more concrete with the years.

I put my palms on his cheeks, and it’s like the world is slipping back to its axis from whence it long ago fell off.

I breathe him in, just below his jaw. He smiles as he rests his forehead against mine, and when our lips touch for the first time in a decade, I’m exploding inwardly.

I’m everything all at once, the invisible girl seen for the first time, a young woman in love, a broken thirty-year-old, and this new woman holding the man she loves.

My bed is too small for us, but the proximity is rapturous.

Our elbows scrape against the wall as we move our hands over each other.

In the back of my mind, a thought: I lived in self-inflicted celibacy for nine years and now I’m making love for the second time in one night.

It’s upsetting. Asier deserves better, Marina deserves better.

I chase the thought away. Vlaho is inside me and all around me, and that’s all that matters.

He’s always been this, a universe unto himself, the only space I wanted to exist in.

Pain, lodged in the depths of me, starts evaporating.

Slowly, like seawater in the sun, leaving only salt crystals behind.

Six clanks of a spoon against the d?ezva.

Vlaho looks at me but doesn’t stop moving. In his eyes, a homesickness and homecoming all at once. I’m suffused with them too; they gather behind my sternum like hunger that’s finally being sated.

After we make love, a fatigue so dense settles in every muscle and bone.

I’m fighting sleep with all I have. There’s no way of knowing where tomorrow will lead us, and I want to hold on to these moments for as long as I can.

But Vlaho’s warm body is enveloping mine, and it’s hard to keep my eyes open.

We’re, once again, hunkering down.

“Guess this means you still have feelings for me,” he says, quieter now, because the thump-and-drag of my father’s feet sounds somewhere out in the hallway.

Dad isn’t in the habit of coming into my room, but his presence behind the door is making us more cautious.

Vlaho pulls himself up on his elbow. “Which brings me back to my original question. Why?”

The one conversation we haven’t had yet.

I wish we wouldn’t today; it’s too much on top of everything else we’ve said and done, all the truths that have crept out from their hiding places.

It’s the one conversation that can corrode everything beautiful between us, vaulting us in opposite directions.

Because I did lie to him about the reasons why I was leaving. I am much more to blame for our breakup than he is. I retreated from him without asking what he thought or wanted, turned myself into water and slipped through his hands.

But he failed to cup them.

A part of me always believed that deep down he must have known it was because of my infertility.

He must have sensed it in that way we know things even if we don’t give them words.

In the way we choose to not know the things we’re unable to confront.

But for all the bargaining, anger, and convincing he did, he never once addressed it head-on.

As if it didn’t compute at all, this mountain of a problem wedged between us.

Not that I’m blaming him; I never allowed myself to dwell on that either.

It was easier to shoulder all the blame myself, shroud myself in guilt for breaking his heart, for leaving him.

Because otherwise I would’ve had to accept that maybe, just maybe, he didn’t love me enough.

That maybe, just maybe, it came easier to him to let me decimate him, to let me decimate myself, than to cause more pain to his mother.

“I think you know why,” I say. “I think deep down you’ve always known.”

He winces. “I’m not sure I do.”

“Did you never wonder why I stopped loving you so soon after the diagnosis?”

He ponders this for a moment. “No,” he says. “I told you a thousand times I was fine with us not having children.”

“You did. And maybe you were,” I say, though I still see his hand on that toddler’s ankle. “But we weren’t the only ones affected by that decision, were we?”

I don’t need to mention his mother because she’s practically in the room with us.

Vlaho has always felt indebted to her. As if it were his fault that his sister had died, and he survived her.

As if it were up to him to do whatever it took to make his mother happy.

Back when we were together, I accepted this as a fact, and this riles me up now, because I should’ve challenged it, challenged him , instead of just offering solace.

He didn’t owe his mother anything. It was she who’d, in her grief, wronged him.

In the essence of things, we’d both missed that point.

If I’d only pushed him, way before infertility became a problem, to face it and claim his life as his own, and not an extension of hers, maybe we would’ve been here, in each other’s arms, all along.

Vlaho rakes his hand through his hair. The turbulence inside him is a physical thing.

Maybe it’s cruel to say the words that are kind of obvious by now. But I need to say it to his face. “I never stopped loving you. Never, not for a second. I only did for you what you had done for her.”

The wrongness of both our sacrifices is a thorn slipping between his shoulder blades. He presses his forehead against mine and mutters, “Goddamn it.”

The atmosphere shifts, depleted after our exchange, and now we’re once again standing on the opposite sides of the fault line as we’re readying ourselves to go back to our lives.

On his phone, three texts from Marina, asking where he is, if he’s okay.

“Just walking it off. I’ll be home soon,” he texts her back, and seeing him type both the lie and the word home slams into me with doubled force.

Maybe she isn’t in love with him, but Marina loves him.

It was obvious tonight, when she tousled his hair, when she rested her head on his shoulder.

It’s been obvious in so many ways all along; the way she listens when he talks, the way she gleams when he plays with Maro or reads fairy tales to Tena.

The way she prides herself on the beautiful home they’ve built.

Not the apartment itself, but the harmonious, cheerful space they’ve created within, where even I feel at ease.

And now her husband is standing in my room, naked, after making love to me. My head churns. I always felt that by marrying him, Marina had wronged me. He was the love of my life. I am his home . But now I have wronged her, and bitter heat spreads in my stomach because of it.

“What now?” I ask him. Meaning, now that we’ve made love. Meaning, now that we’ve admitted we still love each other. What with his marriage and my relationship with Asier? What with us ?

“I don’t know,” he says. “I really don’t know.

” And even though it pains me, I understand that this is the only answer we can give each other right now.

A multitude of relationships and people hang in the balance, and what happens next isn’t a decision either of us can make at six a.m. after a sleepless night.

Vlaho takes his wet T-shirt from the chair and starts to put it on.

“Wait,” I say, and slide the big plastic box from under my bed, where I’ve stored trinkets from my youth.

High school diaries, some photos from our life in Zagreb, when photos were still developed.

My old herbarium. A few Post-it notes he used to leave for me around the apartment that I’ve saved over the years.

I feel you all the time, in my lungs, in between breaths.

An old T-shirt of his that I sneaked into my suitcase as I was moving out of our home. I unfold it and give it to him.

“You still have this?” he says, incredulous.

“It smelled of you. For a while.”

He smiles but looks like he’d rather cry.

“I’ll have to keep this one in its place.” I snatch the wet T-shirt from him. It’s intended as a joke but my voice breaks, and I know there’s no way I’m giving it back. This one still carries his scent.

He laughs, and rummages through the things in the box, pulling out a couple of photos of us in Zagreb’s botanical garden, when he studied for an exam, and I was working on my herbarium.

We were so young, it’s impossible to imagine we considered ourselves grown-up.

He unfolds a couple of his notes, then puts them back in.

Then he pulls at another piece of fabric and takes out the baby-girl onesie I’d put there years before we broke up.

The one I had bought for Tara when she got pregnant, but then couldn’t make myself give her, and kept for our own future daughter instead.

It’s so small in his hands, a delicate pink thing.

He handles it with care, like it’s alive.

The image develops between us, a shared vision of a baby girl we should’ve had.

She would’ve been our entire world. She would’ve saved us.

He brings it to his face, drives it across his cheek. My heart numbs. “Oh, Ivona,” he says.