Page 53 of Slanting Towards the Sea

FORTY-NINE

THAT EVENING, AFTER MY dad goes to sleep, I meet Vlaho in Borik.

It’s the westernmost part of the town, where the hotels are.

Where the hotel Asier stayed in the first time he was here is.

It’s the beginning of September, and the evenings are not as hot anymore.

There are fewer tourists milling about, and no locals come here this time of night, which is why we agreed to meet here.

The air smells of pine resin and salt. We sit on the small boardwalk overlooking the deep cove.

It’s only when I’m sitting next to him that I become aware of how visceral my missing him has been.

There’s an opening in my chest, as if I’m about to cry, but it has nothing to do with sorrow.

It’s more like famine, an unmet need. I run my cheek along Vlaho’s shoulder.

He weaves his fingers through my hair. The pain of wanting so much stretches my chest to impossible lengths.

I wonder why he called me, what he’s about to tell me.

“I went to Cavtat last week,” he says.

I snap back to look at him, and there it is in his eyes. Among the many truths we said that night, I spared him one—the one about his mother. That she had asked me to leave him. I saw no need in causing him one more loss. But there it is. The hurt, riled. He knows.

“She told you.”

He fills me in on what’s been happening in the weeks since we last saw each other.

Marina had been asleep when he came back home that night, so she didn’t know how late, or rather, how early it was when he’d arrived, and she didn’t see him wearing another shirt, a shirt she’d never seen before.

Next morning, she made him iced ginger tea for the hangover, and rubbed his back as he drank it.

Her acts of kindness made him feel even worse, and he didn’t know how to tell her what had happened, where he’d really been.

So he told her he just had a moment. A weird jealous spell, probably alcohol-induced.

Nothing to worry about. He put his hand on her hand, resting on his shoulder. “I’m fine now.”

“It’ll get better,” she told him. “She was bound to move on sometime, and we’re lucky it’s with a guy we both like.” Marina, always wanting to corral us all together, always keen on keeping us in each other’s life.

He nodded, reinforcing her misunderstanding.

How could he tell her what had really happened, what he was thinking of doing next?

They’d built a good life together. She was his closest friend, mother of his children, the only person who knew him almost as well as I did.

Almost. So he allowed the lie to fall between them.

Last weekend there was a fe?ta in the village where Marina’s family is from, and she took the kids and went to stay with her mother, and he said he would go visit his mother in Cavtat. For some reason he felt it was critical he saw her, though he couldn’t pinpoint why.

He hadn’t been alone with his mother since he and Marina had gotten together.

There were always children around, a birthday, a Christmas Eve, Easter.

Now the house was empty but for the two of them, and he sat for the longest time on the couch, staring at his sister’s photo surrounded by its sentinels, the forever-lit candles.

It didn’t take long for his mother to sense something was wrong.

She’d been used to an obliging son, always looking for particles of sorrow on her face, always trying to dissolve them.

But this Vlaho was rigid, unmoving. He only sat there and stared at his sister’s photo, the girl he barely remembered, but who had shaped his life in such unforgiving ways.

“What is it, Vlaho?” his mother asked.

He faced her and said, “Did you ever say anything to Ivona? About our marriage? About her infertility?” He said it on instinct, because I hadn’t told him what his mother had done, what she’d asked of me on the day of my mother’s funeral.

But he intuited it somehow—perhaps the crumbs that were left lying there after it had happened simply started making more sense after I told him the rest of the truth.

His mother sat next to him on the couch. For a while she wrung her hands. “I didn’t do anything,” she said. He waited, because silence has a way of making people speak. “I didn’t do anything,” she repeated, “I only told Ivona she shouldn’t keep you hostage of her situation.”

“When?” he rasped, struggling to keep himself in check. “When did you tell her this?” He couldn’t think of one moment when his mother and I had been alone after the diagnosis. He had made sure of that, and only now was it becoming clear to him why.

Turning to her daughter’s photo, as if it gave her entitlement or offered protection, she said, “At her mother’s funeral.”

He shot up. “For Christ’s sake, Mom!”

She got up too. “It wasn’t right. It wasn’t right for her to keep you tethered to her.”

“Who gave you the right to decide that?” he hissed. He had never hissed or cursed at his mother before.

“You were unhappy, Vlaho.”

He laughed, a broken, ironic sneer. “No, Mom,” he said. “ You were unhappy. There’s a difference. Or did it never occur to you that I am capable of feelings of my own?”

His mother looked chastised, pained, but he could tell from her stoic expression that it wasn’t because she was sorry for what she’d done. It was more that she was inconvenienced by being found out. She was waiting his anger out as if it were a child’s tantrum.

She hadn’t understood what he’d said, not really.

But for the first time, he understood. The choices he’d been making his entire life unfurled before him.

How he didn’t take sailing lessons when he was a child because she was afraid he’d drown.

How he chose economics over nautical engineering because she thought seafaring was dangerous.

How he absorbed her sad soliloquies after the diagnosis because he didn’t know how to ask her to stop.

She had held herself on the pedestal of pain for so long it had made it impossible for him to imagine anyone could hurt more than she did, and he never wanted to be the one adding to her suffering.

But now he was hurting. He had been hurting for over ten years.

Suddenly, he felt queasy, disoriented, and he had to sit down.

It had been more than just this, an occasional concession he’d made for his mother, however big or small.

It had been that he had formed his identity around appeasing her.

Who was he, without that? What was his true nature if not to pacify, placate, acquiesce?

Who would he be had it not been for her influence? He had no idea.

This loss of true north was dizzying. Everything felt up in the air. Even the most essential parts of him were now up for debate.

His mother approached him. Her aquatic eyes filled with tears but even so, she retained some of that confidence, the conviction that he would ultimately yield to her. It had been that way his whole life, after all, she had no reason to doubt it even through this upheaval.

“Son,” she said, “whatever happened back then, it was for the best. Look at you now! You have two beautiful children. A wonderful wife. You lead a full and happy life. Tell me, would you go back, even if you could?”

It caught him off guard. Saying yes would be as good as saying he didn’t want or love his children.

She took his hesitation for confirmation, and pressed on. “It was for the best. And what’s the point of looking back anyway? It was all so long ago.”

“The point is, I love her,” he sputtered. He felt such rage at his mother’s righteousness that he had to clench his fists against it. “I will never not love her. The point is, I already had a wife. I was complete.”

He couldn’t stand sharing a room with his mother for one more second. He pushed toward the door, shoving her to the side, not hard but with intent. “It was you who’ve kept me hostage all these years,” he said, grabbing his jacket and car keys.

On his way out, he did something he’d never thought himself capable of.

He walked up to his sister’s photo on the credenza, and blew the candles out.

He breaks down, telling me this. His shoulders shudder, the pain quaking him from within. “What sort of person does that?”

“Oh, Vlaho.” I pull him into my arms. I kiss every part of him that’s available to me, but I will never hold him close enough, I will never be able to erase this pain.

He curls up in my lap. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry for not doing a better job of protecting you.”

I hold him tighter. The weight of him makes my arms tremble, but I can’t let go. I don’t know if I will ever be able to let go.

“What are we going to do?” he asks, his voice hoarse and desperate.

I shut my eyes against the mess we’ve made.

Against these sacrifices—choices, decisions—that we let braid into this reality, where we owe more to other people than to each other, than to ourselves.

The tension of it, the weight of our past, the elusiveness of our future threatens to undo me.

Call it , I want to plead. Say you’re coming back to me.

But I can’t say it, it needs to be his choice. I need him to choose me this time.