Page 64 of Slanting Towards the Sea

FIFTY-NINE

WHEN I GET BACK home, Vlaho’s car is in my driveway. I close my eyes for a moment. I’d hoped for a long, hot shower, a quick snack, the oblivion of sleep. Time to process what happened with the olives, with Asier. I’m not ready for another earthquake.

As I exit the car, Vlaho comes from around the house, carrying an empty tote. “You’re back,” he says. “I tried to call you, but you weren’t answering.” He stands in front of me. “I’m sorry.” Then more quietly, more intimately, “I’m sorry about your dad.”

I nod, a hollowness creeping up my throat. It would be so easy to fool myself that he’s here because he’s choosing me. But I know that’s not true. He’s here because my father’s death devastated me, and he can’t bear not to offer comfort.

“I figured you wouldn’t have time to cook, so I brought you some food,” he says. “Put it on your terrace because you weren’t answering the door, or your phone.”

“My phone died,” I say. “I forgot to recharge it last night, and this morning it just—” Words leave me at the overwhelming thought of where I was this morning, managing the whole olive operation. This morning, when those olives still stood there, gnarly and vibrant. It seems so two lifetimes ago.

He walks over to me opening his arms, and caught in the space between us is all my sorrow with nowhere to go, like a shoal of frantic minnows about to be caught in a net. He closes the distance, and the minnows are now pressed between our chests, thrashing, fighting for air.

He pulls back a little bit. “You smell like smoke.”

“I had some work to do at Lovorun.”

He stiffens, but doesn’t ask the obvious question, what sort of work could be so important that I had to do it the day before the burial, and on a piece of land that doesn’t belong to me anymore. Perhaps he’s afraid that if he asks, the answer will involve Asier.

“I made you some chicken soup, and polpete with mashed potatoes. It’s all on the table down on the terrace. The polpete and mashed potatoes should still be warm, but you’ll need to reheat the soup.”

“Thank you,” I say, even though I don’t have any appetite.

Worry forms two sharp lines between his eyebrows. “You know what? Why don’t you go take a shower, and I’ll reheat it for you.”

I can’t make myself tell him to go away, so I nod.

I unlock the door and let us both in. He goes to fetch the food from the terrace while I retreat to my bathroom.

My skin pinks at the hot water, the pain in my arms releasing under heat.

The relief is only temporary. When the muscles cool overnight, the pain will be unbearable.

That chain saw weighed a ton, it seems impossible I’d wielded it for as long as I did. It was like I was possessed.

I turn the shower off, wrap my hair in a towel.

I put on shorts and a T-shirt and go into the kitchen.

The fumes of the rich chicken broth bring me back to those long-ago days when Mom would feed spoonfuls of chicken soup to me while I was sick, and I would deem being sick not such a horrible thing after all.

“It smells divine,” I say.

“I can’t find any noodles,” he says at the same time.

I open the drawer where we usually keep them. “It looks like we’re out.”

We.

I correct myself inwardly.

“Do you have any semolina? I could make gnocchi.”

He takes out a ceramic dish, cracks two eggs in it, and whisks them.

I pass him the semolina. He pours the grains inside and whisks some more.

I take the salt container and drop a pinch over the dish.

He adds a drizzle of olive oil. I marvel at the familiarity with which our bodies occupy the same space.

Our minds might have forgotten how to be together, but our bodies still remember the choreography.

In those early days after we moved from Zagreb to Zadar, when we lived in that shabby little apartment in the suburb, this was the dance of the day.

He would come home from work, and unbutton his shirt, and I would slide it off his back and wedge a kiss between his shoulder blades, in the very center of him, and he would release an unwinding hum.

He would put on a sweatshirt, and move around me in our miniature kitchen, taking out plates and forks and knives, two of everything, and I would finish up whatever was on the stove, some version of vegetable stew usually, because that’s all we could afford back then, and we’d sit down to eat in silence, not because we didn’t have anything to say to each other, but because we didn’t need words to begin with.

Happiness is like grief that way, often silent.

I lean against the counter as he brings the soup to a boil and drops teaspoonfuls of the batter inside.

The gnocchi sink first, then pop back up.

He turns the hob off, ladles the soup into a bowl, and puts it on the table for me.

“Eat,” he orders, softly, and turns to the sink.

On my way to the table, I stop behind him, and I can’t help it, I place a kiss between his shoulder blades.

When I’m done eating, he orders me to the living room while he takes care of the dishes.

I remove the towel from my head and, with my hair still moist, curl up on the couch.

Too tired to keep my eyes open, I listen to him rustling through the kitchen.

It’s such a comforting sound after these few lonely days, the clatter of something as mundane as tidying up proof enough that life really does go on.

I settle into it, and the next thing, all is black.

Then, his hand on my shoulder. A gentle stir.

I open my eyes. I’m covered with a blanket that wasn’t there before.

He’s kneeling by the couch, in front of me.

“Sorry,” I say, “I dozed off.”

“It’s okay. You’ve had quite a day… quite a few days.” He’s so close I can smell the scent of his laundry soap, warmed by the humid, nutty scent of his skin. It’s hard to believe it’s been just three days since we made love. Since I said those harsh words to him.

I wish I could take them back. Not because I don’t believe they’re true.

He’s handled everything, everything so poorly.

Seeking me out before he figured things out on his own, just because he couldn’t bear seeing me with someone else.

Marrying someone he didn’t love in the first place, only to have children.

Choosing to stay married all these years, leading some sort of a half life, not unhappy, but not fulfilled either.

But so did I. I handled everything so poorly too.

The need to turn back time, to play it all out differently, is so powerful it makes my lungs burn.

“I’m gonna go now,” he says. In the background, the soft purr of the dishwasher. His warm hand wraps around mine. His face is so close my lips become eager. Around us, the house is big, ballooning into something larger and scarier the deeper the night gets.

I take his hand in both of mine. I can feel it, in my bones, his reticence, but I don’t want to acknowledge it.

It’s too painful to even think that this new chance is slipping through my fingers.

I had promised myself I wouldn’t ask, that he needs to choose me this time, but I am hanging by a thread and I don’t have the luxury of waiting anymore.

“Come back to me, Vlaho,” I say. My voice is full and hollow at the same time, it’s hard to keep it steady.

He winces, as if each of my words is its own razor.

I know I should stop, I’ve already said too much, asked for too much, but the words start coming as if the dam has broken, letting the deluge out.

“We screwed up, both of us did, but we can still make it work. We’re not even forty.

We still have so much life ahead. So much life. Please.”

I might have martyred myself back then, but I’m not that person anymore.

His children are here, aren’t they? They are alive and well, and it wouldn’t be such a disaster if Vlaho lived with me instead of with their mother.

They’d have two homes instead of one, but they’d be loved in both.

“It will be fine,” I say. “Your kids will be fine.”

Vlaho is looking at me through damp eyes. “We shouldn’t be talking about this today, you need to rest before—”

“No.” I snatch my hand from his grasp. “I don’t care how raw I am. This,” I point between us, “this is what’s making me raw, and it won’t go away until you decide.”

Vlaho sits next to me on the couch.

“I want to,” he says. “I want to so much.”

His whole body is invested in each word he is saying, lumbered with the truth, and the longing, and the pain. “But I can’t.”

He puts his head in his hands, and I can feel the full horrible breadth of his want and his impotence at the same time.

“Someone thought we would be fine too, whatever they threw at us,” he says.

“Because we were kids, and kids look so sturdy and resilient because they don’t understand their needs the way grown-ups do.

They don’t know how to put them into words.

But kids feel what they can’t understand, Ivona.

They’re anything but resilient. I mean, look at us, look where it got us. ”

The misery in his eyes imprints itself on me, and I can see what he’s saying, how the seed of insecurity planted in both our childhoods is exactly what got us here today.

Making us both so starved to be seen while shying away from it at the same time, relegating ourselves to the shadows because we didn’t know how to claim the spotlight.

How, because of this, we shone light onto each other in all the wrong moments, only to leave each other in the dark at precisely the wrong times too.

But above his need to be seen, there will always be this—his need to see his children. For his children to feel seen when he wasn’t. This is the difference between us, I realize. I will never know how that feels, I will always ever long for myself to be seen.

“I need to do better as a father,” he says.

His decision is gravity itself, and I let it draw me in, maul me, reduce me to nothing.

I’m undone. Obliterated.

But even as I’m sitting in the debilitating silence of it, there is this. The smallest flicker of satisfaction for seeing Vlaho draw the line.

For he may not have chosen me, but he has chosen himself for the first time.

I’ve never seen him set a boundary, with me or anyone else. In a way, it was what cost us our marriage. His entire life is a sum of his countless concessions to others. Built on him giving up on himself, betraying himself, time after time.

And here he is now, drawing a line, with me of all people.

I should feel hurt, but I’m strangely elated. Because, what better proof of our love?

Because, we don’t set boundaries most easily with strangers or those who mistreat us. We set them with those who make us feel loved and safe, who hold space for us to admit our needs and limits, even when they’re the ones paying the price for it.

Despite the pain it’s causing me, his rejection is the greatest gift he’s ever given me.

I made him feel safe. I made him feel loved.

I made it necessary for him to choose himself.

To hold fast by his convictions, to be true to who he is, even when it hurts someone else, someone he loves.

Because, otherwise, what would be the point of having him?

I only ever wanted the whole of him, the truest of him, or nothing.

“I get it,” I tell him. “I do.” If I had children, there’s no doubt this is exactly what I’d do too.

He untenses a little, pulls his hand through my damp hair. It knots around his fingers, it too unwilling to let go of him. “Maybe one day, when the kids are grown, we’ll find our way back to each other. Because I can’t imagine this ever ending, what you and I have.”

It’s an absurd hope, but I nod nonetheless.

“How did we manage to squander it all so spectacularly?” I ask, gathering all our moments as if they’re scattered grains of sugar and salt, sweet and biting at the same time. All that love. All that pain we inflicted on one another. All this insatiable yearning.

He says nothing because there’s nothing there to say.

“I don’t think you and Marina should come to the funeral tomorrow,” I say. My voice is calm enough that it’s clear I’m not asking this from a place of anger. It’s just unimaginable, seeing him there, inaccessible. One more thing for me to mourn.

“Okay,” he says.

I reach to touch his hair, his face. He nestles his cheek in my palm, closes his eyes, releases a breath.

All the love I have for him gathers in my center, and I will for him to feel the full extent of it, for my aura to become so infused with it that it envelops us both. “Stay with me tonight,” I say.

He scoots closer, kisses my hair. “Okay.”

We go to my bed, curl up against each other, fully clothed. I try to keep my eyes open, stay awake to absorb and memorize the feel of him against me, the specific smell of him, the way my head fits just under his jaw. The drumming of his heart. But I’m so tired. So damn tired, I close my eyes.

When I open them again, he is gone. One blink is all it took for the night to turn into dawn, and for Vlaho to vanish from my arms, this time forever.