Page 8 of Slanting Towards the Sea

EIGHT

BACK IN THOSE FIRST months we were together, we often lay in my bed at night, talking.

The days were getting longer, spring turning to summer, but they were still too short for everything I wanted to ask him, for everything I needed to say.

In the dark, Vlaho’s questions became an archaeologist’s brush, dusting away denial, oblivion, and restraint, revealing one layer of me after another.

It was in the dark that I told him about the year of exile in high school, the sophomore year when my friends had decided that I wasn’t cool enough to hang out with, me with my fancy words like ubiquitous or alacrity .

That I was a drag for refusing to drink and smoke even as their experimenting got out of hand, while I was always too aware and afraid of the consequences.

That I had a warped, romanticized idea of what a friendship should be, with my inflated notions of honesty, loyalty, and devotion, as if we were in the nineteenth century, not the late nineties.

And how the next time I made a friend, who just so happened to be Tara, I learned to keep my thoughts to myself, and when she suggested that we go get some beers, I was the first one in line in the store, and I bought one more than she did.

I told him about my parents’ constant fights, all their near divorces.

My mom had always warned me never to air our family’s dirty laundry with anyone, but when I was with Vlaho, I didn’t feel like I was revealing her secrets anymore, I was disclosing my own.

I told him that my dad sometimes got so angry he threw the first thing he got his hands on.

A phone receiver, a glass, a wall clock. A yellow boot.

I told him that my mom was the sort of person who reveled in dwelling on problems, and that my father and brother offered enough material for her to always have her hands full.

Dad, with his temper, his going out with friends to play cards or bocce, and coming back in zigzags.

His unforgiving attitude toward anything or anyone who thought differently, which alienated most of Mom’s friends.

My brother, who struggled with stuttering, with being the worst at sports because he lacked coordination and was slightly overweight.

My brother who, much like Mom, saw a problem to every solution.

There was a bit of twisted satisfaction she found, I always thought, in the Sisyphean way she was constantly trying to straighten the bent stems of my father and brother, and never quite managing it.

“What about you?” Vlaho asked. “Were you a problem she needed to solve?”

I shrugged. “Sometimes.” Because it would be wrong to say she never helped me or that she didn’t care.

But there was always a sense that she knew that I could take care of myself, that helping me wasn’t as gratifying for her because she didn’t think I needed as much attention as Sa?a, or as much correction as my father.

During those hunkering-down nights, I would ask Vlaho what his parents were like, and he’d say he’d been very blessed, that his parents, especially his mom, were warm and caring.

I found it odd. All my friends resented their parents for one thing or another.

We were barely out of our teens, our job was to talk badly about them, but Vlaho didn’t have anything negative to say.

If I’d loved him any less, I probably would have envied him.

But Vlaho was my favorite person in the world, and if anyone deserved a unicorn of a mother, it was him.

And yet there was always an inward curl when he talked about his family. And at night, whenever I reached for him to stroke his back or kiss his shoulder, he gave a barely audible whimper. The sound of someone longing to be touched, of someone who hadn’t been touched in a long time.

Even while he slept.

A touch—a whimper.

“Why biology?” he asked me one evening in late June, when dusk had settled over Zagreb.

He lay sideways on my bed, books, notebooks, and highlighters scattered around him.

Outside, the swallows warbled. They’d built a mud nest above my window and their baby birds had just hatched.

The air was ripe, fragrant with possibilities.

It was a tough question and had been a difficult choice.

Deciding what I wanted to be had needed to be weighed against what was actually feasible in a country like Croatia.

Most of the subjects that I could study back home in Zadar felt flimsy.

Philosophy, art history, comparative literature…

all sure ways to end up with a job as a salesperson in the town’s mall.

Of course, there were career paths that guaranteed some semblance of job safety: law, architecture, medicine. But I couldn’t imagine anything worse than fighting for a living, and couldn’t draw a straight line if my life depended on it. And I couldn’t fathom cutting into human bodies.

But even then, I understood that those were only rationalizations, and underneath them all was this: for one to know what they want to be, they first need to know who they are.

I knew myself only in relation to others: a daughter, a student.

I understood myself only in negatives—what I didn’t want, who I didn’t want to be. Why biology? I had no idea.

Vlaho rested on his elbow, attentive. Waiting for an answer.

He always did this, just looked at me and listened.

Way past the moment when other people would stop listening.

And the silence he laid between us had a way of drawing things out of me that I hadn’t planned to say.

Things that I might not have even been aware of.

I wound myself around him, contemplating for the first time the real reasons why I’d chosen biology.

“When I was six, my parents sent me to spend the winter at Lovorun with Baba while they were renovating our house. Sa?a had already started school, he had to stay in Zadar, so it was just Baba and me.” Closing my eyes, I could still hear the wind howling through the aged windows; smell the sharp, herbal smell of olive leaves when we cut them, the bura wind freezing our reddened hands.

Baba was a woman of few words, not very affectionate, yet I could sense that she liked having me there.

She was very much the product of the land she grew up on, rooted in karst’s scanty red dirt, made rough by the elements, much like the olives she tended.

But like the olives, she still managed, almost unwittingly, to produce something nurturing from that roughness.

There was something soothing about spending the winter in that isolated place, the first one with no chaos or fights, not even the meaningful, loaded silences.

Just plain existence, the comfort of chores, teasing out life from dirt and stone.

That peace had imprinted itself on me. “It was the only place where I could just be. Where I felt I belonged,” I said to Vlaho, turning to face him, “until you.”

His body softened into mine.

“The thing about biology,” I said, “is that it’s predictable.

It’s like math that way, two and two can’t be anything other than four.

Only, math is unchangeable, and biology flows.

From one season to the next, from birth to death, sickness to health.

It’s exciting and innovative, and yet, essential and fixed. ”

Vlaho’s face stayed blank, and for a moment I thought I had made no sense. “It’s a safe playground,” he said, enunciating each word. And a warmth spread through me.

“Exactly.”

We relaxed into our pillows, listening to the birds outside. “What about you? Why economics?” I asked, considering it for the first time, and finding it an odd choice. He was imaginative, warm, empathetic, impassioned. Economics sounded rigid and dry, so unlike him.

“I wanted to be a nautical engineer, like my dad,” he said. “Travel the world, be on the ocean six months a year.”

“Really?” I propped my chin on his chest. “So why aren’t you studying nautical engineering?

You’d look so handsome in a uniform.” I tickled his side, even though an instant shot of adrenaline coursed through me for the near miss of that future.

Had he chosen nautical engineering, we never would’ve met.

He would’ve been studying in one of the cities on the coast, not in Zagreb.

And even if by divine providence we did cross paths, we would be spending half our lives apart, him being on the sea for work, and that sounded like too much to take.

“Here’s the embarrassing part,” he said. “My mom wouldn’t let me.”

“Wouldn’t let you?”

“Well, technically, she asked. Politely. Begged, more like it.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m her only child. And seafaring is dangerous. She’s been trying to get my dad to stop for years. But it’s in his nature. Sailing. The sea. He can’t stop.”

“So you gave up your dream to please your mom?” I’d done plenty of parent-pleasing myself, but this confession unnerved me. Something lurked beneath it that alarmed me in a way I couldn’t yet identify.

“I had a sister,” he said. He didn’t look at me. He just lay there closing his eyes, as if he couldn’t bear for me to see inside him just then.

“Had?”

“She died. Appendicitis gone wrong while Dubrovnik was being shelled.”

The footage of bombs tearing at Dubrovnik’s gorgeous stone walls and marble streets came to me, the fires burning bright orange against the winter-gray skies.

Those images were always displayed on national news on St. Nikola’s Day, the anniversary of the most brutal of the attacks, so our nation would never forget this barbaric act.

It was a horrible crime, and I never thought about how behind that footage people’s lives could’ve been falling apart for even worse reasons.

A surge of grief for Vlaho, for his mother I hadn’t yet met, swelled in my chest.

“She was three. I was eight.” He said it matter-of-factly, like it was a piece of information outside him, one that couldn’t touch him.

“Oh God, Vlaho.”

I didn’t say anything else and neither did he.

Instead, I covered him with myself, held tighter, as if my body could absorb some of his grief by osmosis.

Our skins glued with sweat, his breath streaming down my neck, the chirp of the fledglings in the nest above our window now inappropriately cheerful.

The pain throbbed inside him, I could sense it, like distant rumbles of a storm on the horizon.