Xhenet Aliu - Brass

I looked away from them both, down to my daughter, Luljeta, as if we were alone in another room after all. She was my daughter. It felt strange to think it at first; I wasn’t used to putting those words together, and they sounded foreign to me, like her name, so I said them over and over again until they started to feel natural on my tongue.

“My daughter. Luljeta. Luljeta. My daughter,” I said.

“It’s a beautiful name,” Yllka said again. She was pleading a little, trying to convince me to keep it instead of trading it in for something I wouldn’t constantly have to explain. But she didn’t have to convince me. The name fit, there wasn’t another name in any language that would suit her more. I wondered how Bashkim had known that and I resented him for it, that this was my daughter and she was more of a mystery to me than she was to anyone else. I was holding her for the first time since I’d given birth to her and I resented that, too, that she’d been taken from my arms so quickly. They thought I couldn’t be trusted. They thought I was like one of those mama pandas at the zoo who give birth to tiny babies and then crush them to death by holding on too tightly. Or they thought I was the opposite: the mama panda at the zoo who takes one look at its young and walks away in search of more apples and biscuits from the zookeepers, its instincts obliterated by its own selfish wanting.

Luljeta opened her tiny mouth and began crying, and I understood it. I knew what she was asking for. “She’s hungry,” I said.

“Should I get a nurse to bring some formula?” Yllka asked.

I shook my head. “She doesn’t need formula.”

“Have you nursed her yet?” Yllka asked. “It’s not always as easy as it should be.”

“I don’t think it should be easy. I just think I should do it,” I said.

“Okay, but don’t be afraid to ask for help. There are lots of people who can help,” she said.

I nodded, but I didn’t want her help, or Gjonni’s, or Mamie’s or Greta’s, or even Bashkim’s. “Can I be alone now, please?” I said.

“Of course,” Yllka said, and she came over and kissed Luljeta on the head, and then she and Gjonni took turns kissing me on the cheek, and then I was alone with my daughter.

“Here, here,” I whispered to Luljeta, but she kept crying, refusing to latch on. I moved her from one arm to the other, from one breast to the other, but she writhed no matter how I held her, until a nurse popped her head in.

“Everything all right in here?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “She’s just being fussy.”

I bobbed her up and down in my arms, and I kissed her tiny fuzzy head, just barely grazing it with my lips, afraid that the fontanel might collapse if I pressed too hard. She kept crying until I joined her, my hospital gown sopping with tears and milk that was sustaining nothing.

“You’re going to have to trust me,” I told her. “It’s just the two of us, you know.”

Eventually she quieted down, and eventually she latched on and drank until she was full. We both fell asleep and when she awoke she was startled, as if she’d forgotten who I was, and when I tried to feed her, I had to convince her to trust me all over again. It went on like that until we were released from the hospital, and even sometimes in those first days back home. She was a suspicious little thing, cynical by nature. She’d cry and she’d follow me with her barely open little eyes and wrap her tiny little fingers around one of mine as if she thought I would let her go. I didn’t blame her; what had I done in all those months leading up to her arrival to convince her I had her best interests in mind? I’d have to spend the whole rest of our lives convincing her I cared about her well-being, I thought, but that was okay. Eventually she would believe me.

Your audience is rapt. Adnan at the table, his kid brother and sister, all of them watching you and your mother, waiting for the silence to break. Only Aggie looks away from the soap opera playing out in her dining nook, a rectangle carved away in a corner of the living room, where an actual prime-time soap opera plays on a flat-screen television that balances precariously on the dirt-brown shag carpet. She walks into the kitchen and begins opening drawers and cabinets, clanking things around, obviously looking for nothing in particular except for perhaps a way out.

For what feels like minutes you try to ask, How? , even though you must realize that you’d left a trail of bread crumbs all the way to Texas. Ahmet probably called her last night, or he called Yllka, who called her, and your mother drove straight to Bradley International and booked a direct flight with the ticket agent, which she probably didn’t realize isn’t really how one purchases airline tickets. She probably paid thousands and was too distraught on the plane to eat the surprisingly delicious Delta cookies or watch the second-run coach-class movies. It would have been her first time ever on an airplane. Her first time, as she’d described it to you more than once, was supposed to have been en route to the Bahamas, to an all-inclusive where she would spend a week once you’d left her for college. She was supposed to sip from fishbowls of banana daiquiris instead of shrunken Solo cups of diluted orange juice. You were supposed to be in a dorm room in Manhattan, perfecting your cat-eye lining technique and reading Les Misérables in the original French, which you’d somehow mastered in a semester despite having taken Spanish for six years without ever being able to so much as correctly order a burrito.

Instead, look at the two of you, not looking at each other.

The other kids look, waiting for some kind of action. This dining room soap opera had started promisingly, teasing fraught confrontations and ticking time bombs, but now seems to be fizzling into some atmospheric, broody drama that overutilizes silence and shadow. They’re just kids, and haven’t yet mastered things like theme and subtext. And even if they weren’t kids, you haven’t provided enough context for anyone to make sense of you. You don’t even make sense to your mother, who appears neither angry nor relieved to have traced you to a carpeted living room rather than the stainless steel gurney in some coroner’s cold medical building, which was the worst-case scenario she both refused to entertain and could not keep from entertaining. She looks embarrassed, as if she were the one who had brought this mess on.

And hadn’t she, in a sense? Her lies and cover-ups, her clumsy maneuvering of the marionette strings that she nonetheless refused to relinquish, that was what had pushed you out. You were pushed, you remind yourself. Right? Right.

Or wait. Were you pulled? Wasn’t there also a pull involved? Wasn’t there something you were forgetting?

There’s also a pressure involved. Not in the room so much as in your own body. The pressure is so real that it’s physical, and then you realize that it is indeed physical, and is coming from your bladder. It’s painful, yet it’s a relief, because you know the solution to this problem, and it gives you some kind of hope that maybe you could stumble on some other answers, too. “Bathroom?” you ask no one in particular, and the little girl answers, or rather silently grabs your hand and marches you down the hall, like a teacher dragging a naughty student to the dunce corner. You step into the room she leads you to and lock the door behind you. There’s no window. You won’t be getting out of this one.

The question will be coming soon— Why? —and you have to come up with an answer. You think, maybe, that you have been too good for too long, and the pressure of acting good when you are so obviously not finally became combustive. You’ve been good because you’d been promised some reward at the end of it all: college, let’s say, the reason for and solution to everything, but that dangling carrot has been snatched away from you in one two-hundred-word email, a rejection driven home with a punch to the head. And then you realized that the prize wasn’t ever really a prize anyway, but rather a door that opened up to a long, hard road to some other destination unknown, and it was like you lost something and had to retrace your steps all the way back to when you last remembered having it. Before you knew it, you were all the way back at the beginning.