Xhenet Aliu - Brass

Yllka asked me, before I drove off in the passenger seat of the pickup that day, you on my lap with the seatbelt around both of us as if we were still one thing, what she was supposed to tell Bashkim when he came back.

“Don’t tell him anything. He’ll know,” I said.

He already knew. I hadn’t told Yllka, but Bashkim had called two weeks after we were released from the hospital. Somehow Yllka and Gjonni had gotten a message to him, which seemed impossible, because nobody even knew what country he was in at that point, if he was even in a country at that point. As far as I knew he’d drowned in the Adriatic on the ship of refugees that sank off the coast of Italy, or he was trampled by an angry mob in Tirana, or he never made it back to Albania in the first place, and was in some kind of UN holding purgatory where they kept people who were citizens of nowhere. I pretended I didn’t care, but I kept an eye out for any article in the World section of the newspaper that might have some information. If there was any news on what was happening in Albania, it was usually an inch of copy nestled between ads for discount produce and discount three-piece suits, but usually there was nothing, and never was Bashkim mentioned by name. Of course he wasn’t. He was a man who barely registered from a country that was more a punch line than a place. If he died, where would the obituary even run?

I alternated between wishing him dead and wishing him back. I alternated between wishing him back so that I could seek vengeance and wishing him back so that I might, maybe one time out of ten, not have to be the one who woke up to feed you, because I thought I could take being strangled, robbed, and drawn and quartered more than I could take one more sleepless night of nursing, terror, and filling out forms to apply for charity hospital bed funds. I alternated between forgiveness and apology and unadulterated hate. I alternated between thinking I could do it all alone and thinking I could do nothing at all.

Yllka and Gjonni were people who could get stuff done. They’d managed to get the message I never asked them to send through to Bashkim, wherever he was. They sent word by carrier pigeon or something, message in a bottle, smoke signal. He called one afternoon as I tried to nurse you, tried to convince you, once again, that the well was safe. I picked up the phone, and right away I could hear every single one of the miles between us. Our voices were thin after traveling the long line of string beneath the ocean, and the constant echo and delay made it feel like we were having parallel conversations with ourselves instead of a single conversation with each other.

“You had the baby,” he said. There was no hello.

“Yes,” I said.

There was static on the line, which covered what I imagined was a sigh.

“You couldn’t wait?”

The delay on my answer to that was so long that the words never came through at all.

“It’s a girl,” he said, finally.

“Yes,” I said.

“Luljeta.”

“Yes.”

More static, a cover for the silence that was obviously lurking beneath it.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“In Greece for now.”

“With Aggie?”

“Yes.”

“Everyone is safe?”

“No, not everyone. It is still bad there.”

“I didn’t mean everyone, I meant you.”

“Oh. Then yes. We are safe.”

“Okay.”

Silence.

“I don’t know how long I will be here,” he said, finally.

“Okay,” I said.

“I have to take care of some things while I’m here. It just makes sense.”

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Yes.”

Static.

“Are you okay?” he said.

“We’re fine.”

“ ‘We’?”

“Me and Lulu. That’s what I’ve been calling her.”

“Oh,” he said. “That’s good.”

Static.

“I’m sorry I was not there,” he said.

“I’m not.”

“I’m sorry for the money. I will pay you back.”

“It wasn’t my money.”

“It wasn’t my money, either, but I needed it. It’s not that much. I will pay it back.”

“Send it straight to my sister. It already did what it was supposed to do. It got you away from me.”

“You are mad,” he said.

“Yes, but that’s beside the point.”

“We will talk about it later.”

“No we won’t.”

“You are very mad.”

“Yes, but it doesn’t matter.”

“I should go,” he said. “This is very expensive.”

“I don’t want you back, is what I mean.”

“What?”

“When you come back here, I mean. If you come back. I don’t want you back with us.”

The line was getting really bad. Maybe he couldn’t make out what I said. Maybe that had been it the whole time, not that he didn’t care but that he didn’t understand, because I was expecting more fight from him, a threat, a plea, something that would give me the bravery to follow through. But all he said, after a pause, was “I have to go.”

“Okay. Bye,” I said. I didn’t wait for a response to that. I just hung up and waited for the phone to ring again. When it didn’t, I took it off the hook so I didn’t have to hear it not ringing.

For seventeen years now, the phone’s been off the hook.

I’m supposed to say that I did whatever I had to do to keep you safe, but the truth is, it wasn’t all my decision. In a sense I got what I asked for, in that I didn’t have to do everything alone. He helped make the decision. He didn’t call back. If he had, it might have been possible that he would have convinced me to stay in that apartment waiting for him to return. He might have convinced me that loneliness was a bigger threat than hunger or terror, that giving up on him meant giving up on everything, which meant that everything was hopeless, a feeling I would have passed on to you through my milk, a bigger threat to you than any virus or food allergy or secondhand Rossi you could’ve been exposed to through me. He could’ve taught you to say hello, goodbye, and sorry in a whole different language. He could’ve taught you the value of a dollar, that the things we think constitute suffering don’t even qualify for an inch of space in the newspaper, and what kinds of guys to stay far, far away from.

But he didn’t call back, so that was that. By the time I heard from Janice, who still to this day slings food at the Ross, that he eventually made his way back to the States, it didn’t matter. We no longer lived in the same world, never mind the same country.

You latched on that night and drank like you’d just discovered it was necessary for survival. I was glad. Everyone talks about hunger as primal, as if having it and knowing how to manage it are the same, but sometimes even instinct fails us. It was okay, though. It didn’t have to come easy. Don’t ever listen to the person who tells you that it will.

The younger son is Tarik, the daughter is Mirlinda. They’re your brother and sister, like Adnan is your brother, but none of you use those words to describe each other. Their mother is Agnes, and she’s dressed head to toe in black like the middle-aged manager of a Hot Topic, though even you, who have not even buried a pet, know that she’s simply donning the universal uniform of mourners. The dress isn’t what sells it, though. Agnes exudes mourning. It’s all over her face like a rash. Her eyes are dark and always wet and her face is cast downward as if gravity has always worked extrahard on her, and not just since the death of her husband. Sometimes she says something that Adnan translates for you and sometimes she says things that Adnan keeps to himself, but mostly she fiddles with things on the counter or in the cabinets, tidying things that were never messy, dropping fresh sugar cubes onto a dish that’s already spilling sugar cubes. She looks as if she’d been caught eavesdropping, even though she doesn’t understand most of what you’re saying and even though you and your mother are the intruders in her home, making her bear witness to a scene she never asked to be a spectator to. You’re the one who should be contrite, who should offer condolences and atonements in equal measure, and maybe later, once you aren’t so goddamned tired, once you’re back at home thinking about all of this from your own familiar bed, you’ll be able to muster it. But your bed is far away, so for the time being you sit in someone else’s uncomfortable chair and let yourself be a quiet spectacle. It’s already gotten old to Tarik and Mirlinda, who’ve gone off to the living room to play some game on some half-shattered electronic device. To them, even math homework would be more fun than the sorry group that took over their kitchen. Sometimes Mirlinda slides back in to take a look at you and whisper something into her mother’s ear, but she disappears quickly, which is fine, because you have no idea what to say to a kid sister anyway.