Xhenet Aliu: Brass

“Shy,” Agnes says, and it’s hard to discern if she’s talking about Mirlinda or herself.

You learn that you’re three months too late. A year ago your father began coughing. Nine months ago he began coughing blood, six months ago he was whittled down to ninety-eight pounds, and not long after that it was clear to everyone but himself that he would die of the always fatal combination of lung cancer and denial. Adnan tells you he smoked Marlboro Reds until almost the day he died, oxygen tubes and all, and while he exhaled he talked about buying out the pizza joint he ran for his brother-in-law once he was back on his feet.

“He could blow perfect smoke rings. A lion could jump through them,” your mother says.

Adnan looks embarrassed by that, that a stranger would know that kind of private information about his father. He’s polite, a good enough kid, it seems, but he’s not yet old enough to hide how much he wishes he didn’t have to be there, translating and explaining things even the older ones among you can’t find the right words for in your native tongues. He shrugs his shoulders almost constantly as he talks, as if trying to shake off someone’s grip from them.

“Did you guys even know about me?” you ask.

Adnan shakes his head. “He never said anything about, like, other kids.”

Your mother looks down at her hands. “It’s not that I didn’t want you to exist to him,” she says.

“Then what did you want?” you ask.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I need some time to think about that.”

“Seventeen years hasn’t been enough time?”

“No, not really,” she says. “I was doing other things.” She takes a deep breath and says, “But I’ll try, okay? I’ll try. I know that’s not what you want to hear, but I have to figure out how to make it make sense.”

Adnan squints his eyes, like he’s trying to make out some tiny figure off on the horizon. “There was this time, though, with Mirlinda. I forgot about that,” he says. “Mirlinda walked in and he just started crying, and he was like, ‘You’re here, you’re here.’ He was all drugged up and stuff, so we didn’t think too much about it, you know? But maybe, I don’t know, that could’ve been something.”

You nod. Maybe it was something, maybe it wasn’t. You’ll never really know, as you had never known, and so it isn’t as devastating for you to hear as you think it should be. Maybe it’s even a privilege of some kind, that someday you’ll get to decide for yourself what it meant. You can tell the story and make it beautiful or sad or stupid or pathetic, and who will possibly ever challenge it? You have a great big blank that you can fill in however you see fit. These kids, meanwhile, are left with the memory of a man in a father mask that fell off once he was dead. You’re the oldest of them and should feel an instinct to protect your siblings from that kind of pain, or reserve it for yourself to dish out when you feel like you have to put them back in line, but you have no idea how to be a big sister. It would be nice, you think, to not be an only child, but you’re thinking you’ll probably have to settle for this in-between thing, not an only and not part of a whole.

You stay longer than uninvited guests should. It seems like there should be more to say, but each one of you expects the other to be the one responsible for it. Nobody save for a single housefly touches the crackers Aggie spread out on a dish a couple of hours ago, and you think that you should send her something when you’re home, one of those epic gift baskets from the Italian shop, to make up for the tea and snacks and time she wasted on you.

“Can we go?” you ask. You realize how rude that must sound, but nobody seems offended. Everybody, in fact, seems relieved.

“Yes, yes, yes, we can go,” your mother says. She stands up and picks up the plate of crackers like she’s going to help put it away, and then realizes she doesn’t know what to do with it and sets it back down. She wipes a few crumbs on the table into her open palm and then, not knowing what to do with the crumbs either, balls up her hand into a fist and shoves it in her pocket. Nobody else notices, but you notice, and you aren’t sure why, out of everything that happened that night, this is the thing to break your heart.

At the door you all look at each other, wondering what’s the most appropriate send-off, handshakes or embraces or a nothing that would reverberate all the way back to Connecticut.

“Okay, then. Mirupafshim,” your mother says, and Aggie even smiles a little, with the kind of smile she could muster, a smile coated with grief.

“Mirupafshim,” Aggie says.

“And sorry,” your mother says, but Aggie doesn’t respond to that word the same way.

In the car, a rented subcompact ten years newer than her car at home, you ask her what that word she said meant.

“ Mirupafshim ? It means goodbye,” she says.

“How did you know that?”

“There are a few Albanians at work,” she says. Then she sighs. “And I don’t know, it’s just one of the things I remember from back then.”

Robbie is at the motel waiting for you. You open the door and scream when you see his six-foot-three figure draped over the floral coverlet, lit up from the light of the TV, until you make out the black plastic eyeglasses and the amber bottle of some craft beer or another on the nightstand.

“Oh my god,” you gasp. “Sorry, I didn’t know you were here.”

“I can go somewhere else for a while if you want me to,” he says.

“I meant to say something on the drive over, but it slipped my mind,” your mother says. “Robbie offered to come, and you know, I didn’t want to be alone.”

Of course she didn’t. She’s never been alone. She’s always had you following her around, asking stuff from her, needing stuff from her, telling her that you didn’t need anything from her. Or maybe that means she’s always been alone, since it doesn’t really seem like togetherness if you never get anything back from the person you’re with. Either way, you know that you should thank him for being there, and you know that he’s one more person to add to the list of apologies due. He’s taking time off from his job, paying for all this nonsense, and he gives enough of a shit about your mother that you know he never even thought twice about those things.

“You should stay” is what you manage to get out. And “I feel really, really stupid.” He nods, and with all his education you hope he’s able to read the subtext, at least until you’re able to find some better words.

Your mother doesn’t ask any of the questions you’ve been trying to prepare answers to. Everybody’s too tired. You’re going to need a full recharge before you can even begin to work this out, but the motel parking lot is lit like high noon, which is confusing to your bodies and makes it hard to sleep. It’s a cheap motel, but not that cheap. This whole thing is costing a fortune, the plane tickets and car rental and motels, the fast food and data usage surcharges. You’ve fallen into deep, deep debt, and tomorrow you’ll have to begin climbing out of it.

But that’s tomorrow, not tonight.

Robbie volunteers to take the cot, so you and your mother are together in the queen bed, each of you feeling every restless twitch as the other tries to fall asleep. Even so, there’s no confusing the feeling when you settle under the covers. It’s relief, a little break from all that happened and whatever’s going to come next.

Huge gratitude to my agent, Julie Barer, for never saying good enough, especially when those were the words I most wanted to hear. Also for her mondo patience, because getting me past good enough took as long as getting a child from the womb to the first grade.