MAMA DIDN’T SPEAK MORE THAN TEN WORDS TO ME AFTER that. She’d disappeared deeply into herself, but it was a dangerous, time-bomb kind of stillness, like a very long lit fuse. I was full to bursting with curiosity, but it wasn’t like I could ask her what had happened between her and this odd and beautiful stranger she clearly knew.
By the time Malina arrived for her shift, Nev had mangled some half-assed excuse for leaving early, and I’d have happily molted out of my own skin just to get away from Mama. I could see Malina assess our moods in her instinctive manner, her eyes flicking back and forth between us. She began to sing quietly, as if she couldn’t help it, a skirling, eerie melody I recognized as a new variation on her theme for danger.
This one had the distinctive three-note refrain that tied it to our mother’s mood. I’d heard it hundreds of times before: when Mama smelled smoke on me as I sat down next to her for dinner; when she caught me stealing nips of the expensive brandy from her larder so Malina and I could have birthday shots when we turned sixteen; when I brought home one piebald kitten after another and begged her to let us keep it.
But this melody had a new overtone, a counterpoint that captured my own tangled reaction, my discomfort and curiosity and deep desire to get the hell out of the café. And something below it, too, a subterranean thrum like shifting tectonic plates, something ancient and feral clawing its way through widening cracks.
It sounded like our mother was trapped, somehow, and very, very much afraid.
Malina kept humming even as she plucked an apron off its rusty hook and tied it around her waist, over a floor-length skirt splashed with marigolds and peonies like a watercolor. The flowing, lacy white peasant top she wore over it bared her creamy shoulders, and a kitschy little vial hung around her neck, tiny bass and treble clefs floating in sparkling water. In my opinion, most of Lina’s outfits made her look like she spent her free time twirling in meadows and saluting the sunshine with her face, but then there were the shoes. While I wandered around in flats and flip-flops and generally didn’t dwell much on my feet, Lina gleefully lost her mind over anything strappy and high-heeled and sassy-bright.
“Stop it,” I hissed to her as she sidled up next to me and reached for a scrap of sweet dough in her usual scavenging way. I tried to eat as little as I possibly could at our mother’s café, but Lina’s fingers wandered freely into pie fillings and frosting, as if staging a silent protest against Mama meant nothing in the face of something sweet. “It’s just making things worse.”
“What things, Riss?” she whispered back. “It feels terrible in here. What’s been—”
“If you’re going to mumble like schoolchildren behind my back, at least call your sister by her proper name, Malina,” Mama snapped, slapping her spatula against a cutting board. We both flinched. “She’s not an animal, much as she does look like a cat in heat today.”
Ris meant “bobcat,” and out of all of Malina’s nicknames for me, Mama hated that one with an especially concentrated passion. Maybe it cut too close to home, reminded her of all the things that pissed her off about me. The feline temperament, the defiance, some sort of invisible dander that Mama was particularly allergic to.
Malina gave my outfit a once-over, eyebrow quirking and one shoulder rising as if to say, eh, she’s not wrong.
Traitor, I mouthed at her.
Slut, she mouthed back.
She already said that, I traced into the spill of flour in front of me, then smoothed it out again. Get new material.
Her eyes softening with sympathy, Malina dropped a little kiss on my shoulder before I twitched away from her. She frowned at me, hurt, but hers wasn’t the comfort I needed now.
“So, I’m leaving, since Lina’s here,” I announced.
“Go ahead.” Mama’s voice was so distant and dim she may as well have been miles away. Or at the bottom of a deep ditch, the hate side of my brain whispered.
I snagged my little backpack and zipped outside, taking a deep breath of sunlit stone as soon as I was out the door, the tension in my shoulders easing a notch. I hadn’t seen Luka since he’d come back from Belgrade last week to help at his father’s nargileh café for the summer, but he’d texted me earlier to let me know he’d be waiting at our spot for lunch. Seeing him was the only thing I could think of that might possibly salvage the day.
It was too steep to take my bike up to the fortress with me, so I left it locked at the café and set out on foot. The street that led to the back entrance of the Old Town veered right, onto the path that would bring me outside the walls. There, I found the stone steps that wound up the mountain to the still-watchful ruins of Saint John’s Fortress. It brooded above us like some crumbling, stolid sentry, built by the Illyrians and reinforced in the sixth century by Emperor Justinian to keep guard over the Old Town below.
My thighs burned by the time I reached the first level of the ruins. The secluded little bit of rampart that Luka and I had claimed years ago was several levels farther up, though below the castle tower itself. I was almost out of breath as I reached the last bit of trail I’d have to take, so hair-raisingly narrow that tourists never thought it led to anything, and locals had more sense than to attempt. I’d flattened my back against the cliff wall and edged there so many times over the years that the sheer drop beneath me barely even registered in the pit of my stomach.
Luka was already there as I inched my way into the little aerie of crumbling stone we’d discovered together, lounging on the rampart. “Lithe” wasn’t a word I’d ever thought to use for any other boy, especially one as tall as he was, but it fit him, the way he draped himself over things as if they were his just because he was touching them.
I barely had time to set my backpack down before he swung himself off the wall and folded me into a bone-grinding hug. “Miss Iris,” he murmured into my hair. He smelled different than I remembered, amber and pine resin, a warm and spicy soap I might have liked if it hadn’t been so foreign. “So good to see you. They don’t provide cliffside service like this in the Belgrade restaurants, let me tell you. And the Serbs say we’re the peasants.”
“Oof,” I squeaked. “Let go, or you’re going to crush me and there won’t be any such service in your childhood home, either.”
“Good point.” I could hear him smile. “Can’t kill the fair maidens of my childhood home. Otherwise, why would I come back?”
He gave me another squeeze before letting go, and we unpacked the food I’d snuck into my backpack for a makeshift picnic. I was beginning to think he’d forgotten when he carefully plucked a little package wrapped in tinfoil from his back pocket and offered it to me, one lean cheek creasing as he smiled. He always brought me a new flower when we met. Jade vine, ghost orchids, sprigs of fuzzy bottlebrush, and once even something called a chocolate cosmos. Rare, exotic flowers that couldn’t possibly grow in the region, that I had no idea where he found.
He didn’t know what they meant to me—I hadn’t shared the gleam even with him, as much as I’d sometimes yearned to have him see the best of me—but he knew I loved them, and it was enough.
I unwrapped it carefully, peeling back the layers until I found a perfect, still-living blossom inside, its petals moist with the water trapped beneath the foil. It was some kind of lily, creamy yellow that deepened into red as if dipped on the ends, and tiger-speckled along the inside with red flecks. As soon as my gaze softened it fractured into a starburst, a miniature firework of yellow upon yellow, a whirlpool of crimson flecks swirling around the minuscule black hole that was the flower’s deepest inner point.
“What is it?” I breathed, like anything over a whisper might disturb the churning bloom. “Where did you find it?”
“It’s an Italia Asiatic lily, and like I’d ever tell. I love when you see a new one for the first time,” he added softly. “It’s like a baby looking at something it’s never seen before. I don’t think you ever look at anything else like that.”
“I’m glad you choose to find it endearing,” I murmured back, still caught up with the contained, gorgeous explosion on my palm. “As opposed to strange and unnerving. That’s the consensus around these parts.”
“Nah. They just think that about your face.”
I set the flower gently back into its foil cradle, then reached out and smacked him on the back of the head.
“Don’t beat me, woman.” He caught my hand and twisted it until I yelped. “At least not until after the food.”
I sat back against the dusty stone, watching him as he ate in his fastidious, starving way, both of us cross-legged on the sun-warmed floor of the aerie. He was wearing city clothes, fitted jeans and a Lacoste shirt with something that actually looked like an alligator emblazoned above the breast pocket, instead of a black-market knockoff like everyone around here wore. His dark hair was much shorter than it had been the previous summer, before he left for college, and his face more angular than I remembered.
He’d been lean-faced and handsome even as a little boy, with those same watchful eyes, a startling light hazel beneath black lashes and the thick, dark eagle wings of his brows. He was eleven and I was nine when we met, the day he punched our most notorious mouth breather in the face for calling Luka’s mother a child-stealing Roma. Later, I crept up to Luka and wiped the scrapes on his knuckles with a corner of my T-shirt while he watched me with solemn eyes.
After that, Lina and I had become inseparable from Luka and his sister, Nikoleta, who was a grade below us. We formed our own little group of half castes, an island of bright color. When we got older, the girls who’d once whispered about his Romany mother began to notice very actively how handsome Luka was.
But even if there wasn’t so much as a kiss between us—and there never was—I was still the girl who’d touched him first.
“Hey,” he said, startling me out of my thoughts. “Why you being so quiet, Missy? And you’re not eating anything.”
“Even the culinary treatings of Jasmina the Peerless get old, believe it or not,” I said, shrugging a shoulder. “Unlike her spectacular bitchery. She likes to keep that fresh for me.”
He snorted in sympathy. “She hasn’t eased up, huh?”
“I don’t think she knows how. It was even worse than usual today, there was this . . .” The white flame of Dunja’s hair blazed through my thoughts, followed by my mother’s devastation and her fear. It felt so out of place here in the sunshine, and with pragmatic Luka right in front of me, like a swarm of moths where there should have been only butterflies. I could tell him about it later, once the strangeness had the time to fade. “But anyway, old news. Tell me about Belgrade.”
He whistled low. “I didn’t think I was going to like it, you know? So much space, so many variables, too easy to get lost in. But it’s amazing, Iris, all these sleek modern buildings.” He gave a light laugh. “Even their older ones are fancier than ours—the biggest theater has this glass covering over the neoclassical facade, like a museum exhibit. It’s gorgeous, you’d love it. And they have stands where you can get a hot dog the size of your forearm, and you eat it with kefir.”
I rolled my eyes. “Understood, pretty buildings and delicious food that lends itself perfectly to dick jokes, if I wasn’t such a lady. Tell me about school.”
He gave me a lazy smile, his eyes narrowing. “Well, as we know, the mathematics are inherently sensual when done by me,” he began, and I cracked up despite myself. “But seriously, some of those kids are beyond brilliant. It’s an American international college, so it’s not even just homegrown math geniuses. My second week, one of the study-abroad students corrected the professor as he was writing out a proof, while he was still scratching it out on the blackboard.” He shook his head admiringly. “Jolie’s from Miami, but she thinks I’m exotic. And you should see her—”
“And stop,” I ordered, giving him a mock shudder. “No need to regale me with your exploits. I’m familiar with the basic concept.”
“You know,” he continued, in the fake-casual tone that always raised my hackles, “you could come visit me sometime. There are so many galleries, and sometimes I go in just to see. None of them have anything like what you make.”
“So what?”
“So, you only have one more year of school, and you can’t tell me you want to be stuck here for the rest of your life after that.” He glanced across the bay, resettling himself. “Even if sometimes it does seem like the most beautiful place in the world.”
I followed his gaze to the water, like rippled blown glass from this high up, the mountains across the bay from us looming jagged. The usual ache rose up in my throat when the blue and white refused to form a shimmering mosaic like they once had. I swallowed it back down.
“Exactly,” I said stiffly. “Why would I want to leave all this?”
“How many flowers in the world are you never going to see if you stay here?” he retorted. “And how many techniques are you never going to learn, because Jovan just dabbles in glassblowing and he’s the only game in town? How are you even going to live off that here, anyway? You know Jovan can only afford to run the gallery because he sold his real one in Belgrade to retire here, and he makes those baubles to keep himself busy.”
Anger rose up in me, tiny fizzy pockets like seed bubbles in glass. Those baubles were the only thing I had left of the gleam. And for all that I loved Cattaro, I’d spent so much of my life burning to leave this gorgeous prison, to see the places I’d only seen in books. It made me feel guilty sometimes, how badly I wanted to abandon all this beauty when other people were born trapped in deserts or slums. But our magic wasn’t the Midas touch kind. And even if I somehow scrounged up enough money to spring me free, who would protect my sister from our mother once I was gone?
I began gathering up the remains of the food, crumpling foil and snapping the tops back onto containers. “You know I can’t go anywhere,” I mumbled, my throat aching. “Mama can’t run the café without our help, and Malina won’t leave her.”
“Lina’s a pure sweetheart, but you’re not Siamese twins. Don’t you think Niko and Tata needed me after Mama died? But I still left when I had to, Riss. Because I want to be an engineer, not the future owner of a nargileh café. They understood that.”
“That is not the same!” I shot back. “I can’t leave Lina to handle Mama by herself, and even if I could, you’re forgetting that we. Have. No. Money. The café barely supports us as it is.”
“You could get another job, and then you can save up and travel. There’s backpacking, and hostels.” He fixed his bright gaze on me, eyes earnest, and I felt my usual, dumb little twinge at how symmetrical his face was, that fine, straight nose and sculpted lips, the cheekbones sharp as arrowheads. It made him annoyingly persuasive—you agreed to things just so you could keep looking. “You could see the tree, Iris.”
He meant the wisteria in the Ashikaga Flower Park in Tochigi, Japan, the one I’d told him about so many times. It was 144 years old, not the oldest in the world, but the book I’d read had called it the most beautiful. The central trunk twisted around itself like a helix, and held pink and purple blossoms that hung like waterfalls from a slim, steel framework around the trunk—half an acre of flowers above your head, like the sky itself was burning with the palest, most delicate fire. I could only imagine what it would look like to me, a riotous supernova of bloom and color.
And it was in Japan, so it came from the same earth that had made half of me.
I had never admitted to Luka how much it rubbed me raw, chafed at me like rope bound around my wrists, that I couldn’t lay any physical claim to a country that was as much mine as Montenegro. A country in which I might have real family—a father, grandparents, cousins, maybe even other siblings. Half sisters or brothers with my eyes or chin or stock-straight hair just like my own.
But even if I wanted to find them, the crumbs Mama had ever let drop were far too few to form any kind of trail. I could never tell whether it was really that she only knew so much herself, after barely a week with our father, or that she couldn’t stand the notion of losing control by letting us know too much. Our father’s name was Naoki; that, she had been willing to cede. He came from Shimoda, one of the smallest port cities, its population only about twice that of Cattaro. I hadn’t known whether to laugh or cry when I scoured the internet for it, only to find that it looked a bit like some much lusher version of Cattaro from a parallel universe, with rolling dunes of mountains steaming with hot springs.
Just like I hadn’t known what to do when Mama told us his favorite food had been uni, sea urchin sushi. Something I couldn’t imagine I would ever have the chance to taste. Since the idea of a Japanese restaurant opening in Cattaro—anywhere in Montenegro, really—was about as likely as actual teleportation to Japan, I talked Lina into hand-making a roll with me once, just to see if we could do it. I’d known we wouldn’t be able to find avocados or nori sheets for rolling, but I hadn’t been prepared for the mess of rice that crumbled pitifully apart instead of sticking, fish that sat rank in the mouth because it wasn’t meant to be eaten raw, the lack of any savory sauce to mimic the umami taste of soy.
The worst of the burn was knowing that even if it had been as delicious as anything Mama made, we still wouldn’t have had any idea how it was really supposed to taste.
“I’m sure the tree will be just fine without me,” I said, shoving the last of the picnic litter into the backpack. “A lot like you in Belgrade, actually. I’ve heard from you, what, three times since you left?”
A tiny muscle in his cheek twitched. “That’s not true, or fair. I had classes and a job and—”
I stood abruptly. “Anyway, it was nice to see you. I need to get back to the café.”
That was a lie, and he knew it. But he was quiet as I left, seething with the silent frustration I knew so well in him. Luka wasn’t one to throw a tantrum, not when he could creep up on you silently with logic. This particular argument gnawed at him especially because he could sense that, on some level, I knew he was right. I’d never know who I could be away from here until I gritted my teeth and left.
What he didn’t know was how deeply it cut every time he brought it up. Because I always wondered: Was what I wanted exactly what my mother had wanted, before Malina and I chained her to this place?