“When you get back I’ll teach you everything,” I whispered to her. “How to walk and talk and color and ride a bike. And everything will be good.”
Outside, my mother sobbed so ferociously that she got dizzy and had to sit down on the curb. My father sat next to her and rubbed her back.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner,” my mother said. “I didn’t want you to get upset. This is the best we can do.” When her breathing steadied, we got in the car and drove out of the city.
At border control a meaty guard checked our documents dispassionately, becoming suspicious only when he came to Rahela’s picture. Babies had no passports of their own, only pages within their mothers’.
“And your daughter?” he asked.
“She’s with her grandmother,” my father said. Both my grandmothers had been dead for a decade, and though I knew it was a lie designed to simplify, I didn’t like its implications. The guard handed our passports back through the window, and my father snapped the rubber band tight around them and stretched across my mother’s lap to stow them in the glove compartment. The guard waved us through the crossing.
We drove in unbearable silence. I ached for the distraction of staticky music, talk radio even. When I thought of Rahela on her way to America an unexpected emotion welled up in me: relief. Then, when I recognized the feeling, shame. What was wrong with me? I was supposed to be sad. I forced my eyes shut in hopes of squeezing out a tear, and got one or two before my forehead lit up with a jagged ache from all the clenching.
“Mama, I need some water,” I said, half because of the headache and half from the desire for my parents’ full attention, something unattainable since Rahela had been born. My mother sighed and turned to look at me, her face contorted with such anguish that immediately I wanted to say never mind, that I was okay. But my father, as if he’d been waiting for an excuse to stop, had already veered toward a derelict gas station. A huge piece of arrow-shaped particleboard had been nailed to the abandoned pumps. TRUCK STOP, it read in unpracticed permanent marker scrawl.
We passed a mechanic’s garage, graffitied and doorless, and pulled into the car park of a building labeled, a bit more carefully than the first sign, RESTAURANT. It was a bucolic structure; the wood was stained black but maintained its treelike properties—the imperfect curvature of trunks, the knots and whorls of unfinished planks. The gravel lot was completely empty.
Inside was a single room with high-beamed ceilings and picnic tables. We approached the cafeteria-style counter and collected orange trays and rolls of tin silverware. There was no menu, just a few steaming pots on the line. A woman in a dirty apron appeared from the back and eyed us cagily.
“How’d you get down this way?” she asked.
“What do you mean?” my father said. “Aren’t you open?”
“This place is always full at supper. The roads must be closed.”
“We came down from Zagreb to Sarajevo, now back. They were clear.”
“They must be closed,” she said, beckoning at our trays. We handed them to her and she slopped down bowls of dense bean soup and hunks of bread. Next to the cash register, thick glass mugs of soured milk perspired, leaving wet patches on an adjacent napkin pile.
“And three of those,” my father said, gesturing to the drinks.
“I don’t want any. It’s bitter,” I said.
“It’s good for you,” he said, taking my mug onto his tray.
At home my mother always cooked, and it was the first time I could remember going to a restaurant. I ate greedily, sopping up the beans with my bread, even downing the tangy milk in the end. My mother ate nothing.
“Do you think the roads are really closed?” my mother asked as we returned to the car.
“We were just there a few hours ago,” my father said, though I noticed him glance at his watch. “It’ll be okay.”
—
We drove for an hour, then two, passed signs for Knin and Ervenik. A pickup truck in the opposite lane flashed his headlights at us.
“Slow down. There must be cops,” my mother said. My father braked and another car appeared, this one driving much faster, laying on his horn as he went by. “Maybe we should turn around.”
“There’s no space for a U-turn,” my father said, looking around. But as we rounded the corner the roadblock came into view. “Shit. Shit.” I pulled myself up and rested my head atop the driver’s seat to get a better look. A cluster of bearded men stood talking and laughing in the road. They wore mismatched fatigues, shoulder-slung ammo belts, and black sword-and-skull arm patches. They had cut down a large tree, which prevented passage on our side of the road. The other side was blockaded with sandbags.
“Can’t we get around?” my mother said. “Tell them we just want to get home.”
Two men stood apart from the group, motioning disjointedly at us.
“Shit.”
“Okay, just pull over!”
“What’s happening, Mama?” I said.
“Nothing, honey, we just have to stop for a minute.”