On the other side, groups of excited loved ones clustered around the opening. A little boy attached himself to his mother’s leg; two friends hugged and jumped and screamed in one another’s ears. Beyond them, men in suits bearing signs with people’s names ringed the lobby. I continued through the crowd, head tilted to compensate for the swirling feeling inside me, until I ran right into a man holding a toddler who looked like my sister.
The man looked down, and for a moment it was unclear which one of us was more terrified. The woman beside him—who was holding a handwritten sign bearing my name with diacriticals in odd places—shuffled through a handful of paperwork. She was short and tan, and her face was set in a smile.
“Rahela?” I peered up at the healthy, curly-haired little girl perched in the crook of the man’s arm. She’d grown so much she was almost unrecognizable, except around the eyes, where we had always looked alike.
“I thought the airline was supposed to bring you—well—” The woman found the paper she was looking for. “Dobrodo?li u Ameriku, Ana,” she read haltingly from her sheet.
“Hvala.” I searched again through my school lessons for any English words that would fit together and make sense. The woman bent down and hugged me.
“It’s so nice to meet you,” she said.
Their names were Jack and Laura, and they said it was okay for me to call them that. But Rahela called them Mommy and Daddy in her high-pitched toddler voice, and for the first few months, I called them nothing at all.
—
I changed trains in Trenton and fell asleep in a saggy leather SEPTA seat. I dreamt of bodies. They were nightmares I’d had years ago, when I first arrived in America. Dreams in which I’d be cliff-diving from the rock ledges in Petar and Marina’s fishing village and, in a midair exchange, was no longer headed for the warm Adriatic but was instead careening toward a pile of bloated corpses. Then, as I was landing, a powerful tingle radiated from my neck to the backs of my knees and jolted me awake. The train pulled into the station and the conductor yelled, “Last stop!” and I gathered my things.
On the platform I watched the train ready itself for reversal, part of me already wishing I could go back with it. I trudged down the town’s main thoroughfare, lined with interconnected strip malls: a two-story pet supply, the Kmart where I worked summers, all the major fast-food chains, and Vacuum Mania.
Sometimes I felt guilty that Jack and Laura had moved here for Rahela and me. I wondered if they ever missed their life before us. For years they, too, had been city dwellers, their apartment just enough for newlyweds and the baby they couldn’t have. Then Rahela arrived, and soon she was rosy-cheeked and growing, toys and clothes brimming from her allocated chest of drawers, annexing the arms of furniture. Of course they knew they’d have to give her back. But with her presence they began to want the things they’d always dismissed as the desires of people older than they were. They bought a cheap piece of land on a hill that was going to become a neighborhood, and began to build.
When construction started I was nothing to my American parents but the older sister mentioned in Rahela’s MediMission fact sheet. Then, before the building was finished, I was there.
“Which bedroom do you want?” Laura asked me on move-in day. The thought of my own bedroom was an alien concept and I defaulted to silence, thinking I’d misunderstood. In the end I picked the room with the bigger window because it reminded me of the balcony in Zagreb. The hill overlooked acres of farmland and, beyond that, forest. When family and friends came to visit the new house, all of them remarked on the beautiful view. But in those first months I spent each day searching the skyline for a building, craving something dirty or metal to break through the dark green. I never got used to the forest, not after months or years, not even in daytime, when the sunlight passed through the leaves. I made up excuses to withdraw from neighborhood games of Manhunt that ventured too close to its edge. At night the trees seemed to lean inward, casting shadows on my wall. They were chestnut oaks, Jack said, when I asked him after some sleepless night of tracking their silhouettes out my window. Like in Stribor’s forest, I tried to tell myself, but I could think of nothing but the white oaks and rotting acorns in the place my parents had fallen.