America was not what it looked like in the movies. I had been right about the McDonald’s at least; they were everywhere. But the bravado and gallantry, that spirit of adventure touted in the Westerns so loved across Yugoslavia, was absent in the life I found in Gardenville. In Zagreb I had always been excited about a trip in the car. In Gardenville you needed the car to do anything, even to buy groceries. There were no bakeries anywhere. Everything in the supermarket was presliced and prepackaged. In stores bigger than any I’d ever seen in Europe, stores that had everything, I followed Laura around incredulous that I could not find a fresh loaf of bread.
The culture was noticeably conservative, even in juxtaposition with the dual traditions of communism and Catholicism back home. In Croatia, topless women graced the covers of most newspapers and were common on the beaches, but in America nudity of any kind was something shameful. In Zagreb I ran the streets without curfew and bought cigarettes and alcohol for the grown-ups. In Gardenville, adults nursed a perpetual fear of kidnappers, and I stayed close to home.
Conversations, particularly with respect to me, were crafted carefully. After those initial bursts of curiosity, no one spoke to me about my past, even within the family. Laura developed euphemisms for my “troubles,” the war and its massacres reduced to “unrest” and “unfortunate events.”
Throughout that first summer I passed the days clinging to Rahela, which was harder now that she could walk. I sat in a tiny chair and pretended to eat the plastic food she prepared in her plastic kitchen, or followed her up and down the driveway in her Flintstoneesque foot-powered toy car, unwilling to let her out of my sight. Sometimes I whispered to her in Croatian, to see if she remembered. She’d parrot back a word or two, but the things she babbled of her own accord sounded like English.
When it was time for her nap I’d hide in the crawl space beneath the porch and look at her picture books, practicing English, matching the illustrations to words. Sometimes I scoured the newspaper for any headlines with “Croatia” or “Serbia” in them, which I pasted in a notebook I hid beneath my bed. When Laura could will me out into the open, she’d speak to me loudly, as if volume was the reason I couldn’t understand. Having studied English all my school days, I could comprehend most of what she said, but struggled to summon the right words in the right order fast enough to respond. She bought me summer school workbooks, and I powered through the math problems and guessed on all the reading fill-in-the-blanks until I had completed enough pages for her to declare me finished. Then I’d return to my spot beneath the porch and fight the urge to sleep. I stayed awake most nights and was always exhausted, but sleep meant dreaming, and so I avoided it.
One afternoon we had a barbecue in the new backyard. When it got dark, I heard rumbles in the distance.
“It will rain?” I said.
“I don’t think so, kiddo,” Jack said. He was right. The sky was cloudless.
Then the explosions started. Bursts of red and orange clustered along the horizon, followed by a series of violent crackles. I yelped and took off toward the house, brushing past Jack.
“Hey, Ana! Wait!” he said. “It’s just the Fourth of July!” I could not understand what the date had to do with an air raid and was not about to stop and find out. I dove beneath the porch, tucking my head between my knees and covering my neck with my arms like we’d learned to do at school if we didn’t have time to get to the shelter.
“Ana. It’s okay.” He was lying in the grass on his stomach now, his head poked into the crawl space. “It’s the Fourth of July. It’s a celebration of—of the end of our war. They’re just fireworks. For fun.”
“You have a war?”
“No. Well, yeah, but a long time ago. Hundreds of years.” He’d grass-stained the shoulder of his shirt and his glasses were crooked on his face.
“Fireworks?”
“Yeah you know, like, the BOOM”—he mimed a big flash with his hands—“and the pretty colors?”
“We had it. In the New Year’s Eve. Before the war.”
“Yes, right. For celebrating.”
I reached out and straightened his glasses on the bridge of his nose.
“Thanks,” he said. After a while he put his hand on my knee. “So it’s okay. All right?”
I nodded.
“Do you want to go watch?”
I shook my head. “You. Please.”
“Well I’ll just be over there if you change your mind.” I hugged my knees to my chest and watched him return to the party. He ran his hands through his hair and whispered something to Laura, who shot sideways glances back at the porch, and I didn’t come out for the rest of the night.
—
At home I shed my muddy sneakers and stood alone in the kitchen. Little magnetic frames featuring pictures of Rahela and me clung to the refrigerator—her as a baby, crawling, walking, graduating kindergarten; me as a sixth, seventh, eighth grader, teeth in transitional positions.
“Hello?” I said, but no one was there.