“What are you looking for?” said Luka. “You just need to follow the signs for Dubrovnik.”
I ignored him and traced my finger along the road, squinting to read the names of the smallest villages.
Luka put his arm across my lap, blocking the map. “Ana. Look at me.”
“What?”
“I’m here. I’ll go with you wherever you want. But you can’t shut me out.”
“I’m not—”
“Whatever it is. Maybe I can help.”
“I don’t exactly have a master plan here.”
“I could’ve asked my dad for old intel or something. You should just be honest with me.”
“I know. I know.”
“You promise?”
“I promise,” I said. It was a lie even as it was coming out of my mouth. There was still one thing I hadn’t told him, had never told anyone.
“Okay,” he said. “Where do you want to go?”
I pointed to a part of the road with a bend like a boomerang and restarted the car.
—
Back on the road I felt almost dizzy with anticipation. I’d pictured a return to this place hundreds of times—had dreaded it and yearned for it—but in all my imaginings it never involved feeling so faint. I studied the landscape for clues, but nothing was familiar, or everything looked the same. We passed strips of black pine and ash, some vibrant green, some blackened and bare from wildfires. I white-knuckled the steering wheel and pushed my foot down hard against the gas pedal. I could see Luka watching me from the corner of his eye.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
“Do you want me to drive?”
“I’m fine.” The tree line was becoming less patchy, more mature, until thick bands of white oak lined both sides of the highway.
“Seriously, Ana, you’re going too fast. The cops will double the bribe if they see your American license.”
I glanced at the quivering needle of the speedometer but didn’t slow down.
“If you just pull over I can—”
“I don’t want to stop here.”
A small side road, almost completely obscured by overgrowth, caught my eye. I craned my neck to watch it take a steep drop down into a valley. Luka protested again, but I shushed him. My stomach lurched, but I tried to ignore it; there were probably a lot of villages in the valley, with a lot of sinuous little offshoots that followed the same arc.
Then, after a few minutes the main road made a harsh curve, and I knew.
“Oh my god.”
“What is it?”
I slammed on the brakes and swerved to the shoulder. We slid to a stop on the roadside grass, the smell of burning brake pads drifting through the open windows.
“What the hell, Ana! Are you crazy?”
“No” was the correct answer, the one I wanted to say, but instead what came out was “probably,” then a wet, congested sound in my chest. Luka sighed and dropped a hand on my knee, and I cried the kind of suffocating sobs I hadn’t since I’d been on the other side of this same road, ten years before.
Safe House
1
My eyes burned. The sun sat on the horizon and I walked toward it. The road forked. The main road was big and level, and the smaller road was unpaved and sloped down into the lowlands. A spiral of smoke twisted up from the valley, beckoning me with a wispy finger. The big road said nothing. I followed the smoke. It led me to the center of a village, down a rocky street lined with houses. A woman wrapped in a purple shawl was feeding leftover crusts to emaciated chickens in her yard. I felt her looking but kept walking. As I got closer, her mouth slackened at the sight of me—a tiny, blood-crusted zombie, soaked in other people’s bodily fluids. She approached, called out to me. I stopped in the middle of the street.
She came to me and kneeled, asked my name, where I was from, what had happened. I tried to determine from her accent whether or not she was a Serb, if it was safe to speak to her. I couldn’t tell, and decided it didn’t really matter, that I had nowhere else to go and I might as well answer. But somewhere along the way my body had taken a vow of silence; she talked and talked and I stayed quiet. She reached for my hand, and I vomited on the asphalt. In the end she grabbed my arm and led me to her house. She stood over me and rinsed the blood from my wrists. It was only cold water, but the cuts were dirty and it stung. My eyes welled up, but no tears escaped.
—