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—”