I unzipped her, tugging the dress down while she wriggled against it like an eel in a bucket until it finally slipped off. She let me work a T-shirt over her head, then lay back down, cheek pillowed on her arm and eyes half closed. “Will you lie down with me? You haven’t done that since you were so small . . . you so roly-poly, Lina, and you, Iris, such a scrappy thing . . .”
“Roly-poly?” Lina echoed, smoothing a strand off her forehead. “Are you calling me fat, Mama?”
Mama rubbed her cheek against Lina’s shoulder. “Never. Though no Linzer cookie was ever safe from you.”
I knew things hadn’t torn quite as jaggedly between them as they had with Mama and me—there hadn’t been that dangerous sense of rent iron between them—but I’d had no idea they still teased each other this way. They never did it in front of me.
“Riss,” Mama whispered, reaching for me. “Will you come, too, just this once? Please?”
Maybe the nickname was why I gave in. As unfair as it was that even this should be on her terms just like everything else, it was also like water to a cactus, parched even by its own low standards. There was so much I needed to ask her—about Dunja, and about what had driven her to this weakness—but I hadn’t even talked to Malina yet. And seeing her so vulnerable had bled off my fury, enough that I couldn’t bring myself to prick the thin-skinned bubble of this moment.
“Do you remember,” she murmured as I settled awkwardly against her back, jerking when she looped her legs over mine, “do you remember the cake I made you?”
I did. It was for Malina’s and my fifteenth birthday, and it had been a Sacher torte in the form of a roulade. Where there should have been just one layer of raspberry jam filling, she’d lined it with layer after layer of fruit alternating with chocolate, apricot-chocolate-strawberry-chocolate-peach-chocolate, into such a tiny central spiral that the sheets separating the core layers must have been thinner than rice paper. She hadn’t baked us a birthday cake in years by then, but that one must have taken hours.
“I do. It was incredible.” I hesitated. “You never told us why you did that.”
“Because that’s what your bougainvillea tasted like. I wanted you to know.”
She meant the glass sculpture I’d blown, of the twilight bougainvillea that grew in our yard. My fractal masterpiece, the smallest and most precise glasswork depiction I’d ever managed—barely two feet long, yet as close as I’d ever come to conveying that honeycomb sense of infinity. I’d given it to her for her own birthday, that same year. No matter how things curdled between us, I’d never stopped giving her gifts. I told myself it was out of the sweetest spite, killing her with kindness. But it wasn’t, and had never been that.
“Why did you hang it up at the café?” I asked her. “You always used to say the desserts were enough decoration.”
She turned to look at me over her shoulder, until we were nearly nose to nose. Even heavy-lidded and sickly pale, she was magnificent in the slanting afternoon light. When I was little, I’d imagined her as one of the Montenegrin queens I read about in my storybooks—like Queen Jevrosima, ethereal mother of Crown Prince Marko, the hero of so many of our folktales. Prince Marko was a dauntless, vengeful protector of the weak, and I’d loved him with a child’s fierce adoration until I read the story in which he tricked a Moorish princess into marrying him, then stole off with her gold while she slept because her dark skin startled him in the night. After that, I’d always wondered what he’d have to say about my own angled bones and eyes.
But in all the stories his mother had been wise and kind, and unfailingly devoted.
And the way my mother watched me now was exactly as I’d thought Queen Jevrosima must have looked at her own son.
Her eyes fluttered closed, and she sighed. “Because, my flower girl. Because you made it for me.”
SEVEN
MALINA AND I SPENT THE REST OF THE AFTERNOON AND evening taking turns watching over Mama while she snored, making sure she didn’t throw up in her sleep. I must have fallen asleep myself during one of my later shifts; it was the unfamiliar expanse of Mama’s empty bed that woke me. It felt like too much room without her and Lina in it.
I let myself laze for a few more moments, the events of the past night washing over me. Beneath the lingering shock, I felt a warm, new kernel of happiness, as if the years of frustration and fury rubbing me raw inside had finally grown a grain of sand into a pearl. I’d spent the night sleeping next to my mother, pressed back to back; she’d looked at me like she might learn to love me again. Maybe everything would be different now, somehow.
I propped myself up and peeked outside. The sky was still peachy and golden with trails of dawn, which meant Mama had probably already wrung herself out and left for the café. Stretching my arms above my head, I swung my feet over the side and headed to check on Malina and change out of the clothes I’d slept in.
My reflection in the armoire mirror froze me in my steps.
My hair was so straight it barely tangled even after sleep, and goose bumps stippled my skin as my fingers slid easily down its length, slipping over the colorful ribbons woven through it. They were arranged in asymmetrical sprays, and the effect was oddly striking, like fireworks bursting against a night sky. Each was barely thicker than a thread, slipknotted into place around the root of the hair, and every time I tilted my head they released faint wafts of leather, carnation, plum, and some sort of warm Arabian musk. I recognized the component scents—Mama used essential and fragrance oils in her cooking all the time, and Malina liked wearing them—but I couldn’t remember having smelled this combination on either of them before.
My scalp turned taut and prickly as I imagined Mama hunched over me for hours as I slept, still drunk yet braiding ribbons into my hair with a touch so deft she didn’t wake me once.
In Malina’s and my room, I found Malina sleeping on top of her sheets, curled tightly on her side; ribbons twined through her curls, too, and I felt a ridiculous twinge of envy that of course, of course even this would look prettier on her. I leaned over her and wound a few carefully around my finger, separating them from her hair so I could sniff at them—hers smelled different from mine, a top note of sweet pea over a rich vanilla base, pierced with a sharp and surprising nip of verbena.