Nev had arrived long before the police got there; I dimly remembered pressing my forehead against her freckled shoulder, her arms around me and Malina as they both shook with choking sobs. At some point, a detective had peeled her away from us and then walked Malina and me over to ?i?a Jovan’s house, refusing to answer any of our frantic questions along the way.
I calmed down incrementally as soon as we were inside. I’d been in Jovan’s apartment so many times, for his family’s slava feast in November, other holidays, and my drawing lessons—the glassblowing, we did in his studio next door—that it smelled like home to me, apples and resin and aged wood. In the meantime, ?i?a Jovan had seized control of the situation with the deft entitlement of someone who’d been at the household helm for a very long time, long enough to outlive everyone else. At his urging, Lina and I changed out of our clothes and into his late wife’s fine cotton nightgowns and cashmere sweaters. For one stupid moment, I mourned the loss of my lovely dress, the tiny insects drowned in Mama’s blood.
“What are we going to do about these?” Malina asked, fingering a strand of ribbons in her hair. “Should we take them out? Since Mama—since she put them in for us last night, maybe they’re evidence?”
“You can do what you want, bunny, but I’m keeping mine,” I said. “She might have meant them as a gift. I’m not letting anyone take them out.”
By the time Jovan came to check on us, Malina had lapsed back into tears while I stayed dry as a stone. He coaxed us into drinking some brandy-laced tea, followed by a slug of straight brandy for good measure, then led us back to the mahogany table in the living room to speak with the detective. We sat side by side across from him, our arms brushing. Malina knotted her fingers in her lap until they turned white, and I curled mine underneath the table’s lip, gripping it as if it could hold me. All I wanted was to feel tethered to the ground, and I was beyond grateful for ?i?a Jovan’s strong, gnarled hands heavy on our shoulders.
“What’s wrong with you, Mirko?” he said in his quiet rumble. “I know all three of your grandparents living—and Petar too, God rest his soul—and what would they think of you refusing to let these children follow their own mother to the hospital?”
The detective shifted uneasily. He was an older man, with a pitted face and dark, hangdog eyes, and he looked almost as exhausted as I felt. “With all respect, Jovan, this is . . . an unusual situation. We can’t allow them there until the doctors have gleaned a better understanding of the, uh, the parameters of her condition.”
“Her condition? What are you even on about, boy?” Jovan rasped. “Jasmina was healthy as a plow horse, always has been. She’s been good as a daughter to me for seventeen years, and she didn’t have any condition I knew of. Why don’t you just get on with it and tell us how she is? If these children are about to be orphans, they have a right to know.”
The detective cleared his throat, a muscle ticcing in his jaw. “It’s, well. The problem is that we’re not sure.”
“Sure about what?” I lashed out. “You haven’t told us anything yet! There was so much blood, and I saw . . .” My mind flashed back to the mulched mass of Mama’s chest, and I couldn’t finish, my gorge rising. “What happened to her?”
“It’s not that we don’t know what happened, miss,” he said quietly. “We do. Your mother’s heart was crushed, by something slender but blunt, about like this.” He held up his hairy hand, palm down, so the bony side of it faced us. “Obviously, it would take a huge amount of force to strike the sternum hard enough to pulverize the heart and most of the lungs. And it’s still unclear what sort of weapon was used to exert this force in such a concentrated way.”
I dug my fingertips into the table until I felt a splinter bite into the soft flesh of my thumb. Malina let out a choked sound and shoved away from the table, her chair squealing against the floor as she sprinted toward the bathroom. We could hear her retching, and Jovan lumbered after her, shooting the detective a poison-ivy look over his shoulder.
I swallowed, forcing down bile. “So what are you saying? Is she dead? I thought I saw—I thought she might not have been all the way gone. . . .”
Mirko dragged one hand wearily over his face, his pitted features distorting. “I know how it sounds. I’m sorry to even have to describe it to you, but . . .” He glanced up as Malina slid back in next to me, still breathing hard and wiping at her mouth, Jovan’s hand landing firmly back on my shoulder. “The problem is that we’re still not sure whether to treat this as an assault or a murder investigation, or if the distinction even matters. Your mother—the doctors don’t understand what’s happening to her. None of them have seen anything like this before.”
A surge of static buzzed through my head. My tongue went dead and heavy in my mouth. “What do you mean?” Malina said, voice wavering. “What’s wrong with her?”
He steepled his stubby fingers, looking at us over them. “She is dead, miss. Or she should be—she has no vital signs, no heartbeat, no blood pressure. Yet she also isn’t dead. She opened her eyes several times in the ambulance, and she has detectable brain activity, that of a living person in a coma. It’s as if . . .”
He worked his jaw a few times, as if trying to release pressure with a click. “Listen, sine. I’m not a religious man.”
Sine. Son, a pet name for a younger person, boy or girl. Somehow hearing it made me feel even worse, the boundless sense of how baffled and sorry for us he was, this man who was supposed to solve things and protect us and neaten the world. Behind us, ?i?a Jovan let go of my shoulder to cross himself.
The detective’s bloodshot eyes snagged mine. “And I haven’t been since I was younger than you both. But if I still were, and if I believed in such a thing as the soul, I would say that your mother’s was trapped, tied to a broken body that simply can’t sustain life. I don’t understand how that’s possible; none of the doctors do, either. They forbid us from even telling you about it for fear that it would get out, start a religious panic, people mobbing the hospital and shouting miracles and sainthood. But you girls go to school with my Goran. I couldn’t keep a thing like this from you, not about your own mother.”
He rubbed the back of his neck and worked his jaw again, and I could see again how much this pained him. “But she’s quarantined now, and until they have a theory of it—what kind of disease might mimic life this way, maybe, some genetic defect your mother might have—they can’t run the risk of letting you near her.”
I could feel myself expand with rage, boiling from me like a solar flare. “No.”
His eyebrows shot up. “Excuse me?”