Since there’d never been much of anything in our living room other than a TV with actual rabbit-ear antennas and more of Jovan’s gorgeous driftwood furniture, I started my search in Mama’s room. Other than two nights before, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been in there. She’d kept it locked during the day since she’d caught us playing dress-up with her clothes once, years ago—that once had been enough to keep Lina humming her danger song for weeks.
The space between bed and closet was so narrow I had to do a little sideways shuffle as I eased open one wing and then the other. The armoire exhaled lavender, sage, and lemon peel into my face; no mothballs for our mother. Wooden hangers clacked as I plunged my hands into an assembly line’s worth of fitted dresses. Mama bought her clothes at the flea market stands and thrift shops just like we did, but she spent hours of her scarce free time painstakingly altering them until they somehow transformed into finery, as if she couldn’t bear anything less than perfection against her skin. She took fastidious care of them, and threw them away so rarely that some of these were almost ten years old, ones she’d worn even before I lost her.
And they smelled so strongly of her.
I let the sobs come rolling out, the louder ones I’d held trapped in my rib cage the night before. Curling the fabrics between my fingers, I pressed her dresses against my flushed face. It felt as if I were turning myself inside out and my innards were spikier than expected, spiny like burrs.
Once I’d finally cried myself dry, I slid down to the floor, my back against the bed and my knees drawn up. If I hadn’t been at that angle, I might not even have caught a glimpse of the folded chessboard at the bottom of the closet, wedged upright against the back so that most of it stood hidden behind longer dresses.
I dove into the closet face-first and dragged it out. It was a big board, and heavy, the squares black and white and the surrounding wood pale shisham, inlaid with silver diamonds and flower petals. I knew that Mama and ?i?a Jovan loved playing chess together, so he must have made this for her; nothing strange about that. But when I gave it a shake no muffled rattle of queens and pawns sounded from the inside. I could hear only a papery slide as I tilted the board back and forth, along with a rumbly little roll. And the padlock that clasped to the hinge holding the two parts of the board together felt unusually sturdy.
Fortunately, I had a rock handy, and a right arm honed by years of stirring, rolling dough, and blowing glass. It had made me the arm-wrestling champion of the sixth grade, and now it let me deal a series of precise blows to the lock without damaging the board. I had just eased the mangled lock out of the hinge and flipped the top back, revealing a plush, royal-blue lining, when a hand clamped down on my shoulder.
I leaped off the bed, scrambling for my rock.
“Riss! Jesus!” Malina backed away, hands held up. “Don’t kill me, please, okay?”
I tossed the rock away and leaned on my thighs, panting. “Why would you sneak up on me like that, for fuck’s sake? How did you even know I was here?”
“Well, the window was open, and the calzones baking at the Bastion woke me up.” Of course they had. “You weren’t there, and after that . . .” She shuddered, and a bright flush blotched down her neck. “That awful dream last night, I thought you’d come back here and look for, I don’t know, clues or something. About what’s happening to Mama. What’s happening to us.”
“That dream,” I said, sinking back down onto the bed. “What was that? I loved her, Lina. I was all but looking around for the nearest cliff to jump from, just so I could show her how much I loved her. You know what I’m talking about.”
“I know. I don’t understand it either, how something could feel that way. Especially for us both. This is just—it’s all too much.” She took a deep breath and soldiered on. “Did you find something? What’s in there?”
She sat beside me as I lifted a plain little apothecary vial from inside the chessboard. The thick brown liquid inside slid viscously back and forth as I tilted it.
“It looks like an absolute, I think?” Lina said. “They’re always thicker than the essentials. Are you going to open it?”
“I was thinking we’d sit here and contemplate its visual properties for a while. See what we can see.”
She frowned at me reproachfully, wrinkling the creamy expanse between her thick eyebrows. “Mean.”
I worked the stopper out carefully, and Lina leaned in until we were almost touching foreheads. Then I brought the vial between our noses and took a wary sniff. The fragrance rushed up bitter, bright, and sweet all at once, vibrantly intense and underpinned by the faint hint of something darker.
Malina whistled softly, then bit her cherry-cleft lower lip. “Orange blossom absolute, wow. That’s wonderful. I’ve never smelled one that dramatic. There’s amber in there too, I think, and maybe myrrh? And lots of other things I can’t recognize, I’m sorry. You know what’s weird, though . . . ?”
“What?”
“Mama never used orange blossom absolute, even though it’s stronger than neroli. That’s the essential-oil version of bitter orange flower. Neroli she loved, but we never had any of the absolute around. I only know what it smells like because Niko bought me the Egyptian kind last year for us to play with.”
“Why would she keep this locked up in here?” I wondered, working the stopper back in place. “It’s gorgeous, but it’s only perfume.”
“Is there anything else in there?”
There was, a curling photograph tucked into the velvet-lined rim. I gently slid it loose. The photo was of a smiling girl who looked a little like our mother, but a much softer rendition, more along Malina’s lines. She was maybe eighteen or nineteen, and her hair blazed a fiery copper, threaded through with ribbons just like ours. Her gray eyes were even bigger and clearer than our mother’s as she smiled widely into the lens, lush wooded mountains and a pine-studded valley visible behind her. She wore an ivory dress, cap-sleeved with a black Peter Pan collar and a sheer lacy panel down the middle, exposing her fine clavicles and even the inner curves of her full breasts. It was both demure and aggressively sexy, and it seemed like a strange choice for a mountaintop in the middle of the day.
I turned the photo over; it simply said Anais in our mother’s swooping, calligraphic handwriting.
“Anais,” Malina breathed. “Ana.”
I ran my fingers over the glossy contours of the woman’s face. I’d never seen a photo of Mama’s sister before. I hadn’t even known any existed; Mama had always said she’d taken nothing with her when she ran, but I wondered now how we’d never thought to question that. How would she even have made it from a remote mountain village to Cattaro, without money or a car or any belongings? What would have happened to our grandfather, if he’d really killed our aunt and grandmother—and not just killed them, but flung them off a mountain?
We’d swallowed the story at the time, like a bitter tincture of truth, but now it seemed glaringly false. Gory as a Grimm fairy tale. A story meant to scare a child, to urge us never to dig deeper.