The woman’s narrow face folded in on itself as I approached her. Her gray-threaded dark ponytail was loose and scraggly, and her fingers flitted up to pluck nervously at it as she struggled to meet my eyes. I glanced at her name tag. “Jelena—it’s okay if you don’t know what happened. Really. I don’t think this was your fault. None of us do.”
She snorted a little, weakly. “Thank you for saying so, though it’s not true—they’re going to be rid of me for sure now. Someone has to take the blame for this. I was the one outside that door, how could I not have seen anything? It’s—it’s impossible. There’s only one way in and out of that room, and I was there, I swear I hadn’t left for a moment. I’d checked in on her just an hour before, and the next time I went in—gone. Vanished like a ghost.”
I pressed my lips together, pulled them through my teeth. “This might sound strange, but do you remember anything else at all? Something like a smell, maybe? Perfume, even?”
Her brown eyes flashed up to mine. “That’s—yes! I smelled peaches, strong, very sweet. Almost like there was a fresh-cut plate of them tucked somewhere close that I couldn’t see. I even looked around for it first, and then I was nervous that maybe I’d had a small stroke or the like. Phantom smells can happen after that. But I could see just fine, and move my hands properly. And there was another smell, something like flowers, then it faded completely too. I thought maybe . . . the vents here can be strange. There wasn’t any other explanation.”
Except for Sorai. She’d taken this woman’s memory, just like she’d taken ours years ago, siphoned out with the power of her scent.
And now she had stolen our mother whole.
BACK AT ?I?A Jovan’s, the three of us collapsed in the living room, Jovan in his massive, hand-carved rocking chair, Lina and me on the couch. “I don’t understand what’s happening here, my girls, I swear on my heart,” he said heavily, massaging his temples. “It’s beyond me. How could they have lost her, and why are they lying? Because it must be lies. Human beings don’t simply disappear into thin air.”
Malina shifted uneasily beside me. On the way out of the hospital, I’d quietly shared with her what the attendant had told me, and we’d both agreed there was no need to tangle Jovan in whatever spiderweb Sorai, or whoever else, was weaving around us. Involving Luka and Niko was already dangerous enough, given how little we knew of anything.
“In any case, we’re all worn out,” Jovan said. “If you’ve eaten already, it might do us all good to make an early night of it. Could be we’ll hear something in the morning.”
“I’m going to sit in the studio for a while, I think,” I said. “I’m not ready to sleep yet.” Or to be alone with Malina, especially now. I didn’t have any spare comfort to lend her, or the inclination.
In the studio, I sat on the little wooden bench across from the furnace, my back against the stone wall, breathing in the familiar, lingering tang of molten glass and wood shavings. It brought me back to the first time I’d slept over at Jovan’s. Mama had made me cry that night, two years ago. By then I almost never let myself cry in front of her, but I’d been so furious that it couldn’t be helped. Lina had been playing for us before it happened, and for once our living room was almost peaceful with the warm contentment of her song, a sleepy-sweet melody like a heavy-eyed pup curled by a fireplace.
And then one of her strings had snapped with a twang.
It wasn’t her fault. The violin was cheap and already old, but Mama had flown into one of her senseless rages over it, rolling in that storm front of fury Lina and I both knew so well. Why couldn’t Lina take better care of her things, why couldn’t she have a lighter touch with the rosin, why couldn’t she be more graceful? Even if the words weren’t aimed at me—and even if they were utterly false, given how much grace Lina had even then—I felt each one drop heavy into my stomach like a swallowed bullet, until I finally moved to shield my sister.
“Jasmina, just stop,” I said. “She didn’t mean—”
“Not ‘Jasmina,’” she hissed back. “I’m your mother.”
“Not really,” I retorted, chin quivering. “You’re not.”
She slapped me across the face. And without thinking, I hit her back, hard.
The shock on her face—the sheer hurt beneath it, the unfamiliar etch of betrayal—frightened me so much I burst into tears. She reached for me as I darted past her and out the door, into the humid, salt-laden August night. I sprinted all the way to ?i?a Jovan’s house on bare feet, my sides throbbing with stitches and sobs. I pounded on his door like a lunatic, and when he finally let me in and gathered me into his arms, I could barely speak.
“She . . . she . . .” I sobbed into the silk-lined vest he wore even in high summer, that smelled of pipe tobacco, resin, and hot glass. My cheek still flamed with the imprint of her hand. “Why?”
He sighed deeply, his lungs creaking. “Oh, sweetheart. I couldn’t tell you why. Your mother is a fine, fine woman, but hard. Heavy as the earth, like they say sometimes. I think it may all be a bit much for her, that’s all.”
I pulled away from him. “And what about us? It’s not too much for us? You know what, I don’t care why. I just wish she’d die and leave us alone.”
His craggy face crumpled, eyes dimming beneath the overhang of his brow. “Don’t say that, my girl. Come, let’s go sit in the studio. Let’s make something together. Anything you want.”
I watched as he fired up the furnace, the crucible in which we heated the glass all the way to 2,400 degrees, a white sun-heat that looked like it might match the level of my fury. Then we cooled the piece down to around 2,000 degrees, still a bright, fiery orange but cooler enough to “fine out” or release the bubbles from within. By myself, I spooled the gather of glass from the furnace onto my blowpipe, like honey twirled around a stick, and transferred it to the marver—his was the traditional marble slab, not the steel most people used these days for their working surface.
And when the cool skin formed along the blob’s glowing surface, the glass was mine to mold: to blow with short, sharp bursts of breath, tweeze and shape with straight and diamond shears. I slowly exhaled my fury as I turned the glass into my bougainvillea through cane and murrine, rolling the sticky, molten scraps in colored powders for their hues.
“Slow and careful with your hands,” ?i?a Jovan murmured as I worked. “And careful with your breath. We can reheat each piece unless it cracks, but we can’t reskin your fingers.”
I worked with him for hours, building fractal offshoots from the leaves and petals of that primary flower, reheating glass when I needed to in the glory hole. I hadn’t known what that secondary furnace was called before, and it made me laugh when he told me. By the time we transferred the piece to the annealer, where it would cool slowly over the next day to keep from cracking or shattering, my rage and hatred had smoothed over and cooled as well.