Now, the studio’s heavy door scraped open, startling me out of the memory. ?i?a Jovan shuffled in, offering me a mug purling with minty steam. I wrapped my hands around it and he lowered himself onto the bench next to me, grunting a little as his knees cracked.
“You’re bearing up so well, my girl,” he said, shaking his head. “Like a proper hero. It’s unbelievable how strong you’re being, both for you and your sister. Even when the world’s turned impossible on you.”
I leaned against his side, breathing out a laugh through my nose. “Hardly. It’s just that I don’t know what to do, and I don’t understand any of this. How could she be just gone, Jovan? Who is she, really? Or who was she, I suppose. I don’t even know how to say it.”
He gave a labored sigh. “I always wondered when you’d finally ask me that. Surprised you never did before, with that auger of a mind of yours. And I wish I had something to give you.”
“But you don’t?”
“She never did tell me where she came from,” he said, hiking up his sharp-creased trousers as he leaned back against the wall. One of his socks had a hole in the ankle, above his fur-lined slipper; it snagged at my heart. “I found her outside the gallery one night, high summer. July, near eighteen years ago. She was sitting on the ground, slumped against the glass like a beggar, but she was wearing the finest dress, white and black. I remember it shimmered in the dark, and all that wild hair of hers was down.”
I could hear the echo of old longing in his voice. If he thought of Mama as his daughter now, he hadn’t always. And all those gifts he’d made for her over the years looked different to me now, too. Tokens of another kind of love.
“Even run ragged as she was,” he went on, “she looked like art herself.”
I held my breath; I’d never heard any of this before. “And you just took her in? A complete stranger?”
“She told me she thought my work in the window was beautiful, the loveliest things she’d seen in the town. That they reminded her of home. And she said she had no money for a hotel or food, no baggage other than a little silk satchel. She looked so sad, so worn out, my girl. I couldn’t turn her away in such a shape. I offered her a place to stay, and I truly believed it would be just for the one night, but then . . . you know how she is, Iris. She’s changed over the years—loosened a little, maybe, though I know it won’t have seemed that way to you—but she was the most elegant woman I had ever known. Everything she did or said was such a wonder to behold, and sometimes it felt . . .”
He cleared his throat uncomfortably, a deep tobacco-roughened rumble.
Such delicacy, such deliberation. It was a marvelous thing to witness. That’s how your mother was when she was young. Every movement done in degrees, to please the eye. And I used to think to myself, no one is simply born this way. Someone taught her this.”
Spider-leg chills skittered down my spine. This is how you should be, Sorai’s voice echoed in my mind. So beautiful that you can wound with it. Your beauty is a force, you know, a power all its own. It can be both sword and shield for you, and win you anything you want.
Had our mother grown up with those women? Had they taught her to be beautiful as they were? I remembered the way she always seemed poised on the edge of flirtation, on the brink of kept-back laughter, with everyone but us. How men and even women nearly tripped over themselves around her. And that was almost a decade later, after she’d fled whoever it was that taught her how to do it. Something about the thought struck me as so sinister, the notion of purpose behind beauty. That my mother had been for something.
That maybe Malina and I were, too.
“And you never made her tell you?”
He snorted. “When has anyone ever made Jasmina do anything? I know you think the two of you couldn’t be more different, but where do you think you came by all that steel?”
I felt a twinge of pleasure at that, pale and raw, like a spring shoot nosing through winter soil. It had been such a long time since I took any comparison with Jasmina as a compliment. “Still. You let her stay with you. It seems like the least she could have done was tell you the truth.”
“She said that a terrible thing had happened to her. That she had lost her sister, and her mother. And that if I wanted her to stay with me—and by then, I couldn’t imagine her gone—I would never ask again. You and Malina came soon after, and she refused to burden me with your care, as if I wouldn’t have loved raising you like a father. All she would take from me was the money to start the café.”
Again, I thought of all his gifts to her over the years, all the furniture and ornaments. He’d been trying to make her life lovely, in the only way she would accept.
“I would never have told you this before, my girl,” he said. “It was against your mother’s wishes, and I’m only telling you now because keeping it from you might do more harm than good. But Jasmina was a haunted woman, even a fool could see it. That’s why I shouted at you tonight. I can’t bear the thought of it, of something happening to you or your sister. It’s too much for this old heart to take.”
SIXTEEN
TUCKED UP IN THE GUEST-ROOM BED, I LAY AS FAR AWAY FROM Malina as I could get, my back turned to her. I knew I should tell her what Jovan had told me, wrap myself around her and split the weight of Mama’s new absence between us, but I couldn’t bring myself to pierce the surface of the silence between us yet. Everything was still too raw. Finally, my thrashing became too much to take. Sleep was so far away that it felt like some distant horizon I would never reach. I needed to be elsewhere, and I needed not to think.
I tossed the covers back and flung my feet to the floor. Malina pulled herself up in bed as I dragged my tunic back over my head and laced up my sandals, her knees drawn up to her chest and her face curtained by the darkness of her curls on either side. “Riss, where are you going?”
“Out.”
I’D ONLY BEEN to the beach at night a few times by myself. Usually it was with Filip and Nev and a Pepsi-vodka flask, a few times with Luka. Lina had never been much for sneaking out of the house for midnight swims.
At least not with me, I thought bitterly. Maybe she’d been here with Niko hundreds of times, for all that I knew.
Either way, it wasn’t always so solemnly wonderful as this. The moonlight was bright as lanterns, and houses twinkled on the bay’s opposite shore, sparking halfway up the looming black mountains like scattered bonfires. Every breath of balmy air was thick with salt. The water lapped at the moonlight, silvered tips above the oily black, and the pebbles beneath my bare feet were still warm from all the sun they’d drunk during the day.
I could hear them crunching as Fjolar picked his way toward me.
“Flower girl,” he said, bracing himself on one hand as he eased down beside me, bringing a waft of whiskey and chocolate. “I didn’t think I’d hear from you quite this much sooner rather than later.”
“But you thought it would be soon, regardless,” I tossed back. “A little presumptuous, no?”