Brass Read online

  My high school health teachers had never mentioned anything about the threat of fetal alcohol syndrome expiring in the third trimester, but nobody protested about the cup in my hand, so I took a sip, and then a few, and by the end of it I was able to muster the smile I wished I didn’t have to fake.

  The shower was at Yllka’s, and people commented on how well that worked out, since we wouldn’t have to drive all these presents back home, just drag them upstairs when everything was all over. Deena started handing me the presents that people had bothered to wrap, all of them tagged with two-inch cards printed with violets or rattles.

  “Thanks, Dardata,” I said, folding the little terry bath towel back into its box. “This is perfect.”

  She smiled a little, maybe even for real.

  All of the things in miniature worked an opposite kind of spell on us. The tinier the object, the bigger the smile it put on a face. Somehow a plastic spoon was adorable because it was shrunken. The newborn-size diapers, each one the width of a fist, made everyone swoon.

  “The shit isn’t as cute, I promise you,” Deena said, and everyone laughed but it wasn’t clear if anyone agreed. Everyone volunteered to take a turn wiping the baby’s butt when the time came, as if changing a diaper were some kind of privilege. Even the gruas were reaching out, taking turns placing their hands on my belly to feel the kicking. Greta took a turn, and tried her best not to smile when she felt the movement inside of me.

  “What’s the due date?” Rini asked.

  “April first,” I said.

  “Ha, April Fools’ Day,” Mamie said. “Perfect.”

  “Do you have names picked out?” Dardata asked. She was looser by then, holding a cup of punch in one hand and the other shaking a rattle along to “Macarena,” which made up about every third song on the mix tape she’d brought along.

  Christ, babies needed names, too. Names and crib bumpers and spiked punch for the ninth month in utero.

  I shrugged. “We’re not sharing yet.”

  “Ugh, it drives me crazy when people keep everything a secret. Boy or girl, name, it’s like you’re the Sphinx,” Dardata said, but she was smiling, because who doesn’t like a riddle?

  Mamie wasn’t smiling. “Why don’t we ask Daddy what the name is. Daddy?” she said. She was looking at the door, and so everyone’s eyes followed hers, and there he was, leaning against the frame as if he were keeping it in place. Once he started to walk toward us, I saw it was the frame that had been keeping Bashkim upright, and without it his knees buckled a little.

  If I had been standing, I would have crumpled.

  “What’s he doing here? Men aren’t allowed at showers,” Mamie said.

  “He doesn’t look good,” Greta said.

  “Mëmë,” Bashkim said, after he stumbled over to Mamie and kissed her on the lips.

  “You stink,” she answered.

  Even through all the punch in that room, I could make out the booze on Bashkim’s breath. His stupid grin and weeble-wobble gait meant he’d poured down more than a few at the social club, which meant the rest of the wives in the room knew what they were in for when they got home. They sighed, all together, like the all-knowing chorus in a musical.

  “Party’s over, I guess,” Dardata said and threw the rest of her drink down her throat.

  “No, party is happening! Stay, stay,” Bashkim said but didn’t even look at her to see the glare she was giving him. The gruas gathered their purses, patted my stomach on the way out, looked at me as if to say not just poor, poor you but poor, poor us.

  “Thank you, thank you for these beautiful gifts,” Bashkim said to them on their way out, in a voice like that of an emcee. “So beautiful, all of you ladies. So beautiful, Roza,” he said to the old one, who shook his arm from her waist, whose scowling face and black mourning dress implied that she’d earned the right by then to be free from the clutches of any man, her husband or otherwise.

  “And you, beautiful ladies,” he said, going down the line, grabbing the faces of Rini and Margot and Deena. “So kind to have a party for my Elsie and my baby. So many nice people around here, so many kind people.”

  “I’ve never seen him like this,” I said, in what was supposed to be an explanation or apology. It was true that I had never seen him like that, but I had seen the aftermath, when he’d wake up to down the half gallon of Gatorade he’d stocked in the refrigerator the night before and then walk into the shower with a lit cigarette, the wet ashes left behind in the tub like dead insects.

  “What does that mean, ‘like this’? I am happy. What is there not to be happy about? Good friends, good family. It is a dream come true, days like this.”

  “Did you just drive here in your condition?” Mamie asked, the pot to Bashkim’s kettle.

  “Oh, stop kidding, Mëmë, you know I am okay.”

  “Who’s Mëmë? That’s not my name.”

  “Mëmë, you know, mother,” he said. “Like a mother to me.”

  “My name is Anna,” Mamie said.

  “You’ll help us move some of this stuff to the apartment, eh?” Yllka asked, nodding to Rini, Margot, and Deena.

  They scuttled upstairs. I grabbed a dirty tray so I could follow them up, but escape wasn’t as easy for me.

  “I feel better, to know that Elsie will not be alone,” Bashkim said.

  “What do you mean, ‘will not be alone’? What, are you planning on leaving her already?” Mamie asked. It was a rhetorical question, an insult really, but Bashkim stumbled into the living room and fell onto the couch and didn’t respond, and that terrified me, that he didn’t seem to have a fight in him at all.

  “Get your dirty feet off of Yllka’s sofa,” I said to him. He was coiled up like a snake, and I wanted to poke at him, to see if he posed a threat or not.

  “It’s gone,” he said.

  I didn’t have to ask what was gone.

  “Everything is gone,” he said anyway.

  “Quiet,” I told him.

  “What’s gone? Besides his mind, I mean?” Mamie asked.

  I shook my head. “Not now,” I said.

  “She is alone. There is nothing there for her,” he said.

  “And what’s here for her?” I asked. “You?”

  “What did you say to me?” Bashkim started to rise, but he lost momentum halfway up, and he collapsed onto his back, covering his face with his hands like a politician caught in a scandal, working his way through a crowd of photographers. Then he began sobbing, something I had never seen him do, something I didn’t even know he was capable of. I remembered from the news the image that struck me the most: among all the women on the streets of Tirana wailing, among all the men stomping on abandoned riot gear, there was one man alone who was sobbing, his wife still and dazed beside him. There was a space around him, as if even in all of the sadness and outrage the crowds were afraid to touch him, as if he were contagious. The crowds knew what to do with an angry man, but not a broken one.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he cried. I’d been waiting weeks for those words from him, but hearing them repulsed me, because they showed a kind of weakness we couldn’t afford anymore.

  “What is he talking about? Who’s ‘she’?” Mamie asked.

  Bashkim switched over to Albanian, which to Mamie and Greta must have sounded like a made-up tongue, a man in need of an exorcism instead of a shower and some hot coffee. Yllka returned from downstairs, and Gjonni followed her seconds afterward, and we all stood around staring down at him on the sofa like we were at his wake.

  “My god,” Yllka said in English and then switched to Albanian, but by this point Bashkim had closed his eyes and stopped responding.

  “Who’s ‘she’?” Mamie asked again.

  “Agnes,” I said. “Aggie.”

  “Who’s Aggie?” Greta asked.

  Yllka and Gjonni looked at each other and then at me and then back to Bashkim, not sure who to worry about the most. “Someone from back home,” Gjonni said, shaking his h
ead.

  “Family from the old country,” Yllka added.

  “Like his sister? Who? What happened?” Greta asked.

  Gjonni bent down and tapped his thumb against Bashkim’s cheek. “Ikim, ikim. Come, let’s go upstairs. Let’s go to your bed.” Gjonni nodded at Yllka and they both prodded and pulled at Bashkim until he sat upright.

  “There is tea made in the kitchen. Help yourselves,” Yllka said, still playing host even with a monkey on her back, almost literally. “We will take care of him. You stay and talk.”

  Bashkim lifted his head as Yllka and Gjonni dragged him past us. “They will take care of me. You cannot take care of me,” he said.

  “Yllka, let me help,” I said. I didn’t know how I could help when I couldn’t even look at him, but this was my mess to clean up after. All they should have had to worry about was tossing out the streamers and empty Solo cups.

  “No!” Bashkim yelled. “You cannot help. You do not understand. Nuk jeni një prej nesh. Nuk jeni!”

  “What’s he saying?” I asked.

  “Don’t listen to him. He’s not talking sense,” Gjonni said.

  “I want to know,” I said.

  “I want to know who Aggie is and what the hell is going on,” Mamie said.

  “There is just trouble back home and Bashkim is upset and had too much to drink and that is it,” Yllka said.

  “Nuk kuptoni,” Bashkim said to me.

  “I don’t understand,” I answered.

  “Yes, you don’t understand!” he yelled, and he repeated it over and over as Yllka and Gjonni dragged him through the door. I heard his voice carry on over the shuffle of their feet on the stairs, until it was muffled halfway up the flight, and silenced altogether by the time they reached the top. I heard the door open and the screen door slap hard against the frame, more footsteps on the floor, and then a dull thud, followed by mumbled voices.

  “What the hell is happening?” Mamie said. “Jesus, that was a goddamned show.”

  “Not now,” I said. “Please.”

  “Is Aggie his sister?” Greta asked, almost pleading. “Why is he so upset? What happened?”

  “Aggie is in Albania. The government has fallen, everybody’s lost everything, there’s chaos in the streets. It’s dangerous, and she has to get out,” I said. It sounded so simple, really. Too simple for everybody, including me, to be so confused.

  “And she’s his sister?” Greta asked again.

  “No,” I said. “His wife.”

  It was as if the silence had been written into this part of the script: it was, for a moment, absolute. No cars outside, no birds, no breeze, no more muffled voices from upstairs, no breathing. It wasn’t peaceful, exactly, but it was reassuring. It seemed to say: You can always come back to this, to nothing.

  “Holy great goddamned fucking shit,” Mamie said, shattering that beautiful calm moment.

  “No, Elsie, really?” Greta said.

  “Really,” I said. I was too tired to come up with a lie, and even an explanation seemed pointless by then. What was I supposed to say, that when I met Bashkim, his wife was a trinket in a life he’d left behind, like a high school trophy sitting in an attic? She was a ghost, a phantom limb, a bridge soon to be burned? How was I supposed to know that Bashkim’s past wasn’t a cold he could shake but a terminal condition? How was I supposed to know that everybody’s was?

  “You’ve really screwed things up, girly,” Mamie said. Her voice was as rough as ever but she said it through tears. It was almost impossible to disappoint her, as low as her expectations were, but I was a prodigy at screwing things up. Not only had I let things fall apart, I’d demolished the raw materials before construction even began. Greta’s hands were crawling all over her head, and Mamie wasn’t even stopping her, because even if Greta pulled every last hair from her head there’d still be a good solid base to rebuild on. There were actual brains under there; everyone said it, even Mamie, and sometimes they said brains like it was a dirty word, but really it was because we were full of wonder at such a thing. Me, I was the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion rolled into one. I looked outside and wished for a twister to take me away, but it was just plain old afternoon sun out there.

  “Could you leave me alone now?” I said, but I didn’t need to ask. Mamie had already started gathering her things, including the presents she’d brought for the baby, but then she cussed under her breath and dropped them back on the table.

  “That poor child,” she said. “It never even had a chance.” Then she walked outside, where Greta was already waiting for her, and they were probably halfway home by the time I thought of an answer to that.

  “There is a chance,” I said. It was just that the chance wasn’t in that apartment, even with the new crib bumper and the pallets of adorable shitless diapers and the spiked punch, and it wasn’t back at Mamie’s house, with the cable TV and drips of burgundy over every carpeted and upholstered surface like the aftermath of a crime scene. I had to get us out of there, me and that kid, out to one of the mysterious highway mile markers that chance had to hide behind, out to where we had a shot at something we needed more desperately than plush rattles and microwaved breast milk. I promise you, kid, I promise you. There is a chance.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Luljeta

  Ahmet is a magician, a straight-up David Copperfield, whom he doesn’t actually look unlike. You didn’t sleep all night—not one second, not even long enough to daydream—and still he managed to slip unnoticed out of bed and get himself showered and dressed and looking like a brand-new man. He even looks a little taller than the one you got into the car with the day before, his head perhaps screwed on a little straighter, with one Nike firmly planted on the thin beige motel carpet and one foot literally out the door.

  He sees you watching him and says, “I’m getting the car ready.”

  You think so long about how to say good morning that the moment passes altogether. He closes the motel door behind him and oddly it’s then that the cold air from outside makes its way to the bed. An engine turns over outside and in five seconds flat screeches out of the parking lot, and you know instantly that it’s Ahmet’s Honda, and that you are now truly alone in this shitty motel in whatever godforsaken red state you’re in—you honestly can’t remember. You wait for the panic to set in, but all you feel is the glorious warmth of the horrendous, scratchy floral coverlet, along with something that might actually be relief. What choice do you have now but to scrape together all of your remaining cash and book yourself a Greyhound as far north as two hundred dollars will take you? It’s the only practical thing left to do, the only decision between you and a life lived at the seesaws of Tuscaloosa, Alabama’s equivalent of Hamilton Park.

  That’s right, Tuscaloosa, Alabama. That’s where you are, in a southern college town where people drive SUVs just to maximize the surface area for their crimson A car magnets.

  The motel room door opens again, and Ahmet steps inside. “Car’s warming up,” he says. David Copperfield at it again: he was gone and now he’s back, the phantom version of him already on the on-ramp to I-20, the nice guy version of him back in the motel room, unable to meet your eye. Really it was only wishful thinking that he had driven away, because you didn’t want to have to stumble through this next part with him.

  “Can you turn around?” you ask.

  He does, without questioning why, and you scramble to find the T-shirt you never bothered to put back on the night before. You slip out of bed and dress in the previous day’s clothes, right down to the socks that are still damp from the previous day’s sweat. Dressing makes you feel more raw. You’re colder the more you move, and you realize that the henley you put on is never going to keep you warm. You have gravely overestimated the temperature in the southern United States, and you made a serious mistake in not bringing along the winter coat that you had naïvely looked at as a relic of your old New England life. You hadn’t even thought to check Weather.com before y
ou left, one of the many oversights that you are finally acknowledging in a plan that is now too far under way to abandon. And you’re hungry. Starving. In need of more than the leftover Gardetto’s snack mix, especially since the premium rye crisps have already been vultured.

  Your crummy motel shares a parking lot with a Walmart, a beacon of hope in an otherwise bleak strip mall. This is what the Mormon settlers must have felt when they set out for the Pacific but instead reached the Great Salt Lake: it wasn’t right, but it was right there.

  “I have to go to Walmart,” you tell Ahmet.

  “What for?” he asks.

  “Just some stuff.”

  He’s antsy to leave. He doesn’t bother to hide it, the way that the Ahmet from the day before would have. “Okay, but hurry up. I’ll throw your stuff in the car and meet you there.”

  “Fine,” you say. As you cross the parking lot, you stare at a lady standing outside of a minivan cum mobile home, and she stares right back at you. She’s wearing a leather bomber jacket and gripping a mug of piping hot something with gloved hands, and you imagine how nice and warm it must be to be cloaked in that animal pelt. You bet it’d be worth killing something to be that warm.

  Walking through the sliding doors into the Walmart feels like crossing over into the Emerald City, all warm and bright and swarming with people who’ve been hired just to tell you hello as you enter. So what if everything here is a placeholder, the thing you tell yourself you’ll just get for now until you can get a better version of it someday. You beeline for the women’s section to try on a gray hoodie with a soft nubby lining, and it warms you all the way to your bones. Then you swap out the hoodie for a full-on peacoat and it’s like getting a hug straight from God. It feels like armor, like there’s nothing that could penetrate that thick skin, even the sharpest fillet knife that a sociopathic trucker keeps in the bunk area of his rig.

  You somehow managed to ignore your bladder for seven whole hours, and you realize now how badly you have to go, so you ramble around looking for a bathroom, only the laundry aisle smells so good that you have to stop by for a minute and just take it in. You’d been in Walmart perhaps more frequently than any other structure aside from your apartment and school, yet you never before appreciated its splendor, never before noticed how many ways it offers solutions to things like cleaning yourself up, orange bottles and blue bottles and purple and white, liquids and powders and capsules and pods. And everything moves along in a way that makes sense: the next aisle over is for the body, shelves the length of your apartment back home, all filled with body washes that invigorate or relax, whatever you need that morning. There are washes for men that women can’t resist and washes for women that women also can’t resist. You’d gone your whole life not ever knowing what a mountain zephyr smells like, and all along it could have been right there in your armpits.