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  Before you part, Noreen asks, “You got money?” You nod, and she says, “That’s good, ’cuz I don’t.” You smile at her joke but she doesn’t, and you realize she isn’t joking.

  “I could give you some money for gas,” you say, crinkling the last twenty in your pocket against your thigh, not really ready to let it go.

  “Eh, keep it, Samantha. We were going to be driving this way with you or without you,” she says. You thank her and that’s that. That’s how fast a story can start and end. And then you’re at the end of a street that you’d traveled nearly two thousand miles to find, and you wonder if stories ever really start or end.

  —

  You don’t know why you weren’t expecting what you see. You imagined your father’s family in one of those big cul-de-sac behemoths with a pull-around driveway, a wraparound porch, and an interior that had never met a beige it didn’t like. After all, he’s a businessman, a pizza scion, maybe not quite Papa John but an entrepreneur nonetheless. He escaped both Communism and the gray-and-rust part of New England that didn’t have Sherwin-Williams paint colors named after its towns, so he has to be a man of some means in order to make it as far as he has. But you quadruple-check the address, and there is no pull-around driveway, or a second or third floor, or a wraparound porch, or a porch at all, unless you count the three concrete slabs that lead to the front door. It isn’t that it’s awful. It isn’t as bad as Greta’s place, it doesn’t share walls or floors with anyone like at your place, there are no discarded Reeboks tangled up in the telephone wires outside. It isn’t awful because it isn’t anything, just a little rectangle like the one Mamie lives in, something that looks like what second graders draw when signifying house. It has four walls covered in yellow vinyl siding with black shutters and a chain-link fence, which keeps a yappy little Bichon Frise in and strangers like you out.

  Strangers like you. That’s what you are, as the barking little dog warns its masters inside.

  This is the part where you’re supposed to hesitate. Everything before this point has been rising action, and this is either the climax or the point where everything falls apart. For it being one of the oldest stories in the book—at least the YA books you so loved when you were far more young than adult, those pages of wayward parents and lonely, precocious, tough-as-nails daughters who talk like teenage girls never talk—you have no foresight into how this will end. It’s here that either you will be initiated into an entirely new family, which will mean you’ll be loved and hurt and protected and betrayed exponentially more than you have ever experienced; or you will learn for certain that you’re a thing to be shunned and rejected, unlovable by vampire or werewolf, your own father and siblings, and, if you go ahead and complete the betrayal by knocking on the door, even your own mother, once and for all. You know that the apprehension a reasonable person would have felt two weeks ago, when the seeds of this maniacal idea had been planted, should surely be occurring to you now.

  But dear god, do you have to pee, and you really want that nippy asshole Bichon Frise off your ankles. So you knock three times, before you have a chance to think any better of it, and the hesitation that follows isn’t on your side of the door. You hear some low talking, and some louder talking, and then a series of dead bolts being unlocked. There’s the sound of something stuck, a metal jiggling or something, but as the door opens you realize that the sound isn’t a sound but a feeling, and that the feeling is that of your heart shaking loose in your chest. Standing before you is a woman with her hand over her own heart, so whatever condition you’ve suddenly been afflicted with is obviously contagious. Neither of you says a word, but she opens the door wider to let you in, and two small children rush over to the woman’s side.

  “It’s her,” the younger one, a girl, says. She’s about eight years old, her thick hair in a side ponytail, and she looks at you with a mixture of fascination and fear, the way that kids look at things they’ve been told about but have not yet seen, like a body at a wake. The girl’s brother, who’s just a little taller than the girl, keeps a safer distance, his black eyes fixed on you like on a television screen. From somewhere away from the door and the huddled mass of human that’s accumulated there, someone calls out, “Hi.” The source is a buzz-cut kid in a black sweatshirt, his posture as bad as yours. It must be Adnan, that oldest son, that legitimate firstborn.

  There’s someone sitting next to him at the table, too, her hands wrapped around a teacup that has to be close to shattering under her grip.

  “Mom?” you ask. It comes out as a question because despite what you’re seeing, it’s impossible that she’s there. But then again, it seems impossible that you’re there, too.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Elsie

  I couldn’t tell if it was nerves or childbirth that unsteadied my legs as I walked the staircase, but I took the steps one at a time as I climbed down, first one foot on the plank and then the next one landing right beside it, the way toddlers do. My free hand clung to the rail for support until I changed my mind and held the baby to my chest with both hands instead of one, then switched back again, not knowing which would keep us safer. Eighteen steps later and we were on the landing, both of us okay for now, even though I worried about crushing her in my arms, which were holding her too tightly. I tried to loosen my clutch around her but I couldn’t. I was too afraid of losing her. Even off the stairs, I walked a pace at a time, one foot meeting the other ahead of it like a bride walking down the aisle. A bride in heather-gray sweats, dyed pink with blood.

  The radio was on, a stream of talk radio raging about war or taxes or traffic, something to get Yllka’s heart pumping before the Turkish coffee kicked in. It was barely dawn, and I imagined the shuffle of her slippers over the linoleum floor. I knocked once, but didn’t hear any footsteps move toward me, so I knocked again, and again, until finally I opened the door and let myself in.

  “Yllka,” I said.

  She whipped around and dropped the bucket of sudsy water she was holding in her hands. “Punë muti!” she shrieked and pressed a wet hand against her heart. “Elsie, you scared me,” she said. She squinted through the fuzzy bangs covering her eyes, then pushed them out of the way. “Elsie? Elsie, Elsie,” she repeated and dropped the sponge that was in her other hand.

  Yllka looked at us, me and the baby, hand to her mouth, eyes wide with horror. Suds dripped from her fingertips as if she bled cleanliness, and could just wash over us with it, but she held her arms close to her, cradling herself.

  “I didn’t know she was coming,” I said.

  “Oh my god,” she said.

  “I didn’t know until it was too late. I couldn’t move.”

  “You…Oh, Elsie…You didn’t know she was coming? Oh, oh, oh.” She touched a fingertip to the baby, to my shoulder, feeling us out, making sure we weren’t a bad dream. “Oh, this is bad, Elsie. How could you not know? Oh, never mind, you need to go to a hospital. Oh, oh, oh. Oh god, and Bashkim! Sit, go sit down!”

  “We should go,” I said.

  “Go? Where do you want to go?”

  “The hospital.”

  “Yes, of course the hospital. Here,” she said, as if about to hand me something, but instead dropped down into the seat beside me, collected herself, and when she rose, she was again the woman I was anxious and terrified to come to.

  “Okay, you have cleaned the mouth?” she asked. “She has cried? You have fed her?”

  “She has cried. I haven’t fed her. She’s been asleep,” I said.

  “She’s moving, though? She’s breathing?”

  I could feel her warm shallow breath against the nook of my arm, where she was cradled, stretching a limb sometimes, and opening her mouth like a bass out of water, silently gasping for something. “She’s breathing,” I said.

  “And you?”

  “I’m breathing, too.”

  “No, I mean, are you all right? Are you still bleeding? Do you feel ill, or in pain?”

  I hadn’t not
iced either until she asked, and then I felt both, immediately and entirely.

  “I’m sore. I feel weak,” I said. My heart began racing, the pain and weakness so great that I worked up a sweat feeling them.

  “Okay.” Yllka grabbed her purse from the kitchen table. “We are going to the hospital. Hand me the baby.”

  I held her tighter. “What? No, I can’t let her go,” I said. I was keeping her safe, and she was doing the same for me. Remove her from my chest, and who knew what kind of wound would open up.

  “You are weak, it is dangerous to walk. I will carry her, you will hold on to me and walk very, very slowly, one step at a time. In the car you will hold her again.”

  “Maybe we should wait for Gjonni,” I said.

  “Gjonni? What does he know about childbirth? I know childbirth more than every man on the block added together. We go now.”

  I didn’t answer. Yllka tapped my shoulder and pulled the baby from my arms. At once I began shivering, and the baby crying. She had come out but she wasn’t meant to be separate from me yet. She wasn’t meant to be her own thing. I was freezing without her, and she was hungry and upset.

  “See, she doesn’t like it. Let me have her back,” I said.

  “Babies cry, they will always cry. Stand up, Elsie, we must go.”

  I was crying, too. I felt the tears and hiccups finally, not sure how long they’d been there.

  “Come,” Yllka said, softer this time. “It will all be fine, everything is okay, we just have to take this first step.”

  “I’m scared,” I said.

  “Scared is fine. You’re a mother now, you will get used to it. Come.”

  I stood, and Yllka coached me down the stairs, got me down one at a time, followed so close behind me that her knees brushed against my back on the way. She was right about a lot of things, but wrong about one: we didn’t have to take just this first step. There were many more to follow, and each was harder than the last. My back slumped more with every stride across the blacktop to the car, as if my head weighed more than the rest of me combined, and my knees buckled under the weight of all of it together. Yllka braced me with one arm, held tight to the baby with the other, and guided me to the garage, and when I was safe in the car, buckled up and everything, she handed me my daughter.

  —

  I always thought that when life ended there’d be a procession of dead grandparents and great-aunts and -uncles to greet me. Maybe even my father, if he’d managed to crash the pearly gates, and if he was more interested in seeing me in the afterlife than he had been in the regular one. We’d stand in puffs of dry-ice smoke like Alice Cooper onstage and I’d manage to keep my white robe free from coffee stains and ring around the collar, because, after all, this was heaven and anything was possible. Instead, in this heaven, all I saw was white light, and I didn’t feel the peace that people suffered through entire lives just to get to. I felt groggy, that’s all. Maybe heaven was like smoking pot: it seemed to make other people really happy, but all it did for me was make me sleepy and too dumb to speak.

  “Hey, look who’s awake,” someone said.

  The white light was an overhead fluorescent lamp, and it was burning my eyes. I rolled my head over to follow the voice. I couldn’t really move yet. Mamie was standing near the bed, cradling something, but every time I blinked I saw bright light in her arms where the baby should be.

  “They cleaned her up and brought her in,” Mamie said. “She’s healthy, they said. She’s sleeping as much as you.”

  I closed my eyes again, but the light followed me.

  “She’s beautiful,” someone else said. It was Greta, standing somewhere beside me. I couldn’t lift up my head to follow the sound of her voice. “So tiny! She’s only six pounds.”

  They had the wrong baby, then. The one I had carried and borne weighed at least a hundred. I wanted to tell them to call the nurse so they could get the right one from the crib, but my mouth was too dry for my lips to come together and form the words. I sensed a headache but the pain receptors weren’t firing all the way.

  “Maa,” I said instead.

  “Yeah, that’s who you are now. Ma,” Mamie said. “And I’m Grandma. Twenty years away from a senior citizen discount and I’m Grandma. At least I won’t be too arthritic to run after her when she starts crawling.”

  “I’m in love with her,” Greta said. “I can’t believe it. She’s perfect.”

  I wanted to see for myself, but my eyes wouldn’t focus, and then they wouldn’t even stay open. Given where she came from, it wasn’t possible that she was perfect, but maybe she could be like a mutation, the kind that starts off an accident but ends up being the first of a stronger, better something.

  —

  The next time I opened my eyes the fog was gone. There was no mistaking the room for heaven anymore. Too many fluorescent lights and mechanized blips. Too many bright colors, Mylar balloons, bouquets of pink carnations and baby’s breath. The television was on and the door was open. The whole world could go in and out of the room as it pleased, except for me. I was tethered to the Craftmatic by a rubber tube jammed into my arm.

  “She is alive after all,” Gjonni said. Yllka was holding the baby while Gjonni held a thick ugly cigar between his lips. Yllka was grasping my hand with her free one, rubbing little circles into my skin with her thumb.

  “A beautiful girl, beautiful,” Gjonni said. “Who needs a son with a daughter like this?”

  “Nobody needs a son,” Yllka said. “What a stupid thing to say.”

  “You will have a son next time,” Gjonni said.

  “There is no next time,” I said.

  “Every woman says that after her first child. ‘Never again.’ The whole world would have died off if women could remember the pain of childbirth,” Gjonni said.

  “I remember the pain of childbirth,” Yllka said.

  “I remember,” I said. “There’s no next time. Can I hold her?”

  “Of course you can,” Yllka said, but she looked reluctant to give the baby up. “Do you want to lie with Mama, Luljeta? Are you ready to eat?”

  “What did you call her?” I said.

  “What do you mean?” Yllka asked. She eyed the sac of fluids being funneled into my arm suspiciously, like she was wondering how much morphine, exactly, it was necessary to give someone who had just undergone the most routine of all procedures in the history of mammals.

  “It’s just saline. They’re just giving me ibuprofen now. Can I hold her?” I asked again.

  Yllka bobbed my daughter a few more times before she placed her into my arms. “Back to Mama, Luljeta,” she said.

  “You said it again,” I said. “Luljeta.”

  “Yes,” Yllka said. “Of course. It’s her name.”

  “Says who? Who named her?” I asked.

  Yllka looked at Gjonni, and then to the button on the wall that would call the nurse. “You named her, love,” she said. She spoke gently, as if she were still talking to the baby.

  “I did? When?”

  “I don’t know, Elsie, we weren’t here for that. Isn’t that the name you wanted? It’s a beautiful name. It means ‘flower of life.’ ”

  “It’s what Bashkim wanted,” I said.

  “Oh,” Yllka said. “Well, it’s good that he had a say, since he couldn’t be here.”

  “He could have been here. He just wasn’t,” I said.

  “Oh, don’t say that, Elsie. He couldn’t help it. He had to leave, you know that.”

  “She’s just tired. And the drugs,” Gjonni said to Yllka, as if I weren’t in the room at all.

  I looked away from them both, down to my daughter, Luljeta, as if we were alone in another room after all. She was my daughter. It felt strange to think it at first; I wasn’t used to putting those words together, and they sounded foreign to me, like her name, so I said them over and over again until they started to feel natural on my tongue.

  “My daughter. Luljeta. Luljeta. My daughter,” I
said.

  “It’s a beautiful name,” Yllka said again. She was pleading a little, trying to convince me to keep it instead of trading it in for something I wouldn’t constantly have to explain. But she didn’t have to convince me. The name fit, there wasn’t another name in any language that would suit her more. I wondered how Bashkim had known that and I resented him for it, that this was my daughter and she was more of a mystery to me than she was to anyone else. I was holding her for the first time since I’d given birth to her and I resented that, too, that she’d been taken from my arms so quickly. They thought I couldn’t be trusted. They thought I was like one of those mama pandas at the zoo who give birth to tiny babies and then crush them to death by holding on too tightly. Or they thought I was the opposite: the mama panda at the zoo who takes one look at its young and walks away in search of more apples and biscuits from the zookeepers, its instincts obliterated by its own selfish wanting.

  Luljeta opened her tiny mouth and began crying, and I understood it. I knew what she was asking for. “She’s hungry,” I said.

  “Should I get a nurse to bring some formula?” Yllka asked.

  I shook my head. “She doesn’t need formula.”

  “Have you nursed her yet?” Yllka asked. “It’s not always as easy as it should be.”

  “I don’t think it should be easy. I just think I should do it,” I said.

  “Okay, but don’t be afraid to ask for help. There are lots of people who can help,” she said.

  I nodded, but I didn’t want her help, or Gjonni’s, or Mamie’s or Greta’s, or even Bashkim’s. “Can I be alone now, please?” I said.

  “Of course,” Yllka said, and she came over and kissed Luljeta on the head, and then she and Gjonni took turns kissing me on the cheek, and then I was alone with my daughter.