Wicked Like a Wildfire (Hibiscus Daughter #1)(20)
My glass bougainvillea was gone.
MALINA’S SCREAMS BROUGHT me back.
“Iris!” she was shrieking. “No, no, no, Riss, no!”
I thrashed my way back to her, sitting up so abruptly the world tilted and slid sideways. A rush of nausea swelled up my throat and I clamped my hand over my mouth, wrapping my other arm around my sister.
“Oh thank God, Riss, I thought you—I thought—” She buried her face into my neck, her shoulders heaving. “I thought you were gone too, there’s so much blood. . . .”
I looked down at myself. My front looked as though I’d been dipped in it, patches still shining slick. I trailed my fingers over the drenched fabric, feeling as though my hand belonged to someone else. It was sticky and cool, tacky between my fingertips as I rubbed them together.
Malina was crying more quietly now, but steadily, her nose streaming. “You were bent over her, and I thought maybe someone had attacked you both, and . . .” Her voice trailed off into a whimper. “She’s dead, Riss, she’s dead, oh my God. . . .”
I squeezed her hard against me. “But she isn’t. I know it looks like—it looks so bad—but she blinked earlier, and her eyes were moving—”
She shook her head once, a tight snap like a spasm, biting her lip. “She’s not breathing, Riss. There’s no pulse. I think . . .” Her voice broke. “I think she’s really gone.”
I shifted and folded my legs beneath me, but as soon as I tried to stand, the world grew blinding and trembly, as if I were inside a lightbulb filament. I let go of Lina and pressed both hands against my face until my cheekbones ached.
“I can’t stand up yet,” I told her. “Call an ambulance. If there’s anything left, maybe they can still bring her back.”
THEY TOOK MAMA away from us; we weren’t allowed to go with her, not even as next of kin, no matter how much I fought the paramedics and the police.
Nev had arrived long before the police got there; I dimly remembered pressing my forehead against her freckled shoulder, her arms around me and Malina as they both shook with choking sobs. At some point, a detective had peeled her away from us and then walked Malina and me over to ?i?a Jovan’s house, refusing to answer any of our frantic questions along the way.
I calmed down incrementally as soon as we were inside. I’d been in Jovan’s apartment so many times, for his family’s slava feast in November, other holidays, and my drawing lessons—the glassblowing, we did in his studio next door—that it smelled like home to me, apples and resin and aged wood. In the meantime, ?i?a Jovan had seized control of the situation with the deft entitlement of someone who’d been at the household helm for a very long time, long enough to outlive everyone else. At his urging, Lina and I changed out of our clothes and into his late wife’s fine cotton nightgowns and cashmere sweaters. For one stupid moment, I mourned the loss of my lovely dress, the tiny insects drowned in Mama’s blood.
“What are we going to do about these?” Malina asked, fingering a strand of ribbons in her hair. “Should we take them out? Since Mama—since she put them in for us last night, maybe they’re evidence?”
“You can do what you want, bunny, but I’m keeping mine,” I said. “She might have meant them as a gift. I’m not letting anyone take them out.”
By the time Jovan came to check on us, Malina had lapsed back into tears while I stayed dry as a stone. He coaxed us into drinking some brandy-laced tea, followed by a slug of straight brandy for good measure, then led us back to the mahogany table in the living room to speak with the detective. We sat side by side across from him, our arms brushing. Malina knotted her fingers in her lap until they turned white, and I curled mine underneath the table’s lip, gripping it as if it could hold me. All I wanted was to feel tethered to the ground, and I was beyond grateful for ?i?a Jovan’s strong, gnarled hands heavy on our shoulders.
“What’s wrong with you, Mirko?” he said in his quiet rumble. “I know all three of your grandparents living—and Petar too, God rest his soul—and what would they think of you refusing to let these children follow their own mother to the hospital?”
The detective shifted uneasily. He was an older man, with a pitted face and dark, hangdog eyes, and he looked almost as exhausted as I felt. “With all respect, Jovan, this is . . . an unusual situation. We can’t allow them there until the doctors have gleaned a better understanding of the, uh, the parameters of her condition.”
“Her condition? What are you even on about, boy?” Jovan rasped. “Jasmina was healthy as a plow horse, always has been. She’s been good as a daughter to me for seventeen years, and she didn’t have any condition I knew of. Why don’t you just get on with it and tell us how she is? If these children are about to be orphans, they have a right to know.”
The detective cleared his throat, a muscle ticcing in his jaw. “It’s, well. The problem is that we’re not sure.”
“Sure about what?” I lashed out. “You haven’t told us anything yet! There was so much blood, and I saw . . .” My mind flashed back to the mulched mass of Mama’s chest, and I couldn’t finish, my gorge rising. “What happened to her?”
“It’s not that we don’t know what happened, miss,” he said quietly. “We do. Your mother’s heart was crushed, by something slender but blunt, about like this.” He held up his hairy hand, palm down, so the bony side of it faced us. “Obviously, it would take a huge amount of force to strike the sternum hard enough to pulverize the heart and most of the lungs. And it’s still unclear what sort of weapon was used to exert this force in such a concentrated way.”