Wicked Like a Wildfire (Hibiscus Daughter #1)(22)
But this one seemed somehow worse than most, though it could have been the gloom of the rain-soaked night outside. The detective had insisted on taking us in late, long after hours, when the hospital depended on an underpaid and exhausted skeleton staff. In the dim, dreary hallway, we could hear the water beating on the roof like the rattle of dice in a cup, and even at this hour a few stragglers waited for attention in the seats that lined the corridor: a withered grandmother with mottled skin and scabs around her mouth, a little boy with a wracking donkey’s cough who buried his face in his mother’s lap when each bout got the best of him.
And then there was the moaning. It was faint but relentless, like the sound of the whistling witch-winds that sometimes stole through cracks in the walls in high summer, and it made all the fine hairs on my neck and arms stand on end.
After a brief conversation with a sallow-faced, tight-lipped nurse in crisp whites—I could see his hand brush hers, and wondered if he’d paid her to look the other way—the detective led us down the hallway, cutting a right into a massive room lined with cots separated only by thin curtains. The distant moaning we’d been able to hear even from the hallway was much louder here. I had thought it might be the cumulative hum of the sick, but most here were asleep and silent, save for snatches of mumbling and phlegmy snores.
We followed the sound down two sets of stairs, until we were well underground, and Mirko unlocked a padlocked door and shouldered it open with a grinding metal screech, bringing us to a stop in front of a room encased in glass. There was a set of clear double doors set into the glass, the vestibule between for decontamination, I guessed.
And beyond, our mother lay like a deathbed princess under fluorescent lights.
It was the ugliest sort of light, the kind that usually made anyone beneath it look like a riverbank corpse recently fished out of the water. But with her ravaged chest covered by thin sheets, and all that bloodied, knotted hair tucked away into a surgical hat, Mama was gorgeous as ever, so transparently pale I could practically see the finesse of the facial bones straining beneath her skin. Her eyes strobed, unseeing—closed, then half open, then closed—and she emitted a keening, unceasing moan like a deflating bagpipe, both too high-pitched and too soft to be so pervasive.
The moaning never flagged, not even for a moment. It sounded like the quietest torture, something so drawn out and tormented that only sheer fatigue kept it tamped down.
“I’ll be at the stairs,” Mirko said tightly, “when you’re ready to leave.” His footsteps clicked down the hall, then faded.
Once we were alone with Mama, I could hear Malina’s breathing speed up beside me, and my heart began to pound in answer. “Riss,” she choked out, stumbling against my side. “I can’t stay here. I—I can’t listen to her.”
I wrapped an arm around her, clenching my other hand into a fist until my nails sank into my palms good and hard, slicing sharp. “Why?” I whispered, wanting and not wanting to know in equal and opposite force. “What does she sound like?”
Lina closed her eyes, her lips trembling, and the fine blue capillaries on her quivering lids reminded me so much of Mama when I’d found her that I wanted to thrust my own sister away from me, to cauterize the image from my mind. “She just wants it to stop. It all hurts so much, and she wants it to stop, and she’s fighting and fighting with nowhere to go. There’s nothing else, I can’t hear her like I usually can, I can’t even find her. It’s like something feral’s trapped inside her skin, Riss. Like a dying animal that just wants to finally die.”
It was too much to take. I could feel steel slipping in, my blood turning to mercury. I had to be both stable and fluid, made solely of strength. There couldn’t be anything warm or yielding to get in the way.
We had to find her, the woman who had done this to Mama. Wherever Mama’s mind and soul were stranded, she was the one who had ferried them there.
EIGHT
MIRKO DROVE US BACK TO THE OLD TOWN, AND ?I?A JOVAN insisted we spend the night with him; neither of us could face going back to our empty house with the pall of Mama’s absence, her death or undeath or whatever it was, hanging over it. And there was the horrible possibility that whoever had hurt our mother might be lurking somewhere near, waiting for the chance to strike at us too. It seemed ridiculous that anyone would want to hurt us, here where we knew everyone, but nothing was certain anymore.
Still reeling, I’d told the detective about Dunja, and my missing bougainvillea sculpture—he’d asked for anything we could think of that might help in the investigation, which he meant to begin no matter what was happening to Mama—and then assured us that officers were posted around the house to keep watch.
None of us knew what to do with ourselves after that. My insides felt clammy and numb, as if I’d been floating in icy water from the inside out. Jovan made sure we were comfortable in his guest room, but after we were settled I could hear him pacing the living room beyond our cracked-open door, murmuring “God, Jasmina, God, kuku lele” to himself, followed by a quiet rasping so low and terrible I didn’t immediately recognize it as tears. I closed the door with a soft click, pressing my cheek against the warped surface.
Malina showered first, so she was already tucked up beneath the quilts in the guest-room bed by the time I padded out of the bathroom. I slid in next to her, folding myself around her curled body, and she tucked her feet against my calves. We lay together in silence for a long moment, listening to the rise and dip of each other’s breathing until we finally matched up.