Wicked Like a Wildfire (Hibiscus Daughter #1)(43)
And then one of her strings had snapped with a twang.
It wasn’t her fault. The violin was cheap and already old, but Mama had flown into one of her senseless rages over it, rolling in that storm front of fury Lina and I both knew so well. Why couldn’t Lina take better care of her things, why couldn’t she have a lighter touch with the rosin, why couldn’t she be more graceful? Even if the words weren’t aimed at me—and even if they were utterly false, given how much grace Lina had even then—I felt each one drop heavy into my stomach like a swallowed bullet, until I finally moved to shield my sister.
“Jasmina, just stop,” I said. “She didn’t mean—”
“Not ‘Jasmina,’” she hissed back. “I’m your mother.”
“Not really,” I retorted, chin quivering. “You’re not.”
She slapped me across the face. And without thinking, I hit her back, hard.
The shock on her face—the sheer hurt beneath it, the unfamiliar etch of betrayal—frightened me so much I burst into tears. She reached for me as I darted past her and out the door, into the humid, salt-laden August night. I sprinted all the way to ?i?a Jovan’s house on bare feet, my sides throbbing with stitches and sobs. I pounded on his door like a lunatic, and when he finally let me in and gathered me into his arms, I could barely speak.
“She . . . she . . .” I sobbed into the silk-lined vest he wore even in high summer, that smelled of pipe tobacco, resin, and hot glass. My cheek still flamed with the imprint of her hand. “Why?”
He sighed deeply, his lungs creaking. “Oh, sweetheart. I couldn’t tell you why. Your mother is a fine, fine woman, but hard. Heavy as the earth, like they say sometimes. I think it may all be a bit much for her, that’s all.”
I pulled away from him. “And what about us? It’s not too much for us? You know what, I don’t care why. I just wish she’d die and leave us alone.”
His craggy face crumpled, eyes dimming beneath the overhang of his brow. “Don’t say that, my girl. Come, let’s go sit in the studio. Let’s make something together. Anything you want.”
I watched as he fired up the furnace, the crucible in which we heated the glass all the way to 2,400 degrees, a white sun-heat that looked like it might match the level of my fury. Then we cooled the piece down to around 2,000 degrees, still a bright, fiery orange but cooler enough to “fine out” or release the bubbles from within. By myself, I spooled the gather of glass from the furnace onto my blowpipe, like honey twirled around a stick, and transferred it to the marver—his was the traditional marble slab, not the steel most people used these days for their working surface.
And when the cool skin formed along the blob’s glowing surface, the glass was mine to mold: to blow with short, sharp bursts of breath, tweeze and shape with straight and diamond shears. I slowly exhaled my fury as I turned the glass into my bougainvillea through cane and murrine, rolling the sticky, molten scraps in colored powders for their hues.
“Slow and careful with your hands,” ?i?a Jovan murmured as I worked. “And careful with your breath. We can reheat each piece unless it cracks, but we can’t reskin your fingers.”
I worked with him for hours, building fractal offshoots from the leaves and petals of that primary flower, reheating glass when I needed to in the glory hole. I hadn’t known what that secondary furnace was called before, and it made me laugh when he told me. By the time we transferred the piece to the annealer, where it would cool slowly over the next day to keep from cracking or shattering, my rage and hatred had smoothed over and cooled as well.
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.”