Girl at War(16)

“Get out of here before I call your mother,” the woman said. “All your mothers!” Ashamed, I quickly filled one of my canisters and darted home.

Inside my mother pressed a hand to her hip and pulled at the strands of wet hair plastered to my face.

“Ana, were you wasting the water?”

“It wasn’t my fault. Some girls from school sprayed me,” I said. Silence hung between us and I mumbled a sorry to break it.

“Let’s hope everybody has enough to drink now,” she said. Then after a while, she smiled a little and swiped again at my hair. “At least I don’t have to boil any for you. You’ve already had quite a shower.”

I smiled then, too, and watched as she heated the water on the stove and bathed with a washcloth in the middle of the kitchen. My mother’s hair was the color of burnt chestnuts, and when she moved, it shone.

—

That night I arrived home from school to find my mother and father standing face-to-face, staring hard at one another. Something was wrong. My father was home too early; his fists were clenched. When the door swung in and hit the wall, they jumped. My mother turned to wipe her eyes. My father began plunking dishes and spoons down on the table with too much force. My mother busied herself, too, was throwing tiny clothes that had once been mine and were now Rahela’s into a suitcase on the floor.

“Rahela,” I said. My parents seemed to slow slightly at the mention of her name. “Where is she?”

“She’s sleeping,” my mother said. They’d moved the cradle into the threshold between the kitchen and their bedroom, and I peered in. Too much blood on the blankets, down the front of her shirt. Her breathing shallow.

“What’s going on?”

“The medicine’s not working. She has to go.”

“To the hospital?”

“There’s nothing they can do for her here. There’s a program transporting out of Sarajevo. We’re going to take her tomorrow.”

“Transporting where?” I said.

“To America.”

I looked around. There were no other cases, no adult clothes in the bag. “By herself?”

“It’s a medical program. They’ll take good care of her,” said my father. “Once they fix her up she’ll come right back home.”

“I want to go to Sarajevo with you,” I said.

“No,” said my mother.

“We’ll see,” said my father.

The power was on for an hour or two, and my father made a series of calls, his hand cupped over the receiver to guide his voice through the shoddy connection. At first I assumed he was trying to reach MediMission, but I noticed him later scribbling out what looked like a map, which he folded and put in his back pocket.

After dinner, when an especially violent air raid rattled the windows of our flat, my mother sprang up and held me and I knew I could win her over.

“Did you finish your homework?” she asked when we returned from the basement.

“I don’t have to since I’m not going to school tomorrow,” I tried.

My mother sighed.

“I want to say goodbye to her, too.”

“Better go to bed then. We’re getting up early.”

On the couch I lay listening to my parents shuffle around the flat.

“She shouldn’t be going with us,” my mother said. “The road isn’t safe.”

“It’s not safe here either, Dijana. What if something were to happen while we were gone? It’s better we stay together.” I heard the paper crumpling and remembered my father’s drawing. “Besides. Look. I called Miro and he gave me the latest intel. We’ll have to take the long way, but it’ll be clear. We’ll be fine.”

I stared at the ceiling, imagining the ride through the mountains with Luka’s father’s map, then some MediMission stranger carrying Rahela in the airport, on a plane, in America. I knew little of America besides what I’d seen on television, mostly cowboy movies they played on state TV Saturday nights. The United States seemed to me a wonderland full of actors who subsisted on McDonald’s, and I wondered if Rahela would go to live with someone rich and famous. On the news men in suits were always calling on the States to help protect us, but no one had shown up yet. Maybe they were just too far away. I slept fitfully, the kind of sleep in which you never quite lose contact with the waking world, and after just a few hours I heard the clack of my mother’s shoes alongside my couch.

“Time to go,” she said. My arms and legs felt leaden and I struggled to dress, rummaging through my clothes in the morning dark.





7


“Ivan, molim te, don’t drive so fast. We don’t need to give them a reason to pull us over.” My mother pressed her free hand against my father’s knee. With the other arm she cradled Rahela, who was too weak even to cry. On the horizon, day had not yet broken. It was cold; the back window was stuck half-open, and my father gave me his jacket to use as a blanket. Whenever he turned too sharply, Rahela’s suitcase banged me in the shin and my mother implored him to slow down. At some point I fell asleep.

When I woke the sun was noon-strong through the streaky windshield and we had already crossed the border into Bosnia; the signposts were written in both Cyrillic and Latin alphabets and the road circled the bases of the Dinaric Alps in a serpentine coil. We called the road a highway, though it wasn’t really—not the kind with streetlamps—and in the spaces between more important destinations it was only two lanes.