chapter four

Our entrance into Europe was less impressive: Zadie vomited in the Munich airport.

It was a long overnight flight. The attendants startled everyone out of sand-eyed half sleep by snapping open the curtains and windows and serving orange juice and muffins that didn’t sit well with my daughter. As we sprawled in the airport chairs, waiting for our final short hop to Milan, where we’d pick up our leased car and drive to Mrkopalj, Zadie leaned over and wretched one convulsive splatter onto the marble floor. Then she quietly asked for a napkin, wiped her mouth, and walked away.

“Are you okay, honey?” I asked, following her and dabbing at her shirt.

“I don’t want everybody looking at me,” she said, sounding panicky, keeping her eyes trained straight ahead. She stole a glance at me. I saw determination in her face.

Could she be trying to prove herself to me? That she could be trusted to come along when Mom traveled? Zadie had said good-bye to me many times before work trips. She’d always been such a big girl about it that I hardly knew she’d noticed my absences. Maybe she had noticed. Probably she had.

One of the things I’d hoped for most on our trip was to figure out my girl. The previous year, Zadie, who was three at the time, had barely survived full-time preschool while I got back to my writing career in earnest, an anguished decision I’d made after years hunkered down in the Stay-at-Home Mommy Cave. Being away from home all day just wrecked my little towheaded daughter. Zadie threw fits from the moment she walked in the door until the Grand Finale Tantrum of Bedtime. Rather than chalking it up to growing pains, I blamed myself, assuming she felt rejected, as if I’d subcontracted her toddler years in favor of my own selfish needs and fears. Which was kind of true. Jim and I worked part-time when Sam was born, raising him without child care until he was four. By the time we had Zadie, we were tired of juggling schedules and watching PBS Kids. In the end, Jim took a full-time gig in one of those places where you have to talk to your boss to prove you really need a sick day. I accepted more magazine assignments because the silence of the office was way easier than parenting two toddlers. And, to be honest, I was probably a little intimidated about having a daughter. I had no healthy template to follow. I just didn’t know how that mother-daughter harmony thing worked and, well, I was terrified of failing.

As Zadie hurried toward a restroom sign, I stepped in front of her and lifted her into my arms. I held her tight, and her body went limp. Finally she cried. I stepped into the restroom and cleaned her up properly.

“You are a very good traveler,” I told her. “You were very patient on the airplane.”

“I’m tired, Mommy,” she said, rubbing her eyes.

“I know you are,” I said, wiping her face gently with a wet paper towel. “You fell asleep on the plane and then slid right onto the floor and slept all curled up like a little baby.”

She smiled at that. “Tell me about when I was a baby.”

“You were a very good girl. You were content,” I said. “I would sit in my office and write stories and rock you in your car seat with my foot. One time, I did a whole interview while I was nursing you.”

“That’s when I would get milk from your boobs,” she said gravely. Nursing is fascinating business for a four-year-old.

“Yes, it was,” I said. “I think we’re all cleaned up now. Do you feel better?”

“Yes,” she said quietly. “I don’t want to ride on the plane anymore.”

“We have one more short flight,” I said. “And then we get to swim in a pool.”

“Okay,” she said, taking a deep breath.

“We’ll be together the whole time,” I told her. “Like two fancy girls traveling the world.”

She seemed pleased at this, and we headed out to wait for our flight.

In Milan, Jim and the kids swam in the icy Novotel pool while I caught the shuttle to pick up the Peugeot we’d leased for a year. A smart black number decked out with a sunroof that spanned the whole top of the car, it was a few inches short of a station wagon, but big enough to fit all our bags and the kids, and it had a very essential GPS, which we set to a prim British voice and named Charla before charting our course to Mrkopalj, Croatia.

We drove a landscape that turned from Italy’s dusty vineyards to wide Slovenian meadows to jagged Croatian seafront. Mountains rolled forward, like great stones hidden under a blanket of deciduous trees and, later, the primeval evergreens of the Gorski Kotar. The first time I’d seen this land, alone and afraid, it seemed so foreboding. Now, with my family, the cool green wilderness was the realm of elves and fairies.

It was early evening under a moody sky when we hit the outskirts of town. Jim pulled over and we took a family photo in front of the Mrkopalj re-creation of Calvary. We drove the final mile into the village, where the trees backed away from the road, replaced by tiny stucco houses. Old stoop-sitting men with hands on knees watched us pass.

We rounded the bend onto Novi Varoš. Giddy and curious, we pulled in to Robert Starčević’s driveway. The three-story house was bigger than I remembered, a mishmash of diamond-shaped asbestos tiles and thick wood planks stained dark. On each floor, mullioned windows swung wide open to the world.

Robert emerged from a side door, a great brown bear squinting and blinking in the sun. He saw us in our car waving at him and startled in a panic. He stumbled down the steps. Was he weaving?

“Oh! Jennifer! Hello!” he said as we stepped out of the Peugeot. I hugged him and he tried to kiss my cheeks but missed. His lips smacked somewhere behind my ears. He smelled like old beer.

“We do not expect you coming today,” Robert said, arms up in an expansive shrug. “E-mail says you come tomorrow.”

“I sent that last night from our hotel in Italy before we went to bed,” I said. “But now that I think of it, I sent it really late. I’m sorry. I meant we were coming today.”

“We do not expect today,” Robert repeated.

“This is my husband, Jim,” I said, standing back a bit and indicating Jim.

“Oh, hey, Jeem!” Robert stuck out his hand. “Is good to meet you, Jeem!”

“Drago mi je,” said Jim, busting out his Croatian up front. “Pleased to meet you.”

I introduced Sam and Zadie, who hid behind me. Sam was wringing his hands. Zadie clutched my leg. They were jet-lagged and disoriented, and I couldn’t wait to get them into their jammies and a comfortable bed and assure their little worried faces that their mama had brought them to a safe place. Because Mama was seeking similar reassurance.

Which Mama did not get. Robert seemed flustered. Flecks of dust and drywall nested in his curly hair. “Your rooms, they are not finished,” he said, fishing in his pocket for his cigarettes. “They are finished tomorrow. Finish, one day.”

“I’d like to see the rooms,” Jim said.

“Yes, of course,” Robert said. He walked us up the steps to the second floor and led us through a narrow foyer toward a pair of French doors.

The rooms of the second floor were under a heavy layer of rubble. The main space was an empty shell of bare studs and stubs of pipes that indicated it would perhaps someday contain a kitchen. Three rooms broke off the main one. Two would likely be bedrooms. A third was sheathed in red tile, and upon that floor was some enormous mechanism—either a giant shower or a time machine, we couldn’t tell.

Construction had barely begun, because demolition had not yet ended.

I stole a panicked look at Jim, who had his hands in his back pockets, thoughtful.

Jim looked at Robert and raised his eyebrows a bit. Robert ran his hands through his hair.

“We do not expect you come today. E-mail say you come tomorrow,” said Robert. “We finish rooms in maybe two days.”

Cuculić appeared behind us. He was shorter than I remembered, his face thinner.

“Mr. Cuculić,” I said, and nodded.

“Mizz Veelson,” he said, nodding as well.

“This is my husband, Jim,” I said.

They shook hands.

“Drago mi je,” Jim said.

“Oh ho ho! Your husband speaks Croatian!” Cuculić exclaimed.

“We studied a little bit before we got here,” said Jim, all jovial. “We’re not proficient or anything, but we do our best—”

I cut him off. “Don’t get comfortable,” I said. “We can’t stay here. Look at this place.”

“Take it easy, Jen,” Jim said, putting his arm around me.

Robert, sensing he was losing customers, hustled us back to the driveway, away from the chaotic second floor, speaking in Croatian to Cuculić.

“Robert says the rooms are not finished today,” Cuculić began. “You may stay here, on the third floor, or you may stay above Stari Baća, until the workers finish.”

Zadie put up her arms to be lifted, and I picked her up and pressed her to me. Sam nudged in at my side. The one thing I’d dreaded most about returning to Mrkopalj—that we would get there with no place to call home—was happening. I’d done everything within my supermom powers to ensure that my family would be as safe and settled as possible on this journey. And yet there were details that even I couldn’t control. Details that I would have to relinquish either to fate or to the people of this village. On this latter note, the two beery dudes before me did not inspire confidence.

Robert surveyed our family and seemed to come to a conclusion. “We go to Stari Baća for just one beer,” he said. Cuculić shrugged, and he and Robert headed to his bright red Chevy, now sporting a great bandage of duct tape across the front bumper. Jim and I followed, driving one block to the bar in anxious silence.

It started to drizzle. I’d picked up right where I left off in Mrkopalj. Lost. Floating. Itching to get out. But this time, I’d dragged my family along. I looked at my kids in the backseat. They seemed to have grown smaller in the past hour. This was all my fault.

“Mom, I’m tired,” said Sam. “Where are we going to sleep?” Zadie had been looking out the window, but now she leveled her gaze at me. I didn’t know what to tell them.

“Hang in there, guys,” Jim said. “We’ll get this figured out.”

I had to keep it together and get us through this. I took a cleansing breath as we parked, then I led my family into the murk of Stari Baća. Robert retrieved beers and juices from behind the bar and brought them over on a tray.

“You stay in Stari Baća rooms for two or maybe three night,” Robert said. “Then rooms in my house finished, and you come.”

Cuculić piped up. “Robert says that you can stay in the rooms above Stari Baća until your rooms in his house are finished.”

“We are not living in a bar,” I said. “We’re just not.”

“You stay then, maybe on third floor of my house, or in rooms here in Stari Baća, until your rooms are finished. Three or maybe four nights,” Robert said, repeating the exact thing that I’d just said I would not do.

“Robert says you can also stay in the third floor of his house, where his daughters sleep now,” said Cuculić. “Then maybe in a few days construction on your rooms is finished.”

“I heard him,” I snapped.

Yes, I am aware that my foul disposition was not helping matters. I was worried about my kids. Zadie crawled into my lap. Sam laid his head down on the table and closed his eyes. They both looked as if they were fighting tears.

The men around me, on the other hand, were kicking back for cocktail hour. I couldn’t tell whom I wanted to throttle more, Cuculić or Robert. How long had these guys known we were coming? Nine months? Give me three stay-at-home moms and a pile of lumber and I could’ve built a house in that time. This all would’ve been a funny bar story if it were just Jim and me and we were twenty-something backpackers. Instead, we were responsible for two increasingly worried-looking kids, and the thought that perhaps I hadn’t led us into the safest situation was throwing me into another Mrkopalj panic.

Jim, noting the apprehension spreading over my face, spoke up. “What were the rooms above the bar like when you stayed here last fall?”

“The abandoned set of a slasher movie,” I answered.

“You want see?” Robert asked. The men led my husband through the restaurant area up the back stairway. I remembered my night in one of those rooms last fall. Battered doors lined a long linoleum hallway. Inside those doors, musty bunk beds made up with army blankets were shoved against paneled walls. Someone had assaulted the bathrooms with messy and moldering caulk jobs. The main renters of these rooms were visiting hunters and bar patrons wanting to get laid in a clandestine manner. I had been conscious all night of men drinking down below. Drinking a lot. And smoking. A lot.

Jim came back downstairs in less than a minute, shaking his head. Robert went to the phone and barked into it. Cuculić floated to the bar.

“Well, those are out,” Jim said. He reached over and rubbed my back. “That’s where you stayed last fall? No wonder you ran home so fast.”

I turned to him and said quietly: “I know we planned to go to Rovinj in the winter, but why don’t we go there now? We could just hang out on a beach until these guys get our rooms done.”

“Be patient, Jen,” Jim said, hands bobbing in front of him as if bouncing two basketballs simultaneously. “It’ll all work out. And hey, you were right—this place is straight out of last century.”

“Jim, those rooms in his house aren’t going to be finished in one day—or even one month,” I said. “Should we maybe talk about an alternate plan?”

“Everything’s behind because Robert’s mother died,” Jim said quietly. “They couldn’t help that. I just wish they would’ve been straightforward about it so we could’ve found something else.”

“We have nowhere to stay,” I whispered. “Don’t you think that’s a problem? I’m pretty sure it’s a problem.”

“You’re panicking. Everything seems worse than it is,” he said. “But it’s actually really pretty here. Is that the tourism guy you told me about? He’s being helpful now.”

“Judas!” I pointed to Jim, incredulous. “What’s so helpful about translating everything Robert says? Robert speaks English!”

“Listen, we’re here to find out about your family,” Jim said. “We can’t do that in Rovinj.”

Of course the guy was right. But being a mom and being a free-spirited traveler were feeling like two entirely different things right then.

Robert returned to the table. He explained that his daughters were clearing out their stuff from the third floor. They would move in with him and Goranka on the first floor, where his mother had lived (and died). The workers would complete the second floor quickly, he promised, and all would be well.

“You want, we go see now,” Robert said with another exaggerated shrug, his eyebrows raised and his mouth in a questioning frown.

Cuculić stepped forward. “Robert says he wants to show you his third floor now. You may decide then what you want to do.”

“I know what Robert’s saying,” I said to Cuculić. “Because he said it in English.”

“Might as well check it out,” Jim said, getting up and pulling me up with him. “It’s late. We’re not going anywhere tonight.”

“It’s not like we have any other options.” I sighed. “Thanks to these yay-hoos.”

A friend had given me a piece of advice before we left: Whatever happens, roll with it. We’d come to Croatia to open our lives to the lessons of the ancestors. That meant relaxing the standards a little. Or a lot.

Roll with it. Yes. I could control the planning for this trip, but I had to make peace with the fact that I couldn’t control what happened from here on out. I had to find it within myself to let go and trust this journey. I took another one of those cleansing breaths and gathered my son and daughter. We filed out the door in the boozy wake of Robert and Cuculić, who were chatting with Jim in broken English about the drive, the flight, and the weather.

“Mom, I want to go home,” Sam moaned.

“It’s gonna be okay,” I said firmly. “We’re together and we’re safe. That’s all that matters right now.”

“You look mad,” Zadie noted.

“Because I am going to kill Robert and Cuculić as soon as we have a place to stay,” I explained patiently. “But that’s more a logistical matter than an anger issue.”

“Jen,” Jim warned.

“And also!” I added, pointing. “Look at the pretty mountains!”

We looked out the car windows and tried to see Mrkopalj as Jim saw it. The earth rose in peaks above the village, vivid green from the rain. Open meadows peeked from behind the houses, blooming with early summer wildflowers in purple, yellow, and white.

When we arrived at 12 Novi Varoš, Robert’s home, his daughters stepped out of the side door, inching shyly down the concrete steps. They looked disheveled. Poor things had been frantically packing, rectifying the mistake of their father and I. We were now moving three very sweet-looking little girls out of their home. This did not improve my conscience.

“This is Ivana. She is fourteen,” Robert said. Tall and thin, with a head of thick and wavy blond hair, Ivana smiled at us.

“Hi,” Ivana said. “Nice to meet you.”

“And Karla. She is twelve,” Robert said. Karla made a small wave with her long hand. Lanky, with thick brown hair and wire-framed glasses, Karla could have a future as a women’s basketball pro.

A third little girl, almost Karla’s miniature, pressed against her dad’s leg. “This is Roberta,” he said, putting his hand on her head. “Roberta is five years old. She is like Zadie.”

Roberta smiled at Zadie.

“We go now upstairs,” Robert said.

“Robert says that now you go upstairs with him,” said Cuculić.

“Seriously?” I turned up my palms at him as I passed.

Robert slid back a rolling wooden door on the third floor of his house. We stepped into a space that was open and dorm-like, with high slanted ceilings. To the left was a bedroom with an upright piano, a wardrobe, a bare mattress, and a desk. Straight ahead was the bathroom. I poked my head in to see a lime-encrusted shower and slanted ceiling of knotty pine. An ominous smell emanated from the direction of the toilet (duly noted by the primary toilet scrubber in our family—me).

On our right was the main living space. Ivana and Karla pulled out a modern red couch with silver pegged legs into a futon. Ivana shook out three child-sized sheets, and smoothed them over the makeshift bed.

“You sleep here,” she indicated to Jim and me.

“Mom! Hi!” Sam called. We looked up. Zadie and Sam had climbed into two tiny lofts opposite each other, straight out of a Laura Ingalls Wilder book.

There was a small wood-burning stove. An old rocking chair in front of a big window. A round table and four chairs. A kitchenette with a dorm fridge.

Though it was small, the place was clean and bright, its wide plank floors stained gold. The heavy wood ceiling beams looked more than a century old. The girls had decorated with stuffed animals and snapshots of themselves and pictures of the Virgin Mary Scotch-taped to the wall. Underneath a Catholic calendar, a tiny dried-up holy-water font was draped with an oversized ceramic rosary.

I walked over to the window with the rocking chair. It swung wide onto a full view of the great green mountain Čelimbaša, less than a mile away. The rain had stopped. Black pavement glistened in the dusk. Behind me, Robert said to Jim: “Two, three days here.”

I turned. “Two or three days to finish the second floor?”

“Four. Maybe five days,” said Robert. “Then rooms: finished.”

He coupled this statement with a shrug that seemed to be his signature. One shoulder raised slightly, one eyebrow inched up in equal proportion.

I was feeling very tired. The kids climbed down from the loft and came over to me. I wanted to snuggle close like chipmunks in that stiff-looking red bed and sleep a long, dreamless sleep.

I looked at Jim and nodded once. “This works,” I said.

Jim turned to Robert. “We’ll stay here, then,” Jim said. “Two or three days.”

“Maybe one week,” said Robert, shaking out a cigarette and casually hanging it on his lower lip, relaxed now. “Not long.”

We all left the house. Cuculić or Robert, I can’t remember which, showed us the vast backyard with a huge garden planted entirely with potatoes. Robert’s backyard and those of his neighbors were not separated by fences. They all ran together into one glorious field of wildflowers, tall grasses, and garden patches, merging in the distance with a lovely low mountain. The girls walked toward the backyard and Ivana beckoned to Sam and Zadie. Surprisingly, my slow-to-warm kids followed.

“Well, shall we get our bags?” Jim asked, giving me a quick squeeze.

“Yes,” I said, watching for a few more seconds as my children receded into the wide meadow in the evening light. They’d never had a yard so big in their lives.

Robert and Cuculić smoked in the driveway. Cuculić called to Jim that we should park our car in front of the abandoned house across the street. Jim did so and we began hauling suitcases.

On the way up the stairs, I peeked again at the second floor. Jim and I have renovated a house. I know the look of near-completion, and the second floor did not have that look.

I dropped a few suitcases in the dorm. Jim stepped in behind me, laden with bags.

“This is going to be good,” he said, clamping a big hand firmly on each of my shoulders. “I know you’re worried, but we’re not going to hang around here and be miserable. We’re going to settle in to this place and have some fun.”

I looked at my husband and nodded, drawing strength from his calm.

Jim chuckled. “What do we have to worry about, anyway? We’re all together. That’s the main thing.”

We all slept on the foldout futon that first night, spooned together, windows thrown open to the cool mountain air. The mattress felt like a countertop and my pillow a sack of flour. I tried not to think of the sea. In the darkness, the silence of the village shattered when a drunken man sang in the night. Cats fought. A dog bayed intermittently. We all slept but Jim, who sat up all night in the big rocking chair, staring out the window with a smile on his face.