ALMOST MIDNIGHT. THEBES SITS UNDER COMPLETE darkness now—a darkness I’ve never seen replicated anywhere else. The proliferation of artificial lights in the cities where I’ve lived the past seven years has comforted me. With lights come people, throngs of people from a thousand different places. People who don’t know about my multiple pasts. I could be anyone I wanted when I was among them.
Here, dark as it is, there’s nowhere to hide.
In the parking lot outside the Parthenon Diner, I lean back in the seat of my open-roofed car and look up at the sky. It takes a few blinks to bring into focus, but slowly, the enormous blanket of distant stars begins to reveal itself. They’re up there, behind the haze of clouds that started rolling in after sunset. Threat of storms tomorrow.
I’ve spent the last hour in the parking lot, alone on this dark night, googling what I never allowed myself to look at head-on before. Rape camps. The Muslim women of Bosnia rounded up and tortured through rape as a weapon of genocide. I must have had aunts, cousins, neighbors. Generations of women from my family, even if I have no way of learning who they were—there’s no chance they all escaped this fate.
How horrible my mother’s end days must have been. What she had to do to protect us. She was Vlado’s prize, a spoil of war, and we were there to keep her compliant. He let us live so long as she did his bidding. And he was perfectly willing to let all three of us die when there was a chance he’d be exposed. He handed Christopher that grenade and he fled. Outcome be damned.
No matter how hard I try, or how deeply I research, nothing on the internet can bring my mother back to me. But, at last, I know what happened.
That’s something. It has to be.
I’m exhausted now. Deeply bone tired. No more planning, no more searches, no more calls. I press the button to shut off my phone—but before it can power down, the still image of Michelle from Izzy’s video glows back to light on the screen.
She’s beautiful. Not because of the makeup—because she’s filled with hope about her future. Denise Juliette Larson was too, in her engagement photo. Like Helen of Troy: faces that could launch a thousand ships. Did any of these girls, with their heads tilted toward the good light, their hair cascading in waves down their backs, smile into the camera and think: I’m starting a war? No—like Melanie had said about us, it was their job to look the part. A Greek beauty. An internet sensation. A perfect wife.
My phone asks me:
Do you want to save this picture?
Do I?
I should delete it.
I might delete it.
Another time.
Yes. Save this picture.
Just in case I want an insurance policy.
Or I need it one day to save somebody I love.
The basin of sky dips low, cradles me, alone in my little car, surrounded by darkness. Night stars shine through the cracks like Sarajevo Roses in the bombed-out crevices of the sidewalks from my past. Is my brother at a rest stop somewhere off the highway right now, stretching his legs and looking up at the same blue-black sky? Paul chose a serpentine route to Pittsburgh to hide his whereabouts. Indianapolis first, Bashiir said, but from there, it’s a secret. Without his phone, and by using an assumed name, my brother has made himself incognito—to everyone except me, that is. I’m certain that I know exactly the identity he’s chosen.
If I had level-two security clearance into the records at the Greyhound station in St. Paul, I guarantee I’d find that a Mr. Husein Gradaščević purchased a one-way bus ticket to Indianapolis about four hours ago. Husein Gradaščević, who loves freedom most of all. Who never lets the sound of church bells bother the call to prayer of the muezzin.
I won’t tell anyone that I believe Paul is traveling as the Dragon of Bosnia. The more people who know, the more danger he might be in, despite Christopher’s promise. Who knows what kind of network my uncle has? If he was willing to conspire with criminals once, it would be foolish of me to believe he wouldn’t again. But I’ll use my research abilities to track Paul once he’s off that bus and onto the next.
My uncle has his skills, and I have mine.