figures out what’s going on. It’s not just that he’s been replaced as the long-time apple of his tata’s eye. It’s a whole lot more than this, though I can’t figure out what. Silent Milo wants to talk, the silence of years is sloughing off like dead skin, and Bruno is half-frantic about . . . what? What is driving him so crazy all of a sudden?
And why has Milo zeroed in on Stefan this way? Is it because he’s become, at fourteen, the star pupil at St. Silvan’s? Or that he’s rapidly morphing into a long-legged young man with hints of incipient handsomeness about him, who clearly has a future? Whatever’s going on, Milo is determined to harness something in Stefan for his own purposes. And weirdly enough, Hana, normally so suspicious, so resentful of being left out of things, is fine with this. She’s immensely proud of her boy, who is not only the valedictorian of our school but also head altar server. It’s only Bruno who can’t handle the new family dynamic. Only Bruno, and of course, sweet little me.
I try to worm my way in, but Stefan’s having none of it. For the first time in his life, the family patriarch is taking him seriously. And after years of brutal rejection, he’s totally vulnerable, swept entirely off his feet by the attention. I lurk sullenly around, trying to make him feel guilty, and when that doesn’t work, I wait till he’s off delivering papers, then sneak into his room with my Brownie. What’s Djed been giving him? Because I’ve seen Brat carrying things when he leaves my grandfather’s room.
Nothing is hidden very well. Stefan is too trusting for that. I find a faded watch cap, a small bag of medals that look to me like something you’d buy in the St. Silvan’s Catholic gift shop, a red-and-white checkered scarf. I find some old papers, written in Croatian, which I can’t read, and a handful of black-and-white photos, one of which may actually be of my dead grandmother. I study this for a while. She’s pretty, I decide, though definitely looks exhausted. And then I find the box. It’s under Stefan’s bed, pushed to the back corner, up against the wall. It’s scuffed and stained, and at first I think it’s an old cigar box except there’s a lock on it with no attached key. I hold it sideways next to my ear and shake it. Something—it sounds heavy—shifts inside. I pick at the lock with my fingernail. Nothing. I find all of this highly irritating, Brat hiding something important from me, so I set the box in the middle of the bed, hold up my Brownie, and snap a photo. I snap photos of everything, and to make sure Stefan knows I’m onto him, leave all of it spread out across the bedspread, then flounce out of the room, slamming the door behind me. There.
This is what I remember. Out of the blue, Milo vanishing. One afternoon closeted in the bedroom with Stefan, the next, gone without a trace. Bruno going berserk, brandishing a pistol I’ve never seen before—even at ten, this concerns me—vowing vengeance against the kopiles, whoever they may be, who’ve kidnapped his dad. Hana, on the other hand, noticing out loud that Milo has not been himself these days (look at all the hours he’s been spending with Stefan, though she doesn’t say a word about this to the cops and neither do the rest of us, nor do we mention the murderous kopile theory). She surmises that perhaps he’s just getting old-people crazy and has wandered off and will show up soon.
Neither of these conjectures strike anywhere near the truth, which is that Milo is hanging in a tree in a big park on the other side of town. Eventually, he is discovered by some hapless homeless guy. His death is ruled a suicide. Though of course, confides one of the detectives to Bruno with the rest of us standing, wide-eyed, behind him in the living room, you never know for sure.
“My brother’s a police captain in Iowa,” says the detective, “and he thinks at least 60 percent of all suicides are actually murders in disguise.”
Bruno makes a strangled sound—of course, his father did not kill himself; of course he was murdered—but remains mute. Why? I’ve wondered this for years. All that foamy-lipped rage, bottled up tight in front of the cops, then spewed out so viciously on the three of us—day after endless day of fountaining bile—that for the first time I am sure Hana will finally leave him. Which, being the exemplary Catholic she is, she won’t even consider.
And Stefan? What you would expect. His grades go to hell, he can’t eat, can’t sleep, walks around like a zombie. Later I’ll see the same look on kids’ faces in war zones, the look of being pushed too far, of being shocked out of their real selves with nobody around to help them figure out what happened. This is what’s happening to Stefan, because Hana and Bruno, neither of whom believe in psychology, much less in something so completely nonproductive as clinical depression, are worthless at this point. As for me, as long as I stay angry enough at Djed for killing himself, I don’t have to feel sad.
In another year—by now it is 1970—Stefan is well over six feet tall with hair the same color and length as mine. His horn-rims have given way to hip-looking gold granny glasses, and he is about an inch away from getting booted out of St. Silvan’s. Bruno gets livid just looking at him, has endless theories about drug-dealing, needle-sharing, war-protesting faggotry. I’m only eleven, but even to someone as clueless as me this sounds like an exaggeration. Not that I come to his defense. Most of Stefan’s time, as far as I can tell, is spent lounging in the park with a couple of bell-bottomed, dope-smoking losers from the public high school down the road, neither of whom wants a kid sister around. So the day Bruno uncovers a stash of pot in Stefan’s room and officially throws him out, I am momentarily, perversely glad. I haven’t had a brother since Milo died, not really, and whose fault it that? Not mine, that’s for sure.
The next day, before Bruno gets home from work, Stefan makes a quick, quiet visit to the house. I am brooding in my room with music blaring and do not hear him enter. But then there is a knock at my door, and when I shut off the radio and open it, my brat is standing there with a brown paper shopping bag in his arms, looking uncomfortable and ashamed, as though he might be trying and failing to come up with an explanation I can understand. I stare back at him defiantly, daring him to try and make me feel better.
Finally, as though giving up the ill-advised effort at reconciliation, he shrugs. “My clothes,” he says, “and some other stuff I’m going to need.” And then, watching my face, which must have revealed right then what I was desperately trying to hide, he sets the bag carefully on the floor and takes me into his arms. Instantly, the waterworks come on, a flood of them down the front of his old green T-shirt. “Oh, Eva,” he murmurs into my hair, “don’t worry about me, okay? It’s not as bad as you think. Okay?” And after I finish with the snorting and the gulping and the pathetic little moans of sorrow and despair, he adds, “Be strong, little sister. And get the hell out of here as soon as you can.”
Afterward, I take myself and my grief-swollen eyes into his abandoned bedroom and make my search. He’s taken some of his underwear, a couple of shirts, some jeans, his tennis shoes. A few books are missing from the shelf. On the bedspread is a neat stack of Milo’s crap: the red-and-white checkered scarf, the cluster of old papers in Croatian, the watch cap, the bag of cheap religious medals. The black-and-white photos, including the one of my massacred grandmother.
When I peer under the bed, I see that the locked box is gone.
Much as I hate to admit it, Robert was probably right about me. There’s a coldness inside that can scare people—men—while attracting them in ways that must feel vaguely uncomfortable to them, no doubt what eventually kills each of these relationships. I’m not the kind of woman who’s going to cling. They don’t have to worry about being guilt-tripped or grasped at with desperate female fingers should they decide to head on down the road. I got cured of all that when I was eleven. You can only feel devastated for so long—especially when you are a kid, especially when you are that self-centered—and then you start to harden up.
Bruno was actually my biggest help here. On the rare occasions he mentioned his exiled son, it was with loud, scornful assertions that Stefan was fine, no doubt making more money as a drug dealer than he himself was making at the steel plant, no doubt living it up and laughing through
