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Lovro trips out of his bedroom at three in the morning, heart beating a hundred-forty beats per minute in his chest, to the sink running, the microwave droning, and more than anything else, the fire alarm going off in a painful electronic trill over which it calmly announces FIRE FIRE FIRE.
He claps his palms over his ears and squints through the gauzy flat. The sheer curtains are closed against the ambient lighting of the neighboring infrastructure, and the air hanging in the room is weighted with something he can taste before he can smell—frying oil and smoke. There’s a fire in a pan on the stove. Volatile, golden light reflects off of every polished surface between the kitchen and dining room.
“Mama?” he calls.
Ana’s a shadowy apparition in her plum pajamas at the sink, folding into the cabinet overhang. Her hands tremble, one outlined darkly on the shiny steel curve of a dirty mixing bowl, the other holding the faucet, pulled from the sink, running the bowl over. Water sloshes on the counter and floor. She turns to the stove, and Lovro’s body reacts before he understands—his stomach flips in the cavity of his torso.
He lunges forward.
At New Year’s—not this year’s, but the one before—Filip worked his way through a fifth of vodka and half a fifth of whiskey between the two clubs that followed their pre-game, and about two minutes after midnight he started to lose it, a marionette with his strings cut.
Lovro had spent the holiday break ill more often than not. His parents’ divorce was finalized at the head of December, which was little in the grand scheme of things—his dad hadn’t been living at home for nearly a month—but did involve logistics such as custody and calendars and bedrooms and idiotic word strings about him being old enough to decide for himself where and with whom he wanted to spend his time. The sentiment was probably genuine on Mama’s part, but shined lacklustre on his father’s, despite the fact that he called Lovro twice a week and kept asking him over. Lovro never felt well enough to visit.
But New Year’s– New Year’s he was expected to be nowhere but out with his friends. In the toilet at KISS he ran into Nix (not Eva’s) and scored his first half tab of E. And at the second club Filip volunteered to foot the bill on his dad’s behalf. When the clock struck zero Lovro was wasted and euphoric. He had his best friend at his back. He had some girl’s tongue down his throat. He felt good, doused in sweat and alcohol and touch. The year washed off him.
Then Filip ran into him.
It was funny at first, is the thing that Lovro always comes back to. Tea was the girl’s name, he thinks, and she’d laughed into his mouth, her fingers toying warmly at the band of his boxers, even as he slung his arm over Filip’s shoulders to steady him. Couldn’t he see Lovro was sort of busy here? When Filip didn’t take his weight back they decided to get him to the bar for some water. Then, when he began to double over, they’d decided to get him to the bathroom. Tea left. Lovro couldn’t decide which toilet would have the shorter line. He directed them outside. Filip didn’t make it. The night devolved from there, in flashing club lights and street lamps reflecting off spilt water and eventually ambulance sirens.
Jakov had been the one to go with Filip, of course, and Lovro watched the ambulance turn the corner, crossed but remarkably sober. There was vomit, still wet, running down his shirt front, and he remembers thinking for a split second that Filip could die.
Watching Ana douse a grease fire with water is worse than that.
There is no humor in the kitchen, just Lovro’s months-long exhaustion combating his over-working brain, a nauseous confusion in his throat, and gut instinct.
He wraps his arms around his mother and wrenches her back, too late.
The kitchen is on fire. Flames from the pan burst and billow, out and upward, a column of fire. Soot and heat explodes into the room. Water and oil screech and whine against cast iron.
With the full force of Mama’s weight on his chest she and Lovro go skittering backward into the dining room, stopped only by her heavy table, which hits him hard and sharp on his low back in a way that instantly aches. He grunts. Mama drops her bowl. The alarm blares on.
“Mama,” he says, for want.
He’s never been so tired and awake in his life. When he blinks he can hear his eyes in his skull, a slow, sandy roll. His mouth tastes dry and awful. His arms sting.
Together Mama and Lovro watch as the flames die down. Through the worn cotton of her pajama top he can feel his mother’s breath jackrabbiting. Her hands grip at his wrists, holding him at her back, keeping him close. Slowly the fire settles back into the frying pan. He lets go.
The kitchen feels decisively acrid, as compared to the dining room. Under his bare feet the tile is cold and wet and grainy with flour. Lovro steps over to the sink and turns off the tap. The faucet head sprung back to the sink when Mama released it, so it hasn’t been running onto the floor. In the cabinet next to the stove he sorts loudly through various pots and pans and lids, but the noise fails in comparison to the fire alarm. Lovro picks out a large glass lid so he can see when the fire finally fizzles out, and fits it over the pan.
It’s comedically over-large.
He looks down over the pan, heat hanging over the stove like a heatwave. There’s a feeling at the base of his throat, one he can’t determine to be a laugh or cough. Mama whimpers before he can find out.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
Mama has tear tracks running fat and shiny down her cheeks, stark in the low light. At her chest and neck her hands are clenched in her top, over where he just held her, half-hugging herself. She nods.
“I’m gonna get—” Lovro gestures between the fire alarm over his head and the step ladder they keep tucked between the refrigerator and wall.
It takes Lovro a minute to get the ladder set up. One of its rubber feet gets caught out of his line of sight. He has to kick at its base to get it to lock, and the metal is icy and painful against his big toe. All cursing is lost to the alarm. The buttons make no sense. Mama moves to brace the ladder despite the fact he’s not even a meter in the air. He takes the batteries out.
Without the alarm, the flat feels cavernous.
He comes back to the floor.
“Hey,” he says, shuffling Mama out of the wrecked kitchen. “It’s okay. You’re okay.”
“You’re okay?” she returns.
Lovro thinks he’s okay. He thinks he’s fine. His body feels static under his skin, white and sheer like a plaster wall.
“I’m so sorry.” Mama takes Lovro’s face in her hands. Then his neck, his shoulders, his face again. His skin is thin in some places and bruised in others from exhaustion. A raw, red nick graces the turn of his jaw from his shaky shaving the other morning, still open and tender virtue of his persistent toying with it. Her fingers hurt. “I don’t know what I was thinking. Thank you. Thank you. I’m sorry. Thank you.”
“Hey,” he repeats, and hugs her again.
When Lovro was fourteen his father went on a business trip to Cologne for a month. He remembers the morning vividly, but only because he’s thought back on it so much. The flat smelled like banana pancakes. He whittled away the time until he would be late for school drawing on the sidewalls of his Converse. Through his bedroom door he watched his parents at the dining table, Tata sprawled in a chair, Mama fretting over a packing checklist. The third time she counted his underwear Tata stood, looping his arms around her and clasping them laxly at her low back. She took a deep breath, looked up at him, and her whole body relaxed.
Were there signs there? Three weeks later, comfortable away from home, his father had sent the wrong text to the wrong person and exposed himself, for the first time, as a cheater. He didn’t come home, when his hell broke loose in Zagreb; Jakov said he would if he really cared, and then turned green with regret and told Lovro that’s not what he meant. Tomislav was just being Tomislav, Mama said when Lovro’d asked. Just the same as his job was his job. Well, Lovro and Ana were Lovro and Ana, but Lovro didn’t think as much until the second or third time around.
When Tomislav returned, Mama had perfected the gluten free blueberry cheesecake Mrs. Babić on the sixteenth floor asked for, and Lovro’d perfected being taller than her. It was a strange realization to make the day before his father’s arrival, hugging his mama goodnight. The previous week had made him feel ancient, and didn’t settle well with the giddiness in his chest. But she smiled, and put up with his ragging on her before pushing him off to his own bed, and they’d both laughed, even if hers had been a little wet.
When Mama looks up at him now, and then turns her face down to tuck her forehead to his shoulder, he feels ancient. Mama smells just as she did then, hypoallergenic laundry detergent and lemon scented cleaner, but only under hardened oil and burnt flour.
The microwave goes off.
Mama flinches and Lovro jerks back, the same as he’d awoken when the fire alarm started going off. He reaches quickly back into the kitchen to pop the door open and turn the beeping off. A wave of melted butter joins the scent of blackened sugar.
“Let’s go back to sleep,” Lovro says.
“I was–” Mama gestures with her hands, frenetic and large but in a way that comes off as timid, contained. “I need to–”
“I’m tired,” Lovro says. It feels like all he says, these days. He’s always tired. He always feels sick. He wants a smoke, and he always wants that too. “Please. Let’s go to bed.”
He watches it hit her. What, he doesn’t know, but there must be something in him, or his voice, that turns her over.
“Okay. Okay.”
She lets him guide her to her bedroom door, and hugs him high around his shoulders, pressing her cheek against his, then a kiss to his temple. He untangles himself from her and ducks back to his own room.