They called me in to identify the body. My mother’s wrinkled face was black with ash and blue with death. Her eyes were closed but her mouth still agape, still gasping for air. Her thin hair was mostly burnt and she looked like a man. I could still hear her screaming my name in frustration from across the apartment, as she often did when I still lived there. For the most part I tried to forget that part of my life. I didn’t miss my mother. I could barely remember her at all.
Olivia had been the one dealing with mother’s foul temper for the past few years, and I cringed at how that was damaging her forever. At her age I had been living in Warsaw for a year with Artur. At her age I’d almost had a child, seen my future play out like an old movie without subtitles. At her age I was already planning my return to New York.
I stood beside Olivia and watched her chest move up and down slowly. Her arms had been burnt and her skin looked grey, but she was still beautiful, even in that state. Her long lashes trembled and although they were closed I could see her bright blue eyes. She was always prettier than me. My friends told me she had recently been responding to the boys in the neighborhood, who for years had worked feverishly to grab her attention. Puerto Rican boys, Brazilian boys, Italian boys, and of course all the Polish boys who felt they were most entitled to her affection.
It had been the same with me, even if I had succumbed to men and their ways at a much younger age. Olivia was quiet and kept to herself. She had few friends, and the ones she had didn’t know what was going on inside her. She used to lock herself up in our room and not let me in for hours. Mother had given up on her, just like she had given up on me. She was rarely home and when she was she wished Olivia and I weren’t there. Her job took everything out of her, drained her dry. She would complain about the men at the sites harassing her, saying disgusting things to her when she was in the middle of an inspection or grabbing her when she got on the elevator. She was cursed with a beautiful body and a cold heart at the age of 44.
In the past few months it had gotten worse, Olivia had been telling me about it when we talked on the phone. Mother had been fired from the job after she complained about her mistreatment. Jurek had encouraged her to file a lawsuit. He had been showing up more often now, and Olivia seemed to think he was genuinely trying to console my mother. I often tried to imagine mother being taken advantage of by a man like Jurek. It made me feel better imagining her fall prey to the same schemes she jealously berated me about when men became interested in me. Though I hadn’t thought about him for years, I seemed to remember Jurek better than I remembered my mother. He was tall and lanky, his body seeming to occupy all the space in the room. He was a barber and always smelled like talcum powder. He would show up on weekends and play with us before sitting at the kitchen table with my mother and talking for hours. Then they would leave the apartment to go on a walk. Olivia and I never knew where they walked to, but I knew it probably wasn’t very far. Then he had stopped coming for a while and mother’s temper had transformed into a quiet sadness. Now he was back, and he must have been talking to mother at the kitchen table as usual that night, because he was also in the hospital struggling to stay alive. But the other man lying in the hospital I did not recognize.
