A HOME LIKE SOMEONE ELSE’S HOME by Victoria Kelly
Once she’d dreamed of skyscrapers, street noise, and late nights in steaming diners; but she ended up instead in the brown, flat prairie on Highway 32, driving to a prison in Shelton, Iowa. It was a tiny, postage-stamp town, the kind people pass through on their way to someplace else. But, every once in a while, there are one or two who don’t make it to the other side, and Bobby Korvacev was one of those men. She drove to visit him with a lean, black-eyed girl called Yasmina in the passenger seat, and Irene didn’t know Yasmina very well, or Bobby at all. But all three of them had somehow ended up in this dying, dusty town, so far from where they had each intended to be.
He was just a name on paper then, a middle-aged man arrested for threatening his wife, and who soon became a Bosnian man arrested for illegal immigration. Yasmina was Bosnian-born as well; she and Irene both worked for a law office in Iowa City, though neither of them were lawyers. Yasmina was a translator, Irene a researcher. Other than that, they had nothing in common except that Yasmina was a beautiful young girl, and Irene was a young girl who had once been beautiful, and they were both driving to Shelton, Iowa to see Bobby Korvacev in his prison cell.
The men’s jail was brick, two stories tall. It could have been a schoolhouse except for the barbed wire on the fence around the basketball courts. Across the street was the shell of a train station with wide, white boards over its doors. They stopped at a pizzeria to have lunch that was crowded with women and children waiting for visiting hours.
Squeezed into a corner table, Irene rooted around for something to say, and ended up talking about grocery stores and fast food chains. “Do you have those here?” She asked about Acme and Arby’s and Taco Bell, ticking them off on her fingers, as if the Midwest were a different country from Connecticut.
Eventually they got around to talking about Bobby, whose first name was actually Bojan, although he had asked to be called something more American. “We have to say we’re his lawyers,” Yasmina said, “or they won’t let us see him privately.”
“But they’ll be able to tell we’re not.”
“I’m twenty-five. Twenty-five is when people graduate from law school.” She spoke perfect English, but seriously, as if English words were not to be taken lightly. She enunciated them with her tongue against her white teeth: people, twenty.
“What do you know about him?” Irene asked.
“Nothing except that he is married and he has been in detention for forty days.” She held up her hands. “Who knows what else? He can’t understand a word they are saying to him.”
“Forty days isn’t very long.”
Yasmina frowned. Irene had learned two things during her three weeks at the law office. The first was that immigrants could be detained for years before they were either released or deported; the second was that in six years her firm had managed to release only five people. What they really did was try to make them comfortable for the long haul; mostly they dealt with shaving cream, calling cards, and hills of paperwork.
Yasmina blotted the oil from her pizza onto a napkin. “I am worried that we have only an hour. Bosnians, if you ask them one thing, they talk forever. Because I am younger, it is rude for me to interrupt him.”
Irene laughed. “But you can’t think about him like an uncle or something. It’s a detention center, not Bosnia.”
“Your father,” Yasmina said, changing the subject. “He is living with you?”
Irene’s father had arrived a week earlier, bundled in a sweater even in the heat. In the doorway, he fumbled with a stuffed bear and a handful of balloons, the ribbons caught on the hallway lights.
She had rented a one-bedroom apartment in a building on fraternity row, where next door, brothers doomed to summer school lounged on the front porch with beer bottles in their hands. The building was tired from so many winters, the floors sloping like the backs of old men and black dust packed into the crevices of the window frames.
No one, since she’d arrived in Iowa, had asked her about the mass of scars on the left side of her face, which was rude because until they asked it would be all they thought about. Eventually she told some of them anyway, about the fire in her college dorm, and the masks of gauze, and about having to take her yearbook picture not face forward but looking over her shoulder at the camera, as if it were someone she was saying goodbye to. What she didn’t tell them was that two weeks before the fire, she’d won a modeling contest in a women’s magazine and had been scheduled to meet with the editors in New York that summer.
“You are lucky,” Yasmina said, dabbing her face with her napkin, “that your family is here.”
Irene shook her head. “Not really. My mother died a year ago. Alzheimer’s, then cancer.” Her father had arrived in Iowa with a stunned look on his face, as if she had just passed the day before. It had suddenly hit him that she was gone.
Yasmina hesitated. “My mother is in Germany with my sister. They are waiting for my father there.”
“Where is he?”
“Croatia, maybe.”
“Why Croatia?”
“This is the last place we saw him when we left Bosnia during the war.”
“But the war was – that was years ago –”
“Yes.”
Irene suddenly understood. “So why aren’t you in Germany with them?”
Yasmina shrugged. “They could come here as refugees, like me. My mother is Muslim and my father is Christian. That makes it dangerous in Bosnia for us. But they won’t come without my father.” She thought about it. “And . . . I have a boyfriend here now. He has a three-year-old daughter. She doesn’t have a mother. I guess I am kind of like her mother.”
After her college graduation, Irene’s father had retired and followed her to Iowa, where a college professor had found her a job. Her father slept on a couch in the living room, and spent his first few days wandering around the apartment looking for things to fix. He had never been retired before, and after a few days hanging around Dickson’s hardware store he had gotten himself hired. Now he left for work the same time she did, and when she got home at night she sometimes found him leaning over the fence at the fraternity house, talking to a couple of the boys.
It was close to twelve o’clock. People in the restaurant were starting to get up and collect their belongings. A line was forming outside the women’s restroom; makeup was extracted from sequined purses. By the time the line thinned, however, all the chattering had stopped. And what was left was the slow, silent procession of women across the road, bent under the hot sun . . . And, just beyond the prison walls, fields and fields of open ground, stretching in all directions like a cruel joke.
People turned when they walked in, the pretty Muslim girl and the white girl with the scarred face. Everyone else was Hispanic or something else; there was no English, only sounds Irene couldn’t quite understand. A sign on the wall warned that visitors could not enter in strapless tanks or short-shorts, and many of the women looked nervous or fearful when they saw the sign, shimmying their skirts down to their hips. They had driven, perhaps, hours. Irene wondered if it ever became a chore, making the visits, and what it must feel like to want to abandon someone you love.
In the corner by the desk where Yasmina waited to show their identification, a flag hung limply on a pole. Protect and serve, it said. On the far side of the room was a glass wall with a row of chairs and telephones; on the other side of the glass the men, talking to wives or girlfriends or children, looked only half real. It seemed possible that they could, even, be the ghosts of men, and one would never know, because it was impossible to touch them to see if they were warm. Life was on one side of the glass and on the other side there was something else that was not exactly life.
It was not like prisons she had heard about; maybe it was the heat, but the jail was quiet as a library. Many of the men wore thick glasses and slicked-back hair; the young ones looked like scholars, like guys she would have flirted with in college. In fact, the whole lobby reminded her of school, the clean, speckled tiles and the fire alarms and the sharp, white lights. There was a Coke machine in the corner, but not enough chairs. She didn’t feel right taking a seat when the other younger women were settling themselves on the floor, but they were supposed to be lawyers, and after a moment of panic she decided lawyers would probably take the chairs. Keeping up this ruse was part of her job; she couldn’t tell anyone the truth, which was that if every attorney drove eighty miles to feel out every case that came his way, he would be bankrupt in a month.
“This city kind of heat,” a large woman beside her huffed, her hands clasped tightly in her lap. She looked at Irene. “You lawyer?”
Irene nodded.
“I here for my son.” She narrowed her eyes. “He didn’t do it though.”
“Do what?”
“Whatever they say he do.”
Irene didn’t ask any more questions. It was a facility for detained immigrants, but a lot of the men had been discovered after committing other crimes. She wasn’t sure she entirely disagreed with the idea of sending those kinds of men away.
Yasmina returned from the desk, frowning. “Maybe we should call the office and tell them we are here.” But then they heard their names, and an officer was standing over them with his arms crossed over his chest. “You can follow me,” he said, and the other women turned spitefully to watch them go, not over to the chairs by the glass wall but through an actual door to the other side, the side where their husbands and boyfriends and sons lived and slept, dreaming about takeout and girls and driving fast cars down the highway.
They didn’t walk the rows of cells as Irene had imagined. Instead, he was waiting for them in a room down the hall, wearing an orange t-shirt and a pair of grey sweatpants. He was seated behind a long, wooden folding table, and Yasmina set her briefcase down before sitting across from him.
“Gosopodin Korvacev.” She reached over the table to shake his hand. “Dobro jutro.”
Irene also reached forward. “Mr. Korvacev.”
He pulled back and waved his hands at her, shaking his head. “Bobby, Bobby!”
“Bobby, I’m sorry, Bobby. I’m Irene.” She took the other open chair, which was set back against the wall, but didn’t pull it up to the table.
He had a pale, round face, but it wasn’t the face of a criminal. It was a gentle face, with three long lines across his forehead. He was in his forties; he had made an effort to gel and comb his hair. She was reminded of her father during her mother’s last mornings, when her mother would wake up lost and he would have to say to her again, choking on the words, “There will be pain, Eileen.” And he would have to help her change her underwear and brush her teeth and then change his own underwear and brush his own teeth because that’s what people did, although it all seemed like a terrible waste of time.
It struck Irene as odd that her father, in his last years in the Air Force in the early 90s, may have flown with his bombs over Bobby Korvacev’s house in Bosnia. “You kill someone,” he said to her once, looking at things she couldn’t see, “and they call you a hero. And sometimes you are and sometimes you aren’t.” She knew he was thinking of her mother then, wondering whether what happened to her was God’s way of punishing him for the things he’d done.
Yasmina was talking quickly now. She put her watch on the table and then leaned forward and crossed her ankles. For a moment her foot slipped out of her shoe and Irene caught a glimpse of a round, black imprint on her heel from the cheap shoe dye. She heard some English words amid the rush of Bosnian: domestic assault and collect calls.
When Bobby spoke, he was reserved at first, holding his palms flat together on the table as if he were praying. Yasmina sat back in her chair and listened. He had a slight lisp, and he spoke deliberately and rhythmically, emphasizing every other word, the way some of Irene’s college professors, lecturing on Baudelaire or Gershwin, had found themselves lapsing into meter.
Then, in the middle of their conversation, he stopped abruptly, and when Irene looked up she saw him staring at her. She knew he was noticing her scars. She drew in her breath and looked at her hands, and when he started talking again she tried to think of anything else except how she had ended up in the glare of this hot, stuffy room so far from home. She wanted to be with her mother and father in their backyard in Connecticut, hanging streamers for the Fourth of July.
Suddenly, Bobby’s voice got louder. She looked up and saw he had taken his feet out of his sneakers and kicked them to the side. He stood up across the table from Yasmina, and in the mirror behind him she could see Yasmina’s wide, frightened eyes.
He stood up, motioning with his hands. Something bad was happening. Yasmina tried to calm him down. “Sjesti,” she kept saying, “Molim te, sjesti.”
And then Bobby collapsed into his chair, throwing his hands over his eyes. When he took them away again he was crying quietly. One of the guards came into the room and put his hand on Bobby’s elbow. “Come on now,” he said. “Time’s up.”
Yasmina stood up. “But we have twenty minutes!”
“Time’s up,” the guard said again, and pulled Bobby out from behind the table. Irene stood against the wall as they passed her. When they reached the door Bobby stopped and turned around. “Miss Irene,” he pleaded. His carefully combed hair had fallen over his face.
She looked at him, startled.
“You are . . .” He struggled to find the words. “You are like me.” And then he hung his head, as if exhausted by this revelation, and disappeared into the hallway.
“The attorneys will not take the case,” Yasmina said when they left. “They will not win.”
Irene shielded her eyes from the sun. “But – why not?”
“He is schizophrenic.”
Irene blinked. “How do you know that?”
“They showed me his file at the desk. This is how they caught him. He went to a doctor raving that voices were telling him to ‘do something’ about his wife. The doctor was afraid; he called the police.”
“ ‘Do something’?”
“That is what the file said.”
“You mean – they arrested him because he was trying to get help?”
“Because they thought he was dangerous, and they found out he was illegal.” She frowned. “If he is not legal, I suppose it does not matter why they arrested him.”
“It isn’t right.”
She shrugged but turned away so Irene could not see her face. “It does not matter. The lawyers will not win with him.”
They were quiet as they drove. Irene watched as the little town of Shelton disappeared behind them. It was nearly three o’clock. Children were walking down Main Street, shouldering pink and blue backpacks. They seemed almost from another time.
“My boyfriend can pick me up at your house,” Yasmina said. “We live outside of town. It is quite far.”
“Are you sure? I don’t mind driving you.”
“No, it is all right.”
After a while, Irene said, “But what happened in there exactly?”
Yasmina opened a window to let the air in. “When I asked about his wife he got upset. He said he would never hurt her. It was sad. He did not seem to understand that what he said about her is not why he is being kept there at all.”
“Is that why he was crying?”
She hesitated. “He was in the Croat army,” she said. “But his city is controlled by the Serbs now. He says they will kill him if he goes back there.” She glanced at Irene. “What he said to you before we left – what was he talking about?”
Irene shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said, but she would remember the moment when she was old, when a troubled, wounded man named Bobby Korvacev had noticed her scars and said to her, you are like me.
They found her father on a ladder next door, fixing the sign above the fraternity house door. The driveway was empty and the brothers weren’t hanging around. Irene burned with embarrassment. “Dad!” she called, getting out of the car. “Did they ask you to do that?”
He waved and made his way slowly to the ground. Irene put her hands on her head. “You can’t just go around fixing other people’s stuff.”
He looked hurt. “They’re our neighbors.”
“They’re my neighbors.” Irene turned to Yasmina. “Come on up. It’s cooler inside.”
Yasmina looked up sharply, as if she had forgotten Irene was there. “Oh,” she said. “Yes, thank you.”
Inside the air conditioner sputtered but ran. Irene pulled some glasses out of the cabinets as Yasmina looked around at the cardboard-box tv stand and bare floors.
Embarrassed, Irene said, “It’s not much, but – ” She almost said I don’t know how long I’ll be here but then remembered that she had nowhere else to go.
“No, this is very nice.”
Irene’s father came in, wiping his forehead with a handkerchief. “I’m Charlie,” he said, holding out his other hand.
“Yasmina. It is a pleasure to meet you.”
“How did the interview go?”
“We will see, I suppose.” Yasmina was quiet for a minute.
“So,” Irene said, setting down the drinks. “I’ll get to meet your boyfriend today.”
“Yes. He is bringing his daughter also.”
“Yasmina’s family is in Germany, Dad.”
Charlie nodded as if considering this. “Nice country now,” he said finally. “My wife and I took a trip to Berlin a few years after the wall came down. There’s a lot of excitement there, a lot of energy. Do you see them a lot, your family?”
She frowned. “Perhaps soon. It is quite a lot of money at the moment.”
“Of course. Damned airlines are like robber barons. It cost me five hundred dollars to fly out here from Connecticut.”
“Will you go back there, to Connecticut?”
He thought about it. “I’m not sure.”
“Dad!” Irene stared at him.
Charlie held up his hands. “What would I do there, sitting in that big house all day?”
“I don’t know – whatever you want. That’s the point of retiring.”
Yasmina smiled. “What did you do before you retired?”
“I was an engineer.” He got up to tinker with a loose piece of trim over the window. “Nothing fancy. Spreadsheets and numbers.”
Irene stood up too. “I’ll be right back.” She went through the bedroom into the bathroom and stood at the pedestal sink, listening to the low hum of their voices. She was angry with her father, but she didn’t know why – because he was giving up the house her mother had died in? She wasn’t sure what she wanted from him. She washed her face and forced herself to look in the mirror, at the pink, distorted skin that ran from her forehead to the left side of her chin, like crinkled wrapping paper someone had tried to smooth over her face.
But it seemed selfish suddenly, thinking about the fire, to want more than the blessing of life itself, of standing in a bathroom in Iowa City in the hot summer.
When she went back into the bedroom the voices had stopped. She looked into the living room and saw Yasmina and her father standing at the apartment door. They didn’t say anything. Yasmina closed her sad, black eyes and put her hand on his shoulder. And then, very gently, her father reached up and patted Yasmina’s elbow.
This is what he had done for Irene in the hospital, when she was wrapped in gauze and the doctors said it was the only place he could touch her without pain. For weeks, he had sat by her bed reading chapters of old children’s books, patting her elbow. Now she couldn’t believe she’d almost forgotten how much she loved him.
Yasmina opened her eyes and saw Irene in the doorway. “Irene,” she said. “I have to go. My boyfriend is waiting downstairs.”
Irene was startled. Something in Yasmina’s eyes said they would not see each other again.
“He can come upstairs if he’d like,” Charlie said.
“Thank you. But we have to get home. And he has Sophie in the carseat. It is quite a chore to get her settled again, once we take her out.”
“We’ll walk out with you then.”
Outside, in the driveway, her boyfriend was leaning against the car. He was a good-looking guy, tall, with sandy hair and scruff under his chin. Yasmina stood on her toes and kissed him without lifting her arms from her sides.
“Hey,” he said, turning to Charlie and Irene. “Thanks for letting her hang out till I got here.”
The little yellow-haired girl in the backseat leaned forward and waved at Irene. She felt sorry for the girl, especially, because one day, Irene suddenly realized, the girl would wake up and Yasmina would be gone.
“Thank you for the drink,” Yasmina said. “You have a lovely family.” Irene looked at her dad. It hadn’t occurred to her before that having one person was having a family.
She watched them turn the corner onto Clinton Street. At the light, the boyfriend reached behind him and tickled the little girl’s stomach. In another life, Irene thought, that could have been her life. But then she remembered that without the fire, she would have been in New York, not Iowa. None of their lives had turned out like they’d thought. And the best any of them could do was to find a home that seemed, even if it wasn’t theirs, like someone else’s home.
Her father watched her as she stared after them. “We could go out to dinner,” he said.
She bit her lip. “There’s somewhere I have to go first.” She ran inside for her purse and searched for the paper the law firm had given her, with Bobby Korvacev’s personal details: name, birth date, home address, prison address. He had lived in a country town called Ely not far from Iowa City.
She went downstairs and got in the car, but her father stood in the driveway. “Aren’t you coming?” she asked him.
“Oh,” he said. “I didn’t know if you wanted me.”
“That’s crazy.” She laughed, and he went around to the other side and got in.
“This about that man you saw today?”
“Yeah.” She wanted to talk to him about the change that had come over Yasmina after their visit. But she wasn’t quite sure where to begin, or what she was even looking for in Ely.
“It’ll be light out for a while,” her father said, peering at the sky.
Iowa City was only fifteen minutes wide from one side to the other, and then they broke out into the country. They drove for twenty minutes down the same, long road until a sign said Ely and Irene pulled into a gas station. A man came outside with a bucket of soapy water and a squeegee for her windshield.
“Do you know where Rowley Street is?” she asked him.
He pointed. “Just off Main,” he said, “half a mile that direction.”
The town was all storefronts and brick and American flags, like Shelton. Bobby Korvacev’s apartment was the top floor of a small house next to a laundromat. Charlie waited in the car while she went up to the porch and buzzed upstairs. When no one answered, she buzzed the first floor.
A woman came outside barefoot, in a cotton t-shirt and shorts, and Irene turned a little to the left so the woman could only see the good side of her face.
“I’m sorry to bother you, but I’m looking for Mrs. Korvacev. Can you tell me if she still lives upstairs?”
The woman shook her head. “Oh, love, no one lives there anymore.”
“Oh.” Irene’s shoulders fell. “Well, thank you.”
“It’s so sad what happened there. Some men came a few weeks ago and took away all his stuff.”
Irene blinked at her. “Bobby Korvacev, you mean? But what about his wife?”
The lady frowned. “His wife? As far as I know, she died a long time ago.”
“But – that’s impossible. She never lived here?”
“No, he lived alone. Used to show me pictures of her. He carried around this terrible guilt, poor man. Said he came home from work one night back in Bosnia, and she’d been killed.” She paused. “By those people,” she whispered. “So terrible what happened over there.” She pressed her lips together. “I got the feeling she was the only wife he was ever gonna have, you know?”
Irene stared at her. The doctor had gotten it all wrong. The voices hadn’t been telling Bobby to hurt his wife; they had been asking him why he didn’t save her.
“Sorry I can’t help you,” the woman said.
“Did you find what you were looking for?” her father asked when she got in the car.
She thought about it. “I don’t know.”
“I have to tell you something,” he said. “I gave some – well, some money, to your friend before she left. To go visit her family.” He chewed his lip and looked at her. “Are you upset? I know it’s none of my business.”
Irene opened her mouth to say something and then, instead, she let out a long, sighing laugh. She was sure now that there wasn’t an escape for Bobby, in the same way that she couldn’t go back to that dorm room again, and get out before the fire started, and the Connecticut house would always be a house for three people, not for one. She hoped, though, that there was still a chance for Yasmina. She hoped she was already on a plane to Germany, with America and its corn and fast food and fast cars far below her.
“No, Dad, it’s – okay.” She tried to form the words. She had this urge to get out of the car and switch places with him. She suddenly wanted nothing more than to give him the keys and let him drive her home, like he had when she was a little girl, when there was nothing she had to do except close her eyes and fall asleep.
Victoria Kelly’s short stories have appeared in Colorado Review, Fiction, The Greensboro Review, Great River Review, and Slice Magazine. This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.