The Blood Debt

Chapter 8

Luljeta

The first time Roman brought Ayla Moore to the house, I was fifteen and I remember waiting for her with the enthusiasm of someone waiting to meet their own death. Once the daughter, and now the sister of a mobster, I was always going to be able to empathise with Ayla Moore.

I thought it was a bad idea from the start and that no good could come from this insatiable bloodlust my mother insisted on, especially when it was directed at someone who had nothing to do with Esad's death. But what would I know, I was just a kid.

I used to feel bad about not hating Ayla like my mother did, but her imprisonment at Roman's hands only made me feel a kind of solidarity with her.

We never spoke about it that year, but we all knew that what we were doing was wrong. Ayla's presence infected us like a disease that year. Hakmarrja was meant to alleviate our collective misery, but instead it compounded it. It was easy for us to blame Ayla for everything that happened that year; how all the joy had been sucked out of our lives and been replaced by death and uncertainty, but deep down we knew she was just as much a victim as we were.

Moms tell their kids they don't have favourites, but ours used to tell us openly that Esad was hers, and she took his death much harder than she did our fathers. He was her golden child and I was a close second by default; the only girl in a family of three boys, but one that would nevertheless be expected to get married before twenty-five, because remaining unwed would be my life's greatest misfortune. Rejab came in at number three, and even though I'm the youngest, mother would refer to him as her baby because he was the youngest son. Albanians are an unashamedly patriarchal society; men are born to rule and women are born to serve and in a family like mine everyone knows their place. That left Roman in last place. He was always too head-strong to come anywhere but last, too quick to point out mother's faults to ever be her favourite. Oddly it was those very qualities she disliked about him, that finally brought her back to the land of the living; his refusal to let her wallow in bed all day and pop pills, surviving on a diet of oxygen and Lexapro, like she's done her whole life. Roman's is a tough kind of love and he gives it, even when you don't want it.

When my dad died, Esad let me stay at home for a month. When Esad died, Roman said I had to go back to school after the funeral, which for Muslims, even if we aren't the most practising, is faster than you can spell rigour mortis.

When I offered to stay at home and help take care of mom like I did when father died, Roman told me I was her child, and it was about time she remembered she was the mother. When he decided that she was well enough for him to move out again, he asked me if I was okay with that before he said anything to her. So while he might be her least favourite son, he's always been my favourite brother. So when I tell him that he shouldn't bring Ayla to the house, and he tells me that this is necessary for mom to move on, I don't say 'imagine if that were me,' because I want to believe that Roman knows best, but it turns out that he makes mistakes too.

When I first meet her, not only can I not hate her, I actually try to save her from my mother's clutches, but Roman stops me dead in my tracks with a glare that tells me to be quiet and sit the fuck down.

He brings her to the house in Brookville while we wait for her in the family room like an audience at the  gladiatorial games. Only Ayla's not a gladiator; she isn't armed; she isn't versed in violent combat like my family is. My mother sits waiting for her on the edge of the sofa, her hands folded tightly over her lap, still dressed in black from head to toe, while I sit as far away as I can and Rejab sits in another armchair, tapping his foot incessantly in an otherwise silent room.

When she walks into the room behind Roman, the uncertainty of her place in our home is etched into her face. She looks frightened like she's marching to the sound of her own death knell. Her eyes survey the triangle of Berisha that surround her but only briefly before she casts her long lashes down, making me sink with shame into the sofa.