Page 17 of Wished

The tiny kitchen of our two-bedroom apartment is overly warm. There’s fresh bread baking in the oven, kicking out heat, and a pot of homemade stock is simmering on the stove, sending warm steam into the air, scented with thyme, oregano, and summer savory.

This kitchen is barely big enough for one person, but somehow we always manage to cram at least three people into its tiny confines.

Our apartment was built in the 1950s, post-war, when efficiency and utility were more important than beauty. There was an architectural style called brutalism that influenced the development of many, many hideously hollow-eyed, soulless buildings, where rooms were tiny, often without windows, and without light.

I think architecture reflects the state of a nation’s soul and its ideals. If a country aspires to beauty and elevation of the human soul, you can see it in its monuments, its churches, its government buildings, and its schools. But if a country seeks to debase, to discourage, and to suppress; if the nation has lost the belief that humanity should always seek beauty and love, that we can aspire to more—well, you can see that in the architecture too. If you want to know the state of a country, look at what they’re building.

I think Geneva has some of the most romantic architecture in the world. Just look at the beauty of the Barone Estate. The elegant stone buildings. The spires of churches. The stone chateaus lining the lake.

Ignore the post-war concrete boxes.

My mom moved us into our apartment after Emme’s dad left. They had an explosive marriage. They met in Detroit at a car show, married after one week, and we’d packed up and moved to Geneva a day after the wedding. My mom claims she married Emmanuel because she was still gripped by the grief of my dad dying. She wasn’t thinking straight; she only wanted to feel something besides the yawning pain of my dad’s absence.

She succeeded.

My mom’s marriage to Emmanuel lasted six years. It consisted of mortars and shells lobbed over a crumbling brick wall of passion. Yelling, throwing dishes, pounding against locked doors—they were all part of the great marriage war. Emme was born six months before he left, and thankfully, she doesn’t remember any of it. I remember too much of it. If I’d been a genie then, I would’ve wished Emmanuel away.

However, when I was seventeen, he finally left in a blitzkrieg of red-faced shouting to go and raise shrimp in Vietnam, where another woman waited with open arms.

We moved to our apartment. It was dirt cheap. It was safe. It was quiet.

It was also ugly, boxy, and post-war. However, my mom had just come out of a war, so it matched her mindset. Regardless, we’ve been here eight years, and now the tiny square rooms, the tiny kitchen, and the windowless bedrooms aren’t so dismal anymore.

The walls are painted creamy yellow to capture the slivers of light that fall through the narrow living-room windows. I sewed bright red couch and chair covers to hide the old, lumpy gray fabric Emmanuel preferred. We have tie-dye throw pillows, colorful pillar candles, and Emme’s watercolors, which hang on a clothesline in the living room, are taped over the kitchen sink, and are tacked to our plywood cupboards.

It’s a home.

And someday, if my mom gets her wish, we’ll leave our post-war apartment and find ourselves a stone cottage in the countryside to better match the hope my mom has for our futures.

“All right,” my mom says, gripping my chin in her hand and tilting my face up to the kitchen’s fluorescent light. “I can’t take it anymore. Why are you crying?”

I can’t deny that I’m crying since tears are, at this very moment, running down my cheeks. But I can make an excuse.

“Onions.” I gesture to the bowl full of the chopped remains of at least fifteen onions.

My mom huffs. It’s one of her superpowers. She can load an entire conversation into a single exhale.

She shakes her head, and I realize that I was wrong. Onion tears don’t disguise real tears. Or it’s that you can’t fool your own mother. My mom’s eyes are sharp, and even when she’s exhausted from pulling a double shift she’s not fooled.

“Fine. It’s not just the onions.”

“That’s what I thought.” My mom nods. She looks a lot like me, except she’s cut her dark, curly hair in a short bob and she has more stress lines on her forehead than any fifty-year-old deserves.

Emme looks up from the watercolor she’s painting. She’s at the kitchen table, a paintbrush in her hand, a purply brown glass of paint water at her elbow, and a large sheet of paper with a watercolor lake and sailboat in process. She’s only eight, but she’s already a better artist than me. The kid has skills. It’s one of her dreams to go to the French Riviera, set up an easel, and paint to her heart’s content.

It’s probably spurred by my mom’s ardent love of Saint-Tropez—a place she’s never been, but dreams of visiting. Some day.

A glop of gray paint drips from Emme’s paintbrush and splats on the sky. She ignores it. I’m sure she’ll turn it into a seagull or something.

“Anna? Are you sad?” she asks, her eyes wide and worried.

Aww. My heart melts a bit and the stupid, stinging onion tears fall faster. I love my little sister too much.

“No,” I say, sniffing and wiping my cheeks with the back of my hand.

When Emme wrinkles her nose and my mom huffs, I say, “Maybe a little.”

“Why?” Emme asks.

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