I started dropping by Mark Vata's hospital room to visit him. We talked in Albanian, we talked of Albania, we talked of conditions in Kosovë, as it was called in Albanian instead of the Kosovo of the English and the Serbs. I met his brother and sister-in-law and talked to them sometimes in the colloquial American English that had surprised and relieved me when I'd first talked to them over the phone. In my apartment at night, curled over my laptop in the bed that filled my bedroom except for a spare foot around two edges, I began to google Albania and Kosovo.

            I learned that Milosevic, the leader of the Serb-dominated Yugoslav government in Belgrade, had unilaterally rescinded long-standing autonomy for the mostly ethnically-Albanian province of Kosovo ten years ago, in 1989. Since then oppression had escalated until a resistance movement, the Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA, had arisen. World opinion feared that ethnic cleansing would soon be unleashed in Kosovo as it had been in the since-escaped provinces of Croatia and Bosnia. The US and NATO had intervened with ultimatums to force Milosevic and the KLA to the negotiating table in Paris. Still, a steady stream of Kosovar Albanians were fleeing to neighboring states, especially the mother country of Albania.

            I did not learn where my parents came from, why they had left, why they never spoke with me of Albania or in Albanian.

*          *          *

            "You missed the reconstructions," said Greg the next night when he was shoehorned into my bed with me. The reason I had so little floor space was that I'd refused to have a bed smaller than a double. Still, with two in it, it was not exactly spacious.

            "What reconstructions?"

            "Shoulder, knee, on your refugee."

            "Mark Vata?"

            "It's not like you not to observe an operation like that."

            "I was tired. I needed time to think."

            "We're always tired. Think about what?"

            I replied with a tidbit from a site I was scrolling through. "Did you know that over a hundred thousand Kosovar Albanians have fled from Kosovo into Albania over the past two years?" Almost to myself I added, "They need food, shelter, medical aid, volunteers."

            He rolled over to place his elbows on either side of me. I felt the density of his presence and his will. "You know that if you decide to do this, you'll be doing it alone." Then thought was lost in lovemaking, hard and direct and breathtaking as a swift rappel down a clean cliff. When I surfaced it was to the thought, "Do what?"

*          *          *

            I made a deal with the Vatas to exchange language lessons after Mark's discharge from the hospital. We would do some at the Vata's house and some at St. Margaret's when Mark came in for his physical therapy—keeping a sharp eye out, I cautioned him, for busses.

            The first time I tried to follow the directions to their house, I took a couple of wrong turns and ended up hanging a U-turn in a cul-de-sac. Struck by a strong sense of deja vu, I came to a sudden stop facing a stone house that looked like an old carriage house split into apartments. Something about it seemed familiar, even as my grown body felt suddenly unfamiliar. I shook off the feeling and reoriented myself to my directions, but the image stayed with me, surfacing later attached somehow to the image of a man, a hearty man about the age I was now, with a dark and bristling mustache.

*          *          *

            A few days later I called my parents at the home where I'd been brought up in Centreville, Long Island.

            "Did we have a, a cousin, an uncle?" I asked my mother. "He might have lived in the Bronx when I was younger, in a—"

            "No."

            Are you Albanian? No.

            "I was there today—"

            "Where?"

            "In the Bronx. There's a big Albanian-American community there, you know." I'd learned that from Mark Vata and his family.

            I could hear my mother draw a long breath. "It has been too long since we've seen you. Do you think you could come out to visit this weekend?" Then she turned the phone over to my father.

            "So," asked my mother, smiling up at me as she hooked her arm in mine to lead me into the house, "have you heard from St. Margaret's yet about your residency?"

            "Not yet." My mother was concrete; something that had achieved manifestation in the physical world attained an almost irrevocable density. "I've been thinking about that."

            My mother's grip loosened and she pulled back a bit, gesturing me towards the facing sofas in the living room. "Yes?"

            I sat on one of the sofas while my father whisked my overnight bag upstairs; it was unthinkable, in this house, for a woman to carry her own suitcase. The living room arrangement had always seemed to me like a furniture showroom, matching sofas facing each other across a coffee table with an open fireplace on the wall end. My father's progress back to us was marked by increasing silence as he turned off the television in the study, then the radio in the kitchen.

            My parents sat side by side now, facing me with perfect host and hostess expressions, my father tall and grey-eyed, my mother short and solid with perfectly coifed dark hair. The fact that they had chosen to settle me here, instead of in the kitchen around the family table, meant that they saw this as more of a formal interview than a family chat. The fact that my mother was not plying us with coffee and teacakes meant that the universe had spun off course.

            There was a newspaper, folded for reading, tossed down on the raised brick hearth. Usually my father read his papers at the breakfast table in the kitchen. When he saw my eyes on it, he refolded it neatly, creased the fold and tucked it between the arm and cushion on the sofa beside him.

            In surgery, you have to make the cut first in order to make things better. "I've been thinking about changing specialties for my residency."

            My mother's composed face fell.

            "To what?" asked my father.

            "I don't know yet. Something like family practice or public health." Something more . . . connected.

            "But these are not—orthopedics is perfect for you!" cried my mother.

            "Perfect for you!" I flashed back, skirting uncomfortably close to the outer limits of disrespect to parents. Maybe this storm had been brewing for longer and for more reasons than I'd understood. I rose to my feet, hands out to my sides, presenting myself as Exhibit A. "I am American, as you have wanted me to be." Somehow, in that moment, I understood that it was this—my arrival as an American, my . . . safety?—more than status or money, that had driven them to drive me towards the goal they had envisioned for me. "I do not need to be a, an orthopedic surgeon to prove it, or even a doctor."

            My mother blanched, then folded her hands precisely at her waist. "Even if you decided to do such a foolish thing, it would take time to make the change. You would end up with nothing to do for a year." To my hard-working mother being idle for a year would be like walking off a cliff without belay.

            My father rose to stand behind her, putting a hand on her shoulder. "Let her talk, Harriet."

            "I could get a job for a year while I think about it. You can get a perfectly good job straight out of medical school without a residency first."

            "A job, yes, but not a perfectly good one!" Not one that said you had arrived.

            "What job?" asked my father.

            "I'm looking into clinics, public health. Maybe something abroad." An unrecognized possibility shaped itself relentlessly into words. "Maybe even Albania."

            My father grunted.

            "Shqipëri!" exclaimed my mother, hand to her heart while I felt an ignoble thrill of victory at forcing something Albanian from her at last. She turned beseeching eyes on her husband. "George?"

            "What," I burst out in fractured Albanian, "is wrong with being Albanian? Why do you act as if it's some shameful secret?"

            My mother looked as if I'd slapped her. "Shameful? No," she said, shaking her head as her hand crept up to grip my father's on her shoulder. "Shameful, never. Why would you think so? There is nothing shameful about being Albanian! Do not ever think it!"

            "We were not trying to bury our background, only to keep you from being unable to grow from it to succeed in America," explained my father.

            I took a deep breath and leaned toward them. "A man came into my emergency room a couple of weeks ago. Nobody could understand him except me. After a while I realized that it was because he was speaking in Albanian. I had some buried deep in my memory, and it surfaced when I needed it. Why?"

            "Because you needed it, of course." My mother gestured with open palms.

            "No, I mean why was it buried? Why do I know it but not speak it now? Why don't we ever use it here, in our house?"

            My mother began to pleat her skirt with her fingers.

            My father circled back around the sofa to sit beside her. "You were in first grade." He looked to my mother for confirmation. I do not know if I'd ever seen his shoulders droop before, and hated the feeling that I had caused it.

            "First grade," she agreed crisply. "Mrs. Humphries."

            "Yes." My father nodded. "Mrs. Humphries." From the way he was drawing this out, I could tell it was sensitive material still. "She came for a home visit. Of course, we didn't know then that they only did that if they thought there was something wrong at home." He raised his hands, palms up.

            "She said," my mother took up the story, "that we were holding you back. That children do better when there is not a second language at home. She had tests, and grades, and papers." She shrugged, an alien gesture to her, then made a chopping gesture with one hand. "So we cut it off. No more Albanian, at home, when you were around, when you could hear. No more."

            That was it? I felt deflated. That was the big secret, the big reason? A thin memory floated through my mind, of my parents' voices rising and falling in a cadence that was not American, behind their bedroom door when they would have thought I couldn't hear. I felt a wave of sadness for what we had all been cut off from. Almost I didn't go on, but there was one more answer I needed.

            "There was something else that surfaced, too," I began hesitantly, avoiding my mother's eyes so as not to confront her direct denial on the phone. "When I went to the Bronx to visit my patient, I saw a house, a stone house cut into apartments, on Ivy Street. I felt as if I'd seen it before, and the image of a man came with it, a man with a dark, bushy mustache, about the age I am now."

            My parents were holding hands now. My mother looked at my father. He looked at his watch. "I am sorry, little one. We told you we have a job tonight; our manager, Dan, has made sure all the food is ready, but we have to supervise the event itself. If we do not go now, we will be too late for the set up." He stood, and my mother stood with him. "We will think on this and talk to you later." I had not been raised by Albanian parents to be ignorant of a parental line when it was drawn.

*          *          *

            When they had left, I prowled the house like a jaguar in a cage. My body craved a run, but nightfall was nearing and running in the dark didn't appeal. For a while I entertained thoughts of scaling the brick and clapboard walls of the house, but restrained myself with the image of the Centreville police pulling up, lights flashing, at a call from the Spencers next door.

            The computer called to me every time I passed the study door. It must have an address book, so all I'd have to do was sit down, open it up and scan for names that looked Albanian or addresses on Ivy Street in the Bronx. But that wasn't the way to go about this. The important thing was for my parents and I to be talking, and we'd started that. Besides, they used the computer for their business, so it was probably password-protected.

            Stalking through the living room, I saw the corner of a newspaper sticking out from beside a sofa cushion and remembered my father folding it away from my noticing eyes. I picked it up, threw myself down on the sofa and leafed impatiently through the pages. Nothing leapt out at me surrounded by blinking lights, though there was one article in the World pages that warned of growing unrest in Kosovo and mounting signs that the Milosevic regime was brewing something significant to quash it. I tossed the paper back on the sofa where my father had so recently sat and resumed my pacing.

            Averting my eyes from the computer on my next circuit past the open door to my parents' study, I noticed the television and remembered my father turning it off on his way back from taking my suitcase upstairs, along with what had sounded like the radio in the kitchen. It was unusual, I realized now, for them to have one of those on, let alone two.

            I strode to the recliner facing the screen and picked up the remote control. If I pushed the On button I'd get the channel they'd last been watching. It turned out to be twenty-four-hour news, with up-to-date bulletins of disasters around the world. Before long, a segment on Kosovo came on. I sank into the recliner to watch.

            Milosevic's delegates were arriving at the Paris talks daily with fresh absurd demands, buying time, speculated some, to mass Yugoslav troops on the borders of the troubled province. World opinion was running out of patience. Despite concern about further injury to oppressed Albanian Kosovars, NATO, backed by the United States, was said to be preparing for war. Reportage was intercut with human interest interviews with refugees.

            My parents had clearly been following this closely. No wonder they'd seemed on edge. Yet they'd let me go on about my own concerns. Guilt gnawed at me, followed by anger: why hadn't they shared this with me?

*          *          *

            Someone was banging on my head. I jerked it aside and felt a jabbing pain in my neck. I was still in the recliner before the television that was still on. The fringe of the lap robe I'd pulled up around me both scratched and tickled my chin. No, the banging wasn't on my head, or in it. It came from somewhere outside, and was echoing through the house. I focused on the remote control hanging loosely from my hand, pointed it and clicked to make the screen go dark, and pulled my body together to go investigate.

            Why hadn't my parents woken me up? Maybe they'd been tired when they came in and hadn't noticed me, or maybe they'd thought it was better to leave me be than to wake me up to relocate to my bed.

            The banging was coming from the front door. Someone was knocking on the door. From outside. Maybe my parents had gotten locked out. But this late? There was daylight seeping through the drapes. My mouth felt like a dirty dish, my clothes like a laundry hamper, my body like road kill—just like after a night shift at the emergency room, but without the coffee. I ran clumsy fingers through spiky hair and opened the door.

            It was very bright outside. A large man made larger by a hat stood with a strange mix of authority and discomfort on my parents' doormat. I held the door barely ajar. "Yes?"

            "Is this the residence of George and Harriett Pelham?"

            "Yes."

            "And you are?"

            "Why don't you tell me who you are first?"

            "Oh, ah, sorry." The man removed his hat, went red in the face, and stepped back a pace. "Sergeant Medowski, Highway Patrol."

            Had my parents, incredibly, gotten a DUI and needed bail?

            "I'm looking for relatives of George and Harriett Pelham of this address."

            "I'm their daughter." I was already thinking of the steps to get ready and out of the house, to ride to whatever rescue they needed. Clothes, hair, shoes, purse.

            Sergeant Medowski went back to looking large and uncomfortable. "I'm sorry to tell you that two people matching the pictures on their licenses were found this morning in a one-car crash, off the sea wall over in South Harbor."

            "They're in the hospital? Where do I need to go?"

            "I'm afraid they're not in the hospital, ma'am."

            I looked at him.

            "They died at the scene."