by Nina Siegal
She hoped this would have a calming effect, but right away she could tell she’d missed her mark. He gazed down at the empty beach for a while. And then he muttered, “Sometimes you talk to me just like I’m a child.” He had said it mostly to himself, then he turned on his heels and marched away, in fact just like an angry child.
Grace was at least allowed to stand there looking out across the lake, watching the sky darken in the water’s reflection.
Chapter 5
Breathe
“Um, yoooooo!” Karin cried out, trying to get Dirk to stop marching on ahead of everyone. She was all the way in back, probably too far for him to hear her. They were walking in order of self-importance, thought Karin: Dirk, Margot, Lotte…She called, “We’re supposed to look at the map together and check our compasses, remember?”
It was kind of a thing now, to try to stay with Dirk and Margot when they obviously wanted to be alone. A few months earlier Karin had noticed that Margot had a crush on Dirk. It seemed like it took a while before he responded to Margot, but then suddenly they had a little thing going. During Scout hours, in front of the adults, they hid it all pretty well, but anyone could tell if they saw the way they looked at each other when grown-ups were out of the room.
Karin had never had enough of a real conversation with Dirk to be able to find out how he’d ended up in the Scouts in the first place. His presence there, among the gentle and shy preteeners who marveled over a butterfly’s wings or camouflaged insects, seemed completely random. Maybe his parents had enrolled him as some form of punishment? Maybe to force him to be more down-to-earth? Dirk lived in Amsterdam and went to secondary school there—one of the private ones, she heard—and he was a wrestler, or had been. That made sense. Being a Scout didn’t.
Since no one was answering, she tried again, only much louder: “Haallooo? We need to figure out where we are and where we’re going.”
This finally stopped Dirk in his tracks. If he’d stopped any more abruptly, he and Margot would’ve banged into each other, like an old slapstick act in one of those black-and-white TV shows her mother watched. “I thought you knew exactly where you were at all times,” he said, not hiding his sarcasm.
Karin shrugged. “Well, even if I did, you’re not exactly following me,” she said. “But anyway, I don’t want to be the leader. Dropping rules say we’re supposed to find our way together.”
“Dropping rules,” he said with a laugh that sounded more like a grunt. “You’re such a rule follower. I say it can’t be that hard. There aren’t so many trails.”
Karin knew that was wrong. “There are, like, more than a hundred trails in this forest. Like, tons.”
That seemed to convince Dirk, but he didn’t backtrack, just waited for Karin to catch up to him and the other girls. The Scout leaders had given them one map, but they didn’t know who had it. They all had to check their backpacks, and it turned out to be in Lotte’s. “I’ve got it!” she cried out, like she’d won the lottery or something. She unfolded it carefully, gift wrapping she planned to reuse. It was too big to hold open by herself, so Margot held one side and Lotte held the other. Karin and Dirk hovered over it, but Karin was stuck looking at it upside down.
“Where did you say we drove in?” Dirk asked Karin. “Stud something?”
Karin paused for a weighty second before she said, “Stag’s Wood. Seems like we must have driven in through the Schaarsbergen entrance,” Karin said. She knew from coming here with her father that there were three car entrances to the park and two places where you could pick up white bikes to cycle around. The south entrance was where you went if you wanted more nature, the west entrance if you wanted to go to the museum, and the north one took you to this kind of weird castle-like house where the people who once owned the whole forest used to live, back in the 1920s or something.
“That would be here,” said Lotte, stabbing her index finger onto the P in the little box that indicated parking. “But we’re not there anymore. I don’t know if we went north or west or what.”
Karin turned around and saw the sun on the horizon, orange and blazing, and backed by a ribbon of purplish blue. “The sun rises in the east and sets in the west,” she said, trying really hard not to sound pedantic. When no one said anything, she added, “So that’s west,” pointing.
“Uh, duh,” Dirk said.
Karin, embarrassed, looked at the others to see if they agreed. Margot wasn’t exactly paying attention. She seemed to be using the moment of gathering around the map to press her boobs against Dirk’s arm and looked like she was daydreaming about something completely unrelated.
“I agree with Karin,” she put in chirpily. “She’s the one who knows what we’re doing. Let’s just follow her.”
Dirk looked over his shoulder at Margot. “I’m not following her,” he said.
Margot took an uneasy step back.
“Um, should we use our compasses?” Lotte suggested.
“Good idea,” agreed Karin, pointing to Lotte.
They all found their backpacks again, Dirk and Margot groaning, and fished around for their old-fashioned metal disks with spinning metal arrows inside. Using the magnetic force of the world, they tried to orient themselves. For Karin, it just confirmed that west was in the location of the setting sun, as it should be, but at least it was quiet for a little while.
Lotte used due north to find where they might be on the map. “Could we be here?” she said, mostly to Karin.
“I’m kind of in a bad position to see it,” admitted Karin. “Can I come around over there?”
“Oh, I thought for sure you could read it upside down and backward,” said Dirk.
“And standing on your head,” said Margot, trying to win back some of Dirk’s favor.
They jostled and moved, with Lotte still holding one side of the map and Margot holding the other, and somehow in the commotion to let Karin take a look, the map ripped in two. Margot fell over, kind of overdramatically, with her half, and Dirk swooped down and grabbed it, putting a hand out to lift Margot. “Hey, cool,” he said. “Now we have two maps!”
Without any warning, Dirk took off in a sprint, and Margot followed. “I guess you’ll have to catch us if you want the other half!” Dirk yelled back to Karin and Lotte, who stood glaring from a distance. He panted up a big grassy hill and disappeared over the other side.
The two girls stood looking at each other. “What the…?” Karin said.
“He’s such a…” Lotte said quietly, not finishing with whatever curse word she would never allow herself to say. Then she let out a heavy sigh. “I guess we’d better chase them, then.”
“Really?” said Karin, feeling defeated already. She could not believe this. It would be a really, really long night if they kept up this way. But then, after Lotte took off in a sprint, she ran.
The two of them bounded over a sandy hill covered with tall grasses, which scraped against their ankles. Karin figured they’d see Dirk and Margot as soon as they rounded a bend in the path, but when they got there, there was no sign of either of them. Lotte was panting pretty hard just from that sprint—she was kind of overweight and didn’t do any sports—but they nodded at each other and kept running. Dirk and Margot had to be here somewhere. Karin thought maybe they’d somehow found a hiding place in the grass, but it was hard to imagine where.
After a while, they came to a large downed tree that was so dried out that it was the color of silver and looked like a kind of driftwood statue. They slowed, then stopped for a minute to catch their breath. “Huh,” said Lotte. “This is so weird.”
Just then, Dirk came screaming out of the bushes, lunging at their feet and toppling Lotte. Margot stepped out a couple of seconds later and stood pointing and laughing. “Ha, he got you! He really got you!”
Karin wanted to laugh so that she wouldn’t seem totally stiff, but she couldn’t make herself do it. That was just mean to Lotte, and mean wasn’t her kind of funny.
It took them all a
minute to realize that Lotte, who was lying flat on her back on the sand, also wasn’t laughing, and wasn’t getting up. In fact, she seemed like she was having trouble breathing. She took tiny sips of air into her lungs, like she was winding up to cry. Her eyes, now directed at Karin, were wide and teary, but she wasn’t crying, she was stuck on the ground, kind of…choking.
“Aw, don’t be like that,” Dirk said, walking off, like he’d had nothing to do with it. “I didn’t hit you that hard. You’re exaggerating.”
“What’s happening?” said Margot. “Is she kidding?”
Karin knelt down over Lotte as the girl’s eyes, behind her glasses, started to look even more frantic. Karin put a hand on Lotte’s shoulder and put her face close to Lotte’s mouth to listen to her breathe.
“You knocked the wind out of her,” Karin said. “She can’t breathe.”
“Come on!” said Dirk, like Karin was making it up just to bother him. “I was playing around.”
Karin reserved the look of disdain she really wanted to shoot at him and instead sat down on the sand next to Lotte. “You’re okay,” she said gently, “but you’ve got to get breathing again. Here, let me help you sit up.” She dug a hand under Lotte’s back and pulled her up into a seated position, while Margot just gawped and Dirk literally walked off into the dunes, cursing. “You’ve got to try to take a few deeper breaths, maybe holding the air deep in your lungs.” Karin had learned all this playing hockey. She’d been on a team for a few years when she was younger, until her father died. She’d seen a bunch of girls lose their breath this way, and it had happened to her once too, so she knew how scary it could feel, and she was afraid for Lotte.
Lotte tried heaving her chest up, but that didn’t work. “Slower,” said Karin, and Lotte gazed at her like she was a life raft. She breathed slower, taking a sip of air this time. Then another. “Good,” said Karin. “Slow like that.” Little by little, Lotte got back to breathing normally. She was pretty upset, though. When she finally was ready to stand up, Karin gave her a hand and Margot came rushing over to try to help too, but it was too late. “Don’t come near me,” said Lotte, kind of croaking it out. “Your stupid boyfriend is a dick.” There, thought Karin, she’d said it.
Margot stepped backward, as if pushed. “Um, he’s not my boyfriend. And anyway, it’s not his fault you fell down.”
“What??” said Lotte, looking to Karin for confirmation.
Margot was a gymnast in school. Karin knew she did competitions and everything. During Scouts she was always doing cartwheels and handstands and sometimes even splits, out of nowhere. She showed off her perfect stomach with crop tops and low-rider jeans. They always had way too many rips, all the way from the top to the knees—the kind of pants Karin’s mom would never let her wear. If Karin was going to take bets, she was sure Margot could easily take Lotte, if it came to a girl fight. She really didn’t want that to happen.
“You’re the dick,” Margot said, but only kind of half committed to saying it.
Lotte blinked in a really obvious way and cocked her head to one side. “Um, not possible?” She pressed her glasses, which had been all tilted, back onto her nose.
“I don’t even believe you couldn’t breathe,” Margot added for no reason. “You were totally faking it.”
Lotte kind of coughed, and not even on purpose, just because she was still trying to get her breathing back on track. It was so obvious she wasn’t faking, thought Karin, it didn’t even make sense for Margot to be this mean.
“Uh, yeah…” said Lotte, turning her back on Margot. Karin was proud of her for doing that.
It was turning into two against two, which really wasn’t cool, Karin knew. It would take forever to get to the campsite if they were constantly fighting like this. Karin didn’t want to act like she was the schoolteacher in the group; she just wanted everyone to get back to the point. The trail, the trip, the campsite.
The three girls stood there for a minute and it was pretty tense. Karin had a lot she wanted to say, but she held it in. They all looked at one another, and for a split second Karin thought they were all going to start laughing.
Then there was this crazy howling noise coming from up the hill, and they all looked up to see Dirk kind of leaping into the air above them. He had a huge silver branch of that downed tree, which he was wielding above his head with both hands.
“I’m a samurai!” he cried, making a whooping noise as he swung the branch around in the sky. “Who dares challenge me?”
Chapter 6
From There to Here
Grace drove herself home, wishing she’d remembered to bring her earbuds with her so she could call her friends immediately and catch up. As a passenger with Martijn at the wheel on the drive down, she had determined that she would use this weekend to discover her inner Zen, take a bath and unwind with a good book. But now that everyone was gone, and she was on her own for the first time in actual months, she felt a kind of rare exhilaration. She could do anything, go anywhere, make all her own choices. No one to answer to for a full twenty-four hours.
It had been so long since she’d seen Krista, Nicolien, or Thomas, or even any of the mothers from school, for that matter. Before they’d married, this circle of friends had been such close confidants, but lately Grace had felt increasingly closed off from them. Maybe it was her embarrassment about how badly things were going with Martijn. All the rest of them were so happily settled. And they’d been so happy for her, especially after losing Pieter, that she’d found this new situation. Or maybe she’d reduced her contact with them out of a sense that Martijn disapproved of her turning elsewhere for comfort, relying on anyone other than him.
She had this sneaking suspicion that whatever was wrong with them wasn’t the normal kind of wrong. It probably couldn’t be fixed with a little extra sugar or salt or milk. She feared it was somehow more fundamentally flawed, like an instant yeast that simply doesn’t rise. What was it? Was it really his work that was making him so distracted?
In the beginning, Grace had jumped into the relationship with both feet; she had ached so badly to have a new partner after losing Pieter that it was possible she had not been sufficiently circumspect. Two years of stellar sex with this absurdly handsome man who was a good earner and a responsible father had seemed like enough. Let’s take this check to the bank and cash it was her attitude. Why muddle around?
But what did she know about him, really, before they tied the knot? She knew his body and his emotional seasons, his daily ablutions and how he took his coffee (with a surprising amount of milk for a European, she felt). She understood his basic morality, if you could call his modern belief system such. She never had asked him much about his work—accounting wasn’t exactly a topic that invited inquiry, and he was never particularly forthcoming about the daily dramas of his job, if there were any. But what did he do up there, in his office?
She’d met Martijn’s estranged father and his wife, but only about a week before the wedding, because they lived “far away” by Dutch standards, up in the Frisian Islands, about two and a half hours by car. The man seemed polite, if extremely reserved, and the wife appeared to have taken over all the social tasks for the both of them, responding rather loudly to any question directed at him, in a thick Frisian accent that Grace found incomprehensible.
Martijn didn’t have siblings; his mother had died when he was just five, and he’d grown up with his dad and a Jack Russell terrier named Hanro. He barely spoke about his early years, but Grace got the feeling they were lonely and drearily metaphysical, like a George Eliot novel, a boy wandering around in the wet northern heath.
Grace could still remember the time she’d met Martijn’s first wife, Lila, introduced in the narrow hallway of her Amsterdam apartment, on the top floor of a titled canal house, converted from an attic. The woman had given her a dour look that spoke volumes of a Dostoevskian length. Had Grace stopped to try to decipher the meaning behind her eyes she might have prepared herself fo
r this marriage differently—how, she couldn’t really imagine—but she hadn’t taken the time to translate even one sentence of that manuscript. Exes always had grievances, though. Grace, for her part, had been light and easy, carried on the butterfly wings of lust. Sure of everything.
No more. Now she was decidedly unsure.
When she finally reached their house—she couldn’t even remember any part of the scenery during the forty-five-minute drive, so deep in her head had she been—she walked up the front stairs, unlocked the front door, went inside, shut the door behind herself, and felt, in a sudden rush of unreality, as if she had entered a home where she was a stranger.
She walked into the empty kitchen, dropped her handbag on a chair she had never noticed was quite so red, took out her phone, and dialed Lila’s number. She had it because they were technically co-parenting—the boys were with her just now—but she had never once used it before. She wanted to ask Lila something, a question about Martijn and his nature, or about his history and the way he operated. About whether there was something she needed to know that she was missing. She wanted to ask Lila, essentially, what was happening with him.
As she heard the phone ring, she realized the absurdity of this mission. What on earth did she think she was going to ask Lila over the phone right now? How would Lila even have an answer? Whatever she knew about Martijn was then, not now. When she heard Lila pick up, Grace clicked END.
Hm. That was a bit of a ridiculous thing to do with everyone on mobile phones, Grace thought. And then there was Lila, calling back.