by Maria Parr
“Can’t you see it’s a submarine, you onion brain?” she shouted.
Then Magnus laughed so much he could hardly breathe.
Really? I thought. He’s almost sixteen. Can’t he find other things to laugh at than his younger brother? I felt embarrassed and looked at Birgit.
“I swear,” Lena muttered. “I swear that by sunrise tomorrow, this idiot-proof raft will be afloat, and we’ll be halfway to town.”
When Lena swears something, it’s going to happen. After dinner, we were back in the boat shed, making improvements. Birgit had gone home.
“It wouldn’t have been safe enough even for just two people,” I said when we’d managed to flip the raft over and had started to attach another layer of polystyrene foam.
Lena didn’t answer. She just swung her hammer so hard that I was glad I wasn’t a nail.
When I went back inside that evening, my head was a mess from spending the day in the boat shed, but there was a full symphony at home, as usual. Minda and Mom were arguing tooth and nail about some trip or other that Minda clearly wasn’t being allowed to go on, Krølla was playing her recorder, and Magnus was sitting on a chair wearing earplugs. He chuckled when he saw me.
I slipped out through the door and down to Grandpa’s apartment. When you’re in there, the rest of my family are only a distant muffled noise. You can hear the clock ticking and the cat purring. It’s almost like another world.
But that day the racket had spread into the basement too. I stopped halfway down the stairs when I heard Dad’s angry voice.
“When will you get it into your stubborn head? You don’t stand a chance in those overalls,” he shouted.
“Uggh,” Grandpa replied.
“Don’t you ‘uggh’ me,” said Dad. “We’re worried about you!”
“Uggh,” said Grandpa again. “If that’s all you’ve got to worry about, then I hardly feel sorry for you.”
I kept quiet as a mouse on the stairs so they wouldn’t hear me.
“I’ve got a house full of half-crazy teenagers, but you’re the worst of all!” Dad shouted. “And you’re seventy-eight years old!”
“Precisely,” said Grandpa. “Seventy-eight and old enough to make up my own mind. Get out of the way, lad.”
I heard Dad’s angry pacing and the clatter of Grandpa doing the dishes.
“Dad . . .” my father began again, in a softer tone.
But Grandpa cut him off. “Up you go, now, Reidar. You’re making my plants wilt with all your shouting.”
Then Dad came stomping up the stairs. He didn’t even say hello as he went past.
“Were you arguing?” I asked anxiously when I got down to Grandpa.
“Uggh,” Grandpa replied. “Your father wants me to start wearing some kind of massive survival suit when I’m out at sea.” He wiped the countertop roughly with a cloth. “I’ve been wearing simple overalls my whole life, and I’m not about to start staggering around like an astronaut on my own boat.”
“But . . .”
“People shouldn’t worry so much about an old duffer like me. It doesn’t matter much anymore, anyway.”
“Doesn’t matter? I don’t want you to drown,” I said.
“I’m not planning on drowning, Trille! I can look after myself. That’s what I’ve always done.”
He threw the cloth into the sink and found me some cookies.
“If I started wearing a survival suit, then your father would want me to wear a life jacket on top, and if I wore a life jacket on top, then he’d want to tie inflatable rings to my hands. And if I had inflatable rings tied to my hands, then he would soon decide that I shouldn’t be out at sea at all. Then I would definitely die.”
I saw Grandpa in my mind’s eye, wearing a survival suit with a life jacket and inflatable rings. On dry land.
“Doesn’t Dad realize that you can look after yourself?”
Grandpa drummed his fingers on the table, as if the agitation from the argument had to get out somehow.
“He’s always been scared that something might happen to me.”
“Why?”
Grandpa sighed. “Well, I was all the children had left, you know, after we lost Inger.”
Now he was talking about my grandmother again. I pictured the island and the lighthouse, and suddenly I had so many questions. But I didn’t really know how to start.
“Did she have curly hair?” I eventually asked.
Grandpa looked at me in astonishment and then laughed a little.
“Curly hair? No, she didn’t. But she was the only girl with short hair. Beat that, if you can. Anyway. What have you been up to all day? I can smell secret projects from miles away.”
So I told Grandpa about the raft and Birgit and Lena. He’s not the sort to tell or put a stop to crucial operations.
The wind came plunging down from the mountains, making small, choppy waves on the sea. It was the crack of dawn. We peeped out from behind the wall of the boat shed to see Grandpa and Troll just leaving the pier and setting off out to sea. For the first time, I felt a slight twinge inside. What if Grandpa really was too old now to fend for himself out there? Should I start going with him more often?
Birgit had her chin buried in the collar of her jacket. She looked nervous.
“It’s a bit windy,” I said.
Lena narrowed her eyes as she licked her forefinger and lifted it into the air.
“The wind’s blowing straight toward town.”
She’d taken the paddles from my punctured rubber dinghy. And three life jackets. There was nothing more to discuss. Soon we were each sitting on a fish box on board the raft. The sail was hoisted. You could see Lena’s head and mine at the top. The rest was a blur of watercolors. The raft looked sturdy in some ways and wobbly in others. But the most important thing was that we were afloat. In just a few seconds we were out of the shallows and past the drop-off, where the water suddenly gets much deeper.
Lena and I paddled. Birgit held on tightly to the mast. I wished I could find a way to make her feel safe, but before I could think of anything, Lena started singing pirate songs. A little smile flashed across Birgit’s face. It was so nice that I missed a paddle stroke.
Water kept on washing over our feet, and the raft was rocking more than was comfortable. A little voice inside told me that this wasn’t the smartest thing we’d ever done. But Lena was right about one thing: the wind was certainly in our favor, blowing along the fjord and toward town. And it was too late to turn back. All we could do was keep a steady course and focus on our target. Dad and Uncle Tor had done it. I gulped and gave Birgit a smile of encouragement.
“Are you OK?”
“Mhm,” she mumbled, just barely nodding.
“Ahoy!” yelled Lena. “There’s the ferry. Good thing we didn’t set off ten minutes later, or we’d have been smashed to pieces.”
The ferry doesn’t exactly go at breakneck speed. In fact, Lena and I have discussed many times how you’d have to search pretty far and wide to find anything as absurdly slow as that ferry. Lena’s sure that it goes slow on purpose, just so that Dad — Able Seaman Yttergård — has time to have a coffee on each trip between selling the tickets. But today it looked different.
“Have they put on an extra engine or something?” Lena asked.
The ferry grew from being the size of a toy boat to the size of a ferry in a bafflingly short time. It almost felt like it was aiming for us. I paddled as powerfully as I could. On the other side of the raft, Lena was paddling so quickly that anybody would have thought she was trying to make some kind of seawater eggnog.
“Aren’t big boats supposed to give way to small ones?” she shouted furiously.
I let out a desperate groan. “It’s the other way around, Lena!”
Birgit’s face was completely white.
The ferry’s massive bow started to look like the maw of a monster. I was sure this was going to end in disaster, and I began waving my arms desperately. At the last moment, t
he ferry blasted its horn and veered out of the way. Thank goodness!
“Holy halibut, they shouldn’t be sleeping at the wheel up there! It would’ve been quite a scandal if they’d run over us!” Lena bellowed.
She shook her fist and was so furious that I realized she must have been really scared too.
But we weren’t out of danger yet. The ferry’s wake was bigger than our raft could stand. The first wave swept right over our entire craft, washing two of our fish boxes into the sea. The second one made the raft tilt so much we almost lost our balance. And the third was so powerful that Lena slid with a scream into the water. When I threw myself across the raft to rescue her, yet another wave came and tipped me into the sea as well.
“We’re shipwrecked!” Lena shouted from inside her enormous life jacket.
She kicked and struggled to get back on board. With Birgit’s help, she eventually managed it, but her lips had already turned blue by then. Luckily her rage kicked in.
“Son of a sea bass, I’m going to crush that ferry the next time I see it,” she said, shivering. “I’m going to —”
“Can you help me first?” I shouted.
I’d never been in the sea fully dressed before. Even though I was wearing a life jacket, it felt like the ocean was dragging me down, trying to pull me under into the darkness below. I was frightened and kept kicking away in the cold water.
Birgit and Lena tried to spread their weight so we wouldn’t tip over too much when I pulled myself aboard. Something was creaking perilously in this raft we’d designed. One of the pieces of polystyrene came loose, and then another. The whole thing was disintegrating! I was left clinging on between one of the floating fish boxes and the crumbling raft, and I was just about to start panicking when we realized that the ferry had stopped.
Shivering and speechless, we saw they were sending out one of their lifeboats. Lena groaned as she hid her face behind her hands.
“If that’s your dad coming to fish us out, then I think I’d prefer to stay here and drown!”
Of course it was Dad. Oh, how he shouted at us! He was like a soccer coach from town. Halfway through the worst volley, he put his arms around me and hugged me so tightly I thought I would suffocate. But then he started again. We could have drowned! Or gotten hypothermia! Were we planning on growing up and behaving like normal people sometime soon? And had we considered that the ferry was full of cars and passengers going to work? Now the whole timetable was a gigantic mess because we’d been thrashing around like befuddled seagull chicks straight in the path of the ferry. In the middle of the fjord!
But when he realized that there were three of us, he was completely derailed. Dad hadn’t been at home when Birgit had visited.
“Have you taken a hostage?” he asked.
“Yes,” Lena grumbled. “She’s from the Netherlands. We were taking her back.”
Birgit kept her distance after that. We later found out it was because her parents thought we must be trouble. They were probably right. The story of the shipwrecked raft quickly spread all across the area, and for the first time in my life, I felt ashamed. To think that I’d invited Birgit to join in with something so stupid! What a muttonhead I’d been! I looked up toward Hillside and wondered what she was doing. Summer vacation was almost over. I should’ve been running around from morning until evening enjoying the last of my freedom. Instead I felt bored. It was as if Mathildewick Cove had become too small.
“You’re all wound up, Trille,” Mom said desperately one afternoon. “Go out and get some fresh air.”
Out, out, out. We always had to go out. Couldn’t she make some toasted buns and play a game with me instead? I walked down to the sea, feeling annoyed.
Ever since I was little, I’ve gone to Grandpa’s boat shed to help him with things. We disentangle nets, prepare lines, and clean fish. Soon I’ll know how to do most things by myself. Grandpa’s passing his knowledge down to me. Sometimes when I coil a rope or put the knife in its place on the beam, I feel that I’ve done it just like Grandpa. The old men at the shop call me “Mini-Lars.” I probably take after Grandpa more than I take after my dad.
So I plonked myself on an upside-down fish tub in the boat shed. Grandpa glanced at me and pretended not to hear me sighing.
“I promised that little lass from next door we’d set a halibut line before the summer was over. Maybe we could do it tomorrow?” he suggested, digging out a large box of tangled fishing line.
I shrugged and lifted up one of the hooks.
Cool summer rain began to dance on the boat shed roof. I heard Dad shouting something in the distance and Minda answering. Grandpa worked away calmly next to me with his big, tanned hands.
“Have you always been like you are now, Grandpa?”
Grandpa briefly shook a tangled piece of line, and a hook came loose. He put it in a wooden box.
“Old, gray-haired, and fond of fish?”
“No . . .”
We sorted out a few more hooks. I shifted nervously.
“Have you always been so . . . content?” I eventually asked.
Grandpa looked at me, a little surprised. “Mm, yes. Except for getting in the odd bit of trouble in my youth.”
“Trouble?”
“Well, you know the sort of thing. A bit of ants in my pants and some argy-bargy. Just ask Thunderclap Kåre.”
He laughed, but I wondered what Thunderclap Kåre had to do with anything.
“But I’ve been really lucky. I’m healthy, I’ve got a family, I have a boat and plenty of time on my hands.”
He shook the tangled line patiently.
“But Granny died,” I blurted out.
Grandpa stowed away another hook.
“Yes.” His hands stopped. I held my breath. “But I was lucky to be married to her first. That was the luckiest part of all, Trille lad.”
He stowed the last hook in the box.
“Make sure you bring Lena tomorrow.”
I nodded.
The sky was light blue and hazy when we put out to sea the next day. There wasn’t a puff of wind in the air, the seabirds sailed silently above us, and it was as calm as I’d ever seen it out by Kobbholmen. Even Lena was quiet as hook after hook of shiny herring bait plopped into the water and vanished into the darkness below.
“Those halibut are going to have a first-class meal down there now,” she cackled as the last bit of herring disappeared from sight. “Delicious but deadly.”
I could see that Grandpa was laughing inside. He likes being around Lena.
I peered through the haze at the lighthouse and the dark island. Lena did the same. Then suddenly she asked, “Can we go ashore?”
Grandpa threw the fishing buoy overboard and spat at it for luck, as fishermen have always done here. “Well, I was thinking we could do some fishing while we wait,” he said.
“How many freezers have you got?” Lena said. “Don’t they ever get full?”
Grandpa took off his cap and scratched his head. “You certainly have a way with words, Lena Lid. Maybe we will pay a visit to Kobbholmen, then.”
As soon as I set foot on the old pier, my whole body began to tingle. A brand-new place to explore! Lena and I set off toward the center of the island. There were concrete steps and old railings everywhere. Our hands were drawn to the black rocks, warmed by the sun. We ran like crazy and climbed like mad.
“Hey, those look like eggs,” said Lena when we’d scrambled up one of the highest crags and were looking down at a small bay full of round gray boulders.
It was a bit hard to get down there, but we were soon on the beach, crouching and patting the smooth rocks. Only the sea could make something that smooth. All the edges and chipped parts had been ground away. I imagined how the roaring waves had washed over the shore right here, knocking and rolling the boulders against one another over thousands of years. I felt warm and happy as I sat down on one of the biggest ones and stared out to sea. Pink thrift flowers waved in the faint breeze, and
the white lighthouse towered over us.
“Are you coming, then?” said Lena.
We went over to the old house. The windows were hidden behind great wooden boards, and the door was locked. How long had it been since people had made coffee, had a nap, or done the dishes inside those walls? Lena managed to find an opening in the shed, behind a rotten plank of wood. It was dark and silent inside, with only narrow bands of light coming in.
She knocked on the woodwork as she inspected the whole room, and I suddenly noticed that she had grown taller. When she stood on her tiptoes, she could reach the ceiling. Lena’s always been a bit shorter than me, but now she wasn’t anymore. What if the others in my class had grown just as much over the summer, and I was the only one who was exactly the same height as before? I took a nervous step in the dark. It was only gossip, but Lena had heard that Kai-Tommy’s voice was changing.
“They used to keep chickens in here,” said Lena, pointing behind some wire netting.
“Hmm,” I said, remembering something Dad had said one Sunday at home when he was making chicken fricassee: “This used to be your grandmother’s favorite dish, Trille. Chicken fricassee and homemade red-currant squash to drink.”
When we got back to the lighthouse, I saw the two red-currant bushes in a warm spot next to the steps.
And up on the steps themselves was Grandpa. He’d kicked off his clogs and rolled up the trouser legs on his overalls, his white shins reflecting the sunlight.
Lena let out a shriek and covered her eyes. “I’m snow-blind!”
“Oh, be quiet, you!” Grandpa tossed us our packed lunches. He looked happy as he wiggled his toes.
“I definitely could’ve lived here,” said Lena, plonking herself down on the bottom step.
“Oh, it’s good on Kobbholmen today, but my, how the wind can blow out here.”
“So was Trille’s granny actually a lighthouse keeper?” Lena fished out a piece of bread as big as her face.
“No, her father was the lighthouse keeper,” said Grandpa.
“Was she living out here when you fell in love with her?” Lena went on.