by Maria Parr
It’s so wonderful this is happening, especially since we couldn’t come to the concert at Christmas!” Ylva said happily.
It was May, and some totally crazy person at school, probably the music teacher, had gotten it into their head that the ones in our class who had music school lessons should provide the entertainment at a class party for our parents. I’d actually been unusually angry when Mr. Rognstad told us. I wasn’t about to start practicing like I’d done before Christmas. No way, José.
“It’s ‘Für Elise’ or nothing,” I’d said, surprised to find that I was able to put my foot down this time.
Ylva, who had been feeling sick for the first few months with the baby in her stomach, was sparkling as she sat next to me. I’ve always thought Lena has the prettiest mom. She has long, dark hair and a silver nose stud. Now she was prettier than ever: she was shining. She was holding Isak’s hand, and her other hand was lying over her baby bump. Imagine being so happy just about going to a concert.
I peered over at Lena. She was sitting there, gloomily staring straight ahead. I knew that she’d been practicing. I’d heard the booming rhythms of the keyboard through the walls of her house many times over the past week. The question was whether it had helped.
The lights had been dimmed in the school auditorium, which was full of friends and families. I’d finished “Für Elise,” and Krølla had clapped with great gusto. Now it was Lena’s turn. She was wearing a dress, and her hair was neatly braided. I hadn’t seen her in a dress since Isak and Ylva got married. For the first time, it struck me that she looked a bit like Ylva.
Then my neighbor hurled the keyboard volume up to full and switched on some absurd rumba rhythm. It was clear that she’d decided to go down fighting. But she made it all the way through the piece, in her own way, with a lot of pauses and strange noises. I could see how much she hated every single note. When she’d finished, she rushed straight offstage and sat down next to Andreas instead of us. I glanced cautiously at Ylva. She tried to wave to Lena to get her to come and join us, but it was no use. Lena sat there, staring angrily at her shoes, while Birgit dazzled her way through a kind of jazz piece that left most people’s mouths open in admiration.
After the concert, we waited for our parents in the parking lot.
“That wasn’t too bad, really,” I said.
Lena pulled uncomfortably at her dress and gave me a sullen look.
“I’ve got a game tomorrow. Two o’clock. Are you coming to watch, or what?” she said, a little irritably.
“Your first game in town?” I asked.
She nodded. It was a long time since I’d last seen Lena in goal. And it was a long time since she’d invited me to anything. I felt confused and happy in an unexpected way. I was about to say yes when Birgit suddenly appeared.
“Hi,” she said. “It’s my birthday tomorrow. Would you two like to come to my house at around three o’clock?”
“Um . . . sure,” I said.
Lena looked at me more or less in the same way as she had that time I spilled the beans to Birgit about the raft.
“What about you, Lena?” Birgit asked.
Lena didn’t say a word in reply. She just turned around and left. That’s when I became angry. Railing rams, there’s a limit. I ran after her.
“What’s your problem, Lena?”
She didn’t answer.
“Do you think I should miss a birthday party just to see a totally normal soccer game?”
Lena stopped. “I couldn’t care less what you do! It’s your life!” she said.
“Yes, it is, actually!” I shouted. “And I’m absolutely sick and tired of you being grumpy all the time.”
“Grumpy?” said Lena in disbelief. “I’ll tell you one thing, Trille Danielsen Yttergård: it’s better to be grumpy than to be an idiot.”
She threw her keyboard book into the ditch, sending mud splashing out, and ran off home.
“Kai-Tommy’s right,” I yelled after her. “You’ve got serious problems with your temper!”
Back at home, I went straight up to my room. I was furious. For a moment I thought about going down to Grandpa in the boat shed. But then I saw that Lena was already there. That made me even angrier. What were they doing together? Couldn’t she get her own grandpa? I spotted the ice-cream tub with the broken bottle and ship in it on my shelf. I tore it down in rage and emptied all the contents into the garbage can by the toilet.
Birgit’s family had set out a long table in their barn. The walls were decorated with paper lanterns, and there were bunches of spring flowers everywhere. The table was teeming with colorful foods, not bread and sausages like we were used to. It was like stepping into a film. All the boys from class were being polite and trying to behave maturely.
Birgit was wearing a light-blue dress and a necklace of polished wooden beads. Her curls softly touched my face as she gave me a hug.
“Happy birthday,” I murmured dizzily. “Nice necklace.”
“Keisha gave it to me.” Birgit put her hand on the beads, clearly pleased with it. “She sent it for my birthday.”
Andreas and Abdulahi came in after me. They got hugs too. Kai-Tommy was already on the ramp at the entrance to the barn, chatting confidently with Birgit’s father, the author. He was wearing a shirt like the one his brother had been wearing at Christmas.
“Wh-where’s Lena?” Andreas asked. He was looking nervously at a tray of stuffed mushrooms.
“She’s playing a game in town,” I grumbled. The very thought of Lena made my stomach boil with rage.
From the corner of my eye, I spotted Birgit sitting down on the bottom step of the barn and talking with Kai-Tommy. They sat there for quite a while. She laughed several times. I’d managed to eat a whole load of those mushrooms before they got up. I suddenly felt that I just wanted to go home. All the small talk and all the people — I just couldn’t cope. I quietly told Birgit that I had a headache and shuffled off down the hill.
Down at the bend with the wood anemones, I stopped and looked out across the fjord. It was still and light blue in the afternoon sun. A small plastic-hulled boat was on its way out. “My boat is so small and your sea is so wide.” We’d learned that song at Sunday school. I watched the boat and the lone wake behind it. That was exactly how I felt.
I lay in my room, looking at the picture I’d been given for Christmas. Birgit had painted Kobbholmen and Troll and the beautiful summer colors with her own hands. What did I normally think about before Birgit came along with her curls?
I don’t know how long I’d been lying there when there was a knock at my door.
“Trille?” Mom stuck her head around. “Ylva’s downstairs. She’s wondering if you know where Lena is.”
“Isn’t she at the soccer game?” I asked.
No, the game had finished several hours ago, Mom told me. Nobody had seen Lena all day.
I went down to the kitchen.
“Weren’t you at the game either?” I asked, looking at Ylva, who was reading a message on her phone.
“No, I couldn’t face it, Trille. I felt so nauseous, and . . .”
“What about Isak?” asked Mom, bobbing up and down a little to calm Inger.
“Isak’s on call today. I can’t get hold of him either,” said Ylva.
A painful feeling crept into my chest. “Did nobody go to watch her play?”
Ylva looked at me. She was forlorn, and I knew a painful feeling had crept into her chest too. Lena’s first game, and nobody to cheer her on.
“I’ll check with Grandpa,” I said, heading out.
What nonsense was Lena up to now? Couldn’t she see that people were getting fed up with everything having to be about soccer all the time? She hadn’t even replied to Birgit when she’d invited her to her party. Actually, now that I thought about it properly, she was being really selfish. I stuck my hands in my pockets as I strode across the fields.
Grandpa was standing at the door when I arrived at the boat shed. I pe
ered over his shoulder. There were all sorts of odds and ends in there, and it struck me that Lena must have been gathering bits of flotsam and jetsam for a new raft all spring.
“Have you seen Lena?” I asked.
“No.”
I explained what Mom had said. From the corner of my eye, I noticed Isak’s car turning in to the farmyard back up by the house.
Grandpa scratched his head a little. “Then it must be Lena who’s taken it,” he said. “But how on earth did she manage that?”
He disappeared into the old boat shed.
“Manage what?”
“The boat’s gone,” said Grandpa.
What did he mean? Both Troll and Dad’s blue plastic-hulled boat were at the floating pier inside the breakwater. They certainly weren’t gone.
“Which boat?”
Grandpa glanced at me. “Your boat.”
“I haven’t got a boat, Grandpa,” I said quietly.
Was that why he’d been so strange recently? Had he started getting confused?
“Grandpa, I haven’t got a boat,” I said again, in despair.
Grandpa turned toward me. “No, you haven’t, Trille, but you were going to get one.”
He drummed his fingers pensively against the wall of the boat shed.
“Lena and I have been fixing up an old Silver Viking for you, here in the old boat shed. It was supposed to be a surprise for your birthday.”
What?
Grandpa pushed open the doors that led out to the water.
“Lena and I thought it was about time you had your own boat. You deserved it after . . . Well, you know.”
He patted his injured arm and gave me a sheepish look.
A boat for me? From Grandpa and Lena? Was that what they’d been doing during all those hours together down by the boat sheds? Fixing up a boat? For me?
Overwhelmed, I stared across the rocks by the shore. There were clear traces of somebody having taken out a boat. The rollers for moving it were strewn all the way down to the water’s edge. I knew how strong Lena could be when she was angry and upset. She would’ve needed a lot of strength for this.
“Grandpa, we’ve got to find her!” I shouted.
At that very moment, Isak came bounding down across the fields.
“Do you know where she is?” There was an unusual quiver in his normally calm voice.
“No, but we’ll soon find out,” said Grandpa. “Fetch your life jacket, Trille, then . . .”
He took a deep breath.
“Then we’ll launch Troll.”
I held my breath as I stood on deck, watching Grandpa turn on the boat’s ignition for the first time since the accident. It had been a while, and Troll coughed and shook a few times, but soon the engine was throbbing in its happy, familiar way. Isak untied the last mooring line and leaped on board, and then we put out to sea.
To begin with, Grandpa looked as stiff as a statue, but gradually it was as if the shuddering engine shook out the old Grandpa. He checked a little bit, adjusted a little bit, squinted a little bit. But mostly he stood there with his arm firmly and calmly on the wheel, peering out to sea with blue eyes.
Suddenly, I realized how quiet it had been the last few months. I leaned against the railing and felt the engine throbbing throughout my body. It was as if my pulse were back.
Isak was peering all around. “I didn’t manage to talk to her after the game. I had an emergency call . . .”
“Were you at the game?”
Isak nodded. He’d seen almost the whole thing, he said, but then he’d had to leave a short while before the end.
“I don’t think Lena could see me, though, because I had to stay up by the car in case I got a call.”
He was staring everywhere.
“Was she good?” I asked.
Isak turned to look at me. “Good? She was outstanding, Trille. I had no idea that she was so good. Did you know?”
I gulped. Lena, Lena. Where was she?
Grandpa had set course toward the mouth of the fjord. Neither Isak nor I had objected. We knew Lena. She wasn’t the sort to nip over to town when she was upset. It was more her style to point straight out to sea.
“She’s probably on her way to Crete or something,” said Grandpa, trying to get us to smile. It didn’t work. Isak’s face was completely gray. I’d never seen him like that.
We sailed on for a while without saying anything.
“Are you sure that she’s gone this way?” Isak asked eventually. He was so restless now that he couldn’t stand still.
Grandpa shook his head.
“Maybe we should turn around and look . . .”
Isak didn’t get any further. All three of us saw it at the same moment. A small boat floating in the sea. Bright white in the afternoon light, with freshly painted green boards to sit on. My boat.
Totally empty.
Now I know what a terrified dad calling out for his child sounds like. Isak was shouting so much that I thought his heart would tear.
“Lena!” he yelled out across the still waters. “Lena!”
I didn’t call her name. I couldn’t even look at the white boat. Feeling powerless, I sat down on deck and stared at Grandpa’s boots.
“We’ve got to alert . . . We’ve got to . . .” Isak stammered, fumbling with his phone. “Lena!” he called out again.
“Just hold on a moment there, Isak,” said Grandpa, pointing at the horizon. “Lena might be all right.”
A thin plume of smoke was rising up from Kobbholmen.
We could see her from some distance. She was standing motionless on the old pier, still wearing her soccer cleats and tracksuit. Her black hair was hanging over her face, and her fists were clenched. Isak jumped ashore when we still had a few feet to go. He reached her in two quick bounds and lifted her up like a feather. Nothing happened at first, but then Lena started crying. She cried and cried, and Isak held on to her tightly until the crying faded.
Then Grandpa turned off the engine and nodded at the bonfire. “Are you cooking hot dogs?”
Lena wiped her eyes with her sleeve and nodded.
“Are there any left?”
Lena nodded again.
I realized she must’ve had some kind of plan to live on Kobbholmen. She’d packed food and a sleeping bag. She told us that she’d pushed the boat away herself so she wouldn’t be tempted to go home immediately.
“But why don’t you want to go home?” Isak asked quietly.
Lena didn’t answer. She just poked at her beautiful bonfire and was as silent as a dead crab.
“Lena?”
“Because nobody likes me,” she said eventually.
Grandpa, Isak, and I all stared at her in shock. Nobody liked her?
“But, Lena . . .” Isak looked at her, brokenhearted. “How can you say that?”
“Because it’s true,” she muttered.
“No, it’s not true,” said Isak.
Lena turned one of the logs on the fire, sending smoke and embers hissing into the sky.
“Well, I’m not the way you want me to be. So I might as well live out here.”
“You’re exactly the way we want you to be —” Isak began.
But Lena became enraged. “No, I’m not,” she said. “There’s not a soul who cares about what I can do. But as for music and math and all that rubbish I can’t do . . . You all think those things are a matter of life and death.”
She raked the fire angrily.
“Shrieking sharks, I don’t want to be stuck hanging around in Mathildewick Cove like some kind of keyboard-playing Christmas decoration.”
Isak was about to answer, but before he could, Lena started crying again.
“You and Mom haven’t been to see a single flipping soccer game in all my life, and Trille . . .”
She didn’t say any more.
I looked at her sadly. Isak put his arm around Lena and told her he had been at the game. He’d seen that penalty she’d saved. He’d heard Lena taking ch
arge of the back line, directing them and keeping them in order even though it was her first game. And he’d seen how quick and focused she was right from the start of the game. He’d heard the other girls, who were two years older than she was, calling to her and singing her praises. And he’d had to leave five minutes before the end, because there was a young man on the other side of town who’d had a heart attack.
Lena wiped her hand across her eyes and looked at him in disbelief.
“You saw the penalty?” she asked breathlessly.
Isak nodded.
“Did you see how she tried to make it look like she was going to shoot to the left, but I threw myself to the right anyway because . . .”
“I saw,” said Isak.
Lena sat up straight. She had a strange expression on her face.
“But Isak, did you see . . .”
“I saw everything,” Isak said, smiling. “I was the proudest dad of the whole game.”
On the way home, we picked up the little white boat and towed it along. Lena was behind my back, but I could tell she was looking at me. I hadn’t managed to say a word the whole time.
When we were on our way back up from the boat sheds, and I was dragging my feet under the rowan trees, she stopped and waited for me.
“Trille?”
I gulped.
“Shall we try out your boat tomorrow?”
I nodded.
It’s a funny thing with Lena. As we pushed off from shore on my boat at the crack of dawn the next morning, it was as if there’d never been any problem at all.
“Isn’t it a top-notch boat, Trille? It was Lars who fixed the outboard motor.”
I leaned over and pulled the cord. The engine started on the first pull, and soon we were speeding along. It was a fantastic boat. But I just couldn’t cheer myself up. I felt a great lump in my throat at the very thought that this was my boat. I didn’t deserve it.
When we stopped the boat and Lena wanted to start fishing, I took a deep breath.
“Lena, I’m sorry that . . .”