by Diane Zinna
The All-Night Sun is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2020 by Diane Zinna
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Zinna, Diane, author.
Title: The all-night sun: a novel / Diane Zinna.
Description: First edition. | New York: Random House, [2020]
Identifiers: LCCN 2019037495 (print) | LCCN 2019037496 (ebook) | ISBN
9781984854162 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781984854179 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PS3626.I56 A75 2020 (print) | LCC PS3626.I56 (ebook)
| DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019037495
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019037496
Hardback ISBN 9781984854162
International edition ISBN 9781854186
Ebook ISBN 9781984854179
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Diane Hobbing, adapted for ebook
Cover design: Sarah Horgan
Cover image: Kendall Kirk Singleton
ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue
Spring
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Summer
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Fall
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Dedication
Acknowledgments
About the Author
WHEN I ACCEPTED Siri’s invitation to travel home with her for the summer, it was like taking her up on a beautiful dare. I can still see her with her backpack, eighteen years old, lightly crossing transoms of age and language to make me feel comfortable among her teenage friends. In dreams Siri leads the way through Gamla Stan’s crowded caramel streets, turning to smile at me as I follow behind. Back in the United States, before I impulsively accepted her invitation, I had been Siri’s teacher. Like the midnight sun that does not set, my decision to go to Sweden with her spread its undying light over everything. My grief was like that, too. I fell asleep to it. I awakened to it.
In essays, Siri had written about this place imbued with magic: trolls; water spirits; the holiday called Midsommar, when everyone flees the cities for the countryside, when everyone turns young again. Midsommar, when the sun didn’t set and night’s torments didn’t come. Really? She’d agreed, yes, it was that green, that fresh, that new—everything would be just thawing out.
She wrote about her home back in Sweden. She was an art student. I asked her questions to color in her descriptions of the people she knew, of her country home in Olofstorp, of the traditions she kept with her family. She had a sister with long hair who worked at an airport, cleaning planes. She had a brother. She shrugged through a description of her town. It’s not like here, she said. She missed home, but she didn’t know why. I said, put down your pen. Just tell me about it. What colors do you see when you think of home?
And then we were there. Lush canvases of wet meadow opened one upon the other, bright green oceans that undulated and tipped with the wind like liquid. Did we create that place with our words? I could barely remember the words she used to ask me to come home with her for the summer break. It doesn’t seem possible that there were words enough to make me risk the job I loved. Teaching gave my life some aspect of normalcy, and I thought then that it was normalcy I craved. But there was no hesitation. I bought my ticket that very day. Maybe all those years alone were building to that moment, that invitation to somewhere else.
I grasp at early memories of our trip now, and they are otherworldly, other-sensory. The purple door of her family’s country house—did it really smell of lavender? I remember our three days in Stockholm as sticky and sweet, maybe because we got ice creams from vendors on three different corners, one right after the other. I remember sitting there beside the water, trying to talk through bites, laughing because our lips were numb. We shielded our eyes and watched tourists taking banana-boat rides out beyond the Viking-style, curl-prowed ships in the harbor. And when I think of our talks there, they can sometimes feel like sun in my eyes.
We visited many beautiful towns there. I could never pronounce their names right. I couldn’t grab hold of the sounds to remember them. With so little English around me, I had the feeling of being half-awake the whole time. In some ways, it was like being a child, when you could just close your eyes during a conversation, slide down under the table, and run around. But I was not a child. I was almost thirty then.
For weeks we zoomed through storybook towns with square-cobbled streets and curved one-lane roads barely able to accommodate Siri’s tiny car. In the countryside, there were dark red farmhouses with white frames around their windows. We jumped from barn lofts, laughing so hard strands of hay got caught in our teeth. We laughed as though we were both children.
And on the last day of our trip, she arranged for a group of us to drive to Öland, an island off of Sweden’s eastern coast, where we would camp and celebrate the holiday. She said that at Midsommar it would even be warm enough to swim, but I could see my breath when her brother, Magnus, helped us load the car that morning. And I could see his breath when he stooped to check the air pressure in the tires, and when, after all the other girls had gone inside, he stood to face me for the first time in days and mutter a goodbye.
“Goodbye,” I repeated softly, unable to match his emotionless tone.
As he walked back into the house, I stepped into the place where I’d seen his breath in the air and willed myself to feel the warmth he’d shown me a week earlier, before he’d grown cold. I wasn’t just going away for two days—these were the last days. Didn’t he feel time running out like I did?
I suppose all those sunlit nights and long twilights had made it feel like we had enough time to work everything through.
All of Sweden was intoxicated with the endless June sun. The animals, too, seemed dopey and confused. That day in Kalmar, right before we started across the great Öland bridge to the island, a moose walked slowly across the road, blocking traffic for a while and
blinking peacefully at the honking cars.
And then we were crossing the bridge, four high miles. Siri squinted hard at the white lines through the clouds that kept touching down. Her friends slumbered in the backseat, a mash of black clothes, smeary eyeliner, and punk-rock hair. They were tentative to use the English they’d learned in school even though they spoke it fine. Sometimes, when they were drinking, they tried more. I sat in the passenger seat, a crate of beer like insurance on the floor between my feet.
I had been looking forward to this trip being just us, but at the last minute, Siri had invited the other girls.
“The day is going to warm up,” Siri whispered, trying not to wake her friends.
I was grateful that she was whispering. I thought it meant she was ready to talk to me about all that had happened, with her, with her brother. Through the fog, I could just glimpse the water beyond the bridge. There were promises of waves, but they gathered no energy.
“Kalmarsund,” Siri said.
“It feels like we’re flying,” I said.
“I don’t know if you can see it, but there’s a castle on that shore called Kalmar Slott. It’s from medieval times. People sometimes get married there. It’s very beautiful at night. They light it up.”
I tried to see, but when there were breaks in the fog, all I could make out was the glitter of the sound. I turned to look behind us, but there was a yellow inner tube pressed against the window of the hatchback.
“You’re still going to swim with me, right?” she asked.
I shook my head, but I expected I’d cave to her and be swimming soon. Over those weeks, I’d let Siri dye my hair blond, then blacken the ends. We’d gone shopping for new clothes. I’d cut up the T-shirts I’d brought to make them look punk rock, crimped my hair with an actual iron, and skinny-dipped for the first time in my life. Afterward, in a woodsy bar, with my head still wet and with damp clothes, I shouted “Skål!” and danced with my eyes closed—not to keep the room from spinning, but because I couldn’t bear to see all of that reflected back at me in the mirror above the bar. Siri had liked it—that I was trying, that I was shaking off the shell of grief I’d worn so long.
“There is an old legend. It says you mustn’t go swimming on Midsommar because an evil spirit named Näcken waits out there in the water, sitting on a rock, playing a fiddle. He is waiting to pull you down. In the story, a maiden stabbed herself in the heart rather than go with him, and white water lilies turned red with her blood. If he gets you, he’ll make you live under the water with him forever.” Siri smiled mischievously. “You see? We have to swim.”
She laughed, but I shushed her, afraid that her friends would awaken and commandeer the conversation and bring it back to Swedish. I was grateful for her smile, her playfulness now. I missed the first part of the trip, when we traded stories and taught each other what we felt were beautiful words in our languages. I had taught her languid, gloaming, and verdant, which remain charged with memory even now.
We were halfway across the bridge when another car pulled ahead of us and Siri stopped short.
She looked over at me with concern. “You okay, Lauren?”
I unclenched my fingers and rested them flat against the seat. I wanted to appear calm. I told myself the white fog was sealing us in.
I saw her mouth moving silently. She knew I was afraid of bridges. Maybe she was praying for me. Siri prayed a lot for a young person, in a manner less contemplative than compulsive. She said it helped her to feel closer to her mother, who had died when she was five. She’d never shared how her mother passed, only that her death had been hard on her and her siblings and it was the reason for the rift between her and her brother.
Before this trip, she’d told me some other things about Magnus: that he didn’t want her to go to college, that he was too critical, an artist himself and disdainful of her desire to study art in school. For these reasons, I had disliked Magnus before I met him. I had disliked the sounds I first associated with him: keys dropped on the dining table, the loud slam of his door, the way he talked to himself on the other side of our shared wall. When Siri had asked me to stay away from him, it had been easy to promise. Now all I could do was think of him.
“If I swim, will you swim, too?” Siri asked now, slowing behind a car, its taillights glowing ruby through the thinning fog. A group of gulls floated beside the bridge and then disappeared above us.
“You know I will,” I said. “But I might be the one Näcken pulls down.”
“At least then you wouldn’t have to go home.”
I smiled and looked over at her. The last few days had been hard. I wanted to be going back to the United States, but I wanted to be going back with her, where it could be just the two of us again.
Siri was staying in Sweden until the start of the new semester. Though she had assured me that she was planning to return for her second year at Stella Maris, I kept worrying that she wouldn’t actually come back to school. It was hard enough for me to imagine my classroom without her in the front row.
The girls in the backseat stirred and rearranged themselves, a bundle of limbs and blankets. They were Siri’s age, and they brought the teenager out in her. I never felt the difference in our ages until I spent time with them. The awkward, motherly conversations I attempted with Siri’s friends made them self-conscious. I tried to fit in, but the whole stretch of irresponsible summer, I was going around like Alice, dumbly drinking potions because they were marked “Drink Me.” And then, I was Alice in the tiny house, barely able to fit inside, my legs scrunched underneath my giant body. What a lifetime you can live—or not live—in ten years’ space.
There was the hush of the waves so close. We were coming down out of the clouds and land was again beneath us, a straight two-lane road. My guidebook had said that this island ground was a mosaic of blanched shells and fossils. I could hear the water and its rush, rush. The girls in the backseat started to stretch and talk, and their Swedish made me drowsy.
Siri announced that we were going swimming first thing. We drove through a tunnellike stretch of woods, the branches of trees knitting together over the road. It was like waking up when we saw the sky again. We parked alongside a rugged beach. The terrain reminded me of a beach on the north shore of Long Island I had often walked as a child with my mother and father, only the slope that the girls ran down was shining blue and green in the sun. Fringy ropes of what looked like blue algae swung lazily in the gentle waves, and the rocks were fuzzy with it underfoot. The beach was called Neptuni Åkrar—Neptune’s Fields.
“You said you would swim!” Siri yelled, rushing down ahead of me.
Clutching the yellow inner tube, I picked my way down the rocks. Bright blue flowers grew all along the shoreline. We were the only people as far as I could see, and the coastline stretched long and curved, changing from otherworldly blue beach to stark white in the distance. Three maroon sea huts stood at the top of the ridge and a thin string of cloud line ran parallel to the shore. I sat down upon the inner tube while the girls splashed in the sea. They had an easy, loving way among themselves. They were close in the way only childhood friends can be.
“Come in with us, Lauren!” Siri yelled.
I waved but didn’t get up to join them. Suddenly they were running toward me with big, splashing strides, hanging on to one another, their hair wet and pressing against their cheeks. They each grabbed hold of the inner tube and pulled me into the ocean. I went under smiling and got a mouthful of water.
We couldn’t stay in for long. The water was cold. When we came out, our skin was tinged blue from the algae. We wrung out our clothes to dry and sunned ourselves on the azure, blooming rocks. I loved that afternoon. There was no English, no Swedish, just sun on our bodies and sleep.
When afternoon came and the clothes were dry, we drove to the campsite. The girls in the backseat kept looking at themselves in
a little mirror, their teeth shining stark white in contrast to their bluish skin. I rested my head against the passenger-side window, and my breath made a fog on the glass. I found myself thinking of Magnus’s goodbye that morning, and in the condensation, I lazily traced a letter M. Sunlight streamed through the trees overhead, turning to clicks of light when I closed my eyes. I rubbed the wetness from my fingers against my thigh.
“Lauren,” Siri said, soft and low.
I opened my eyes and wiped away the M on the glass.
“Can you help me?” She unfolded a map of the island against the steering wheel as she drove.
I smiled. Whispering. English. Things that made it just us again.
I TAUGHT ENGLISH composition in the international program at Stella Maris, a small Catholic college outside of Washington, D.C. I was a popular teacher. When class started, my show started. I led with a gentle authority I never quite exacted in real life. The students all wanted to be my favorite. No one was ever disrespectful or unprepared. The other professors complained about their problem students, about how out-of-control some of them were, but I never had behavior issues in my classroom. I loved my students. They participated, and I graded hard, so they worked hard. They didn’t skip my class. Their writing improved.
It was the first job I ever loved. In front of the class, I was always in the moment, fully theirs and full of movement, completely in my body, hands chalky, sitting atop my desk, laughing at their jokes. Students didn’t depart when I dismissed them. They stayed after to tell me about their childhood bedrooms turned into walk-in closets, the jobs waiting for them in their family businesses. They would bring me candy from their home countries and want me to try everything right then. They would tell me how empty an accomplishment could feel when those you love aren’t there to see it, to say well done. I knew what they meant by that. A check mark in the margin of their paper, a nod, a smile.