by Diane Zinna
We turned to face the house together. Now that I had been inside its mostly empty rooms, I sensed more deeply what had drawn Siri and me together: not just the loss of our parents, but the family stories never finished, like that mural in sun-faded pencil beside the stairs.
She took my arm, and we set out for a walk through her town, the all-night sun with us, a friend.
She pointed out her old elementary school, and the little red house of an old favorite teacher, and a stream where she’d once sailed hand-folded cardboard boats in the winter, when the water moved slowly and tiny floes of ice helped buoy them upright. The Swedish summer was peculiar and lovely. It felt like winter in its stillness, but with hot sun on my shoulders. I felt both young and melancholy-old. It was a mix of everything.
As we were walking back up to the road, a car came roaring toward us full of girls, honking the horn. They pulled over, and the three of them leapt out and tackled Siri, covering her with kisses.
Siri laughed and hugged them all. “These are my best girls!” she said to me.
From the mix of limbs and hugs, a skinny blonde extended her hand to me. “I’m Karin!” she said. “We’ve been waiting to meet you! We’ve come to show you a bit of our town. You ready?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Where?” Siri said brusquely. “I want to show her the lake first.”
“Ja, we’re going to the lake,” the girls said.
“Well, you said the town,” Siri said.
“No. We meant the lake. See?” One of the girls pulled down the neck of her sweatshirt to show her bathing suit underneath. It was clear they wanted to please her.
“Okay, Lauren, well, you met Karin.” She turned impatiently to the other two. “Can’t you at least be polite and tell her your names?”
“Margareta,” a heavyset brunette offered. She paused a moment and then kissed both my cheeks.
“Nice to meet you,” I said, but I was looking at Siri. I had never heard her talk to anyone so tersely.
The other girl, white haired, tall, her face jutting with angles, simply nodded at me. Her lips were painted black, and her ears were pierced up and down the edges in a metallic C.
“This is Frida,” Siri said, hanging on the girl’s shoulders.
The girl looked away, squinting like she was trying to make something out in the distance.
“She’s so shy today,” Siri whispered in a taunting tone. When Frida didn’t respond, I noticed Siri pinch her arm and chastise her in low Swedish until Frida shook her off and greeted me.
“It is good to meet you finally,” she said.
Siri was smiling again. She was clearly the leader here, and I couldn’t help but be taken aback that even Frida—imposing, two heads taller than Siri—had responded with such deference to her. It struck me too that this was the first time Siri was seeing these girls in months. She had so easily slipped back into this role with them. I wasn’t used to Siri like this. She grabbed my hand and I could feel the other girls notice. Frida stiffened a bit. I tried to tell myself that Siri was feeling protective of me, that she just wanted them to be kind to me.
Frida’s accent was thick, and her words felt practiced. “Do you swim?” she said to me, still looking at Siri’s hand in mine.
“I love to swim,” I said.
“We want to take you to the lake!” Karin said.
“Karin, you can swim?” Siri said.
“Oh, yeah, it’s okay,” Karin said.
“She just had a baby,” Siri explained to me.
“Oh my goodness, congratulations,” I said to the girl, who was fumbling with a locket in the scoop of her neck. She showed me the pictures inside, the baby’s face in both sides of the oval.
We went back to the house for our swimsuits. When we’d left for our walk, I’d thought the house belonged to the ghosts who’d lived there once, but having seen her with her friends, everything now seemed to belong to Siri.
I heard loud music coming from behind the closed door of her brother’s room. I know Siri heard it, too, but she didn’t even pause. She raced past me, down the stairs. Did he not exist unless she wanted him to? My eyes caught on his shut door, and I followed her out to Frida’s car. Frida handed her keys to Siri, and it was Siri who drove us to the lake.
* * *
—
WE WERE THE only ones there that afternoon. The lake gave off a screen of mist, but a tiny island was visible a short distance from where we stood, barefoot, on the planks of a narrow pier. My black one-piece had a skirt to cover my thighs. Siri and her friends wore bikinis under zip-up sweatshirts. Frida turned away and disappeared into her hoodie. Margareta yawned a lot, and I could see she had two extra teeth in the gumline above her canines. And Karin smiled at me a lot, but it seemed that Frida’s stony gaze out at the island was keeping us all from talking. For some reason, I could sense that girl did not want me there.
Karin knelt to untie a wide, wood-plank raft from a piling, and we stepped out onto it, lay down side by side. Frida had a six-pack of beer in one hand and a snorkeling mask in the other. Siri was on the edge and used a long branch to push us away from the dock. We floated out into a pool of stinging sunshine, round, yellow, certain summer. She let the branch fall to the bottom of the lake, and we drifted in the breeze.
“Frida is planning on going to Stella Maris in the fall,” Margareta said.
Siri sat up. “Frida. Did you really send in your application?”
“Ja, jag skickade det.”
“You’re not kidding me?”
“Men jag är rädd,” she said.
“Frida, English,” Siri said sharply.
“I am afraid,” Frida translated, embarrassed, but Siri didn’t hear her. Siri was pointing up at the sky, wanting to show me a group of birds circling us. Frida slid on her black sunglasses, withdrew again.
“We’re all so quiet,” Margareta shouted. “The birds think we’re dead!” She swooped up, rolled Siri with her into the lake with a splash, and we all laughed. Everyone but Frida.
“Don’t you live in Washington, D.C.?” Karin asked me as we righted the float and balanced our beer cans between the slats.
“Just outside.”
Margareta hoisted herself back up. Her black hair was slicked back now. “I thought you were from New York.”
“I am.”
“Why would you move from the center of the world to Washington, D.C.?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I never really belonged in New York.”
“It’s true—you can’t be shy and live in New York City,” Margareta said.
I bristled at this, and Siri could tell.
“That’s not the right English word, Margareta,” Siri snapped. “Lauren is not shy. Besides, who would say something like that?”
“Everyone knows that,” Margareta said. “So, have you ever seen your president walking around? Just like a normal guy? Going to the gas station, going to the market?”
“No.”
“Nobody likes him, you know. We don’t like him, no one in Europe, no one in Thailand—”
“Thailand? How would you even know?” Siri said. “Shut up, Margareta.”
“You should have studied in New York City, Siri. It’s all about who you know, and in New York you could have known everyone.”
“Margareta, var tyst!” Siri said.
“What? I can’t talk? I should be able to say what I feel.”
“She’s just asking you to be polite,” Karin said.
“No, it’s okay,” I said. “It’s fine. We’re all friends here.”
“Who are?” Frida said huskily. She lay on her back, her can of beer balanced on her belly. “You? And us?”
Siri glared at Frida. “Swimming! We’ll swim,” she announced, and she started pushing everyone off the raft. She swa
m ahead and gestured for us to make our way to the small island of tall, whiskery trees. Frida put on her snorkeling mask, and we all started in that direction like a school of fish.
Buzzed and jet-lagged, it was hard to swim. I was dizzy in the cold water, my legs heavy. Siri was already at the island. Frida and I swam as fast as we could to be next. Frida beat me, plopped herself down on the shore, and started cleaning out the mask with huffs of breath. She shot me a fake smile.
“Do you enjoy living in Washington, D.C.?” Karin asked kindly when we were all settled and our conversation lulled. “What are the people like?”
“I guess they’re like city people anywhere. The people I work with tend to be ambitious. They’re smart, but it can be hard to connect sometimes. How about you all? What do you like most about living here?”
Margareta laughed. When she saw Siri look at her disapprovingly, she threw up her hands.
“I’m sorry! The way we’re talking, it’s like some Oprah shit.”
Water lapped at the shore, ruffling the skirt of my old-fashioned bathing suit. I replayed the conversations I’d been having with them over in my mind, realizing how forced everything must have sounded, how much older I must have sounded than them. I caught Frida staring at me. She narrowed her eyes and started carving shapes in the gravel with her mask.
“What do you do for fun?” Margareta asked. She took off her bikini top to splash away specks of seaweed under her breasts. I averted my eyes.
“There’s a stable, and we sometimes go to watch the kids who take lessons there,” Siri said.
Frida snapped her head toward us.
“Oh, Frida loves horses, too, Lauren. We all grew up riding at her family’s farm. They have so many. We should all go riding here before you leave.”
Frida lowered the mask back over her face and turned to the expanse of the lake.
“Frida, what’s wrong?” Karin asked.
“Inget,” she said. Her mask was fogging.
“Why are you wearing your mask?” Siri asked.
Frida responded in Swedish, a long low string of sentences directed at no one.
“I told you we need to speak in English, so Lauren can understand,” Siri said.
Frida sighed and stood. “I said because I don’t want to see Margareta’s flappy tits the whole of tonight!”
Margareta snapped her suit top at the back of Frida’s head, and Frida caught hold of it and threw it in the lake. Siri jumped up and grabbed Frida by the arm and walked with her around the side of the island, where maybe she thought I couldn’t hear her yelling. It was so strange to me, the way she was treating these friends. And it was bizarre to not hear Frida responding at all.
I turned to Karin, who was digging her toes into the sand.
“I’ve never heard Siri yell before,” I said.
“Huh?”
“Is she often like this?” I nodded in the direction of Siri’s voice.
“Oh. Well. You know. Old friends. You can just be yourself around one another. It doesn’t mean anything.”
I couldn’t help but feel I was the reason for the way Siri was treating these girls. I’d disturbed their equilibrium. I lay back on the gravelly beach and looked up at the black birds circling us again.
When it had just been Siri and me, I didn’t stand out. These birds could see something was off about me, that I didn’t belong there. Siri nudged me with her toe, trying to get me to snap out of it. She and Karin lay down on either side of me and taught me dirty words in Swedish for a while, then how to count to ten, and then, giggling, the marble-mouthed word for “strawberry ice cream,” jordgubbsglass, until Frida stood and removed her suit top.
“Okay then.” She stepped out of her bottoms. “What is the phrase in English? Last one in.”
She dove into the water and the other girls jumped up to follow her in. Frida had seemed to hate listening to Siri talk and laugh with me. She was just jealous, I thought. It would eventually pass. I peeled off my suit and slid into the water, thinking how silly it was that someone like Frida could feel threatened by me.
That was the night Siri taught me the word glöda: “to glow.” We picnicked as the sun held on—bread and beer. We all ate chocolate bars and swam in between bites. We left what remained in wrappers on the dock, and when we got out and finished them, drenched and huddled in blankets, they tasted also of lake water.
Later, Siri and I were sitting together with our feet dangling in the water, watching the other girls do cannonballs off the far end of the dock.
“They’re like my sisters,” Siri said. “We’ve known one another since we were babies. Frida—she comes across tough, but she’s actually a really fragile person.”
I nodded and waited. I thought Siri was about to explain more about her relationship with these friends, this rough side of her that I’d never seen. Instead she laid a finger upon my bare back and I jumped.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
I hugged the blanket to me to cover myself. I knew she had seen the four equidistant circle scars that went down my lower back.
“What are those from, Lauren?”
I collected all the candy wrappers from the dock and pressed them into a wet ball.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you upset.”
I remembered that night, crying alone in my bathroom, twisting to look at my back in the mirror, wondering if my vertebrae were exposed.
“I couldn’t tell if they were real or a shadow,” Siri said.
“They’re both,” I said.
We stared out over the lake. I didn’t want to mar the night with the story of how I got those scars. And despite how she’d been with her friends, I still trusted her. I just thought we still had all the time in the world to tell each other such things.
After a while, Siri taught me mångata. Måne for “moon,” gata for “road.” It was a word that meant the roadlike reflection of the moon on the water. It was a word that felt like the night. A word that felt like the start of our journey.
AFTER THE LAKE, Siri and I walked back to her house in our swimsuits, carrying our shoes on the country road. It felt good with it just being the two of us again.
There was the hum of sleepy insects in the grass. The road narrowed into the trees and then dipped, so that a hill grew tall beside us. I soon had a feeling that we were being followed by something moving along the top of that hill. I looked up and saw a calf. She kept backing away from the edge but returning with curiosity.
There was a rock ladder built into the side of the hill, and we climbed it to see her up close. When I reached the top, I saw a wide expanse of field and about a hundred cows, lying in the grass in pairs. The one I’d seen from the road wore a bell around her neck that jingled as she moved. She went running toward the others, her young legs stiff and angular, full of happiness and announcement. The heads of all the herd turned toward us, appraised us.
I loved their scent and the lake air, the mint smell of the coming night. I looked over at Siri, and it was the old, sweet version of her. The way she had been rude earlier that day with her friends—maybe that was something left over from her childhood, an old hierarchy I just didn’t understand. It felt utterly false now, and I wondered if she was embarrassed that I’d seen that version of her.
It was what Siri called the blue hour. Everything glowed as if through a sapphire filter. When we turned the corner and her house came into view, it took my breath away—the solitariness of it shining white against the sky.
We ran to the house. “I want to stay out all night!” I yelled. I had never run so fast, never felt so much inside my body. When we collapsed on the grass among the immense pink and purple flowers pushing up out of the earth, we both started laughing at their wonderful name: blomsterlupiner. Siri said we’d build our own house, the sky for our ceiling, the giant f
lowers our end tables, the rising moon our window, the still-out sun our door.
We were lying wet-headed in the grass, renaming everything in the field, when we heard a car pull up and its engine stop.
At once I felt the tension in Siri draw together beside me. By the time I turned my head, the screen door to the house was clapping shut.
“Who was that?” I asked.
She closed her eyes again. “Maybe he didn’t see us.”
“Was that your brother?” I asked.
“Yes.”
I propped myself up on my arms and looked at her, and then at the old red car parked at an angle on the grass beside their house.
“Siri, is there something I should know about him?”
She didn’t answer me.
“Siri?”
“It’s better we just stay away from him,” she said.
“Why?”
Birgit came to the door. “Siri? Are you out there?” She couldn’t see us lying in the grass.
Siri sat up. “I love my brother. I do. But you know the story of how the frog is put in a pot when the water is cold, and when the stove is turned on, the frog doesn’t realize it’s getting hotter until it’s too late?”
“Yes.”
“Magnus is like that. He boils people up.”
Birgit was holding open the screen door for us to come inside. She had changed into pajamas and was wearing a pair of eyeglasses with a taped hinge. When she saw our wet bathing suits, she rushed for towels. “You swam? It’s still too cold! What were you thinking?” While we changed, she stood outside our bedroom doors to collect our wet clothes, tsking.
“Come on,” she said.
We went to wash our clothes. I noticed that Birgit and Siri stepped lightly past the closed doors, and I imagined Magnus was behind every one, a dog that might come charging out at us. His presence in the house now made them quieter. On the stairs, Birgit was careful to skip the step that creaked.
The sisters washed the clothes in the bathtub and brought them in a basin to a closet off the foyer. Inside, they lit a heat lamp and draped the garments on crisscrossing clotheslines and drying racks. I stood in the closet with them as they hung the clothes, sweat coming off of me in streams. Soon the walls were a heavy patchwork of damp fabric. The smell of detergent filled the room. The glowing disc of the red heat lamp made it look like a photographer’s darkroom. I remember thinking that as they worked, their beauty rose more and more to the surface, like developing pictures.