by Diane Zinna
We were in there when we heard a slamming sound in the front hall. They looked at each other, Siri burning up but Birgit’s expression still insisting that all was fine.
Birgit flung a shirt onto a clothesline above her. “We’re in here,” she called.
Nothing. They both watched the door of the drying closet.
“Vi är här inne!” she called again.
“Hush, Birgit. He knows,” Siri said. “I don’t want to see him either.” Siri looked down at the now-empty washbasin, from which the last of the water had evaporated.
* * *
—
I WOKE IN the middle of the night with jet lag that felt like a hangover, my skin smelling of the detergent they’d used for the laundry. I felt sticky with perspiration, as though I were wearing wet clothes. There was the sound of a creaky gate. The digital clock beside my bed read three a.m. There was half a chocolate bar left over from the lake on my night table. I reached over and touched it, surprised to feel that the heat of the room had not melted it.
I kept thinking about Siri at the lake and how she’d been so hard on those girls. At the time I had kept telling myself that she just wanted them to be kind to me, but Karin had remarked that it was the stuff of old friends.
I went to the window to try to open it and get some air. I thought of the way Siri had snapped at Margareta. How she’d pinched Frida’s arm. How when Siri had pulled Frida down the beach to yell at her, Frida hadn’t yelled back. These girls were used to this treatment from Siri, but I had never seen this side of her at all.
In the moonlight, I could see the window had been painted shut.
As I was pushing at it, I noticed a man standing in the field behind the house and stopped.
I knew at once it was Magnus. He was tall. Hair fell into his face over his brow, darker instead of Siri-fair. He held a metal shovel, and he was kicking at its glinting head, trying to push it into the ground.
His white shirt was streaked with dirt near his throat, and his mouth was a tight line, as though trying to keep his body from turning inside out. Everything about him was force and hunch, anxiety, sweat. He had broken the ground now, and I could see the lines where his muscles moved in his arms. He was the one hard thing in the soft field. Now he became the reason my room was hot. He was the reason the window was painted shut, the reason for walls and doors.
Siri had told me to stay away from him. I tried to remember that I had disliked him before this moment, when I could see him standing on the head of the shovel, falling forward with it, and then to his knees. He was at once at work and at the mercy of whatever was driving him. The dusk field was his soul, and he was lost in it.
I saw the hole he’d dug in front of him, and I saw he held the shovel, but it seemed that the hole wanted to suck him in.
I thought of my nights back home, staring through my blinds at the other apartment windows, inventing stories about my neighbors and how we might be alike. But with Magnus, there was something about his energy I immediately knew for sure, something that felt—like me.
The sudden sound of someone in the hallway made me jump. I went to the wall and snapped on the light to reorient myself, take a sip of water. After a few minutes, I shut off the light and tried to go back to sleep. I ate the chocolate bar in the dark. But then I was up and at the window again. Magnus was gone, but there was a mound of pulled-up plants on the ground where he’d dug. I wondered what it was. I wondered if he’d seen the light in my room go on.
Then I saw him.
He was standing off to the side, but closer to the house now, staring up at my window, right at me. It was definitely Magnus, though he wasn’t smiling the way Siri would smile at me. His mouth was still a tight line, but I couldn’t help smiling back at him. He dropped the shovel, and I dropped to my knees and crawled back to my bed, my heart thudding in my chest.
Shh, I told it when I heard the front door open and close with such force I thought the house might collapse to that side. Shh, I tried to soothe myself. I heard the door to the room beside me open and close. And a feeling of relief, of acquiescence to sleep or to possession, cooled me.
THE NEXT MORNING at breakfast, Magnus was there. Like a fool, I stood when he came to the table and extended my hand to him, nearly knocking over a carton of milk.
Siri reached out at the right second and steadied it.
“Magnus, this is Lauren,” she said.
He shook my hand, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes. It gave me extra time to take him in. He had reddish hair and skin that had already tanned. He wore a dark blue uniform with Bergström embroidered on his shirt pocket.
Siri and Birgit were talking about budgeting, and a birthday present for their little cousin Fredrik in a northern city, and Siri’s tuition for fall, which was not inexpensive. Magnus’s gaze volleyed between them.
“What do you think, Magnus?” Birgit said.
“Jag kommer att jobba mer,” he said, shoveling a forkful of food into his mouth.
“That will help,” Birgit said. She turned to me. “He’s talking about more hours for his job.”
“What do you do?” I asked him.
Silence. He piled all the dirty napkins from the table upon his plate.
“He’s an electrician,” Birgit said.
Magnus pushed back from the table and sighed. “Elektriker?”
“You make it sound like we’re calling you a name,” Siri said. “It is your job, Magnus.”
“Then I’d best be off to it.”
His eyes met mine, and suddenly I remembered the other details from his face the night before. Not just the fixed line of his mouth, but his eyes and the way they locked, the way his brows came together to make up his mind about me, the way my skin pricked at having him stare.
“Nice to meet you, Lauren,” he said.
He left the room. I reached for the milk carton and sent it flying.
* * *
—
MAGNUS AND BIRGIT each did their part. Their house was neat. The dishes always done, the fridge stocked. They had a metal box in the kitchen for bills when they arrived. Birgit paid them in the evening at a little schoolhouse desk, drinking tea. I felt thankful to rarely see Magnus; he worked late like a dutiful father but went straight to his room when he came home.
It was different for Siri and Birgit, though. It was easy for them to discuss money and then run out into the field beside the house and see who could do the longest string of back walkovers. Birgit would come home from work and go straight out to the field to set up the badminton net so we could play late into the evening. Sometimes the sisters would argue, small old grievances coming out between swats of the rackets, tickle fights that ended in shouts and tears, then too-long silences at the times when it would have been natural for a mother to peek in to see if everyone was okay. In those moments, I felt we were all waiting for the same woman to come in and hush us.
Birgit wanted to know more about my parents. The day I told her how they’d died, I found the beats of the story more easily, and she held her cheek and stared at me, her taped glasses a little lopsided on her face. She marveled that I lived alone, that I’d moved away from my childhood home and sold my parents’ furniture.
“I don’t know what I would do without Magnus and Siri to care for,” she said.
“You’re amazing,” I said. “I can’t even take care of myself.”
“But you’re a college professor. It’s a great accomplishment,” she said.
She got up to pour us some juice, and the ghosts in the house nodded, affable. I wanted to say I was just an adjunct. That I appeared accomplished but wasn’t, really. I appeared like I had things together, but I didn’t.
“Lauren is going to interview for a full-time position at Stella Maris,” Siri said.
“Do you think you’ll get it?” Birgit asked.
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“I don’t know. I think they’ll want someone who can also teach Asian American literature, and I don’t have that background. And even if I could convince them that I knew enough, I don’t have the degree they want. I’m sure they want someone with a PhD.”
“She’s reading all these books by Chinese writers. You wouldn’t believe how much she reads,” Siri said.
“Well, it’s clear the students love you,” Birgit said, throwing her arm over Siri’s shoulder.
“I love you so much I brought you to Sweden,” Siri said, raising her juice glass to clink hers with mine. She had her notepad and pen in front of her, a list of all the places she wanted to take me while I was there. I tried to read it upside down.
“Oh, if they knew I was here I’m sure any chance I have at that job would be shot.”
“But why?” Birgit asked.
“They would see this as something…inappropriate,” I said. “They’d say there should be boundaries between students and professors.”
“Well, I think it’s great,” Birgit said. “I think Siri needs someone responsible following her around on this”—she picked up Siri’s carefully drafted itinerary—“this agenda. It’s like my sister now has a chaperone so I don’t have to worry so much.”
I thought of how odd that sounded. Siri was the one who made the way safe for me. It seemed Birgit didn’t know her own sister.
“Well, I plan to get Lauren into lots of trouble,” Siri said. “After everything she’s been through, I think she deserves a little fun.”
I laughed at this, but Birgit caught my gaze.
“Siri can find trouble anywhere. She will have you out late every night if you let her. I don’t want anything happening to you two while you’re here.”
It seemed Birgit was trying to warn me about something specific.
“For me, look out for both of you, okay?”
She reached across the table for my hand and squeezed hold of it. All the giggling stopped, and it sent a chill through me to feel the seriousness of her gaze on me.
“Please, Lauren. Watch out for her,” she whispered.
“Stop it, Birgit.” Siri snapped the juice bottle closed and slid it from her.
“You can’t be so selfish, Siri.” She patted my hand and then crossed her arms against her chest. “I don’t want Lauren getting in trouble with the school. I mean, is that really true, Lauren? It could affect you getting that job?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Goodness. Why would you even want a job where they are so judgmental?” Birgit asked.
“The other professors can be difficult, but—it’s the closest thing I have to a family. Teaching there has come to mean a lot to me. Birgit, you were saying that having Magnus and Siri to look after…it keeps you going. Teaching does the same for me. A full-time position someday would just—well, it would make it all feel a bit more permanent.”
Birgit nodded. The look on her face made me worried I’d embarrassed her.
“I get it. But it does make me sad,” Birgit said. “You two have so much in common. With the losses you’ve had, it’s natural to be friends. You’ve lived the same story.”
“No,” Siri said quickly. “My story is nothing like Lauren’s. She really suffered.”
I turned to look at her. Was that what she really thought? She’d said that before, on the day in the adjunct office when I first told her about my parents’ deaths. But certainly, she must have realized that our stories were similar. It was what drew us together, wasn’t it? If not that, what? It felt good that Siri acknowledged my story as rare, a tragedy. But didn’t she see we were algebra? A-B-A-B-A-B. That while A and B seemed different, they were really very similar. We were an essay in the comparison-and-contrast form.
Siri was wiping at some stain upon her sleeve.
Sitting in the kitchen, I somehow felt that if their dinette was a boardroom table, then I was the trustee too long absent and finally arrived, sitting in the place that had always been reserved for me. They awaited now my grief-shareholder’s speech about how my story was worse. But I wanted to believe Birgit, that someone could look at me and Siri and easily see that we should be friends.
That’s when it happened: an explosion.
We hurried to the pantry, where some of the cabinet doors had been flung open. Orange jelly oozed from the white shelves, spread across the countertop, and fell in fat drops upon the floor.
“Mamma’s hjortronsylt,” Birgit marveled. Tentative, she opened one of the cabinets, and another glass jar burst with a little pop. It was cloudberry jelly. There must have been twenty jars in various states of ruin.
We heard Magnus’s heavy boots coming up the stairs. I hadn’t known he was in the house. He came into the kitchen and stared at the scene. He was wearing his work uniform, and the neat creases in his work shirt and down the front of his blue pants made it seem he was trying very hard to hold himself together.
“Det blev för varmt därinne,” he said slowly.
He motioned to the wall the cabinets shared with the drying closet. The girls had left the heat lamp on all night. The jars had gotten too hot.
“I tell you all the time to shut off that lamp. And the lights we are not using. And to turn off the water. And to stop letting the hose run in the grass—”
“Äh, sluta, Magnus!” Siri shouted.
I could see him trying to remain calm.
“I know you have not been here, Siri, for a while. But we have rules in the house,” he said. “And practices we have enacted to save money. For your school, among other things.”
“I’m glad they burst!” Siri yelled at him.
Birgit tried to put a hand on Siri’s shoulder, but before I even saw her pick up a jar, she was turning from her and hurling one at Magnus.
When it landed at the tip of his boot, it popped rather than shattered. It looked like a glass balloon, still held together by some kind of thread skeleton, or by the jelly.
Magnus stared at the broken jar, as though contemplating what it would take to glue it back together. We were all quiet.
“You come back and bad things happen,” he said to Siri. I realized he was saying this in English so I could hear it, too. “You can clean it.”
“They had been in there too long, and that is your fault!” she shouted.
I’d never witnessed Siri so full of rage. She was pointing her finger in his face, and he backed away, stony eyed. He was used to this from her. I wasn’t. I had no idea this had been underneath her skin all this time. I could feel the way she was yelling at him in my chest, the way a parade goes by and a bass drum thumps at your heart and throat. Birgit was starting to clean up, moving in a wide circle around her. I could tell that she too was used to seeing this kind of emotion from her sister. She got the trash bin. She filled a basin with soapy water. It was her way of dealing. Magnus left, his boots scraping shards of glass against the wood planks of the floor.
I felt angry that Siri was letting her sister clean. Angry that she had just let her brother leave. And I suddenly felt resentful of Siri, that she would take for granted this brother and sister. I felt resentful that she had family at all.
Birgit started pulling off long sheets of paper towels. “They’d just been in there too long. For years,” she said to me, trying to pretend that all was normal.
Siri stood staring at the arched doorway through which Magnus had gone.
“The summer before our mamma died, we were visiting our cousins in the north, and they had cloudberries growing wild near their house. Mamma did the canning herself, and we brought these home. After she died, Magnus never let us touch it.”
“I’m glad they burst,” Siri said again.
Birgit went for a broom. “Yes, well. Let’s just get it cleaned.”
They let me help them but talked softly i
n Swedish between themselves. It was easy to tell they weren’t talking about Magnus or the jars or Siri’s rage. I caught words I knew. Sommar. Mamma. Bär, for “berries.” They were trading memories of that last summer with their mother. Together we scrubbed the cabinets with soap and water. The deep orange jelly smelled sweet and delicious and got all over us no matter what we did.
Siri pulled a cardboard box from under a cabinet to collect the broken glass. It caught light from the kitchen window, and I recalled the sparkling geode paintings she’d shown me that first morning in our classroom, the mistake at the bottom of her canvas repaired with gold.
“Are you thinking of using it in your artwork?” I asked.
She smiled a little. “I wasn’t. But maybe.” She seemed to have come back into herself. I wondered if she was embarrassed by the way she’d behaved.
Birgit looked between us. “Siri, you should show her your scrapbook,” she said. “Our mother was the kind who kept everything. Do you want to see?”
Soon we were all sitting cross-legged on the bed in Birgit’s room. Siri brought over a red album full of her childhood artwork. On the cover was a child’s rendition of Pippi Longstocking.
“Have you read those stories?” Birgit asked. “We’re planning to take you to Vimmerby this trip. There’s a park based on the tales. We used to go there when we were little.” She opened the book so I could see the playful pictures inside. Crayons and pastels. A self-portrait, where Siri was all teeth. Drawings of Magnus, redheaded, and Birgit, as tall as the book. There were empty pages at the back.
“I was eleven when our mamma left us,” Birgit said.