by Diane Zinna
“I was five when my mother died,” Siri said. “She used to tell me I could draw and be an artist.”
“Magnus and Siri got all the artistic talent,” Birgit said.
“It’s the only way he and I are alike,” Siri said.
Birgit laughed. “She doesn’t like to admit it, but she and Magnus are a lot alike.”
“Don’t say that, Birgit. I have a temper, but I’m not crazy.”
“I hate that word,” I said.
The sisters stopped and looked at me. Birgit seemed embarrassed. Siri just shook her head.
“You don’t understand, Lauren. What I mean is he does crazy things.”
“He works hard. He misses you terribly,” Birgit said.
“Syster, you know what I’m talking about.” Siri turned to me. “After our mamma died, I told Magnus that I was starting to forget what she looked like.”
“Oh, I tell her even now—just look in the mirror,” Birgit said.
“Magnus said he would help me remember. He started describing her to me at night before sleep. I would look forward to it. He’d sit on the edge of my bed. Tuck me in. Then I realized that he was always describing her in different ways, to mess with my head.”
She looked up at a portrait of a woman on the wall above the bed. “That was one of many.”
“It’s accurate, Siri,” Birgit said.
“But he painted ten others that were all different women. Some looked like demons. He just kept making them.”
“We all handled her death in different ways,” Birgit said to me.
“I couldn’t sleep with them in the house. Even when I look at that one, I—I know it looks the way she did. But it brings back a lot of painful feelings.”
“He wouldn’t throw them away. He insisted on burying them out behind the house,” Birgit said.
I looked at her.
“He’d go out at night and dig up the field and bury them. It was very strange.”
Above her shoulder, the doorway. Magnus stepping into it silently. The girls’ backs were to the door. They didn’t know he was standing there.
I tried not to look at him.
“We have a complicated relationship,” Siri said.
I could feel Magnus’s eyes on me. He was waiting.
He wanted to see if I’d tell them that I’d seen him last night. I couldn’t bear his gaze on me. I wiped at my face and got jam in my eyes.
“When Mamma died, Magnus was just a kid himself,” Birgit said.
“I hate when you say that,” Siri said. “Look at you. Don’t act like you haven’t had to step up and act like the oldest because of his issues.”
“But he’s a different person now.”
“I don’t believe you when you say that.”
“It’s the truth.”
“You would say anything to defend him.”
I found the desire to defend him rising in me, too. I fought back the urge to speak. Siri noticed my expression and breathed out, a smile. “Oh, your face, Lauren. You’re making me feel like a bad sister.”
“Good,” Birgit said. “You don’t understand how much you hurt him.”
“Did your mother keep a book of Magnus’s artwork, too?” I asked.
“No,” Birgit said. “He was already at the age when he was private about things.”
I looked up at where Magnus had been standing. He was gone.
“Do you have sisters or brothers, Lauren?” Birgit asked.
“No,” I said. “It’s just me.”
She reached over and patted my knee. “And now all of us. Our difficult family.”
We turned back to the scrapbook. The drawings gave a sense of how different their household had been when their mother was alive. The pictures were neatly arranged, dates beneath each one. You could almost see, making your way through the pages, when Siri’s hand steadied, when her use of color became more purposeful, when she first tried shadow.
We passed the book back and forth, the room still smelling of cloudberry jam, the scent of the explosion. Siri reached out for my hand, like her contractions of pain and love and happiness and sadness were labor pains. I know Siri had felt release when the jars burst. Perhaps at a time when I least expected it, things would burst open for me, and I’d be relieved. But I couldn’t help but think, holding Siri’s hand, that this was the hand that had thrown the jar. And I couldn’t help but think of the man now in his childhood bedroom with the music cranked up, for whom the pieces we’d swept up and trashed were more than just bits of glass. And sometimes I misremember, and it’s Siri’s startling fury that shattered all of the jars.
SIRI KEPT ME busy the next few days. We went by ferry to Denmark and drank beer in Nyhavn, beside rainbow-colored port houses overlooking the canal. She showed me the one Hans Christian Andersen lived in when he wrote “The Princess and the Pea,” and we shared with each other fairy tales of our own to pass the day.
Later in the week, we went to visit their family in Hamburgsund, a harbor town, to celebrate her cousin Fredrik’s tenth birthday and watch him in his sailing race. We cheered for him from the rocks as he navigated his tiny yellow boat just out of the harbor and back. Afterward we all climbed a path that led to a rocky overlook to see a view of the whole harbor. Fredrik sweetly whispered to me that he’d named his boat Ost, the word for cheese, because his was the only yellow boat in his whole sailing club.
I loved that little boy and that harbor, and its rock cliffs and rain clouds that gathered around them—they made it look, for once, like it was getting dark when it should. With the sun out so early and so late, and the wind continually trying to push back summer, it felt like it could be any time and any season. We went back to their house for hot dogs and birthday cake, and after he opened his presents, we all fell asleep, exhausted, on the L-shaped couch in their living room. And I loved the long drive back to Olofstorp with Siri. She talked about all the other places we’d see, and she was so happy and gentle, it didn’t seem possible she could ever break a jar.
* * *
—
SIRI ARRANGED FOR us to go to the Pippi Longstocking park that next weekend. I sat in the backseat with Siri. Items for our picnic were stacked on the front seat beside Birgit. With her closer to my age and so responsible, I felt I was stealing something by laughing in the backseat with Siri while she studied the map in the front alone.
I looked out the window at the flower beds Birgit kept. She was the sister who made beauty from order. Though Magnus was the oldest, Birgit embraced her role of mother to her siblings, caretaker of this house. She had Siri’s same earnestness but not her carefree ways.
Birgit liked hearing our stories of our time in the United States, but it was clear she didn’t want Siri to return to school in the fall. It was costly, and she mentioned that to Siri a lot. Mostly, she wanted the three of them under the same roof, as though they all needed to be present for anything good to happen for them. I stared at her neat rows of vegetables just starting to wind their way through the squares of a white lattice.
Magnus rapped on the door beside me and I jumped.
He was looking off to the side, waiting for me to open the door. I sat upright and rolled down the window.
“I’m coming with you. Open up,” he said.
I opened the door, and he pressed in beside me.
Siri leaned across me. “You’re coming to Vimmerby?”
“I think there’s at least one thing we should do here as a family, don’t you?”
Everyone was silent. I moved closer to Siri to give him room.
“Well, okay then,” Birgit said, glancing at us in the rearview.
We drove. On the radio: soft, sentimental music from another generation. It wasn’t long before Siri and Birgit were humming along. I gazed out the window at the blurring green. It was a b
eautiful, gray-skied day, the green fields glowing as if lit from the inside. Light came through the trees like honey dripping.
I read from my guidebook, a section on Swedish folklore and the story of a beautiful sylvan nymph called the Skogsrå, who guarded woodlands and lured wandering men to marriage or their deaths. After she slept with them, she’d reveal herself in her true form, the skin of her back made of bark, her torso a hollow trunk full of leaves. I felt Magnus reading over my shoulder. When I turned to him, he looked away.
I noticed Magnus’s hands, resting on his thighs. They were still, but light flickered over them. I found myself listening for his breath, noticing the curve of my body that was against his. The undersides of his fingernails were all black.
Then we passed a lake and suddenly everything was water and silver-shining, bright-blue-sky openness—and I felt Magnus’s chest rise. I looked at his face, and he was looking at me, too, as if we were sharing a secret. I imagined in that moment he was seeing all the different sides of me at once, and I thought of those portraits buried in the field. The girls were still humming, and he and I were just breathing. His scent of pine—I could imagine that sparkling lake was the place he disappeared to for the whole of every day, and now that I knew of it, maybe I could go with him there.
“Lauren.”
Siri’s voice.
“We all call that lake Bi Sjön—the bees’ lake,” she said. “When we were kids we swam there. There is a thick tree root that grows out over the water, and one day we discovered that the inside was hollow but full of dead bees. Magnus, do you remember when Mamma showed us?”
When I looked back at Magnus, there was tree cover again, like we were going through a dark green tunnel. His eyes were shining, and he didn’t respond.
“Magnus, do you remember?”
* * *
—
AT VIMMERBY, WE ate lunch sitting on long plank benches in the sunshine. Siri and Birgit argued a little. Actors dressed as characters skipped by. Teenage girls with yarn wigs were everywhere, sometimes two Pippis at once. In Swedish, she is known as Pippi Långstrump, and I loved the sound of that. We sat in the shadow of her multicolored house, Villa Villekulla, and watched as children ran up to men dressed as Pippi’s horse, holding balloons in the shape of Pippi’s monkey. Some of the pretty, yarn-headed teenagers stole furtive glances at Magnus as he sat wide-legged with his back against the picnic table smiling at them. Siri shot him a look and whispered, “Nej, Magnus.”
I couldn’t stop looking at him, either. He wore a white tank top, and my eyes kept going to the dark constellations of freckles clustered on his shoulder blades. The muscles in his back tensed as he scratched hard at the side of his neck, leaving a red mark where his fingers dug in.
His notebook and pencil were in front of me on the table. I’d seen him sketching throughout the day. I wanted him to turn to me. I wanted to feel that openness in him again. I picked up his pencil. I reached across the table and touched his shoulder with the rubber eraser.
He turned. I was still stretched across the table, smiling at him goofily, the pencil extended toward him. He took it from me and snatched his sketchbook up. His bottom lip was cracked in the center, and he had a dried bead of blood there.
“I have been wondering what you do,” I said.
“My sisters told you. I’m an electrician.”
“I saw those easels in your room. Were you an artist? Is that what you studied in school?”
He opened his sketchbook and pushed it toward me, flipping through a few pencil drawings of animals we had seen in Vimmerby’s petting zoo earlier that afternoon.
“I am an artist now,” he said with gravelly confidence.
I told him they were good and slowly turned the sketchbook’s pages.
“I’m not good at drawing animals,” he said.
“He’s good at drawing people,” Birgit said, her mouth full of sandwich.
I noticed that in the backgrounds of all the drawings were shadowy ball-and-line figures, as though the people in the park were made of wooden beads.
Siri came over and whispered in my ear. “He never shows anyone his drawings.” She tried to see the animal sketches, but Magnus took the book back.
“Fine, Magnus—whatever. You know I think you’re good.”
“I think it’s wonderful that you’re both artists,” I said.
“Yes, but we do very different stuff,” Siri said.
“We’re not that different,” Magnus said.
Siri was quiet.
“Well? Say it, Siri. Say we’re not that different.”
“You don’t even know what I’ve been working on,” she said. “I’m working in new mediums, and just being away from here has provided a lot of inspiration. I mean, Lauren has seen my work. What would you say, Lauren?”
He turned away from us, and Siri scoffed, gesturing to Birgit as if to say, See, he hasn’t changed at all. But I saw how it had hurt him. The way he cocked his neck, the way he rubbed at his temple. Some nearby children stopped their play to stare at him, and he made an expression to make them laugh. It touched me, that he was trying to put them at ease. Birgit went to him and spoke in low Swedish in his ear. He nodded and took out a piece of paper.
“Ja, do it, Magnus,” Siri said.
“What?” I asked.
Magnus turned to a fresh piece of paper. “I am going to draw you.”
Siri twisted around in her chair so that her back was to me, and she made a gun shape with her fingers like she was one of Charlie’s Angels. “You do it, too,” she said, elbowing me in the ribs.
Magnus stared at the blank sheet of paper.
“No, no,” I said, lowering Siri’s hands. “Be serious.”
She leaned back into me. “I can’t take him seriously.”
She said it softly. I studied his face as he started to draw us, wondering if he’d heard her. He was the only person I’d ever heard Siri disparage, and it made me feel protective of him—and angry with Siri. There was the feeling of my hair and Siri’s hair mixed together on our necks. His hand swirled on the page, the motion of a gravestone rubbing. I saw now why his fingernails were black—they were scraping up graphite from the paper.
Siri sighed against my back.
“Are you smiling?” I asked her, wanting to know if I should smile too.
“No,” she said. “I have a serious expression.”
She’d spoken louder this time, wanting to provoke him. It made me angry. Things had seemed better between them since the day the jars had exploded. Now I remembered how she’d called him crazy.
He erased something on his page.
He was drawing her, and she was sighing. He was drawing her now, like this, taking care to get her just right. I looked at him, wanting him to respond somehow, to defend himself or at least say something that would help me understand this breach between them.
Magnus kept his eyes on the circular motions he was making on the paper, and I kept my eyes on the aqua-colored shutters of Villa Villekulla. The two men in the horse costume negotiated their way up the bright house’s porch steps. Magnus kept scrawling, slowing down, slower and slower. He removed his sunglasses from the top of his head and put them over his eyes.
“Hey,” I said, trying to soothe him.
Suddenly, in the distance, Siri and Birgit were calling out my name. Somehow I could still feel her back against mine. When had they left the table? They’d crossed the field and were climbing wooden steps up the side of a red barn.
“Don’t move,” Magnus said.
I could still feel the pressure, the weight of Siri’s body pressed up against my back, but now it spread around me like an embrace, at once keeping me seated so that he could draw me and pulling me in, pulling me in closer to him. I remembered his digging in the field, how he had seemed drawn into th
e ground, fighting not to be drawn into the hole. That was how I felt now. I was being pulled into the paper, I was made of graphite, I could smear on his fingertips.
I was always the kind of person who hated to have her photograph taken, dreading that instant when the camera might catch me looking stupid or at a bad angle, reduced to one version of myself, someone thinking that’s all I am. Something like death in a photo. A stranger might pick it up, and to them that’s all you’ll ever be, this moment you had no control over, that had no before and no afterward.
But his drawing was alive. I could tell that he was contemplating my hair, my brow, my lashes. How would he do my neck? My shirt? My mouth?
My mouth was open, my lips parted. How would he render the things of my lips—my words, my breath? He was slowing down, but I wanted his hands to keep going, I wanted his eyes to keep me.
I saw in the drawing that Siri was as light as a feather, insinuations of a shape, just straight lines where her collarbone and shoulder met. But even from upside down, I could see all my lines were bold and dark and sure, clear curves, tiny details, eyes made bright by his hand. All of that came from his hands, upside down, everything, upside down.
He wanted to show me the drawing. He tore it from his sketchbook like he would give it to me.
“I have to go,” I said.
I ran across the field to the barn. I climbed the stairs to the high loft, where Siri and Birgit were waiting for me. I could see them each turning—even now I see it in slow motion—one at a time the sisters launched themselves from the second-story loft into the hay below. Openmouthed and eyes closed, air gone, exhausted, laughing, motes of dust and pieces of straw drifting down, hanging in the rays of sun, magnets to the bars of light falling across them.
I breathed. I jumped. I remember feeling suspended, feeling my breath and heartbeat hanging in the air above me, even as I collapsed into the soft, sweet straw. I landed with my arms spread open to make room for my heart to fall back into my chest.
When I opened my eyes, I saw Magnus looking down at me with a pained expression from the high loft.