by Diane Zinna
* * *
—
ON THE DRIVE home, the sisters recognized a road, a field they’d known as kids. I saw the name of the place in my guidebook. You enter beneath an archway of three stones—the remains of a passage grave. The massive stones had once been built into a hill, but the hill had worn away over hundreds of years, leaving only the two standing stones and roof stone behind. We parked on the side of the road and got out to explore it.
Before the stones, the ground was different. You could see pale stripes where snails were feeding on the lichens that matted the rocks. On the other side, there began a dense forest, where stones were flecked with copper or covered in moss. The forest part was an open room where everything was pied, shimmering with color and depth. I read as I walked, checking off the names of plants I saw there, spinning around to yell, “There’s a tree here that is nine hundred years old!”
Magnus looked annoyed at me and my guidebook. He went off on his own while the girls and I went to find the old tree. It was a beautiful monster. Low down on its trunk, it split in two like horns, and the girls posed in front of it while I took pictures. The three of us played hide-and-seek, peeping from behind enormous red-leaved cabbages and climbing the massive, octopus-rooted trees. I wondered if everything there had grown up so giant from the dust of people once buried there, when all of this ground was yet inside a grave. I thought of my parents. How I would have loved the idea of a passage grave, a vault in the woods for safekeeping, where they would not be constantly shifting with the currents of memory, with the distant, mysterious currents of a lake bed.
I was hiding from the sisters when Magnus jumped out from behind the two-horned tree to scare me.
I felt like we became quickly enshrouded by massive ferns and trees that grew up to conceal us.
“Are you the beautiful Skogsrå?” he asked. “Let me check.”
He pulled me to him and slowly slid his hands down my back. I wondered if he would feel the scars left there, the four hard dots over my vertebrae like bark. I stood in the tent of his gaze, the house of it, and I remembered Siri just as she came around the bend. I pulled away from him just in time but couldn’t catch my breath.
IN THE DAYS that followed our trip to Vimmerby, Magnus occupied my thoughts. On the hall windowsill, in the dusty track for the storm window, I found three stubby pencils, their erasers gone. I wondered if Magnus had used them to make the sketches near the stairs, and I thought about how those drawings must have scratched the itches of the old house. One day, when Siri was napping and Magnus was at work, I found myself wandering the rooms, looking for more items of his left around. His jacket was where he always hung it, on the hook behind the kitchen door. His toothbrush was on the bathroom windowsill in a yellow plastic cup, beside Birgit’s. I passed his room twice before deciding to turn the knob, which had been painted over many times. The old colors of the house were still showing where the paint had chipped. The door opened.
I went in. On his bedside table was a sketch pad and a half-drunk glass of water, a lens case, dust, coins. His easels were bare, the clips and dry brushes spotted with color. I breathed in the paint smell, touched the dried paint on the metal clips, catching a little underneath my fingernails. I had the sudden urge to run my fingers down his blanket, too.
I found myself breathing faster, trying to take in his scent from the sheets on the bed, which was positioned against our shared wall. I noticed that there were pencil lines all over that wall, just like the faint mural beside the stairs. Up close I could see eraser shavings stuck to the paint as he’d changed the flower shapes again and again. I imagined our lying back-to-back, or stomach-to-stomach, with just this wall of the house between us, this wall of flowers.
I hadn’t really let myself look at the drawing he’d made of Siri and me at Vimmerby. Siri had been acting like an impertinent child while he’d scrawled and erased, trying to get the shape of her just right. And me. He’d drawn me while I was filling up inside with feelings of protectiveness for him. Now I longed to find the picture.
There was a mound of papers near his stereo, bills and paperwork from his job. I found myself touching them, wondering about his work, looking for evidence of his handwriting, all the while listening for any small sound in the hallway that could indicate Siri was awakening from her nap. I moved some of the papers, hoping to find that crinkly picture buried underneath, but found something else, made of fabric.
It appeared to be an embroidered kitchen calendar divided into twelve parts. Each square bore the image of a different macabre creature. A goat-priest with its heart exposed; a sow with sharp spines; a skeleton girl, her skull swimming with dots of frayed, bluish floss. The old embroidery threads appeared to be held together with rubber cement.
I touched an image of a black bird. It had a hole in one of its outstretched wings.
“That is Nattravnen,” a voice said.
I turned to find Magnus standing behind me. I jumped back.
“The Night Raven. It’s said that if you look through the hole in its wing, you’ll see the thing you fear the most. Very bad luck to look at it. Better not look at the goat one either.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, closing my eyes to the bad-luck images, the sight of him standing there in his dark blue work uniform.
“What are you doing in here, Lauren?” he asked.
My eyes were still closed. I didn’t know what to say.
“I could help you, if you told me.”
He didn’t sound angry, but I rushed from his room and into Siri’s, where she lay sleeping on her bed. I locked her door behind me and stared at it, wondering if he would knock and demand I come out and explain myself. He didn’t.
I turned to Siri’s room. On the walls were framed compositions she had made, which felt very much like her. Paint infused with glitter, mosaics made with metal pieces and paper tissue, all scrunched up.
She had a little rolltop desk and papers there in neat stacks. I went to them. I saw that the papers were her old essays from my class, and that my writing laced the sides.
Tell me more, I’d written in one place. This reminds me of a favorite story. It’s called “All Summer in a Day.”
I knelt next to her bed. This girl had changed my life. She had clicked open my locked door.
In that moment, I promised myself I’d put as much distance between Magnus and me as I could. I had been two people ever since what happened in the forest. I wondered about these changes in her, if she was the one in the wrong, and I liked the way being around him made me feel. But I wanted to be one person—one good friend to Siri. I wanted to believe everything about Siri, even when she said there was something wrong with Magnus. She had asked me to stay away from him, and I wanted to promise that I could.
* * *
—
TENSIONS BETWEEN MAGNUS and Siri grew hotter the next day. I was in the shower when I heard them yelling in the hall. I put my head under the stream of water to drown out Magnus’s voice whenever he responded to her, trying to focus only on Siri’s side of the argument, saying that she must return to school, that there was no way for her to be the artist she wanted to be in Sweden. It was over by the time I shut off the shower. I heard him storming from the house as I was putting on my clothes, and he didn’t come back that night.
I was grateful when Siri’s itinerary involved our traveling by train to Stockholm for a few days alone, and it could just be the two of us again. I remember the long ride through the countryside, the gleaming lakes, trading music back and forth on her headphones, playing hangman, trying fitfully to sleep, but the dreamscape being beyond the window, all that green, the gleaming lakes, the rolling fields.
I remember coming into Stockholm. There was a long, dark tunnel that went on forever until we seemed to blast out of it. Then we were gliding across the water—water on all sides of the train, a bright, flashing
expanse. We couldn’t see the track for all the water. The train might as well have been a speedboat. Or a rocket. My heart was racing so hard. I felt I was shooting through space. Siri slept, her face pressed against the window.
Once we arrived, the first place Siri wanted to show me was Gamla Stan, the old part of the city, and we walked the cobblestoned length of Västerlånggatan, a bustling street full of tourists and outdoor cafés. Siri went down every tunnel-like alley. I poked my head through the doors of every church. She went into a store to buy candy, and I waited outside, taking photos.
There was a shop adjacent to an old church, and in its window, I saw painted woodcuts of saints, long faces with head coverings and gold halos. One immediately caught my attention. She was standing in sackcloth, had brown flames for hair, and was holding her own blue eyes in a dish. The shopkeeper came and pulled up the gate while I was standing there. “Excuse me,” I asked. “Which saint is that?”
“Oh, her,” she said. “Don’t let her scare you. That is Saint Lucia.”
She invited me inside her shop and handed me a book.
“She went with her ill mother to pray at the tomb of Saint Agatha, and her mother was healed. Lucy was so overcome with joy that she pledged her virginity to God and refused to wed the pagan man to whom she was betrothed. He shocked her with his lust, telling her that he could see in her eyes the sexual creature she really was. So she plucked them out.”
The book said that when Lucia gave away her pledged dowry to the poor, her enraged fiancé had her arrested. The guards came and found Lucia so filled with the Holy Spirit she was as stiff and as heavy as a mountain. They could not move her even when they hitched her to a team of oxen. She continued to pray even as a soldier thrust a dagger through her throat. They tried to burn her at a stake, but the flames did not touch her. It was only after she was given communion that she fell softly and peacefully into death.
“Is that the story you imagined looking at her?” the shopkeeper asked.
“No.”
She moved behind the counter and smiled. “You are very sweet.” She started to wrap the woodcut in brown paper. “You must take this. She is just like you.”
“What do you mean?”
“You might as well be holding your own pretty eyes in your hand.”
She handed me the package and wouldn’t accept my money.
“She is the patron saint for the blind,” she said.
I took it, but it made me feel exposed. What wasn’t I allowing myself to see? I don’t remember ever showing the woodcut to Siri. When I stepped back onto the street, she and I simply continued our walk along Västerlånggatan, she with a bag of licorice in her pocket, and I with the Santa Lucia. It felt so heavy, and so did I, heavy with shame that even a stranger could see that I was still borne down by my grief.
* * *
—
“STAY THERE! I’LL take your picture!” Siri and I were in a big outdoor arcade known as Sergels Torg. There had been a picture of it in my guidebook, and gift shops sold postcards of its cityscape sunsets and large, black and white triangular tiles. She took the stairs two at a time, and I followed the dot of her in the crowd.
“Do something!” I heard her yell. People looked to see what I’d do. I waved. She kept opening her arms indicating bigger, something bigger. I was being captured against a black and white screen. Wherever I stood, I felt I was a game piece and that something was about to happen to me.
What happened was rain. Out of nowhere. My blue jacket was immediately drenched, my bangs clung to my forehead, my makeup ran, and I couldn’t stop laughing. I was a sky-blue top on that wet game board, my arms wide open, my side teeth showing. I spun, and my jacket floated out around my hips. When she ran back down the stairs, I hugged her.
She said, “Finally free. That’s how we should caption that photo.”
If Sergels Torg was a game board, the Tunnelbana continued the game underground. We avoided the rain by descending into the city’s subway system and riding the trains to see the artwork that exploded against the cavernous ceilings, floors, and walls of the subterranean stations. We were inside the colors, the art spread out and around us like great wombs of pattern and noise.
“Magnus used to bring me to the different stations back when he was a teenager,” she said, slowing down. “This is one he especially liked.”
We were in a vast vaulted chamber just before descending the escalator to the platform area of the Järva line, where an artist had painted silhouettes to depict workers constructing the station and the scaffolding they’d used.
“Magnus told me our stations were a marvel, that no other city loves art the way we love art. Because all of this is hidden from the street, you have to get down inside the station to know it. He’d get candy and let me eat the whole bag just to buy himself more gazing time.”
I had managed to put him mostly out of my mind that day. It had been the rain, the running around in the city, just being with her, so light and free of spirit like we used to be. Why did I now find myself wanting her to talk more about Magnus? I wanted to ask her questions. I wanted her to explain him to me—or explain him away.
I was determined to focus on us. Approaching each new station, I scrambled to read the guidebook passages. Departing, we made our own notes in the margins. In Alby, beneath the cavernous green ceiling: a teenage couple with mohawks, dressed in matching outfits, their hands in the back pockets of each other’s pants. Siri drew them like a cartoon while I nodded. In Solna, the man with a violin. In Rådhuset, the ten enormous billboards advertising herring. We made a game of it. Our eyes had been sponges and we wrung them out into my guidebook until I was left wondering, How can I record my breathing? How to note how it felt to be beside her, to jump from the train platform and not be afraid, to give the last of my kronor to an oompah band in T-Centralen?
The guidebook began to feel similar to my dream journal, beloved and utilitarian. I was grateful that I’d have it, this record of our time together, despite the speed of the silver train and our hourglass running out, despite how, no matter how many words I taught her in English, she’d return to her first language when I left for home.
Two days later, on the nonstop train back to Gothenburg, there was a digital sign over the door that flashed through the names of towns we were passing and told us how fast the train was traveling. I’d wondered how fast two hundred kilometers per hour would feel.
I had the guidebook out. Now it was our book. I read aloud some of the funny things we’d written, but she was melancholy, smiling where I expected her to laugh, staring at the blur beyond our window like she was reading the paint of its long green lines. A table separated us. She listened to music on her headphones.
I thumbed ahead to a section about Öland, the island we were planning to visit the last day of our trip. It was long and thin with a lighthouse at each end, four hundred windmills in between. The guidebook spoke of ruined castles and windsurfing, the Iron Age, crowded beaches. The center of the island was a heathland known as Stora Alvaret, famous for being unlike any other terrain in Sweden. There were no pictures in this section, but they made the alvar sound like a windy desert swirling with tumbleweed.
The digital sign above her head marked the speed like a blood pressure cuff. “Look. Two hundred kilometers per hour,” I said.
Siri took off her headphones and fumbled with the player.
“Lauren, do you agree with Birgit? Do you think I’m a bad sister?”
She’d caught me off guard.
“What? No. Birgit doesn’t think that,” I said.
“The way I treat Magnus. Do you think I’m wrong?”
I paused, and I hated that she saw it. “You feel what you feel,” I said.
“What do you think of him, Lauren?”
“Me?”
“If you didn’t know all the stuff bet
ween him and me? What would you think?”
“Do I know all the stuff between the two of you?”
She ignored my question, but I think we could both feel it, that there was something each of us was trying to hide.
“He told me I was avoiding him by bringing you home this summer.”
“Were you?”
“I don’t think I would have come back if you hadn’t come, too.”
“Why?”
I wanted her to say it was because she loved spending time with me, but she didn’t. If that was the reason, she didn’t know it. I could see her thinking, and in her silence, other ideas gripped me. That she’d brought me to bolster and surround her. I was a wall for her, a mask, a way to prove herself through my devotion. I wanted her to say it was because of love, if only to quell what I was feeling now—that I’d been used.
She laid her head against the velvet of the seatback. I was angry that she was allowing herself to rest without offering even a made-up answer. Maybe that’s why my words came out sharply.
“Siri, what is it between the two of you?”
“The pictures he made of my mother,” she said, staring out the window at the whizzing green.
“Yes, you’ve told me about them,” I said.
“Yeah, I know,” she said.
I was impatient. Magnus hadn’t made her forget her mother’s face. She was blaming him for the things that time does.
“If there was something else…would you tell me?”
“Don’t you think that’s enough?” she said. “I used to look up to him. I was a child. I told him I was forgetting my mother’s face. I told him I was scared of spiders, and he painted her like a spider.”
The light through the window made her freckles blink through the powder of her makeup.
“He believes her death was my fault,” she said.
We looked at each other. This felt closer to the truth.