by Diane Zinna
“That’s why he paints her like that. To punish me. It’s in the sketches on the walls. It’s buried in a hundred holes in the field around the house. I imagined the paintings rising up again and coming to life. It’s part of the reason I needed to get away from there.”
I thought of the way she treated her friends and family. I thought of the wide berths people gave her, how much they forgave, how they didn’t yell back.
“What happened with your mother, Siri? How did she die?”
Siri gazed solemnly out the window at the blur.
“She went for a walk and didn’t come back,” she said.
I felt a chill rush through me. I’d asked her about this before when she was a student in my class. Nobody knows for sure, she’d said. I’d assumed then that meant something too long undiagnosed. Something regular and sad. After all our talks, all our sharing, Siri had never told me more.
“Sometimes, lying in bed in that house, I find myself listening in the middle of the night for the front door to open, the sound of her returning,” Siri said. “I feel it when I’m home. All of us in our beds, listening for the front door. But it’s always the gate. The gate.”
Her makeup had dried out, and there were lines around her light eyes I’d never noticed. She got up and came to my side of the table to sit beside me. Maybe so I’d stop looking at her. Maybe so she could stop looking at me.
She laid her head against my shoulder, then turned her mouth onto my skin. I could feel her lips move as she whispered. “I’ll tell you everything someday, Lauren. I promise. Until then, stay away from him. For me. Please.”
I know we both felt how fast the train was moving. I wanted it to stop moving in his direction, but all I could feel was the high speed at which we were traveling, the inability to stop it, the disaster of not stopping it.
BACK IN OLOFSTORP, everyone wanted to host Siri before she returned to the States. Everyone wanted to toast her. Frida had a party where people drank akvavit out of a long, hollowed-out horn. She’d gone around sulking most of the night with her arms crossed against her chest, shooting dark glances at me with Siri.
Siri’s packed itinerary kept us out late, and both of us were starting to get a little sick, coughing ourselves to sleep each night. I worried that I would keep Magnus awake on the other side of our shared wall. Sometimes I would imagine him coming in with a wet cloth for my head or a cup of tea to soothe me. But Magnus was still gone. Birgit said that he hadn’t come back since the fight with Siri, and he hadn’t reported to work the whole time we were in Stockholm.
I know Birgit heard the coughing coming from both our rooms at night. She had pleaded with me to help slow Siri down, but I’d delivered both of us home from Stockholm sick. Often I saw her sitting alone on the window seat and worried she was angry with me.
We were headed out to see Siri’s friends again one evening when Birgit jumped up and showed Siri that the freezer was packed with ice cream. “I went shopping for us. You could just stay in and we could watch movies the way we used to,” she offered.
“I don’t want to stay in. Come with us if you want to be with me,” Siri said.
Siri went to get her bag, and Birgit went back to the window seat. I walked up beside her. I noticed that the window overlooked the road that led to the house.
“You’re worried about Magnus,” I said quickly. His name in my mouth felt like a jawbreaker.
Birgit turned to me.
“You’re watching for him. You want to be here when he comes back, right?”
She nodded. “I need to try to fix things between them,” she said. “You know, I see how you look at him, Lauren.”
I sat down at the dinette table and stared at the blue and yellow pattern of the tablecloth.
“No. It’s okay. What I mean is that you see he’s not a bad person. Siri is too hard on him. He’s been gone now for days. I so wanted them to fix this thing between them, but how can that happen now? And with the school vacation so close to being done.”
Siri walked back into the kitchen. Her hair looked wet. She’d slicked it back.
Birgit brightened.
“But at least we’ll have the weekend. Right, Siri?”
“Syster, I told you.”
“You’re not still thinking of going camping!”
“You can come with us!”
“I’m too old for that bullshit, Siri. Lauren is too old for it, too. She doesn’t want to go there.”
Siri tried to show Birgit a map of where we were headed that weekend, but her sister went out to smoke alone on the balcony.
“If I do not go out tonight, she will want me to stay home tomorrow, too, and the next day, and I am going back to school. That’s what she wants, Lauren. You hear her. She wants me to not go back.”
I wondered if Birgit could hear her through the glass. As we went down the circular staircase and out of the house, Siri told me we were heading to her favorite bar. Though she insisted it was the place everyone in town went to feel sentimental, I couldn’t help but look back at their house, and at the second-story patio, where Birgit sat rocking among the yellow flowers and the orange stripes in the sky.
* * *
—
FRIDA AND MARGARETA met us at the bar, but soon many more people squeezed together at the corner table where we were sitting, all people Siri knew. Each conversation with a town friend sounded like she was picking up in the middle of a story. There was a local rock band in the corner of the room, the bass drum stuck with electrical tape, the lead singer droning on a high stool.
I caught Margareta looking at me.
“All this time, guys, and I don’t think Lauren knows how to toast like a Swede!” Margareta put her arm around me and poured me a drink as the others raised their glasses. “I’m going to teach you. You look at all of us before you drink that drink. And then when you sip it you keep eye contact with the person in front of you. Okay? I will make the toast.”
Siri seemed angry and yanked on her arm. Maybe she was afraid of what Margareta would say. Margareta was insistent.
“No, I will do it! And I’ll do it in English,” she said sweetly. “For once, let me make the toast. It’s about you, too, our dear one.”
Everyone laughed.
“If Siri is going to be away from here, and from us, we think it’s a good thing that she has Lauren to watch out for her and be her friend.”
She raised her glass.
“To Lauren.”
“Skål!”
When I made eye contact with the people at the table, I felt I was drinking in a tiny bit of each of them to keep with me forever. I raised my glass to the person across from me—it was Frida. The only person with no smile in her eyes. I tried to keep eye contact with her while she drank, but she was taking forever, her gaze a strange glare I didn’t understand.
“You see,” Siri said, grabbing my hand, “you make everything better.”
“Magnus is here,” Frida said stonily. She hadn’t been looking at me at all, but over my shoulder.
Margareta tried to head it off. “So? We don’t have to talk to him.”
He was on the other side of the bar, two pretty girls leaning over the partition of another booth to talk to him. Had he gone home first? Did Birgit know he was here?
“We’ll go someplace else,” Frida said, reaching for her sweatshirt.
But Siri was waving him over. What is she doing? I thought. Magnus picked up his jacket and carried it over to our booth. I could feel a wall going up between him and the others, but I found myself inching over, inching over, to make room for him. What am I doing? I thought.
“Hello,” he said to the table.
There was a bandage taped across his hand. Frida and Margareta pulled out a compact and started applying sparkly makeup in the mirror together. Magnus sat down beside me
. Had Siri told him to?
“Hello, Lauren,” he said.
“Hi.”
After so many days of not seeing him, we were body-to-body, me needing to press in even closer as more chairs were brought to the table. All I could think of was how he’d run his hands down my back and called me Skogsrå. I was sure he could sense my anxiety and hear the beat of my heart in the hollow tree of my body.
But Siri seemed relaxed. She asked him questions and answered him with more than just one or two words when he spoke to her. In him I saw a gratitude building. Certainly it couldn’t go any larger, he couldn’t go on expecting this volley of laughter to last much longer.
As the tension between Magnus and Siri eased, it was easier for me to be around him. “What was that?” he asked when I spoke and no one else heard me over the noise. “Your jacket slipped,” he said, picking it up from the floor and draping it gently over the back of my chair. He was talking with me, and she seemed okay with it. Maybe something was changing between them.
From the beginning, I not only felt the space between them, I felt I was the space between them. When they were at odds, every muscle in my body was tense. But now that they were drinking together and toasting each other, actually looking at each other when they spoke, I was loosened, becoming unwound.
I was drinking too much. Suddenly everything was hilarious. The band grew louder, all synthesizers, disco, bass. Over and over Magnus slid his water bottle toward me and told me to drink. I sipped from it when Siri turned her back.
She kept turning her back.
I told him I was going to use the restroom. No, don’t go, he said. Don’t go, don’t go. This song. This song. I remember it so well. It was a slower song. People were coupling up on the dance floor. He reached out his hand to me. Siri’s back was still turned, but Frida and Margareta were slow-dancing, their eyes fixed on us.
I tried to walk past him, but Magnus caught me in his arms. When he felt the tension in my body he tried to make me laugh, dancing with me straight-armed and fast, like in an old-timey movie. I wanted to smile but couldn’t. I stared at Siri’s back. His hand touched my neck. Finally, she turned. I felt the floor sway beneath me. He took me by the waist and drew me to him. Over his shoulder, Siri and I locked eyes. In that moment I realized she hadn’t brought him to our table to make things better with him.
She had done so to test me.
I waited for her eyes to turn to fire. Instead, she gave me an unreadable smile, lifted her bottle, and drank, an eerie toast. A toast to what? He spun me, and Siri turned back to watch the band.
She clearly wanted to see where my loyalties lay. For just a moment, I let myself feel him holding me. I imagined myself with him, not going home to America, but living on both sides of our shared bedroom wall, part for Siri, part for him.
“What were you looking for in my room?” he sang into my ear.
His question caught me off guard, and I pulled back to look him in his eyes.
“I was looking for the picture you drew of us at Vimmerby,” I said.
He laughed. His face was kind. “You didn’t even look at it that day. You ran away.”
Because that’s what Siri had asked of me, in myriad ways. That I always follow her, be there for her. That was why she had brought me to Sweden, wasn’t it? To be in her corner, to reflect her light. I stopped swaying with him, looking again at the back of Siri’s head. I thought of the picture he’d made of us, the swirl of our hair on our shoulders, back-to-back. I wanted that picture in my hands now, something to possess, maybe because I could feel her attention draining out of me. She had just toasted me, but I was stupid to think it could ever be permission. She wanted me to herself.
I went back to the table and reached across its slick surface to touch the back of her arm.
“Siri?” She didn’t turn.
Magnus slid his water bottle toward me. I refused it. He asked me what artists I loved. He put it just that way: “What artists do you love?”
Siri was ignoring me. She was testing me. I was supposed to be proving something to her right now, but I would never be able to do enough to satisfy her. I wanted to drink. It took me a second to identify my beer from among the many bottles on our table.
“Or maybe you’re an artist? I never asked,” he said.
I drank. “I like Monet and his water lilies—the colors.”
He stayed serious. “What kinds of colors do you love, then? Blue and green?”
I was in a bar with a loud Swedish grunge band, lifting my hand to the waitress to ask for a harder drink, and Magnus was asking me my favorite colors.
“I love all colors,” I said.
“All colors?”
“Mostly colors.”
“Most colors?”
“No, I mean, over subject matter.” I knew he could hardly hear me over the music. “Mark Rothko,” I yelled.
Siri made a face at us across the table. But at least she had turned.
“Who do you like, Magnus?” I asked.
But he’d been snared by Siri’s expression. “What?” he asked her.
“Nothing.”
“You have a better way to pose the question?”
She ignored him.
“You know, you’re not just being rude to me. You’re being rude to Lauren.”
“You don’t know anything about Lauren,” she said possessively.
And just like that, everything was shrinking again, the trees growing up.
He turned to me. “She and I used to be close. She used to go to see the art in the Tunnelbana with me when she was a little girl. She liked the rainbows at Stadion station. When she was little, she was a feeling person, now she is only selfish.”
His cheeks were two flushed rectangles.
“Now your question, Lauren. About art—you really do need to ask the question as, ‘Who do you love?’ It’s the only really interesting way to ask that question. Not ‘My favorite is,’ or ‘I like pretty good this one or that one.’ ”
“Magnus, you are being a bore,” Siri snapped. “Who cares how she put the question?”
“No, it’s okay, Siri,” I said, looking between them. “He’s just trying to make the distinction.”
She held my gaze a second, then stormed off to dance. It was too loud in there; I don’t think she’d heard what I said, but I know she sensed that I was defending Magnus, and it angered her. But I couldn’t help it. Her hardness made me feel protective of him.
Magnus leaned in and tapped the back of my chair. “Let’s go outside,” he said, his breath hot on my neck. I shook my head.
I watched Siri dance, her back to us. I reluctantly went out onto the dance floor to join her, and she smiled a sort of thank-you smile, an everything-is-okay-again smile.
And I saw Magnus throw his body weight against the back door and go out. A ray of light streamed in and narrowed along the floor until the door fell closed.
I danced mechanically through two songs. When Siri went to get water, I slipped out the way Magnus had gone. The sun was too bright. I squinted. I saw him leaning on the side of the building playing with a lighter.
“She brought me to Stadion station,” I said.
He looked up at the sound of my voice.
“The winding rainbows,” I said.
“You’re talking about the artwork in the T?”
“Yes. The flowers above that one bench that all look like rainbows. She took me to all of the stations in one day. She showed me…the one with the silhouettes. The men on the scaffold. She said it was your favorite.”
I went to him.
I said, “She still loves it. Really loves it.”
“What are you doing, Lauren?”
“What do you mean?”
“You want to make things better between me and my sister?”
/>
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I see you both in pain,” I said. But that wasn’t it. As long as they were in pain, I was in pain. I was the breach between them and the reason she’d brought me home. If I could salve that, if I could make it better, she and I could be friends again.
He reached out his hand to me, the one with the bandage and tape. I took it. Maybe this is all it is, all it’s been, I thought. I am just trying to help. I had to help this gulf between them, to narrow this gulf in me. I could smell the pine, sunshine, and sweat in his clothes. I noticed a dimple on his cheek for the first time. He wiped my hair back. Oh no, I thought. Oh no. He leaned in and his gaze swept me up. He was smiling, his mouth so close. There was wetness in his lashes.
I thought I heard the door to the bar open, and I pushed away from him. But the door hadn’t opened. Only something in him, in me.
I walked around the other side of the building, through the parking lot, all the way to the road. Only then did I look back. The bar seemed then a temporary structure—a ramshackle cabin with a metal roof and a metal door looped with graffiti. There was litter on the ground, and cars peeling out of the dirt lot, and all was early morning sun-on-metal mist and dust.
* * *
—
WHEN WE GOT home, Siri apologized to me. She said that the way I defended Magnus made her feel like a bad sister. She said that I had an amazing sense of patience.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
I didn’t know if I believed her.
She reached across the table and pinched my arm, the way she’d done with Frida that first day.
I cried out and tried to draw back, but she grabbed ahold of my arm and rubbed it to soothe me. I couldn’t help but feel she was trying to manipulate me, pat things down, smooth them out so I would accept her apology. She kept rubbing my arm and saying sorry. I think she could see in my eyes that I didn’t believe her.
She was working hard on forgiving him for things but wasn’t there yet, she said, louder this time. Would I forgive her?