by Diane Zinna
WE HAD BEEN planning to go into the city of Gothenburg the next day, but at breakfast, Siri read over our itinerary with her head in her hands and ate lozenges one after the other. Her cough was sounding deeper and deeper. When I suggested we just go another day, she shook her head. “We’re going to Öland this weekend. This is the only day we can do it.”
“If you don’t rest you’ll get sicker and you won’t even be able to go to Öland,” Birgit said. “Which might be for the best, because that place—”
“Oh, syster, you must take her then,” Siri said, bleary-eyed. “Take her to see the Poseidon statue. Take her to see the water. Bring her to the ice-cream place we always go.”
“Are you kidding me, Siri?”
“I want her to see the city.”
“I don’t have time to entertain Lauren. You have your itinerary, and I have mine, okay? I have to wash these dishes, because neither of you have washed a dish since you came here. Then I have to go to work. Because I have ett jobb.”
It seemed her voice descended into Swedish to spare me, but I couldn’t help but feel I’d let her down. Siri was back to her old habits, and now she was sick. I wasn’t supposed to let this happen. She brought out a kettle and muttered to herself as she looked in the upper cabinets for tea. “You want some, too, Lauren?” she asked, but I could hear anger in her voice.
I loved Birgit. I immediately went to the sink and filled the basin with water. “I’m sorry,” I said, and she watched me with her arms crossed as I started soaping the dishes.
Birgit helped Siri into her bedroom to lie down, then came back and dried dishes beside me with a white towel.
“It’s just that I asked you,” she said. “She pushes everything to the limit. God. I hate her being away. When she was at school, the fear never went away. That she’d do something so impulsive, so selfish, that I’d never see her again. But then she told me about you. We can make this work. You and I can be like sisters, okay? You can be her big sister in the U.S. You can call me. You can tell me if she’s out of control. Can you do that?”
I nodded. She reached into the sink and removed the drain stopper. “Siri made me promise that I’d take you to Gothenburg. We’ll go in an hour, okay?”
I agreed, then went back to check on Siri. I found her asleep in Birgit’s room, curled up like a cat on the down comforter. The portrait Magnus had made of their mother hung above Birgit’s bed. She had been dark haired like Birgit, but everything else about her face was Siri. The shape of her eyes, the delicate features, a sprinkling of freckles across her nose. Behind her ear she wore a purple rose touched with silver, and her eyes were partly closed in a shy, happy way. The portrait reminded me of a headstone, and Siri, lying there, like a girl asleep atop a grave.
I heard a snapping sound and noticed a piece of plastic had been taped across Birgit’s bedroom window, where a section of the glass had been broken out. The old house had lots of places taped and bracketed and pinned together.
I went to the window and looked out. Birgit had a view similar to mine—the field behind the house, where Magnus had been the first night, digging, burying something. Had she been watching Magnus out there, too? Had she known then that it was another portrait of their mother? Did she hope that this time, when he tried to bury her, it would stick?
I looked around her room. Into the edges of her dresser mirror, Birgit had stuck old photographs of herself with childhood friends, but there was nothing more recent. They reminded me of the pictures of teenage friends I had on my refrigerator at home. In the kitchen, Birgit was arguing with someone on the phone. I walked out into the hallway with my backpack on my shoulder and my jacket over my arm. When Birgit saw me, she went out onto the balcony and closed the door so I couldn’t hear her.
Two ironing boards with bright daisy patterns were set up in the foyer. The sisters did their ironing there in the mornings, talking between puffs of steam. There was a narrow window beside the stairwell inlaid with stained glass, and I looked through the clear diamond shapes out onto the fields below the house. I felt then I was a girl between worlds. There was so much beauty here, but also so much that weighed me down. I waited, expecting that at any moment Birgit’s phone call would end, and she would take me to Gothenburg.
Instead, Magnus came in.
“She’s going to be a while,” he said.
His red hair looked almost blond in the light of the foyer. He had been keeping his distance from me since the bar. Whenever I entered a room, he was always just leaving it.
He played with the button on the iron, and when a puff of steam shot out, we both jumped.
“I’m going into the city anyway,” he said.
“You mean you’ll drop me off?”
“No. I don’t have work today.”
I looked down the hall, at where Birgit was pacing now on the balcony.
“You want to ask her permission?” he said.
Birgit saw us talking and opened the glass door.
“I’m not going to be able to go for a while, Lauren. I’m sorry,” she said.
“I said I’d take her,” Magnus said.
“You did?” she asked.
“I better not go. Without Siri, I mean,” I said.
Birgit covered the phone with her hand. “No. He has a nice idea, Lauren. You should go. I can explain it to Siri.”
Her expression was insistent. She wanted me to go with him. I knew she didn’t want him disappearing again for days. She wanted someone to make sure he would come home for these last nights before Siri left for school. She waved me on and shut the glass door.
“Magnus, I—”
“You won’t come because of Siri?”
“No. I mean—with her, she just doesn’t see—”
“But you do.”
He took my hand. He went down the circular stairway backward, holding my hand all the way to the bottom. There was a crooked-smile proposal in each step, all the penciled faces whipping toward us as we passed.
Outside, heat rose from the gravel drive. We got into his car and he started the engine, which roared loud, an announcement.
“Now I’ve got you,” he said.
His words sent a rush through my body. As he pulled onto the road, I imagined Siri sitting up straight on the bed, yelling our names.
“She will be furious, you know,” he said. “No matter how Birgit explains it to her.”
Part of me wanted to say So what? And It was your fault, Siri. I didn’t make the seating arrangements for our car ride to Vimmerby. I needn’t have been squashed up against him in the backseat all the way there, smelling how he smelled: pine, charcoal.
“But why?” I asked. “Why will she be angry? What is this thing between the two of you?”
“I heard you talking with Siri and Birgit that day with the scrapbook. Siri rarely talks about our mother’s death without blaming me for it.”
“Blaming you?”
“Hasn’t she told you?”
“She hasn’t told me enough for me to understand.”
“No? Well, I’ll leave that to her then, in her time. I imagine she gets the right to tell the story how she remembers it. She’s your friend. You should hear it from her first. We can talk about something else. Ask me anything.”
“Should I be afraid of you?”
He laughed and looked over at me incredulously. “Are you serious?”
“Yes.”
“No. You should be afraid of Siri and her temper.”
He drove fast down the winding roads, the roads all like tunnels with the treetops knitting together above us, shadows closing off everything behind. He revved the engine around a curve, and I felt intoxicated by the speed.
“Surely you have seen how she is with her friends here,” he said, looking over at me. “You think you’ll be spared much longer?�
�
Of course I had seen how she treated the other girls. And Magnus. And Birgit.
“I feel like I get her. And she gets me,” I said, a little defensive. I found myself rubbing the place where she’d pinched my arm the night before.
“Have you asked yourself what will happen when she starts treating you like that?”
“I’m a little older than her other friends,” I explained. “She wouldn’t treat me that way.”
“Yeah, you are older,” he said with a flirtatious smile.
“Shut up.”
“I’m just saying that I can see you’re a sensitive, good person. I heard her telling Birgit about what happened with your family. I’m sorry about that. I just think you need to take care of yourself, you know?”
All Siri had done so far was pinch my arm. But I’d felt her in charge of me here. In the forest playing hide-and-seek, when he ran his fingers down my back, all I could think of was her. The day Magnus had found me in his room and I rushed back to her. Her strange toast to me in the bar when I’d danced with him. Outside the bar, when I’d run off before he could kiss me.
“For example, you have feelings for me,” he said.
“What?”
“You like me. But she won’t even let you feel that I am a normal person.”
I stared at the trees flying past, the side roads, the telephone poles. I could feel his eyes on me, and it scared me.
“If you’re going to drive this fast you need to watch the road!” I said. I slid my guidebook out of my backpack, intent on making the day about the places we were headed and not him.
“That book again,” he said.
I opened it. The first things I saw were Siri’s marks, her purple drawings, her cartoons.
“What do you want to see today?” he asked.
“There is a famous statue. Of Poseidon?”
He nodded. “Yes. Fine.”
“Do you like the city?” I asked him.
“I don’t like most people, and there are fewer in Olofstorp,” he said.
“What do you want to see in the city?” I asked him.
“Me? I have seen everything.”
“Is there something you would prefer to see, I mean? Other than the statue?”
“I guess we could go to Fiskekyrkan.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a fish church.”
“Fish church?”
“A fish market that looks like a church.” He shrugged.
“You’re not much of a tour guide. Maybe I should have waited for Birgit.”
I didn’t know if he would like my teasing him, but to my relief, he smiled. “No, you shouldn’t have.” He looked at me out of the corner of his eye. He gunned the engine, and my heart sped.
In Gothenburg he parked the car in a public lot near the harbor, where small vessels were docked and men with extreme sunburns sat on wooden pilings drinking beer. I heard some of them talking in English and turned my head toward what sounded like a New England accent, but Magnus took my hand and pulled me along.
I followed him like we were both late to something. We walked past the city’s opera house, and through its immense glass windows I could see its interior was curved like a hull and the wooden floor resembled the deck of a ship. Everything in the city felt maritime, from the shapes of the buildings to the hidden canals.
We soon found ourselves in a busy central area with cobblestone streets and mobs of people crisscrossing our path. The energy of the square seemed to charge him, and he walked faster, talked faster. Above us, colorful banners ruffled in the hot sun. The sounds of glass and silverware being laid out in cafés tinkled around us. We passed the city’s central food market, Saluhallen. When I tried to pull out my guidebook and read its entry, he snapped it shut and pulled me down an alley where every door was painted a different raucous color.
The quiet alley was narrow, high, full of shadows. I was suddenly nervous that the scarlet, violet, and yellow doors led to single rooms with mattresses on the floors.
“Where are we?” I said.
“Shh.”
With his eyes fixed on mine, he opened one of the doors. I heard a bell jingle above our heads. We were met with the smells of wood and paint.
It was a small gallery full of canvases. A white-haired man sat at the rear of the store, sawing wood for new easels. “Hallå, Magnus,” the man said amicably.
“This is a friend of my sister,” Magnus said.
Magnus positioned his hands on either side of my lower back and moved me in front of the paintings he thought I should see. Each time we passed him, the old man smiled to himself. When we left, Magnus took my hand and led me to the shop next door, where all the narrow-faced portraits looked the same, and all their eyes watched us back.
The alleyway was full of tiny galleries, and all the owners knew Magnus but didn’t talk with him much. I asked him if these people were his friends.
“They are people I know,” he said. “That first man—Jens—he used to be a great artist. All the others, they get one successful painting and then open a shop where they sit inside and celebrate themselves. No one ever comes here but other artists. But everyone is nice to one another.”
“Are you going to open a shop someday?” I asked.
“When?”
“When you have your famous paintings.”
“No. I won’t need this mutual-affirmation society.”
He was determined to show me as many paintings as possible. Portraits of black-eyed women. Geometric patterns like melted-down Calders. I found myself searching his eyes for an indication of what was interesting to him, but we were going too fast. His attention fluttered from piece to piece. I let him tow me along, from one bright door to the next.
“I have another idea. We’ll have to take the trolley,” he said.
My feet hurt from walking on the cobblestones.
“Wait,” I said. “I didn’t get to see the statue.”
“Which statue?”
“Poseidon.”
We turned the corner, and there it was, as though he had conjured it. It was massive, bronze green. Around its perimeter, sea creatures—mermen and strange fish with human faces and scales like coins—lurched away from the figure of Poseidon. Bright nickel arcs of water shot from their mouths up around the god’s body, as though he were a man caught in sprinklers.
I pulled my guidebook from my backpack.
“You are such a tourist!” he joked, trying to grab it from me. “Tell me all it says. Who made this thing? Why the spitting fishes?”
“Stop, Magnus,” I laughed, pulling away from him.
Magnus looked so happy. He climbed up to sit upon the edge of the fountain and spread his arms wide. “This magnificent example of Swedish sculpture of a god and his several fish was installed in—” He reached down for the guidebook to check the date, but he started to lose his balance. When he reached behind to steady himself, the book slipped from his hands into the fountain.
“No!”
I climbed over the side. I saw it in the water and waded in to retrieve it. The fountain sprayed over my head, and then I couldn’t see. I knelt down, feeling for it.
When I found the book, it came up thick and heavy.
I tried to pull the pages apart, but it was soaked through.
It had been our illuminated manuscript of this trip, with memories like condensed diary entries in its margins. A cherished record, for when I was alone again, of a time when I hadn’t been.
One page: art in the Tunnelbana, Siri’s cartoon drawing of the mohawked teenage lovers, now pulpy. Another: a map of Öland, the margins impossible to write in now, when there would surely have been so much to say about our last day in Sweden.
The water around my legs was cloudy. Siri’s purple ink, words,
pictures, our shared memories, rippled away from me.
I looked up and saw Magnus before me, water shooting against the back of his head in an explosion of white rain. He was already drenched, letting the water hit him, his mouth open, waiting for a cue from me that it was all right for him to smile, to laugh. I shook him off my shoulder, but he kept trying to grab me, to make it a game.
“Lauren, it’s only a book,” he said.
I shouldn’t have left Siri. Why did I do that? I thought about all the notes we’d made in that guidebook, praying I would be able to remember them on my own.
Magnus was running through the water, around and around, with big, dancing strides. He was trying to reach me, to make me laugh. The sounds of traffic intensified. I was all at once aware of the everydayness of the avenue—the people sitting on the steps of the nearby museum, all the people just walking by us.
But Magnus was gone. He was a satellite. He might as well have been that far away, that distant. I climbed out of the fountain and sat down on a bench. I closed my eyes and listened to the rush of the water bursting up and coming down, thinking about calling the house, envisioning Siri answering, how impossible that would feel.
“Are you mad at me?”
He was beside me again. I tried to put some distance between our bodies, but I could still hear him breathing. The rise and fall of his chest, the rise and fall of the water.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “There is a bookstore nearby. I’ll buy you two of those guides.”
His hair was tousled and wet, his eyes pleading.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Let’s just get out of here.”
I’d let him back in. He knew it. He sidled closer to me and asked if my legs were cold, though he was the one wet from head to toe. “Come here,” he said, coming closer. He turned me so that I was facing him. “Come here.”
“I’m right here.”
“What about your arms? Did your arms get wet?”
We stood up, and he rubbed my arms while I tried to glare at him. I loved that book. But I was growing intoxicated with his now-cataloging of my body, what parts were wet, whether I was cold, was I still mad, did I have a fever. I found myself leaning into him at the street corner when we were waiting for the cars to stop. I stuffed the wet guidebook down into my bag.