by Diane Zinna
The light changed. We crossed. I felt we were running through the streets. This was how Magnus and Siri were alike, I thought, the speed of beginnings, how fast things could change. When we returned to the house that night, it would have to be over, but right now we were just starting.
He paused on another corner. He sensed my keeping up with him, keeping up with his thoughts. His hands closed around my cheeks and drew my face toward his.
“How old are you?” he asked.
I pulled away.
“I just want to know,” he said.
“Twenty-eight,” I whispered.
“You have such a soft voice.”
“Twenty-eight,” I said a little louder.
“I heard you,” he laughed. “Why are you embarrassed?”
“How old are you?”
He shook his head like a dog, drizzling me with water from his hair. “I am gray. All this is red paint!”
I reached up and touched his hair, and he caught my hand as it grazed his neck.
“One more place to show you,” he said, leading me down the street and through another door.
It was a shop filled with postcards, Swedish souvenirs, and candy. There were convenience-store smells, the ink of magazines, the salty oil of fried food. He brought me to a line of small paintings in the back of the store.
The colors were distinctly Swedish—the blue and honey-drop yellow of the Swedish flag. They made good souvenirs for tourists, here in this shop so close to Central Station, everyone leaving and wanting to grab one last memento of the harbor city.
I picked one up and turned it over to see the price. It was only about six U.S. dollars. In the center of the canvas was one small, yellow, daffodil-like flower. Its tiny, translucent petals had been worried over, in contrast to the swipe of sea-blue and white, spackled-on crest. It was floating, lost, out of place.
“What do you think of this?” he asked.
“I like the colors.”
“With you, always colors,” he said. “What about the flower in the middle? How can you stand it? So detailed, so out of place from the rest of it.”
I tilted the canvas in my hands; its white lines sparkled like the fizz of sea foam. “My father brought me to a Salvador Dalí museum in Florida when I was a little girl,” I said. “There was one painting as big as a wall. But if you got up close to it, right at my little-girl eye level, he’d painted a tiny silver fish. You could see its pink gills and all the parts of its eye, like he’d done it with a razor blade. This reminds me of that.”
Magnus looked at me like he was waiting for me to say something else, but the memory of that silver fish, of standing beside my father, was so close all I could think of was that St. Petersburg museum full of air-conditioning, the streets outside full of steam. In the gift shop, my father had bought me a perfume because I’d loved that its gold bottle was shaped like an ocelot.
“Why did you want to show me these paintings?” I said.
“I didn’t.” He took the painting from me and fit it back into its place among the others. “I wanted to show you the ocean.”
I looked again at the wall of paintings. In my mind, the silver fish darted away.
They were all similar, the tiny yellow flowers now disappearing against a blue background. The white swathes now approached as one long breaking wave. The creamy lines set side by side made for a beautiful effect, and above the crests, an indigo horizon slowly settled along the back wall of the store.
His eyes flashed to see it moved me.
Perhaps because the paintings’ coming-at-you energy was so like him, because he was a wave that was always building, I knew then why he’d wanted me to see them.
“These are yours,” I said.
He smiled. That sunlike smile from the car ride to Vimmerby. So pure, because he felt seen.
We went outside and stood beneath the shop’s awning. I had this feeling that the wave would come through the revolving door at any moment and knock us over. Those were his paintings, a solid wall of them lining the back of a convenience store. It’d taken him the whole day to trust me enough to show me: that this is where they were sold; that they did not cost much; that they weren’t selling; that together, like him, they were a wall and they were a wave.
“Are you hungry?” he asked me. “I could take you to dinner.”
“It’s getting late,” I said. “Maybe we should go home.”
He smiled a little, shook his head. He grabbed for my hand again. He wanted me to know that he enjoyed being with me this way. Seeing that I liked his work had calmed him down. I could feel it in his body. He turned to face me, put a hand on my shoulder. With his other hand, he tucked my hair behind my ear. Where to now, then? I wanted to say. He put his arms around me and drew me close to him. He lightly touched my back, where the scars were. He went right to them, beneath my shirt, like he knew exactly where they were. His eyes, so light. Like water. I could hear him breathing, each exhalation rolling against the sand of me.
He kissed me, so light. A friend’s kiss, maybe. Just a thank-you kiss. Then another because we knew it was coming. Then harder, because you knew this was coming, Lauren, this wave, this wave crashing over you now, this thing you must have, more, please, a scramble of hands to each other’s faces, this kiss rather than breathing.
* * *
—
INSTEAD OF TAKING me home, or to dinner, Magnus took me by trolley to Liseberg, an amusement park in the center of Gothenburg. All evening we braved roller coasters and free-fall rides. Now we were sitting, pressed against each other on a bench, his fingers in my hair.
He looked at me intensely, and behind him, the lights from a fountain danced and changed from white to red on his face.
“Why—” I started.
I had so many questions.
He kissed me. I couldn’t be close to him anymore without wanting to be in his lap. I kissed him back. I kissed his hands, and I could taste the sugar from the long ropes of licorice we had eaten instead of dinner.
All those days of his walking out of a room just as I was entering—my not following him always felt like flipping a hidden coin in my pocket. Magnus was one side of me, Siri the other. I’d wanted to be like her, but I felt that I was him. The love she showed me felt beautiful but demanded more of me. Thoughts of Magnus were dark, familiar, and easy.
And being with him felt like a respite from the house, as though I’d been seen and claimed by him, taken out and fed the meal I deserved, all sugar, shown the places I was supposed to see, my body kissed and tossed.
I fingered the collar of his shirt, still damp from the fountain that afternoon.
“I can’t help feeling that you and I are similar,” I said softly.
“What are you talking about? Your shirt isn’t even wet.”
He meant that he’d been the one who’d ruined the book.
“I’ve been thinking about the first night I was here,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“When I saw you. Out in the back of the house.”
“And I saw you. By the light of the moon,” he said, singsongy, a twist of my hair, a nod to the water behind us. “All white now,” he remarked of the fountain lights.
“What were you doing that night?”
“You heard my sisters.”
“I know. I want to hear it from you.”
“I’d done a portrait of my mother. I was putting it in the ground.”
“Why?” I asked.
“It wasn’t right.”
“Why not just throw it away?”
“Because there was something in it that was of her.”
“You could have put it in a closet. But you—”
He cut me off.
“The portraits bother my sisters. They think they’re bizarre. They are. The
whole thing is bizarre.”
I thought of how I had tried to protect my parents’ things. Part of my mother in this copper pan she cooked with; part of my father in the matchbook cover he used as a bookmark.
“Siri had come back home. My paintings upset her. I didn’t want her to see.”
“I saw the one you did with the purple rose—”
“Yeah, yeah. They liked that one.”
“But the ones you bury?”
“No roses.”
“Okay.”
“Maybe a crown of thorns. Bees where her eyes should be. Her face blue with frost. Smiling and clutching a bloody heart. Maybe her, but ripped in two like that old tree you liked near Vimmerby.”
I suddenly remembered the creatures from the old embroidered calendar I found in his room that day. When I didn’t speak, he just laughed and looked back at the fountain.
“Why do you paint her that way?” I asked.
He shrugged and nuzzled my neck where my shirt wasn’t wet. Then his hands were up underneath my blouse in the back, tracing the four dark circles that had once been scabs and had each come off in one piece, like bark.
“Was she troubled?” I asked.
“Yes. She was in a deep depression after my father died. It was a hard year. Sometimes I think I’m the only one who saw it.” He tried to harden his face. “All that’s in the Öland cemetery of my mother is a name marker.”
“Öland? She’s buried on that island?”
“We had a summer house there. Our happiest times. But no, not buried. They never found her body.”
“Siri said…she’d gone out walking?”
“Is that what she said?”
“Yes.”
He shook his head. “No one knows what happened to her that night. But lots of people had ideas. And I was young, trying to make sense of it all. The images come from that time, from a younger me.”
“But you’re not that boy anymore.”
“Aren’t I? Won’t you always be the age of the girl whose parents died?”
A chill went through me. Yes. Every part of my body was ringing yes.
“I was trying to capture something of my mother in those paintings, and I was failing, over and over. I understand Siri was young. She wants to remember our mother one way only. But our mother was grieving the death of our dad that whole year. Going around in his shaggy brown sweaters. Writing us notes and signing them from him. She was depressed. Some days she didn’t get out of bed. She was a beautiful spirit. But she was also all of these other things that scared and angered me. I was trying to remember her then, even when she was in our house. I felt her slipping away. I didn’t want any part of her to slip away. Siri only wanted to remember her smiling, with a purple rose in her hair….”
His voice trailed off, and I realized that was the Siri I knew, too. She wanted things simple. Me on her side. Us having fun. Everything just better, all the time. She wanted everyone to focus on her, so she wouldn’t have to focus on her grief. Magnus buried portraits in the ground. She buried all the complicated versions of things inside.
“Siri said your burying the paintings in the field around the house makes it feel like a cemetery.”
“It helps me to think part of her is in the ground and she’s not just…out there walking.”
“Maybe you could show me those paintings someday,” I said. “Maybe it would help to talk about them.”
He drew back. Maybe I’d crossed a line.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I tried to tell Siri before you went to Stockholm. We fought about it.”
“Fought about what?”
“I entered some into a competition. They won. The judges saw them. They liked them. Siri said absolutely no. And Birgit says to put them on display would torture Siri. She’s trying to convince me not to do it. But they don’t see that these are of me. To have someone look at them and see I’m not a bad person—it means something to me, Lauren.”
“Did you tell Birgit that?”
“She said some things should be off-limits. We screamed at each other. I punched out a window, and we don’t have the money to fix it. She told me I scared her. The usual-usual.”
I looked down at his bandaged hand. I thought of the plastic stretched across the window in Birgit’s room.
“You still think you and I are similar?” he whispered in my ear.
“Why? Because you punched a window?”
“Because I’m selfish about my art. I might make a decision that hurts my sisters.”
“I don’t think you’re the selfish one,” I said.
That made him quiet. We were so close I could feel the blood rushing in him, his heart pounding, the sweat on his hands.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Was that wrong to say?”
Magnus put some distance between us on the bench. “I think all this time I wanted to convince you that I wasn’t a bad person. I wanted you to see what she does, the way she is with her friends, how she pushes people away. But it was hard for me to hear you call her selfish.”
“It’s hard for me to see the way she treats you.”
I put my hands on either side of his face and tried to get him to look at me, but his eyes were fixated on the colored fountain, the whites going red and blue.
“I just feel like I’m seeing everything more clearly,” I said. “And that’s not a bad thing.”
“As much as I hate it, she is going to go back to that school,” he said loudly. “I need her to have a friend there. I don’t want to drive a wedge between you. She needs you. When she was over there, I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t work. She didn’t return my calls. I felt crazy all the time.”
“Birgit said the same thing to me. Of course I’ll look out for her.” I gently touched his bandaged hand. “But who will look out for you?”
“Birgit says I’m crazy.”
“No.”
“She wants me to see a psychiatrist. Wants me to go on medication.”
“Would it help?”
He stiffened.
“What I’m saying is that people have also told me that I should,” I tried to explain.
“Why not, then? Aren’t we similar? Aren’t we just open wounds all the time? How long has it been for you? Ten years, right? There’s something wrong with the world if the world thinks that ten years is long enough.”
He stood up from the bench. He was so loud now, people turned to listen to him.
“I’ve watched you since you’ve been here…with Siri, and her friends. You even let them dye your fucking hair. You want to be accepted, you want to be close to other people, but we’re different. Siri is little Miss Fun All the Time. Not me. Not you. Whatever makes us different, it keeps us separate, and there’s no medication for that.”
The fountain suddenly went dark. People started walking out of the park.
“We should go back,” he said, his words clipped. He carried my sweater. When we got to the park gate, he handed it to me. We rode the trolley back to Central Station and sat straight and forward, hardly talking to each other, but I wanted to talk. I wanted to tell him I understood him. I stared at his hands, wanting to hold them. I noticed the tar beneath his nails. I swore at that moment he smelled of charcoal—of dirt, things red-hot and compressed.
We walked to the car, where it was parked by the opera house. Water lapped at the bellies of the rocking boats. His faith in me was receding. He didn’t want to look at me. I didn’t understand what was happening. By the time he was fumbling for his keys, all the dark tree cover had grown back between our bodies.
At the house, Birgit was awake. She told us Siri was still sleeping but feeling better. Magnus and I went to our separate rooms. It felt like an ending. In my bed, I thought about pressing up against Magnus while waiting on line for the roller coast
er, when I had reached up under the light material of his button-down shirt and touched his chest. About the things he whispered to me in Liseberg’s sculpture garden—how beautiful I was, how long he’d wanted to touch me. That we were two lost and grieving people trying to find relief in each other. His fingernails had grazed the small of my back when we kissed. I imagined him pulling the bark off my back one sliver at a time.
In the guest room, I held my breath and listened for him to talk to himself, to play the songs I knew he liked before sleep. But the sounds on the other side of the wall were just rustling, a drawer opening and closing—all calmness. I felt so foolish.
In the middle of the night, I thought I heard Magnus in the front room, and I rose to go out and apologize to him. I wanted to tell him I did understand the way he grieved. That I did still feel like that eighteen-year-old inside—my own kind of eighteen, the alone eighteen, the floating eighteen.
I opened my door and padded softly across the wide-plank floors to the foyer, where I’d met Magnus that morning between the ironing boards. There was a glow underneath the door of the drying closet, and I saw the door was ajar. I opened it and peered inside.
Siri sat in the red light of the heat lamp, her hair combed back and wet from a shower, cross-legged on the floor. Her cheeks were red. She was peeling apart pages of a book.
My guidebook. She was trying to dry it out.
She looked up at me, and with her hair combed back that way—what had her father said to her as a child? That he brushed it back because he wanted to see her beautiful face? I saw it. I saw all the complexities of her, the vulnerability, the fear that she was losing me, too.
There were still so many days left to go.
SIRI HAD ONCE written about how a deer with antlers jumped into the family car one Midsommar and wouldn’t budge until her sister coaxed it out with a plate of strawberries and cream. In her essay’s margin, I’d written Charming (happy face), then Verisimilitude? But on our five-hour drive from Olofstorp to Öland, I found myself checking for a deer sitting inside each time I opened the door to her small car. It had become so easy to believe in magic by then. I’d seen it and felt it in the places we’d been; in words, in light, and then that morning, in the inky flowers that bloomed in the water at Neptuni Åkrar, where Siri, Karin, and Frida’s blond hair all took on just the slightest tinge of blue from swimming.