The All-Night Sun

by Diane Zinna

  “I think he’s good, Siri.”

  She waved off my comment. I wasn’t going far enough. I needed to tell all of it. Not just how I’d held his hand, kissed him, imagined us as lovers, but that I really did believe he was, as a person, good.

  “He’s not,” she said loudly. “He’s a fool.”

  She watched for my reaction, to see if I’d grow protective. I squinted at her, where she stood in the sunlight, trying to get her into focus, trying to understand this side of her.

  “I think he wants to impress you,” I said. “He wants you to approve of him.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  I’d wanted to impress her. I’d wanted her approval.

  “He’s so controlling,” Siri said. “Don’t you see it?”

  An opening. Why couldn’t I just tell her everything? I needed to fix this. I was going home to America the next day. I needed her to be my friend again when we were there together. I couldn’t imagine my life back in America without her.

  “You saw it,” she whispered. “I bet you that day he did something bad and you’re hiding it from me. Tell me the truth.”

  I was quiet.

  “You have feelings for him,” she said, walking deeper into the field, the grass and plants up to her shoulders. “Something happened that day between the two of you.”

  Yes. Yes.

  “Hallå, hallå!” came a voice in the distance.

  We looked up and saw an old man in front of the large farmhouse, its Swedish flag flapping. Smoke curled from an outdoor stove built from wide, stacked stones, and the smoke smelled of an inside winter night, not the bright evening. The man was standing on his porch wearing a T-shirt, suspenders, and shorts.

  Siri ran toward him. “Hallå, hallå!” she yelled.

  I was angry that she hadn’t given me the time to find the words to speak. She would fly toward anyone ready to give her attention. Even this old man, this stranger.

  I followed her to where she stood conversing with the old man in Swedish. She looked suddenly happy again, as though a flock of birds had flown from her, taking all of her resentment with it. When she told him we were collecting flowers for Midsommar crowns, he said something that made her laugh.

  “He thought we came to steal his flowers,” she translated. “He wants to show us something inside his house.” Siri dropped her bundle beside his fence.

  The man opened his white gate and waved us in. He saw me hesitating. “Really, really,” he said, like it was the only word he knew in English. Siri walked through the gate and turned to me.

  “Lauren, it’s okay. He is a nice man.”

  What was she doing? Why was I following her in?

  Inside the house, newspapers and books were stacked almost to the ceiling. I felt it: the way his things must have talked to him, the way he walked by them like the piles were people. The windows at the back of the house were painted over. We followed him up the stairs, and with each step, I resented Siri’s avoiding our talk this way. The man waved us into a room at the end of the hall. I wanted to turn and run out.

  In the bedroom, two yellow dogs lay sprawled on the floor, but they were lying at strange inclines—the center of the floor was sunk in from age. Some of the furniture had shifted away from the walls toward the dip in the center of the room. There were signs that this had once been a well-tended home. A cupboard displayed pretty crockery and a collection of small wooden Dala horses, most of them glazed bright red. Lace doilies draped the bedside tables.

  I felt that at any moment the room could collapse from our additional weight. The man hurried to a dresser and grabbed a bunch of pink silk roses from a vase. They were dusty and stained. He gave one of them to Siri and one to me.

  That was all.

  Outside, we picked up our flower bundles and left him sitting on his porch petting the dogs, which had followed him out. Siri explained that the silk roses had been his wife’s, and she was dead now, buried somewhere in that field we had explored, but she would have wanted us to have them for our Midsommar crowns.

  She pointed now to where the grass was sprung with daisylike flowers. “Oh, those are very important for the crown. It is a traditional flower. They call it prästkrage,” she said. “This is similar—it is called baldersbra. You have to pick it yourself to make it lucky.” She watched as I gathered a few, then she moved on. “And these here are called Jacks! Sometimes we call them Jack-go-to-bed-at-noon.”

  We were on our way back. I walked slowly, and she had to wait for me to catch up. She placed her bundle on the ground and rolled up the cuffs of her pink pants.

  “You’re mad at me,” she said. “I’m sorry. I should have asked if you wanted to go in his house. But he was nice, right? He was like my grandfather. With that big belly! He was sad. He missed his wife.”

  “No, that’s not it, Siri. We were talking about something important.”

  “You said all you needed to say. Okay? I am fine. Enough of this.”

  Siri looped her arm in mine and we climbed the dirt path back over the hill. No, there was so much more to say. We had just been getting to it. I didn’t want to avoid this anymore, but soon the path became asphalt, and we were descending back into the village square, and heading back to the campsite.

  THE CAMPSITE CAME into view. I wished we were back at the start of our adventure, or even back in that old man’s plain, collapsing room, with time to talk between ourselves. At the mouth of the campground, Siri pointed at a wooden sign. “It’s nearly ten o’clock,” she said. “We are in for the night. After ten there is no readmission, even by way of the pedestrian gate.”

  That felt like an announcement of nighttime, of an ending, though the sky was still as light as it had been when we left. She didn’t want me to tell her about my feelings for Magnus. She knew, and she wanted me to know she knew and feel guilty, and that was the end. There would be this long, all-night party with strangers, the time in the car with the girls back to Olofstorp, breakfast at her house—but our time together, alone, our storytelling, word-sharing, whispering time, was done.

  We walked toward our plot with our bouquets draped over our arms, the long reeds fanning the ground as we strode along. The place appeared, now, like a military encampment. We passed tiny campfires and rows of overflowing garbage cans. People saw our bundles and called out to us, “Are you going to make crowns?” “Make me a crown!” Beer cans littered the ground.

  Siri’s friends seemed jealous that she’d taken me to gather flowers. Siri sat down on the moose-skin blanket and spread the flowers before her. She plaited some stems to form the shape of the crown and wove in flowers until it grew large. The other girls tried to pick up some unused pieces to start their own, but Siri slapped their hands away, saying, “No, these are just for me and Lauren.”

  Margareta slinked toward me. “Do you even know what a midsommarkrans is? Or why it is for?”

  “Sluta, Margareta!” Siri said.

  The girl pursed her lips and fell silent.

  “I’m serious. I’m tired of you all being rude to Lauren. Back up!”

  They did as they were told and glowered at us from the perimeter of the blanket, scolded into silence. She was back to defending me, and the girls hated that. I hated it. I knew there was something false about it now.

  Siri went back to trying to show me how to make the flower crown. I tried to follow her example, but I was conscious of the girls’ silence, and my flowers were falling to pieces. I had collected flowers primarily for their beauty, but Siri had known to choose hardier types. Some people came around to watch Siri finish hers. When she was done, she popped the old man’s pink rose in the center, placed the crown on her blond head, and smiled. It was perfect.

  Strangers asked to take pictures with Siri, and she posed with them. Her crown was a hit. I told her she looked like a movie star, and
she snapped out her sunglasses and slid them on for effect.

  As I pulled my array of broken flowers into a pile in front of me, Viktor came over to us holding clear plastic cups with purple drinks. They looked like decomposing Jell-O shots. He told us that they glowed in the dark, but it was still too light out to see. He gave Siri a cup, and she lifted it in the air to toast me. When I looked into my drink, I could see the gelatin separating into chunks, a film of dirt on top, a blade of grass.

  Siri held up her empty cup. “Look at me. I toasted you,” she said. “Did you even notice? Now you toast me, Lauren.”

  I was tired of her pushiness, but I lifted the cup.

  “To you, Siri,” I said. I held my breath and drank it down.

  Frida came back from the Playboy RVs. She said the boys wanted to talk to the pretty girl with the crown.

  “Bygga broar?” Siri laughed. “I will be right back.”

  I looked over at one of the RVs. Two boys were sitting on the roof with their legs hanging over the side. They saw me look up at them and they waved. The Mylar balloon from earlier in the day winked among the trees.

  “Siri, no—stay here,” I whispered. “Make me a crown.”

  “I will be a second. I just want to see what they want.”

  She was so at ease with her beauty. The extra beats of a man’s gaze against her chest. The way men’s voices grew louder in her presence, as if each meant to stake his claim to her by outshouting the others. The shyer ones, furtive, their longings that read like anger. None of it gave her pause.

  “I’ll make you a crown,” Frida said. She came over and undid my hair elastic, combed my hair through with her fingers. “I can braid your hair the traditional way.”

  Frida was never this nice to me. She was drunk. I could smell her body odor as she worked with her arms raised.

  “You could come with me, Lauren,” Siri said. “It might be fun.”

  I didn’t answer her. She shooed Frida away.

  “Lauren.”

  My eyes stung because I knew they were just teenage boys, but in the dark, now, they looked like men. And the invitation was the invitation of certain men: They wanted to talk to the pretty girl; they would wait for her to come to them.

  And she wouldn’t listen to me. Because I held no authority here. In her eyes, I had taken all my insecurity, deep troubled nonsense that I’d confided in her—I’d given her up and thrust myself at the one person she didn’t want me to be with.

  She picked up the braid Frida had started. She dropped some of her unused flowers into my open palms. “Hold these. I’ll put them in your hair.”

  Siri braided my hair tight. My head hurt but I let her continue to do it. I looked down at the weary daisies in my cupped hands.

  “Are you going to just sit here all night on this stupid blanket?”

  “No.”

  “Bygga broar.”

  “What does that even mean?”

  She pulled my hair back. “It means ‘building bridges.’ Getting to know people.”

  “You know I’m not feeling well. I almost got sick before. Remember?”

  “I know you are full of shit right now.”

  “They look like assholes, Siri. And what if there are drugs over there? I promised Birgit I’d watch out for you.”

  “I don’t think there will be droger there,” she said. “But you know I’m young. I want to do things.”

  “I know,” I said.

  She was at the age when she was supposed to be reckless. I was at an age when I was supposed to be responsible. I could hear Birgit in my mind, entreating me to keep her safe.

  “You worry about me so much,” she said quietly. “And I thank you for that. You hear me? I do thank you. But I need you to stop being so controlling.”

  I turned to look at her. That was the word she so often used to describe Magnus.

  “You’ve got to stop now, okay?” she said.

  She went off in the direction of the Playboy RVs, her crown streaming petals as she ran. It was the first time I hadn’t followed her.

  I sat in the center of the moose-skin blanket surrounded by smoke, and garbage, and drunken revelers, and trees, and somewhere, beyond the dune, the sea. I tried not to look back at Siri. It was unfair that she’d called me controlling. Surely she knew that I hated worrying about her like the mother of a teenage daughter, half feeling that I must do everything in my power to protect her, half that I must be her fun best friend and look the other way, lest she hate me, storm from my house one night, and never come back.

  I crawled inside the tent and into my sleeping bag, listening to the mix of beats, ecstatic singing, and drumming music. The Playboys turned on their headlights and a globe of yellow light made a perfect circle on my tent’s wall.

  Then the headlight was a spotlight, and my heart was lit up with pain from back home. I didn’t know how I would manage when I returned home, alone. I had no technical-writing work lined up yet. There would be two months of empty time before school started again. The simple schedule I’d imagined with Siri on the hill—spending my days reading, writing, and eating biryani—would have been manageable were it not for the apartment I lived in, which could be so loud with pain. I stared up at the white circle of light as if to ask it what it had to show me.

  Someone was making a shadow animal against the light—a dog. It was a man; I heard him clear his throat. He made the dog bark, then run about in the circle. It made me smile. I would be happy to see Annie. My poor old Annie. The dog became a rabbit. I closed my hands and slid them under my head. After the bunny came a bird, flapping its wings. I thought dreamily of the ocean beyond the dune. I closed my eyes and let the bird sing to me of its wings beating down ocean-thick air. When I opened my eyes again, there was an animal I could not quite recognize, and I said this aloud in English. I waited for him to reposition his fingers, but he went away.

  “Don’t leave,” I said.

  The light went out.

  Then darkness.

  I wanted to believe it was Magnus. His light, his wings. Siri thought Magnus was controlling, but he had only been trying to love her. Every time I saw him, he was loving her and she was pushing him away. Calling him controlling. Turning her back and running toward something or someone else. All we wanted to do was protect her, and she couldn’t handle it.

  I crawled on my belly to the front of the tent and zipped it open.

  The darkness outside had depth and edge, but I couldn’t make anything out. People slid continuously across my line of vision. They were gathering, walking, clapping, but they might as well have been dancers, counting out beats in the dark.

  How long did Siri say it would be nighttime? Minutes? Hours? I thought of the game young Siri had played with her father, where she’d fall asleep counting and wake up to his counting. My heart beat fast; it was up in my ears, counting.

  I was overcome with the idea that he was out there. I wanted to believe it had been Magnus soothing me through the tarpaulin. I wanted to believe that at any moment his face would float toward me through the night like a sun, looking at me the way he had on the car ride to Vimmerby.

  It started to rain. Someone ran by me, kicking up dirt and getting it in my eyes, forcing me back inside the tent, forcing me to listen to the drumming that echoed from the vein in my own neck.

  That tent was like a one-chambered heart.

  The drumming became louder and quicker. I felt it moving in my stomach, then against my temples.

  I thought the sound was coming from inside me. The pulsing of growing sick. But it was the rain. Rain like fingertips tapping on the tent’s top.

  * * *

  —

  I AWAKENED LATER to a glinting gold oval, a pendulum swinging—Karin’s locket as she leaned over me. Then voices as Siri, Margareta, and Frida crawled into the tent.
They were whispering. Sover hon? Är hon sjuk? Frida and Margareta pulled the dirty moose-skin blanket inside and draped it over me. It was strewn with spent cigarettes and smelled sour, dirty from the afternoon of people dancing, smoking, and eating upon it. Wet, too, from the rain. But the weight of it, and the girls leaning over me, and their Swedish, comforted me.

  Siri touched my forehead and brushed the hair away from my eyes. I could sense the concern in their voices. Är hon okej? Är hon okej? Margareta’s coarse black hair hung loose near my face, and Karin fiddled with the locket at her neck, breathing hard, like she’d been running. Siri leaned down to whisper in my ear. “Lauren, you’re okay, right?”

  “Are you having fun?” I asked her.

  “Ah, so you are awake. Are you feeling any better?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Rest. I will find something for you to eat and bring it back here.”

  The girls smiled at me and backed out of the tent. Siri’s denim jacket smelled smoky. My long braid lay upon my shoulder. Softly, she combed it out with her fingers and removed the flowers from my hair. “We picked these at different crossroads, remember? There was that cloud of baldersbra, white and fresh. You picked these yourself.”

  She arranged the flowers gently by the edge of my sleeping bag.

  “Where is your pink rose? The one the man gave you?” she asked.

  I pointed to where it lay by my bag and she placed it with the others.

  “I’m going to teach you that other tradition, the one with the flowers. But you have to make me a promise, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “On Midsommar’s Eve, if you sleep with seven different kinds of flowers underneath your pillow, you will dream of the man you are supposed to marry. It’s even more powerful when you pick them from a crossroads. It’s magical that way. We didn’t do a lot of the magical things I had planned for us. We couldn’t find a midsommarstång in town. We didn’t really swim here. I was hoping to, but you were right. It’s too cold. But this—this is big magic. This is a good thing to do on our last night here.”