by Diane Zinna
“Hey. Have you ever seen fjords?” Björn asked.
“No.”
“Have you ever been to Norway?”
“No.”
“How about we go there tonight? We cash in your ticket home and make our way to Oslo. Then Hardangerfjord, Sognefjord. How much did your ticket cost? I bet it would be enough money for everyone here to travel for a month.”
I didn’t say anything. Björn was watching me. Then we heard a sound in the distance.
“Is someone coming?” Björn asked.
“I don’t see anyone,” I said.
“I thought it was maybe your friend’s brother again.”
I looked at him. “Her brother was here?”
“Yeah. She threw a fit when she saw him. She ran off, and he went after her.”
I felt suddenly uneasy. I looked out into the dark.
Could it be Magnus coming back? I could see the line of the big dune in the distance. The ocean panted beyond it. I wanted it to be him. I didn’t feel like myself. A teenager’s drug was wearing off. The blankets were oily with teenage sweat, gritty with dirt from a teenage campsite, and damp with rain from this eighteen-year-old part of the earth. Siri was the unlocked closet door. Magnus was the rocket ship. I thought I’d wanted to be young again, but now I wanted him to be looking for me, coming to pull me out of there, somewhere into space.
There was the crunch of gravel, and then the ruffle of underbrush. A man drifted forward from the woods, and I sat up straight.
It wasn’t Magnus.
I saw the yellow stripe across his jacket.
“Hello!” the man called out in English.
I turned to Björn. “Can we close this door?”
“What? Why?”
The man pressed forward. “I know you!” he shouted cheerily. “Right? We met earlier tonight. I met you and your friends.”
The man had a flashlight and swept it over the others’ sleepy faces just before I pulled the door shut.
“How do you lock this?” I asked. Björn reached forward to snap the latch, and I looked at Siri, awake, rubbing her eyes. “It’s one of those guys from before,” I told her.
The man pounded on the van door, awakening the others.
“What does he want?” Björn asked.
The man started calling out in Swedish. I couldn’t understand it, but it was the same line, over and over, a rhyme, like he was singing. Siri suddenly reached into the strata of blankets for her shoes.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
She didn’t answer me. I grabbed her wrist to keep her from touching the door handle. She shook me off. The man continued to call out.
“What is he saying?” I asked.
“He wants the girl in the pink pants to come outside,” Björn said.
Siri found her shoes and was pulling them on.
“Siri, no,” I said.
“What did she do?” Björn said. “I don’t want everyone here to get in trouble for something she did. She should get out.”
Siri looked around for her aviator sunglasses. “He wants to take me swimming.”
“Swimming? But there’s lightning. And you’ve been sick this trip.”
“She should get out,” Björn said.
“Stop it!” I said. “Siri, stop. It’s too cold. Don’t you remember how cold the water was at the beach?” I tried to grab Siri’s shoulder, but she slid open the door.
The man leaned against the van, his legs crossed at the ankle. He had a handsome face, but his hair was gray in places, and his lips were dark and chapped. Looped over his arm was Siri’s yellow inner tube—the one we’d used at Neptuni Åkrar. He turned on his flashlight and shined it in her face.
Siri scrunched her eyes.
“Well, come on, then.” The man peered into the van. “Anyone else want to come? Everyone is welcome.”
I suspected he was speaking in English because of me. Maybe he thought Siri wanted me to give her permission to go.
“Hey, American girl. Tell your friend I’m okay. I just want to party,” he said.
Karin crumpled against me. “Tell Siri not to go,” she whispered.
He looked odd. But it was also his age. His face was half-subsumed by shadow, but I could see now that he was older—like me—too old to be hanging around the campsite with these kids.
“Tell her, Lauren!” Karin pleaded.
“Don’t go, Siri,” I said.
“There she is,” the man laughed, swooping the flashlight into the van. “I knew you were in there.”
Siri turned and found my eyes, even though that man couldn’t, even though I was sitting way back in the dark. Could she see in my eyes all the other things I was feeling in that moment? That this man with the stripe across his jacket, with his way of coming just for her, that he was—or might as well have been—Näcken. He’d take her down to the bottom of the sea.
“I’ve always wanted to swim in the ocean at night,” Siri said.
“Siri, you can’t. Please, stay with me.”
“You sound just like Birgit! The two of you always want me in your sights!”
The man with the striped jacket started laughing.
“I don’t think it’s safe,” I said.
“Why do you care?” she said. “You care so much it’s making you crazy. You know who you’re like?”
“Don’t say it.”
“You’re like my brother,” she said. “You’re exactly like my brother.”
This had been the true violation. Not that I’d desired him. Not that I’d had feelings. She didn’t want me to be like him. And now I could see that she was ready to write me off like she’d done with Magnus. She was pushing me away, like she had done so many times before with Magnus and Birgit. I could be Magnus, crunching out of the room in anger after the jars broke. I could be Birgit, sadly rocking in her balcony chair. But Siri was going to go with this man.
I grabbed at her, but she dodged out of my way.
“Fine. Go then,” I said. It was a dare. I didn’t want her to take it. I thought another argument could buy us some time. But she took the man’s arm. I remember her pink capri pants with the strings dangling about her calves. I remember her backless sneakers.
Then the van door was closed again, a drawn curtain.
People in the van were talking casually.
“Your friend is a lot younger.”
Björn.
I nodded.
“So where did you live in America? I only know New York.”
“Yes, I lived in New York.”
“No, you didn’t. You didn’t live in New York.”
I was supposed to go after Siri. I was supposed to protect her.
Björn again: “You don’t look like you lived in New York.”
I tried to shut out his voice.
“You look like a teacher,” he said.
Yes. That is what I was. What was I doing here? How did I get here?
There was the sudden sound of a horn being leaned on, and everyone reacted in tandem, as though it were a siren. Björn pulled his gaze from me and crawled into the driver’s seat.
“Let’s get out of here!” he yelled.
A girl scrambled up beside him to help him navigate his way through the tight maze of parked cars to the gate.
I kept thinking that if we left, there could be no readmission to the campsite until morning. I didn’t know then that there was never going to be a way back. This was the end.
Karin did not hesitate. I saw her leap through the van’s open back doors and scramble teeteringly to her feet. She turned, waiting for me to follow her. She grew small as Björn drove us quickly off the campsite. And I—I did not jump out.
WHEN I CAME home, I hesitated to look at any photos from the trip.
I thought of each of our cameras, full of the summer past. Skinny-dipping pictures: still places along the shore where you could see ice, thin as cellophane—and there’s me with my nipples out and sharp. There was a picture of me from the last night—the worst night—on the campground in Öland. I was giving a fake smile, but I was still the only person smiling in the whole group. I have trouble thinking about that night. I don’t look at the pictures.
What if Siri showed the photos to friends in her fall classes? What if my colleagues at school saw them?
I never knew you owned so many tube tops, Professor Cress.
I didn’t buy them until I got to Sweden. Everyone was wearing them. Even women my age. I’ve dyed my hair back to all brown. I’m still the same smart girl-woman I was last spring.
I remembered the first morning after Siri bleached and crimped my hair, after we’d shopped at the only clothing store in her town, which carried mostly cutoffs, studded T-shirts, and off-the-shoulder tops. I came into the foyer to catch a glimpse of myself in the skinny window that overlooked the field behind their house and felt so confident, so tended to. Then I’d turned and seen Birgit sitting at the dinette, looking at me, seeing that Siri had so taken me over, marked me as hers. I think Birgit wanted me to be on her side, to be another adult. She started asking me questions right then about my life back in America, as though trying to remind me of who I’d been here. I didn’t want to remember. Her questions were exacting. Do you know the other families who live in your apartment building? How far from the school to your apartment? How often do you see Siri outside of school?
In Sweden, I’d been a tourist, temporarily free. Birgit’s questions reminded me of who I was, that I was grown, and that I’d made her a grown-up promise to watch out for her sister.
That closeness, that I could have ever been that person, seemed far away now. I’d been back from Sweden for almost two months, and I hadn’t heard from Siri. I didn’t have her phone number in Sweden, but I’d called her U.S. cellphone number periodically since coming home, and she’d never picked up. I made excuses for her in my mind, mostly that she was angry with me and Magnus, that it would take time for her to get over it, but that she would. Certainly, she would.
I went to campus for an adjunct orientation in late August and saw some students moving into their dorms. I thought Siri must be back. I called her number again, and this time it went straight to voicemail. I left messages, more and more. At first with a mother’s pain that her teenage daughter had lied and not come home. Then with a child’s anger, that her mother had lied about there being magic.
She was being selfish. A lot had happened that last night on Öland, and memories of our last day together now left me feeling betrayed. I wanted to tell her that seeing how she treated Magnus made me want to care for him. I couldn’t help it. I wanted to tell her that in Sweden, I had seen how she treated her friends, and I wanted no part of it. That I’d seen what she truly was. But each time I called her number, her sweet voice on the recording melted me, and I felt an urge to apologize. I told her that I was sorry for what happened with Magnus. I told her I’d give her space if she needed it until she was ready to talk with me.
But she didn’t call back.
I was being shut out.
I had seen her scream at those Swedish friends she called her “best girls.” I felt tormented as more days passed, angry and jealous that I didn’t deserve even that much.
Those early days, I answered the phone for any unfamiliar number, so eager to hear Siri’s voice again. Always they were calls for short technical-writing assignments, and I’d solemnly look for a pencil to scrawl the details. I accepted every contract I could, desperate for the distraction.
When I was in Sweden, I felt the country belonged to me, that it just always had and I’d never known it. It was so far removed from my regular life, it sometimes felt I’d never been born to parents at all, but born of Sweden’s glades and overlooks, my mother the clear water you could dive into, and my father a dinner spread on raw wood tables, heels of bread with liverwurst.
Back home, the things in my apartment berated me. Their part-forgottenness stung me afresh, all of them wanting to make me listen, again, to their stories of the past. They were disgusted with the souvenirs I’d brought home. The eerie woodcut of Santa Lucia, which I hid on a back shelf in my closet. I don’t remember if I had ever even shown it to Siri. A Swedish travel magazine, taken from a train. A woman on the cover had her head thrown back, eyes closed, arms wide to take in summer. The magazine was still dog-eared to mark the places I’d once thought I’d return to someday. But it was Siri who’d let Sweden be a part of me. If she was shutting me out, Sweden did not belong to me anymore.
I tried to tell myself that I just wanted things to go back the way they were before Siri. But things had not been good before her.
My birthday came, and I spent the day alone. I tried to make it through the day without calling her old number, but by evening, I was dialing it. I found myself leaving a voicemail about a dream I’d had that my parents were alive again. I was sitting on a patio reading a book, and they were talking softly together inside a house, in a dim summer room. And when I finished the book and I walked into the room, it was empty. The dream had left me so shaken, I told her. I laughed a little, embarrassed, but I could almost see her compassionate eyes in my mind. When I went to hang up, I realized that my story had gone on too long—the voicemail had cut me off, and I’d been talking to no one. I waited for her to call me back. She didn’t.
And then, I knew she wouldn’t.
My pain from that was so great. She knew the depths of the grief I’d shared with her. She knew she was the only one to whom I could tell something like that dream.
I resolved that we were done, and when, later, long international numbers appeared in my voicemails between the tech writing calls, I made myself delete them without listening. It felt like I was setting a healthy boundary. It felt like self-care.
* * *
—
STELLA MARIS WAS built upon a hill, with its four main academic buildings huddled around a square, three stories deep, a labyrinthine series of stairs-to-gardens in triplicate. It bottomed out at an amphitheater informally referred to as “the pit.” Some said the three-level square was inspired by the architectural designs of Frank Lloyd Wright. Siri used to say it was reminiscent of Escher’s famous drawing of piled-up, interlocking stairs.
There were benches on each level of the pit, and lion-faced fountains that bled rust. They didn’t run in the winter, but they gargled through the last of the hot autumn days. Students sometimes stood around the top of the pit and called to each other. On my first day back, I kept hearing Siri’s voice in the mix. I scanned around for her blond head. But then I’d hear the girls’ voices in my mind from that last morning in Sweden—She is nowhere—and I moved on, angry at myself for caring.
It was the opening day of the fall semester. Members of a student committee were passing out white and purple balloons, and the sky was dotted with them. Ahead of me, two girls swung glossy white bags stretched by the weight of new textbooks. I passed each cluster of students with my head down.
I didn’t know what I’d say to Siri when we ran into each other again. I cataloged the places I was sure to see her and tried to imagine a map of the campus without them. But Stella Maris was small, and our memories together formed a chain of interlocked places I couldn’t avoid, no matter my path.
I found myself walking toward the tiny campus chapel. From outside, it looked like a plain white box. Its two old priests often walked in and out of the confessionals like they were phone booths, but I never saw any confessors. There was a peacock-blue rug that ran down the aisle. On one side of the altar there stood a carved wooden statue of Mary with her hand over her plump wooden heart. On the other side, there was a statue of Jesus with his hand extended.
L
ike the Rose Walk and the late-night library, I early on claimed the campus chapel for my own. It was a place I could breathe deeply.
That first day back, I went in and sat down in a rear pew. I’d brought Siri to the chapel once. There she’d told me she sometimes went to the Lutheran church in town because they had a Wednesday night service in Swedish and it helped her feel less homesick. I wound up telling her about my meeting with a pastor once, not there, but after my parents died, back in New York. That pastor had a circular office with candy-colored stained-glass windows. There had been a tinkling sound the whole time, and I’d tried to identify it, thinking there must be wind chimes. In my memory, his window rained pieces of rainbow glass upon his office floor.
I told her that I’d gone to that pastor because, after my first visit to his church, someone from the congregation had come to my house with a loaf of bread and told me they’d like to see me the next Sunday. It had made me want to go back. I had been going to a Catholic Mass before that, but when I held my hands the wrong way during communion, the priest told me he couldn’t serve me if I wasn’t Catholic, and people stared at me as I walked to the back of the church and out.
I had told Siri that I was doing all the things then that I thought one did to grieve healthily, but I wasn’t grieving healthily. I remember that in the days after their deaths, I was going through my father’s toolbox and found a razor blade, rusted, popped from his old box cutter. There was a box of long nails. There was a small handsaw. I used to take these things out one at a time and lay each object upon my coffee table. A voice in my head narrated the things I did: “She just wants attention.” “She would love someone to see this.” “If she really wanted to kill herself, she would have done it by now,” and “She just wants someone to knock this razor out of her hand.” But I was alone in that place. No one was there to knock it out of my hand.
Why couldn’t the pastor have sent me a loaf of bread after our meeting in his round office? Why couldn’t he have asked me if I had a box of nails, or a razor blade, or a plan? Instead he gave me a book he’d self-published on the Ten Commandments with a clip-art cover and told me he couldn’t meet regularly.