by Diane Zinna
A boy named Nikhil wanted to tell us of his life in the jungles of Nepal. He wore a long soccer jersey and sandals, and his thick black hair fell to his shoulders. “I raised a tiger from birth,” he said. “When it was small, it would drop gifts of headless birds and rodents on our doorstep. When it got big, my father became afraid and brought it to a distant place in the jungle and abandoned it there. But one night, it came back to see me. It missed me. It hitched a ride on a bamboo raft and rode all the way down the river until it got back to my village. It snuck into my hut at night, where I was lying in my loincloth outfit, then rose up on its back feet to put its front paws on my shoulders and hug me. My father thought it was trying to attack, and so—whizz!—he blew a blow dart at its face and killed it. I loved that tiger very much.”
Everyone was quiet. Cecile and Ana had covered their eyes, as though the tiger had fallen dead right in front of them. Nikhil was looking around expectantly for other reactions. I could see the faintest glimmer of a smile at the corner of his mouth.
“I’m joking, people.”
“That’s not fair. We all told real stories,” Ana complained. But she was the only one who was upset. The others applauded. Ana, tall, with the broad shoulders of a basketball player, watched my face for a reaction. She didn’t like it when I smiled.
I passed out blank sheets of paper and continued the lesson, telling them, “Don’t worry about grammar. Just freewrite for about ten minutes. When you’re done, you can pass them up to me.”
Emotionally exhausted, I slumped into my chair while they wrote out their scary tales. They were all writing happily. Nikhil kept searching out my face. When I finally allowed myself to meet his eyes, I tried to shake my head at him, but a laugh burst out of me like a burp, and this made the others laugh again. Suddenly the door creaked open. A girl walked in.
Her blond hair was longer than before and pushed back with a thick headband in a preppy American way. Her collar was sticking up out of her sweater. She looked at me with wide eyes.
It was Frida.
“Are you my teacher?”
“Are you in this class?”
She handed me the white slip with her late registration information, and I stared at it unseeingly, my heart pounding. Frida had said she might come to study at Stella Maris. It had not occurred to me that she could wind up in my class.
“There’s a seat in the back,” I said.
She maneuvered between the chairs and dropped her bookbag on the floor. It was covered with colorful round buttons, and she wore black boots that laced up the front to her knees. Ana turned to Frida and told her the assignment. Frida looked at me and scowled.
“It can be any story,” I told her. “I just need it as a writing sample.”
She didn’t hold her pen right. She wrote with a bunched fist and didn’t blink.
This girl had seen me drunk, vulnerable, topless. She’d seen me try to connect and to be like her friends. When I’d tried to make jokes, she had not laughed. She’d seen me giddy. Happy. Her best friend had loved me, and because of that, she’d tried to like me but could not. For all those reasons, I told myself it was natural for me to be uncomfortable with her sitting in my classroom now.
But there was another reason. Frida would never have come to the United States on her own. If Frida was here, Siri was back in the United States, too. And she had really not sought me out.
Frida was done with her paper before many of the others and sat back to appraise me. The papers drifted to the front of the classroom, and I collected them.
When I dismissed the students, Frida lingered. She stayed at her desk with a peach-colored paper map of the campus spread open before her.
I walked to her with my arms crossed in front of my chest. Her fingers were covered with rings, and I could see tattoos poking out near her wrists like the sleeves of an undershirt. I didn’t remember her having tattoos. I leaned against the back wall and cleared my voice.
“Well, how are you?”
She was silent. I didn’t know how to take it. I felt anger rising in me, but I didn’t want it to show.
I sat down in the desk beside her and pointed at a square on her map. “That’s Goering’s Bookstore,” I said. “It’s the best bookstore in the city. There’s a shuttle you can take there. It leaves from outside the administration building a few times each afternoon. You can get the schedule from the secretary.”
“This is weird,” she said.
“I know. I…I can’t believe you’re at Stella Maris.”
She folded up the map and put it in her bag.
I wanted to ask about Siri. Was she well? Were they roommates after all? Which classes did Siri have? I readied myself to ask, but Frida was impatient.
“This place is not what I expected. I thought I’d be getting some kind of American experience, but they have us living with internationals, taking all our classes with internationals—I feel separated out.”
“I’ve heard that from other students. Siri used to say that a lot last year.”
She looked at me hard. “Have you been talking to people about her?”
“What? No.”
“But you two were such great friends.”
“People here—they’d have opinions about how she and I were friends. They wouldn’t approve.”
“No one here knows you were friends with her?”
The finality in how she said that. I tried to steel myself.
“I tried not to make it public. It was just easier.”
She looked down at my purple cast.
“How is your arm, Lauren?”
Immediately I felt the break inside the cast, the sweat and water trapped within it, the blue tinge from the swim at Neptuni Åkrar.
“It hardly ever hurts anymore,” I lied.
Her cat-eyed gaze was a transcript. She gathered up her things and left. I imagined her carrying my words back to her dorm in her black bookbag, emptying them upon Siri’s bed like small, headless creatures.
THERE WERE MANY obstacles on the way out of the campsite. Double-parked cars. Sheep blocking the highway. It was as though the island wanted us—me—to stop and go back. One of the girls, a blonde named Mia, hung on Björn’s shoulders and urged him on. She wore a sleeveless concert tee and a black velvet ribbon tied in a bow like a choker, so tight its knot dug into her neck. The others were looking through the rear windows and shouting. They were afraid. I knew then that they must have done something wrong to be so afraid.
For all their urgent narration, there were no sirens, no police cars following us. Mia directed Björn toward the head of the gigantic bridge that stretched over the Kalmar Sound and back to the mainland.
“Let me out,” I said.
We passed beneath highway lights. They made a slow strobe upon Björn’s face. “We need to keep going,” he said.
The others quieted down, and with the ease of adrenaline came a sudden recall that there was no readmission to the campground after ten o’clock.
“There’s no one following us. I need to go back,” I said.
Björn glanced into his side mirror as though he still anticipated a chase. Mia turned to stare me down. “Look. He wanted this van ever since he saw it Wednesday.”
Another girl was shaking. “We’ve gone too far,” she said. “This is like we stole it. This is different.”
So the van was not theirs.
“The keys were in the door,” Björn said, defending himself. “It was waiting for us.”
They started talking about going to Norway.
“We will go to Mia’s house first and gather some things.” Björn looked at me in the rearview. “Then we’ll go west. We can sell your ticket home.”
“No, I can’t do that,” I said.
“But Midsommar is just the start of everything!” Mia said.
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I should have gotten out with Karin. My legs were still tensed for the jump I didn’t make. I crawled to the back of the van. Through the back windows, the threat of my real life was coming up. Nothing tailed us—no sirens, no recourse. No bright-headed Siri, poking her head out into the highway, waving me back. Just a new day and my trip home. I didn’t want to go home like this. Not back to my friendless grief, all-the-way dark all the time.
“First Oslo. We’ll plan a great escape into the world from there,” Björn said. He was still wearing his felt crown. He seemed to expect me to follow his reassuring, monotone directions all the way to Oslo, help them navigate the stolen van through the crevasses of fjords or as deep into Lapland as he wished to take me.
“I don’t have any money. I don’t have anything to sell. Please take me back.”
Mia reached into Björn’s pocket and drew out his pack of cigarettes. I watched her light one. Pursed lips, slow exhale, a flick of her tongue when she noticed my staring. “She doesn’t want to come. Forget it,” she said.
Björn laughed. “No, she wants to go back and wait for that asshole.”
“What?”
“That asshole who was in the van before. The girl’s brother. I saw your tits light up when I told you he’d been there.”
“No.”
I went for the door. The others saw me try to open it and yanked me back, afraid I’d jump out. They yelled at Björn to pull over and he did, finally, but I could still hear the sound of wheels, or rushing, or panting—
Mia slid open the door. “It’s the water!”
A wave came toward us, white crested. When it hit the jagged rocks of the shoreline, a mist sprayed into the van. The road had been running adjacent to the shore all along, but I couldn’t tell because of the dark.
The others jumped out. Björn and I followed them. Above us, the stars were so large they might all have been planets. When my eyes adjusted, I saw that we were nearly at the place where the long silver bridge met the land. I could see one spot of light, far in the distance, floating across my line of vision—one little car crossing to the island. Björn stared hard at me.
“If we sold your ticket, we could all travel for a long time,” he said.
“You keep saying that. I don’t even have my ticket with me.”
I wondered if he was able to follow my English as quickly as I was talking. No rail separated the road’s shoulder from the slant of rocks. I stepped toward the water, to get some space, to breathe, but Björn grabbed me around the waist. His hands on my body felt too familiar. They were small-of-my-back hands, the kind I fell into when I felt lost. How young are boys when they first learn to spot weakness? Does someone teach them?
“You said yourself that the van was just left there. No one’s looking for it.”
“There was a siren.”
“It was a car horn.”
“I could get arrested. Or I could drive and take my friends to see fjords. And we’re all friends now, aren’t we?”
“I’ll walk back,” I said.
“All the way back? It is five miles.”
“I can walk five miles.”
“Did you see the first windmill when we passed it? No, you weren’t looking. You were crying, with your face in your hands. You won’t recognize it for a landmark. There are hundreds of windmills on this island. You’ll turn at the wrong one. Or one will reach down with its arms and fling you into the sea.”
Had I been crying? On my knees with my face in my hands? Of course I had.
“Drive me back. Please.”
One of his arms was still around my waist. He pulled me closer and grabbed ahold of my ponytail.
“They used to tie women by their hair to the arms of the windmills. People think the windmills are picturesque. They don’t know the dark history of this island.”
I tried to wrestle away from him.
“I’m giving you a story. Don’t you like history? You are a teacher, right? I’m giving you a story to use in your classroom.”
I elbowed him in the stomach, and he grabbed my left hand and bent my wrist back. I heard it crack. Björn heard it, too, but it didn’t slow him. Pain rushed up my arm. He pushed me against the side of the van and reached into the back pocket of my jeans for my wallet. Then he pushed me into the gravel, climbed back into the van, and honked the horn to call the others back.
I clutched my wrist to my chest. The kids ran up the road and hurried into the van, like they knew this had been the plan all along. The van’s wheels crunched out of the gravel shoulder, left me in the dark.
I was stupid, so stupid.
I mentally went through the contents of my wallet: about forty dollars in Swedish crowns, a torn piece of paper I’d been using to pen details from the trip since losing the guidebook, the phone number for Siri’s house in Olofstorp. My passport, my plane ticket, and a wad of American cash were still back at that house.
Here: There was wind. Darkness. The bridge like a long arm, like a needle, like a false thing that had been erected just for me, and I didn’t take the chance. Now it could fall into the water.
The sounds: only wind. At times like a chime, a whistle, a groan, but only wind. It carried scents from the interior of the island. I could smell wood smoke. Chimneys. There were houses nearby.
I turned, a blind dog each time the wind shifted. The smell of a hearth. Someone who might take me in and keep me.
My wrist was surely broken. It felt heavier than any other part of my body. But the hurt made room in the center of my chest for an old, familiar feeling: that I’d be all right. I would be all right if I wanted to be all right. I could hide, adapt, get by on my wits. I was on my own again, but I knew how this worked.
A cloud shifted, and out came the moon. I saw a windmill in the distance and thought about what Björn had said. I knew there were ghosts on this island—since we’d arrived here, I could feel the press of them from all sides—but they weren’t my ghosts. Mine swelled up in my injured wrist, pressed up against the underside of my hand. They said, We will be your witness that you need to be treated with kid gloves. That you are the sensitive type. That you are world-wounded and allowed a certain extra number of mistakes. They stroked my hair and called me so lonely.
Why hadn’t I jumped with Karin? Because I was afraid. Because that man, swollen and pockmarked, seemed a leftover piece of my hallucination. Because if he was Näcken, then Siri was the girl from the story standing at the edge of the water, delighted with his attention, willing to go with him though she should have known better.
Is that why I was angry? Had I sought to punish her for being that girl?
Taking a chance, I turned at the first windmill, and the campsite was visible down the straight shot of road. Heat seemed to rise from it. I knew it had taken me a long time to convince them to pull over, and it would be a long time before I was back there. I could walk five miles, but I didn’t know how long I could be alone with myself.
IN SIRI’S ESSAY for the compare-and-contrast assignment last spring, she’d written of the Norse god Odin and his two pet ravens, Huginn and Muninn. Huginn represented thought. Muninn, memory. Each morning Odin would set them loose. They would fly around the world and bring back news to him so he could know everything.
Odin had wolves, too—everyone remembers the wolves. But it was the ravens that Odin feared. They didn’t have wolves’ teeth or ravenous appetites, nor were they killers. What made the birds frightening was that after he set them loose, they might not return.
It had been weeks since I’d written in the journal I kept by my bedside. More and more my dreams were about the time I’d spent in Sweden. A pause at the end of a line—this is where she would laugh or smile; now no one to listen. No need to pause. It became sheer rambling, no punctuation, no landings. When they came back to me, my ravens were illogical, hazy: I hear
d the sound of Siri coughing. The metal clack of the bill box on the wall of their house. I used to dream of my parents floating; now I dreamed of them contained, prisoners, in a metal box with a lid, and I dreamed of them coughing, coughing.
* * *
—
EVERY DAY I was anxious about seeing Frida in my classroom. I imagined that after class she went right to Siri to report what I’d talked about, how I’d looked, whether I still wore the purple cast on my arm.
Sometimes I thought I’d said something in class that made me seem like the good person I used to be, and that for sure, for sure, she would go back to her dormitory and tell Siri I should be given another chance. But each class Frida was darker in mood, gaunter in the face, faster out the door. She alternately sulked when people asked me questions, punctuated my responses with non sequiturs, vied for my attention like a despondent child.
In an early assignment, I asked my students to write a short poem and read it aloud to music. Frida refused to do it, but the others put forth beautiful efforts. Nikhil misunderstood the assignment and sang a cappella about his grandfather, who was dying in Kathmandu. He sang about the clouds in his grandfather’s eyes and how the old man hadn’t remembered him the last time he was there, and it was all so heartbreakingly beautiful that when he finished, we all were breathless with appreciation that he hadn’t made it another joke.
The last one to go that day was a man named Adnan. With a full beard and sun-hardened skin, he looked much older than the others. Usually he wore his long blond hair tied on top of his head in a knot, but that day he shook his hair loose and played speed metal at high volume. He shouted the lines of his poem and no one could understand him. A few minutes in, Tenny came to my classroom door to complain about the noise, but I just held up my hand to her and asked him to continue. My students all leaned forward toward Adnan like the line they would understand was coming if only they were ready for it. Toward the end of the song he was banging his head, his hair flailing.