The All-Night Sun

by Diane Zinna

  The music ended.

  “Lauren!”

  Gwendolyn Shoales had pushed past Tenny and come into my room. She was much shorter than us both. She wore a cream-colored polyester suit with a deep V. I could see the bones of her chest, her skin shiny from her body lotion.

  Gwendolyn stared at me. She wanted me to apologize for the noise, and she wanted me to say it in front of my students.

  Everyone was quiet. Adnan collected his papers and went back to his seat, looking from me to the two other women with trepidation, tying his hair back up into a knot.

  Tenny widened her eyes at me, imploring me to apologize. She always aligned herself with power. But I couldn’t bear it. I felt protective of Adnan—of Nikhil, of all of them who’d been willing to be vulnerable that day.

  “This young man had something to say,” I said finally. I turned to the class. “Give Adnan a round of applause, everyone.”

  The students clapped their hands. Gwendolyn tried to put her mouth into a straight line, but she couldn’t help but bare her teeth. Turning to leave my room, she walked into the janitor, John Sled, and yelled at him to get out of her way. Tenny watched Gwendolyn leave. I could tell she was trying to figure out if I’d just won a challenge or gotten myself in deeper trouble.

  Class was over. There was the screech of chairs as the students got up from their desks. Frida started to approach me, but when students swamped my desk, she gave me a sad smile and walked out.

  That smile. It was an opening. What would she have said to me?

  And what did she say to Siri, back at their room, about the way I defended Adnan? I wanted Frida to tell Siri that I had stood up for him, that I still had it in me to do something like that. I wanted Siri to be proud of me, to say I was that kind of person. I stared after Frida, as though I might hear their conversation if I listened hard enough.

  Slowly, one of my students, Hae-Won, came into focus. She was standing right before me. She’d been saying my name.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “What is it?”

  With two hands, the girl slid a clear glass jar of kimchi across my desk. She said she’d made it herself back home in Korea by burying it in the ground for a year to make it the traditional way. “The heat of summer,” she said. “The cold of winter. You need to have both or it does not taste the same.”

  I thanked her and set the jar upon my desk while I talked to other students. They wanted to know if I’d read their papers. Yes, of course, I said over and over, I remember what you wrote. But it wasn’t true. This thing with Siri was making it impossible for me to focus. My hands dove to the gritty bottom of my bag, shaking. Writing back to my students on their essays had always been my favorite part of teaching. I thumbed through the pages, realized too many of the paper clips were at the bottom of my backpack, the papers were out of order, some graded, most not. All the while, Hae-Won’s jar sat upon my desk, a lava lamp of summer and winter, red and black.

  I was still shaking when they all departed. I looked at the large jar and the viscous scarlet leaves floating inside. I thought I’d slide it into my bag, but there was no room with all the unmarked papers. I carried it in my hands and, turning the first corner, ran right into John Sled’s cart. The jar slipped and crashed onto the sparkling hallway tiles, the red and black cabbage flowers like organs caught up in the patterns of the vines.

  I hurried to the bathroom to grab paper towels. I could smell the kimchi. My eyes stung, and then I was crying, hanging on to the sink and staring into its tiny drain. I chastised myself. So stupid. So thoughtless.

  Outside the bathroom I could hear the students’ voices. “What happened?” someone said.

  I prayed that Hae-Won was not among the students in the hall, that she hadn’t seen me so spectacularly destroy her gift.

  “Where did she go?” I heard someone say.

  My shoes were stained from the kimchi. I felt something stinging me between my toes. It was a shard of glass.

  A voice, full of calm, full of concern: “Was it Miss Cress?”

  I turned my head toward the door. Siri.

  In the mirror, I could see I was disheveled. My purple cast dark-splotched from the sink, the front of my blouse wet from leaning against it. But I didn’t care. I didn’t care anymore that I didn’t know what to say or who was there to hear. Or about the unreturned voicemails or the space I was supposed to be giving her. I burst from the bathroom, afraid she’d already left, just wanting to see her again.

  John Sled was mopping up the mess. Some students stood in a circle near him. I rushed to them, looked into all of their faces. Siri wasn’t there.

  “Are you okay, Miss Cress?” one of them asked.

  I nodded, but I noticed John was staring with concern. I wiped at my eyes, and he looked away, squeezing out the ropes of his mop head.

  The students dispersed before noticing that I was barefoot and bleeding between my toes, that I wasn’t breathing. After that day, each time I walked down that hallway, which had always been my favorite, I could still almost smell the pungent wreck of that jar and see the stain of red mixed up in the vines and flowers, and I imagined it came from an open cut on my own foot.

  * * *

  —

  THAT NIGHT, THE Vallapil children, Ravi and Khushi, were playing with a tricycle in front of the apartment building when I got home.

  “Where’s your friend?” Ravi asked. “We never see her anymore. I still remember all the words she taught me,” he said. “Jordgubbsglass means ‘strawberry ice cream.’ ”

  “You pronounced that perfectly,” I said.

  “Do you know any new ones?” he asked. Their mother came out onto the patio to listen.

  “She once taught me the word mångata, which means ‘the reflection of moonlight on water.’ Måne is how it sounds, ‘the moon.’ Gata means ‘road.’ The reflection in the water makes a road of light. Isn’t that pretty?”

  Khushi stood for a moment looking up at the sky, her mouth open. I followed her eyes.

  “That’s a satellite,” I told her softly, and the kids walked me to my door.

  An envelope sat under my door knocker.

  “Someone left something for you,” Ravi said.

  “Who was it?” I asked. “Did you see?”

  “I don’t know. We were playing,” Ravi said, mounting the tricycle and hoisting Khushi on the handlebars.

  I smiled and opened the door to find Annie sitting on the arm of the sofa, looking at the fishbowl, nose-to-nose with the small red betta that lived within.

  “Hi, my girl.”

  She came ambling toward me as fast as she could, like she had been waiting all day to tell me something.

  I ruffled her white head and opened the envelope. Inside lay a ticket to a Santa Lucia holiday service at the Lutheran church in town.

  I sat down quickly. Was this from Siri? I stared at it. Had she come to my apartment again, raised my door knocker? I felt hope rushing in, but I didn’t trust it. I looked up at the opposite velveteen chairs we used to sit in, and I remembered when things with her were good, and I felt a rush of sadness.

  In the breezeway, Ravi was singing. Annie knew his voice. She tilted her head, shuffled her feet like she was dancing.

  “You want to go out with your friends?” I whispered to her. “You feeling strong?” She wanted to play. I looked around for something I could use to play with her and realized it had been a long time since she’d had any toys. “Maybe we could find you a ball,” I said to her. She followed me from room to room while I searched.

  In the laundry room, I came upon a box that held my mother’s old knitting. I opened it on the floor, so Annie could smell the old yarn. I found a ball of string and wound it tighter. It still smelled lightly of my mother’s Chanel No. 5, her spearmint gum, so many years on. Annie pressed her body against the box an
d leaned her head inside. It seemed she was remembering the time after my parents’ accident, when she didn’t eat for days and lay near my mother’s open closet door, staring at her lined-up shoes.

  I looked again at the chairs, the ottoman Siri and I used to share. I hadn’t used them since I came back from Sweden. That was where our ghosts sat.

  When I knelt to give Annie the ball, she leapt upon my lap like a young dog and then into the box, where she circled round and round three times, snuggled down, and pressed her nose into the knitting. And I put the ticket atop my dresser, where it slowly collected dust.

  * * *

  —

  THE NEXT CLASS, Frida approached my desk with a huge piece of oak tag flapping.

  “I wanted to show you my artwork,” she said. “These are some things I have been working on.”

  She spread the messy collage onto my desk. It ruffled with Swedish magazine clippings, pictures of small-windowed yellow buildings, some of her own drawings.

  “That last assignment. The story you had us read,” she said. “It inspired me.”

  I suddenly remembered Siri’s art, the sheer weight of it. Anything she wanted to show me would take two arms to lift. She took stuff from life, the heaviest stuff—metal to weigh her ghosts down, glitter to baptize them, spackled-on layers of paint to suffocate them. When looking at her work, I’d always thought about depth. But it was height, a pile, a burial mound. Magnus had his in the field; Siri’s were on her canvases.

  Frida lifted up the edges of some magazine clippings so I could see clearly a drawing she’d done of a girl with long, light hair.

  “You didn’t know her when she had her hair long,” she said.

  “You’re studying art here, too?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  Other students had come in. I looked up and saw Ana watching us.

  “Let’s get this out of here now,” I whispered, anxiety rising in me.

  “I wanted you to see….”

  I turned away, but she slid it across my desk so the part with the drawing of Siri would be in my line of vision.

  “What do you think, Lauren?”

  “Not now, okay?”

  She was hurt. She turned to see the other students looking at her and took the collage back, embarrassed. Some of the magazine clippings fell off as she walked to her desk at the rear of the room, and the skinny boy in the front row collected them from the floor and passed them down the aisle to her one at a time.

  In the previous class, I’d had them read Alice Munro’s short story “Meneseteung.” In it, a narrator imagines a time in the life of a small town’s poetess by piecing together newspaper clippings from the town library. I asked my students who their favorite artists were, and we did some in-class writing. They were to imagine a day in that artist’s life strictly from the works they remembered. What did that artist love? I said. Can you guess from what they painted? Not like, but love, I said. It’s the only interesting way to think of it.

  I was writing instructions on the board when I remembered who first said that to me. Magnus, that night at the bar.

  I turned back to the class. “Have fun with it,” I said, my voice high and wrong. “There is no need for any of it to be true.”

  Frida laughed out loud, and the other students turned their heads toward her.

  “Why are you laughing?” Cecile asked.

  “Who would even read this?” she said, gesturing toward the freewriting instructions upon the board. “I don’t understand the purpose of what we’re doing.”

  The students ignored her and turned back to their work.

  “I’m just saying there is not one person in my life who would read this and care,” she said.

  “Miss Cress cares!” Nikhil called out.

  “I don’t think she does,” Frida shouted back.

  It seemed impossible to me that Frida and Siri were such close friends, that they’d shared an adolescence, that they were people of the same town. Siri drew people to her. Frida was pushing everyone away. I hated having her in my classroom. Why was she the one who still got to be in Siri’s life?

  I thought of that night at the bar again, when I learned how to toast the traditional way. That night Frida had been sitting in front of me. Her eyes had seemed to bore into me, just as they did now. Mine had gone to her throat to see if she was done drinking, if I could look away.

  I looked at her throat now, at the way she appeared to be swallowing hard.

  “Some people won’t care about what we write, Frida. Some people won’t hear the depths of our stories the way they are meant to be heard,” I said. “But there are those who will.”

  She pulled up her hood and slid down in her chair. I watched her, and soon she took up her pen and was writing.

  I thought maybe I’d broken through to her. But when she turned in the assignment, I saw that Frida had only written a few paragraphs—about Siri. I scanned her sheet: Why Siri had wanted to study in the United States. How Siri had applied for the scholarship herself, announced to her brother and sister her decision to go, but never asked their permission.

  I hadn’t known that. I found my eyes dragging on Siri’s name. I wanted to read it all, but it was painful to see her name written there.

  “This wasn’t the assignment,” I said to Frida. I handed the paper right back, holding it at the end of my extended arm to keep her at a distance. Other students pressed forward, asking me my opinions on their papers cheerfully. I felt Frida watching me as I gave them feedback. She returned to her desk, looking at her paper.

  “This isn’t fair,” she erupted from the back of the room. The others went silent.

  “Frida, give me five minutes.”

  “I did what you asked! Maybe I didn’t understand what you wanted. You said someone who listened to you!”

  She waited until everyone else left.

  “Why are you treating me this way?” she asked. “Why are you shutting me out?”

  I stared at her. She was keeping Siri from me. This was never about me and her. Why was she writing about her? Just to torment me?

  “This wasn’t supposed to be an essay about Siri,” I said.

  She bristled to hear me say her name, as though she were tasked with protecting it and she was the only one who got to use it.

  “You said our favorite artist!”

  “You can’t yell at me in class.”

  “Maybe I just didn’t understand your stupid instructions!” she screamed. She pushed the sleeves of her sweatshirt up like she was gearing up for a fight. On her forearm, I saw she had tattooed the outline of a girl’s face.

  I couldn’t breathe.

  “My plan was to avoid you,” she said. “That was probably the right idea.”

  “Avoid me?”

  She stuffed her collage back into her bag. “I want a different teacher.”

  I said okay, and my voice cracked with distress.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I won’t tell them the real reason why.”

  Frida gathered up her bag and sweater and clopped out of the room, her high-heeled boots sounding her way down the long, long china-plate hall.

  THE ÖLAND HIGHWAY back to the campground was so clean, with fresh blacktop and no cars. In the distance it seemed the whole of humanity was on that site and the rest of the island was floating free.

  It was jarring when I came upon a small concrete building lit up with fluorescent lights. Polisen. A shield with three crowns.

  It took me a moment to realize what it was.

  My thoughts flew. I could ask an officer to drive me back to the campsite. Surely I’d be let back onto the campground if I arrived with the police.

  I rushed in. A white-haired man in uniform stood at a counter, typing with his index fingers. Several young men sat in colored pla
stic chairs along a cinder-block wall. The long cord of a green telephone stretched across the room and looped around the officer’s chair leg. The officer put its receiver down when I walked in and slid a form toward me across the counter for me to complete.

  I imagined reporting my complaint: My friend abandoned me, and then a stranger broke my arm and stole my wallet.

  I was taking too long to write. The officer was staring at me. It felt strange to be under the fluorescent lights after walking so long in the dark.

  The form’s headers: Brottsplats. Brottstid. Brott.

  “Vad betyder…brott?” I asked the officer, who had already gone back to his slow typing.

  “It means ‘crime,’ ” a familiar voice behind me said.

  I turned toward the voice, toward the row of men sitting on plastic chairs.

  And then I saw him. His blond-red hair. I had to tell myself it had been so long since we were in the fountain together—how could his hair still be wet? He wore a white tank top and had a red flannel shirt tied around his waist. What were the chances of his being at that police station?

  Only one hundred percent.

  “Did you come for me?” he asked, standing up.

  He had a bruise under his eye and lines of dried blood coming down either side of his mouth. His bottom lip was busted open, and his shirt was streaked with mud.

  “What happened to you?” I asked.

  “I was camping,” he said. The blood from his mouth had stained the area beneath his bottom lip pink.

  “You got into a fight?”

  “Of course,” he said. “And you?”

  He saw how I was cradling my wrist against my body. “Yes, I guess I did, too.”

  Magnus asked a question of the officer in Swedish, and the man pointed toward the door.

  “You can leave?” I asked.

  “He just wanted to make sure I had a ride. I have my papers. He wanted to make sure I had someone to take care of me.” He nodded toward the form. “Did you have something you needed to report?”