The All-Night Sun

by Diane Zinna

  I imagined Siri swimming, phosphorescent, full of Viktor’s neon jelly, a firefly moving along the surface of the sea.

  “No,” I said.

  “Then let’s go back,” he said quickly. One of the other boys sitting against the wall yelled out something in Swedish at Magnus. “That kid says he wants to kick my ass more before I leave, but I think we’d better go.” He took me by my good hand and led me out into the parking lot. He was looking at the cars, looking for Siri’s.

  I looked down at our entwined fingers.

  “Whose car are you driving?” he asked.

  “I don’t have a car.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I walked here from the bridge.”

  I realized then that he must have thought Siri was out in the parking lot waiting, or that she had sent me to pick him up. Had she seen him get arrested?

  “She didn’t send you to get me?”

  “No,” I said.

  He wiped at the cut on his lip with his flannel shirt. “I shouldn’t even be walking,” he said. “I probably have a concussion.”

  “Should we call a taxi?” I asked.

  “There are no taxis out here. Come on.”

  He seemed upset that Siri hadn’t come for him. He glared at the still-distant campsite, where light was rising like steam.

  “What was your fight about?” I asked.

  “Oh—everyone fights here. I didn’t know those guys.”

  He walked with long strides and it was hard to keep up. “When did you get to Öland?” I asked.

  “This afternoon.”

  “Did you come alone?”

  “Yes.”

  He wasn’t looking at me when he spoke; he clearly wanted to get back to Siri. But there was also something in his manner that seemed like he was exhausted—tired of him caring and her not. It had been the same way with her and me. I was new to that feeling, but he had lived with it for years.

  We walked for a while without talking. It seemed he was angry that he cared so much, but he was still walking quickly to get to her. With each step, I felt the anger growing in me, too, that we were now both walking in her same direction, at that same speed.

  A blank expanse grew to the east of us, a level, void blackness of ground-sea-sky. If we stepped off of the road we’d be sucked into space.

  “They call this part of the island the alvar,” he said. “It looks barren but there are relic flowers out there that don’t grow anywhere else in the world.

  “Not too far from this spot, there are standing stones. It’s too dark to see them now, but they are large. They used to bring people out to those stones to execute them. One is carved with the story of how a father and son were executed out there. This was in the very olden days. They would make the doomed people run back and forth between the stones. When they were exhausted, they would say, ‘We will let you go free if you can jump over one of these stones.’ But even the lowest of the stones is to your waist. A tired man cannot jump in the air. But the people always tried. That was the scariest part.”

  There was something different about his voice. I wanted him to turn so I could see his face in the moonlight. I wanted to ground myself in his black eye, his split lip.

  “Our summer house was not too far from here. My aunts sold it after what happened with our mother. Whenever I come back to the island I go to visit it and look it in its face. I went this afternoon.”

  I remembered Siri telling me that their summer house had already likely been torn down. Surely she knew otherwise. I was suddenly angry that she hadn’t wanted to show it to me when I’d asked her.

  He stopped walking and pointed out at the alvar.

  “When we stayed here, there were times my father would punish me by leaving me out there to find my way home. It was hard for me to get my bearings. There is the sky and the highway. Those stones. But if you get spun around, it’s hard to figure out which way to go. I would just stand out there thinking about killing him.”

  He looked at my face to see if that had shocked me.

  “And no trees. No way to take cover from anything,” I said in his same rhythm. I wanted him to hear it in my voice, that I understood him, to make up for what had happened that night at Liseberg. “All you can do is be afraid.”

  “People say there are no trees, but Siri and I once found a whole stunted pygmy forest,” he said.

  “I heard you came looking for her at the van,” I said.

  “She’s always getting herself into trouble.”

  “And out of it.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Nothing sticks to her, as they say. Maybe I shouldn’t worry about her so much. It drives her away.”

  Worry did push her away. And anything that smacked of disloyalty or disinterest. A pile of blue, broken pottery lay on the roadside where I stood. I recognized it from the morning, when we first drove onto the island. Magnus knelt and tossed the chipped cups and vases into the darkness like he was skipping rocks on a black lake.

  “I wish I could show you this place in the light. It is usually on and on of nothingness. But after a rain, like tonight’s, it is an old map. Lines come up on the ground, and you can see all the ancient roads. Lines that went to ancient towns. There were people who lived out here. Can you imagine it? This high-screeching sound of the wind in your ears all the time? I wonder how they did not go mad.”

  He put his hands over his ears, though the wind was low.

  “When the water dries up, the roads dry up again,” he said. “But for a while you can imagine the people walking by from the past. And you don’t feel so alone. Sometimes when I walk here I wonder if I might meet my mother on the road. Did Siri ever tell you anything about that?”

  “No.”

  No. She never told me what it was like to lose them, despite all I shared with her. I had asked, hadn’t I? Despite everything, there was a wall between us that she’d put there.

  “Do you remember the calendar you were looking at in my room that day? With the Nattravnen?”

  I immediately thought of the eerie embroidery I’d found. When I looked out at the alvar and tried to make out what Magnus was seeing, it was those macabre creatures I imagined, embossed over the blackness.

  “When I was a kid, after our mother died, there was this rumor that our mother never wanted to come back that night. Some people said that she wanted to be rid of us. Some said she’d found a lover. It was mean stuff. But one day, someone told me there was a way that you could see a loved one again after they’d died.”

  I wondered what this had to do with those creatures. We were walking, our eyes on our own feet.

  “You go a day without food or water. At midnight you go out into the woods alone. You might meet some of those creatures along the way, if you’re lucky. They help you know you’re on the right path. If I could make it past them all, maybe my mother would meet me in the dawn.”

  “Did you do that?”

  “I was distraught. I was depressed. I would have done anything anyone told me to do,” he said.

  I remembered doing all the old funeral director instructed me to do: I was to press two browning chrysanthemums in a Bible; I was to stand at the door to greet the visitors; I was to fill my car with flowers to its roof.

  “What happened the night our mother died was my fault,” Magnus said.

  “What?”

  “There is a winter holiday—a saint’s day. The idea is that this woman comes in the night, bearing light, casting away the darkness on the darkest night of the year. Every year girls compete to be chosen in a kind of a beauty contest, and the winner gets to lead a procession at church and sing.

  “Siri wanted so much to be chosen but she was still small. She decided to go out in the night and knock on doors, sing the procession’s songs to our neighbors, like a little ca
mpaign so they’d vote for her. Our house was asleep. I’d heard Siri moving around downstairs. She’d taken a candle and lit it on the stove light. I heard her go out. From my window I saw the light from her candle moving from the house and to the gate. I rushed to our mother’s room and told on her, and our mother went out after her. Our first neighbor on the road brought Siri back right away, but our mother—she never came back.”

  My heart was in my throat.

  “I could have gone out after her myself,” he said.

  “You can’t blame yourself for that. You were a child, too.”

  “After all this time, Siri is still going out into the world knocking on doors trying to convince people to choose her, that she is a bringer of light. It’s like she has been set into some kind of perpetual motion, to escape this house, to have her candles blown out, to have someone bring her home again. And it’s like, now I am always at the window, wondering what to do.”

  I remembered Siri on the train saying that at night she often found herself lying in bed, all the siblings quiet, everyone listening for their mother to open the front door. But it’s always the gate. The gate, she’d said. The creaky gate. I’d heard it the first night I was in Sweden. It was the same sound I came to associate with Magnus as he dug into the earth. The same gate she’d opened to go down the path with her white candle in the snow.

  I could see her in motion. I could hear her steps. They were inside of me, a beat I’d learned to respond to—for every action, a reliable reaction from me. He was sitting at his window. I was the neighbor at the door. How beautiful, the neighbor must have said upon seeing Siri standing in the snow. Did she ask, Where is your mother? or did she just bring Siri home?

  “Did Siri even tell you anything about our house here?”

  “A little.”

  “Ah, of course she said nothing. Nothing here matters to her anymore.”

  Magnus looked at the way I was cradling my wrist.

  “What did you do to yourself, anyway?”

  “I think it’s broken.” I didn’t want him to touch it.

  “I know you didn’t get in a fight. You’re too good.”

  He untied his flannel shirt from around his waist and tore off the sleeves with quick motions. He fashioned a little sling and tied it carefully around my neck. He brushed the loose strands of my hair away before tightening the knot.

  “I liked your hair better when it was brown,” he said.

  “You don’t like it now?”

  “I don’t like that you thought you had to change it.”

  The sky was turning golden-green in the distance. “Can you ever see the Northern Lights from here?” I asked.

  “On Öland? No. We’re too far south. That’s dawn coming up.”

  The fields stretched out on both sides of us now, like desert. On the very edge of the roadside: blomsterlupiner, baldersbra. I said them to myself in Siri’s voice. I remembered her walking in the high fields earlier the same day. The wide, padded straps of her lilac backpack sliding down her arms. How she touched the faces of flowers. In my mind, she turned to face me, and all the flowers closed.

  “Why did Siri leave you alone?” he asked. “You don’t know your way around here. I’m mad at her for doing that to you.”

  “No, it wasn’t like that.”

  But it was kind of like that, wasn’t it? She had embarrassed me on the campground in front of those men. She never apologized, and then she pushed me away. While the rain clobbered the roof and I sat there thinking over ways to forgive her, she slept in the van. She must have known that she’d hurt me. She knew that, didn’t she?

  I felt Magnus’s hand picking out a leftover, wilted daisy from my ponytail. “You are so svensk to have flowers in your hair on Midsommar,” he said, putting it behind his own ear.

  “You should have seen Siri tonight. She made a flower crown.”

  “Sounds like her.”

  “She loves you, you know.”

  “She avoids me.” He spread his arms wide like he had a paintbrush in each hand, and birds rose out of the field, squawking, like black tar pencil across the morning’s now-pasteling canvas.

  I let my hand fall onto his shoulder. I wanted to comfort him. I wanted Siri to have to answer for his feelings. I was convinced that she’d gotten him wrong.

  “I’ll never give up on Siri,” he said.

  He was beautiful and open. Wounded. That statement, a beating drum. I felt everything in me rushing toward him.

  “Did you know,” he said, “out there on the alvar—there are flowers that bloomed during the glacier age. There’s a whole palette of flowers that can only bloom here.”

  “That’s what you said.”

  He reached out his hand, and I looked into his palm again, like he had taken something from the sky and was presenting it to me as a gift. He laughed and grabbed my good hand, pulled me into the alvar.

  It was a gunshot, marking the start of a race. My heart banged like a pinball. Would my guilt soon set in, the metal ball sucked down into the machine again? I knew what was about to happen, but in that moment, I let it. She didn’t want me. But he needed me. He ran backward into the dark field, laughing. I chased him into the blackness.

  “I’m going to jump the stones!” he yelled.

  We were so far off of the road I thought we’d never wind our way back, and I didn’t care. We were in space, where I’d always longed to go. Everything black, deep, and vast, a place to float. My wrist didn’t even hurt, the way he’d tied it against my chest. He turned to charge deeper into the alvar. I followed him by the brightness of his white shirt and stumbled on a rock. He came to nurse my skinned knee with kisses. He unfastened my sling, then he unfastened my buttons and pulled me beneath him.

  It was selfish of me, I knew, but I could sense both of us pushing her out of our thoughts. It felt so good. There was nothing between us at all. His mouth gentle on my neck, his breath like he was about to say something just for me, over and over. He reached under my shirt and slid his hands over my breasts. He squeezed my nipples with his fingers; his palms felt for my heartbeat. Every time he touched me, I felt the thousand instances he’d wanted to. I could feel him letting go, letting himself do the things he’d wanted, and I loved it. There were flowers beneath my neck, crushed into scent. There was the rub of grit behind my knees. The way he was pushing into me, it felt like he was trying to push me underground, to put some version of me in the ground. When he looked at me, his pupils widened and widened until his eyes were black as night and I was completely taken in. It felt real, and the earlier events of the night seemed like a dream drying up.

  PREPARING FOR A conversation with Siri on campus wouldn’t serve me. When our paths did eventually cross, it would be in some unexpected place. She’d be silent. I’d be forced to start. What if my colleagues were around? I’d speak too softly. What? she’d say, and I’d be caught off guard, and I’d have to start again. In my mind, I started that conversation over and over.

  But not on campus, I’d think. In Stockholm. Let’s meet again on that rainy day in Sergels Torg, when everything was just joy. Me in my sky-blue trench, she with her hair spiky and dusted with glitter, when we’d floated across the large black and white triangular tiles in the marketplace that had reminded me of a game board. Siri kept stepping from black triangle to white, taking pictures of me. With each step, I thought, What now?

  I remembered our ride through the stations of the Tunnelbana, looking at all of that artwork and writing about it in the guidebook together. In one station there were gears along the walls like a hundred plain shortbread cookies. And in Näckrosen, it was silver all around with palm-sized rocks like barnacles spackled into the posts. Green lilies painted on the ceiling put you underwater. It had been a beautiful day. It was a time I would never get back.

  Siri’s own artwork was mostly piec
es of concrete and metal, brass, like armor, on a canvas. But the underworld stations she loved most were playful and ethereal. I loved that about her, the way her eyes lit up at Stadion’s rainbows. How Järva’s line of black figures on red clay made us both feel as if we were wrapped around a Grecian urn. How Tensta’s white walls made the station a shining pearl with sculpted penguins on rock-face shelves. We’d been on an adventure—two friends on a subway, talking about art and family. Alby was a heavenly, kelly-green woodland. And Solna Centrum was blood red, making the long escalator down feel like a descent into hell.

  * * *

  —

  I SAW TENNY in the basement office the week after Frida transferred out of my class. She didn’t say more than hello when I walked in. At my desk, papers were starting to pile up, rustling in the breeze from the open window. I reached for something to place upon them to keep them from blowing away. I opened the drawer of my gray desk and saw the gift Siri had given me, the bud vase in the shape of a lemon, its finish that of a lemon rind. It was the only personal item I kept in the office.

  “Did you apologize to Gwendolyn Shoales yet?” Tenny asked.

  “For what?” I asked.

  “The way you embarrassed her in front of your class.” She came over to my desk and lit a cigarette beside the open window.

  “No. I haven’t,” I said.

  “I bring it up only because she’s been appointed to the hiring committee for the position that’s coming open. Professor Trela’s. Are you going to apply?”

  “I’ve been thinking about it.”

  “You should, you should,” she said, smoking, blowing out a long breath of air. “You’re the right kind of person for it. And you’re so young. You could have a long career here.”

  She watched me set the lemon vase back on my desk in a way that would catch the light. She eyed it with a little jealousy, I could tell. I know what Tenny saw. I was still the teacher who got little gifts. Sparkly cards from students. We hope you are having a good day! written on the board before I came in.

  “Here, I got your mail for you,” Tenny said. She retrieved a pile of papers and envelopes from her desk and handed them to me. “I also got your student. Frida Dahlström. What a sullen little bitch she is.”