by Diane Zinna
I looked at her as she blew her nose.
“I know,” she said. “I shouldn’t say that about a student. I just hate them all this semester. But I’m good at not letting it show.”
From the way she was changing the topic, it didn’t seem that Frida had told Tenny her reasons for transferring out of my class. Tenny was the type who couldn’t resist a piece of gossip. If she knew the slightest bit of the story, she’d want it all.
From her bag, she held up her illuminated volume of Dickinson.
“When things got too hard for Emily, she shut herself up in her house. She would listen to the children playing down in the street, get to know their personalities. She would fill a little basket with candy, tie it to a bedsheet, and lower it down to them. They only saw her slender white arm through the window, but they came to love her. Sometimes I think if I could only conduct my classes through an upstairs window, I would be a good teacher.”
“You’re too hard on yourself,” I said.
“Maybe. You don’t seem to have those problems, though.”
“No. I mean…sometimes I do,” I said. “We all do.”
She looked at me appraisingly. “What kinds of problems do you have, Lauren?”
I’d been trying to convince myself that since Frida had left my class, things were going better. I’d attributed my tension to her, and when she left, I thought I’d be relieved, but I wasn’t. More and more I had to ask students to repeat themselves. Sometimes I would be talking in front of the class and realize I’d said the same thing twice. They’d stare anticipatorily, as though waiting on me to become that teacher from the first day again, the one who asked them for scary stories and could bear things like that.
When I pulled out construction paper and asked them to make paper snowflakes, they humored me. I asked them to write their favorite line from a personal essay on their snowflakes, and they did, though I still hadn’t returned most of their papers. I planned to say something about their voices being like snowflakes, but suddenly a blond girl breezed past my open doorway, and my throat clenched as I thought for a moment she was Siri. I was suddenly sapped of the confidence to broach sentimentality. I went to the door and looked down the gleaming, empty hallway.
“Miss Cress?”
Back in the room, I didn’t put the snowflakes in any context. I just taped them to the windows and dismissed the class.
* * *
—
I TOLD MYSELF that before Sweden I had been getting better. I had found a friend. I was going to apply for that full-time job. I was going to make up for lost time. Afterward, here I was, that person again. The one who couldn’t sleep at night, the one who walked the aisles of a twenty-four-hour store to pass the time. Up and down the rows, just looking at things. I had to be out of my apartment, among people. I felt that if I withdrew any more inside myself, I risked disappearing entirely.
I met a man there late one night, when I was feeling particularly bad. He was an employee there. He had black hair that he slicked back, and he was very thin and tall. He asked for my number. Since Siri, I thought, I’m not playing that word game anymore. But I started it up again, with him. He called too much. I stopped answering my phone.
And on a day toward the end of September, I showed my students a scene from a gangster movie. A man shot another man in the head after calling another man a racial slur. I asked them to compare and contrast the two cruelties. On the board, I went through my algebra, making a key to indicate the A’s, B’s, and 1-2-3s. I talked through it—the blood and gore, the racism, the ignorance, the pain. When I had filled the board with chalk, I turned around. They were all silent. Slowly, Adnan raised his hand.
“How can you talk so coolly about death?” he asked.
I brushed at my pants, covered with dust from the chalkboard. The old TV was on its dusty rolling stand in the corner, shut off, but they were all looking at it so as not to meet my gaze.
“You think I talk coolly about death?”
As had become my habit, I dismissed class before the end of the hour.
I found myself staring at Siri’s old desk. The desk’s legs were uneven, and whenever she was writing, she’d gently tip the desk back (click) and forth (clop) as she wrote, a soft, slow pendulum that no one else seemed to notice. She would sit so straight in her chair I could see the pattern of her breathing.
I reached into my bookbag for my grading. So many ungraded papers, all of them the beginnings of conversations. Looking at their opening paragraphs, I could see that my students were trying to do what I told them. Writing is a way of connecting, I’d told them. Here’s your topic—what is the first thing you think of when I say (blank)? I wrote in their margins less and less. Click, clop—a beat of memory with no outside dissonance. A little quiet. A little focus, and slowly, memories: The number of people we had to ask before finding a bottle opener at that outdoor bar in Nyhavn—sixteen. The name of the tiny sailboat Siri’s young cousin captained in Hamburgsund: Ost, because in that sea of children steering white boats, his little yellow one looked like a wedge of cheese. Siri, in her lavender jacket, turning to face me, her hair blown by the wind.
I looked toward my open classroom door. The memory of Siri was so present then. It seemed she would reappear immediately. I felt an unreasonable hurt when she did not. Condensation dripped on the big windows. I heard footsteps out in the hall and listened hard, trying to figure out if they were coming closer or moving away.
It was Tenny. She filled the doorway space.
“Did you release your class early again?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She held a book in her hands like an open hymnal.
“I want to ask you something,” she said. “Did something happen between you and that student?”
“I’m sorry?”
I was caught off guard. I tried to think of a fair response, but none came. I did all I could think to do—indicate the empty chair opposite me, where she might sit and talk about what had happened. But she didn’t come farther into the room. She wanted me to answer for something, but I couldn’t speak. She shook her head and walked away.
My hand was still extended toward the chair. The first seat in the first row—Siri’s chair. I pulled my hand back as though I might be burned.
On the other side of the water-patterned windows, students talked. Their mouths moved mechanically. I went over and pulled on a string to lower the blinds. The entire contraption came down with a dusty crash, and I jumped back.
I stood blinking in the powdery air as the desk that had been Frida’s came into focus, its top covered with black stars, drawn in pencil. They were similar to the ones that jutted at Frida’s wrists.
What did she tell Tenny?
Lit up with grief and adrenaline, I went to Tenny’s classroom. She was sitting at her desk with neat piles of papers before her, writing with her hand bunched like a fist.
“You walked away without explaining. Which student did you mean? The girl named Frida Dahlström?”
She gave me an inquiring look.
“No, not her. I thought you knew who I was talking about.”
“Who did you mean?”
“That blond girl from last year. I would see you with her quite a lot. You were friends with her.”
I tried to stay composed.
“I know who you mean,” I said. “She was very sweet.”
“What was her name?”
I paused. “Siri Bergström.”
“Yes. People were talking about her today.”
“What people?” I asked.
She laid her book open flat on the desk and folded her hands upon it, as though her long fingers aimed to cover a secret.
“You never talk to me anymore, Lauren. We used to be good friends here. Why don’t you just tell me the truth?”
I look
ed at the door, then at the window. I wanted to run from that room, but I felt frozen there.
“What was your relationship with that girl?” she asked. “Your student.”
“Yes, she was my student.”
“I don’t want to get into an argument with you. That’s not what I meant to do at all,” she said. “It’s just that people saw you together all the time.”
“You keep saying ‘people.’ What people? Faculty here? She was my student. She didn’t have very good self-esteem and had a hard time adjusting here. I offered her a listening ear.”
She nodded. She tilted her head to one side and blinked.
“Tenny, I hardly knew her. In any case, you needn’t be concerned about it.”
“I’ll mind my own business,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. I was accustomed to Tenny’s being deferential to me. To everyone. I hung in her doorway, my nails digging into my palms while she returned to her grading.
“Tenny.”
“Yes?”
“What did she say?”
“Who?”
“Siri Bergström. Did she say something about me?”
Something changed in her expression. Like she was doing mental math or buying time.
“When was the last time you saw her?” she asked.
“In the spring.”
“The spring.”
“Yes,” I lied.
“Lauren, that girl didn’t return to school.”
“What?”
She took up a letter opener. She was still staring at me as she plucked an envelope from among the papers.
Slowly she slit it.
There had been that opening-day Mass in the pit. That day with the splattered kimchi and the feeling of Siri passing by my open classroom door. I would be someplace on campus and suddenly feel the memory of being there with her, and I’d flee. Or I’d be standing with colleagues and laugh a little louder because I felt, I just felt her presence nearby, and I wanted to show her that I was okay.
The ticket. The ticket to the Santa Lucia service at the Lutheran church. Hadn’t she left it for me? Whenever I passed it on my dresser, I told myself I’d see her at that church, if not before. I’d see her there. That was the church she went to when she felt homesick. She had invited me home again.
I spun from Tenny and hurriedly walked back to my classroom, where my students’ paper snowflakes quivered in the air from the radiator. I grabbed my things, put on my coat, and left the building.
I thought I’d been giving her space. I had thought there was a chance, however small, that we would fix things and go back to the way we were before.
In Gamla Stan’s narrow caramel alleys, in Stockholm’s silver subways, in the streets, with her purple backpack bouncing ahead of me—I’d felt lighter.
When she walked ahead of me down the cobblestone tubes of the Old Town, she made the passage safe. Her presence vouched for me.
I was the one who needed protecting. She was supposed to protect me.
I’d replayed the last night on Öland over and over in my mind. If what I had done to Siri that night was not a betrayal, denying our friendship to Tenny had been. To whom could I apologize for that? She hadn’t come back.
Lying had become second nature in my adult life. It was a way to spare strangers difficult conversations. The lies only ever pertained to my own information, and nothing I said was ever that important; the lies only served to keep me smiling, to keep the conversations from going off the cliff of sympathy, to keep me from breaking down.
But my lie to Tenny that Siri hadn’t been my friend—it was not white.
It was a lie that aimed to black out everything.
WHEN WE GOT to the campsite, things were awakening like a morning house. We trod over the fanlike seagrass that grew near the now-open pedestrian entrance, walking one behind the other through the maze of cars that dripped with condensation in the new light. I led Magnus past the glimmery splutter of campfires to the place where I’d helped pound in the stakes of our decrepit tent the day before.
There, beside the moose-skin blanket, the girls sat in a circle of plastic chairs, bundled up in sweatshirts. Over the embers of a dying campfire, they were making coffee in a silver pot. They ate cookies. It seemed so strange to be seeing people doing ordinary things here in the daylight—picking up debris from the ground, frying sausages, packing up. The Playboy vans that flanked us gleamed, freshly rinsed from the rain.
When Magnus and I approached, one of the girls turned, slowly, to look over her shoulder. Frida. She saw me cradling my wrist and blew out her cigarette smoke.
“It’s broken,” I said.
“Where is Siri?” she demanded.
Karin was with them. She was slouched in a lawn chair, a bag of ice on her ankle. Both her knees were scraped and bloody.
“You never caught up with them?” I asked her.
“No, I never caught up with them,” Karin said angrily. “Where did you go?”
“Isn’t it clear where she went?” Margareta said, staring at Magnus.
The girls glared at me. Frida poured what was left of the coffee onto the grass.
“Who did she go off with?” Magnus asked.
“Some man,” Margareta said.
“We have been all over the campground. She is nowhere, Lauren,” Karin said.
I’d never seen such disgust in Karin’s face. Of the girls, she had always been the kindest to me.
“You were stuck to Siri all this time, Lauren,” Margareta said. “Why didn’t you stay with her?”
Frida started shaking, her eyes suddenly full of tears. The girls tried to comfort her. I undid the straps of my sandals. There, on my right foot, was a long red line from where I had stepped on the shard of glass the night before, as if to assure me the dream had been real.
Magnus looked at me with his eyes wide. “Why didn’t you tell me that something happened to Siri?”
“She just went off. I told you that.”
“What did this man look like?” he asked the others.
“Well, Lauren? You saw him! What did he look like?” Margareta said.
“Tall,” Karin said. “Broad. There was something wrong with his skin.”
In my mind I saw the too-tight skin, the too-tight smile, the way his skin was pocked like a sponge.
“He was older than us. He had a deep, strange voice,” Karin said.
The sound of the waves, then, was the sound of breathing, rasping for air, the first breaths after being underwater for a long time.
That man had wanted to take Siri swimming.
“Did you check the beach?” I asked.
I could barely speak. Would my English conjure her? Would she come toward us again through the woods, dripping from head to toe, from the bottom of the sound, take me someplace where it could just be us again?
“Of course,” Frida said.
The girls started talking to one another in Swedish, purposefully shutting me out.
“Did you check the water?” I asked.
“What?”
Magnus heard me say it. “What are you talking about?” he hissed, as though I were wishing something evil upon his sister.
With each passing second, the feeling inside me grew. If there was ever a connection between Siri and me, I felt it then. I felt her. I left them, walking in the direction of the water. A moment later, Magnus was beside me, and then we were running together toward the high dune.
We had to climb it to see the water. Pieces of fencing poked up from the sand, shards of glass, a doll’s head. My steps sank in, exposing things—chunks of concrete, a shoebox. I was losing my footing, and my fingers curled into the sand looking for something to hold on to, but the whole thing was as delicate as sugar, the dune about to collapse beneath me. Magnus h
ad made it to the top. He was reaching back for my hand to help me over. I clambered up to where he was.
When I saw the Kalmar Sound from the top of the dune, it was lit up with sun. A silver balloon was riding a current of air straight out over it. Even in my panic, I thought I’d never seen anything so beautiful.
We caught our breath and walked along the top of the dune, one behind the other. He squinted out at the water. “Siri’s a good swimmer,” he kept saying. “Don’t worry.”
But then the Kalmar Sound folded in on itself and there emerged from its crease a yellow dot. The inner tube. My mind raced with fear. Was that it? The one I’d sat upon, that we’d packed in the hatchback of her car?
It dipped beneath our line of vision for just a second and then Magnus was racing down the side of the dune, kicking up stinging sand. When I was able to focus, I saw him bounding into the water. And when he turned, he was carrying Siri in his arms. She was not moving.
I hurried down the dune toward the water and splashed in. The water was up to my waist. Siri’s eyes were open. Her yellow inner tube was looped on Magnus’s arm.
He placed her on the sand and bent over her, his cheeks already red from the cold. She kept saying that her legs hurt, and I saw how thin she was, with a bruise on her knee. When she saw me, she grabbed my arm with so much strength that I stopped crying and yelled out.
“How long were you out there?” Magnus leaned down and rubbed her arms to warm them.
“I swam out far,” Siri said.
“Where was he?”
“We were partying on the beach, and he wanted to go for a swim. Then when I tried to swim back in, I was too cold. I couldn’t move. He just left me.”
Except for the light waves and Siri’s breaths, all was quiet then. The man hadn’t been a premonition, a nightmare come to life. He wasn’t Näcken—is that what I’d thought? The idea of it felt so foolish now. He was just another selfish, careless person. It was morning now, Midsommar’s Day, and we were just three people gathered on an empty beach.