The All-Night Sun

by Diane Zinna

  “Siri, I think we should take you to a hospital,” I said.

  “He didn’t touch me.”

  “But you’re freezing. And you’ve been sick this trip.”

  Siri looked at me intently. “No. It was Viktor’s drink. I can still feel it. I don’t want to get in trouble.”

  “In trouble with who?” I asked.

  “You think someone put something in your drink?” Magnus asked.

  Siri nodded.

  “I should have stayed with you,” I whispered to her.

  “I didn’t want you to stay with me,” she said.

  Her words hurt. I looked at her, her hair wet and pressed against the side of her face, her lips dark. I wanted to help her. Why was she still pushing me away?

  Magnus put his hand on the small of my back and talked over my shoulder so she wouldn’t hear him. “She needs to go to a hospital. Her skin is ice, she—”

  Siri’s gaze was retracting. Pulling back, back, far enough to really see me and her brother beside me, the hour hand upon my back and the seconds beating in his fingers. She got us into focus. It was an alarm going off. She pointed at me, at him.

  “Did you dream of him, then?” she asked. “And he came true?”

  Magnus scooped Siri up from the sand, whispering words to calm her. He carried her across the beach and over the dune, leaving me there with the yellow tube, slack jawed and staring at the writing on its side, all dots and vowels.

  The island was no longer a place of magic. I was no longer a girl between worlds. I sat looking at the water for too long after they’d gone off. I picked open the clear plug on the tube and pounded and pushed until all the air was out.

  When I got back to the campsite, her friends were combing her hair and dressing her in warm clothes. She looked so small, so different. I don’t think Siri ever told anyone everything that happened that night, though it was clear every one of them had a story in her mind that held me accountable.

  The girls looked at me with disdain. Siri, however—she looked at me with what could only be described as sympathy, as though she could foresee the many long, questioning days that lay ahead of me in my life.

  Everyone was encouraging her to go to the hospital, but she did not want to go. They were still arguing with her when I left the campground. Without any discussion, Siri arranged for me to travel back to Olofstorp with Margareta.

  On the drive back, Margareta did not speak in English again and smoked a lot. In Olofstorp, Birgit drove me to a clinic, where a doctor properly cast my wrist. The doctor also refused to speak to me in English, but Birgit translated that it was only a tiny fracture. And then to the airport. And then I was in the air. And then I was home.

  THE NIGHT AFTER Tenny told me that Siri had not returned to school, I ransacked my apartment, looking for Siri’s contact information in Sweden, but I could find nothing. I dialed her D.C. cellphone again. This time, instead of the robotic greeting, I got a message saying that the number was no longer in service. I dialed it again. It was as if the tones were trying to tell me that the number had never existed. I thought of voicemails from the strange numbers I’d deleted those days my feelings had been bruised, telling myself it was self-care. Self-care! Had it been Siri calling then, to tell me why she wasn’t returning?

  It must have been Frida who left the ticket for the church service, I decided. She had somehow found my address, come to my apartment, lifted my door knocker to leave me something that she knew would hurt me. She was here in Siri’s stead. She was studying art like Siri, walking the same paths we used to take together, taking up my time like Siri. She was a trespasser.

  I had to teach the next day, and it went poorly. When Gwendolyn Shoales strode up to me at the end, I thought she was there because she’d seen it all—how I’d lost my breath while reading a poem aloud; yelped after leaving my hand too long on the hot glass of the overhead projector; opened the wrong side of the chalk case and dropped the pieces on the floor, where they broke into bits too small to use.

  “Lauren, how are you,” Gwendolyn asked huskily, shaking my hand. I motioned toward the seat at the teacher’s desk, but she shook her head.

  “What’s with snowflakes in September?” She went to the window and touched one. She noticed they bore handwriting. “Are these things the students wrote?”

  “Yes. Lines they liked.”

  She read one of them under her breath. “Not very clever, this one. But I get the idea. All this construction paper…from outside, this looks like the window of a preschool.”

  “Do you think I should take them down?”

  “No. I mean, who cares?” I realized one of her hips was jutting out. “I want to talk to you for a minute.”

  “Yeah, of course,” I said.

  I sat down in the chair I’d offered her. She went on.

  “You think of yourself as a ‘fun’ teacher, right? You give easy A’s. Maybe you’re too much of a pushover—would you agree?”

  “To which part?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Well, you just said three very different things.”

  “Let me just say that you should stop being stupid. I’m here as your friend today, okay? There have been complaints about you.”

  “What?” I felt a sense of dread. “From who?”

  “Whom,” she said, correcting me.

  She looked me over.

  “Lauren. I know you’re young. You’re not much older than the kids here. But you need to draw a line between yourself and them. Some things are off-limits. If you are ever wondering if you are getting too close, then you are—yes, you are. Draw back. That girl who transferred from your class? She told Professor Ryan the way you conducted class made her uncomfortable.”

  “Uncomfortable? You’re making all sorts of statements. What exactly was the complaint?”

  “People are calling it ‘inappropriate behavior.’ I think it’s all unfounded. I do. Everyone here has a weakness for gossip. I don’t think you are a bad person—I just think you’re a poor teacher. I’m coming to you today as a friend, okay? I’m your friendly colleague, here to tell you to wise up.”

  “What exactly did Frida say?”

  But she was already out the door. I grabbed my things and rushed to Dorothy’s office. I had always been enamored with the campus, the mossy conversation of its trees, the edged paths, the marble steps. Now the scenery felt oppressive. The light of evening—I remembered the golden word I taught Siri my first night in Sweden: gloaming. There you are again, gloaming. Like I need a spotlight illuminating this race to Dorothy’s office. Go away, gloaming. No one needs to see this.

  I approached her open door. She was on the telephone. She turned around in her chair when she saw me standing in her doorway. I was breathing hard from running up the steps to her office, and I’d caught her off guard. She pointed to the phone she was holding and came toward me. Why did I think she was going to hug me with her other arm? She didn’t. She closed the door in my face. I was sure she’d come talk to me as soon as her call was over. I waited out there like an idiot, thinking any moment she’d open the door and apologize to me. She didn’t.

  * * *

  —

  THAT NIGHT, I drove across the campus in the dark. A one-lane road separated the boys’ and girls’ dormitories, and above the road there was a narrow walking bridge, from which the campus bell hung and rang out each hour. I circled the building a few times, looking up at the bell, looking up at the dormitory windows, where some of the curtains were pulled back. I could see figures moving inside like dolls.

  There were spaces in the front, but I parked behind the building and turned off my headlights. I would find Frida’s room. Maybe Siri would be there. Maybe Tenny had gotten it wrong.

  For so long, I didn’t know what I’d say if I saw Siri again. Now I
wrapped my scarf around my neck, around my mouth, to keep the words from spilling out before I got to her. My fingers curled through the holes of its knit. Why did you leave me? Why didn’t you return my calls? You know me! You know what I’ve been through, what’s made me the way I am. Why didn’t you come back?

  She hadn’t come back. She wasn’t in that dormitory.

  I hated her for not coming back. And I hated Frida for being here instead. How dare she be here, taking Siri’s classes, making collages, showering on her hall, sleeping in her bed?

  Inappropriate behavior. Did Frida tell people I’d harassed Siri? How could I even mention Siri’s name now, ask anyone about her, without bringing more suspicion upon myself?

  I screamed into my bunched scarf.

  How could I even say Siri’s name now without shrieking?

  I clapped my palm against my mouth and felt tears between my fingers.

  I turned on the overhead light to look at myself in the rearview mirror. My cheap jacket. My hair—too long again. No lipstick, no blood in my face. I was scared of the anger I saw in my eyes. I thought of the ticket she’d left me at my home. I didn’t trust myself to go into Frida’s dorm. I felt I could kill her.

  A gaggle of girls came out of the entrance to the dorm, hanging on one another’s arms and laughing. I turned to roll up the window and shut out the sound of them. I looked over into the car beside me.

  Tenny.

  Was she watching me? The amber glow of her visor light made two long shadows of her eyes. A red dot near her cheek—the burn of her cigarette. She brought it to her mouth and turned her face upward, and the way the light shifted, her eyes elongated down, down, like two black slashes.

  I put the car in reverse and backed out as fast as I could, nearly hitting a student. I motioned for the girl to go ahead. She wouldn’t move—she just stared at me with her mouth open. Frantic, I waved her on and pulled back onto the one-lane road that ran beneath the bridge.

  A class must have just let out. A river of kids separated and curled around my car. There were so many students I had to stop. More and more kept coming. Clutching books, bundled in coats, bookbags, purple and gold college sweatshirts, contorted faces blanched out by my headlights—hands on my car, they pounded on the hood and one started yelling at me, others started yelling, one unified, fierce, riotous mob drumming upon all my windows.

  Then it was just forty to fifty individuals, dis-coagulating, laughing at the joke and becoming people again in my rearview, lit up red by my brakes.

  MY NEXT TEACHING day, I was in my classroom when Frida came in. I worried she’d heard I was outside her dormitory. I was full of anxiety at the sight of her, but she seemed entirely placid.

  I cleared my throat, a sudden rushing sound in my ears, a furnace switching on inside me.

  Frida slid into the chair beside my desk. She flicked her hair. It smelled of incense.

  “I have something to give you,” she said.

  She reached into the pocket of her denim coat and pulled out a folded piece of paper dotted with lint. She wiped it on her jeans before handing it to me. It was a printed image of a painting—a very good painting—of two girls, back-to-back, smiling.

  It was a rendition of Magnus’s sketch of us at Vimmerby.

  It was like she’d handed me a picture of ghosts. My hands were shaking as I took it from her. Hers were, too.

  He’d captured Siri perfectly. Her openmouthed, laughing smile, the way her eyes sparkled. I was overcome with tears upon seeing Siri’s face. I was overcome by the fact that we could still exist anyplace together, though it was only a picture of a painting.

  “You look beautiful in it,” Frida said.

  I let myself look at my image. Magnus had painted my eyes blue-green. There was copper in my hair. Leaning against Siri’s back, our hair mixed together on our necks. I could still feel that. I looked self-conscious, but the way I was smiling—I didn’t know at the time I was being seen that way. I remembered that happiness right on the surface of my skin again.

  Frida made a motion to grab my hand, but I drew back.

  I put my hands under my desk, so she wouldn’t make that mistake again.

  She seemed a little embarrassed, but she continued speaking. “It’s pretty famous now in Sweden. The painting was on the cover of a magazine. Magnus was on television. Apparently, he won a prize,” Frida said.

  “What kind of prize?”

  “It’s a famous painting now. He thought you would want to know about it. I said I would give this to you.”

  “When did you talk to Magnus?” I asked.

  “I didn’t. I don’t. This picture came by way of my mother. She mailed it to me.”

  “And Siri?”

  Her name had spilled out.

  “Everything Magnus does is for Siri now,” she said as though scrambling to take Siri’s name back from the air. We were still jealous of each other; Frida, perhaps, of this painting, I of her ability to say my friend’s name out loud.

  “I still can’t imagine you purposefully putting an ocean between the two of you,” I said.

  The radiator at the back of the room grumbled on.

  “An ocean?” she said.

  Emotions flashed on Frida’s face with strange speed. Some students started to come in. She turned to see who was there, then faced me, full of heat.

  “I spoke to Birgit. She asked about you,” she said.

  I was sweating. The radiator was on high.

  No, it was a furnace. It was inside me: a broiling thing that filled in all of the space of that room. A hot-air balloon inflating my chest. A heat that made me shake, that gave me a blacking-out feeling. A circle of blackness that aimed to grow and grow until it squeezed out any memory of Öland.

  I wanted the long, steely bridge to the summer gone. I wanted to explode whatever was at the end of the bridge.

  “Birgit thinks you and I should be friends here,” Frida said. “Do you think there’s ever a chance of that?”

  I remembered how Birgit had entreated me to keep Siri safe. How it hadn’t proven possible. How I’d failed her. Was Birgit asking me now to protect Frida? I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t keep my own head above water.

  “We can talk another time.”

  I slid the picture into my backpack.

  “Why not now?” she said. “Lauren, why not just say that’s what we are? That you and I are friends?”

  “How?” I whispered. “With all that you have been saying about me?”

  “I have not said anything! This is your own guilty mind—”

  “No.”

  “I heard you that day, you know. I heard you say that you hardly even knew Siri.”

  She pointed to my backpack.

  “The name of that painting is Två Flickor: Two Girls. That is your face. It proves you were there.”

  Some of my students were standing outside, hesitating to come in. Frida wiped at her eyes like she wanted to rub them out.

  “I could make copies. I could post them everywhere in the school so everyone knows it!” she said. “That’s your biggest fear, isn’t it?”

  “It’s okay!” I waved my students in. “Class is going to start in one minute.”

  Frida turned like a ringmaster to them.

  “Everyone, yes, please come in! Miss Cress is getting ready to tell you about the best way to express yourself. To connect with the world through writing!”

  She pointed at them with her fingers splayed, her lower jaw jutting out, her bottom teeth bared.

  “Miss Cress wants you to be authentic! So you better tell the truth!”

  * * *

  —

  SIRI: LAUGHING. HER mouth is open in a daring, crooked smile. Mischievousness. Her fingers in the shape of a gun, like one of Charlie’s Angels. Her blond hair tucke
d behind her ears, all her freckles out, her green eyes challenging but twinkling. Like she is ready for a fight. Or flight. Something in her look: fleeting. She is not going to stick around very long. She didn’t, of course.

  Me: my back to Siri. The swirl of our hair made us look like we were of one body, connected at our shoulders. Our hair mixed on our necks. Though Siri and her friends had dyed my hair blond, Magnus had painted my hair bronze-brown, the way I looked when I first arrived in Olofstorp. I am looking down to where our hair is swirling together. On my shoulder, the three tiny freckles my father once called my trinity. Magnus painted them blue, pink, and green. The colors of Monet’s water lilies.

  Now: nighttime in my apartment. By the gray cast of the television, the picture thumped in my hand like it had a heartbeat.

  In the actual photographs I took at Vimmerby, Siri and I both look young, like there is little difference between our ages. But our friendship bridged that span of time when women try to figure out who they want to be and what parts of themselves they want to leave behind. I should have known who I was by then.

  All of the pictures were out of order. I didn’t have any of Magnus. But he was in Två Flickor. I could feel Magnus staring at me when I looked at it, just as I’d grown breathless when he’d done the sketch at Vimmerby.

  I was attracted to Magnus long before I promised Siri not to dream of him. And Siri knew it. I wanted to be like her, but I felt that I was him. Siri was going to rescue me by pushing me over the hill. Magnus was the cold-wind top of the mountain just before you go over, the standing there, being able to see forever.

  He smelled of snow-topped pine, of charcoal. Siri smelled of strawberries—those were youth. Wild strawberries in milk, delicious and rare.

  Två Flickor. Two Girls. I went to my computer and typed the title in English. Then I typed in his name:

  Magnus Bergström.

  And there he was.

  Result after result…had enough time passed for him to have accomplished so much? A professional shot of him in Malmö, near blue water. In another photo, his arms were crossed before him on a table in a café. One was snapped of him looking pained, and the angle of the shot made it appear he was falling out of the frame.