by Diane Zinna
That day at the lake, that first day, when we were floating on the wooden raft—didn’t I push them off one by one, hand Näcken each of their ankles, until together we formed a human chain to the bottom? I blamed myself for everything that had happened from that day forward. And I could see, now, that Frida did, too. That was why she had been trying to connect with me. That was why I had been trying to push her away.
Blaming myself was a pause. It bought time. Making it about me meant Siri’s story hadn’t yet ended.
Frida was a ball on her bed, rolled up on the pink covers, a snail with no shell.
“Frida,” I whispered.
She wouldn’t look at me. Her black-rimmed eyes were fixed on the striped mattress across the room.
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“I tried all semester to talk to you about what happened. You kept pushing me away,” she said.
“I didn’t know.”
“How can you say that? You knew. You had to know.”
I looked around for the blue book essay I’d brought with me. Like we could review it together, line by line.
“Right, Lauren? I wasn’t alone here this whole time in this, was I?”
Had I known? Had I known it in my bones since the fall, even from those first unreturned calls? Is that why I deleted all those voicemails without listening, why I wanted to jump that day into the pit when I caught sight of similar blond hair? I’d wanted to jump then because I’d wanted to jump from the van, because the feeling in my legs had never been right again since then.
It was all too much. “I’m sorry,” I managed to say. I backed out of her room. “I’m sorry,” I said, rushing toward the stairs, past the posters of girls looking at me wide-eyed. In her room, Frida let out a scream, the loudest, loneliest of screams. The scream of a killer, of one being killed.
Somebody should see if she is okay, I thought.
But no one would, I thought.
If they did, they’d find her a twist of embarrassment and pain. She wanted her story and she wanted her blame. Easier to keep arguing inside about who should take the blame. Our kind of grief waited on revision.
I kept going. Past the Coke machine, past all the doors that were shutting, one at a time, falling dominos against her screaming. I went down the steps and out into the fog. I could hear the rain pummeling the roof of the red van. I remembered the way Siri looked so disdainfully at me on Midsommar’s Eve, when we sat across from each other in the van, wrapped in blankets, surrounded by sleeping bodies, in silence.
IT WAS AFTER five o’clock in the Humanities office, and people were leaving for the weekend, taking with them their clutter and noise so that Dominican felt empty. I went to the mail cubbies and slid my midterm grade list into Dorothy’s box.
“Those are late,” she said.
I turned and saw Dorothy standing there. She was wearing a flowing skirt that seemed to take up the width of her doorway. Her hair was pulled back, and the rings on her red fingers glittered. When I paused, she smiled and beckoned me into her office.
I let out a breath as though it were that day I’d run to her office, that day I’d stood outside her door, desperate to be let in.
“I don’t want to believe these stories,” Dorothy started. She pulled out a chair for me and I sat in it. “But is it true? You hit Frida Dahlström outside of your classroom? And that you went into the girls’ dormitory and upset her?”
Her eyes searched mine. When she spoke next, her voice was low and resigned.
“You know what I’m going to tell you.”
“You’re firing me.”
“We’re just not inviting you to return. Let’s say that. Adjuncts enjoy employment here on an at-will basis. You were never a full-time employee here. So nothing bad on your record. No record.”
“No record,” I repeated.
“That’s right. We even…wish you the best.” She managed a smile.
“You said I was a good teacher.”
“We wish you the best,” she repeated. “I do. You know I do. I wish you the best. Don’t make this any harder than it has to be, Lauren.”
I stared at the gold-edged planner on her desk and noticed, beneath it, the cover of a blue book.
I started going through the lines of Frida’s essay in my head while Dorothy rolled her great copper rings around and around her fingers. Those rings were like the beads of an abacus as she moved them back and forth over her knuckles. The skin on her hands was shiny, as though rubbed to a polish.
“Frida Dahlström’s essay,” I said.
“What?”
“What she said on her midterm about me and Siri.”
She stared back in confusion.
“Frida said I harassed her, but I didn’t harass her. I went to Sweden last summer because she and I really were friends. A teacher and a student can be close—”
“Who?”
“Siri Bergström.”
“Lauren, are you talking about that girl who died?”
I knew. So surely everyone knew. Surely she knew, and this was the reason—
“Did you just say that you were with her this summer when it happened?”
She moved her planner to scan the year on her desk calendar. She moved the blue piece of paper to her waste bin. It was not Frida’s blue book. No, I’d left that crumpled on the desk in Frida’s room.
I was being fired because I was losing control. And not grading papers. And found that day soaked from the sink. And yelling at Ana in the classroom. And at Frida, in front of Tenny.
“You were in Sweden with her? Over the summer? How do you explain that, Lauren?”
“She was my friend.”
“When, friend? You met her when she was a student in your class?”
“I—”
“Lack. Of. Judgment,” she said.
“She was there for me when I needed a friend.”
“Oh, God!” She laughed. “It’s a damn shame, Lauren. You really are talented and smart. It’s just a damn shame that you are so needy.”
The word hit me in my stomach.
Yes, of course that was what it was. She picked up her phone. Was she going to ask security to escort me out? I drifted from her office. It was over.
* * *
—
THAT NIGHT, I dreamed that I was the one who drove the van away, with Siri in the back, fussing at me for having driven off the campsite. I floored it down the highway to the bridge, and when we got there, I slammed on the brakes and our van skidded off the road, over the shelf of rocks. The back of the van went in first. All the kids were laughing as the van filled with water and we drifted down to the bottom of the Kalmar Sound. I kept my face up near the ceiling to breathe in one inch of space. Soon even my eyes were covered over with brine, but I could see it through the window—the Port Llewelyn ferry was coming in. We would soon crash into its underbelly. Bodies loosened themselves from the blankets, and the striped mattress floated, suspended. We were all in space. All of them drowned dotted with bubbles, and Siri’s body rose to the top, petals from her crown floating around her.
No, I convinced myself upon waking. That is not how it happened. But my memories were never the same twice. They were waves building one upon another, changing, disappearing. I was going crazy, in a process of trying to label each wave.
* * *
—
THE VALLAPILS KEPT coming by, but I didn’t answer. One day I woke to see Ravi standing over my bed with my fishbowl under his arm like a football. I sat up quickly, and he rushed to set the bowl back down on my nightstand.
“How did you get in here?” I said.
“I need to feed the fish.”
I remembered I had given him the extra key to my apartment so he could take care of my pets while I was at work.
“We’ve been worried
about you. My mom prays for you,” he said.
I could hardly bear his large brown eyes, his earnest expression. I looked over at the little red fish negotiating the rocking water.
“You can keep the fish. Just tell your mommy I’m okay.”
Ravi picked up the bowl again, the water sloshing. “I will take good care of him.”
“I know you will.”
He walked slowly from my bedroom, making sure the water stayed even.
Another day, I heard his mother talking outside, and I thought she was talking to a neighbor, but when I got closer I could hear she was talking softly through the door to me, telling me it was all going to be okay. Tears streamed from my eyes, but I couldn’t open the door.
* * *
—
ON MY NIGHTSTAND, a ring in the wood where the fishbowl had sat. Bunched tissues. Half-drunk cans of cola, the Latin workbooks. I didn’t know if it was morning or evening. Light was light. I screwed up my eyes against it.
When Magnus and I get to the campsite, things are awakening like a morning house. A house with all the curtains thrown back, its furniture pulled out onto the patio, all the scuff marks showing, dust rising into the sun. There are police cars, red and blue lights swinging, and an ambulance, and all the kids who were free and dangerous the night before are serious now.
The girls sit in a circle of plastic chairs, bundled up in sweatshirts.
“Why didn’t you stay with Siri?” Margareta asks.
“Me? Where were you? Where were any of you?”
Frida is shaking, her eyes full of tears. The girls try to comfort her. Then the police say it is time. We all go single-file to the dune. I see little bits of paper in the sand, and I pull them out and they are whole portraits. One is of Siri with a lavender rose behind her ear; another is of my mother, who looks also like me.
“Siri’s a good swimmer,” Magnus says. “Don’t worry.”
A giant crane is pulling Siri’s body from the water, and water rushes off of her like waterfalls on either side.
We are all standing behind cones and police tape, yellow police tape with big, black-marker, hand-drawn letters that run the whole length of the ocean.
“Vem var mannen?” a policeman asks me.
I look around.
“Vem var mannen?”
“Tall,” Karin says. “Broad. There was something wrong with his skin.” She speaks in English, as if to spur me to join her in a description of him. They are asking about the man Siri went off with. The waves now are like breathing, rasping for air, the first breaths after being underwater for a long time.
“He had red skin,” I say. “He taught technical writing.”
Out of the corner of my eye I can see the girls screaming, falling to their knees on the sand, a collective organism. I never had friends like these: witnesses to one’s whole life. The crane is rotating her now and she is hanging above our heads, an arching circus performer on a swing. It is lowering her down. It is laying her gently before us on the beach.
“Who was the man?” the policeman says. He is on the phone. The long cord wraps around our legs and around the metal workings of the crane, and he isn’t going to let me go until I answer him. In the water, fiddle strings wag, beer cans clink, a wicker-waisted bottle with colored wax bobs. Then the colored wax melts into the water, and the horizon rises to stripe the morning sky.
They are perplexed about the blue tinge to her skin, those peculiar flowers from Neptuni Åkrar. They wonder if she floated from the other side of the island.
It is morning. All I want to do is cry, to have my anguish, to fall to my knees on the sand, but they want me to answer questions, work through probate, identify their bodies, take my mother’s necklace home in a plastic bag, fill out the forms, the pen is not working, but here is a new pen, continue.
Her eyes are open. Magnus’s face is wet, as though he has dived under to get her. Her hair is wet, and her face is pressed in on one side. I rush to touch her round belly. We have the same belly shape, I say. Her lips are a silvery purple. For a moment I think I can see the barest smile there, a loving erasure of all dark things.
I am yelling I’m sorry.
“Lauren, we need you to focus so you can help us.”
I start to recite beautiful words Siri taught me during the trip. Glöda: “to glow.” Mångata: “the roadlike reflection of the moon on the water.” Blunda: “to cover one’s eyes.”
“It was the man who lives in the water,” I say.
“What is that?”
“He sits on a rock, out there in the water.”
“Like an island?”
“No. Not an island. Underneath.”
The policeman pulls me away from the others. “Did you know the man?”
“He…he drags women underneath and makes them live with him forever.”
“Who does?”
“Näcken,” I whisper.
I can see his eyes changing as he goes from thinking it is a translation issue to thinking I’m out of my mind.
They think I am in shock. Birgit is called and drives all the way from Olofstorp. She is beside herself, but when I am taken to the country hospital, where they give me medicine and I sleep, she stays with me, and keeps saying, “Yes, I forgive you. Please don’t think on it anymore.” The doctor barely speaks to me in English, but Birgit translates that it is just the shock of it all, a tiny fracture, but all will heal again, when I am ready. She gives me an index card that lists all the things I must do to get better. And then to the airport. And then I am in the air. And then I am home, checking off the things I must do every day.
The card was just the back of my airline ticket, worn soft from handling, and from—when things were too hard—the erasures.
THE WAY I was remembering things scared me. It was like my brain was trying to show me how fragmented I’d let things become. There was a loop, this potential for perpetual motion, jumping from the van or not, making love to Magnus or not. But I was slowly coming to terms with what had happened despite myself. I wrote in my journal and scrutinized every line to make sure it was absolutely true. I didn’t want to lie to myself anymore. I felt there was something I needed to do to make it all stop.
The ticket to the Santa Lucia service had a different message for me every time I passed it on my dresser. That I had once thought it came from Siri. That I had once thought it came from Frida to taunt me. That it was a ticket back in time, and to go would be to confront something I had been fearing. When I picked it up, it bore an energy in my hand, as though if I were to let go, it would flutter like a sail.
I went into my closet, and there on a back shelf was the woodcut the shopkeeper had gifted me in Gamla Stan. Santa Lucia, holding her own blue eyes in a golden dish. The shopkeeper had told me I was blind. I ran my fingertips over the grooves in the wood, the place where the saint’s eyes stared back at me. In that moment, it struck me that Frida had left the ticket under my doorknocker the very day she had smiled at me in the classroom, the one day things had gone right. That day I’d imagined her going to Siri to report to her that maybe I wasn’t so bad. Frida had been lonely, and she’d been blaming herself, like me. She’d left me the ticket to try to connect.
I decided to go. The evening of the service, I got myself together and drove to the old chapel in town. For a long while, I sat in my car, staring at the places where melting ice pied the blacktop. It took me some time, but I went in.
Inside, the church was bright and crowded, alive with voices that sounded like the summer past. There was a man in the vestibule tuning a long, narrow violin with buttons like an accordion. I asked him what his instrument was called, but he said it so fast, I didn’t catch it. That, too, felt like the summer.
There was an old woman collecting tickets, her long skirt patterned with vines and flowers. “It is a nyckelharpa
,” she said, nodding toward the man with the instrument. “Very traditional. He’ll play later, when we dance.”
I handed her my ticket.
“Do you have a daughter in the program tonight?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“A sister?”
“No. Why?”
“It’s no problem. It’s just that this ticket is a special one for family members of the girls and boys,” she said.
I took a seat in the back row, right on the end, and the nave went black. From behind me came the sound of girls singing. It sounded so distant, as though it were coming from outside, from beneath the icy trees.
People turned to see the girls enter. I did not expect my tears. An extraordinarily beautiful girl with flowing, white-blond hair came down the center aisle. The girl’s white robe was tied at the waist with a red satin sash. Upon her head she balanced a frightening crown adorned with lit candles. She moved slowly, her head perfectly still.
A luminescent procession followed—twenty girls filling the church like white smoke, their white robes swishing. Each girl held a single candle before her face, singing the slow, entrancing refrain, “Santa Lucia,” their candlelight illuminating the stone walls.
I didn’t let myself look at the girl with the crown. I had come here to face something, but now I was afraid. I feared she was holding my eyes in a dish. I feared I was made of wood. I feared I’d burn up.
The young women congregated upon risers at the front of the church, each of their clean, fresh faces prettier than the last. When they were all arranged, their angelic chorus died away. The one with the candle crown sang it through one time more, alone, in a dreamy mix of Swedish and English that reminded me of being with Siri’s friends. Lines floated up to me:
Natten går tunga fjät,
The night walks with heavy steps.
Skuggorna ruva,
Shadows are brooding.
Stiger med tända ljus,
Bearing lighted candles.
Santa Lucia, Santa Lucia.