The All-Night Sun

by Diane Zinna

  I was suddenly tremulous with recognition.

  The girl with the white-blond hair, the one who sang alone, in the center of them all—it was Frida. She looked so innocent. And, as impossible as it seemed that she could see me in the darkened nave, she was staring at me.

  As their musical director led the girls through a series of cheerful Swedish holiday songs, I tried to avoid Frida’s gaze, but her eyes were locked on mine.

  The singing ended, and the girls proceeded back down the aisle two by two. Frida came last. One of the candles on her crown was slightly lopsided. It seemed the candle could fall at any moment and catch her bright hair on fire. But she walked with confidence, the long sleeves of her robe falling back from her thin white wrists, her star tattoos nowhere to be seen. When she passed me, she began the “Santa Lucia” chorus again, singing alone, even as the doors closed behind her and her volume diminished, as though she were singing inside of a box.

  The lights came up and everyone applauded. I felt ill. I told myself it was just the seasickness of hearing all that Swedish again in the dark. But it was Frida. That she had wanted me here after all that had happened with Siri. I gathered my coat up from where I had been sitting upon it. From my coat pocket I grabbed my hat and gloves.

  People waited their turn to file out of the church, some of the older people needing help to leave. I had no choice but to stand in line. All those puffy coats, people all around me. My anxiety grew, and I fixated on little yellow flowers an old woman in front of me had pinned into her hair.

  By the time I made it to the door, Frida was waiting for me. She had changed into regular clothes, her crown gone, a long, wool-lined denim coat thrown over her shoulders like a cape. People pushed by us, moving into the church hall.

  “I can’t believe you came,” she said. “I left you that ticket when I thought us friends.”

  With all the people around us, I was pressed up against Frida, our faces nearly touching. I could see wax in her hair, from where the candles had dripped. I waited until I could step back again before answering her.

  “It was beautiful,” I said. “You have a beautiful voice.”

  Some of the other girls from the procession laughed and pushed by us, tapping Frida on her arm as they passed. Frida didn’t acknowledge them. Her eyes were on me.

  “I hope you will stay with me awhile and have some food in the hall.” She pointed to the ink stamp upon my hand. “I told some people you were my mother.”

  I pulled on my gloves.

  “Just for a few minutes,” she said. “Please.”

  She turned and went through the double wooden doors to the church hall, then looked back at me with a semblance of a smile. I followed her. In the hall, people in traditional Swedish dress stood behind tables of handicrafts and food. Red-glazed wooden horses, clay trolls, crocheted ornaments, pastries in the shape of curled-up cats with raisin eyes—I didn’t belong among these things. I tried to push aside the eeriness it made me feel because I could sense there was a reason Frida still wanted me there, and I needed to know it. I kept her bright hair in my line of vision. I followed her until we were shoulder to shoulder at the refreshment stand, where a woman handed us Styrofoam cups brimming with deep-scarlet liquid.

  Frida and I sat down on some folding chairs away from the crowd. “It’s called glögg. Try it. It’s strong.”

  I sipped. It burned my throat. I could feel it in my nose. At the refreshments table, I watched some boys reaching for cups of it and an old lady swatting at their hands.

  “There was a time I thought Siri had left me the ticket for tonight,” I said.

  “Thinking of Santa Lucia makes me feel close to her. But Siri would never have come to something like this. I think you know that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Didn’t she tell you what happened to her mother?”

  I shook my head, and I expected Frida to thrill at that—that she’d known more about Siri than I ever did. I think she expected it to thrill her, too, but it didn’t.

  “Siri only told me that she died. Magnus told me a little more.”

  Frida scoffed. “Magnus.”

  Small children were starting to gather near a Christmas tree in the middle of the church hall. One of the little boys came to Frida and pushed himself into her lap, laughing and demanding attention. She set him back down on the floor, and he ran off, leaving behind his conical hat. Frida spun it in her hand, and its glittery star caught the light.

  “You heard in the songs tonight how Saint Lucy comes with her candles to cast out the darkness? Magnus heard her go out. He woke their mother, and she got dressed and went out after Siri in the terrible cold.”

  Magnus had called it a saint’s day. But of course. It was this day. Santa Lucia.

  It had been the smell of candles—that was surely what had made me sick during the service, the candles, and how all the girls went out the back door into the night, into the memory of the story Magnus had relayed.

  I remembered asking Siri how her mother had died. Nobody knows for sure, she’d said. Her mother had always worn a necklace that appeared to be made of silver coins. A beautiful detail—a check mark in her essay’s margin.

  Nobody knows for sure.

  All Siri had told me was that her mother wore shift dresses all year, but in the summers, she was always in a too-small black bikini, the first to jump into the cold water, gathering her and Birgit and Magnus in the glade to tell them stories charged with magic.

  That’s what I knew of her mother—how she’d laughed and jumped and loved to swim. That was very Siri, always looking for the living parts.

  My story is nothing like Lauren’s. She really suffered, she had said.

  I hadn’t even pressed her. I felt aggrieved that I’d asked so little when I had the time. For so long I’d been angry that Siri had revealed herself to be selfish, but I’d been selfish, too.

  Magnus had said that since that night, he and Siri had been fixed in a state of perpetual motion—she going down and unlocking the gate, he at the window, trying to decide what to do. Maybe, for Siri, it was the going after her that felt like love. She going out, the lover or the brother or the friend chasing after her. The girls at the campground that morning had despised me because they believed to love Siri was to go after her, and I hadn’t done it.

  The musical director came up then and hugged Frida. “We are so glad you were able to come here tonight and be present for Frida,” the thin woman said. “It has been hard for her to be here in the U.S. alone. She’s been missing Sweden so deeply.”

  The woman walked on before seeing that there were tears in Frida’s eyes, then tears slowly moving down my own face. I realized that for Frida, I had been the closest person to Siri she had in America. Part of me now wanted to reach out and embrace her.

  “Birgit told me she has still been trying to reach you.”

  Her knee bounced. She was holding a paper plate with a pastry on it, a shiny braided cake meant to look like a kitten with two raisins for eyes.

  “At the school? I was fired. I’m not there anymore.”

  “I know. They told Birgit that. She was devastated. She knew how much the school mattered to you.”

  It meant a lot to me that Birgit had remembered that. “She told me once that taking care of Magnus and Siri helped her through her depression. I told her teaching had done the same for me.”

  “And then Siri, of course,” Frida said. “She helped you.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Frida had finished her drink and was scooping slivered almonds from the bottom, eating them with her fingers. “She was complicated, and she drove us all crazy, but she wasn’t afraid of sadness in people. I think that’s rare.”

  I had once thought that Siri was going to fix me, that this golden girl had been put into my life to thaw me o
ut. And then I thought of how angry I had been at her because she’d deserted me, rejected me, after coming with a candle to my door.

  I drank my glögg. I remembered the glue and gold glitter she’d used to patch her artwork, not to cover what went wrong, but to give it light. Being with her had sometimes felt like gold running through me.

  Siri was imperfect. She could be rude and selfish. But she could also mend things with her lines of gold. For so long, I’d thought only of myself and what she hadn’t ultimately been able to be for me. I could see now that her friends and family weren’t chasing her down to fix themselves. They were trying to get her to see how much she was loved. Did she ever really know it? Did she ever know she could slow down, let herself rest in it?

  “You’ve got to go back and see them, Lauren. Birgit and Magnus.”

  “No. There’s no way, Frida.”

  “They want to see you. They want you at that exhibition of Magnus’s work.”

  “I can’t. I don’t know what I’d even say to them.”

  She tossed her cup and plate in a nearby bin. “You wouldn’t have to say anything. You don’t always have to have the right words,” Frida said.

  I remembered standing as I had been told to do, by the front door as people came into the funeral home, and all those wrong, wrong words they said that didn’t go away, and all those people who had nothing to say but rushed to stand nervously in their curious clusters around the room, and I shook my head at Frida.

  “I’m going back,” Frida said. “I thought I’d feel closer to Siri here, but it has been…a nightmare.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  I needed a break from talking. I felt out of breath.

  “I’m not coming back to school after the holidays,” she said.

  “I wish you the best,” I said, and I remembered that was exactly what Dorothy had said to me when I was being dismissed.

  Frida got up from her chair.

  “Is it the English teacher in you that thinks everything can be fixed with words? Sometimes it’s just enough to be around people who loved the same person you loved.”

  She went off to pour herself another cup of glögg. I watched her drink it down. I thought she was coming back to me, but she didn’t. She pulled on her denim coat and walked out of the church hall into the night.

  I WAS SUPPOSED to get up and go after Frida, take her hand, follow her all the way back to Sweden. But in the days after the Santa Lucia service, if I left home at all, I was careful to avoid the roads near the college, for fear that I might take a wrong turn and wind up in Magnus and Birgit’s gravel driveway. I kept the curtains drawn for fear I’d see the spires and rooftops of Gothenburg, dive into the ocean from my apartment, swim to its shore.

  But I did return to Stella Maris. One day, when the school was on its winter break, I drove past and saw that the student parking lot was empty and the guard’s gate was raised, with the kiosk empty. I turned onto the campus road and parked beside my old building. As I entered, I saw the janitor, John Sled, salting the path near the main entrance of Wells. Down in the stone-walled basement, I could smell where he had the coffeepot on.

  The door to the adjunct office was open, but no one was inside. I went in and locked it behind me. To my surprise, my old books and papers still lay on the desk. Some were marked with coffee rings where someone had set a mug upon them.

  One by one, I opened my desk drawers. Empty. I went to Tenny’s and opened hers. Nothing. I started opening all of the drawers to all of the desks, pulling them out, the metal innards whining and screeching, all of the drawers semester-break empty, nothing but pencil shavings and paper clips inside.

  I heard the rattle of keys and the door to the office unlock.

  John Sled opened the door, pulling his cart behind him. His blue jacket hung from a broomstick on the top. He saw me and stopped.

  “Miss Cress.”

  “Hello, John,” I said.

  I held an empty metal drawer in one hand.

  He came into the office, looking at his keys, shaking them. I noticed his cart blocked the doorway. I held the metal drawer against my body like a shield. He noticed.

  “You’ve been gone.”

  “Yes.”

  The palms of my hands were pressing into the metal runners of the drawer.

  “You were, uh, close with that girl,” he said. “That pretty girl. The blonde. Sometimes I’d see you leaving campus together,” he said.

  I wondered if he could hear my heart beating against the metal. I couldn’t read his expression. What had he heard, pushing his cart past my colleagues’ doors? What had he read from the wastepaper baskets of this place?

  “What’s her name?”

  “Siri.”

  “I’ve been looking for her to come around. Do you think she’ll come back to school in the spring?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”

  “She was kind to me,” he said. “You can tell her that. But I bet she doesn’t even remember me.”

  “Siri remembers everybody,” I said.

  “She seems like that kind of person. She used to talk to me sometimes.”

  I thought of how other people would dart their eyes, ignore him, pretend not to see him coming. Of course Siri had slowed down and spoken to him. She’d probably made him visible to the whole school on those days.

  “I’ll tell her you asked about her,” I said.

  “You will?”

  It was lying about my parents that contributed to my forgetting them. It was when I started lying about Siri that those memories grew tangled, too: First, that we hadn’t been friends. Then, that I hadn’t known something was wrong. That the good might not have existed because of the bad. That the friendship never meant anything because it didn’t mean everything. The distance, this ocean between me and Sweden, was even letting me lie to myself, tell myself that Siri might still be there, that she would be the person I had to answer to if I went back.

  “She died last summer,” I told John.

  “What?”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know how to say it. She got very sick after a camping trip.”

  “Oh my God.”

  I had told the truth. I had said it out loud. I felt a breaking-open in me, a place for the truth to live and take hold in a way that it hadn’t been able to before.

  But for John, all his energy drained away. He seemed younger suddenly, the way grief makes all of us younger. Like we have a separate timeline of wakefulness to this shock of the world, and all of those events are strung together, the line itself hidden, an ancient road that rises up after a rain and then drains away again into the past.

  “Wait,” he said. “Just wait.”

  Anxiously, he started going through the items on his cart. There were plastic baggies of twine and balled T-shirts. A Styrofoam clamshell container with tiny items sorted by color: plastic figurines, dice, a small Rubik’s cube that was once a key chain. Suddenly he was presenting me with a damp clump of paper towels. He opened them like petals of a flower.

  Inside lay the lemon vase.

  “Someone put it in with the garbage. This was yours, wasn’t it? I didn’t think you would have thrown it away.”

  My heart was beating so fast. I took the vase and turned it over and over in my hands.

  I noticed for the first time that there was glitter in its glaze. It looked like lemon sugar candy. It was so heavy, for a small thing. It was a sign and it was a memory—of Siri, and of blomsterlupiner, and of unexpected gifts. All good things. It was what I had come for, what I had been searching for in the drawers.

  “I was afraid I’d lost it,” I managed to say. “Thank you.”

  He didn’t respond, but when I looked up, his back was rounded again, and he was tapping the items on his cart to count them.

 
After he unlocked the wheels of his cart and pushed on, I sat down in my chair with the vase in my lap. I ran my finger over its curve and felt a ridge I’d never noticed before.

  I held it up to the light and saw that there was a spot of gold glue along a tiny crack in the base. Siri had repaired it the way she repaired so many of her artworks, in a way that illuminated the break. She had said that repairing it with gold could make the thing more precious. Like the wounds that leave different marks on each of us and change us.

  The colorful flyers, the sunlit desks, the new ice trapped between the screen and the glass of my picture window. I had loved this desk at this school, my window. It would belong to someone else in the spring.

  I had started to gather the papers scattered over my desk when I noticed an envelope tucked underneath my tattered blotter. It was a letter. The long envelope, addressed to me at the school, had Birgit’s name in the return address. Its postmark was August.

  I picked up Birgit’s envelope from the table.

  I opened it and read it through. She had known I was in trouble. She didn’t want me to blame myself for anything.

  It was an opening. It was a gap in space, and to open it, read it—her words delivered me out of the warp of memory to the realness of that place and time again. It was my ticket back.

  I’d been trying to find a way to make the loop stop, and I knew then that Frida was right. I needed to go back. Easier to go across the world one more time than to do it unceasingly in my mind for the rest of my life.

  I put on my coat and ran to the car. I turned on the radio, thinking of Adnan in my classroom, his unintelligible grief poem, his head-thrashing, honest mess, delivered in front of all of us, given freely from his soul. I turned the music up as loud as it went. I screamed, and this was a hundred jam jars bursting, this was the clay urn splitting, and this was the hot balloon of my grief exploding. Finally. The latex splats of it, the shreds drifting down, the hot air going out.

  I GAVE THE taxi driver the address.

  “This is Tunnelbana,” the taxi driver said, pointing at a sign on the street. “You take the T right there.”