The All-Night Sun

by Diane Zinna

  I didn’t understand. He sighed, and we fought traffic to get across the city. It was midafternoon but dark as night. We passed parks flooded by giant spotlights so that kids could play on the basketball courts as though it were still sunlit day.

  I laid my temple against the coldness of the taxi window. Just hours before I had been coming out of my bedroom with a packed suitcase. Annie had kept walking ahead of me to block my path. I knew she didn’t want me to leave her again. I’d crouched and run my hand from her soft, curly head to her white, wagging tail. She’d pressed herself against me, lengthwise, like she wanted to feel as much of me as she could.

  “I love you,” I told her. She licked my face, and when I smiled, she tried to lick my mouth, like she had never seen me smile before and it looked delicious.

  I took her over to the Vallapils, who had agreed to watch her again. I’d never been inside their home before. The small pictures on the walls, all nailed a little too high up, bore the serious faces of gurus, and the smells of spices were lovely on their side of the door. Annie went straight to a corner, and Khushi rushed to her with a folded blanket.

  “That’s how she was the whole time you were away last summer!” Ravi said.

  Annie lay on the blanket, and Khushi petted her back. The girl whispered to her in her high, rare voice, then laid a row of tiny plastic dolls before Annie’s nose.

  “No, that is how she was,” Mrs. Vallapil said with a smile. “Inseparable all summer. Best of friends.” She touched my shoulder. “You needn’t worry about her. You just go and have a meaningful visit with your family.”

  I hesitated, and she looked at me with concern.

  “It’s not my family,” I said.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “I don’t have any family. I had a friend who passed away recently, and I am going to go pay my respects.”

  Her hand went to her mouth, and she closed her eyes. “Was it the young woman with the colored hair?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  She threw her arms around me and hugged me hard. The father and the children stopped what they were doing to watch us. The next thing I knew, Ravi was hugging one of my legs and Khushi the other.

  I felt loved by them. I thought of the familiar whoosh of their dishwasher, the kids’ voices in the stairwell, the mother coming to me with plates of food—there was a long list of ways they’d loved me, though I’d been blind to it.

  Annie barked at me when I handed Ravi her leash, and it made me feel good to know that she wanted me to come back for her. When I left, Mr. Vallapil lifted Khushi up so she could kiss me on the cheek, and he leaned in to whisper to me.

  “You better come back. I don’t mind the fish, but I’m not keeping the dog.”

  I nodded.

  “You better come back,” he said. Gently, he reached out and touched my hand.

  “This is it,” the taxi driver said now. He stopped the cab short and pointed at the glowing sign for the T. “I told you. That address you gave me is for a station.”

  I paid and stepped out. Lining the curbs were stalls, all painted the same color red, their clapboard awnings held open with stick shutters. A thin layer of snow iced the ledges of the old buildings, and along the tops of the stalls, ovals of sausages hung like garland. It was a Christmas market. There was glögg for sale, and reindeer meat to sample, and knitted ornaments. A man dressed as Santa poured hot chocolate from metal thermoses, one in each hand, and the top of his hat brushed the ceiling of his kiosk. People carrying shopping bags pushed past me, disappearing through the entrance of the Tunnelbana.

  I looked up at the station lights. I wondered whether Birgit had given me the wrong information. We’d talked on the phone before I left the United States. She’d been polite, said she’d heard everything from Frida, and pushed away any semblance of apology from me. I looked at my watch. I was a few minutes late. I wondered for a moment if she’d recognize me, my hair dark again, all these layers of winter clothes.

  But then I saw her, coming toward me on high, wobbly heels. She’d cut her bangs blunt, and where her coat was open at the neck, I could see she was wearing a necklace that Siri used to wear all the time, a tiny cross. At once I felt ashamed that I’d forgotten about the cross.

  She embraced me. Her small frame—it was like holding Siri. I could smell her hairspray. She was crying. The rock of her crying against my chest was my own rhythm of grief. But she was hugging me. I’d been so afraid of what to say, and here she was expecting nothing. Here she was holding my hand as she paid both our fares. Here we were, together going through the subway turnstiles.

  I thought we were about to board a subway car. She’d told me to meet her at this address, and she’d take me to the exhibition of Magnus’s work. The air was acrid. With so many people pressing against me, I felt I was being carried along by them, inside a vein. We descended the escalators to the train platforms, where the walls arched and spread around us with long blue and green arrows pointing deeper down, down. There was a smell, familiar and woody, growing stronger the deeper we went. Then I realized what I was smelling.

  It was paint.

  Paint that bled off paper that had been put in the ground. The images, buried, had dripped down through the ground and rematerialized.

  “Lauren, what do you think?” Birgit asked.

  On the rough bedrock of the station wall was Siri’s face. And my face. Neon colors with tiny flashes of silver and bronze.

  It was a two-story-high rendition of Två Flickor.

  Was this a trick? It felt like an exposure. It was an explosion, like I’d burst open completely, and all my months of missing her were on the wall.

  Someone bumped me from behind. I looked to the left and the right—there were more. There were some above the tracks, lit up by an oncoming train, animated by the flash of its approach.

  In one, I walk ahead of the viewer through Gamla Stan’s caramel alleys. I look over my shoulder with a beaming smile. I have excitement in my eyes. I am wearing a white tank top, and on my shoulder are the three freckles, pink, blue, and green. My skin is golden brown with a suntan, and my hair is the same color, tinged with copper. It was the early morning we had run down the main street of Old Town. The mouths of yellow alleys had reverberated back our laughter. How could I have forgotten that morning?

  Another painting, on the side of the station stairs: me, lying in a mound of hay. Vimmerby. I am viewed from the side, and the hay around my face makes me look like a lion. My eyes are closed, and I am laughing with my nose scrunched. Bars of light fall upon me.

  People milled past. They were all about to board a train or coming off of one. The shock that had first seized me fell away. We had been those people. We had been happy, looked at each other that way, lain that close to each other’s bodies. In every painting where I could see her eyes, I saw her compassion, and it made me so happy because I knew Magnus had painted it and despite the way she treated him, he knew it had been there inside her, too.

  There were gradations in the rock, and our faces were distorted in places, but Siri was just as beautiful as a giantess on these walls as she had been as a pixie in my classroom.

  I heard Birgit laugh, and it made me turn to her quickly. I almost couldn’t believe she was able to laugh like that while still grieving.

  “Birgit, I’m so sorry,” I said.

  “I told you please not to apologize to me—”

  “I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t want to acknowledge it, so I let myself believe all semester that she was just angry with me. Better that than—” I stopped.

  “I remembered you telling us that they would have looked down on you for being in Sweden with Siri. You told us how much teaching there meant to you, and you were going to apply for that job. I didn’t want to ruin that for you. You said how much it meant. That you didn’t ha
ve anything else. I know that feeling. And I knew Frida would be there. I thought you two could help each other.”

  “It didn’t work out that way. I was terrible to Frida. Terrible to all of you.”

  Her blue eyes shot toward me, at the crack in my voice, at the tears streaming from my eyes.

  “No, Lauren. Frida is doing the same thing and she is living in a hell. What happened this summer was no one’s fault. There is nothing for you to worry about with us. Do you understand me?” She looked over my shoulder and gestured to the other side of the station. “We’re all just glad you are here now.”

  I turned, and the train that was there was pulling off, and I could see, suddenly, clear to the opposite end of the track, where Magnus was.

  He stood against one unpainted wall, the world moving in a blur around him. He was staring at me.

  “You’re the person who finally helped soften Siri’s heart to him,” Birgit said.

  He drifted toward us. He was wearing a suit; Birgit and I were in black dresses. We were all clothed for a funeral. When he reached me, he started taking off his tie, fumbling like he’d never worn one before. I felt we were both trying to get in air.

  “You were the one who told me she still loved the paintings in the T,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Everyone in Stockholm knows your face now. You are famous,” he laughed. “More famous than me.”

  He handed me a program with the Tunnelbana symbol on it. The booklet discussed the history of art in the Stockholm underground, which dated back to the 1950s. The title of Magnus’s collection was printed at the top.

  “Guidebok?” I asked.

  “I promised her at the end I’d help you see.” He pointed up at a portrait: Siri and me sitting with green beer bottles between our ankles beside a harbor. Black and white lines of ships jut up behind us like scaffolding. “That’s Nyhavn,” he said.

  Yes, it was. But he hadn’t gone with us there.

  He slid his hand into his suit jacket and drew out a book, bloated and faded.

  I gasped. It was my old Per Vikander’s Guide to Sweden, the same one we’d illuminated with memories in the days before Magnus threw it in the fountain.

  “You left this behind,” he said.

  “I thought it was ruined.”

  I’d thought the trip was ruined. The friendship.

  I opened it and saw my old handwriting, bleached out from having been in the water. But written over those ghostly entries, in purple pen: new writing. Siri’s hand. In some places, she’d traced what I’d written to make it legible. In others, she’d drawn pictures. Places circled—the places we had traveled. In the blue sea beside the map of Öland, a list of the flower names she’d taught me. Baldersbra; Jack-go-to-bed-at-noon; sandklint; rödklint. Just as I’d listed them in my mind, sitting alone in the tent that rainy night.

  I looked up at the giant paintings on the walls with new vision. Me in Gamla Stan. At Neptuni Åkrar. My eyes-screwed-shut profile in the hay—it was Siri who laughed beside me and with me from that angle. He’d taken our memories from the book and enlarged them here.

  I clutched the guidebook against my chest. My fingers stretched and curled around it. I ached to reclaim every piece of her inside it, every bit of the wholeness that had evaded me since the summer.

  On the inside front cover, there was a note that trailed down, getting smaller near the bottom, curving up to write sideways along the page’s edge. Arrows telling me to turn the page. Parentheses where it left off, directing me somewhere else, where it would begin again. The letters growing smaller and squashier, not enough margin space in the world for everything she wanted to say.

  Then: Kram—a hug, och puss—a kiss. Like the book was the end of a long, long letter.

  The cover was soft from old water, but also from the way Magnus’s hands must have opened and closed it a thousand times to see her handwriting.

  I closed the book. I thought of the long comments I used to scrawl in the margins of her essays, the small spaces first allowed us.

  The subway cars zoomed in, breathed, pushed on. I closed my eyes, let myself feel being beside him, this man who knew her and grieved her and loved her. I was afraid that the sound of a train taking off again was the sound of his moving on, but he remained beside me, perfectly still, another person who had loved Siri. I’d been attracted to Magnus because I’d thought him wounded, like me. I think it was because Magnus and I knew we had been loved once, and we were trying to get back to that. We were flying parallel for a while on the way back to that.

  Birgit had come to stand with us. “He did a good job, yes?”

  “It’s incredible,” I said.

  “He wanted to record every detail. But it’s hard to remember everything. Thank God we have others to help us remember. But you know, even if all of this washed away tomorrow, it would all still be okay. It would all still be written on the heart of God.”

  Someone came to Birgit and asked her a question in Swedish. Magnus stepped away to sign someone’s program. I sat, those words repeating over and over in my mind against the music of their talking.

  My whole life, I’d been working to remember every detail about my parents, feeling that all fell to me. But in coming here, making the decision to come back here, I knew this time I didn’t have to go through this alone. It could be different this time.

  Frida had said that it might be enough to simply be with other people who loved Siri. With the proximity of our bodies, I think we felt the same thing: that we each had a piece of Siri inside of us, parts that only we would ever know. It made me feel like we were connected.

  Birgit came back to me and looked at me like she was reading my mind. “You have us,” Birgit said. “Our difficult family.”

  It was something she’d said to me last summer. I remembered my heart racing when she first said it, lifting at the possibility that I might ever be seen as a part of their family. Now, standing with them in this place, after all that had happened, I knew it to be true.

  On the wall before us there was a painting of a white horse. Five girls sat upon its long, long back. I recognized Karin, Margareta, Frida, Siri, and me.

  “That is Bäckahästen,” Birgit said. “It’s from mythology. We call it the Brook Horse. The story goes that children would be mesmerized by its beauty and leap upon its back. No matter how many children, its back would grow longer and longer to accommodate them all. Then the horse would jump into the water and swim to the bottom, drowning them.”

  In the painting, Margareta is smiling with her extra teeth bared. Karin’s golden locket is open in the scoop of her neck. We all look exuberant. But that horse did go on to drown us, didn’t he?

  A drowning. It felt truer than what I’d been told: That pneumonia had overtaken Siri’s body after she was pulled from Kalmarsund. That she’d spent time in the hospital going through the guidebook, writing over the faint ink and talking to Birgit and Magnus about the things we’d done.

  In the horse painting, white-haired Frida is holding on to Siri, her face buried into her shoulder so hard one might not know it’s her, unless they know how hard she held on, always, to Siri.

  “Did you notice?” Birgit said, reaching out to touch the mural. “The horse’s feet do not touch the water. I think Magnus painted it that way for a reason.”

  This moment is the joy just before they go under, I thought.

  THE TREES CAME together over the road so that I was driving through a long, long tunnel, with only clicks of light. I’d find that beautiful hill we lay on, I told her. The one where we could see the water from all sides. I imagined that she was the sun, and I could be closer to her there, for as long as the sun stayed out that day. I drove looking for that town with the surf shop, the one with the path that led in all directions away, into the fields of windmills and sky. But it was
winter, and the sun had come out late and was setting fast. It was almost down when I saw, on the side of the road, the entrance to the campground, now deserted.

  There was the gate, rolled back. There was the empty kiosk, where the man in lederhosen had taken our money, and the registration building, its windows dark.

  I rumbled over the familiar gravel drive. I parked and walked down the road where Margareta had once carried Karin upon her back toward the tall bonfire. Between the slender bodies of the trees, I could just make it out: the tall dune, dotted with snow.

  Now, in the distance, a man’s figure, making his way toward it. Another figure swept past—a woman. A cold wind spun round me. I could suddenly smell my father’s smell, feel my mother’s hands. My father was running with a white sail behind him. Or was it snow being moved by the wind? They ran past me, disappeared.

  Were they all waiting for me on the other side of the dune? The touch of my mother’s rose-petal hands, the smell of my father’s black coat. I felt them calling me. The vibration of girlish laughter: Siri, saying, Everything is fine, follow me, I will make the way safe. She was waiting for me to swim with her, just as she’d made me promise to do at Midsommar. It was cold, and everyone said you must not swim, so of course we had to.

  I used my hands to claw my way up the dune. When I got to the top, the sky flashed with a familiar, glowing green light—it was like the light I once saw outside my apartment window. And then the lavender of her front door, and lemon-drop yellow, all in bright lines that whipped back and forth, like long ropes of candy. Then there were flashes like waves being viewed from underneath, like the whole arc of heaven was the body of a fast whale, and the sky bore the iridescence of shells.

  I would remember those lights as the Northern Lights, though Magnus had once said it was impossible to see them that far south. He told me that what I thought were the Northern Lights was actually the dawn. I would remember feeling seen there, as I was seeing them.

  I went down to the beach, where a white line of foam had frozen on the sand, and I picked out some reeds that had been made pliable by the lapping of the water. I tried to braid them into a circle. I started to speak the names I remembered, and in my mind, they appeared. Jack-go-to-bed-at-noon. Baldersbra. Chicory—Siri’s favorite. Up they came, blooming from the snow.