The Summer House

by Philip Teir

  She sat down by the window. The rain was coming down harder. She’d been here more than a hundred days now, never leaving the house except to cycle to the supermarket or – during the past few weeks – to spend time with Anders.

  At least now she was eating decently. During the first months she’d merely eaten whatever was easiest. Ready-made meals, fruit, rye crispbread. When she was a student she’d eaten rye crispbread whenever she was short of money. All spring she’d found it oddly comforting to eat pieces of plain crispbread, without butter, as if that reminded her of when she and Johan were young and newly in love, living in a dormitory in Åbo.

  Presumably she would have continued to eat that sort of food all summer – heating up whatever she had in the freezer, maybe going into town once in a while to buy wine – if her family, and later Anders, hadn’t come to see her. She’d had a simple plan: to isolate herself from the world and simply stay here at the summer house until she was ready. But ready for what? She didn’t really know, but she knew she needed time. That’s what she was always telling her patients too: time heals all wounds. It was a cliché, of course, but clichés existed because they were true.

  How long would it take?

  In her work she often met people whose partners had left them, and it could take years for them to heal. They lost their appetite, had difficulty orienting themselves in their day-to-day lives, and were constantly losing or forgetting things. But ultimately almost everyone did recover.

  It was worse for those whose partners had died. Or maybe it wasn’t worse, but it was different.

  Personally, she had nothing left.

  Of course she had the children, but they were grown now and had their own lives.

  She didn’t even have the ring.

  She’d been carrying it in her hand, not really knowing why, and suddenly it was gone. Like yet another sacrificial gift.

  But then Anders had arrived. He was so awkward and fumbling at first, but he turned out to be a warm and kind person, and maybe he’d even helped her a little. It was as if she’d been waiting for him here all along, as if he was exactly what she needed. He’d acted as a therapist for her.

  She didn’t really understand what sort of relationship they had. Maybe they were just two people who needed to talk to each other. Two people who’d both ended up in a phase of their lives that made it necessary to retreat and leave the rest of the world outside.

  But the more she talked, the more she noticed the past coming back. She was smart enough to realise that sooner or later she would have to work through her grief. She had never told any of her clients to lock themselves away in a summer house. But she had a hard time practicing what she preached.

  It became too much for her. The grief was surging inside her chest, trying to escape, but she didn’t want to burden Anders with her sorrow. She didn’t want to force him to carry it too, yet she also knew that he wouldn’t understand. What they had together couldn’t sustain something like that. She was definitely not ready.

  Grief took on strange forms. It ate through her like a worm, burrowing into her head until she felt completely hollowed out, and everything reminded her of her grief – everything she saw, everything she ate, everything she heard other people saying. She tried to avoid burdening him with all that.

  Before Anders turned up she played tennis when she couldn’t sleep. She would run around the court aggressively, slamming the ball against the green board as hard as she could.

  She’d always played tennis with Johan. They’d played almost every day when they came out here to Mjölkviken. He’d taught her the sport, and she’d loved it – the feeling of having strong and sinewy calf muscles, of lunging freely across the asphalt. They taught the children to play too, and when they moved away from home, Kati and Johan continued their tennis games.

  But Johan had gone skiing across the ice in April. There was nothing she could have done; she didn’t even witness him falling through. She was in the city, and he’d come out here alone with the dog.

  She still couldn’t comprehend why he’d skied so far out. After all these years he should have known that it was dangerous in April when the sun had been shining all day, making spots slushy and brittle. Under no circumstance should he have risked skiing there.

  Maybe the problem was that Johan had been so experienced. Maybe he thought he could cope with anything. He’d talked about practicing for just such an event when he was serving in the military, how it was possible to crawl out on the ice using spikes. But presumably he hadn’t thought about how hard it would be with skis and a big Siberian husky.

  When they finally found him, there were signs that the dog had tried to get out before Johan, that Johan may have run into trouble because he was trying to save the dog. It was impossible to say, but Kati thought that’s what must have happened. It would have been typical of him. That’s the kind of person he was, always thinking of others.

  All of his things were still back home in the city. She hadn’t yet cleared anything away, and she’d withdrawn from everyone and everything. She’d asked for sick leave from her job, and then she’d come out here. She hadn’t paid any bills or answered any phone calls except from the children.

  In the beginning they had handled a lot of the practical matters, including the funeral arrangements and some of the paperwork, since she was too bereft to do it. But when that was taken care of, they went back to their own lives, as if nothing had happened. No, maybe not as if nothing had happened. But they had recovered considerably faster than she had, as if they were in a hurry to move on. She felt hurt by this, but she understood.

  She and Anders tried to have sex today, for the first time, and it was clumsy and strange. She had to stop herself halfway through when she almost said ‘I love you.’ Instead, she said ‘I love this.’ Anders hadn’t managed to enter her because he wasn’t hard enough. Afterwards they lay in bed and told each other it didn’t matter, that maybe it had been a bad idea from the start. Maybe their relationship wasn’t like this. Maybe it was about something else that had nothing to do with desire or sex but rather with other basic needs.

  Anders got up to use the toilet. He was in the bathroom for a while and then flushed.

  ‘What were you doing?’ she asked.

  ‘I flushed away the pills I brought from Hanoi. I don’t need them.’

  Julia dropped by an hour later to tell them the kids had disappeared, and Anders left to join the search. Kati stayed behind at the house, and for the first time she noticed how it really looked, how dirty and dreary it was, so she decided to do some cleaning.

  9

  THE KIDS CAME BACK HOME early in the morning. Anders and Julia had driven around half the night until they finally gave up. It wasn’t until 3 a.m. that Anders realised they could check the kids’ Instagram accounts, and that’s when they saw that Leo had posted a picture of Alice on the beach. The picture was dark, but it had been posted only a couple of hours earlier.

  ‘They’re around here somewhere, so they’re not in any danger. Maybe they just forgot they’re children and there are certain rules they need to follow,’ said Anders.

  ‘I thought she might pull something like this sooner or later,’ said Julia. ‘I’m glad mobile phones exist, but I’m also annoyed that we can’t get hold of them.’

  Julia had fallen asleep in the car. Anders had to wake her and lead her up to the summer house. She didn’t want to go to bed, so she sat on the terrace to wait until morning. At that point she was planning to ring the police. She was relieved that Alice seemed to be alive, but she wanted her daughter home.

  At five in the morning Alice came walking up to the house. It was still barely light, the sort of summertime darkness that is quiet and contained. The sky began rumbling ominously, and Alice was wet and tired from the walk.

  ‘Where have you two been?’ asked Julia. She was no longer angry, merely relieved, as if operating on adrenaline. She’d had three cups of coffee and everything seemed unreal:
the muted low pressure system, the impending thunder – and Alice, who seemed so happy even though her lips were blue.

  At no point had Julia felt truly frantic. She suspected that Alice had gone somewhere with Leo, and that neither of them was in any serious danger. There was very little traffic in the area, and for both of them to have drowned was such an appalling thought that she hadn’t even fully considered the possibility.

  Alice changed her clothes and fell asleep on the sofa in the living room.

  Julia also slept for a few hours. When she awoke it was already eleven in the morning and it was raining heavily. Anton was awake, sitting in the kitchen. Julia started making breakfast as she phoned her parents. Her father answered.

  ‘Are you alone?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, your mother went to the supermarket,’ replied Göran.

  ‘Oh.’

  For a moment neither of them spoke.

  ‘Pappa?’

  ‘Yes, dear?’

  ‘What do you know about Mamma and Sten Segerkvist?’

  A long silence.

  ‘Pappa?’ Julia repeated.

  ‘Why are you asking me that?’

  ‘Because I saw Marika, and she started talking about a lot of …’

  ‘Do you really want to know?’

  ‘What is there to know?’

  ‘Hmm … Well, I suppose it doesn’t matter any more.’

  ‘So tell me.’

  ‘It was a long time ago. They had an affair that lasted for several years, every summer when we were in Mjölkviken. At least a couple of summers. I didn’t know anything about it until after it was over. Do you remember the time when we talked about getting a divorce?’

  ‘Yes. Mamma talked about it a lot, but you didn’t.’

  ‘That was after I read the letters.’

  ‘What letters?’

  ‘They wrote to each other all the time, during the winter, planning how they were going to leave their spouses and start a new life together. There was a whole box of their letters.’

  ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Of course you didn’t.’

  ‘But nothing happened, right? I mean, they didn’t leave.’

  ‘Fortunately. He was a handsome man, a doctor, but a bloody idiot, if you ask me. A real ladies’ man who promised her the moon. Finally her friends talked sense into her.’

  ‘So that’s why you bought the summer house closer to the city? That’s why you don’t come out here any more?’

  ‘Well, there are other reasons too. I think it’s more pleasant to be closer to town. But that was certainly one of the reasons. That place has negative associations for me.’

  After talking to her father, Julia rang Erik. Outside there was a real downpour, with lightning flashing in the kitchen windows. It was eerie, almost frightening. The storm seemed to be centred right above the summer house.

  ‘Hi, sweetheart,’ she said.

  She could tell at once that something was wrong. Erik’s voice sounded odd, as if he didn’t know how to begin.

  ‘There’s something I have to tell you,’ he said.

  All sorts of things raced through her mind – that he’d met someone else, that he’d been in an accident, that he’d found himself in the drunk tank, that he realised he was gay.

  The last thing she would have imagined was that he’d been sacked.

  ‘So there’s nothing to be done about it at the moment,’ he said. ‘I’ll try to find a new job in the autumn.’

  ‘Did you just find out about this?’

  ‘I’ve known since midsummer, but I didn’t want to say anything. I don’t know why. I suppose I thought I’d be able to find another job and then you wouldn’t have to worry.’

  Another lightning flash. Only a few seconds later a thunderous boom, like a huge explosion, directly overhead. Julia jumped. Anton looked scared.

  ‘My God,’ said Julia.

  ‘We’ll be okay.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ she said. ‘We’re having a thunderstorm here. A really big one.’

  She placed her hand on the worktop and leaned forward.

  ‘But I’ll be getting a severance package,’ Erik went on. ‘So we’ll be able to manage for at least six months.’

  Julia nodded, as another flash of lightning lit up the room, followed by an even louder crack of thunder.

  ‘Erik, I’m starting to feel scared.’

  ‘It’s just thunder.’

  ‘I know, but it seems to be right on top of us. Isn’t there an old TV antenna on the roof that the lightning could strike?’

  ‘It’s very unlikely that would happen. But you could go sit in the car. That’s what we always did when I was little.’

  Julia glanced at Anton.

  ‘Okay, Erik. I’ve got to go now.’

  ‘I talked to Martin,’ he said. ‘I thought he might have something for me.’

  ‘How did it go?’

  ‘That’s the worst part. Even his company is cutting back. There’s just nothing right now.’

  ‘How strange,’ she said.

  ‘I think so too. Julia?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Do you love me?’

  ‘Oh,’ she said.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Erik.

  ‘More lightning.’

  The instant she said that, thunder boomed with such force that it felt as if the whole house might be split in two.

  ‘Mamma?’ said Anton.

  Julia looked at him.

  ‘Erik, I need to go. I love you.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Take care of yourselves.’

  She ended the call and set her mobile on the table. Then she glanced at Anton, who now looked really scared.

  ‘Is Alice still asleep?’ she asked.

  ‘I think so,’ said Anton.

  ‘She must be tired. Shall we go sit in the car and wait for the storm to pass?’

  They ran out to the car through the rain. When they were inside, Julia switched on the radio. She thought about Alice still in the house, and she wondered if they should wake her. But she wanted to hide out in the safe confines of the car, mostly for her own sake. They sat there for half an hour until the thunder finally moved on, like an unwelcome guest. When the rain started to let up Julia opened the car door. Anton got out and walked down to the road.

  Big streams of water were running down the road towards the ditch. Anton knelt down and began making little canals that led to bigger furrows. He created a big, complex system of channels for the water. He wasn’t bothered by the fact that it was still raining because it was warm outside. He wanted to be alone to think and to take in everything through his senses.

  He had just dug a new furrow when he caught sight of Marika. She walked past him, as stiff as a zombie in a horror film. She looked upset, as if she were walking in her sleep and dreaming about something scary.

  Anton froze as she walked past. He didn’t know what to do.

  ‘Hello?’ he said.

  But she didn’t respond as she simply continued on.

  Then someone came running. The thin man with the dread-locks. Anton didn’t know his name. He was carrying a blanket. He rushed forward and wrapped the blanket around Marika.

  Only then did she stop. Anton could see that she was hurt. Her forehead was bleeding, and her legs were muddy, maybe from falling.

  ‘How are you?’ asked the man.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’ll be fine. Wait … where am I?’

  ‘You’re walking along the road. I tried to stop him, but he hit me. I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Ville,’ he said. ‘Don’t you recognise me?’

  ‘Ah,’ she said. She looked down at her body and saw that she was naked under the blanket.

  ‘Why don’t I have any clothes on?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Ville.

  10

  ALL SUMMER LONG MARIKA had been afraid to wake up each morning, afraid that
Chris would be irritable and capricious, afraid that he would threaten her or do something unpredictable. Maybe he’d take Leo and run off to Scotland or God only knew where, without saying a word to her.

  She’d been sleeping on the sofa for the past three weeks, ever since Helena moved into their bedroom. Chris wanted all three of them to sleep in the same bed, but that was too much for Marika. Instead she lay awake at night, listening to them panting. She heard Helena’s moans, her animal-like howling, and Chris’s repeated commands, telling Helena to get down on all fours, or telling her to suck his dick. Marika could hear everything that went on in the house, and she could understand why Leo had moved out to the yurt and later taken Alice along to the woods.

  This was not a good environment for children, no matter what Chris might think.

  She no longer remembered when it all started. In the beginning he’d been so wonderful and tender, so different from all the men she’d previously known. The special upbringing that he’d had seemed to lend a certain melancholy to his face. And it gave him a genuine curiosity about everything in nature, from the tiniest bug to the big topographical changes at various places they’d visited over the years. She had a feeling that no topic was too big or difficult for Chris to tackle, and he always shared his views with her. It was like being with someone who was constantly moving forward, who wanted life to be one big adventure, who could make life into one big adventure. That was what it was like when they visited Death Valley in the States, when they explored caves in Australia, and when they went surfing near Lofoten.

  But then his behaviour changed. Small things at first. Like the times he’d get angry if she made friends with people and wanted to go see them. She remembered when they were living in Edinburgh and she decided she wanted to study psychology. In the beginning he was enthusiastic, but when she actually enrolled in classes and was away from home in the daytime, he got more and more surly. He showed less interest in what she told him, and finally he flew into a rage when she decided to join a study group that met on Tuesday evenings.