Stockholm Diaries, Melanie

by Rebecca Hunter

  Mel pulled her head back inside the house and carried her small bag of groceries into the kitchen. Behind her, Henrik removed the plastic sheet from the window frame again. Trying to ignore his looming presence, Mel unloaded the groceries onto the kitchen counter: bread, salami, chips, a couple of soup-looking cans and three small glass bottles of soda. At least, it looked like soda. God, she was thirsty. She picked up the bottle and began opening the old wooden drawers, one after another, searching for a bottle opener. Nothing. She closed her eyes in annoyance. Couldn’t her father have made just this one thing easier for her?

  “It’s hanging above the sink. The hook next to the window,” said the deep voice from behind her.

  “Thanks,” she muttered.

  Of course Henrik knew where her father kept the bottle opener. And of course he was watching her flounder through her first day in the cabin. She tried to ignore him, but the gaping hole in her living room wall made this difficult. She was like a creature on display at the zoo—Björn’s daughter, in a new habitat. Only an hour into her arrival on the island, and already this wasn’t going as planned.

  Mel uncapped the drink as Henrik began to bang away. Ignoring the noise, she turned her attention to what she had come for: her father’s cabin. The bookshelves, the only hint of unruliness in her father’s life so far, begged for her attention. She walked across the room and ran her fingers over the lines of books.

  They were all in Swedish. Of course. Mel let out a sigh of frustration. She had resolutely rejected the idea of learning her father’s language, despite the fact that her college had actually offered it. Instead, she had chosen French, a decision she now thoroughly regretted: Surrounded by books, with all the time in the world, she couldn’t read a single one.

  Mel scanned the shelves, waiting for recognizable words to jump out at her. After all, her father did live in the U.S. for a few years; his English must have been decent. She found a Swedish-English dictionary and pulled it out, giving it an obligatory scan before setting it back on the shelf.

  Where were his own books, the ones he wrote? When she was younger, her father’s thin volumes of poems stood on her mother’s bookcase, waiting for his return, she guessed. Then one day they were gone, and Mel finally knew for sure what her mother wouldn’t say: Her father was never coming back for her.

  Mel searched each shelf until she found one of her father’s poetry books, and in English, no less: Endurance. It was a more recent volume, filled not with the original love poems he was known for but with poems of loss. She opened it up to the middle and looked, but she didn’t have to read. She knew the first lines by heart:

  Ignore it.

  The relentless tick, tick, tick,

  that holds a man together

  when hope shutters its doors for good.

  Against her better judgment, she couldn’t help but love this spare collection, so immediate, so beautiful, and so sad. Maybe, she thought, maybe she could find a way to forgive a person who ached this deeply. She leafed through the pages and set it back in its place.

  Next to it, as if positioned to provide some sort of ironic contrast, was his first book of love poems, the book that had made him into an international name. Mel pulled out the thin volume and flipped through it, stopping at his most well-known poem. She whispered the first lines aloud:

  brown hair twisted into wet ropes

  dripping down the arch of your back

  the drops disappear

  leaving a salty trail for my fingers to follow

  Mel slammed the book shut. Lies. Her mother had said her father had invented the scenarios in these poems. Why would the emotions be any more real? But his marriage to her mother, an American, had allowed him to live in the U.S., to meet the right people, to step into the international market, beyond Sweden—he had stayed around just long enough to make sure of that.

  She left the first bookcase and walked over to the second one, but before she reached it, she stopped. Mel sucked in her breath, heart pounding. Her book was there, the one she had written. Her biography, published less than a year ago, was tucked among the chaos of books stacked in no apparent order, no more or less than the others. But it was the only one in English. This couldn’t just be a coincidence. Her father knew about her.

  The knowledge provoked a surprising wash of anger, still so close to the surface after all these years. He read her writing but never contacted her? Maybe he had hoped for something better. Or maybe he knew she would want to dig into his story, too. The thought sat like a weight in her stomach.

  The fog of exhaustion began to overtake her. Her flight had left Boston Logan yesterday night, but the sunlight had shone through the cracks of the airplane window not long after the flight began, pulling her out of her precarious sleep for the rest of the ride. Now she was almost afraid to calculate how long she had been awake. At this point, what she needed was to lie down. The hammering had stopped, and her father’s handyman was nowhere in sight. Mel crossed the room again and lay back on the daybed.

  Just for a few minutes, was her last thought before she fell into a deep sleep.

  THUMP, THUMP, THUMP.

  Mel’s eyes snapped open at the sound, but it took a moment to orient herself. Warily, she looked around the room until the last 24 hours started to come back to her: the sleepless night over the Atlantic, the boat ride, the cabin.

  Thump, thump, thump.

  The rest came back: Her naked. Henrik. Crap. It must be him. There were only a handful of other cabins on this tiny island, and Henrik was the one person who knew she was there. She tried to keep her eyes open, but drowsiness overwhelmed her again.

  “Melanie?”

  She heard her name through the door, waking her out of slumber’s purgatory once again. But it was the way he pronounced her name in three separate syllables—Mel-ah-NEE—that pulled her out of bed. She had never particularly liked her name, and everyone had called her Mel since she was very young—since her father had left. But the way Henrik pronounced it stopped her from wanting to correct him.

  “Coming,” she called, her voice scratchy and low.

  Mel stumbled to the door and pulled it open, squinting in the afternoon sun. Whoa. Henrik stood right in front of her, cleaned up. Locks of dark hair fell over his forehead, glistening in the sun. Like some sort of sea god that had stepped out of the water and onto her deck, just for her.

  Her eyes widened. She hadn’t just been loopy from the lack of sleep. He was gorgeous. In fact, if anything, her memory had toned down Henrik’s appeal: Skin bronzed from hours outdoors, startling green eyes and the hint of a smile. And that was just the top. The rest? Well, she was trying to keep her eyes from wandering down again to the muscles that stretched at the sleeves of his t-shirt.

  Mel swallowed.

  “Yes?”

  Henrik gave her a once-over glance, and a wider smile twitched at the corners of his mouth. I must look like hell, Mel thought as she reached up to feel the hair that seemed to be testing gravity’s limits.

  Tucking the mess of locks behind her ears, she said, “I fell asleep.”

  As if he couldn’t see that. He didn’t fight the smile any longer.

  “Sorry to wake you,” he said, though he looked more amused than sorry. “You slept through my pounding on the window, so you must have needed it.”

  She nodded slowly.

  “Thanks,” she said, pointing at the window.

  Henrik gave a nod of acknowledgement.

  “I turned on the water and electricity, too, in case you need that.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “I might.”

  His eyes widened at her response before he let out a snort of laughter.

  Her words were punctuated with a loud rumble from her stomach. How many hours had it been since the stewardesses had served her the airline breakfast? Too many, clearly. And there were cans of unidentifiable soup waiting on the counter for her.

  “I better s
tart fixing dinner. The delicacies of island life await me,” she said, gesturing at the counter.

  “Is that all you brought?” he asked.

  She frowned. Was he implying that she, who drove her mother crazy with her lists and schedules, wasn’t prepared?

  “I’m planning on taking the ferry to the store tomorrow.”

  “Not tomorrow,” he said. “The ferries don’t run that route much on holidays.”

  Oh. After all her careful planning, how did she miss that detail? She stopped herself from asking what holiday fell at the end of June. Instead she tried for humor.

  “And no restaurants on this island?”

  The question was actually half serious—she had to check. Dragging a suitcase and handbag to the ferry back in Stockholm had been difficult enough, so she hadn’t picked up much in the way of food. And now she was stuck.

  “No McDonalds here,” Henrik said dryly. “Not yet, at least.”

  “I’ll do my best to cope,” she said in a tone to match his. “And I don’t suppose I can get another ferry to the mainland tonight?”

  “You can. You just can’t get back.”

  “I’ll survive,” she said.

  Mel stepped out of her doorway and onto the deck, letting the sun wash away the last remnants of sleep. She looked at the steps that led down to the front yard, if the rocky expanse could be called a yard. The only sounds around her were the rustle of leaves and the water, lapping against the shore. But despite the lure of the landscape, she was finding it difficult to concentrate on paradise.

  She couldn’t deny that the source of her distraction was the man looming in back of her. Her physical reaction was undeniable, but she knew enough to keep her distance from him. She liked the kind of guy she could read easily. Fun, preferably a little younger. A distraction. Well, a different kind of a distraction, a light one, easy to let go of. Nothing like this man in front of her, whose physical presence sent her heart pounding like some teenager who didn’t know any better.

  Because Mel did know better. She’d spent her childhood listening to her mother rail about her father’s failings, about the kind of man who never let on what he was thinking, who would leave without warning, long before Mel even understood what her mother was talking about. Her mother had firmly instilled the message: A guy like Henrik was exactly the wrong kind of distraction.

  “I’m taking my boat to the store on the mainland tomorrow,” he finally said. “I’ll take you with me.”

  Mel held back a snort at his statement: He had jumped right over the part where he asked her to come and moved right to his own conclusion. She opened her mouth to point this out when the more rational part of her brain kicked in. She needed food, probably more than she could carry back to the ferry on her own. Accepting his offer was clearly her best option, though she had been known to reject similar best options, especially when they involved male entanglements. But not in foreign countries, where she didn’t speak the language. Her stomach was outwardly protesting.

  “What about the holiday? I mean for you—don’t you have plans?”

  Henrik shook his head.

  “I’m not the holiday type.”

  “Is there a holiday type?”

  He shrugged, frowning.

  “You know, the type with a warm, fuzzy family.”

  Henrik looked away, and Mel couldn’t miss the raw edges in his voice.

  “Me, neither,” she said quietly.

  At least they had one thing in common.

  Mel closed her eyes. She did need his help, at least for tomorrow. Just one more day in his debt and then she could make this life here her own—at least for a little while. The way she always did.

  “Thank you for the offer. I really do appreciate it,” she said.

  “You’re Björn’s daughter,” he said. “I owe a lot to him.”

  There was sadness in his voice, and Mel suddenly wondered if she had misread him all along. When he spoke of her father, Henrik’s voice revealed loss in a way she knew hers did not. He was more than just her father’s handyman. He had cared for her father enough to fix up his house, even after his death.

  She looked carefully at Henrik. She was almost sure she knew the answer to her next question, but she asked it anyway.

  “Did you—?”

  She stopped. There was no good way to ask this. She’d just have to say it.

  “Were you the one who found him?”

  “Yes,” he said, though strangely, he didn’t look too upset about that piece. “In his bed. His eyes were closed, so he must have been asleep when he died. If that makes you feel better.”

  Actually, it didn’t make her feel anything. The executor of the will had told her where he died. Björn was a stranger to her, and the only thing she felt was an uncomfortable twinge of resentment: her father had cared for this handyman more than he had cared for his own daughter.

  Henrik was watching her; she could feel it. She looked up and felt the jolt of their connection. He let their eyes lock, and she felt as if he were gauging her, trying to follow the direction of her thoughts. Then he turned away.

  “I’ll pick you up at nine tomorrow. The stores close early,” he said over his shoulder, disappearing around the corner of the house.

  “I’ll check my calendar,” she called after him.

  AFTER EATING WAY too much salami, she slowly wandered through the big, open room, simply letting the place around her sink in. Along the far walls were three doors. She walked over to the first and rested her hand on the long, slim door handle. She pulled down on it and peeked inside. Her father’s bedroom. A wooden dresser stood in one corner, a chair in another. A white bedspread was pulled neatly over the narrow, single bed under the window, with a tiny bedside table next to it. Nothing else. The room was empty, impersonal, and yet Mel felt as though she were trespassing into uncomfortable territory. This was the most intimate room of her father’s life, the place he had died. It just didn’t feel right to start here. She closed the door.

  The next door was the bathroom, which she had already visited. Spartan, utilitarian, but a row of small seascape paintings gave the room some warmth that her father’s bedroom lacked. She glanced in the mirror and saw her wavy blond hair was still a mess, and the dark circles under her eyes hinted at just how far she had travelled from home.

  Just inches from that door was a third room, and the door stood ajar. Mel peeked through the opening, testing the feeling first. Her father’s office. It was smaller than the bedroom and contained only an old-fashioned teacher’s desk that faced the window, looking out into the forest. The front door opened into this room, but her father’s executor had been correct: It was jammed shut. She walked over to the desk and sat down, trying to imagine what it felt like to be her father for a moment, to live in this empty cabin on an isolated island and simply write poems.

  Mel rolled the incongruously modern chair back and opened the top desk drawer. The heavy drawer was a mess of pencils, erasers, paperclips and various other writing accessories. In the second drawer were neat stacks of photos fastened with rubber bands. She picked up a stack, and the rubber band snapped from age. They were all old black and whites, yellowing with age. She turned the stack over looking for dates. Those that were labeled predated even her father. She’d look through them more carefully another day, but Mel doubted they had any real bearing on what she was looking for. Too old.

  But in the third drawer, the tallest, deepest one, Mel found what she had been hoping for. In fact, it was the lure of this possibility that had triggered her summer journey here, against her mother’s explicit wishes. She needed to look for herself. In this drawer was a large stack of what appeared to be journals—his journals. She stared at the pile, fingers twitching. There were so many of them. Mel’s heart pounded in her chest. Slowly, she took the top book out of the drawer, dated with the current year on the front. The next one on the stack was last year’s. She continued, book aft
er book, faster and faster, going back in time, back to what she had been searching for all these years.

  She was nearing the bottom of the pile, tossing each book on top of the previous one without a further glance. But just as she closed in on what she had waited for, that year her father had left them, the year that would answer all her questions, the dates abruptly jumped. Written on the next journal was the year before Mel was born, the year he left Sweden. His years that included her mother, that included her, were missing.

  “No,” she whispered.

  Mel lay her head down on one of the teetering piles of journals stacked up in front of her. She had come so close to finding the answer, only to hit another dead end. Still, the question rang in her head in the same, plaintive voice it had since she was four years old: Why did he leave? Her mother refused to answer that question, aside from a few, pointed outbursts that were more emotion than information. And none of her last three months of research had turned up anything even close to a lead for insight into this part of his life. Mel was now being paid to find the answer to this and all her other questions, but still they felt inexorably hidden.

  She didn’t even bother taking the last few books out of the drawer. Instead, she stuffed them all back in, all except the one dated the year after her father had left. It was her best hope. She placed that book in front of her and opened it.

  “No,” she growled, glaring at the carefully-formed letters that covered the first page.

  Of course. The journals were written in Swedish. And of course her translator lived back in Massachusetts. When she’d planned this trip, she hadn’t let herself hope for a gold mine like this. If only she had let herself believe that she would find journals here, she might have flown the translator over with her. She had planned to scan or copy and ship anything that she wanted translated, but the prospect of waiting now felt excruciating. She needed someone here. Right now.