But when she opened the top drawer of her father’s bureau, the scent made her slam the drawer shut again. Whatever it was ran through her senses, throwing her off enough that she couldn’t even remember what was in the drawer. Maybe undershirts? Soaked in uneasy sadness, she turned and walked out the bedroom door.
She needed a more calculated approach. Break it down into steps and conquer. After breakfast.
A few minutes of searching uncovered a frying pan and a coffee pot. At least she thought it was a coffee pot. Mel unscrewed the multi-layered thing and took it apart, but that didn’t make its workings any more clear. Finally, she abandoned the contraption in favor of a regular pot, filled with water and a couple scoops of coffee. Problem solved, she thought with a grin. Though the taste of cowboy coffee wasn’t ideal, she didn’t need anyone’s help to figure it out. A step in the right direction.
Mel buttered a couple slices of bread and sat down at the small, wooden table. Her father had sat there every morning. He had positioned the table to look out the window while he ate. She wondered what her father thought about as he sat there, alone.
Certainly not what I’m thinking about. Because her mind kept returning to Henrik. He had pulled her against the weight of his wet body, and she still could feel his heart pounding against his hard chest.
She steeled herself for the usual reaction to this break in her careful defenses, but the feeling didn’t come. Instead, she felt something else, foreign and unrecognizable. Mel took a deep breath, allowing just a little more of her reaction to seep in. Another deep breath. Was it… relief? That certainly fell into the “foreign and unrecognizable feeling” category. Stepping forward to meet his lips, giving in to the desire, an emotion she kept so well in check, felt like relief.
Mel blinked and looked around. Just sitting at her father’s kitchen table felt off kilter. She was so far from home, and everything felt foreign, even her own thoughts. Did it matter that just this once, she let down her guard and allowed herself to follow these thoughts? She was here just for the summer, not long enough for bigger mistakes.
Except that Henrik had broken off the kiss with a more practical statement: This wasn’t a good idea. They were supposed to work together. But just because they weren’t going to kiss again didn’t mean she had to shut off this long-buried part of her entirely.
Had Henrik said he’d come over today? They had discussed the translations, but some of the specifics of their conversations had faded, in favor of other parts of their interactions.
Maybe she could conjure him up. Whenever she was scantily dressed or in some sort of compromised state, Henrik seemed to be there to witness it. The idea was so uncharacteristic of her that Mel decided it was worth a try.
She dug the tiny red bikini back out of her suitcase and put it on. Who spent money on this kind of thing? Someone who is the opposite of me. She smiled a little as she grabbed the towel she had found earlier in the bathroom and headed down to the dock.
The morning was sunny and warm, but storm clouds loomed farther out over the Baltic. She walked across the old wooden planks, but as she neared the end of the dock, she slowed. She had never hesitated to swim on her own before, but after yesterday’s events, Mel’s heart pounded as she looked down into the murky water in front of her. When she closed her eyes, she could feel herself sinking deeper into the water, her struggles for the surface pulling her farther down. She shuddered and opened her eyes again.
Instead of diving in, she sat down on the edge and dangled her feet into the cold water. She scanned the shore and was surprised to see that she wasn’t alone—neighbors, a man and a woman. They were far enough away that they hadn’t seen her either. Actually, they didn’t look like they noticed anything besides each other. They were a pair of opposites: him, tall and broad, and her, small and slim, with a long tangle of red curly hair. They sat next to each other on their dock, talking, it seemed, but then the man leaned over and kissed the woman. A real kiss, with a tenderness that grew into something much more. The kind of kiss Mel had always wanted but never really expected to get.
Because what Mel saw in that kiss was the subject of the sappy romances that made for blockbuster films, not the complications of real life. Happily ever after. Where you never really saw what happened “after.” And it was the worst kind of fiction—the kind that was so tempting that you could start to believe that it’s real. But it wasn’t. Her father’s poems had taught her that lesson too well. Those beautiful, aching, heart-wrenching poems that flowed out of him in the years that he and her mother were together were a tantalizing fiction that came to an abrupt end when her father left, disconnecting himself from her life completely and without warning. That, too, seemed like a twist in a fictional plot, though a very different kind of fiction, Mel thought bitterly.
By the time Mel’s thoughts had wandered back to the present, the neighbors’ kiss had broken off. The woman looked over at her and waved. Mel smiled and waved back. After a moment, the red-haired women stood up and walked over toward Mel’s dock.
“Hi, I’m Alice,” said the woman as she neared. Mel’s eyes widened—another North American, probably a New Yorker, judging from the accent.
She stood up to shake Alice’s hand.
“Nice to meet you, Alice. From the U.S., right?”
Alice chuckled and nodded.
“Jonas and I had a bet,” she said, gesturing to the man still seated on the dock where she had been sitting. “He saw you smile and wave at us, and he bet me you were American. He said no Swede would smile and wave at a stranger.”
“Even a neighbor?”
“Especially a neighbor,” said Alice, smiling. “He’s going to love that he was right.”
“Are there lots of Americans in Stockholm?”
Alice shrugged.
“I haven’t spent much time in Sweden,” she said. “This is Jonas’s place.”
Mel wondered how Alice had found herself on this quiet archipelago island, kissing Jonas the way she did a few minutes before, without a connection to Sweden, but Mel had just met her. It was a little early in their relationship to pry.
“Jonas thought that a poet lived here, an older one.”
Mel sighed.
“Yes, my father. He passed away not long ago,” she said, then quickly added, “I didn’t know him.”
Alice nodded but didn’t ask. Mel liked this woman already.
“So you and your boyfriend came here for the cabin?” asked Alice.
Her boyfriend? It took a moment for Mel to register that Alice meant Henrik. She must have seen him working.
“Henrik isn’t my boyfriend. He… he sort of came with the cabin,” she said.
Alice laughed.
“Sounds like an interesting arrangement.”
Mel laughed, too, and nodded.
“Definitely interesting.”
Alice brushed a strand of curly, red hair out of her face.
“Listen, I’d love a friend to walk with while we’re here. Jonas works in the mornings, and I need an excuse to get out of the house. We’re up early, so just knock if you’re interested.”
The offer took her by surprise. Even back in college, Mel didn’t have a lot of girlfriends. She wasn’t interested in spending her afternoons chattering about diets and men and the other things she imagined girlfriends talked about. It was easier to keep to herself. But on this tiny island, so far away from home, so far from the version of herself that she had carefully constructed, the idea of a friendship brought another taste of relief.
“Thanks. I’d love to take morning walks with you,” said Mel.
“Great. Just knock,” said Alice. “Now I’m going back to let Jonas know he was right.”
She watched Alice head home. First, the kiss with Henrik, one that she initiated, and now a possible friendship? This summer certainly wouldn’t be ordinary. But she knew that when she decided to come to Sweden, didn’t she?
Mel closed her eyes. Her little experiment had failed—Henrik still hadn’t appeared. And now, the image of her waiting in her little red bikini made her stomach turn. Of course he hadn’t shown up. She had decided long ago that this was the problem with relying on people, so why had she thought Henrik would be an exception?
But this was exactly the kind of thought that she needed a little relief from, so she let it go. Just for the summer.
MEL STARED AT the mess on her counter and sighed. Despite all her research, there were so many things she hadn’t read up on before arriving in Sweden. Even making bread was a complicated task. She had had the foresight to bring along her favorite, all-purpose cookbook, but the kitchen, once again, seemed to present more hurdles than she had expected. For one, the oven temperature was in Celsius, not Fahrenheit. Yes, she knew Sweden used the metric system, but she hadn’t expected to be doing math problems so early in the morning.
Mel dug around in her father’s kitchen drawers but only found one measuring cup, a small one marked dl, some metric measurement she probably learned about in elementary school and then promptly forgot. After further searches turned up nothing, she picked up the little cup and inspected it again. It looked a little smaller than a half cup. She decided to go with that.
But the yeast completely stumped her. Instead of the thin packages of sand-like substance she was used to, the grocery store yeast came in rather large, squishy cubes. Back at the store, when she had asked Henrik for the third time whether this was, in fact, yeast, or if he had misunderstood her, he just gave a little snort of laughter and shook his head. Instead of rolling her eyes at him, Mel should have asked her next, obvious question: How was she supposed to make the yeast in this little package work?
This is why I need the Internet, she grumbled to an imaginary Henrik.
Maybe with the Swedish-English dictionary and one of the dusty cookbooks on her father’s shelf, she could—
Thump, thump. The knock on the door made her jump. Mel washed her hands in the sink and then opened the door.
“Melanie?”
Henrik was leaning on the door frame, arms folded, showing off the muscles she couldn’t seem to keep her eyes off. Damn. His hair was damp and unruly, and the corners of his mouth pulled up with a warm smile that made her heart beat faster.
“I thought you might not let me in,” he said.
She laughed.
“I thought about it,” she said, “but, of course, I need your expertise again.”
“At least you’re smiling about it this time.”
The tension that lingered after their kiss seemed to have dissipated a little, she thought as he brushed past her. If she could just keep a little physical distance from him.
He glanced around the cabin, his eyes stopping on the mess on the kitchen counter.
“Over here?” he asked, heading into the kitchen for a closer look.
“I think I’ve spotted your problem,” he said. “You have a deciliter measuring cup and a recipe that uses the American system.”
“Deciliter,” she muttered to herself. That’s what dl meant.
She shook her head.
“Not that problem,” she said. “The yeast. I don’t know what to do with it.”
He stared at her, eyebrows raised, until she finally added, “Ours comes in a powder form.”
Henrik shook his head and said, “I don’t know. You might need only half of that thing. I haven’t made bread since I was a kid in… I wonder what you call that class in America?”
“Home economics?” she said.
She chuckled at the thought of this formidable man in front of her as a teen, meticulously measuring his baking projects.
“Probably. What’s funny about that?”
Henrik was smiling, and he moved a little closer so that he was standing over her now, teasing her gently, wordlessly. He looked over her shoulder at the cookbook, his breath caressing the side of her face as he turned to her. Her heart, apparently conspiring against her better judgment, thumped harder. When she met Henrik’s deep green eyes, Mel was almost sure he could see the effect he was having on her.
She swallowed, fighting competing urges. Part of her wanted to push him away with some sort of sarcastic comment, to wrench control of the situation, but the other part wanted another taste of his lips. Both of which would have been a mistake, so she did neither.
“Never mind,” said Mel, brushing past him. “I’ll start the bread later. Let’s look at the journals.”
The moment Mel touched him, he drew in his breath, just loud enough for her to hear. She walked away with a little smile. At least she wasn’t the only one having trouble keeping her focus.
By the time she had crossed the room, Henrik was behind her, keeping his distance. Mel opened the door and walked in.
Her father’s office was exactly as she had left it—tidy and bare, with only his desk in the middle. It was as if he had known he would die, she thought suddenly, and had tidied up for the occasion.
“Was my father always this neat?” she asked.
This drew a smile from Henrik.
“Always,” he said. “I guess you could say he was a little like a monk—spent most of his days in his quiet routine, and he didn’t believe in keeping much of anything, though not for any higher reasons. He just didn’t think there was much worth holding onto.”
Henrik gestured for her to sit down in the desk chair, and he left the room. When he returned, he had a chair from the kitchen table with him, which he set beside the desk. He sat down.
“He was one of Sweden’s most famous poets. From what I understood, he had more than enough money, and yet he stayed in this tiny cottage with almost nothing in it, for the most part speaking only to a few other neighbors,” he said.
Mel hung onto every one of his words. Her father had left her mother and her for the monk-like solitude of this Stockholm island. Why? Why was living alone better than living near his daughter?
“Are you okay?”
Henrik’s voice was quiet and gentle, and it occurred to her that he must have some idea about what she was going through right now. Maybe Henrik even held some of the answers she was looking for, some of the missing pieces of the puzzle of her father’s inexplicable desertion.
“Did you ever ask him why he was here or why he didn’t keep anything?” Mel asked quietly.
Henrik’s mouth curved into a little smile. “Many times. He never told me. Once I asked him if he was happy. After a long time, he said, ‘I was once happy, long ago, and that’s enough.’”
Long ago? thought Mel. Was that time of happiness the time he was with her mother and her? It couldn’t be. Otherwise, why would he leave them? But Mel’s heart didn’t seem to hear this last thought; it still pounded with the hope she thought she had tired of long ago.
Mel turned back to the desk. The journals. This drawer full of books seemed to hold more promise than all her research from the previous months combined. And Henrik could unlock them for her. Henrik. Again his presence made her body shiver with awareness. She didn’t have to look—she could feel how close the thick muscles of his legs were to hers, almost brushing them.
Slowly, Mel pulled open the drawer. She heard Henrik draw in his breath and then chuckle.
“Wow,” he said. “That’s a lot of books.”
“You don’t have to do it,” she said quickly. “You can say no.”
They both stared into the deep drawer, stuffed to the top with her father’s journals. He leaned his forearms on his legs, his face close enough to feel his warm breath caressing her neck.
“No one else would do this job for you,” he said softly. “Either they’d tell you to transcribe them onto the computer first, or they’d charge you more than you’ll ever make on this book.”
He took one of the books from the drawer and leafed through it.
“What’s your deadline?” he asked.
Mel propped her
forehead on her palm and sighed.
“My publisher gave me six months to write the first draft,” she said, “but that was three months ago. I finished some of the chapters back at home—the early years, his years with us, the years when he studied at Stockholm University. But even some of that may change based on what’s in here.”
She gestured to the drawer again.
“I think I’m in over my head,” she said, frowning. “I got tons of help on my last biography: professors, the poet himself and even my grandmother. But now that I’m on my own, I’m not sure I can do this.”
The words slipped out, more of a confession than she had meant to give. Letting her guard down meant navigating a slippery slope of emotions she usually kept under tight control, and Mel wasn’t sure she was ready for them.
Henrik was quiet for a long time, and she found herself watching his wide hands as he turned the pages. He had the hands of a man who didn’t mind physical labor. Why did a guy like this spend his summers alone on a near-deserted island?
“You don’t have to do it. Really,” she said quietly. “I’ll figure something out.”
“No, we’ll do this,” he said. “Just give me a little time to look through the books.”
“Well, you can start on the translations chronologically, and then I’ll read—”
Henrik cut her off. “No, that won’t work.”
“I really think I should pay you for this work. Then it might be more clear who’s in charge of this project.”
Henrik had the nerve to chuckle. He was amused, not penitent. As if he had known her flash point and deliberately poked at it. She could feel her own, protective shell rising, but snapping at him would get her nowhere. For once, she decided to fight her instincts.
“Sorry,” she whispered. “That was rude.”
The corners of his eyes crinkled, and his gaze warmed more than just her face.
“Do you really think paying me will make me easier to work with?” he asked with a mischievous smile.
“No,” she snorted.
Stockholm Diaries, Melanie Page 6