“The view over the water can be a little deceptive—it’s pretty far away,” he continued, “but it’s usually downwind from here, and on the tip of that island, there’s a hotel and a restaurant.”
He looked at her and smiled a little.
“The other day, you asked me what you should do if something happened. If I’m not here…” He said those last words in a low voice. Then he continued, “If the water isn’t too rough, you can row out around this point and let the wind blow you over there. The hotel will have most of what you need.”
Mel laughed.
“It can’t be too much of an emergency,” she said. “Otherwise I might die a slow death while trying to get this little boat going.”
Henrik didn’t laugh.
“That’s why it’s best not to get yourself into too much trouble out here. It’s a trade-off—in exchange for this quiet, summer life,” he said, gesturing to their island, “you have to take care of yourself.”
“I like taking care of myself,” she whispered.
“I know, Melanie.”
She stared at the large island in the distance.
“Have you had any emergencies out here?” she asked.
His face lightened, and he shook his head. “Nothing worse than running out of good dinner food,” he said with a chuckle. “I go over there for a meal or to meet friends when I want some company. The restaurant has outdoor seating by the water.”
He turned the boat around and began to row back towards her cove as she considered his answer.
“Do you have friends out here?” she asked, gesturing to their island as well as a couple others nearby.
Henrik shrugged his shoulders. “A few. Your father was probably my closest friend out here. Most people I know are in the city.”
For a few minutes, there was only the sound of the oars slicing through the water. Then Henrik began to talk again.
“I have an apartment in Stockholm like your father did. And when I’m there I have more of a… a typical life. I go to meetings with my publisher, meet friends for dinner, go to the pub—that kind of thing.”
Mel tried to imagine Henrik in any of the places he had just listed, but she found it almost comical. The man she sat across from in the boat seemed so self-contained that she found it nearly impossible to see him accommodating the demands of everyday life. With other people. She could feel her smile grow as she imagined him jostled around on the subway platform.
Henrik was watching her again.
“You find that funny?”
Something about the mix of the image in her mind and his proper British accent brought the laugh bubbling to the surface.
“Only in the best way,” she chuckled.
He raised an eyebrow.
“Is there a best way to be laughed at?”
“Definitely,” she said, laughing harder.
He looked over at the shore, the corners of his mouth quirked up in wary amusement. He continued to row.
“Sorry. It’s just—” started Mel, the remnants of laughter still in her voice. She tried again. “It’s hard to imagine that you can get an entire city to bend to your will.”
“Why do you think I’m out here?” he asked, grinning now.
“Yeah, I got that.”
But was she so different from him? This extended trip to her father’s home wasn’t Mel’s first escape from her everyday life, though it was by far the most emotional and impulsive, if anything she had ever done could be called impulsive. She couldn’t imagine this man in front of her making anything close to an impulsive decision, either.
She watched the oars cut through the water.
“Tell me more about what my father was like,” she said.
“Not as dark as he sounds in his journals,” said Henrik with a smile.
He stopped rowing and stared down into the green-grey water, and he seemed to consider her question.
“Most of the time Björn didn’t say much, but he was… well, warm. I guess that’s the best way to describe it,” said Henrik, resting his elbows on his knees. “He was the kind of person who just makes you feel good without doing anything more than smiling. He could even make my mother look happy—and that says a lot.”
The corners of his mouth drew in to a sad smile.
“My father, well…,” Henrik paused, and the smile on his lips disappeared into a thin line. “My father certainly never made her happy, and even when she smiled at me, she never really looked happy. But when we were around Björn, everything was just… lighter. Better.”
Henrik seemed to be looking right through her as he spoke. Mel found herself watching his hands. He let go of the oars and let them drift over the still water. He clasped his hands together loosely, his thumbs moving restlessly against each other.
“That was the first summer we came here. The cabin was my mother’s place; my father wanted nothing to do with it. I think he was only here once to inspect the property. Buying it was his one and only concession in the marriage.”
Henrik frowned, but Mel kept still. He was offering her a glimpse at the pieces of him that he held so closely, and she didn’t want him to stop.
“So my mother and I were on our own for the first time. And even at five years old, I felt the relief, though I didn’t understand why at the time. Everything just felt easier. But my mother had lived her whole life in Stockholm, and she didn’t know the first thing about staying in a cabin for the summer.”
Henrik chuckled, and Mel turned red. Was this how he thought of her, too? But Henrik didn’t seem to notice that connection, or if he did, he didn’t let on. His mind remained in the past.
“We walked off the ferry with a couple bags of food and some clothes, ready for the summer. Your father was fishing off the ferry dock, so she showed him a photo of the cabin and asked him where it was. I can’t imagine how out of place we must have looked to him—like the last people he’d find on an island out this far. Your father took pity on us. If he hadn’t, we probably would have starved,” he said with a little snort. “My mother certainly wasn’t used to taking care of everything by herself.”
“I probably spent every day of that summer with him, fishing, throwing stones in the water. He taught me to swim, and then he’d sit on our deck, drinking his afternoon coffee with my mother and talking to her. I used to lay in bed wishing he were my father instead.”
Mel was blindsided by the stab of jealousy this last sentence brought. Björn had filled the role of a father for Henrik that summer. He had acted like a father to a child that wasn’t his. Over the years, she had wondered, maybe even hoped that her father was simply incapable of parenting. Though neither characteristic was particularly appealing, parental incompetence ranked above parental neglect. At least it was a little less insulting. But clearly, her father was perfectly capable of a father-like relationship—just not with her.
There was another silence. Henrik seemed unaware of her reaction. He rubbed his jaw and looked at her again.
“And then, after that summer, he was gone,” he said flatly, the smile fading from his face. “My mother had warned me that he wasn’t coming back, but still I wasn’t prepared for how empty the island felt without him.”
“He had moved to the U.S., to Massachusetts,” whispered Mel.
He frowned and nodded.
“Yes, he moved there and married your mother. Somehow I knew this, though I don’t remember my mother ever telling me. And I didn’t talk to him again until I was an adult. I think he might have been on the island a couple times, but I never saw him.”
Mel wasn’t quite sure what to say to all this. As far as she could tell, Henrik had spent plenty of time with her father in recent years, but he was still hurt from her father’s sudden abandonment such a long time ago. Mel felt a rush of familiar anger at her father—he hadn’t just left her mother and her; he had abandoned Henrik as well.
But Henrik’s feelings seemed to be mo
re complicated than the flat, dull anger that had stuck with her, flaring up unexpectedly at times. Henrik must have forgiven her father. Her father had come back and reestablished a relationship with Henrik. That simple fact hurt: Why did her father give Henrik a second chance and not her?
She looked back at the quiet, rocky shore.
“I understand now why you want to be involved in my father’s biography,” she said.
Henrik stopped rowing.
“It’s not that simple,” he said, and after a few moments of silence, she realized he wasn’t going to elaborate. His eyes were dark and intense, and she found her heart pounding as hard as it had before, when their bodies were touching. But then his maddening smile was back. “My life certainly hasn’t gotten simpler.”
She snorted at the thought, trying to hide the red she felt creeping up her neck.
They had come to the cove, and Henrik took a couple of last strokes with the oars. He balanced them on the edge of the boat and let the craft float towards the dock. He reached out his hand and guided them over to the ladder at the end.
“You can probably keep your boat at the dock as long as you tie it up tight. This cove is protected,” he said, gesturing for her to climb out. “Just don’t forget to bail it out when it rains.”
She nodded and took the rope from him, tying the boat to a cleat on one side. She could feel his gaze on her, making sure she knew how to tie the boat up correctly. He was looking after her, whether she liked it or not. Now that she was getting used to the idea, she had to admit it felt good for him to lift the weight of her doing everything on her own. After all, it was just for the summer.
Mel watched as Henrik climbed out of the boat. He looked so comfortable, so sure of himself. The sun was above them now, and the salt from his morning swim almost glistened in his hair.
“You’re all set for a solo escape from the island,” he said, bringing her back from her gawking. “Next, we’ll take on swimming.”
“Thanks,” Mel said, “but I think I can manage on my own.”
She regretted her knee-jerk reaction as soon as it came out of her mouth. He raised an eyebrow.
“But you haven’t gone swimming since that day, have you?” he asked softly.
“I haven’t thought about it,” she lied.
He was silent. There was only the sound of the water gently lapping against the side of her rowboat. And her pounding heart, she noted irritably.
“Okay, you’re right,” she finally conceded. “I’m scared to go back in the water. But I’m not sure I’m ready to give it another try.”
Henrik nodded, seemingly unphased by her change of course.
“Okay,” he said. “Whenever you want.”
They stood close together now, but Mel stared down at the dock. The water sloshed around the sides as she searched for what to say. No biting retorts came to mind, and his last comment had cut through her lingering defensive edge. Where did she go from here?
Finally, she met Henrik’s eyes and smiled.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
Such simple words. And they were rewarded with a nod and his warm smile that remained as they gathered their belongings.
Chapter 9
Mel’s morning walks with Alice took her around the island, along the rocky coastline with views of other archipelago islands, large and small, most dotted with cabins. Alice told Mel about her life in New York and how she ended up in Stockholm, and Mel found herself talking about her own life back in Massachusetts. She had never talked about her family with other friends before, though she wasn’t quite sure why. But uncovering all these pieces of her father’s life seemed to open that part of her as well. And it wasn’t nearly as uncomfortable as she’d thought it might be.
But the biggest surprise of her mornings was the discovery of her father’s poems. Of course, she had read them before, but always as clues to solve the puzzle of her own past. Now, for the first time, she tried to see through the windows that the poems themselves opened.
The love poems were difficult to distance herself from, but her father also wrote a small collection chronicling his life on this island that caught her attention. She’d pull out this thin volume and bring it to the kitchen table, reading lines between sips of coffee.
The fishing line disappeared into the belly of the sea
swallowed down whole
searching for dark, murky treasures
asking too much from this quiet beast.
Yet she still offers
She’d read until her coffee tasted cold and stale, and the poems stayed with her as she washed her dishes and ran through her head as her feet beat their rhythm on the path down to the water. It took many of these quiet mornings to understand that for the first time in her life, she had found a piece of her father she could carry inside her.
“THIS ISN’T MOVING fast enough,” said Mel, interrupting Henrik’s translation mid-sentence. His chair was pulled up next to hers, and he was leaning over with his forearms on his knees, holding the journal in front of him.
When she spoke, Henrik jerked his head up in surprise, and he chuckled.
“And to think that it was just a week ago that you were praising my translation abilities.”
Mel shook her head, but she felt a hint of a smile on her lips.
“That’s not what I meant,” she said. “You’re impressively good.”
This was the truth. He read her father’s words as if the story came straight from him. Most days she closed her eyes and just listened, almost believing that it was her father reading. She didn’t quite remember her father’s voice, but it had been something close to this: deep, low and with a different rhythm that must have come from Swedish.
But today Mel was distracted. After over a week of listening to her father’s journals, she still had nothing more to write. When Henrik left for the day, her afternoons were supposed to be filled with shaping the next part of the biography, but she was still stuck.
It wasn’t that the journals held nothing of interest; it was quite the opposite. Her father’s thoughts had begun to sketch the outline of him, pictures of a real, nuanced, living man and not just the famous cad that left her. But that wasn’t enough to make a book. She was still far from a coherent narrative.
Mel’s other biography, also of a poet, had been much more straightforward. The poet had a couple defining moments, events and decisions that seemed to steer the rest of his life. In late childhood he moved to rural Massachusetts, and in early adulthood his mother suddenly, terribly took her life. These two events took hold of him and twisted his path into something new, dark but ultimately beautiful.
What were her father’s defining moments? Leaving her mother behind? Mel had assumed this would be one of them, but nothing in the journals confirmed this, despite the fact that Henrik was reading from the years right after he had left. The only evidence was the She featured in his daily thoughts.
Mel sighed and leaned back in her father’s wooden chair.
“What’s the matter? You look…” Henrik’s deep green eyes were soft.
“You look sad,” he finally said.
She felt his hand, warm and soothing, against her as he tentatively smoothed her hair over her neck and down her back. She let out a deep, shuddering sigh, and felt his hand again, this time more certain. It was this last gesture that let her tears spill over, just this once, she told herself. She wiped them from her cheeks and then lifted her head, almost afraid to look at Henrik. Mel had promised herself years ago she wouldn’t cry over her father again.
Henrik was watching her, his mouth twisted into a grim mirror of her pain, but he didn’t say anything. His hand stopped at the base of her neck, caressing gently. He let go, and she closed her eyes, trying to save some of the warmth from his touch inside her. She opened her eyes again, and he tucked one side of her hair behind her ear the way she so often did herself. Then his thumb caught a stray tear and wiped
it away. She thought she felt a slight tremble in his touch.
“I’m sorry,” she said. Her voice came out in a decidedly uncivilized croak, and they both smiled a little.
“Please don’t be sorry,” he said gently. “Tell me what’s going on.”
“I came all the way over here to Sweden, to this island, hoping to understand why my father left,” she said, steadying her voice. “But since we began reading the journals, I realized I’m also looking for proof. Proof that he cared about me, that even if he left my mother for some reason, he regretted leaving me. That he missed me.”
The tears threatened again, but this time she was ready for them. After all, she had plenty of practice holding them back.
“But he didn’t write a single word about me the whole first year after he abandoned us,” she said. “Nothing.”
Henrik was still watching her, his mouth pressed into the same thin line, his eyes creased at the corners. His hand moved toward her face again as if he were going to do something—touch her? Kiss her? Anything felt possible at this point.
Instead he pulled his hand back, forearms resting on his knees, and his head hung in the space between.
“Melanie, I know your father cared about you.”
He said the words quietly but firmly.
Still she shook her head.
“No, Henrik. I know he was really good to you, but that’s not enough. He left me when I was four and never came back, never contacted me.”
He opened his mouth to argue but seemed to struggle with what to say next. Then he stood up and reached out his hand.
“Come with me. I want to show you something.”
Mel stared at his hand, meant for comfort, nothing more. But even just touching Henrik was both a danger and an aching temptation. She had avoided it since their trip to the mainland, and the incident in the rowboat the day before confirmed why. Working next to Henrik disrupted her enough without the further distraction of wondering where it might lead. Nowhere. He had made that clear, and she agreed. But the line they had established didn’t stop her acute awareness of his nearness, nor did it stop the pounding in her throat when she finally gave in and reached for his hand.
Stockholm Diaries, Melanie Page 10