His voice faded out, and he let her go. Mel lay back on her pillow so she could see his eyes and took a deep breath, preparing to ask the question that had lingered in her head since she had seen the photo of his mother.
“Henrik, could it have been your mother? Could she be the one my father wrote about, the one he came back for?”
He sat up, pulling himself away.
“No,” he snapped. “She would never have cheated on my father. Never.”
Mel froze. The room was silent, and she held her breath, wondering what would come next. His shoulders hunched as if he were guarding himself from a physical attack. He took a long, rough breath.
“The answer is no, and don’t even think about asking her.”
Mel stayed silent for a moment, waiting until he finally lifted his gaze to meet hers.
“If you want me to discuss things with you, you can’t yell and try to intimidate me every time I don’t agree with you.”
“But I don’t want to discuss the idea that my mother would have an affair. I can’t even think about it.”
“I didn’t want to hear that about my father, either.”
“That’s different. You didn’t know him.”
Mel’s breath hissed through her gritted teeth. She moved further away from him on the bed.
“You’re going to throw that at me? When you know how bad that fact hurts me?”
Henrik looked down, but he made no move to ease the edge of his comment.
Mel raised her eyebrows and kept her voice steady. “If we don’t discuss your mother, what should I do? Just write about it in my father’s biography?”
She hadn’t meant this as a threat, but his body stiffened as if it were one. Henrik’s eyes were cold and hard.
“I think it’s time for me to leave,” he said, climbing out of bed, careful not to touch her again.
The heavy silence built between them as he dressed. She didn’t say anything. She simply watched him leave.
MEL WOKE UP to the sunlight shining in her eyes. She glanced out the window, towards the overhead sun. She had drifted off into a restless sleep after Henrik had left, full of strange dreams she couldn’t remember. How long had she been out?
Mel dragged herself out of bed in search of the clock in her father’s office—her office, now. But when she opened the door, what she found herself looking at were the empty chairs, facing each other, almost touching. Where she and Henrik had sat.
But today, her cabin was silent. Each footstep she took broke the quiet, echoing her regret—for putting her own need for answers first, but mostly for taking advantage of Henrik’s most vulnerable point. Once again, she had let her simmering anger at her father’s abandonment guide her, this time at the expense of someone who she cared for.
When he’d left, he’d said nothing about seeing each other again, though she hadn’t either. Mel had to wonder if she had pushed him too far this time. Was this how her father had left her mother? The connection between her father and Henrik was tenuous at best, but Mel couldn’t help but feel that Henrik might just as easily do the same thing to her. He could just disappear. Her breath hitched at the thought.
Mel took a deep breath and blew it out slowly. She couldn’t spend the next few days with these thoughts spiraling through her head. She glanced around the room, trying to remember why she had come here in the first place. The clock.
She walked over to the desk and picked it up—11:00.
Alice would be stopping by, probably soon. At least she’d have someone to talk to. Mel hadn’t realized just how much she would need company today.
Chapter 21
“The view of the water is beautiful from here,” said Alice, settling into one of Mel’s deck chairs.
“It is,” said Mel, nodding. “I’m still getting used to it.”
Alice wrinkled her brow.
“Where’s Henrik? Not included with the cabin today?”
On any other day, the comment would have earned a laugh, but nothing about the situation with Henrik felt funny right now. Mel shook her head.
“Henrik left. I don’t know when he’ll be back.”
Alice’s eyes widened.
“Judging by the way he looked at you, I’m pretty sure he’ll be back soon. He’s clearly in love.”
It hurt to think about the distance between yesterday afternoon on the dock and later that night when he left. Mel rested her hand on her forehead.
“I’m afraid it’s the other way around. And last night ended badly. I’m not sure what will happen now.”
Alice raised her eyebrows.
“And you’re just here for the summer.”
Mel sighed.
“It’s never like this with me. Relationships aren’t usually so… complicated.”
That comment got a chuckle out of Alice, and Mel couldn’t help but laugh, too.
“I guess I’ve just been careful over the years,” said Mel, “not to get too involved. So this summer with Henrik is a surprise. And I’m just realizing how bad I am at falling in love.”
“And he’s tied up in the project you’re working on too?”
Mel frowned. “It’s complicated.”
“It always is,” laughed Alice. “These days I think Jonas is much better at understanding me than I am at him.”
Though everything Alice had told Mel suggested that Jonas’s and her future was far from settled, she didn’t look one bit unhappy with her situation. Quite the opposite, in fact. If Alice’s situation was still complicated, Mel had no idea how to describe her own relationship with Henrik.
Alice turned toward the cabin.
“I read one of your father’s poetry collections,” she said. “He was good—really good.”
“Yes,” Mel conceded, “he was good.”
Mel found it difficult to say these words without qualifying them, without adding something negative to balance the impression they gave of her father. But she had said it all to Alice before on their walks, so this time, she let it be.
“I hope you don’t mind,” said Alice, “but I’m dying to see what the inside of a poet’s cabin looks like. In the book publishing world, we love this kind of stuff.”
“I had the same thought when I arrived, too,” said Mel. “I wanted to see how a poet lived. But the experience itself is a little anticlimactic. It’s just an old cabin.”
Alice laughed. “I’ll prepare myself for the let-down.”
Mel opened the door and motioned for Alice to follow her in.
The cabin hadn’t changed much since Mel’s arrival. She had arranged her own possessions on some low shelving under the window next to the daybed, but otherwise, the cabin was still as sparse as she had found it.
“I love the wooden walls,” said Alice, running her hands over the unfinished panels. She stopped at the door to Mel’s father’s bedroom.
“Can I open it?”
Mel nodded and crossed the room, too. Alice took a couple steps and stopped.
“You haven’t taken over the bedroom yet?”
Mel shrugged.
“I don’t think anything in here is relevant to my research.”
Alice raised her eyebrows but didn’t respond. Mel frowned.
She added, “And I guess I wasn’t ready to go through his personal things yet. Though I might be ready now.”
Alice nodded.
“It feels like I shouldn’t be in here,” she said.
“It felt like that for me, too. The sacred ground of my famous father,” said Mel with a snort.
They retreated to the living room again.
“Well?” said Mel, gesturing around them. “Did this little cabin live up to your expectations?”
“Definitely,” Alice laughed. “Not a bit anticlimactic.”
“I feel that way about the island itself,” said Mel. “It’s so still, beautiful, closed off from the rest of the world.”
Alice smi
led. “Dreamlike, isn’t it?” she said. “But we’re not too closed off. If I stand on the end of the ferry dock, my cell phone even works.”
HER CELL PHONE works?
As soon as Alice walked out the door, Mel ran to the table and grabbed her little device. She threw on a sweater and some shoes and headed out.
The trail next to her house was warm and smelled of sweet decay. She turned onto the main dirt path and broke into a run down the hill, dodging stones and roots and cursing her father along the way.
Mel couldn’t help blaming her father for disturbing her carefully ordered world. If he hadn’t left her the house and his journals, she never would have found herself on this island, aching from the swirl of questions about her past.
Björn knew she was a biographer—her book sat on his bookshelf, the only one in English aside from his own poetry volumes. He left his cabin to her, knowing she’d have to come. Did he know this would lead her straight to Henrik? Was that his intention, too?
But nothing about her father was what it seemed. The poems, the photos, her grandmother’s revelation that it was her mother, not her father who had cut off relations between them, all conspired to shake up her world.
The wind hit her as she neared the clearing out to the water, slowing her pace. The heartbeat in her ears pulsed the question she had asked her whole life: Why did her father leave? All these events boiled down to that selfish question, and she was so tired of it.
Mel stepped onto the dock, gripping the phone hard in her hand. She walked out to the end and looked down into the dark water. This was it. Her heart thumped, and she took a few short breaths, gathering herself together. She braced herself, at least conscious of the fact that if her own phone didn’t get a signal out here, she would be more than disappointed. It was time to check.
After speaking to her grandmother, she was so angry at her mother she couldn’t think straight. But as her anger cooled, the questions for her mother rang louder in her mind. She would always regret not asking her father why he had left. Her mother had avoided answering the question many times before, but this time Mel wasn’t going to back down.
She took a deep breath and looked at the screen of her phone. A signal, small, but there. Her heart pounded in her throat, and she swallowed hard. She found her mother’s number and called it. The wind blew in her ear, distorting the sound, and she turned away.
“Mel? Is that you?”
“Yes.”
“Are you okay? You’re calling me from Sweden?”
Mel almost laughed aloud. Despite longstanding, everyday use of the telephone, its standard capabilities still seemed to take everyone by surprise.
“I’m fine.”
Sort-of.
“How’s your summer?”
A gust of wind blew loudly into the microphone, and Mel turned towards the shore, trying to shield the phone from the wind.
“Mom, I found some things here—journals, photos, things he saved.”
Mel paused, waiting for her mother to say something. She heard nothing.
“Was it you who broke off contact with my father?”
Silence. Mel turned, cupping her hand against the receiver, but she still didn’t hear anything. Maybe her mother had hung up. It wasn’t out of the question, considering the direction that previous conversations about her father had taken. Mel glanced at the screen of her phone, but the seconds still ticked away.
“Mother?”
Still nothing. But in that silence was the answer that she already knew.
“Why?” she whispered. “For all these years I thought he left us.”
“He did,” said her mother. The anger in her voice hadn’t mellowed over the years, even with Mel’s father’s death. It was still there, lurking under the surface, waiting for provocation.
“Your father didn’t want us. He wanted someone else, someone back in Sweden. When I found his journals, her name was all over them. I couldn’t read a word of Swedish, but I knew what it was. And when I showed them to him, he admitted it.”
Her mother’s voice cracked. After all these years, his betrayal still hurt her. Mel felt a little of her anger drain away.
“I gave him a choice,” said her mother. “Leave her behind, no more poems, no more contact, and just be with us, or get out of our lives forever. I couldn’t have it half way, knowing that he’d leave us if the other woman changed her mind. Well, you know who he chose. And for all I know he went back to find her. He didn’t love us, and he would have left sooner or later.”
He chose loving this woman in his journal over loving her mother. And her. How could this knowledge still hurt? But it did. Her mother’s words ran through her mind again: He didn’t love us. Her mother had neatly wrapped her into the assessment. Did her father see it this way, too? More questions raced to the front of her mind, but when Mel opened her mouth to speak, nothing came out.
Finally, she whispered, “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Her mother’s response came quickly and evenly, as if she had prepared it long ago.
“He didn’t deserve any connection with you. And if you had really wanted to know, you could have asked him yourself.”
Mel’s hand throbbed from squeezing the phone so tightly. As she eased her grip, she felt the sudden urge to throw the phone as far as she could into the Baltic, cutting off all ties to the rest of the world. Wouldn’t that be easier? Mel squeezed her eyes shut and swallowed.
“I didn’t know he would die so young,” her mother added, her voice barely there.
Did she hear a hint of regret, a hint that her mother saw this from Mel’s perspective, too?
“Mel, he was selfish, in his own world. Seeing him would have been a terrible disappointment. No good would have come out of it.”
“Maybe,” said Mel. “But I wish I had made that choice myself, with all the information.”
Finally, Mel felt the well of tears in her eyes. Behind the anger of this conversation was sadness, the sadness that no matter the reasons behind her mother’s decision, and no matter how angry Mel got, in the end, it was too late. She would never know her father. He was far, far from the kind of father she had hoped for him to be, but still it seemed better than no father at all. Which is what she had now.
“What was the woman’s name?”
Mel’s voice came out raw and low.
“I don’t remember,” her mother said.
Mel was almost sure this was a lie, but there was a finality in her mother’s voice that told her she wouldn’t get further. Another gust of wind blew through the microphone.
“I can barely hear you out here,” said Mel. “I’ll call you back another day.”
“I did it for you, honey,” came her mother’s voice. “I really did what I thought was best for you.”
One of the tears that was blurring Mel’s vision fell. Her mother still believed this.
“We’ll talk about it when I come back,” whispered Mel, and she hung up.
She stuffed her phone into her pocket and brushed her hair out of her face, her mother’s words still running through her head. She had already known that her mother had cut off contact with her father—that much she had learned from her grandmother. But somehow, this conversation left Mel far more distressed. Did her mother really believe, deep down, that she’d done what was best for Mel? Did her mother truly think that seeing Björn again would have made Mel’s life worse? Or was this just a self-serving excuse for her own bitterness and vengeance toward the man who hadn’t loved her back?
Mel shivered as the wind blew through her clothes. She lifted her heavy legs and took steps forward, again, again, until her feet hit the soft, brown earth of the shore. She continued along the trail, up the hill, the way she had come the first morning of her arrival. What had she thought she would find that first day? Evidence that her father regretted leaving them? His journals held no evidence of this. The only tangible proof that he thought of her wa
s her school photos. Even the conversations Henrik had with her father felt nebulous, not quite real.
Maybe she had been just as far from the other poet she had written on, despite all her research; she just had never realized it. Her drive to write biographies was built on what she was beginning to think of as a faulty premise: that she could fundamentally understand another person.
Mel reached the top of the first slope and slowed in front of the turn-off to Henrik’s cabin. She swallowed back her tears. Her ache wasn’t only for her father, she realized. What she wanted more than anything at this moment was to tell Henrik all these thoughts. And he would hold her tight enough to pull her out of the quicksand of emotions she just couldn’t stop struggling against. She would feel his lips on her cheek, his hands on her hair, down her back.
But once again, Mel understood this too late. His mother was there now, and nothing was stopping him from disappearing back into Stockholm when he drove her home. She turned away from Henrik’s place and walked back to the little red cabin.
Mel walked in the door and headed to the daybed that she had slept on for the summer. She stopped in front of it. She had never moved into her father’s bedroom. Would she avoid that room forever? Maybe she was finally ready. After all, what was she afraid of?
But the events of the day had already overwhelmed her senses. Instead Mel crawled under her own covers, pulled the other pillow—Henrik’s pillow, infused with the scent of him—over her head, and fell asleep.
Chapter 22
What time was it? She had absolutely no idea how long she had been asleep, except that she felt rested.
Had she slept through dinner? Her stomach told her the answer was yes. She looked around the open room for clues. Sunlight shone through the windows, ruling out the dead of night but little else. Which direction was the light coming from—the office?
Mel dragged herself out of bed in search of a clock. It sat at her father’s—her—desk, right where she left it, and it read 8:23 am.
Whoa.
She had slept the entire afternoon, evening, night and into the next day. Her arm shook as she set down the clock again.
Stockholm Diaries, Melanie Page 19