by Jessica Lidh
I wanted to collapse. How could it be this whole month, this suffocating month of mourning, and I hadn’t thought about it? The American Swedish Historical Museum. The old man with the stories and the fika. I needed to revisit that large, dark building and go talk to the man. Somehow he could help me.
The bus was running late and we arrived at the museum near closing. The parking lot was as deserted as it had been the first time, but I knew better. In my memory, I could see the old man sitting up in his stuffy library with his shoes to the side and his socked feet rubbing themselves against the carpeted floor. I saw him leafing through old photo albums and carefully fingering the cracked spines of dusty books.
“I’ll wait here.” Gabe zipped up his ski jacket and shoved his hands in his pockets.
“But I—”
“You need to find it on your own. Whatever it is. I’ll be here when you get out.” Gabe nodded toward the door. “You better hurry—it closes in ten minutes.”
I stood conflicted but turned to go. Gabe was right. I needed to hurry. I clenched my own fists together to keep warm while sprinting up the cement steps to the museum entrance.
I rang the bell three times to make sure the front desk heard me. The door slowly opened.
“We’re closing.” The same unfriendly woman wrapped her cardigan tightly around her shoulders as she squinted down at me.
“I know,” I bounced my knees nervously. “But there’s someone I need to look for.”
I tried to peer behind her beyond the lobby and up the staircase. She watched my eyes, and I saw a hint of recognition as her face softened. She stepped aside to let me pass through the doorway.
I waited at the front reception, never once taking my eyes off the staircase, waiting to see the old man materialize. The woman bolted the door against the winter wind and slowly shuffled her way behind the desk. I hurriedly dug through my shoulder bag to produce the entrance fee, but the woman held up her hand to stop me.
“He’s not here.”
“The old man?”
My question seeped with disappointment. I met her gaze and immediately regretted it. Standing in the cold lobby, I found myself staring at a woman whose red-rimmed eyes expressed unquestionable bereavement.
“He passed away last week.” She inhaled deeply and shut her eyes as she composed herself. Her palms pressed firmly down on the desk as she managed a tender smile, “He suspected you might come back.”
I couldn’t find the words to say anything. A growing ball lodged itself inside my throat.
The woman bent beneath the desk and reappeared, producing a large manila envelope. “He gave us explicit instructions to leave this for you. In case you came back.” She held out the paper envelope for me to take. For a moment I just stared at it, unsure what to do. Finally, she pushed it further toward me.
“I’m going to go turn off the lights, and then you’ll have to go.”
I stood alone in the lobby wondering what I might find inside the parcel. It wasn’t completely sealed, and one of the metal brackets had broken off. I bent the remaining clasp up and released the flap. Inside was a newspaper clipping and a note written from a shaking hand; the script barely legible.
Flicka: After our conversation, I could not help but recall an old myth from my youth. At first I did not believe the chances of your relation to my childhood hero, but as I combed over the books I kept as a boy, I found the proof for which I had searched. Now, you have it. I hope you know what your grandfather did for his country during sadder days long ago. Find a Swedish friend and have him read this article to you during fika. I think this may answer some of your questions. Vi syns, Henrik Malmström
The newspaper clipping was yellowed, with fragile, torn edges, and had multiple creases where it had once been tenderly folded. Big block letters read,
“FANTOMEN PÅ SJUAN SLÅR TYSKARNA!”
The Number 7 Phantom Takes Germans!
XXXV.
I decided I needed to write my grandfather’s story out while everything was still fresh in my memory. It took me two weeks and forty pages to get it right. Gabe constantly asked me about my new, important project. It was difficult for me to keep him out, but I promised that he’d be there for the final reveal. I made sure Dad didn’t suspect anything. I needed to tell the story on my own terms; I needed to tell it how it was told to me. But I kept postponing the retelling. It never seemed like the right time. And then, something happened that made it impossible for me to put it off any longer. Greta and I had pulled into our driveway in The Thing one Friday in early April. We were alone; Dad was still at work. Greta turned the ignition off, but she didn’t move to open the door. She stared straight toward the house before holding up her arm.
“This,” she pulled up her sleeve and offered her wrist to me so I was forced to look. “This was a mistake. It was stupid. I did it once and I’ll never do it again. I know that. And I won’t just disappear again. I’ve said my goodbyes to Mom now. But damn it, Louisa, we have to stop pretending. All of us. I can’t be invisible anymore. We need to see each other again; we have to open our eyes and stop turning away from each other. We’re all we’ve got, Lou.”
I sat rigidly still until she reached out and tenderly placed her hand on my leg.
“I miss her, Lou. So unbelievably much. But I changed when she died. So did you, and so did Dad. We’re all going to have to move on, I get that now, but we have to do it together.”
“No matter what you believe, Greta,” I swallowed, staring at her across the armrest, “you’ve never been invisible to me. I love you, but I can’t keep your secret any longer.”
“I know. I’m going to talk to Dad. He and I have a lot of catching up to do, I guess.” She smiled softly, and then she reached for the door. “I love you, too, Louisa.”
Dad wasn’t supposed to get back for another hour. I fetched the mail out of the mailbox, but the box’s lid came unhinged. An old, rusted screw fell to the ground into the pansy bed Gabe had recently planted for us. Purple and yellow petals fluttered in the light spring breeze. Summer was coming. Soon, we’d be barefoot. I reached down to grab the loose screw from the moist dirt. I needed a screwdriver, and I knew just where to find one. How hard could it be to fix a mailbox?
The cellar doors were heavy. The smell of damp earth overtook me as I slowly stepped down into the humid cavity. Grandpa’s workbench was still covered with cobwebs and sawdust. The cellar was a giant catacomb for various parts, miscellaneous pieces, and scrap metal. His model trains were strewn in pieces, some unfinished, some unpainted. I looked under the table for his toolbox but found none. Old coffee cans housed loose nuts, bolts, screws, and nails. A hammer and a socket wrench sat in an old wire crate, but no screwdriver. I reached for a coffee can high up on a crowded shelf. More loose parts. Where was the screwdriver? And then I spotted a wooden toolbox under some used paint cans. I lugged the box to the top of the workbench, got it under the light, and blew off a thick layer of dusty grime. The top lifted easily.
In the top tray of the box lay a handful of rusty nails. I picked up the tray and placed it aside. I finally found the screwdriver underneath an oily rag, but my hand knocked against something else when I moved to pick up the screwdriver. I slowly pulled the object out of the ancient toolbox: an old tin container for Cherrydale Farms Peanut Crunch.
I shook the tin and the contents that rattled inside. The lid was rusted onto the base, but I tried working it, and it popped off without much trouble. Inside the container, I found Dad’s boyhood treasures—the ones he’d described to me in the woods on Thanksgiving morning. I dumped the contents onto the workbench: a pinecone, a chestnut, stones of various shapes, sizes, and colors, an old harmonica, a few wooden spools of thread, a snakeskin, a small, whittled, wooden horse, and one long mallard feather. But there was something else inside, wrapped in an old handkerchief.
I slowly unfolded the cloth. There, gleaming dully under the faint cellar light was Grandfather’s pocket watch. I recogn
ized it at once. Its face was cracked, just as Grandma had said it would be. I lifted the timepiece out of its temporary casket and turned it over in my hands in disbelief. I wound the stem, hoping to hear it run, but it remained silent. Maybe it was too old. Maybe it’d been too long. I polished the gold case on the end of my shirt and held it up to the light. I read the faint inscription:
Till min son med hjältens själ.
Grandpa had added to Leif’s inscription. What message had he left behind? What did he want us to know?
In my bedroom, I held the timepiece closed in my palm as I leafed through the Swedish-English dictionary I’d bought at the used bookstore with Chris. The first part of the inscription I knew. Till min son, to my son. But what was med hjältens själ? I looked up each word and scratched them down in pencil on a loose scrap of paper. And then I saw it—the translation complete. Of course.
To my son with the hero’s soul.
I held the watch near my ear. Silence.
I had to try it again. Just once more. I hesitantly popped the winding stem, and twisted it between my thumb and forefinger. It spun to the right, and I wound it until it clicked into place. Incredibly, the watch started to tick. The sound was so beautiful, so simple. It was both soft and deafening. It reminded me of Grandma’s phone. Whispers of sounds of lives long gone. Tick, tick, tick, tick. This was my grandfather’s voice, his spirit echoing from the folds of time, that space between earth and the grave. He was telling me he needed his son to know the truth. He was telling me to finish the story.
I sat alone on our front steps with the watch, staring blankly into the yard until Dad pulled into the driveway. He whistled as he unloaded his briefcase from the car.
He took a seat next to me on the stoop, moving the watch to make room and handing it to me without a second glance. He had no idea what he’d just held.
“Those buckets—” Dad pointed across the street to the galvanized containers clinging to the sugar maples. “We need to tap them again. My dad taught me how to do it once, but I thought maybe you and I could get them going again. I think he would like that.”
“Dad, I—” My face felt flushed.
“Hey, you okay?” He finally looked at me. Really looked at me. He wrapped his arm around me and pulled me close to him.
“I need to tell you something,” my voice trembled.
I was stalling. This was harder than I thought. I felt guilty for keeping Grandma’s calls from him. It had already been too long. It wasn’t my gift to keep. Since we’d arrived, Dad had tried catching up with the life he’d once had when he lived with his parents on October Hill Road. With my help, he was about to meet the Gerhard Magnusson he never knew, to know his story, to know his heart. I was going to introduce him to the Gerhard who loved and laughed and lived; the Gerhard who died with his brother. I was finally able to give Dad what he never had: the truth about his father, the hero and the coward. This wasn’t only Gerhard’s story. This was Dad’s story. This was my story.
I took my seat at the head of the table and gently placed the old man’s newspaper clipping and Grandpa’s stopwatch on the surface next to Grandma’s antique telephone. Its rotary and letters were no longer foreign to me. I knew its weight and the way it felt against my ear. I knew its shape on the attic desk, the shadows it sent against the wall, and the sound it made when it rang. This phone was the direct line to my grandmother and grandfather. In it, I’d heard of all the events that led me here.
I looked around the table at the faces of my family: Dad, Greta, Rosemary, and Gabe. Somewhere near—I could feel them close—Mom and Grandma watched over us. They stood as anxiously as the rest, each wanting to hear this, too. It felt good to have them there. The narrative was complete, and yet it was just starting.
I took a deep breath and let the story begin: “The problem with hiding secrets is they run a lot faster than we do. They’re bound to catch up with us sometime or another.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jessica Lidh pulls inspiration from her Swedish heritage and experiences as a high-school teacher in suburban Maryland. In encouraging young minds to suck the marrow out of life, Jessica often uncovers the fascinating and hilariously horrifying insights of the twenty-first century teenager. When Jessica isn’t fervently teaching or writing, she loves to watch old musicals, bake Swedish cinnamon buns, and go on imaginary bear hunts with her daughter, Elsa.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would never have happened if not for a handful of invaluable people in my life. Mom, Dad, and April, thank you for believing in and encouraging me from the time I first learned to pick up a pencil. Todd, thank you for convincing me I could actually write this story, for being my constant sounding board for ideas, and for loving me endlessly. The Nilssons (young and old) and the Wilhelmssons, thank you for showing me your Sweden and welcoming me into your families. My wonderful agent, Kimiko Nakamura with Dee Mura Literary, there aren’t enough thank yous to fit on this page to adequately express my appreciation for all you’ve done with this novel. To the good people at Merit Press, thank you for wanting to share my story with the world. I hope I’ve made you all proud.
Copyright © 2015 by Jessica Lidh.
All rights reserved.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher; exceptions are made for brief excerpts used in published reviews.
Published by
Merit Press
an imprint of F+W Media, Inc.
10151 Carver Road, Suite 200
Blue Ash, OH 45242. U.S.A.
www.meritpressbooks.com
ISBN 10: 1-4405-8306-4
ISBN 13: 978-1-4405-8306-3
eISBN 10: 1-4405-8307-2
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-8307-0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lidh, Jessica.
The number 7 / Jessica Lidh.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-4405-8306-3 (hc) -- ISBN 1-4405-8306-4 (hc) -- ISBN 978-1-4405-8307-0 (ebook) -- ISBN 1-4405-8307-2 (ebook)
[1. Families--Fiction. 2. Secrets--Fiction. 3. Swedish Americans--Fiction.] I. Title. II. Title: Number seven.
PZ7.1.L53Nu 2014
[Fic]--dc23
2014026764
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.
Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book and F+W Media, Inc. was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed with initial capital letters.
Cover design by Frank Rivera.
Cover images © Igor Stevanovic/Victor Zastolskiy/123RF.