by Maria Parr
It’s often difficult to understand that people are dead, Mom explained that evening. It was warm and safe in her arms. She was right. I wasn’t able to understand anything. It was strange that I would never see Auntie Granny again.
“You can see her one last time, if you’d like,” said Mom.
I’d never seen a dead person before. But that Tuesday I got to see Auntie Granny. I was dreading it. Lena said that all dead people have blue faces, especially those who have died of heart attacks. I think Magnus and Minda were dreading it too. Krølla just sat up on Dad’s shoulders, grinning.
But it wasn’t creepy. Auntie Granny wasn’t blue. She looked like she was sleeping. I almost thought she was going to open her eyes. Maybe all this dying was only a mistake. I stood there for a long time, watching her eyelids. They didn’t move. I imagined she opened them and looked at me and said, “My goodness, Trille, my young boy, how handsome you look!” I had dressed up, even if Auntie Granny was dead and couldn’t see anything at all. Before we left, I touched her hand. She was cold. Almost like snow.
The funeral was on Thursday, but I’d been to one before. Lena got to come along. She’d known Auntie Granny too. I think Lena thought it was pretty boring at the funeral. I couldn’t cry.
“Now Auntie Granny’s in heaven,” Mom said when we came home.
That was hard to believe, I thought, because they’d buried her coffin down in the earth at the graveyard.
“Is it true, Grandpa?” I asked a little later, “that Auntie Granny’s in heaven?”
Grandpa was sitting in his rocking chair, looking straight ahead, wearing his best suit.
“Yes, it’s as true as the day is long, Trille lad. The angels will have a good time up there now! And here we are . . .”
He didn’t say any more.
Mathildewick Cove was in mourning now. The whole beginning of December was strange and quiet and full of bouquets of flowers. We missed Auntie Granny. Eventually Lena threw open our door with a bang and said that I should come out and throw snowballs and stop being a rotten haddock.
“What’s wrong with you? You haven’t got a concussion, have you?” She stood there impatiently in her snowsuit.
And so we threw snowballs, Lena and I. Actually, it was good. Afterward I wanted to go over to Lena’s, because it had been so long.
“You’re not allowed,” she said harshly.
I didn’t understand, but my neighbor had a very determined expression on her face, so I didn’t ask again. Maybe she had an enormous surprise Christmas present for me in there.
Christmas came that year too, but everything was different, since Auntie Granny wasn’t there with us. Nobody was sitting at her place at the table. Nobody folded up the wrapping paper and said that it was bad to throw away such nice paper. Nobody sang in a high-pitched old lady’s voice when we went around the Christmas tree, and it was Mom who had to gather us in front of the Christmas crèche and read the Nativity story. And I didn’t receive any knitted sweaters. Imagine being sad about that!
In the evening, Lena dropped in to say merry Christmas. We went up to the ropeway window. I noticed that Lena had closed the curtains in her room. What was it that she didn’t want me to see? She’d given me some shin guards for Christmas, so it couldn’t be another present. It was almost two weeks since I’d last been to their house.
“Is heaven above the stars?” Lena asked before I had a chance to ask her anything myself.
I peered up and said that I thought it must be. Auntie Granny would be puttering around up there with the angels and Jesus. I figured she’d given them knitted sweaters for Christmas.
“They’re probably itching between the wings now,” I said. “The angels, I mean.”
But Lena didn’t feel particularly sorry for the angels.
“They’ll be eating waffles too,” she said.
Then I remembered what I hadn’t told Lena: “I’ve inherited something. I was allowed to choose one thing from Auntie Granny’s house that would be only for me.”
“Were you allowed to choose anything at all?” Lena asked.
I nodded.
“What did you choose, then? The sofa?”
“I chose her picture of Jesus. It’s hanging above my bed, so now I don’t need to be afraid anymore.”
Lena went quiet for a long time. I had thought she would tease me for not choosing the sofa or something else big, but she didn’t. She just pressed her nose against the windowpane and made a strange face.
I thought that now that Auntie Granny had died, it would be a long, long time before something sad happened again. But that wasn’t the case.
“Are you all right, Trille dear?” Mom asked on the day after Boxing Day. She sat down with me after I’d made a slice of bread with liver paste for dinner.
“Yes,” I said, smiling.
“But it’s going to be quite lonely for you when Lena leaves, my sweet.”
It was like the piece of bread dried up in my mouth.
“Who’s leaving?” I asked, breathless.
Mom stared at me. She looked shocked.
“Hasn’t Lena told you that she’s moving? They’ve been packing for several weeks!”
I tried to swallow the bread, but it just sat there. Mom took my hand and squeezed it hard.
“My darling Trille! Didn’t you know?”
I shook my head. Mom squeezed my hand even harder, and while I sat in silence, she told me that Lena’s mom had half a year left to do at art school, which she hadn’t finished before Lena was born. Now she’d gotten back into the school, so they were going to move to town. They were going to live next to Isak. Maybe Lena would have a real dad soon.
I sat there, the bread and liver paste in my mouth, unable to swallow it or spit it out. So that was why I hadn’t been let in! Lena was going to move! She was going to go right ahead and move without even saying anything! I could see that Mom was really sorry for me. And I could understand why!
This was not right! I got up so fast that the kitchen chair fell over. I ran out in Magnus’s shoes and hit at the hedge as I went through that horrible hole. It was so dark that I tripped on Lena’s steps, sending my liver paste and bread down the wrong way. Spluttering and angry, I threw open the door, like Lena usually does, and stomped inside.
There were cardboard boxes everywhere. Lena’s mother appeared from behind one of them, surprised. We stood there looking at each other. Suddenly I didn’t know what to say. The cardboard boxes were so strange. Lena’s house didn’t look like itself anymore.
Lena sat in the kitchen, not eating her dinner. I went right over to her. I thought I’d yell, like she normally does. I was going to shout—so loud it would echo around the half-empty kitchen—that you can’t just move without telling people! I’d opened my mouth to do it—but then it didn’t come out. Lena didn’t look like herself anymore either.
“Are you going to move?” I whispered eventually.
Lena turned around and looked out the kitchen window. We could see each other’s reflections there. We looked at each other in the dark window, and then Lena got up and sneaked her way past me. She disappeared into her room. And closed the door quietly.
Lena’s mom dropped everything she was holding.
“Didn’t you know, Trille?” she asked, looking even more shocked than Mom had. There was a piece of tape stuck in her hair. She climbed over the cardboard boxes and threw her arms around me.
“I’m so sorry! We’ll come and visit lots, I promise. It’s not far from town.”
For the rest of the week, Lena and I each sat in our houses and waited.
“Aren’t you going out to play with Lena before she goes?” Mom kept asking. And I felt that I was the only one in the whole world who understood Lena. Of course we couldn’t play now.
On New Year’s Eve, we held a farewell party at our house, with loads of food and fireworks. Isak was there too. I couldn’t bring myself to speak to him or Lena. Besides, Lena didn’t speak to anyone.
She sat there looking angry all evening—her mouth set in a straight line. It only turned into a circle when Grandpa stuck one finger in each of her cheeks and pressed so that he could pop in a chocolate.
When the moving van came, I stood at the ropeway window, watching the moving men, Lena’s mom, and Isak carrying the cardboard boxes out of the white house. Lena came last of all. I’d been wondering whether they would have to carry her too, but she walked by herself and sat down in the back of Isak’s car. I felt that I had to go outside, but first I went to my room and took down the picture of Jesus.
Lena didn’t look at me. There was a thick car window between us. I knocked, and was a little surprised when she opened it. To be fair, it was only a small gap, but it was just big enough for me to push Jesus through. And just big enough for me to say good-bye. But it was apparently too small for Lena to say it.
“Good-bye,” I whispered one more time while Lena gripped my picture and turned away.
Then they drove off.
That evening I was so sad that I didn’t know what to do. It was completely impossible to get to sleep. Dad must have understood, because he came up to my room long after he had said good night. He brought his guitar.
I didn’t say anything. Neither did Dad, who sat on the edge of the bed. But after a while, he cleared his throat and began to play. He played the Trille tune, just like when I was tiny. It’s my very own song, and it was Dad who wrote it. When he finished, he said that he’d written a brand-new song for me, called “Sad Son, Sad Dad.”
“Do you want to hear it, Trille?”
I gave a tiny nod.
And as the wintry wind swirled around the house and everyone else slept, my dad played “Sad Son, Sad Dad.” I almost couldn’t see him because it was so dark. I just listened.
And suddenly I realized what dads are for.
When he’d finished, I cried and cried. Because Lena didn’t have a dad, because Auntie Granny was dead, and because my best friend had moved away without saying good-bye.
“I never want to get out of bed again!”
That was all right, said Dad. He said he would bring food up to me even if I stayed there right up until my confirmation. Then I cried even more, because it was going to be a terrible life.
“Will I ever be happy again?” I asked.
“Of course you’ll be happy again, Trille, my boy,” said Dad, lifting me up onto his lap as if I were a little child. I fell asleep there that evening, and hoped that I would never, ever wake up again.
I did get up the next day.
“What’s the point of staying in bed?” I said to Grandpa, who heartily agreed.
“No, it’s not worth staying in bed, lad.”
But I wasn’t happy, even if I might have looked like it after a couple of days. I went around trying to smile when someone was kind to me, because they all were, but inside I was just sad. Sometimes I stopped what I was doing and wondered how everything could change so quickly. Only a short time ago, Mathildewick Cove had been full of Auntie Granny’s waffles and Lena’s noise, and then suddenly almost everything I cared about had completely vanished. I had nobody to go to school with, nobody except Krølla to play with, and nobody to sit at the ropeway window with. Instead I had a big, painful lump inside me, which would never disappear. I felt the lump was there mostly because Lena had left. That had changed everything. Trees weren’t for climbing anymore, and my feet wouldn’t run. She must have had something to do with food too, because suddenly nothing tasted like anything. It made no difference if I ate bread with liver paste or ice cream. I almost wondered if I should stop eating. When I told Grandpa, he suggested that I should start eating boiled cabbage and cod-liver oil.
“Seize the day, lad!”
Grandpa was now the best thing in my life. He understood everything without going on at me. Plus he was missing someone too. Everyone was sad. We missed Auntie Granny, and we missed Lena, and we missed Lena’s mom. But it was Grandpa and me who were saddest. The whole day was full of sadness, from when we got up to when we went to bed.
When an entire week had passed and I’d experienced the first Friday without Lena, Grandpa and I were sitting at his small kitchen table, listening to the wind. I had been to school and walked there and back alone. When I came home, I was drenched with sleet and tears. Grandpa was the only one in, and he’d just made hot coffee. He gave me ten lumps of sugar and half a cup of coffee. There’s no stopping Grandpa. Ten lumps of sugar!
I told him about my day. The boys in my class thought it was more boring at school now that Lena had left. The class had been quiet and strange, and not nearly as perfect as Kai-Tommy thought it would be without girls. I didn’t say anything else for a while and picked at the sugar cubes. Thinking that Lena was never going to be in my class again was so sad that my stomach tied itself in knots.
“Grandpa, I miss her dreadfully,” I said in the end, starting to cry again.
Grandpa looked at me seriously and said that missing people is the best sad feeling there is.
“You see, Trille lad, if you’re sad because you miss someone, then that means you care about that person. And caring about someone is the best thing there is. We carry the people we miss inside us.” He put his hand to his chest with a thump.
“Oh . . .” I said, pulling my sleeve across my eyes. “But, Grandpa, you can’t play with people who are in there.” I sighed, thumping my hand on my own chest.
Grandpa nodded heavily. He understood.
We didn’t say any more, Grandpa and I. The wind whirled around the buildings, making enough noise. I didn’t want to go out sledding by myself.
When I went back upstairs, Mom had made my favorite meal for dinner. It was the third time that week. Maybe I should’ve told her that I couldn’t taste anything, but I decided not to. By the time I went to bed, it felt as if I had strained my smiling muscles. They were completely exhausted.
“Dear God, please give me back my sense of taste,” I prayed.
The sad lump in my stomach meant that I couldn’t sleep. I lay there listening to the horrible weather instead. Suddenly there was a bang on the windowpane.
“Help!” I mumbled, sitting up in bed, afraid.
There was another bang. I wished I still had Jesus above my bed! I was just about to run through to Mom and Dad’s room when someone half whispered and half shouted, “Come on, open the window, you dozy dormouse.”
I sprang up and practically flew across to the window.
There was Lena, standing outside. In the middle of the night.
“Smoking haddocks! I thought I’d have to smash the window before you heard me,” she said irritably when I opened it.
I didn’t say anything. Lena was standing outside my window with her backpack on her back and her knitted hat on her head, and it felt like I hadn’t seen her for a hundred years. She didn’t say anything for a while either. She just looked at me in my pajamas.
“It’s cold,” she said at last.
Shortly afterward we were sitting in the kitchen drinking hot water. It was the quietest thing we could think of. Lena hadn’t taken off her hat. She’d run away hours ago and was so cold that her teeth were chattering.
“I’ll move into the hay barn,” she said.
“Into the hay barn? Our hay barn?”
Lena nodded. And then a sob came out of her. I could see that she was struggling to look normal. For a long time she sat like that with a very strange look on her face, but eventually the tears came anyway. She was crying. Lena Lid, who never cries!
“Lena,” I said, brushing tears from her cheek. I didn’t know what else I should do; she might strike out or something if I tried to hug her.
“Have you got a sleeping bag or haven’t you?” she asked, a little severely.
“I have.”
When I went back to bed, I was the only one who knew that my best friend had moved back to Mathildewick Cove. She was lying out in the barn, wrapped up in a blanket, a sleeping bag, and the hay
. And even if it was creepy to sleep in a dark barn all alone, she probably slept like a log, because the picture of Jesus was lying next to her in the hay. I’d never been part of anything so secret before. And I’d never been so happy.
The next morning, I didn’t remember immediately what had happened during the night. I just knew that I was happy. And when I did remember, I thought I must have dreamed it. I got up like a shot. The wind had stopped blowing, and the fjord lay there light blue and smooth as a mirror. Everything was so bright with the snow, the sun, and the sea; I’d never seen anything like it.
Mom was talking on the phone when I came downstairs. Nobody noticed me running outside. I bounded over to the hay barn. It was so cold that my footprints didn’t show in the icy snow, and my heart was beating so lightly that I think I could have flown if I’d tried.
When there’s such good weather outside, rays of sunlight come streaming into the hay barn, making it look like a church. I made my way to the far corner, farthest from the door, where Lena had been lying behind a stack of dry hay. The sleeping bag and the blanket were there. The picture of Jesus too. But not Lena.
“Lena?” I whispered nervously.
What if I had dreamed it after all?
“Up here!” she said.
I looked up. Lena was sitting on the top beam, right under the roof. And then she jumped.
She fell and fell and landed next to me in the hay without being hurt in the slightest. I smiled. So did Lena.
“I’ve fallen off so many high places that it’s become second nature. There’s nothing I don’t dare to do,” she said proudly. “Oh, I’m so hungry!”
Walking back from the barn, I wished that I knew how to make scrambled eggs. That would be something very good to give to someone who had run away.
Grandpa was coming from the other barn and looked at me, surprised.
“You’re a happy lad!”
“Well, you’ve got to try and smile when the weather’s as good as this!” I said, clearing my throat.
Not even Grandpa could find out about this!