The American Girl

by Monika Fagerholm

  “The cousin’s mama would find it so hard to go on.”

  And Doris Flinkenberg had been able to understand that, no problem. So she had promised. And finally, promised. And it was a promise she kept.

  Doris Flinkenberg was not someone who let the cat out of the bag once she had given her word to someone.

  The most difficult thing had been the cousin’s mama. But on the other hand, there were so many other fun things happening in her life then.

  And with Sandra. That had been something else. She had thought, maybe in some way, they would be able to play their way to the truth.

  And then you would not be breaking a promise if someone, so to speak, came across something by means of play.

  At the same time she certainly saw that now, if she thought more carefully about everything, how many holes there were in Rita’s story. How many questions to ask about relevant points, how many HOLES.

  So turning to Inget and Kenny had been like a test. Well.

  It had not gone well at all.

  So. Okay. If someone told a lie, if the story had holes in it and you knew it, what did you do with that knowledge?

  If the story, so to speak, had holes.

  When none of those affected even wanted to know about them.

  And then Sandra. First, she was gone. On Åland, damned Åland. Second, she was going to run around making a fool of herself in the Eddie-clothes and hum the song and be so damned silly and fateful the whole time—just when you thought we were going to start advancing methodically, collect facts and really get to know the American girl.

  Walk in her moccasins. As the Indians say. Even if only for one day.

  Pretend for the idiot. Bengt. Yes yes. Doris had certainly seen it. She had certainly noticed it, yes. Sandra, she was so obvious.

  So, all right. What do you do with this information then? Obviously not so much.

  Doris Flinkenberg stood and trod on Lore Cliff at Bule Marsh (because at the same time, this damned cursed restlessness when Sandra Wärn was away).

  The Mystery with the American girl. Ha. Ha. Ha.

  . . .

  But such a quiet day, moreover. Quiet not only there by the marsh, where it was always quiet, but in the woods as well. No wind. No rain. No ripples on the water. Nothing.

  It was abnormal. A highly abnormal silence in the abnormal weather forecast.

  The latter, the abnormal weather forecast, was at least an objective fact, which had been talked about on the radio as well. In the local radio’s morning special that same morning, rather a few hours earlier to be more precise, in the cousin’s kitchen, when true to form Doris had been feeling the anxiety around her for a while.

  Sister Night, Sister Day. The strange restlessness when Sandra Wärn was gone.

  Though Doris Flinkenberg had not known what the day would bring.

  “The ground is boiling,” the weather expert on the radio had explained. “A highly local phenomenon. But very interesting. It really happens at these latitudes. A combination of the high humidity in the air and . . .”

  Of course Doris had not listened to it very carefully, she had tuned to another station where one of her favorite songs was being played.

  “What snow conceals, the sun reveals.”

  What a good song, in other words. But she also had not interpreted it as a sign of what the day would bring.

  Nope. Instead Doris Flinkenberg had true to form connected the words in the song to her own rich world of thought and feelings.

  And sometimes to put it mildly in an extremely unbearably sentimental way. There was this mushy side to Doris Flinkenberg. And in Doris Flinkenberg’s head it was accompanied above all by different melodies that she snapped up a bit here and a bit there.

  “Everything that was wide open becomes a closed world again,” for example, only this little bit from a song sung by Lill Lindfors hid oceans of meaning for Doris Flinkenberg.

  A relic from the time of the women. She had gotten the record from Saskia Stiernhielm when the women left the house on the First Cape and Saskia Stiernhielm had traveled home to the Blue Being again. Like a memento.

  And Doris remembered. Every time Doris listened to that record she remembered.

  And longed back to the women, to when the women were there.

  When the women were there. Not an eternity ago. A few months, maybe a little more. A little more than a half a year. The past summer. Most of the time. But still. It was the kind of thing you barely remembered anymore. How it had actually been. And Doris, who really wanted to remember, had already forgotten so much.

  Second to the end, of course. You certainly remembered that. That sallow day when they had stood on the cousin’s property, the cousin’s mama, and Rita and Solveig and herself, and watched while the women stowed their belongings in the bus Eldrid’s Spiritual Sojourn, which later of course did not want to start and you had to call Lindström’s Berndt and Åke and ask them to come up with the group taxi and drive the women, in two loads, up to the bus stop by the side of the road, the side that led to the city by the sea.

  Their light red bus, Eldrid’s Spiritual Sojourn, would remain parked on the cousin’s property many months afterward and would finally be towed away, not by the women but by the family who moved into the house on the First Cape after the women. The Backmansson family. Which would be a normal family, made up of a mother, father, child who, as said, for the thousandth time, on top of everything, were the direct heirs to the house’s rightful owner.

  An ordinary family. As it should be. And utterly terribly pleasant people, pleasant, as Liz Maalamaa would say somewhere in the future. So not because of that.

  But there they had stood unaware of this continuation, the cousin’s mama and the twins and Doris Flinkenberg, this, in other words, rare mute day in the history of the world when the women packed up their things and left the District for good, stood—and if you were Doris Flinkenberg in any case—and thought thoughts that were melancholy. Also the cousin’s papa in the living room window somewhere in the back, you knew this without needing to check; the only one who was not there was Bengt who was beside himself with a heavy drunkenness, like superduperdrunk, which he was sometimes when he wanted to have nothing to do with the world outside, in his room in the barn. And when the women had left and it had become empty in the garden and Lill Lindfors had sung melancholically and fittingly in Doris’s head “everything that was wide open becomes a closed world again,” this delicate mood would not be allowed to remain in the air for any longer period in time because suddenly another melody would practically be echoing over the property:

  “IT IS REALLY PEEEACE WE WANT TO HAVE . . . AT ANY PRICE?”

  And that would be Bencku’s music, from the barn.

  But still, the very last minutes in which the women were there: the District people on one side of the cousin’s papa’s property and the women next to the bus Eldrid’s Spiritual Sojourn on the other, road easement in between. Stupid, Doris Flinkenberg had thought, where did this boundary suddenly come from? During the women’s time there had not been any division of this kind.

  But clearly the cousin’s mama had also been gripped by the terrible mood that prevailed because she suddenly turned toward the first best person who happened to be standing next to her and it had just come out:

  “They come through like a circus in a small town. They rig up their tents and invite us into their colorful and reckless performances, but before you know it they’ve left and gone on their way. Then you’re standing alone in the square in the bitter wind, with hard cotton candy in the corners of your mouth, shivering in the rain and in the bitter wind.”

  Unfortunately, the first best person who happened to be standing next to her was Rita, Rita Rat. She had wrinkled her nose and said with a voice filled with apathy as only Rita Rat could:

  “What was that?” And added some illustrative swear words in the District dialect, “damn,” like “fuck off.” “Fuck off,” Solveig had sighed alo
ng, a sigh that was not directed at anyone in particular, but a sigh of tiredness and boredom in general.

  But Rita Rat had not let the cousin’s mama go, rather repeated, “What?” almost bitterly when the cousin’s mama had not answered. The cousin’s mama had rushed to say “well, well, well, well” but it was certainly clear she was a bit afraid of Rita.

  Rita Rat. She did not want to be in any small town—was it maybe the center of the world?—where circuses constantly came and went. Rita Rat, she wanted to go in the world (she did not say this out loud, you would not ask her either, but she was quite obvious, Rita, and you could read quite a lot based on her “nose position,” which you said in the District dialect, quite simply). Think metropolis then, think London, Paris, and so on. And why not, Doris Flinkenberg had said to herself, where she was standing outside the cousin’s house in the muddy yard under the low sky of late fall . . . why not? (or on Åland, where Sandra was, with near relations: why not, apart from the relatives?).

  Doris had thought like this and afterward she tried to exchange looks with Rita, but Rita had not caught on. Rita had quite simply stuck her tongue out. Solveig had also noticed something was going on after Rita’s tongue sticking, and she had, so to speak, seconded it by saying “damn” again and stared maliciously at Doris Flinkenberg.

  To accompany Rita: it seemed to be Solveig’s main task in life. There was another thing she went around saying: “It’s the two of us. Us two.” And one time when Doris Flinkenberg had, with the best of intentions and meant only as entertainment, shown Solveig an article in True Crimes about the two telepathic identical twins Judit and Juliette, who had murdered their respective lovers with fifteen hammer strikes to the head (at least one of them) at the same time without being aware of it and Solveig had not laughed. She had adopted a serious attitude. Solemn, so to speak.

  “Others don’t know what it’s like to be a twin,” she had said. “What it means to be two.”

  There was something, yes, not exactly frightening about it. But certainly sick.

  The women were gone, in other words. The house’s real owners moved in. Backmansson. A small family that had inherited the house. Mother, father, child.

  Normal.

  And the friendliest. Still Doris Flinkenberg came to miss the women so that it literally gutted her.

  “Everything that was wide open becomes a closed world again.” So damned normal.

  But Doris Flinkenberg started to suspect that normalcy was her enemy.

  In other words, when the Backmansson family appeared almost out of thin air and took possession of the house on the First Cape it had been a huge surprise in exactly a few minutes. Right about when the mother and the father and the boy, who was called Jan and was a few years older than Doris Flinkenberg, had knocked on the front door of the cousin’s house and later when the cousin’s mama had kindly opened the door for them and they had come all the way into the kitchen to say hello to all members of the cousin’s family who were gathered there for dinner.

  Well, in any case. A normal family in a nice normal turn-of-the-century house on the hill on the First Cape, so normal that normalcy endured being repeated many times over again. He was a journalist, she was a photographer, they also had a daughter, but she was not there, she was studying the art of dance (modern dance and artistic fusion dance with Eastern influences the mother, Tina Backmansson, clarified in the kitchen in the cousin’s house, just as if it made anything clearer) in New York.

  The boy, as said, who was with them was named Jan and had said good day; he was going to be a marine biologist when he grew up—but they found that out later. And the following had happened. Rita had looked at him across the bowl of sausage soup. And she, yes—you could not even say “seduces,” “seduced,” “had seduced” him.

  It was so damned predictable all of it. So normal.

  And Doris Flinkenberg, as said, seriously started suspecting that normalcy was her enemy.

  So then she was standing there that strange late summer day in the strange weather on Lore Cliff at Bule Marsh feeling sorry for herself. Suddenly experiencing such an unbelievable feeling of abandonment.

  It was like a desert.

  “. . . everything that was wide open becomes a closed world again.”

  Doris also suspected that growing up would also mean that you would not know where you should go. The damned abandonment.

  If Sandra was not . . . in other words Sandra. On Åland again.

  This damned restlessness when Sandra Wärn was away.

  So, consequently, Doris Flinkenberg was standing there on Lore Cliff at Bule Marsh shivering. In the middle of late summer. That so quiet, warm, overcast, mushroomy.

  Flash. Flash. Flash. Flash.

  What was it? Was something not flashing shrilly and red in the corner of her eye, in the reeds, down below to the left? Something she had been aware of for quite some time already, but in the midst of her self-pity she had not taken it in?

  Something strange in the corner of her eye. Red. A red color in the reeds.

  Poor Doris.

  She went closer. Really close, as close as she could get. And then—she heard her own scream.

  And then she started running. Rushed blind and wailing like a bolting moose in the soft, calm, quiet woods.

  Ran in the direction of the cousin’s property, on the path, and wailed.

  Straight into Rita and Jan Backmansson. Collided with them and fell to the ground like a reed.

  “Is she dead?” Rita’s voice could be heard from somewhere above.

  But: pop in the head. It became dark and quiet. Doris had passed out. And when she became conscious again people were swarming around her.

  That was how Doris found the corpse.

  Eddie de Wire. Her remains.

  The American girl. She had floated up in the swamp in the reeds in the marsh after so many years in there.

  “A relatively unbelievable phenomenon,” said the expert on the weather forecast who was being interviewed on the radio again. “But not at all impossible. Just the opposite. A totally logical natural phenomenon. As a result of the strange weather we’ve been having, at times very strange, locally speaking, this summer. Drought and humid heat at the same time. Technically speaking it’s called earthquake vibrations. What is under the surface bubbles up again . . . down in the earth . . .”

  Plastic is an eternal material. This is what Doris saw in the woods. A hand (from the skeleton). The red raincoat. Plastic is an eternal material. Red and terrible. Cruelly visible. So because of that.

  Rita Rat. It was a Saturday in the month of August, Rita and Jan Backmansson were walking in the woods. They were walking on their own paths as they had a habit of doing, Rita a few steps behind Jan Backmansson. Jan Backmansson was talking, Rita was listening. And carefully. She loved it when Jan Backmansson told stories, it was almost as if she had been there herself. And the best thing of all: they were no fantasies or made up in any way, it was for real, it was true.

  It was the same day Jan Backmansson had come back from Norway where he had been traveling around with his parents. It had been a working vacation. Jan Backmansson’s parents were journalists, they wrote and photographed as a team and their reports were published in well-reputed nature magazines, not National Geographic, but almost.

  They had been traveling in a small rubber boat with an outboard motor over the dark water of the fjord that was lined with high mountains sloping straight down into the deep. They had driven far out over the cold water, mother, father, child, all three in yellow oilskins and red life vests. Exactly the day Jan Backmansson was talking about while he and Rita were walking in the woods in the District, and as it were, getting to know each other again after a few weeks apart (otherwise Rita more or less lived with Jan Backmansson in his room in the tower in the house on the First Cape). It had been an overcast afternoon with rain that just kept coming down. It had also been almost completely still when they left the city on the coast to head
off on their assignment, but now the wind rose suddenly, a wind that was blowing inland, straight into the narrow but certainly not very wide fjord that just continued inland and they were moving quickly as that was the direction they were going.

  Otherwise it was quiet, just the little ten-horsepower motor growling, no people anywhere, not on the water, not along the beaches. In the water near the beach there were mussel cultivations: large white balls that had been anchored in a field in neat rows and would lie unspoiled for so many years. The occasional house here and there, mountain goats in the crevices of the steep mountains, birds in the air. Large blackbirds against a sky that was gray and white.

  At the beginning of the trip Jan Backmansson had been lying in the bottom of the rubber boat just looking up toward the white sky with the dark birds. It had been an amazing experience. But suddenly the motor had coughed once, twice, and then stopped and they had not been able to get it started again no matter how the three of them tried. The motor had just been dead and they had not even had oars with them, just a boat hook you could row around with in an emergency, but it was rather useless in the wind and the currents. And they had ended up like that, in the rubber boat, drifting in the fjord. The same silence everywhere, not a human being anywhere, not a boat, and the current, as said, was strong, the current was running away with them. Then the rain had suddenly poured over them and the darkness continued to fall and very quickly it became like a bag around them. They had drifted on, helplessly, the radiotelephone connection was also broken. And it was cold; the chill from the ice-cold water hundreds of feet deep was forcing its way up to them.

  The quilted jackets and padded pants that they had on under the rain clothes and life vests had not been able to provide enough protection against the bad weather in the long run; in the end they curled up on the bottom of the rubber boat, all three, mother, father, boy, close together, in the darkness. At regular intervals the father lit the flashlight and shone it over the beaches in order to provide a sign of life in case someone happened to see them. But it was a matter of being thrifty with the light because the bulb was growing yellow, which was a sign the batteries were running out.