The American Girl

by Monika Fagerholm

  A solitary flickering spire sweeping over the water. Otherwise nothing. Empty.

  They had waited for help. Just waited. Of course there had been nothing else to do while the boat was drifting farther and farther into the apparently endless and empty bay.

  Minutes as long as hours, a minute like an eternity, but suddenly, where they lay tightly pressed against each other on the bottom of the rubber boat, wrapped in all of the outer clothing that was on hand, they had nevertheless been able to discern a new noise, a muffled hum slowly growing and becoming stronger and it stirred both hope and anxiety in them. What strange thing was it, not rapids, or a waterfall? They continued drawing closer to the sound, which was becoming louder and louder sounding like a giant heart beating, a heart as big as the entire world, but the current was also becoming stronger and it was quite threatening.

  But suddenly everything became bright behind a bend in which a ship popped up, a brilliant, enormous passenger ferry—one, it would turn out, luxury cruise ship with a lot of foreign tourists on board. And their little boat had shown up on the large ship’s radar.

  Afterward when they had been rescued and been allowed to shower and change into dry, warm clothes, the captain had taken Jan Backmansson with him to the bridge and shown him all of the navigational instruments on the beautiful, new ship. He explained seriously that it really was not a sure thing that one would catch sight of a small rubber boat in the water in such foggy and rainy weather.

  “So you were lucky,” the captain said to Jan Backmansson and then they were invited to eat dinner as guests of honor at the captain’s table. Jan Backmansson tried to explain to Rita how strange it was to come in almost directly from the cold and the darkness and the fear into the ship’s beautiful, grand dining room filled with dressed-up cruise ship passengers, so discreet and cultivated.

  But then, right then, in the middle of Jan Backmansson’s story that Rita had become so absorbed in that she had almost lost track of space and time there where she was walking behind him, huge crashes and shrieks and the sound of twigs being broken and thuds could be heard in the woods in front of them and before either of them knew it Doris was there in front of them, Doris who came running straight toward them, Doris who saw and did not see them, so beside herself she did not even notice though she was calling for help and ran almost straight toward them. Just as you thought she was going to collide with Jan Backmansson she stopped as if she had seen two ghosts, opened her eyes wide, and sank slowly to the ground lifelessly where she came to lie as a dead person.

  Jan Backmansson had fallen down on his knees next to Doris and taken her hand in order to check her pulse.

  “What’s wrong with her? Is she dead?” Rita had asked, certainly worried but not without a splash of her usual harshness in which there was probably a tone of someone always has to come and destroy things when you’re in the middle of doing something important.

  Eddie wonderful, on a stretcher in the woods—the remains of her. Inget Herrman threw up. Kenny was deathly pale. The sisters staggered away, leaning on each other. Bencku was not there then. He was drinking himself into a stupor in the barn. But he would certainly wake up later, in the night, when it started burning in the woods. Suddenly a significant part of the large woods was ablaze, and the flames lapped up to the house on the First Cape where the Backmansson family in any case had enough time to get to safety before that.

  Rita.

  Doris looked at her.

  Rita met her look.

  Rita looked back. But it was later, at Bule Marsh, when the house on the First Cape had burned up, the Backmansson family had moved to the city by the sea again and they had not taken Rita Rat with them like they promised. When it was fall again, and everything was too late, too late.

  Later. Not yet. Just that day, that day when Doris made the discovery, she was dazed and beside herself, Doris. People were standing in groups, both known and not known, on the whole half of the District (even some sea urchins) at the cousin’s house. Doris had straggled past all of them, in the arms of the cousin’s mama, and up the stairs to her room. There the cousin’s mama had helped Doris get in bed, given her both sleeping pills and headache powder and closed the shades properly, which covered the whole room in darkness at once, because they were real blackout shades used during the war, and Doris had put ear plugs in her ears and then fallen asleep and slept for a thousand years.

  One and a half days, to be more exact. An entirely satisfactory amount of time so that everything would be changed when she woke up. Just as dark of course, but when she crawled out of bed and pulled up the shade the daylight flooded in. Doris opened the window to air out the musty smell of sleep.

  As soon as she had woken up everything that had happened the day before—she still thought it was the day before—came back. The marsh, the red plastic, the hand and the bracelets—also of plastic, wretched white plastic. A wave of discomfort had traveled through her. But it still had not been unbearably horrific then; she was thoroughly rested and alert and could even think about it objectively, a little bit in any case.

  Suddenly she longed for Sandra Wärn, why was she not here? Why was she always away, always somewhere else, when important things happened? Doris longed to tell her everything, go through it from beginning to end. “Just as I thought it had never happened. That someone had said, a long time ago. That the American girl hadn’t drowned. She just disappeared because she wanted to disappear, or had to. She was like that. You know what Inget Herrman said. Someone who showed up and disappeared again but before she did she had time to cause a lot of unhappiness and devastation. Just like—”

  “Rita told me that I was wrong. That’s not what I saw—”

  But now, in the morning in other words, renewed strength anyway, Doris had opened the window and breathed fresh air into her lungs, sensually and deep. But. There was something odd, something bizarre, but also something terribly familiar, in the air. A smell. Or, stink. She had never smelled such a smell and stink before. Or yes, she had. But in her former life, in her former existence, in the marsh Doris existence. And that was almost the worst because it made her not only afraid but literally rigid with fear again.

  It smelled like someone had tried to burn down a house. Namely.

  You have to remember that Doris was a child who all too well, of her own dearly bought experience, knew a lot about this smell in all its details. Not just once, but twice, Doris Flinkenberg as a small helpless child had with great difficulty and only because of her own alertness managed to get away from the flames both times (and both times helped someone else as well, tormentor number one, and marsh mama besides, to save herself).

  You need to remember that in order to understand why Doris became completely cold with sweat and panic-stricken again. That damp and burnt smell, moreover it was almost unbearably strong, damp with extinguishing and stinging your nose. And Doris ran again, ran down the stairs and out onto the garden steps where she remained standing in the dawn—it was morning of course, but morning two days after Eddie, the American girl, had been found dead in the marsh, a skeleton in a red raincoat of the finest quality, the coat almost intact but the body almost decomposed. Doris had been sleeping for almost two days. They really must have been dynamite sleeping pills (they were) that the cousin’s mama had fed her so she would get some sleep that terrible afternoon after the corpse of Eddie de Wire was found.

  Doris on the steps of the cousin’s house, stopped and looked around. At first glance everything looked so normal. The cousin’s papa’s blue Saab was parked in the yard, the old moped that was rusting away was by the corner of the barn, a few bicycles, a blue bucket, a gray spray can that was missing its sprayer, a garden rake carelessly thrown in the flowerbed at the side of the house among the everlasting flowers and sweet peas in violet and pink with delicate stems that were hesitantly forcing their way up the brown wall, trying to hang on to the nails hammered into the wall here and there. But they were sooty, the green leaves so
ftly spotted with brown. And the stink, it did not disappear, it was everywhere. It was stronger than ever, and then Doris’s gaze lifted and she looked toward the hill where the house that was the house on the First Cape was. It was crazy.

  The house was still there, strangely enough. And still. It gaped black with holes on one side. It was completely open there. As if a piece of the entire house had fallen off. And the tower was crooked and several of the windowpanes were broken. The house of luck stood there and gaped so desolate and destroyed in the quiet, quiet morning. The woods off to the side later. There was a hole in it so to speak. It had burned down on one side, the ground smarting with pain and the emptiness ran like a wide furrow farther into the woods than what could be seen with the naked eye from where she was standing.

  “Like a corridor of fire in the woods.” That was how Doris would describe it later, when she would express it in words to Sandra, recently returned home from Åland, whom she would meet in the woods the same day. But still, morning at the cousin’s house, and Doris stood on the steps and reflected on everything she saw without understanding anything while at the same time she tried, and this reflection was a means in this attempt, to overpower the panic growing inside her. Somewhere she also became, which was calming but at the same time an insult to everything, aware of how normal everything around her seemed.

  What happened?

  Why has no one told me about this?

  If you listened carefully for specific sounds in the summer morning, in addition to the silence that was a result of no birds singing (but they did not do that anyway this late in the summer; and far away, by the sea and the Second Cape, which was like another world now, a world by itself, the cry of seagulls and the like could be heard), you could hear the usual noises from inside the house: the radio was giving the weather forecast for seafaring or playing a familiar piece of music at a low volume, the cousin’s mama was clattering with cups and containers during the morning dishes, but always made sure to leave a clean bowl for oatmeal and a clean coffee cup on the table for the one who happened to sleep too late. The cousin’s mama. Mama. Doris, so small again, heard from the cozy sounds that the cup and the bowl really were there and above all safe and all of that. She was so thankful but at the same time it made her furious, and suddenly, before she knew what was happening she had run back into the house, thrown open the door to the kitchen, almost steamed in, and screamed at the top of her lungs in the cousin’s mama’s face:

  “WHAT HAPPENED? WHY HASN’T ANYONE WOKEN ME UP?”

  In other words right in the face of the person she loved the most and who loved her the very most, with moreover a practical love that was expressed in action and not in these incessant puns and words. The cousin’s mama, at the sink, had looked overwrought, for a moment quite simply wounded. But then she had become herself again.

  “But calm down, Doris,” the cousin’s mama said so calm and motherly. “Calm down.” Put her arm around Doris’s shoulders and looked at her with all the tenderness left in the world, and that, Doris determined, who so often saw that when she looked at the cousin’s mama, that tenderness, it existed. “You needed to rest. You were sleeping so soundly. After all of that terrible . . . you should thank your creator that you have the gift of sleep. Otherwise there have been more than enough horrors and dreadful things. As if the other thing had not been enough . . . The alarm sounded, Doris Flinkenberg. There was even talk that the cousin’s house would be evacuated.”

  And then Doris’s eyes had grown to tablespoon size again because you never forget the terrible experiences of your childhood.

  And suddenly, again, Doris had forgotten all her indignation, all her anger, and just peeped, perplexed like a small, small child:

  “But THEN you would have woken me?”

  And inside the cousin’s mama all the love that existed in her overwhelmed her in just that moment.

  “My goodness,” said the cousin’s mama, so to herself that she barely got the words out. “That’s clear. Doris, small beloved child. Doris, little little child.”

  And the cousin’s mama wrapped Doris in her arms again, so overwhelmed by this extraordinary person, Doris Flinkenberg. Sometimes the cousin’s mama had that feeling with Doris: that Doris was a like a world, her own planet.

  A planet in and of herself, and not even she, the cousin’s mama, had access to it.

  “Have a seat here and we’ll warm the oatmeal and I’ll pour some coffee and I’ll tell you everything. And look. We’ve gotten our very own hero.”

  And the cousin’s mama had gotten the morning paper and shown Doris Flinkenberg. There was a large picture of Bengt on the front page with a switch in one hand, with which he was hitting the burning ground, and a stick with a hot dog on the end in the other. “Two birds with one stone,” the caption under the photo read.

  But then Doris would not say much more. Strange maybe, and also not. The fire would not become the object of more speculation from her side; it was as it was, a forest fire that had started during the strange weather pattern, or maybe quite simply a result of someone having carelessly handled fire. Thrown a burning match away in the dry moss, or a burning cigarette, by mistake. And there had been so many people moving about in the woods at just that moment. Doris’s discovery before she fell into her long sleep, the rumor of that terrible discovery at Bule Marsh, had put people into action then.

  There were many who had made a pilgrimage to the marsh to see with their own eyes how the last question marks in the mystery surrounding the American girl could be deleted. What happened with her? Did she really drown? The correct answer was yes, in other words. She drowned. What a terrible tragedy of love. Based on the stage of decomposition in which the body was in, it was also clear that it had been lying in the marsh all these years. “The last question mark dispelled,” it clearly read in an article in the local paper the following day. Under the caption “Schoolgirl’s macabre discovery brings an end to things.” And a rather fuzzy picture of reeds and the like, which were then old pieces of a corpse.

  Maybe there were questions also when it came to the fire for example. But there are things you do not understand. Some things do not become better by trying to understand them. And remember that Doris was a mistreated child and somewhere inside her, that fire was still burning. The real fire, the one from the match that had been struck against the striking strip and thrown into something you had moistened with gasoline and swoosh, it catches fire, the house, where you are if you happen to be the unhappy victim.

  Doris had alleged reasons to respect fire.

  “If you stick your finger in a candle flame it will get burned. Ow. But you don’t always get off so easily. With just burns I mean. And now I don’t know if I—”

  That was how Doris would say it to Sandra, that it might be time for other games now. Of course not the only reason, but still.

  “Besides, I’m tired of this now. In the long run it gets boring with these fateful looks and these hot, uncomfortable shirts,” Doris would really clown about on the scorched ground out in the woods where Sandra and Doris would meet again that same day, in the afternoon.

  “Life is waiting. Come on. Let’s get out the map now. The real one. Because now we’re going to travel.”

  And Sandra would also be gripped by Doris’s eagerness in the face of something new. And so it became that the fire in the woods marked the end of Doris and Sandra’s game the Mystery with the American girl.

  Sandra was not there when the corpse of the American girl was found. She came home the same morning Doris Flinkenberg woke up after a day and a half of beneficial sleep after the terrible events at Bule Marsh.

  Sandra was on Åland. She loathed these relatives, the uncles and “the aunt” who stood behind her when she looked out over the ocean that was so close it almost smashed against the veranda window when the waves were high. “The aunt,” who before you even had a chance to experience it yourself, talked about how nice it was, with the sea, when it ca
me toward you. How “wild nature’s forces could be.”

  “The aunt” also stood there behind her and asked a bunch of questions that Sandra did not answer, partly because she was not listening properly; she had enough going on trying to concentrate on experiencing something herself for once. Without a middleman or an instruction manual.

  But when she did not answer, “the aunt” just said:

  “Yes, to lose yourself in the sea and open spaces, that’s an Ålandic trait. The big dreams—” and she did not finish the sentence, not because she would have lost her train of thought but because the continuation was so obvious. That is the way it sounded anyway.

  “The aunt,” in other words, there behind Sandra, at the window, otherwise nothing happened. No telephone rang, no one called to tell her that something had happened in the District, that the corpse of the American girl had been found.

  Loneliness&Fear. “The aunt” had poked at Sandra’s shirt when she had arrived.

  “Don’t touch it,” Sandra had said.

  “What kind of thing is that?”

  And when she had not stopped nagging her, Sandra finally forced out:

  “A game.”

  And behind her again, so close.

  “What strange games you play.”

  Sandra said nothing. Well, she thought. She was no islander. Definitely not.

  She was no islander. She was from the District, the marsh, from where Sister Night was, Sister Day.

  “I’m going to become Queen of the Marsh when I grow up,” she had said to “the aunt” at another time. “A really slimy one.”