Chapter Forty-Three

 

ELLA IS HERE. She telephoned several times to tell me she was coming, her eagerness barely hidden behind her starchy nurse’s voice.

As always, when she stays over, we drag the old zinc tub out on the kitchen floor and fill it with cold water. I shed my clothes, step into the tub, twist my long hair and hold it up against my head while Ella scrubs my back. I ask her to scrub harder and she keeps scrubbing, shifting the brush from one hand to the other, until her arms hurt and my skin feels almost raw.

After supper, she gives me a report she has borrowed from a doctor.

“It’s about a child on the ward,” she says. “You must read it.”

As she watches me from the sofa, I sit at the kitchen table, reading words that make no sense.

She tells me to keep going. “You’ll be glad you did.”

The photographs are the hardest. Not that I cannot see what they are—the child’s lids are so dry that they are pulled inside out, the eyes themselves a tortured stare for help. Still, I seem unable to make the connection. I copy passages of text onto my spiral-bound notebook, word by word, but even now the words fail to add up.

Ella rises, sits beside me, and gently takes the pencil from my hand.

“Writing it down won’t change it,” she says. “But at least you know.”

I lean back, remove my glasses, and rub the bridge of my nose. It is only then that I surrender to the tears.

This morning I walk with her to the bus stop and watch the bus pull away. Instead of going back to the cabin, I walk over to the lake. Ripe lingonberries spread carpets of red. A wood grouse hen squats next to the path, all but hidden in her mottled gray and brown, so modest compared to the cock that will seduce her in the spring.

As I stand by the lake, the call of a loon pierces the air. Other loons answer, and soon there is a chorus of birds, eerie falsetto cries that ripple across the lake. Is this what wakes me up in the night?

I hear Björn’s voice. We are children again, drifting in the rowboat, one of those long summer afternoons.

“Ramm!” he shouts.

“Hult!” I shout back and the game begins.

Sweden! Scandinavia! Europe!

Björn shouts the names of the stars and the galaxies, so loud that anyone standing on the shore can hear us.

He lies on his back and talks about “the great order of things.” He says our lives will be over in a flash and no one will know we had even existed. I tell him there will always be stories, just as Rammen said. That is how people live on.

The water laps against the boat, an osprey circles above, and cattle graze on the island. When he catches a perch, Björn takes it off the hook and throws it back. The perch flips its tail and swims straight down, the water swirling green and brown. He says he does not trust the stories. He would rather be remembered by a fish.