Snow whirls in through the doors of the parish house as Klara and Grandma send the funeral guests out into the darkness one by one – after two hours of coffee and sandwiches, halting speeches and anecdotes.
As Klara turns around to find a jacket for one of her grandfather’s older cousins, she catches a glimpse of her face in the small mirror above the hall table. For a moment she doesn’t recognize herself with her new haircut. She looks younger than her thirty-two years, she thinks. Thinner. She kept it in a longish bob for so long. It felt like a relief to cut it off the day after Grandpa told her about the cancer. It was time to move forward, time to lift her eyes, time to become herself again.
She closes the door and looks at the melting, grey slush on the hall floor. ‘I’ll clean it up before we leave,’ she says.
‘Majvor will do the cleaning later,’ Grandma says. ‘Don’t think about it now.’ She pats Klara on the cheek and narrows her bright blue eyes. ‘You don’t have to take care of me. And I wouldn’t accept it if you tried. Do you understand?’
The last guests have gone now. They’re alone in the dim hall. Grandma’s pulled on her coat, ready to be picked up by her sister and her sister’s husband, who just went to pick up their car. Klara nods. She knows, has known since watching her grandmother walk across the parking lot after the funeral, so calm and balanced, just like usual.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I understand.’
Grandma takes a half step back, leans her head back and cups Klara’s face in her hands. ‘Rock and salt,’ she says, patting Klara’s cheek. ‘That’s what your grandpa used to say. I know he wanted you to be like that, too. Hard as rock and salt, as you become out here on these islands. And I can’t just lay down and die, can I?’
She gives Klara a hug before cracking the door to see a car rolling forward.
‘If you want, you can come with me and Maj and Roland, you know,’ she says. ‘But why would you want to sit with us old folks? You’ve done enough for us. For me, Klara. It’s time to do something for yourself.’
All through her childhood. Every summer and Christmas. Every cold morning in the kitchen with Grandma with the pipes frozen. Every afternoon with Grandpa in his boat on the choppy sea. Everything Klara had become was given to her by them.
‘I haven’t done anything for you,’ she whispers.
But her grandmother just looks at her calmly, with eyes shining in the dark, young and alert, almost like Klara remembers them from before that terrible autumn.
‘We got you, Klara,’ Grandma answers calmly. ‘We lost your mother. But we got you. It’s more than anyone could have hoped for.’
Now Maj and Roland’s car is pulling up outside; she can hear Grandma’s sister opening the car door.
‘You know, your grandpa would never forgive himself if he knew it was his fault you ended up playing Devil’s Bridge with a bunch of old fogeys in Bottna.’
Klara smiles weakly. ‘Maybe,’ she says.
‘Maybe?’ Grandma laughs. ‘All he wanted was for you to live your own life, Klara. Just like you always did. You have no idea how proud he was, how much he bragged about you. Go to Stockholm with Gabriella. We’ll talk soon.’
She opens the door while Klara carries her bags to the car for her.
‘You’re not driving to Stockholm in this weather, are you?’ Roland says, while gently placing Grandma’s bag in the trunk of his ancient Audi.
‘I think that’s the plan,’ Klara says.
‘It’s out of the question,’ Maj says. ‘I’ll call the hostel, and they’ll fix a room for you. It’ll take twenty minutes just to get to Bottna in this sleet.’
‘Is the hostel even open this time of year?’ Klara says.
‘Believe me,’ Maj says. ‘If we ask Gertrud to fix a room for you, you can be sure she will.’
Grandma gives Klara a final hug then climbs into the back seat. ‘Promise me you won’t drive to Stockholm now,’ she says. ‘We’ll talk tomorrow.’
Roland does a careful U-turn on the now completely snow-packed parking lot and slowly rolls on towards the highway. It’s been snowing so heavily that you can only barely make out the tyre tracks of the other cars. Klara turns around and looks up at the illuminated facade of the newer, bigger nineteenth-century church. She feels a kind of relief, something close to freedom. The funeral is over. Grandma is with her sister. Maybe she can go to Stockholm with Gabriella without feeling guilty.
She starts to go back to the parish house, but something in the twilight makes her start, freezes her in her tracks. Slowly, she turns back to the parking lot, not sure what exactly it was that stopped her. There’s the church, quiet with a gentle creamy white in the slight illumination of its walls. The snow is falling down in sheets in the grey light in front of her. All the tyre tracks you can still see lead out towards Highway 210, of course – it’s the only way out of here.
All but one.
She turns her head towards the forest and the gravel road that leads down to the sea and a small campsite. And there they are, the tracks of a pair of tyres heading around the curve and disappearing. They can’t be old, or the snow would have covered them. Someone drove down there after the funeral. But who would drive to a closed campsite in a snowstorm?
Klara shrugs her shoulders and shakes off the snow, buries her paranoia, or whatever it is. This is Grandpa’s funeral; she doesn’t have the energy to think of more than that.