A KIND OF AN ENDING

Henrietta died at dawn, between night and day. A window was open in her room, and the air that sifted in was cool. The first blackbird of the new day started singing in the garden, and I thought I saw a smile on her sleeping face as she heard it.

Dad and I held Henrietta’s old hands in ours and watched life seeping out of her for almost an hour. There was nothing fearsome in it. On the contrary: it went so slowly and still, so completely without pain. Her breathing became weaker and weaker, until it stopped altogether.

Dad pulled the sheet carefully over her face, and then we went downstairs together to get something to eat. The first ray of sunlight broke through the mosaic in the stained-glass window on the stairs just as I passed it. I stopped and let it shine on my closed eyes for a couple of seconds.

Henrietta had lived a long life, and now she was gone. The earth kept turning, leaving behind an empty space in the world. What else can you say about the life of a human being?

I lean back and look at the words I have written. It feels like a kind of ending, but it’s too early to know. Perhaps I’ll recall something that I’ll want to add in due course.

I’m writing this sitting in my special study. It’s dark around me, but the screen on Dad’s old laptop—which is mine now—lights up my face. I know that it’s just a computer screen, but I can’t help thinking of it as a window, or perhaps a door. A shining opening into all the days I have not yet lived.

It has been almost two years since the morning when Henrietta died, and I’m fourteen now. Older than Wilma was then, and we are still living here. In the end it turned out that no one apart from Kajsa wanted to sell Henrietta’s house, so we divided it into flats instead. Mum, Dad and I live on the second floor, and Daniel, Signe and Erland live on the floor below. The ground floor is divided into a shared sitting room and a flat, which Kajsa sold. A young Iranian family lives there now, with a little girl who Mum says looks exactly like me when I was that age.

Mum turned up at Henrietta’s house after only a couple of days, and she and Dad took care of all the practical matters. There was a lot to be done, of course. Mum said that there usually is when somebody dies. A lot of everyday things that no one has thought of suddenly turn up and have to be dealt with. In the evenings I lay under the table in the dining room and listened to their calm voices. They made phone calls, found solutions. After a while Dad started writing again, and then he bought a new computer. In the afternoons I’d write my diary on his old computer, while I listened to him tapping on his keyboard in the next room. It was so like everything I’ve ever dreamt of that sometimes I couldn’t be sure it was for real.

Daniel came back too, with Erland and Signe. Signe was pleased to see me, and Erland was just an ordinary little boy. He read a lot, and that’s something I had never seen him do before. Daniel had got some new clothes and glasses and for the first time I heard him speak of Erland and Signe’s mum. She lives in Germany with a new man, and Erland and Signe visit her in the school holidays.

I didn’t see Wilma again until a year after Henrietta died. I didn’t even speak to her on the phone, and I thought that perhaps she was angry with me. At first I tried to understand why, and then I tried to be angry as well.

But then one summer morning when I came out into the garden, Wilma was sitting on the steps talking to Mum and Dad. I shouted out and threw myself around her neck. I couldn’t stop myself.

We talked all day, and Wilma told me that she wasn’t angry at all. At least not with me. But she had quarrelled a lot with Kajsa and her dad. They wanted her to study economics at college and go into sales like they had, but Wilma refused. When the time came to choose a new school, she picked an art college, which was a long way away, and now she lives in a completely different town.

Wilma comes and stays quite often during her holidays, and I think she sees us more often than her own parents. She says that she loves Kajsa and Kjell, but that she has to be allowed to decide for herself. She says that she always felt like that, and she probably believes it is true.

I have tried to talk to Wilma about everything that happened with Hetty in the house of mirrors, but it is as if she has forgotten. Everyone else seems to have forgotten, too. But I remember.

I look through Henrietta’s albums sometimes, and sometimes I still play hide-and-seek with Signe and Erland. It’s just an ordinary game now, and the wardrobe with the mirrors has been furnished with wallpaper, a rug, a chair and a table.