The American Girl (28 page)

Rita had hesitated, but later she nevertheless met Doris Flinkenberg halfway. She and Solveig happened to be on the beach that morning. The girl had come there, the American girl, something had happened, she had told them. There had been a big fight, not between the American girl and Solveig and Rita but something the American girl had been a part of just before . . . in any case she could say nothing more about it—and yes, admittedly, the American girl fell into the lake, but she came up again.

“As luck would have it,” Rita said, relieved. “And guess who it was who saved her? It was Solveig.” Solveig who could swim so well and was truly capable of saving lives in the water.

The American girl had been so moved and thankful. She had as a matter of fact not really known how she should express her gratitude.

Finally, as a thank-you, the American girl told them everything about the rather terrible story that she had been dragged into with some people, not Bengt and Björn and them, but some others. And because of that she had to get away. She had to disappear. Completely.

And she had in other words asked the girls to keep quiet about everything. That they had seen her that morning. She had to disappear.

Could she trust them? the American girl had wondered.

And Rita and Solveig gave their word.

And then, when Rita had told Doris Flinkenberg this, she asked Doris the same thing.

Could she trust Doris now? That she would keep the secret now that she knew everything? When Doris was still hesitating a bit, but mostly for the sake of show, she had probably already started thinking that it was quite nice just being entrusted with something so big and important and vital, that she could have thought about going along with almost anything, Rita had said again:

“Do you understand, Doris? This is a story involving many people and if it gets out it’s possible that nothing will ever be the same again. Not even in the cousin’s house . . .”

And that of course put the screws in Doris Flinkenberg. The most terrible thing Doris Flinkenberg could think of was that something in the cousin’s house would change irrevocably, something that could result in her being without a real home, and she would be forced back to her marsh papa and her marsh mama—

So Doris had finally promised, truly sworn, too. No, she would never ever say anything.

“Not a word to the cousin’s mama. Promise.”

That had been the hardest thing of all.

“Remember, Doris. It will become very complicated if a lot of people know. And you know how terrible this has been for her already. With Björn . . .

“Because the worst thing about this story,” Rita finally said. “Is. That it probably is the way it seems, that Björn went off and killed himself for Eddie’s sake. He was so in love with her. And he didn’t know her. He didn’t know who she was. He took it very much to heart to discover that she had been someone other than who he thought she would be, the whole time. But remember something else, Doris. Björn had a violent temper. And he wasn’t the first person in his family to off himself. Almost everybody there had snapped. For all sorts of reasons.

“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 along, 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.