Adventures with Waffles (12 page)

T
he next morning, I didn’t remember immediately what had happened during the night. I just knew that I was happy. And when I did remember, I thought I must have dreamed it. I got up like a shot. The wind had stopped blowing, and the fjord lay there light blue and smooth as a mirror. Everything was so bright with the snow, the sun, and the sea; I’d never seen anything like it.

Mom was talking on the phone when I came downstairs. Nobody noticed me running outside. I bounded over to the hay barn. It was so cold that my footprints didn’t show in the icy snow, and my heart was beating so lightly that I think I could have flown if I’d tried.

When there’s such good weather outside, rays of sunlight come streaming into the hay barn, making it look like a church. I made my way to the far corner, farthest from the door, where Lena had been lying behind a stack of dry hay. The sleeping bag and the blanket were there. The picture of Jesus too. But not Lena.

“Lena?” I whispered nervously.

What if I had dreamed it after all?

“Up here!” she said.

I looked up. Lena was sitting on the top beam, right under the roof. And then she jumped.

She fell and fell and landed next to me in the hay without being hurt in the slightest. I smiled. So did Lena.

“I’ve fallen off so many high places that it’s become second nature. There’s nothing I don’t dare to do,” she said proudly. “Oh, I’m so hungry!”

Walking back from the barn, I wished that I knew how to make scrambled eggs. That would be something very good to give to someone who had run away.

Grandpa was coming from the other barn and looked at me, surprised.

“You’re a happy lad!”

“Well, you’ve got to try and smile when the weather’s as good as this!” I said, clearing my throat.

Not even Grandpa could find out about this!

Mom had finished on the phone. She and Dad were sitting at the kitchen table. Steam was rising from their coffee, and the morning sun lit up the whole room.

“Trille, come and sit down,” said Mom.

I didn’t want to, but I did anyway. My parents looked at me seriously.

“I’ve just been speaking to Lena’s mother. Lena wasn’t in her bed this morning.”

I turned the plate in front of me.

“Do you know where she is?” asked Dad.

“No,” I said, starting to make some sandwiches.

They fell silent for a long moment.

“Trille,” Mom said eventually, “Lena’s mother is terribly worried. Everybody’s looking for her. The police too. Do you know where she is?”

“No!” I shouted, slamming my hands on the table, because now I was so angry that I could have smashed up the house. Nobody was going to take Lena back to town! Even if all the police in the world came to Mathildewick Cove, Lena wasn’t going to leave again. I stomped out of the kitchen in a fury. Grown-ups should never have been invented. Carrying on like this, taking children here and there when they didn’t want to go!

I realized that everyone was going to start searching for Lena. Oh, why did everything have to be so difficult? Wasn’t there a safe hideout somewhere? I thought about everywhere in Mathildewick Cove, and I couldn’t think of a single place.

“The cabin,” I mumbled to myself in the end.

It would have to be the cabin.

When nobody was watching, I started putting together essentials in a plastic bag. Matches, a loaf of bread, butter, thick socks, rope, a shovel, and the cabin keys. I moved quickly. Last of all, I took my sled out from its place under the steps and put everything I’d gathered on it, with a blanket on top. Now all I had to do was smuggle Lena out too!

“Where are you going, Trille?” Dad asked as I was putting on my snowsuit.

“I thought I’d go sledding and have some fun,” I answered angrily.

And then I went down to the hay barn. I put the sled inside the door.

Lena had caught one of the hens.

“What are you going to do with her?” I asked, spotting that it was Number Seven.

Lena told me that she wasn’t planning to starve—despite me bringing her so little food. At least hens lay the odd egg now and then. I shrugged and told her everything. Lena looked away for a moment.

“Yes,” she said eventually. “I’ll move into the cabin.”

Her voice was strangely deep.

“But they’ll see us when we go uphill, Trille,” she said.

I nodded. There were just bare slopes all the way up to Hillside Jon’s farm.

“You’ll just have to pull us,” said Lena with a smile, and, hey presto, she and Number Seven disappeared under the blanket on the sled, together with the bread and the butter and all the rest.

“And you can’t make it look like it’s heavy or they’ll get suspicious!” she ordered.

Suspicious indeed! They had probably become suspicious a long while ago. At least Grandpa had. He glanced out from below the porch as I pulled the sled out of the barn. I gritted my teeth, wound the rope one more time around my hand, and set off.

Lena’s not large, as I’ve said, but strangely it was still hard going. I pulled and pulled so much I was sweating, while trying to make it look as if I were pulling the lightest sled in the world. But it was not the lightest sled in the world. It was one of the heaviest.

“Giddy-up!” said Lena now and then from under the blanket.

Thank goodness for the icy snow. I had never seen anything like it! There wasn’t a trace of me or the sled.

We’d never taken the sled all the way up to Hillside Jon’s place before. Not once. We would never have managed, at least not Lena. She only likes downhill slopes and thinks we should’ve built a sled lift in Mathildewick Cove long ago. Besides, it’s already high enough for sledding long before you get to Hillside Jon’s farmyard. If I hadn’t been pulling my best friend, I would never have made it. But Lena had come back. I couldn’t stand the thought that she might disappear again.

Now and then I turned around to see if anyone was following us. Grandpa was next to the hay barn. He became smaller and smaller the farther up we went. Eventually he was just a tiny dot. When I was finally able to lean against the wall up at Hillside, he was hardly even a dot anymore.

“Lena, look at the view,” I panted.

“I can see it,” said Lena, sticking her head out from under the blanket. Number Seven clucked angrily from within.

Lena and I looked at our cove from above—at Mathildewick, our kingdom. The sun had disappeared behind the mountains, turning the whole sky beyond the fjord pink. There wasn’t a ripple on the sea. Smoke rose from the chimney of our house. And even though it wasn’t that late, the sky had teased out a star.

“What are you thinking about?” I asked, completely exhausted and absorbed by the view and big thoughts.

Lena rested her head on her hand.

“I’m thinking,” she said in a hoarse voice, “I’m thinking that it’s scandalous.”

“Scandalous?”

“Scandalous, yep. Here we are, up at Hillside, higher than we’ve ever been before, with totally amazing ice on the snow. We’ve got a hen and a sled with us, but we can’t go sledding!”

She shouted the last part.

I scratched my head.

“But, Lena, don’t you want to go and stay in the cabin?”

My knees shook from exhaustion. Lena lay completely still. Winter made the whole world look calm.

“I want to stay in Mathildewick Cove!” said Lena with feeling. “And I want to go sledding,” she added, getting up slowly and determinedly from under the blanket.

Before I could gather my thoughts, Lena had turned the sled over, leaving the bread and butter in a heap on the snow. She sat well forward, so that there was space for me too. Lena and I hadn’t been sledding together once this winter. We’d been too sad.

“Sit down, then! You don’t want to just stand there now that you’ve pulled the sled all the way up here, do you? Besides, someone’s got to hold the hen!”

Lena’s eyes narrowed. I looked down the slope. The snow was sparkling. Who in their right mind would say no to a ride like this? I held tightly to Lena’s waist with one hand, holding Number Seven closely with the other.

“Yee-haw!” we shouted in chorus.

“I suppose you’ve never been completely normal, you two,” Magnus said a few days later when Lena and I had recovered enough to sit at the kitchen table and eat with the others.

“It was high time Trille got a concussion,” Lena said sharply. As for her, she’d begun to get used to it, she claimed. I smiled. I felt happy all the way down to my little toes. Our concussions didn’t matter.

“What was that sled ride like, anyway?” Minda asked with interest. I shrugged. Neither Lena nor I could remember anything.

But Grandpa remembered it. He’d been standing by the hay barn and had seen the whole thing.

“Well, let me tell you, Minda. They flew as fast as a speeding magpie. I’ve never seen anything like it in my whole life!”

Lena chewed thoughtfully.

“Smoking haddocks! Why can’t I remember it?” she said angrily.

And then she got Grandpa to tell us—for what must have been the tenth time—how he had seen Lena and me and Number Seven set off from Hillside Jon’s farm.
Suffering sticklebacks
, he’d thought when he saw us picking up more and more speed on the hard snow. He’d heard the hen clucking and us shouting “Yee-haw” until we got to about halfway. Then the hen fell silent, and Lena and I began to shout “Whaah” instead. We had good reason to do so, because although we hadn’t built any jumps, we’d been going at such a speed that we’d shot off a bank of snow with enough momentum to fly all the way over the main road.

“And then they sailed in a beautiful arc—Lena headfirst into Krølla’s snowman, Trille with his face smack into the hedge, the hen skyward, and the sled
bang
into the side of the house!” Grandpa concluded by clapping his hands together to show the sound it had actually made.

“And then Mom came,” said Lena with a smile.

“Yes, then your mom came, and everything was straightened out.”

The others kept on talking, but I went inside myself and was just happy. Lena wasn’t my neighbor anymore. She wasn’t going to be my neighbor for a long time. She’d moved in with us instead! See what grown-ups can do when they set their minds to it.

After we’d recovered from the sled crash, I’d asked Mom if there was anything she could conjure up.

“Lena’s mom and I have done some magic,” Mom had answered. “We’ve cast a spell so that Lena will stay here with us until the summer, while her mom finishes her course.”

“Abracadabra!” said Lena Lid, smiling.

H
aving Lena at my house was even better than having her as a neighbor, although I wished she would give me back the picture of Jesus. It hung in her room, above the bed she’d been given.

“You’ll get it back eventually, Trille,” said Mom when I mentioned it to her. “Maybe Lena needs the picture at the moment.”

“Yes, but now that she’s moved back to Mathildewick Cove, she’s doing fine, isn’t she?” I said.

Then Mom explained that even if Lena didn’t say anything, she must definitely be missing her mother. Especially when she went to bed in the evening.

“But she never says so,” I argued.

“No, but does Lena usually say things like that?” asked Mom.