Deep Sea (21 page)

“You shouldn’t have brought that up,” says Nellie. “I don’t want her talking to Maud’s mother, either. But I’m going to play with Sonja tomorrow.”

Not until Stephie’s on her way home does she remember the card in her pocket. But it’s getting dark out now. There isn’t enough light for her to read it.

Suddenly she’s in a hurry. She has to find out what that little rectangle of stiff, yellowish cardboard says.

Her bike light sheds a diffuse light on the road in front of her. But when she stops pedaling, the generator stops working, too, and the light fades.

She tries spinning the front wheel with one hand while holding the card in front of the light with the other. It’s impossible. Not enough friction. She’ll have to wait until she gets home.

Stephie pedals as fast as she can, leans the bike against the house, and pulls the card out of her pocket again.
Standing outside the basement kitchen window, she reads.

O
nly thirty words.

Thirty words as heavy as the boulders down by the shore. Dark, immovable. A weight pressing Stephie down to the ground and threatening to suffocate her.

She was in a rush a few minutes ago; now she feels paralyzed. Slowly, the hand holding the card sinks down and remains slack at her side. Her feet feel as if they were cemented in the gravel.

Her legs won’t carry her. Everything that held her upright before, every bone in her body, all her muscles and cartilage, seem to have dissolved. Her body is a quivering mass, like one of those horrid jellyfish down by the sea.

She wants to scream, but she has no voice, either. All that comes across her lips is a soft moan.

She falls into a black hole. A black vacuum that sucks her into a vortex of misery.

Aunt Märta opens the cellar door and pops her head out.

“Stephie? Stephie, is that you? Why don’t you come inside?” And then, in a voice full of concern, “Are you all right? Why are you lying there? Are you sick?”

It takes a long time for Stephie to be able to speak. By then, Aunt Märta has helped her up and led her gently to the kitchen settle. She sits there with her arms around Stephie, cradling Stephie’s dark head against her chest.

“My little girl, my dear little girl,” she murmurs.

Although Stephie hasn’t said a word, and although Aunt Märta cannot read the German text on the card, Stephie knows that Aunt Märta knows. That she understands.

Everything hurts. Her clothes are rubbing against her body as if she were sunburned. The light from the ceiling lamp is burning in her eyes. Even when she shuts them, she sees little bolts of lightning inside her eyelids.

Slowly, she runs her tongue around the inside of her mouth. It feels like a shapeless lump.

“Aunt Märta … could you please turn off the light?”

Aunt Märta lights the stump of a candle and turns off the electric light.

“Is that better?”

“Yes, thank you.”

Stephie lowers herself so that she is lying down on the settle. She shuts her eyes again. Lies absolutely still.

The bolts of lightning are gone now. Instead, images streak by. Dreamlike images of Mamma as Queen of the Night, singing wordlessly. Mamma in a hospital bed. Mamma at the train station the day they were parted, her bright red lips a gaping wound.

She should never have left. She should have stayed with Mamma and Papa. Now it’s too late to do anything.

This is the darkest night, the longest. Although it’s still summer, dawn never seems to come. Rain-heavy clouds hang darkly over the sea.

For that whole long night, Aunt Märta sits on a chair beside the kitchen settle, while Stephie twists and turns in uneasy sleep. Now and then, she touches Stephie’s cheek lightly, as she did that very first night she had a little girl in her house again after all those childless years.

The dawn brings the rain. Upstairs, where Miss Björk and Janice are asleep in their beds, the heavy drops patter against the roof. In the basement, the rain swishes against the windowpanes. Aunt Märta blows out the candle and starts the morning pot of coffee.

Stephie wakes up with a burning emptiness in her chest.

Dead. Mamma is dead.

On the chair where Aunt Märta had been sitting, she finds Miss Björk.

“Mrs. Jansson is getting a little rest,” she says.

Never, in all the years she has known her, has Stephie seen Aunt Märta lie down to rest during the day. Neither exhaustion nor knee pain have stopped her from being active, dawn to dusk. The only rest she has ever allowed herself was to sit down for a cup of coffee in the morning and another midafternoon.

Miss Björk notices Stephie’s worried look.

“Don’t be frightened,” she says. “She isn’t ill. But I had the impression she’d been up all night.”

Stephie remembers the voice talking to her in the semidarkness, the hand stroking her cheek.

“All night,” she murmurs. “Did she sit here all night?”

Miss Björk nods. “No words can convey how sorry I am for your loss, Stephanie. And for your sister’s.”

Nellie.
Be as gentle as you can when you tell Nellie
.

“She doesn’t know yet?” Miss Björk asks, her voice soft and sympathetic.

“No. I’m going to have to tell her.”

“If you’d like, I could phone her foster mother. And she can tell Nellie.”

Stephie shakes her head. “No, I have to do it myself.”

“I thought that was what you’d say.”

Miss Björk keeps a discreet distance while Stephie gets up and dresses. Everything takes so long. Do the buttons on her blouse usually slip between her fingers? Is it always so hard to buckle her sandals?

“Would you like me to come along?”

“Thank you for offering, but I’ll go alone.”

“All right. You’d better have some coffee and a sandwich first, though, don’t you think? We don’t want you passing out again, do we?”

Actually, she is hungry. Distantly she recalls that neither she nor Nellie had any dinner yesterday. Neither of them felt like sitting at the table with Maud and her family.

Miss Björk pours Stephie a cup of coffee and puts butter, cheese, and bread on the table.

Mamma always served them breakfast back in Vienna, before they left for school. Fresh bread from the bakery and hot chocolate. That was the only meal she prepared herself. Otherwise, the kitchen was the cook’s territory.

“In the mornings, I want to look after my girls,” Mamma used to say.

She was different in the mornings. Without lipstick and with her black hair loose over her shoulders, she looked like a young girl.

“No one can take your memories away from you,” says Miss Björk.

Stephie is so startled she spills a little coffee into her saucer.

“What do you mean?”

“No one can take your memories away from you,” Hedvig Björk repeats. “They are part of you. Your mother will stay alive inside you.”

Those words release a tightness in Stephie’s chest, and her tears flow like a flood that she feels in her whole body.

“Mamma!” she sobs. “Mamma! Mamma! Why couldn’t I have been there with you?”

W
hen Aunt Märta comes in, she tells Stephie she has spoken to Auntie Alma.

“I asked her to send Nellie over,” she says. “I thought you’d want to tell her yourself. Nellie can spend the night if she wants to.”

Stephie sits on the front steps, waiting for Nellie. It has stopped raining and the sun is looking out from between clouds. The steps are already dry.

Be as gentle as you can when you tell Nellie
.

It’s a beautiful day. The sky is blue and quickly clears so that soon there are just a few white, airy clouds. The sun reflects brightly off the sea. A gentle wind caresses Stephie’s face.
How can anything be so pretty when Mamma is dead?

Nellie leans her bike up against the house.

“What is it?” she asks. “Auntie Alma said you had something important to tell me.”

“Come along,” says Stephie. “Let’s go sit on the dock.”

“But what is it?” Nellie nags.

Stephie doesn’t answer. She walks ahead onto the dock, and Nellie follows. Not until they are sitting next to each other on the edge does Stephie speak.

“Do you remember the nursery we shared at home in Vienna?” she asks. “Before we had to move?”

Nellie thinks.

“Yes,” she says after a while. “We had white beds. Yours was on one side of the room and mine on the other.”

“Do you remember how Mamma used to tuck us in at bedtime?”

“Yes.”

“What do you remember?”

“That she smelled good. She used to sing for us before turning out the lights.”

“This one?”

Stephie starts humming one of Mamma’s lullabies.

“Yes, I remember that one. She even taught me to play it on the piano when I got a little bigger.”

“Right,” Stephie tells her. “You were really good at the piano even when you were very young. You’re musical, just like Mamma. You inherited that from her.”

Nellie looks suspiciously at Stephie. “What’s with you today?”

Stephie bites her lip. A minute ago, she thought she had broken through Nellie’s prickly shell. But this is going to be more difficult than she imagined.

“You asked me once,” she goes on, “if I thought Mamma and Papa were thinking of us. It was on New Year’s Eve. Do you remember my answer?”

“No,” says Nellie.

“I told you that wherever they are and whatever they’re doing, I’m sure they’re thinking about us.”

“But I don’t think about them often enough? Is that what you’re getting at?” Nellie gets up. “If that’s what you’re after, I’m not going to sit here and listen to you. All you want to do is to make me feel guilty.”

Stephie’s losing her. She’s got to tell Nellie now.

“Wait,” she says. “I’ve still got something to tell you.”

“What?”