Drowned (15 page)

“Are we never going to talk about it?” I say. “Are we never going to talk about what we did to her and the fact that she’s dead now, are we going to pretend it never happened?”

“But …” he begins.

“I don’t understand how you can read that and just pretend nothing has happened.”

“I’m not pretending nothing has happened,” Gabriel says quietly.

“So how can you sit there and say it’s beautiful? Because you actually think it’s nice? The fact that she’s not here to nag you anymore, so you can avoid taking responsibility for anything and just sit around reading poetry and being an artist?”

“Calm down, Marina.”

His tone is sharper now.

“Was it you who forced her to make that mark on her leg?”

The question pops into my head from nowhere, but as soon as I’ve spoken I know it was the right thing to ask. I can see it in his eyes, a fleeting expression of surprise, I realize it’s something he never thought I would ask.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean exactly what I said. She had a mark on her inner thigh, she said she’d burned herself with a cigarette. Was it you who made her do it?”

I have been feeling guilty about the mark on Stella’s leg all through the fall, I didn’t say anything about it during the police investigation. I hardly said anything at all, they didn’t ask me many questions, I wasn’t even there when it happened. In any case they should have noticed it themselves if they did an autopsy, they should have noticed it just from looking at her—and maybe they did, but they didn’t mention it to Mom and Dad because they were being discreet, or maybe they did mention it but Mom and Dad didn’t want to worry me. I can hear Mom’s anxious voice in my head when the police call and someone asks her formally if Stella ever displayed any kind of self-harming behavior. Perhaps it
was an experiment that went just a little too far—I picture her holding a glowing cigarette against the inside of her thigh, keeping it there as long as she can, she has decided on a fixed number of seconds, maybe in the same way as when she went down to the lake, maybe she’d decided to see how long she could hold her breath, just like when we were little, in the backseat of the car on those winter days, she tried to hold her breath for the same amount of time now, for as long as she could beneath the surface of the water, and then a little bit longer, just another ten seconds, I can see her in my mind’s eye, pale, her face almost blue, she’s not getting any air and she’s enjoying it, just a little bit longer she thinks, her head is spinning, just a little bit longer and then everything goes black.

“Did she do it herself?” I say, since Gabriel doesn’t speak.

“I don’t know.”

“Didn’t you ask?”

“No. I don’t actually know what you’re talking about. You seem a bit confused, maybe you ought to go to bed.”

I look him straight in the eye, and he holds my gaze. I don’t recognize him at all, I don’t want to be in the same room as him, he’s lying, I think, for some reason he’s lying. I leave him with the mulled wine
in the living room, closing the door of my bedroom quickly behind me once I am inside.

Gabriel gets up early in the mornings now, he makes a big pot of coffee and pours it into a Thermos on the draining board. It’s still piping hot when I get up around nine and stand at the kitchen window looking out over the wet gray late-fall garden, at a magpie on the black, tangled branches of the birch tree, the smaller birds on the fat balls in the lilac bushes. We have had the same weather every day since I got here, every day equally slow and gray, they flow somnolently into one another, all exactly the same, misty, mild, as if they were padded. Gabriel is writing, the house is silent. I sit at the kitchen table for a long time, I read the morning paper, a few lines in a book for my assignment, the same few lines over and over again. Gabriel appears in the kitchen at regular intervals to top up his coffee cup, nods good morning to me, asks me to let Nils in.

“How’s it going?” I ask.

“Fine,” he says absentmindedly, he’s said the same thing every time I’ve asked. He’s started writing something new, it might become a collection of short stories, he seems to be completely absorbed by it. He rummages around in the larder and finds a box of
ginger cookies, grabs a handful and disappears up the stairs.

I take a walk around downstairs, I feel restless. There are still some of Stella’s things to go through, boxes of papers from when she was at college, old assignments and notes, boxes of crockery and household bits and pieces she brought to the house with her but never even unpacked. I don’t know what to do with all her stuff, I put it off, I can’t bring myself to get rid of anything else right now, it feels wrong, as if I’m clearing her away, removing every trace of her.

It is dark in the living room. I switch on the big chandelier, it’s too large for the room really, the ceiling isn’t all that high. The light it gives is soft and warm, flattering. In a corner next to one of the bookcases is a bundle of old school posters with botanical motifs that Stella bought at an auction last summer, the dust swirls in the air as I leaf through them: potato, lingonberry, creeping thistle, a slender star-of-Bethlehem with elegant leaves, Stella loved alliums. Right at the back there is a poster of the spotted orchid, it is a pink flower. Suddenly I remember Stella’s orchids in the greenhouse where she worked. Gabriel hasn’t mentioned them, he hasn’t said whether anyone is looking after them now, and when I think about it I realize Stella never said anything about them while he was around during the summer, even though she liked to
talk about them. Does he even know they exist? He usually seemed to be listening with only half an ear when she talked about her plants, he seemed to like the fact that she was interested in them, even though he wasn’t the least bit interested himself, particularly when she went into all the practical details about nutrition and fertilizer and pruning and different types of soil. Perhaps she told him about the orchids and he nodded, thinking about something else: his novel, himself.

There is a bus into town just after lunch, it’s the same bus I caught in the summer when I was going to meet Stella. If I hurry I can catch it. I quickly put on some makeup and for the first time in ages pull on my own boots, it feels strange walking in heels after wearing Stella’s flat Wellingtons for such a long time, I glance at my legs in the mirror, they look good.

“I’m going out for a while,” I shout up the stairs to Gabriel, he responds with a preoccupied “Okay.” I think that he probably wasn’t even listening to what I said, and he’ll wonder where I am the next time he comes down to fill up his coffee cup, but I haven’t got time to write him a note, I’ll miss the bus. I cut across the garden and run down the road, it’s not so windy today and my umbrella is actually quite effective at keeping off the fine drizzle suspended in the air, it’s almost motionless, like unusually wet mist.
When I switch on my CD player it skips at the beginning of the track I want to listen to, skips back to the start when it’s played a few seconds, or jumps to a completely different track. I switch it off and on again several times, but it makes no difference. Maybe it’s the dampness, the air is so wet all the time. I imagine everything inside it turning green, small copper wires and pins, all covered in a coarse green patina, I see it growing like salt crystals, making all the wires look furry, as soon as I get out into the damp air it’s off, growing, multiplying, cutting out.

I reach the bus stop in plenty of time, the bus is almost empty, just like in the summer. It takes the same meandering, circuitous route as before, past farms where no one gets on and no one gets off and there is not a soul in sight, except for a cat sitting by a mailbox, black against the wet grass, and a big flock of jackdaws, silhouetted against the unchanging pale-gray sky.

When I get into town I can’t find my way at first. Although the center is small I go wrong twice, in the end I have to ask a man who is cutting across the town hall square where the greenhouses actually are, he knows exactly, he points and explains. There are very few people about, the town almost feels deserted, and when I get to the greenhouses and press down the handle of the gate in the iron railings surrounding
them, I discover it’s locked. The cypresses beside the gateposts are dark with moisture, they look silent, serious.

I have been standing there for only a few minutes when a man riding a small moped pulls up behind me. The platform behind the moped is full of leaves and branches, the man is wearing bright-orange overalls.

“Are you waiting for someone?” he wonders.

“Yes, someone who can open the gate,” I say, and he raises his eyebrows, no doubt wondering who I am. I realize I probably sounded rude.

“My sister used to work here,” I say. “Stella.”

His face softens immediately.

“We all miss her,” he says as he fishes out a bunch of keys from one of his pockets.

“Mm.”

“Not like you, of course,” he adds hastily.

I follow him along the gravel path and into the greenhouse. It is warm inside, the heat is even more noticeable than it was in the summer, but now the humidity is almost as high outside as inside the greenhouse. The man in the orange overalls waves to a woman in an oversized men’s shirt, the same kind of clothes Stella used to wear when she was working in the greenhouses. Her blonde hair is caught up in a knot at the back of her neck.

“This is Stella’s sister,” says the man in the overalls, and the blonde woman introduces herself as Linda, she also tells me they miss Stella and offers her condolences and says how tragic it all was, I swallow and nod.

“Have you come to pick up her things?”

I shake my head.

“No … no, not now. I just wondered how the orchids were getting on.”

I realize this sounds odd, confused probably, but Linda smiles kindly at me and invites me to accompany her to the corner where the orchids are growing.

Some of them are still flowering, they look exactly the same as they did in the summer, that same unreal, almost waxy perfection. I place the palm of my hand on the damp moss, it feels good. The air is sweet, with a powdery scent, it immediately makes me think of that summer afternoon and how annoyed I got with Stella when she insisted I was late meeting her from work, what did it matter, I feel stupid when I think about it now.

“We’ve looked after them,” says Linda. “You don’t need to worry.”

I nod.

“She was so proud of them,” I say, and then my voice breaks and I am on the verge of tears.

Linda places her hand on my arm, tells me to sit down on a little bench over by the wall and I do as
I am told, I sit there watching Linda as she fetches a small trowel and a plant pot, lifts a small piece of the moss surrounding one of the flowering orchids and pushes the trowel into the soil underneath. She takes her time, gently loosening the roots, teasing and poking until the pink flower and all its tangled roots are free. Then she piles soil into the pot, carefully inserts the orchid, makes sure it’s standing firm. When she has moistened the soil and smoothed a piece of shiny, velvety moss over it, she hands the pot to me.

“Here.”

“Thank you,” I say quietly, my voice holds now.

The orchid in the pot looks as if it’s gaping at me openmouthed, the flower head looks too heavy for the thin stem. I have never really liked orchids, I think there’s something faintly revolting about them, they are so palpably organic.

“Are they parasites?” I ask.

Linda smiles.

“No. They’re epiphytes, it’s not the same thing. They grow in trees, but they don’t suck nutrition from them. They just use the trees to climb higher up, to get at the light.”

I nod.

“It can be very dark down on the floor of the rain forest,” she adds. “There are so many trees and leaves that it’s not so easy for the flowers. Would you like a drink?”

“Yes please.”

I follow her through the greenhouse, past rows of hyacinths and amaryllis to the far end, past the little pond with the babbling water where the two carp slowly glide around like black shadows, then through a door leading to an untidy office. There is a table and some chairs in one corner and she nods, inviting me to sit down. I am still holding the plant pot in my hand, it is cool, silky smooth. Linda clatters around in a small kitchen area, I can see her through a swaying curtain made of brightly colored plastic beads, her movements make the beads rattle. I put down the pot containing the orchid on the table. I can smell coffee. Linda places a yellow mug in front of me.

“Milk, sugar?”

“No, it’s fine … thanks.”

She sits down opposite me, takes a sip of coffee from an identical mug.

“How are things?” she says.

She seems as if she really wants to know, unlike Gabriel, who asks me all the time without showing any interest in my answer. Although I do exactly the same, I think, I let him get away with “fine” every time I ask how things are going.

“I was thinking about the old containers,” I say. “Stella told me about them in the summer, she’d found them in a storeroom somewhere. Old containers for
plants, they looked like leaves, kind of … instead of those white plastic ones.”