by Maria Parr
PART ONE: SALTWATER SUMMER
1 Jumping from the Breakwater
2 The Crowd at Hilltop Jon’s Farm
3 The Message in a Bottle
4 Birgit
5 An Angel in the Boat Shed
6 The Launch — and a Wretched Big Brother
7 Do Ferries Have to Give Way?
8 The Day on Kobbholmen
PART TWO: AUTUMN UPROAR
9 Kai-Tommy’s Voice
10 Lena and I Go for Music Lessons
11 The New Soccer Coach
12 The Salt Lick
13 The Girls of the Class
14 Krølla at Half-Mast
15 Mom Goes to the Doctor
16 Drama in the Lid Family Kitchen
17 Game-Day Madness
18 Keisha
19 The Ruler Stunt That Went Wrong
20 “Für Elise”
21 The Christmas Present
PART THREE: WINTER AND WAITING
22 “Away in a Manger”
23 Hurricane Angels
24 Ellisiv, Axel, and the Big Question
25 After the Storm
26 Flotsam and Jetsam
27 Lena Resorts to Violence
28 My Grandfather Hands
29 The Death of a Chicken
30 Lena Shoots Dad in the Bum
31 Grandpa, the Sea, and Me
32 A Heroic Deed
PART FOUR: SPRING IS SPRUNG
33 After the Accident
34 Rumba Ruin
35 “My Boat Is So Small”
36 A Desperate Dad
37 A Serious Talk — and a Few Mackerel Too
38 “Who Do You Like Best?”
39 The Guys on the Field
40 Grandpa and Thunderclap Kåre
41 The Message in a Bottle
The back door slammed shut, making our whole house shake. Then there followed an almighty crash and somebody shouting “Oh, fish cakes!”
I stumbled out of my attic bedroom onto the landing, still half-asleep. The rest of my family were already standing there with unbrushed hair and confused expressions. Minda, my big sister, only had one eye open. Dad looked like he hadn’t worked out yet if he was a man or a duvet.
“Bang!” shouted my little sister, Krølla.
“What on earth was that?” asked Magnus, my big brother.
“Either there’s been some kind of natural disaster,” said Mom, “or Lena Lid’s back from her vacation.”
It wasn’t a natural disaster. When I got to the bottom of the stairs, Lena, my best friend and dear neighbor, was standing there in the hallway.
“Hi, Trille,” she sighed.
“Hi. What’s that you’ve got there?”
“It’s your present.”
I rubbed my eyes. “Thank you. What is it?”
“A pile of sticks and broken glass, obviously! But it was a ship in a bottle.”
Lena looked miserable.
“Maybe it can be fixed?” I suggested.
“Fixed?” said Lena. “It was supposed to be the best present ever. It can’t be fixed! I really don’t know how they managed to get that ship inside the bottle, Trille. The masts and sails were all up and were way wider than the neck.”
Mom helped us clean up the shipwreck. She wanted to throw it away, but I gathered up all the bits of glass and wood in an ice-cream tub and put it in my room. It was a present, after all.
Lena sat down at our breakfast table. She looked different, and I had to check carefully several times to see what had changed. She’d had her hair cut and gotten some multicolored braid things put into it. She’d gotten a suntan too. As for me, I felt a bit too much like my normal self, sitting there in the same old shorts I’d been wearing when she’d left. Our family hardly ever goes on vacation, or at least not abroad. We’ve got our farm and everything to look after. But Lena, that lucky sausage, she’d just spent two long weeks on Crete with her mom and her stepdad, Isak.
She’d drunk smoothies with little umbrellas in them, she told me while I ate my liver paste on bread. And she’d slept under only one sheet and swum in the warm sea. There were hundreds of little shops there, with millions of cool things she could get with her pocket money. Like that bottle. She’d had french fries for dinner every day. And it was so hot around lunchtime on Crete that it was almost like standing next to a Midsummer bonfire the whole time.
“Smoking haddocks, you should’ve seen what it was like, Trille!”
“Yes,” I said, carrying on munching.
It was annoying never having been to the Mediterranean. But I had something exciting to tell Lena too. I waited anxiously for her to ask if anything new had happened back here in Norway. But she didn’t. On Crete there was a speedboat she’d taken to a little island, she told me, and her mom had tried being dragged along behind it with some kind of balloon in the air.
“Anyway, did I tell you how hot it was?” she asked.
I nodded. Lena went on about a stray dog called Porto, who might have had rabies, about some girls she’d played with — who hardly dared to do any balancing games at all — and about having pancakes for breakfast.
Eventually I couldn’t wait any longer.
“I jumped off the highest part of the breakwater.”
Lena finally stopped talking. She squinted at me suspiciously. “You’re joking.”
I shook my head. My neighbor got up. I could quite clearly tell that this was one of those things she’d have to see before she could believe it. And see it she would!
“Thanks for the food,” I called to Mom with my mouth full.
Then I grabbed my towel from where it was hanging on the banister.
The L-shaped breakwater in Mathildewick Cove is made of massive rocks and has a swimming area in the crook of its arm. In the winter, the storms blow in fine sand, which we use to make sandcastles and other fortifications. But when Lena went on vacation that summer, I’d been allowed to go with Minda and Magnus and their friends to the outside of the breakwater, where it’s highest and the water below is deep and cold. It was almost like the beginning of a new life.
Lena’s the champion of Mathildewick Cove when it comes to jumping off tall things. Nobody has less fear in their stomach. Or less sense in their head, as Magnus says. But even Lena’s never jumped from the breakwater. She doesn’t float very well.
“Throwing Lena into the fjord is more or less like dropping an anchor,” says Grandpa.
It was quite a big deal that there was something I could jump from that she couldn’t. I could tell that Lena wasn’t pleased.
There I was on the highest rock on the breakwater. It was the crack of dawn, and it was only sixty degrees outside.
“Are you sure you’re psyched up enough for this?” Lena asked me seriously.
She was leaning over one of the other rocks, wearing her jacket and a Mediterranean scarf. I nodded. I’d jumped in the water lots of times while she’d been away. But it had always been at high tide. Now the tide was out, and it was farther to jump. I could see the bottom. The wind buffeted my swimming shorts. For a moment I wondered whether it was really worth it. But then I saw Lena, back from Crete, leaning over the rock and not believing I could do it.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. One. Two. THREE!
Ker-splash! came the sound as I hit the water, and then sworlsh as the bubbling surface closed over my head. The first time I’d gone down into the deep like this, I’d thought I was going to drown. Now I knew that all I had to do was thrash my legs around like crazy and hold my breath.
“Phuh!” I puffed as I shot back through the surface of the water and into the summer morning air.
Lena had climbed up onto the highest rock and was looking down at me ske
ptically. I smiled triumphantly. I’d shown her this time!
Next thing I knew, Lena was putting one foot in front of the other and slapping her hands against her face to psych herself up.
“Ay-ay-aaaaaaaaaah!” she howled.
Then she flew through the air in her jeans, sweater, jacket, scarf, and sneakers.
Ker-splash!
It was only as she leaped from the breakwater that Lena properly landed home from her vacation. Talking about smoothies on Crete doesn’t quite have the same shine to it when you’ve almost drowned in Mathildewick Cove. She resurfaced after what seemed like an endlessly long time and then disappeared again with a bloop.
If Grandpa hadn’t come along with his fishing gaff, I don’t know how it all would’ve ended. He used the long pole with the hook on its end to pull Lena ashore like a giant fish while she coughed and flailed around worse than ever.
“I did actually drown for a moment,” Lena said afterward. “I saw an enormous light.”
We’d drunk two mugs of Isak’s special red-hot July cocoa, but Lena was still shaking like a lawn mower left running.
“Pfft,” I said. “You can’t drown and still be alive. It was just the sun. That’s what it looks like from underwater.”
“You don’t know what I saw! The sea in Mathildewick Cove is colder than iced tea. The people on Crete would seriously die if they went swimming here!”
I didn’t say anything. It was where we’d always swum.
“Well,” Lena went on, “never in my life am I going to jump from that breakwater again. Been there, done that.”
She tilted her head back happily, downing the last few gulps of her cocoa.
When Mom heard about us jumping in the water, she gave each of us a formidably large bucket.
“Anybody who’s big enough to jump from the breakwater is big enough to start helping out a bit more. Don’t come home until you’ve picked enough bilberries to fill these right up,” she ordered.
Lena looked at the buckets in horror. “I’m not part of your family, Kari.”
“Shall I remind you of that next time we’re having pancakes with bilberry jam here and you suddenly pop in?” Mom asked her.
I could see that Lena was thinking about answering back, but even she wouldn’t dare to defy Mom. My mother’s as strict as an old headmistress these days. Magnus secretly calls her “the Dictator.” Lena says it’s hardly surprising that Mom is so strict. She thinks things in the Danielsen Yttergård family are completely out of control. Minda and Magnus slam the doors so hard that our house is permanently trembling. And Krølla goes on and on so much that sometimes we could do with helmets to shield our heads.
“And then there’s you, a lazy so-and-so always drifting off in your own world and never clearing away your plate after dinner. It’s no wonder Kari has to sort you all out. It’s just a shame that innocent people have to suffer when all they’ve done wrong is live in the house next door.”
As for Lena, she’s pleased she can relax with her own peaceful family. Things have calmed down at their house since she and her mom got Isak. He putters around with his ruffled hair and never gets mad. I wonder if he’s so calm because he’s a doctor. Maybe he’s so used to illness and drama that living with Lena is no stress at all. Sometimes Lena calls him “Dad,” but when she does, she says it quickly and seems a bit embarrassed, almost as if she’s afraid he’ll disappear if he hears that word.
By the time we reached the forest where the bilberries grow, up behind Hilltop Jon’s farm, we’d walked off the cold from our swim. Lena stuck her head down into her bucket.
“Child labor!” she yelled with all her might. “There’s an echo in here, Trille,” she added. “Kari might as well have given us a whole bathtub to fill up.”
I sat down by a bilberry bush and started to pluck the berries off the stalks. The sun’s rays sneaked their way between a thousand leaves, making a polka-dot pattern on my T-shirt. Lena sat a short distance away, throwing pine cones.
For a brief moment, everything was lovely and quiet, like a summer’s day ought to be, until she said, “One measly little brother, Trille. Is that too much to ask, do you think? Honestly?”
My best friend isn’t a person who wishes for things. She just decides how things are going to be. And two years ago, as soon as her mom had married Isak, Lena had made up her mind that they were going to have a baby, and that it was going to be a brother.
“It’ll take a little while,” she’d told Grandpa and me, “but soon I’ll have a brother, who’ll cry, poop, and look like me.”
Lena was positively certain about it, and Grandpa and I were so used to things turning out as Lena wanted that we’d practically taken this brother for granted right away. But now two long years had passed. Lena and I were about to start our last year at primary school, and there was still no sign of so much as one of that brother’s little toes over in the house next door.
“Babies don’t just turn up when you want them to,” I said. “Mom told me.”
“What does your mom mean by that? You’ve got so many brothers and sisters that you can’t move without crashing into somebody whenever you enter or leave a room.”
I kept on picking berries. After a while, Lena ran out of pine cones to throw, so she started pulling up clumps of moss instead. She laid them neatly in her bucket, and when it was almost full, she started picking berries with me.
“Lena,” I sighed.
“One full bucket in no time at all. You should do the same, Trille. Nobody will notice.”
“Yes, they will,” I said. “They’ll notice when they start taking the berries out and cleaning them.”
“Yes, but I won’t be there then,” Lena assured me. “Shh, what was that?”
Desperate whimpers had suddenly pierced the quiet summer air of the forest. We spun around and peered through the trees. We couldn’t see anything to start with, but then the whimpering came again.
“It’s a dog!” Lena shouted, rushing toward it. “It’s got its leash stuck! Poor thing.”
Imagine finding a dog in the middle of the forest! It would’ve been one thing finding Labben or Aiko or Brandy, or one of the other dogs from the local area, but it wasn’t any of them. It was a brand-new dog that neither Lena nor I had seen before. He had brown fur that shone beautifully in the sun, and he was looking at us with sad eyes.
“I think it’s a sign,” Lena said solemnly as we carefully freed him. “I think this is a dog that’s come here to Mathildewick Cove to stay. In that case, I can always wait another year for a brother. We might even have too much on our hands as it is now . . .”
I looked at the dog’s long leash. “Somebody owns him, Lena.”
Lena didn’t answer.
“Come on, boy!” she called.
Then she ran out of the forest and through the knee-high grass of Hilltop Jon’s field — running backward for a bit and then turning again — all the while laughing at her new playmate. Lena was well suited to having a dog.
But her joy didn’t last long. At Hilltop Jon’s farm was a massive white van with a whole bunch of people standing around it.
“Haas!” they all shouted.
The dog raced off, dragging Lena, who fell right over into a big, muddy tire track and lost hold of the dog’s leash. When she got back up, she looked like something the dog had left behind. For several seconds she stood glowering at the people below, her arms sticking rigidly out from her sides. Then she marched on down.
“You don’t take very good care of your dog!” she told them furiously.
The people stared at us, clearly terrified, especially of muck-covered Lena. I moved toward them nervously. At the back of the group I saw a girl who looked almost like sunshine. She had a cloud of blond curls around her head, and she smiled shyly as she scratched the dog behind his ears.
Then they started speaking in English. I’m much better at English than Lena. She can’t see why she should have to learn English when she can alread
y speak Norwegian. Although now she’s been to Crete, perhaps she can see the point of it.
Before I could say anything, she’d beaten me to it.
“The dog was stucked in a tree!” Lena didn’t know you say “stuck” in English.
“Ah! Thank you, thank you!” said a man who appeared to be the father of the family.
Lena stared at him angrily. She looked extremely dangerous as she stood there, dripping with mud.
“The ferry is that way!” she told them bluntly, pointing. “Come on, Trille.”
I felt embarrassed. I smiled at the girl with the blond curly hair and followed Lena.
“Pickled herring, these tourists,” she fumed, speaking in Norwegian again. “Always getting in a jam. Imagine being so lost that you end up driving all the way up here. They should have hazard lights stuck on them, the whole lot.”
Lena said that she’d had enough of dry land, so the next day we decided to launch a message in a bottle. We used to send out loads of messages in bottles. This summer we’d only launched a couple: one from the ferry across the fjord and another from the breakwater. But Mathildewick Cove seemed to reel the bottles back in. They always ended up drifting onto one of the beaches by our house, and then people made fun of us. A proper message in a bottle was supposed to reach Shetland or Iceland. Or Crete, of course.
We’d gotten ourselves ready to leave at five o’clock in the morning. Grandpa was going all the way out to the small island of Kobbholmen to pull in a fishing line that had been out overnight, and he was letting us come too.
“Can’t it go any faster, this boat of yours?” Lena asked as soon as we’d put out to sea. “When I went to Crete, I went on a speedboat that —”
“When you went to Crete indeed, you little madam!” said Grandpa. “Do you think this is just any old boat?”
He struck his fist against the side of the cabin.
I don’t think there’s anybody more fond of their boat than Grandpa. His boat’s called Troll. Grandpa’s always had her.
“Can’t you at least get an engine with a bit more horsepower for this old Troll of yours?” Lena moaned. “It’s going to take us all day to get far enough out.”
