Lena, the Sea, and Me

by Maria Parr

  Lena and I exchanged glances. Kai-Tommy’s dad and Halvor’s dad? This was some kind of plot!

  “Who normally plays in goal?”

  My jaw dropped. How could he possibly not know? Everybody in the area knew that Lena was the goalie on our team. She stepped into the circle wearing her goalkeeper’s gloves and looked up defiantly at the man in the black tracksuit.

  “Me.”

  “Just you?”

  The others shuffled nervously, and then Halvor stepped into the circle.

  “I used to stand in goal sometimes, and when Lena’s out sick . . .” He quickly glanced at her, almost as if he was slightly scared.

  Halvor, our new assistant coach’s son and Kai-Tommy’s best friend, must have grown about eight inches over the summer. His long arms hung down on each side, goalkeeper-like. Lena had grown a bit too, but she was just as skinny as before. And her mom couldn’t be further from being an assistant coach. I’m not sure Ylva even knows the rules of the game.

  I wonder if it was at that moment, standing in the circle with Halvor, that Lena realized things were going to change.

  I don’t want to remember the rest of that practice session. We had to run until our mouths tasted of blood, and I ended up last in almost all the drills. Never had I felt so out of place. Both Lena and Halvor were being tried out in goal, but I wasn’t paying attention.

  By the time we went home, Lena had scrapes on both her elbows and gravel on her face, and she was so tired that she got off her bike for the last hill. She didn’t say a word until we were about to go our separate ways to our own houses. Then she looked out across the fjord and at Grandpa moseying up from by the old boat sheds.

  “Don’t stop coming, Trille.”

  I couldn’t even answer her. The only thing I was thinking about was getting out of my wretched soccer clothes and into the shower.

  “See you tomorrow,” was all I said.

  Then off I went.

  Lena didn’t ask about soccer again. She went alone to the next practice. I stood at the window and watched her cycle off without looking back. For two seconds, I felt like scrambling after her, but then I remembered about Kai-Tommy’s dad and shuddered. I couldn’t go through that again.

  “Have you stopped playing soccer?” Dad asked.

  I squirmed. I didn’t really want to say I’d stopped. All the boys around here play soccer, after all.

  “I’m taking a break,” I mumbled.

  Dad isn’t usually one to let me avoid doing things. But that day it was as if his thoughts were somewhere else.

  “Well, if you’re not going to soccer practice, you can keep fit by lending your father a hand,” he said. “I was going to take up a new salt lick for the sheep.”

  Was he joking? Our salt licks are twenty-two- pound blocks of salt that give the sheep all sorts of minerals they need, but this one had to go all the way up to the Cliff. It would take the whole afternoon. I was about to say something about child labor, like Lena usually does, but then I saw the furrow in his brow. Mom was lying asleep on the sofa, and the kitchen looked like a disaster zone.

  “OK,” I said, heading out to the barn.

  The Cliff is at the end of an endless mountain slope that starts down by the sea and is steep all the way up. I was breathing heavily long before I came close to Hilltop Jon’s farm. But then it was as if I found my second wind. What if Birgit was home when I went past?

  Hillside had been in a pretty bad state the last few years that Hilltop Jon and his horse, Molly, lived there. Tiles were missing from the roof of the barn, the paint was flaking off the walls, and there were clumps of long grass sticking out of all the berry plants. Now I narrowed my eyes as I stopped for a moment. The infield was green and freshly mown. Herbs and vegetables were growing in a row of planters. The roof of the barn was as leakproof as a rain jacket, and the walls were newly painted.

  A smell of freshly baked bread came drifting out of the kitchen window. It hardly looked like the sort of disaster zone I was used to at home, I thought with dismay.

  “Hi!” Birgit’s father, the author, climbed down from a ladder on the far side of the house. “Trille, isn’t it?”

  I nodded, and then suddenly remembered that this man must hold me responsible for almost drowning his daughter.

  “Are you looking for Birgit?”

  I blushed and shook my head. I felt it was impossible to explain all about the salt lick in English, so I just patted the bag and said, “For the sheep.”

  And then I sped off.

  The track was slippery after all the rain of the past few days, but as long as I stepped on the rocks, it was fine. Small birch branches and alder twigs smacked me in the face. Dad should have been up here ages ago to clear the track with his clippers. Why hadn’t he done it this year? All my life, I’d thought that parents could do anything. But now I was starting to doubt it. Things were in a complete state at home. It was all wrinkles and mess and sleeping and arguing.

  I clenched my teeth and tried to think about nice things, but the salt lick rubbed hard against my back, and the hill was making my thighs ache.

  “Trille?”

  “Aaaah!”

  Birgit and Haas suddenly appeared ahead of me.

  “Going up the mountain?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “Mushrooms,” said Birgit, opening a large basket. A yellow glow came from inside.

  Wasn’t it lethal to eat mushrooms? That’s what I’d learned ever since I was little. You could die or get kidney stones just from swallowing a tiny piece of the wrong sort.

  I don’t exactly know how it happened, but Birgit put down her basket and came up the mountain with me. The warm September sun shone down on us, the track became drier, and the salt lick felt lighter. Neither of us said very much. She’d clearly been up there before. There’s a visitors’ book tucked into the small cairn that Minda and Dad made at the top, and her name was written there several times. Now she wanted to know the names of everything we could see. I strung up the salt lick and flopped myself down at the resting place by the cairn. Dad always points out places and tells me about them when we’re up there. Oh, shear my sheep, if only I’d paid more attention! I told Birgit the names of the islands and mountains I was sure about.

  “And that small one, all the way out there,” I said finally, “that’s Kobbholmen. My grandmother lived there when she was little.”

  That made an impression on Birgit. Imagine having a grandmother who came from the sea. Grandpa was on his way out with Troll, probably going to set a net. Birgit looked at the tiny dot of a boat and wondered how I knew it was him.

  I shrugged. “Is it true there aren’t many hills in the Netherlands?”

  It was. But there were other beautiful things. As the sun played cat and mouse with the clouds, Birgit told me in a mixture of English and Norwegian about her life there and the friends she’d left behind.

  “Do you miss it?” I asked boldly.

  She shrugged and smiled. She was used to missing places, she explained. “We travel so much.”

  Haas was lying down by my feet, looking at me curiously now and then.

  “He’s wondering where Lena is,” Birgit said, laughing.

  The dog opened his eyes wide when we mentioned her name. Lena takes chickens tobogganing, rides cattle, says “boo” to horses, and puts kittens in the dirty laundry to scare her mother. And yet I don’t know of a single animal that doesn’t like her.

  “Lena’s at soccer practice,” I mumbled, gulping down my guilty conscience.

  And she really had been practicing. She’d trained so hard that she was still completely furious when I popped in to see her later that evening.

  “I hate gravel fields,” she roared.

  She was sitting on the kitchen table. She’d had a shower and was fiery red. Isak was cleaning the cuts on her knees and listening patiently to her as she shouted.

  “Why can’t we get an artificial-grass field in this stupid pl
ace, like everybody else has? Ow!”

  I sat down on a chair and asked her tentatively how it had gone.

  Lena snarled. “I hate boys, I hate coaches, and I hate gravel. What have you been up to, then?”

  I told her about the salt lick, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell her all the rest. That I’d been for a walk with Birgit, that I’d been invited into her house afterward and eaten fried chanterelle mushrooms on sourdough bread. That it was the best thing I’d tasted in all my life. And that I was slightly scared of dying of kidney failure, but it would almost have been worth it.

  You’re each going to choose a book,” Ellisiv said as she looked at us. “And then you’re going to give a presentation on the book and the author.”

  I felt a weight like a stone in my stomach. Speaking in front of the class is my worst nightmare.

  “What’s a gifted child like you got to worry about?” Lena usually says when I tell her about my fear.

  It was Auntie Granny who always called me that. “You’re such a gifted child, Trille,” she used to say. “You’ll go far.” Lena thinks it’s an excellent expression.

  Nobody in the world has ever called Lena a gifted child. She’s good at PE and recess. If you ask her, everything else at school’s a pain in the neck. Math is the worst. She and Andreas spend half of our math lessons out in a group study room with their own teacher. Lena’s tried to explain to both Ylva and Ellisiv that it’s pointless to get somebody to try to teach her math like that. She’s going to be a goalie and will never have any need for all those sums. But it’s no use. Ylva and Ellisiv are dead set on Lena learning math, just like every other person. I don’t understand why they worry. Lena will manage fine.

  I laid my head down heavily on the desk and stared at my wet sneakers.

  “You’re going to work in groups,” I heard Ellisiv say, and I squeezed my eyes tightly shut. If I had to work with Kai-Tommy or Halvor, I might as well run away to sea.

  “Trille, Lena, and Birgit. You can go and sit in the library . . .”

  My heart skipped a whole stack of beats. I gathered my books up all in a fluster.

  “Look, there go the three girls of the class,” Kai-Tommy muttered as I passed.

  Halvor and a few others snickered, but I pretended not to hear them. They weren’t the ones getting to be in a group with Birgit.

  Our library isn’t big. I often go in the evenings with Mom, and I’ve read most of what they’ve got. Now Lena lay down on the sofa there, banging the heels of her wellies together with such force that the noise filled the whole room. Birgit and I each sat on a chair and put our notebooks on the table. The three of us had hardly been alone together since the raft-wreck.

  “Let’s pick Emil and the Great Escape,” Lena said. She’d clearly made up her mind already. “I’ve got the movie of that one.”

  “Um, isn’t it a bit childish?” I said with a cough.

  “No. It’s pretty short too,” said Lena.

  I looked at Birgit. She rarely said very much in class, but she seemed a bit more relaxed now.

  “Sure, let’s pick that one,” she said.

  She’d read the book in Dutch when she was younger. It would be a good way to improve her Norwegian, since she already knew the story. Besides, she’d learned about Astrid Lindgren, the author, for a school project a few years ago, and we thought we could include a bit about her other books too.

  “Fine by me,” said Lena. “But I want to do the bit about Emil and the Great Escape —”

  “Because you’ve got the movie,” I said, finishing her sentence for her.

  On weekdays, Lena and I are always the first ones home. When we get there, we rummage through all the cupboards in both our houses for something to keep us alive until dinner. Dad’s started hiding his favorite cookies in the sock drawer in his bedroom. On that particular day, there was a fruit bowl with some old grapes in our kitchen, so we sat down there.

  “What a mess,” Lena sighed, tidying up the newspapers on the table so she could get to the tablet lying underneath. “Are things completely out of control here?”

  I looked around. It really was pretty chaotic in our house at the moment.

  “Do you all expect Kari to go around like a garbage collector, tidying up after you? In the middle of The Change? It’s not easy, you know. I asked Isak.”

  I was about to remind Lena that I’d carried a massive salt lick all the way up to the Cliff the day before, but instead I opened the dishwasher and started emptying it. Birgit was going to come down when she’d had something to eat. The house couldn’t look like this then!

  “Smoking haddocks, we should make a movie about Emil and the Great Escape,” said Lena. “Ellisiv would be blown away. Then you wouldn’t have to speak, Trille.”

  She said it in a perfectly normal way, as if it were the most natural thing in the world that standing in front of the whole class made me panic. I wrung out the cloth that was in the sink. It smelled foul.

  “Did you know this?” Lena asked. She was using the tablet, swiping her fingers eagerly across the screen. “In the seventies, there was a TV series of Emil, but they didn’t show the whole thing here in Norway. They were scared that children would start hoisting each other up flagpoles, like Emil does with his little sister, Ida.”

  She munched the old grapes as she read on. “What a load of rubbish! We’ve got to have that in our presentation. Actually, how about we . . .”

  I pictured little Ida at the top of the flagpole. Sometimes I just know what Lena’s thinking.

  “Who are you planning to hoist up?” I asked, chucking the stinky cloth in with the laundry.

  Lena closed the cover on the tablet.

  “It will have to be whoever’s lightest. Shall we go and pick up Krølla from her after-school program?”

  Strictly speaking, we should have waited until Birgit arrived to start our book project, but we had to get this particular scene filmed while our parents were still at work. That much was clear even to me. I quickly fetched my bike, and we sped off to school. Krølla hates her after-school program. Every day she asks Mom if she can go home with Lena and me instead. For some reason or other, Mom thinks that’s completely out of the question.

  It wasn’t hard to persuade Krølla to be part of Lena’s film stunt. Before we knew it, she’d gone and found her red dress, so she would look like little Ida.

  “You’ll end up in two pieces if we tie that thing around your waist,” Lena said, peering at the thin cord on the flagpole. “We’ll need to use Magnus’s climbing harness.”

  It was probably around then that I realized this was a bad idea. Magnus’s property is sacred, but Lena’s never worried about that.

  “He never uses it anyway!” she said.

  The harness was far too big for Krølla, so Lena immediately adjusted every single strap. My brother was going to go berserk, but at least Krølla was secure in the harness. Lena fixed her to the flagpole rope with a carabiner.

  “We have to get this done before Magnus comes home,” I said. “Are you all right, Krølla?”

  She put on her sunglasses and gave a thumbs-up.

  “Take one. Action!” Lena shouted from over on the lawn, filming with her cell phone camera.

  That Emil must have been strong! It was hard work hoisting Krølla. I sent a thought to the top of the flagpole, hoping that the hole the rope went through could bear the load. With every pull, Krølla came closer to the sky. She clucked away happily up there. I was struggling and sweating, but trying my best to stay cool. This video was going to be shown to the whole class, after all!

  Krølla was only a couple of yards from the top when somebody coughed behind us.

  It was Birgit and Haas. Why did she always suddenly appear like that? I gave such a start I lost my grip for a brief second. Krølla slid down the flagpole with a wail, Haas barked, and Birgit put her hand to her mouth. Miraculously, Krølla came to a stop just over halfway up the pole.

  “Are you al
l right?” I shouted, trembling.

  “I’m stuck!”

  Lena looked accusingly at Birgit. “We were in the middle of filming a scene here!”

  “Sorry,” Birgit whispered.

  The problem now was that we couldn’t get Krølla up or down. She’d gotten herself stuck on a hook. No matter how much we jiggled and tugged, she wouldn’t budge.

  “Perfect,” I sighed, as I saw the school bus stopping up the road.

  The high school students were glued to the bus windows, examining the scene in our garden. I could see from Minda’s face a hundred yards away that she was mortified.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she snarled furiously as she threw down her bag.

  “I can see all the way to Mariannelund!” Krølla shouted bravely, trying to quote from the story about Emil and Ida.

  Then Magnus saw the harness. “Seriously?”

  “We’re only borrowing it,” Lena said calmly. “Safety’s our top priority.”

  Magnus was about to blow his top, but Minda stopped him. “Can’t you for once try thinking about other people instead of yourself and your stupid stuff? We’ve got to get her down!”

  My brother and sister tried jiggling the cord too, but Krølla was truly stuck, strung up there like a dried fish in the north wind. Magnus went to fetch a ladder, and just as he came back with it, the door to the basement apartment opened and out came Grandpa. He’s always having an afternoon nap when we come home from school. Now he screwed up his eyes as he looked at each one of us and then up at the flagpole. He was holding the telephone.

  “Vera Johansen just phoned to see if I was dead.”

  “Huh?” I blurted out.

  Grandpa scratched his chin drowsily. “Yes, since our flag was flying at half-mast,” he explained. “So I told her I was only having a nap, which I was.”

  I glanced nervously at Birgit. If she didn’t already think we were completely off our rockers, she certainly would now. Why couldn’t we just for once have a normal afternoon in the cove?