by Maria Parr
“Mm-hmm,” I said. “What about you?”
“Yup. Birgit’s going to the Netherlands, isn’t she?”
I nodded. Why was Lena asking that? Was she pleased? She was smiling anyway.
“We’re going to set a new record with our haul of sweets when we go caroling this year, Trille. Mark my words.”
Then she pulled her head out of the window without so much as saying bye.
I started playing “Für Elise” again, even though Magnus had said that he was going to be hospitalized if I played that piece one more time. From the corner of my eye, I saw Lena crossing the frosty fields in the low December sunlight. She met Grandpa down by the boat shed. I wondered what they were talking about as they strolled out onto the breakwater together. Suddenly I felt such a longing to be down there with them, it was like something slicing through my chest. But I’d agreed with Birgit that I’d go up to Hillside so we could study for our Norwegian test.
The music school concert was a blur. I can’t even remember going up when it was my turn. But my plan worked. I knew “Für Elise” so well that I played it even though I was sitting onstage like a dead monkey. In any case, Mom, with her huge tummy, said it had gone well. And Mr. Rognstad clapped, clearly pleased.
I came back to my senses when it was Kai-Tommy’s turn. He started off well but then ground to a complete halt halfway through and had to start again. A nasty little feeling of satisfaction grew inside me. I glanced over at Lena. Her brows were knitted, and when Kai-Tommy finished, she burst into thunderous applause.
I tried to spot Birgit, but I couldn’t see her slender frame until she took her seat onstage. People probably thought they were about to hear something ordinary and halfway decent, like when the rest of us played, but then Birgit started blazing away, playing something by Grieg that sent chills and waves of warmth down my spine.
There was total silence when she finished. Then the deafening applause began. I could see that Mom was extremely impressed. Only Lena seemed unenthusiastic, slapping her good hand half-heartedly against her thigh. She seriously doesn’t have a clue about music.
Just as I was getting into Mom’s car at the end, somebody grabbed on to my jacket.
“Here,” said Birgit. “A Christmas present.” She pushed a parcel into my lap.
“Oh, thank you!”
“I’ll see you in the new year,” she said softly, giving me a quick hug. Then off she ran.
Neither Lena nor Mom said anything on the way home. Mom just smiled in a very irritating way, while Lena looked out the window. The parcel on my lap felt like it was smoldering.
Back at home, I ran straight up to my room. There was no way I was going to open Birgit’s present in front of everyone else down in the living room at Christmas.
It was a picture. I recognized all the mountaintops. She’d painted the view from the cairn in shades of a summer’s evening. You could see Kobbholmen out at sea in the evening sun, and just next to it she’d painted a black dot. That was probably Troll.
If anybody had seen me there in my room, they would’ve thought I’d gone completely bonkers. I jumped around like a fool, bumping into the shelves so hard that the ice-cream tub holding the broken bottle Lena had given me leaped off and landed on the floor. Birgit had given me a Christmas present!
Birgit went to the Netherlands to spend Christmas with her brothers, and suddenly I had all the time in the world. The same went for my little brother in Mom’s tummy. It seemed he wasn’t planning on coming out anytime soon, even if Mom was so pregnant that the walls were buckling around us. She even said that Lena was right: she was too old to have a baby.
The weather outside was really miserable, so the whole family was pretty much stuck indoors, but we did all we could to pull ourselves together to make things as comfortable as possible for Mom. For instance, I would come into the kitchen and suddenly find Magnus making dinner, or Minda playing animal bingo with Krølla instead of staring at her phone and being grumpy. As for Dad, he put up decorations, ironed tablecloths, sorted out clothes and goodness knows what else. If we absolutely had to argue, we did it in the attic, and as quietly as possible.
“Could Mom burst?” Krølla whispered while we were loading the dishwasher one evening.
She was holding a fork in her hand and looking worriedly at Mom’s enormous bump.
“Pfft,” I said dismissively.
But, secretly, I was watching Mom anxiously too. Didn’t that baby realize he had to come out soon before she keeled over?
I saw unusually little of Lena. Ylva was probably keeping her at home so there would be as much peace and quiet as possible in our house. But when Boxing Day arrived and there was still no sign of our new brother, she came stomping into our kitchen in her familiar style. Outside, the wind was blowing the cold December rain sideways.
“Today we’re going to go caroling, and we’re going to dress up as guerrilla soldiers,” she declared, wiping the worst of the rain from her face.
There was already a large puddle on the kitchen floor around where she was standing.
“Are we?” I asked skeptically.
“It’s a genius idea, Trille. We’ll wear Magnus’s military gear and camouflage our faces. And we can borrow his hunting knife too!”
I could see several problems with what she’d said, including the fact that my big brother’s name had come up twice. But I needn’t have worried.
“Over my dead body!” said Mom, leaning heavily on the kitchen counter. “There’s no way you and Lena are going around wearing military gear and singing ‘Away in a Manger’ while brandishing a hunting knife.”
She told us that Christmas was a time of peace and that we should dress up as angels or Christmas elves and behave ourselves.
We went up to my room. The wind and the rain were even louder up there. Lena scanned the walls. I could see that she’d spotted the picture from Birgit.
“Kai-Tommy got one too,” she muttered.
“Got what?”
“A Christmas present from Birgit.”
“Oh.” My voice was indifferent, but inside it felt as if the blood had stopped in my veins.
Was it true? I’d had such a happy and warm feeling all Christmas every time I’d looked at the picture! Had Birgit given Christmas presents to everybody? Or just to Kai-Tommy and me? Why did Lena have to come here and tell me this, anyway?
Angrily, I rested my chin on my palms and peered through the rain-spattered windowpane. The wind was doing its best to shake the lights off the cedar tree out in the yard. Two crooked figures were coming up the track. Grandpa and Dad. They’d been down to see to the boats.
“I can’t be bothered to go caroling in this awful weather,” I mumbled.
I’d grown so used to Lena just shrugging and leaving me to do my own thing recently that I was really taken aback by her reaction.
She stood right in front of me. “There’s no such thing as bad weather, you wimp, only bad clothes. How many of your Christmas sweets have you got left, anyway?”
“Wimp?” I asked in disbelief. Lena had hit where it hurt most. “Only snotty little brats go caroling, Lena. I’m not coming!”
Lena’s eyes narrowed and she focused on something behind me instead of looking straight at me. If I wanted to stay inside playing the piano and staring at art, that was fine by her, she said coldly. It was my life. But she was going out caroling before every Tom, Didrik, and Harald went out and the sweet supplies ran dry. Then she left.
I stood there, feeling regret and anger at the same time. Eventually I pulled the sheet off my bed and stormed after her.
“OK,” I said, wrapping the sheet around my shoulders.
Lena looked at me crossly. It was almost dark now.
“Are you seriously going as an angel?”
“I’m going to disguise myself as an angel,” I said. “When we get up to the main road, I’m going to turn into a ghost.”
I fetched a sheet for her too.
Do
wn in the kitchen, two new puddles had appeared next to the one Lena had made when she arrived. Dad and Grandpa were shivering after their walk down to the sea.
“‘God rest you merry, gentlemen,’” Lena said in greeting, curtsying in her angel costume.
“You can forget that,” said Dad. “Nobody’s going out this evening.”
The wind was supposed to be getting stronger, he told us. On the radio, they’d been telling people to avoid going outside unless it was really urgent.
“I know one thing that’s really urgent,” said Lena when Grandpa and Dad had gone to get changed. “And that’s my supply of goodies.”
Silently, I went to fetch the waterproof cooler bag from the pantry, and then we crept out.
We realized right away that we’d have to forget our ghost plan. If we wanted to keep the sheets over our heads, we’d have needed to tie them to the ground. The only solution was to wrap them around ourselves tightly and do our best to look like angels.
“Gales and pouring rain,” Lena shouted. “It feels so Christmassy.”
I was still mulling over what she’d said about Kai-Tommy. I shielded my angry face from the rain and stomped through the wind.
Our first caroling stop was Uncle Tor’s place.
“Are you two completely crackers? Get home, for crying out loud!” he said when he opened the door, only to be met by a faceful of wind, rain, and “Away in a Manger.”
“We’ll go home soon,” said Lena, opening the cooler bag. “We’ve just got to get enough to cover the bottom.”
My uncle grunted as he threw in some assorted sweets and fled back indoors.
We probably should have gone home, but I didn’t want to. What would I do there anyway? Sit looking at the picture Birgit had given me and tiptoe around Mom? We took shelter around the back of the hay barn so we could discuss our next move. Down by the ferry landing there was a whole bunch of houses sure to be full of sweets. It was only a quarter of an hour’s walk, and there could hardly be any competition from other carolers wandering around on an evening like that.
“Imagine if we knocked on Kai-Tommy’s door,” said Lena. “I’d like to see his face when he realizes that we’ve snapped up the whole area while he’s been inside waiting for snow and robins flying around.”
I tightened my grip on the cooler bag handle. “Let’s go,” I said firmly.
Blinking barnacles, it was so good to get out and about! We practically flew along with the wind behind us. The lampposts waved in the wind, and the shadows of the tall spruce trees on the uphill side of the road danced wildly in the changing light. When we got to Ellisiv’s house, I was all ready to sing a carol, but Lena thought we should press on and get these houses done first.
“We can do her on the way back!” she shouted.
We came around the headland before the ferry landing and could hear the sea roaring. The water droplets landing on our faces were salty. The storm was really picking up now. Sometimes it felt as if the wind had taken hold of me by the waist and was carrying me along the road.
“Let’s do ‘Joy to the World.’ It’s one of the shortest!” Lena shouted. She started running up toward the houses. Her sheet flapped over her shoulders like a load of confused laundry.
Generally speaking, people were quite alarmed when they opened their doors. Lena thought their bewilderment meant they were giving us more sweets. We were raking in the goodies!
“I knew it had to be some of you hardy folk from Mathildewick Cove,” said Thunderclap Kåre. Clearly impressed, he gave us each an enormous bar of milk chocolate. “Say hello to Lars from me, and get yourselves home!”
But we couldn’t go home until we’d knocked on Kai-Tommy’s door.
The house where Kai-Tommy and his family live looks kind of American. They even have columns by the front door. In their yard, a thousand Christmas lights danced in the wind.
It was his brother who opened the door, the one who’s a budding soccer talent. He was wearing a light-blue shirt that fitted him tightly across the chest, and he flicked his bangs back in just the same way Kai-Tommy does. I could imagine him wearing a soccer uniform. Minda would probably have swooned. Was this what Kai-Tommy was going to look like in a couple of years? Was that why Birgit liked him? Dispirited, I stared down at my boots, which were sticking out from under my sheet, but Lena looked straight at Kai-Tommy’s brother and started singing “Joy to the World,” the song echoing through the roomy hallway.
Halfway through the verse, Kai-Tommy popped up behind his brother. For a split second, he looked at us in shock and awe, but then he put on his usual sneering face, as if we were the two greatest idiots in the world. Then the boys’ parents appeared. Their mother was wearing a red Christmas dress, and Ivar looked like an English football manager, wearing a suit.
Lena’s last “heaven and nature sing” was a little quieter under the gaze of her soccer coach. But when Kai-Tommy’s mom brought us two large chocolate Santas, Lena opened the lid of the cooler bag ever so slightly and said, “We’ll have to take them in our pockets, Trille. It’s full up in here.”
As we closed the door, I was pleased to hear Kai-Tommy inside, shouting, “How come they’re allowed out and I’m not?”
“You’d think they had no parents,” his mother replied.
“I think we should go home now, Lena,” I said.
The wind and rain had crept all the way through to our skin, and now the cold had more of a bite to it. I wasn’t angry anymore, just fed up and worn out. It was quite different walking against the wind. It felt like walking straight into a living wall, and sometimes it was almost hard to breathe. The best thing we could do was to lean forward and walk kind of sideways, each with an arm in front of our faces.
The way home suddenly seemed endless. A little worry started gnawing away at my stomach. What had we gotten ourselves into this time?
But it was only when we arrived back at the ferry landing that we really understood the seriousness of the situation. Lena was blown off her feet like a paper angel. Then the ice-cold sea spray came washing right up onto the road, making me lose my footing too. By the time we got up, we were both without our sheets. As if on command, we scrambled down into the ditch on the uphill side of the road.
“We have to get to the other side of the headland,” I yelled.
We half walked, half crept along the wet ditch, Lena dragging the cooler bag behind her like an anchor. I remembered that her hand was still in a cast, and I turned around to take the bag. At that moment, a huge wave came roaring over the road where we’d just been, washing away stones, snow poles, and anything else that wasn’t tied down. A storm surge! The fear struck me like a hammer blow. I didn’t know the wind could get so much stronger so quickly!
Another gust forced us to get down almost flat in the ditch. I hardly dared look at the lampposts anymore. What if they snapped?
“Trille! Over there!”
I lifted my head. One of the spruce trees farther up the road was about to come down. The wind pulled and tore at the tree’s winter-green branches, and it started to give way in slow motion. It rocked and swayed and eventually fell right over in the stormy light, like a wounded giant. We sat in the ditch, speechless, as we stared at the enormous tree lying right across the road. We were out in tree-toppling storm winds!
Then it got dark. I don’t mean dark like it normally gets at night. I mean pitch-dark like in a dark closet in a dark room with a dark hallway outside. The streetlights went out, the dots of light on the other side of the fjord disappeared, and the moon fled as far away as it could. I fumbled my way over to Lena.
If we kept crawling onward, we might get mashed underneath a tree. If we crawled back to the houses where we’d been, we might get washed out to sea.
We were trapped!
Ellisiv’s house!” Lena shouted in my ear.
We knew our teacher’s red-painted house was all there was between the headland and the trees, but we couldn’t see a thing, and it f
elt dangerous to crawl out of the ditch. Another blast of wind came thundering in from the sea. Then it let up slightly, so I wiped the rain from my eyes and spun my head to try to find some kind of landmark. Was this what it was like being blind?
Then something pierced the darkness like a nail.
“There!” shouted Lena.
It had to be one of Ellisiv’s windows. Had she lit a candle or something? We started to fumble our way forward again. We lay down flat in the ditch every time a gust of wind came, but we dragged ourselves onward in the small gaps between the gusts. Lena went in front, while I followed behind with the bag. Eventually the house was right above us. Now we just had to climb up out of the ditch and into the yard.
We waited until the wind calmed, and then we booked it. We tripped several times. It was impossible to see where we were putting our feet, and the wind shook and ripped at us with enormous power. When we reached the house, I tripped on the bottom step and fell down flat. It hurt so much that I howled with pain, and I could taste warm blood as it trickled down from my nose and into my mouth. Another gust almost blew us back down into the yard, but finally I managed to claw my way to the door handle. I had to use all my strength to stop the door from blowing off its hinges. Then we plunged into the hallway, the door slamming behind us with a loud bang.
The sight that met Ellisiv would probably have scared most people stiff. Two soaking-wet and bloodstained children lying amid piles of chocolate and clementines. She let out a scream and put her hand to her mouth in shock. Luckily she wasn’t alone. Axel, our old soccer coach, popped up from behind her. Lena and I dragged ourselves up until we were sitting.
“What are you doing here?” said Lena, looking at Axel in surprise.
“You’re one to talk!” Ellisiv shouted. “What on earth are you doing, Trille and Lena?”
“Well, we were going to sing you a Christmas carol, but . . .” Lena couldn’t go on.
