A Question Mark is Half a Heart

by Sofia Lundberg

  Elin crept down, careful to land both feet on each step before attempting the next. Marianne didn’t react, the only movement in her hunched body was her heavy breathing. Elin could hear the air whistling strenuously through her nose. Apart from that, the house was silence itself. Elin tiptoed the last steps to the front door with her feet spread wide apart so her trouser legs wouldn’t rub together and make a noise.

  A cold, hard sea wind sucked at the door as she opened it. She held on and closed it carefully, one millimetre at a time. Then she ran quickly across the yard towards the little forest road. The whistling had stopped and the only thing she could hear was the crash of the waves. She stopped still in the pitch-black night and listened attentively. Whistled a few notes herself. There was no response, but she thought she heard someone approach, steps crunching on the gravel. Her pulse quickened.

  ‘Fredrik? Is that you?’ Elin called. There was no reply, and the footsteps had stopped.

  She started to whistle again, the same melody again and again. In the end, it was answered by a single high note that slowly ebbed away.

  ‘Don’t be afraid, come out!’ Elin looked around, the juniper bushes and the tree filled with threatening shadows hanging over her. She spun around, craning her neck anxiously. Suddenly he jumped out right in front of her with his hands in the air, and she screamed and punched him hard on the shoulder.

  ‘Give over, you frightened me!’

  ‘Scaredy-cat, are you afraid of the dark?’ Fredrik laughed at her and started running along the road. She ran after him. They knew the area inside-out, they didn’t need eyes to guide them in the dark evening. Suddenly he stopped dead and took her hand, pulling her into one of the gardens they passed.

  ‘What are you doing? Aren’t we going to the beach?’ she protested, struggling.

  ‘Shhh,’ he whispered. ‘Look: Aina just put a light on. Come on, let’s play a game with her.’

  They ran towards the outhouse. They could see a soft glow from the heart shaped cut-out of the door. A power cable dangled from the branches of the trees, running the electricity out from the house. Fredrik crept round behind the privy and opened the hatch that concealed the bucket. Elin kept her distance, wrinkling her nose and flapping her hand to ward off the smell of the privy. Fredrik held a long stick out to her.

  ‘Shhh, she’s coming, not a sound,’ he whispered with a giggle.

  Aina was the oldest person in the village and used a wheeled walking frame. They heard it squeaking as she rolled it over the paved garden path, and she groaned as she made her way up the little step. The whole hut swayed as she sat down with a thud, then there was a loud rumbling. Elin and Fredrik looked at each other and smothered the laughter that bubbled up in their bellies.

  ‘Now,’ Fredrik whispered, stretching the stick towards the hole. Elin took hold of his arm and shook her head.

  ‘No, it’s mean. What if she gets angry?’ she whispered.

  But Fredrik didn’t listen. He poked Aina gently on the bottom with his stick and when her terrified shriek filled the night he couldn’t keep the laughter down any longer. He guffawed until he almost wept as they vanished, quick as shadows, into the dark forest.

  ‘You horrible little scamps!’ Aina shouted after them. Elin snuck a look behind them and saw how the flab on her arm wobbled as she shook her fist.

  ‘That was mean, Fredrik. What if I’m not allowed to go there now, what if she doesn’t want to read to me any more?’ Elin admonished.

  ‘It was funny, though. She’ll never think it was you, she loves you,’ Fredrik chuckled as he wiped away tears of mirth.

  Elin couldn’t contain herself when she heard his infectious laughter. They laughed all the way to the sea, and their secret spot between the rocks, the place they had their campfire. Fredrik gathered sticks and dry grass from the ground and laid them over the charred remnants of their last fire. Elin lay on her back and studied the yellowy-white explosion of stars in the sky.

  ‘It’s so clear. Tonight we’ll definitely be able to see everything,’ she said.

  ‘Hmm, almost everything. Not Venus. Unless you want to stay up until five, that’s when it’s meant to come up, over there behind the cliff.’

  Fredrik struck his knife against the steel. The sparks lit up the night.

  ‘Five. We don’t have school tomorrow. Why not?’ Elin put her hands behind her head. The stones felt knobbly and hard beneath her back.

  ‘Dad gets up at five, I’d better be home by then or he’ll go crazy.’

  Fredrik struggled with the steel but none of the sparks caught. Elin stuck her hand out and grabbed a few pine needles.

  ‘Here, light it with dry needles, that might work,’ she said, scattering them over the sticks.

  ‘Ah, what do you know about fires? You can probably only light one with matches and newspaper. I can do this, just wait a minute.’

  ‘Dad used to light fires with pine needles. He was good at it, he was good at everything. Well, until he turned into one of those … you know …’

  ‘Don’t think about it now. You’re having a nice time here with me, right? I’ll get the fire lit, I promise.’

  Fredrik carried on feverishly scraping the knife against the steel, and at last the dry grass started to glow. He blew carefully. The flames turned yellow and took hold. He stuck in a few extra sticks and then lay flat on his back a short distance away.

  Elin stretched out her hand and put it on his arm. She left it there, like a link between them, and felt the warmth from his body against her palm.

  ‘Can you see Cetus?’ He pointed up at the sky with his free arm.

  ‘No, where?’

  ‘There, in the south-west, can’t you see it? It’s really bright tonight.’ Fredrik inched closer and took hold of her hand, pointing it towards the constellation.

  ‘I can’t find it, it’s too hard,’ Elin sighed and pulled her arm back again. She went on quietly studying the heavens above them. ‘I can see something there. It’s Castor and Pollux. That’s Gemini, right?’

  ‘Good, you’re learning.’

  ‘What is a cetus anyway?’

  ‘It’s a whale, dummy.’

  ‘But whales are called whales, not cetuses.’

  ‘You think too much. Stop thinking.’ Fredrik threw a little stone at her, which bounced off her stomach and then fell back among the others on the beach. Elin gasped.

  ‘Did you see! Three at once,’ she whispered.

  ‘I saw.’

  ‘Do we get three wishes each then?’

  ‘Yeah, of course. One for every shooting star.’

  ‘Though you only need one.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I wish all my wishes would come true.’

  Fredrik groaned loudly.

  ‘But they’re not going to,’ he sighed.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because you said it out loud, of course.’

  NOW

  NEW YORK, 2017

  Elin wakes early. Sam is lying far away from her, right over on his side with his back towards her. He’s sleeping deeply. She reaches her hand out towards her bedside table and feels for her phone. When the screen lights up, she sees that she’s got a reply from Alice. OK, it says. Just two letters. She sighs and sits on the side of the bed to send a swift response.

  Sorry. I really mean it. Can we have dinner soon? You choose the place. I love you.

  Two against one again, she thinks and rubs the sleep from her eyes. She looks at the screen, studies the words she just wrote. Then she clicks away from the thread with Alice and her bad conscience to read another message. It’s from Joe, her assistant.

  I’ll pick you up a bit earlier, 7.15. The drive takes longer than I thought. Hope that’s OK?

  She looks at the clock and is suddenly wide awake. Barely half an hour from now. She struggles out of her nightdress on the way to the shower.

  Sam is still sleeping when she sneaks past the bed and into the closet, feel
ing her way among the hangers without turning the light on. She chooses black on black, a blouse and trousers, and gets dressed in the hallway on the way to the lift. Sam doesn’t wake up. Or he doesn’t let her know that he knows she’s leaving. The last few sessions with the therapist have mostly been about her job, about how he wants her to take a step back, to be more present. Once upon a time he was the one pursuing a career, but now he seems to have grown tired of it. For Elin, her job has never been about having a career. It’s been something else altogether. When she’s taking photographs, time and thought cease to exist.

  A little more than half an hour has passed when she comes out onto the street. Joe’s Jeep is double-parked and he’s leaning out through the open car window. His arms are covered with tattoos and his t-shirt is tight across his shoulders. He holds out a large cup of cappuccino and she gratefully takes a large gulp.

  ‘Let me guess. You didn’t see the message until you woke up,’ Joe laughs.

  Elin is hiding behind large black sunglasses. She steps out into the street, between two hooting taxis, and quickly climbs into the car.

  ‘Maybe, maybe, but I’m here now,’ she says, smiling as she sinks down into the soft seat.

  ‘But you know where we’re going, right?’

  The old Jeep lurches as Joe releases the clutch and pulls away.

  ‘Out into the bush,’ Elin sighs.

  Joe changes gear and the vibrations from the engine spread to the inside of the car. There’s a strong smell of petrol. Elin screws up her nose.

  ‘What?’ Joe pats the dashboard. ‘This is a priceless treasure. Don’t you start complaining about my car.’

  ‘We can talk about it when we get there. If we get there,’ Elin sighs. ‘Why didn’t you take my car?’

  She winds down the window a little and leans her face into the breeze, shutting her eyes against the bright morning light.

  ‘Who are we shooting today again?’ she drawls.

  Joe turns his head towards her, a little too long, so that the car swerves slightly.

  ‘Are you kidding me? Are you still asleep?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’ve never forgotten who we’re shooting, or where. You look a bit out of sorts. Are you ill?’

  Elin keeps her eyes on the street and shakes her head vaguely.

  ‘Yeah, I’m kidding, I do remember,’ she says, so quietly she can barely be heard above the engine noise.

  When they arrive, the garden is already full of equipment and people purposefully crossing the lawn. The rest of the team are there. Reel after reel of cable are unwound to provide electricity for the lights arranged in front of a luxuriant flowerbed. On the drive there’s a trailer, and outside it, beneath a protective marquee, the woman who’ll be the subject of the portrait is being made up. Her long hair is in curlers, and she’s tilting her chin and gazing upwards so the make-up artist can line her lower eyelid with kohl.

  It’s a novelist this time, but Elin hasn’t read her books. She hardly ever finds time to read these days, even though it used to be her idea of heaven. In her jacket pocket is a piece of paper with a short summary of the book, but she hasn’t read that either. The star chart is in the same pocket, folded four times. She can feel the folds against her chest.

  The publishers want flowers in the background. The portrait should feel pastoral and warm, which is why they’ve left the city and made their way out to this garden in the suburbs.

  Elin holds the camera and moves around the house, followed closely by Joe and two other assistants. Here and there she puts the camera to her eye, looking for backdrops. She settles on a bed at the back of the house where a mass of marigolds and asters are clustered together. Behind it are two low apple trees, branches loaded with round red fruit.

  ‘We’ll do it here, this will be better. Move everything.’

  Joe stares at her. Four flashes are already rigged up, everything’s plugged in. But he doesn’t protest, and they traipse off to start breaking down and moving the heavy equipment.

  Elin wanders on alone. On the edge of the garden is a little shed, hidden behind a wall of bushes. The door is blue. Shining cobalt blue. She reaches a hand out towards it, strokes her fingers across the surface. It’s uneven, hand-painted with a brush. Between the brushstrokes, streaks of black show through. A rusty, old-fashioned key has been left in the keyhole. She turns it, this way and that. Feels the chill of the iron in her hand. Suddenly she can’t move. She remembers another door. Details from another time wash over her. The front wall of the house, with plaster coming off in big chunks. The flowerbed, where the rose bushes grew wild and unpruned, their branches entangled. The scent of mouldering leaves and damp earth.

  She backs away a couple of steps and takes a photo. But the light is bad and the colour doesn’t come out properly. She uses her phone camera instead. Then she stands, still as a statue, staring at the door.

  Someone comes and takes hold of her arm. She shakes off their touch. They’re talking around her but she doesn’t hear any words. There’s a muted ringing in one of her ears. She’s tiny and barefoot. The door she’s standing in front of is suddenly her own.

  THEN

  HEIVIDE, GOTLAND, 1979

  Elin heard the blue front door slam shut, then everything was quiet. Marianne’s joints often gave way, from exhaustion. When that happened, she would curl up in a foetal position on the doormat, or wherever she happened to be at that moment. Her jacket was spread out behind her body, like a pool of brown mud. Her forehead was touching her knees and her cheeks were pale. When Elin went up to her and stroked her hair she mumbled that she just needed to rest a little, that she’d get up in a minute. That Elin should go away.

  Elin left her reluctantly, after putting a soft jumper under her head, and went back to the kitchen table. It was covered with drawings. Just flowers, wildflowers in gentle pastel colours. It was Gerd who’d taught her how to draw flowers, a long time ago. She started with four small circles, close together, a green stalk, and two green leaves. She practised in the shop, day after day. And when the results got good enough, Gerd let her draw a flower on the front of her diary, on the first page. She made it yellow. Yellow like the sun. Yellow like Gerd’s smile.

  Now she could breathe life into all kinds of flowers: clover, lady’s bedstraw, chicory. She would draw the leaves carefully with a pencil, down to the tiniest vein. There was often a bouquet on the table, in a well-worn glass vase. Now there were hardly any flowers left to pick, only a few kept growing into the autumn, slightly withered and drooping.

  Dusk was falling when Marianne at last stood up and joined Elin in the kitchen. She opened the fridge door and stared at the shelves. The skin on her cheekbones was rough, and the darkness made the shadows in the scar sharper. It was because of The Angry that she looked like that. Not her own, his. It came when he drank. Marianne got angry sometimes, but not like him. They could wind her up, but it always passed. He got so furious that his rage had a name: The Angry. The Angry’s coming. Elin shivered at the memory.

  It was The Angry’s fault that they came, that the police came and took him. They didn’t know that there was another side to him, they didn’t know about his warm hands and his cuddles. How could they?

  She missed him, but not The Angry. Things were calmer now.

  Elin saw him dragging Marianne across the yard by her hair that evening, the evening her cheek got rough. She saw her dress get ripped up and one of her legs get coloured with dark red blood as her skin-and-bones body was dragged across the ground. She was little then, standing on tiptoe by the kitchen window. The voices, the screaming, the despair on Marianne’s face. When he finally let go and staggered drunkenly away from the farm, she crawled towards the door, towards the children inside. Towards Elin and Erik. That was how it always went when they fought. Marianne stayed and Lasse went. When he finally returned home he’d be his normal self, kind and full of cuddles, with big warm hands that stroked your back.

&nb
sp; ‘There’s milk?’ Marianne’s voice roused her from her thoughts. It was weak and reedy, as though she hadn’t spoken in a long time. She turned to Elin and held up the carton.

  ‘Yes, I didn’t steal it. Micke gave me five krona the other day, I had a few krona left so I bought it today.’

  ‘Micke did? Grinde’s Micke? How come?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘We don’t need alms.’

  ‘Alms, what are they?’

  ‘I’m going to give it back to him. Say no next time.’

  ‘But we need milk, don’t we? It’s good, isn’t it?’

  ‘Stop arguing. Water does just as well, we’ll none of us die from drinking water.’

  ‘I just thought …’

  ‘Well, don’t. I’m tired, I can’t handle any more, damn it. Water’s free and it’s good enough for us.’ Marianne was glaring at her.

  ‘You swore.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Elin grabbed a pen from the table and added a line to the tally on a piece of paper taped to a kitchen cabinet. There was one for each of them, but Lasse was crossed out with a thick black line.

  ‘You’ve got the most now, not counting Papa,’ she said.

  ‘Aha. Good. Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn. Now I have even more,’ Marianne said, indifferently.

  ‘What are you doing? Do you want to lose? You were the one who came up with the idea of tallying it up.’

  ‘So you’d stop swearing at school. So I wouldn’t get any shit from your teacher.’