A Blessed Child (20 page)

Chapter 65

But it was going to take time. Morning came and afternoon came and when the storm finally abated it was succeeded by cold, torrential rain, and Ragnar lay quite still in his hollow, saturated with the water that had flowed through him; pale and dead. Many stayed indoors that day and the beaches were empty; no girls on the rock; everything was purling, cold and gray, and only Ann-Kristin went from house to house, asking if anyone had seen her son, but no one had.

Other mothers and fathers—Marion’s mother, Pär’s father, the mother of the twins Fabian and Olle—opened their doors and looked at her, inquiring, indifferent, wondering, and shook their heads.

“You haven’t seen him since yesterday evening, then?”

“He tends to run off sometimes, doesn’t he?”

“Have you called the police?”

Palle Quist also had a visit from Ann-Kristin that morning.

“I hope Ragnar plans to show up this evening,” Palle Quist said to her. “We’re having a complete run-through.”

He quite simply forgot to ask if she wanted to come in out of the rain, dry off, warm herself by the stove for a minute, have a cup of coffee. And no, Palle Quist had not seen Ragnar. Neither had his daughter, Emily, as far as he knew, but he would ask her when she got up.

“But he’s progressing,” he said. “Ragnar is progressing. It’s so good, Ann-Kristin! Tell him that from me when you see him, and tell him it’s good! We mustn’t lose momentum now, even though the weather has turned.”

When Ann-Kristin collapsed in a heap outside Palle Quist’s house and began to sob, he had already shut the door.

From Palle Quist’s house it was not far to Isak’s, but she had dreaded ringing at that door and asking about her son. It was Rosa’s cold stare; it was the fact that Isak had told her long ago to keep away, and she had kept away. She would ask to speak to Erika. She wanted to say: Where is Ragnar? Where is he? You know where he is, don’t you? But when she had run and stumbled all the way to the blue-painted door beyond the long, white grass and rung the bell, and Isak had opened the door and was standing there in front of her, huge and brilliant and terrible, she cried out through the tears and rain: “I can’t find the boy!”

It would take a few more hours for them to find him. Molly sat in front of the grandfather clock, tracking the movements of the big hand across its face, while the rain rippled down the panes of the three closed windows. The big hand moved once a minute: to think that a minute could take such a long time. Molly wanted to go home to her mother in Oslo, she wanted to get away from the white rails in Rosa’s drying cupboard, get away from the bears who swam across the sea at night when the ferrymen weren’t keeping a lookout, get away from Laura and Erika, who were suddenly just sleeping and sleeping, like princesses behind a hedge of thorns. They simply wouldn’t get up. Rosa said the change in the weather had left them feeling poorly.

In the kitchen, through the wall from the living room, Ann-Kristin and Rosa sat facing each other across the table, under the blue lamp. Ann-Kristin was crying silently. Isak was talking on the telephone. As he put the telephone back on the hall table, he said that the police were on their way, but that it would take them about two hours to reach the island and everyone was to carry on searching until then.

Ann-Kristin looked up, meeting first Rosa’s eyes, then Isak’s.

“But doesn’t Erika know anything?”

She didn’t believe it. Did nobody know where he was or where they had last seen him?

“Doesn’t Laura know anything?”

Ann-Kristin demanded to talk to one of them, preferably Erika. Weren’t Erika and Ragnar going to celebrate their birthday together? They always had before. Did Isak know that? She lowered her voice. Did he in fact know what good friends Erika and Ragnar were?

Rosa interrupted.

“Erika had her birthday party here yesterday,” she said. “On the veranda! There were lots of them here, but not Ragnar. He wasn’t invited, as far as I know.”

“Wasn’t invited?”

Rosa went on: “Friendship between children of that age is so unpredictable; one minute they’re bosom pals, the next minute they’re not talking to each other anymore.”

Isak said: “I’ll go and wake Erika. She was ill late last night, after the party, but I’ll wake her and ask her when she last saw him.”

He moved toward the door, but then turned and said: “Ragnar has a hut…”—Isak was groping for words—“a secret hut in the woods.”

He gave a little laugh and looked at Ann-Kristin.

“You know where it is, I imagine? You’ve checked he isn’t just in the hut?”

Ann-Kristin lifted her head and looked at him.

“Of course I’ve been to the hut,” she whispered. “It was the first place I looked. The hut’s empty.”

So much water everywhere.

Water through his clothes, water through his skin, water in his lungs, water dripping from his hair. He lay in the hollow, in brackish water, in rain and sea, and the stones that surrounded him were as smooth as the palms of a little girl. When they finally found him that afternoon, he was heavy to the touch, heavy to carry.

It was two foreigners, two women from Adelaide, Australia, who saw him lying there. They had been on Hammarsö for the whole of July, enjoying the scenery, which reminded them more of places in Africa than of Scandinavia. This was their last day on the island, and they had decided to brave the rain and go for a long walk along the stony beach.

They acted swiftly and silently. One woman crouched down, bent over him, listening for his pulse and heartbeat, although she knew he was dead. She stroked his hair to one side, patted his cheek, and closed his eyes. Then she put her arms around him and pulled him to her. She got wet and cold, and many, many years later, when she was old and not far from death herself, she would remember the dead boy with the thin wrists as the rain bucketed down. She nodded to the other woman. They lifted him—the boy was not very big, but he was heavier than they expected—and they carried him between them along the stony beach and through the woods until they reached a house, though they did not know who lived there, and knocked on the door.

Ann-Kristin was still sitting in Isak and Rosa’s kitchen when the telephone rang. Rosa took the call.

Erika stood in the doorway in Laura’s pajamas, rubbing her eyes. Her body was heavy and sated with sleep.

Rosa spoke quickly and quietly, saying what had happened, what had been said on the phone, how they had found him, where he was now; her voice went on and on, she used many words.

Ann-Kristin raised her head and looked straight at Erika. They regarded each other for a long time: the woman on the chair and the girl in the doorway. Rosa’s voice droned on. Then Ann-Kristin opened her mouth as if to scream, but no sound came.

Rosa stopped talking; and then it was quiet.

Chapter 66

One after another they were interviewed by the police and fed hot chocolate and Cokes and dry cinnamon buns that grew big and doughy in their mouths. The rain had abated, but the day that was turning into evening was cold and gray, a sign of impending autumn. Everyone was talking about the change in the weather. They were all present. Marion, Frida, and Emily. Eva was there, and Pär, Fabian, and Olle. Their parents were there, too. The police interviewed them one by one, in the community center. They all agreed it was a tragedy. A deliberate accident, someone called it, and that phrase,
a deliberate accident,
seemed to stick. No one said straight out that Ragnar had killed himself, but why else would he have been down there when the storm was at its height?

“It can’t be viewed as anything but a deliberate accident,” said Marion’s father, Niclas Bodström.

What did Erika tell the police through a mouthful of bun?

“Ragnar was sort of…a bit weird,” she said.

She chewed and chewed on the bun and talked at the same time, gesturing, pointing, crying, and chewing bun, which expanded in her mouth and was impossible to swallow.

“We weren’t usually with him,” interjected Laura.

Marion, Emily, and Frida nodded. The boys looked at the ceiling or at one another, anywhere but at the girls, who did the talking.

“He was just unbelievably weird,” repeated Erika.

And afterward! By the time the police had talked to everybody who knew him (and no one knew him particularly well, they said), by the time the ambulance had taken him to the mainland and a kindly islander had offered Ann-Kristin a place to rest, a bed to sleep in, so she wouldn’t be left on her own, it was late in the evening and everyone agreed that this year’s production of the Hammarsö Pageant would have to be canceled because of Ragnar’s death. Palle Quist’s entire team had gathered in the community center. The coffee and hot chocolate had all been drunk, the buns eaten, the evening’s rehearsal canceled because of the police interviews.

They couldn’t possibly think of doing the play now, not under current circumstances, thought Frida’s mother, who was involved in this year’s production as both a costume designer and an extra.

A great, heavy, long sleep was descending on everyone.

Palle Quist put his head in his hands and wailed: “It’s terrible. Terrible!”

Someone nodded, someone shook her head. But then Palle Quist had an idea. He had been sitting with his head in his hands saying
Terrible, terrible
all evening. Now he raised his head and stared out through the big vaulted windows that overlooked a heath covered in fiery red poppies. The community center was known for those windows, and for its view. It was strange. The weather had turned again, and the evening was now as mild as a Swedish summer evening can be, and light. Yes! Yes! Palle Quist allowed himself to be seduced by the light and heard himself say tentatively, inquiringly, because he was still not sure whether one could say what he was about to say:

“But what if we
don’t
cancel the performance?”

He cleared his throat.

“If we were to go ahead with the performance, as a…as a…” Palle Quist racked his brain for the right word: “…as a
tribute
to Ragnar?”

He was met by a wall of sleep: sleepy faces, sleepy looks, sleepy hands fending him off. No one, except Frida’s mother, could be bothered to answer.

“Palle,” she said, and repeated what she had said earlier in the evening, “we can’t think of doing the play now. Not under current circumstances.”

Palle Quist nodded. It was what he had expected. They would change their minds. His work, his magnum opus, would not go to waste. He would allow time to work to his advantage. Everything, he thought (no, he knew!), would look different after they had all had a night’s sleep.

Isak went first, with long, heavy steps. The woods were dense, but the night was light. Her father’s back was bigger and broader than the blackboard at school: you could write things on it, Erika thought as she walked behind him. And the great, fair head with the great, brilliant brain. What was he doing with it all? She imagined an explosion of forgetting and grief.

Just before she fell asleep the previous night, she had opened her mouth and told him everything. The words had tumbled out of her, every word a stone four hundred million years old, and he had put his finger to her lips and said
Hush, little one,
and carried on singing.

First Isak, then Erika, and then Laura. Isak chose the shortcut through the woods. It only took ten minutes if you hop-skipped or ran or took long, straight strides like Isak. Rosa was waiting at home with tea and freshly baked bread and wild strawberry jam.

Molly lay sleeping in her room.

When Rosa tucked her in, she said: “No more of this getting into Laura’s bed at night. It means neither of you gets any sleep.”

Molly shook her head.

“Good night,” said Rosa.

“Good night,” said Molly.

But Molly would not sleep. She lay in her bed that evening, aware of the smell of freshly baked bread. She had helped make the uncooked strawberry jam while the others were at the community center, and been allowed to taste it before going to bed. As she lay there, she heard Rosa pacing up and down the kitchen. She heard Rosa sigh, heard her crying, heard the tick of the grandfather clock in the living room. She heard Isak, Erika, and Laura come home; she heard a door slam, footsteps in the hall, voices. All this Molly heard. When Isak opened her door a crack and looked in, she pulled the quilt over her head and became a snail in its shell.

Isak closed the door again.

“Hoy hoy hoy!” whispered Molly, trying hard to think of lollipops.

Someone is playing, someone is shouting, someone disappears under the water, and then they pop up again, one way or another. Molly pushed the quilt off her face. She wasn’t a snail anymore.