Samurai Summer (13 page)

I didn’t see Christian the next morning, either, when I sat in Matron’s office. She wasn’t looking at me but was looking through the window like she was keeping an eye out for him too. Then she turned to me.

“We can’t find your mother.”

“She’s not home,” I answered.

“We know that.” Matron looked out the window again, this time as if she were looking for my mother. “But she
doesn’t seem to be at the… other establishment either, the rest home.”

The
es-tab-lish-ment
. As if our home was an establishment, too, and the rest home was the other one. Like a castle. Only there was no castle in town. The castle was here.

“So we haven’t gotten hold of your mother.” She turned away from the window again. “Do you know anything, Tommy? About where she might be?”

I thought about the letter I’d gotten from Mama, the last one where the letters were a little smudged. She had written that she’d be away when I came home and that she’d explain when she got back.
Everything’s been taken care of
, she had written.
You don’t need to worry. Everything’s going to be fine.

I shook my head.

“You must know something.”

I shook my head again.

“Kenny?”

So, it was Kenny now. She really wanted to know.

Then I started to worry. I hadn’t understood until now.

“What’s happened to my mother?” I asked.

“Nothing’s happened. Not that we know of. We just wanted to speak to her, but she wasn’t there.”

“What about?” I asked.

“What?”

“What were you going to talk to her about?”

“You, of course. About your behavior here.”

I nodded.

“You do understand that, don’t you? You realize that you’ve been behaving badly?”

I didn’t answer. That wasn’t what I nodded about.

“We can’t keep you here. You do realize that, don’t you?”

She looked out the window again. I couldn’t see out, but I knew the sun was shining and the sky was blue. It was just as hot as last week and the week before that. There was going to be another swimming trek around the lake today too. I knew that the children were being lined up outside the building right now.

“That’s what we were going to talk to your mother about.”

Matron ran her hand over her hair that was put up with pins at the back of her neck. They were like secret weapons. “But now we don’t know what to do with you.”

I almost felt happy that Mama wasn’t there to answer when they called. She had chosen the right moment to leave.

“The people at the rest home have to report it to the police,” said Matron. “She’s been missing for over twenty-four hours.”

The rest home. I saw Mama’s face in front of me but it was smudged like the letters in her note.

“Didn’t you receive a letter?”

My thoughts were interrupted. Matron looked down at me.

“You got a letter the other day, didn’t you?” she asked.

I nodded. There was no lying about that.

“Wasn’t it from your mother?”

“Yes.”

“What did she write?”

“Nothing.”

“Where is it?”

“It’s… gone.”

“Gone? What happened to it?”

“I dropped it in the forest.”

“I’ve never heard the like. You dropped a letter in the forest?”

I nodded again. She looked at me like she knew very well I was lying, but she couldn’t force me to say where I’d hidden the letter. In that sense, she knew me. And I knew her.

“What did she write?” asked Matron again.

“Nothing special. Except that she was gonna be gone when I got back.”

“That’s nothing special? What are you saying? I’ve really never heard anything like it. Where was she going?”

“I don’t know.”

“And where were you supposed to go while she was away?”

Of course I wasn’t going to tell her that. I wasn’t going to let Matron send me to Mama’s friend and her stupid kid.

“She was going to take care of it,” I said.

“Take care of it? How?”

“She was going to let me know.”

“My God,” said Matron. “What a family.”

She got up. I got up, too, as a reflex.

“You can go join the others,” she said.

As I was on my way out the door, she called to me.

“Don’t think you’re off the hook,” she said from her desk. “As soon as we get hold of your mother, you’re out of here.”

One day passed and then a second. I gathered that an alert had been sent out for Mama, but that they hadn’t found her yet and that was why I was still at the camp. I wasn’t under house arrest anymore and could move around freely like before. I thought some police officer would come and question me about Mama but nobody came.

I was sitting behind the wall of the castle’s inner courtyard with the letter from Mama in front of me. The paper had gotten all crumpled and thin. It was about to fall apart into shreds. It looked old like parchment or something. The letters looked different—almost like they were from some other language.

Everything’s been taken care of. You don’t need to worry.

What did she mean by that? What had been taken care
of? Why didn’t I need to worry? Because it
had
been taken care of? Because it
would
be fine?

I was worried, but she had written to me. She would write again when she got to wherever she was going. She’d be there soon. And why should she have to tell the people at that place where she was going? They couldn’t tell her what to do. Nobody could tell Mama what to do, and no one could tell me what to do either, not even Mama.

I heard the troop practicing with their swords outside the moat. Maybe it was Sausage’s new sword I heard. It was almost bigger than he was—like Musashi’s oar when he defeated Kojiro.

My own
bokken
lay next to me. It wouldn’t be easy even for Christian to break that in two.

I hadn’t seen him since he’d sat there spinning around on the merry-go-round in the middle of the night. He’d had a strange glint in his eyes when he’d looked at me in Matron’s office. It was something I hadn’t really picked up on last summer. Maybe it was more noticeable now that he’d grown up. Something frightening. I hadn’t been able to see how he’d looked when he was staring up at the girls’ window, and I was glad about that. He had driven off, and when I sat there in the castle, I hoped that he would disappear too.

I
closed my eyes and the shouts from the sword practice seemed to be echoing in a dream. It was my dream. One day we would wake up once this summer was over. Would the ruins of the castle still be there, like the remnants of a dream? Something we knew we had experienced but couldn’t remember in detail?

I opened my eyes and saw the stones that made up the wall. They would still be there for others who came after us, but that wasn’t good enough for me. This was my dream and my castle.

“Wanna go into town? Have you got the guts?”

I had closed my eyes again and his voice was like a loudspeaker in my ear.

Janne was bent over me. He was still wearing his shoulder, knee, hand, and neck guards after the practice session. He looked like an ice hockey player. The only things missing were the skates. Even his helmet looked like an ice hockey helmet.

He was rubbing his shoulder.

“Are you hurt?”

“Micke really laid into me.”

“He always does.”

“This was worse than ever,” said Janne. “It was like he was angry about something.”

“He’s always angry.”

“So are you.”

“Am I?”

“Yes.”

“Aw, get out of here.”

“The question was whether we should go into town,” said Janne.

“You mean right now?”

“We’ll make it back for supper.”

“What supper?” I asked and Janne laughed.

“Okay,” I said. “We’ve got nothing to lose.”

The field overlooking the town was like an ocean as far as you could see. The wheat swayed in the wind like waves. We
tried to stick to the edge of it so the farmer wouldn’t see us and come racing over in his tractor accusing us of destroying his crop. It had happened before.

“You could have a really big battle here,” said Janne. “The two biggest samurai armies in the land.”

“It’s a good spot,” I said.

“Our troop versus Weine’s,” said Janne.

“Weine’s aren’t samurai.”

“But we could fight them just the same.”

“The farmer wouldn’t like it.”

Janne looked around and then turned to me.

“Do you know what I think?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Before this summer’s over, we’re going to have to face them in a big battle. A real battle. A serious one.”

“Not only them,” I said.

“What do you mean by that?”

“We have other enemies.”

“The counselors? Matron?”

“Them as well.”

“Who else?”

“We’ll see,” I said. “But I can feel it.”

“Feel what?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

A hitchhiker was standing at the town line. He was on his way out at the same time that we were on our way in. His backpack was on the ground in front of him. As we passed him on the other side of the road, he raised his thumb at us like he was wishing us good luck.

“Do you think he’ll get a ride?” asked Janne.

“We’ll see if he’s still there when we go back,” I said.

“Wanna bet on it? I’ll bet you ten that he’ll still be there.”

“Okay,” I said, although I didn’t have any money. But I was sure he’d get a ride before we left town. He seemed pretty confident. He had a cap and sunglasses and looked pretty cool. Maybe too cool, in fact. Anyone ready to offer him a ride might want to see his eyes first.

Then he took off his sunglasses and squinted at us.

“He’s Japanese!” I said.

Janne took a good look at him over his shoulder.

“Nah, he’s just squinting.” He kept on walking.

The Japanese hitchhiker put his sunglasses back on. Did he just want to show me what he was? I wanted to cross the road and ask him, but I didn’t have the nerve. He would probably think I was an idiot.

“If he is Japanese, he might not get a ride,” said Janne
turning around to look again. “He’ll still be there when we go back.”

In that case I would lose money, but it would be worth it. I knew there were people from foreign countries who hitchhiked their way around Sweden. I saw someone from Africa once. That was from a train as we were passing through another town. He looked pretty glum, that African, as if he knew he’d never get a ride. But I’d never seen a real live Japanese man before.

We continued walking toward the town center. It wasn’t a big town, but it was bigger than the one I lived in. There was a bridge over a wide river and a park on the other side. The park had a hot dog stand at one end, so we went over there and asked if they had any burnt hot dogs they wanted to get rid of.

“We throw them away,” said the lady behind the counter. She had to lean out of the window in order to see us. “It’s not good for you to eat burnt food.”

“Don’t you have any that are just a little burnt?” asked Janne.

The lady laughed, drew her head back inside, and started doing something behind the counter. Then she handed over two hot dogs in buns with mustard. There didn’t seem to be any burnt bits on either hot dog. They were brown and juicy.

“Here you go, boys,” she said.

“How much are they?” I asked.

“They’re on the house!”

She reached out a bit farther with the hot dogs. The front of the stand started to smell like paradise. She smiled. I’d been there before, but I didn’t recognize her. She looked nice. She should have had the job of cook at the camp.

“You look hungry, boys. Don’t they give you any supper at home?”

We tried to answer but we couldn’t. We were drooling at the thought of what was to come. Besides, we didn’t really have a home. But we each had a hot dog. We carried our delicious supper into the park and sat down on a bench.

“There are actually some nice grown-ups,” said Janne before biting into the end of the hot dog sticking out of his bun.

I nodded and took a bite of my own. It was the best thing I’d tasted all summer. We chewed away as we watched a couple of guys about our age paddling down the river in a canoe. One of them had a fur hat with two feathers sticking out of it. The other had a bow and some arrows hanging down behind his back. They looked like explorers I’d seen once in a book about Lewis and Clark. The one with the hat raised his hand toward us in some kind of greeting. I raised the hand that wasn’t holding the hot dog. A samurai with a hot dog. The canoe vanished underneath the bridge and emerged on the
other side. The river flowed into the lake where the summer camp was. I’d seen a canoe on the lake last summer. Maybe it was this one.

“Why don’t they have a canoe at the camp?” wondered Janne. “I like canoes.”

“They probably think we’d use it to get away,” I said.

“We get away anyway,” said Janne.

“But it’s easier if you have a canoe. All you need to do is jump in from the dock back home.”

“
Back home
?”

“What do you mean?”

“You said ‘back home,’” said Janne, “like the camp was our home.”