The American Girl (29 page)

Well, in any case. A normal family in a nice normal turn-of-the-century house on the hill on the First Cape, so normal that normalcy endured being repeated many times over again. He was a journalist, she was a photographer, they also had a daughter, but she was not there, she was studying the art of dance (modern dance and artistic fusion dance with Eastern influences the mother, Tina Backmansson, clarified in the kitchen in the cousin’s house, just as if it made anything clearer) in New York.

The boy, as said, who was with them was named Jan and had said good day; he was going to be a marine biologist when he grew up—but they found that out later. And the following had happened. Rita had looked at him across the bowl of sausage soup. And she, yes—you could not even say “seduces,” “seduced,” “had seduced” him.

It was so damned predictable all of it. So normal.

And Doris Flinkenberg, as said, seriously started suspecting that normalcy was her enemy.

So then she was standing there that strange late summer day in the strange weather on Lore Cliff at Bule Marsh feeling sorry for herself. Suddenly experiencing such an unbelievable feeling of abandonment.

It was like a desert.

“. . . everything that was wide open becomes a closed world again.”

Doris also suspected that growing up would also mean that you would not know where you should go. The damned abandonment.

If Sandra was not . . . in other words Sandra. On Åland again.

This damned restlessness when Sandra Wärn was away.

So, consequently, Doris Flinkenberg was standing there on Lore Cliff at Bule Marsh shivering. In the middle of late summer. That so quiet, warm, overcast, mushroomy.

Flash. Flash. Flash. Flash.

What was it? Was something not flashing shrilly and red in the corner of her eye, in the reeds, down below to the left? Something she had been aware of for quite some time already, but in the midst of her self-pity she had not taken it in?

Something strange in the corner of her eye. Red. A red color in the reeds.

Poor Doris.

She went closer. Really close, as close as she could get. And then—she heard her own scream.

And then she started running. Rushed blind and wailing like a bolting moose in the soft, calm, quiet woods.

Ran in the direction of the cousin’s property, on the path, and wailed.

Straight into Rita and Jan Backmansson. Collided with them and fell to the ground like a reed.

“Is she dead?” Rita’s voice could be heard from somewhere above.

But: pop in the head. It became dark and quiet. Doris had passed out. And when she became conscious again people were swarming around her.

That was how Doris found the corpse.

Eddie de Wire. Her remains.

The American girl. She had floated up in the swamp in the reeds in the marsh after so many years in there.

“A relatively unbelievable phenomenon,” said the expert on the weather forecast who was being interviewed on the radio again. “But not at all impossible. Just the opposite. A totally logical natural phenomenon. As a result of the strange weather we’ve been having, at times very strange, locally speaking, this summer.
Drought and humid heat at the same time. Technically speaking it’s called earthquake vibrations. What is under the surface bubbles up again . . . down in the earth . . .”

Plastic is an eternal material. This is what Doris saw in the woods. A hand (from the skeleton). The red raincoat. Plastic is an eternal material. Red and terrible. Cruelly visible. So because of that.

Rita Rat
. It was a Saturday in the month of August, Rita and Jan Backmansson were walking in the woods. They were walking on their own paths as they had a habit of doing, Rita a few steps behind Jan Backmansson. Jan Backmansson was talking, Rita was listening. And carefully. She loved it when Jan Backmansson told stories, it was almost as if she had been there herself. And the best thing of all: they were no fantasies or made up in any way, it was for real, it was true.

It was the same day Jan Backmansson had come back from Norway where he had been traveling around with his parents. It had been a working vacation. Jan Backmansson’s parents were journalists, they wrote and photographed as a team and their reports were published in well-reputed nature magazines, not
National Geographic
, but almost.

They had been traveling in a small rubber boat with an outboard motor over the dark water of the fjord that was lined with high mountains sloping straight down into the deep. They had driven far out over the cold water, mother, father, child, all three in yellow oilskins and red life vests. Exactly the day Jan Backmansson was talking about while he and Rita were walking in the woods in the District, and as it were, getting to know each other again after a few weeks apart (otherwise Rita more or less lived with Jan Backmansson in his room in the tower in the house on the First Cape). It had been an overcast afternoon with rain that just kept coming down. It had also been almost completely still when they
left the city on the coast to head off on their assignment, but now the wind rose suddenly, a wind that was blowing inland, straight into the narrow but certainly not very wide fjord that just continued inland and they were moving quickly as that was the direction they were going.

Otherwise it was quiet, just the little ten-horsepower motor growling, no people anywhere, not on the water, not along the beaches. In the water near the beach there were mussel cultivations: large white balls that had been anchored in a field in neat rows and would lie unspoiled for so many years. The occasional house here and there, mountain goats in the crevices of the steep mountains, birds in the air. Large blackbirds against a sky that was gray and white.

At the beginning of the trip Jan Backmansson had been lying in the bottom of the rubber boat just looking up toward the white sky with the dark birds. It had been an amazing experience. But suddenly the motor had coughed once, twice, and then stopped and they had not been able to get it started again no matter how the three of them tried. The motor had just been dead and they had not even had oars with them, just a boat hook you could row around with in an emergency, but it was rather useless in the wind and the currents. And they had ended up like that, in the rubber boat, drifting in the fjord. The same silence everywhere, not a human being anywhere, not a boat, and the current, as said, was strong, the current was running away with them. Then the rain had suddenly poured over them and the darkness continued to fall and very quickly it became like a bag around them. They had drifted on, helplessly, the radiotelephone connection was also broken. And it was cold; the chill from the ice-cold water hundreds of feet deep was forcing its way up to them.

The quilted jackets and padded pants that they had on under the rain clothes and life vests had not been able to provide enough protection against the bad weather in the long run; in
the end they curled up on the bottom of the rubber boat, all three, mother, father, boy, close together, in the darkness. At regular intervals the father lit the flashlight and shone it over the beaches in order to provide a sign of life in case someone happened to see them. But it was a matter of being thrifty with the light because the bulb was growing yellow, which was a sign the batteries were running out.

A solitary flickering spire sweeping over the water. Otherwise nothing. Empty.

They had waited for help. Just waited. Of course there had been nothing else to do while the boat was drifting farther and farther into the apparently endless and empty bay.

Minutes as long as hours, a minute like an eternity, but suddenly, where they lay tightly pressed against each other on the bottom of the rubber boat, wrapped in all of the outer clothing that was on hand, they had nevertheless been able to discern a new noise, a muffled hum slowly growing and becoming stronger and it stirred both hope and anxiety in them. What strange thing was it, not rapids, or a waterfall? They continued drawing closer to the sound, which was becoming louder and louder sounding like a giant heart beating, a heart as big as the entire world, but the current was also becoming stronger and it was quite threatening.

But suddenly everything became bright behind a bend in which a ship popped up, a brilliant, enormous passenger ferry—one, it would turn out, luxury cruise ship with a lot of foreign tourists on board. And their little boat had shown up on the large ship’s radar.

Afterward when they had been rescued and been allowed to shower and change into dry, warm clothes, the captain had taken Jan Backmansson with him to the bridge and shown him all of the navigational instruments on the beautiful, new ship. He explained seriously that it really was not a sure thing that one would catch sight of a small rubber boat in the water in such foggy and rainy weather.

“So you were lucky,” the captain said to Jan Backmansson and then they were invited to eat dinner as guests of honor at the captain’s table. Jan Backmansson tried to explain to Rita how strange it was to come in almost directly from the cold and the darkness and the fear into the ship’s beautiful, grand dining room filled with dressed-up cruise ship passengers, so discreet and cultivated.

But then, right then, in the middle of Jan Backmansson’s story that Rita had become so absorbed in that she had almost lost track of space and time there where she was walking behind him, huge crashes and shrieks and the sound of twigs being broken and thuds could be heard in the woods in front of them and before either of them knew it Doris was there in front of them, Doris who came running straight toward them, Doris who saw and did not see them, so beside herself she did not even notice though she was calling for help and ran almost straight toward them. Just as you thought she was going to collide with Jan Backmansson she stopped as if she had seen two ghosts, opened her eyes wide, and sank slowly to the ground lifelessly where she came to lie as a dead person.

Jan Backmansson had fallen down on his knees next to Doris and taken her hand in order to check her pulse.

“What’s wrong with her? Is she dead?” Rita had asked, certainly worried but not without a splash of her usual harshness in which there was probably a tone of
someone always has to come and destroy things when you’re in the middle of doing something important
.

Eddie wonderful, on a stretcher in the woods—the remains of her. Inget Herrman threw up. Kenny was deathly pale. The sisters staggered away, leaning on each other. Bencku was not there then. He was drinking himself into a stupor in the barn. But he would certainly wake up later, in the night, when it started burning in the woods. Suddenly a significant part of the large woods
was ablaze, and the flames lapped up to the house on the First Cape where the Backmansson family in any case had enough time to get to safety before that.

Rita.

Doris looked at her.

Rita met her look.

Rita looked back. But it was later, at Bule Marsh, when the house on the First Cape had burned up, the Backmansson family had moved to the city by the sea again and they had not taken Rita Rat with them like they promised. When it was fall again, and everything was too late, too late.

Later. Not yet. Just that day, that day when Doris made the discovery, she was dazed and beside herself, Doris. People were standing in groups, both known and not known, on the whole half of the District (even some sea urchins) at the cousin’s house. Doris had straggled past all of them, in the arms of the cousin’s mama, and up the stairs to her room. There the cousin’s mama had helped Doris get in bed, given her both sleeping pills and headache powder and closed the shades properly, which covered the whole room in darkness at once, because they were real blackout shades used during the war, and Doris had put ear plugs in her ears and then fallen asleep and slept for a thousand years.

One and a half days, to be more exact. An entirely satisfactory amount of time so that everything would be changed when she woke up. Just as dark of course, but when she crawled out of bed and pulled up the shade the daylight flooded in. Doris opened the window to air out the musty smell of sleep.

As soon as she had woken up everything that had happened the day before—she still thought it was the day before—came back. The marsh, the red plastic, the hand and the bracelets—also
of plastic, wretched white plastic. A wave of discomfort had traveled through her. But it still had not been unbearably horrific then; she was thoroughly rested and alert and could even think about it objectively, a little bit in any case.

Suddenly she longed for Sandra Wärn, why was she not here? Why was she always away, always somewhere else, when important things happened? Doris longed to tell her everything, go through it from beginning to end. “Just as I thought it had never happened. That someone had said, a long time ago. That the American girl hadn’t drowned. She just disappeared because she wanted to disappear, or had to. She was like that. You know what Inget Herrman said. Someone who showed up and disappeared again but before she did she had time to cause a lot of unhappiness and devastation. Just like—”

“Rita told me that I was wrong. That’s not what I saw—”

But now, in the morning in other words, renewed strength anyway, Doris had opened the window and breathed fresh air into her lungs, sensually and deep. But. There was something odd, something bizarre, but also something terribly familiar, in the air. A smell. Or, stink. She had never smelled such a smell and stink before. Or yes, she had. But in her former life, in her former existence, in the marsh Doris existence. And that was almost the worst because it made her not only afraid but literally rigid with fear again.

It smelled like someone had tried to burn down a house. Namely.

You have to remember that Doris was a child who all too well, of her own dearly bought experience, knew a lot about this smell in all its details. Not just once, but twice, Doris Flinkenberg as a small helpless child had with great difficulty and only because of her own alertness managed to get away from the flames both times (and both times helped someone else as well, tormentor number one, and marsh mama besides, to save herself).