It had begun to rain outside. Raindrops tapping the window panes. Gently at first, then insistent. Against the glass, a fury of smattering waves.
“This is nice,” Karl-Henrik said.
Laura opened her eyes. Karl-Henrik was the most distant of them. He disliked people and walked the earth as if he’d arrived here from the moon: each movement exact, a continuous frown on his face, thinly veiled disdain pulling the corners of his mouth down. At night, she left her apartment door unlocked for him. A couple of times a week, she’d hear him enter, go from the hallway to the library and the door slide quietly shut. In the morning, she’d find an empty whiskey glass on a table and a full ashtray. He needed this. To be somewhere he wasn’t completely on his own when the night got too dark. A breathing body next door. Warmth. Life. How she first understood that he would come, she didn’t know.
“I mean, this doesn’t happen often, does it? These kinds of friendships . . . Or does it?”
He tapped his foot, looked at the ceiling, tapped again.
“Did he just say he liked us?” Erik asked.
Karl-Henrik frowned. “I wouldn’t go that far. We have idiots among us.” He threw a glance at Matti. They’d been arguing the value of Aristotle all evening.
Matti snorted. His hair was too long and covered his green eyes. He pushed at his fringe. An impatient gesture. He caught her gaze, winked at her. Despite herself, she blushed.
“I’m sure the other students have found each other, like us,” Erik said.
“You think?” Britta asked.
Laura had never been this close to a group of people before. They had met and fallen in love. They were fiercely protective of one another. Nobody else seemed remotely interesting.
Erik shrugged. “Then let it all remain like this.” He dragged on his cigarette and tipped his head back to avoid getting the smoke in his eyes. “And they stayed the same and didn’t change. They never fought, they never separated, they never ever grew up and left.”
Erik’s voice sounded like that of a priest: solemn, chanting. As if he were reading them a spell.
“You do know things change, right?” Britta said, twisting her head, trying to catch his eye.
“Nah,” Erik said. “Not us.”
“Perhaps if we sacrificed to your Odin,” Britta said, smiling now, “he’d allow us to stay the same. Do you think he’d have us? We strive for wisdom, like he did.”
Erik’s big passion was Old Norse history and Asatru, the Norse faith. They’d all become besotted with it. How many afternoons had they spent in Laura’s apartment listening to Erik tell them the stories of the Norse?
Erik lifted his chin. “The only sacrifice Odin wants is one of hanging. They used to have these big feasts to the gods’ honor once every nine years. It is written that they sacrificed nine of each male type; hung them in the trees. Men, dogs, even horses, hanging in these sacrificial groves; their blood used to appease the gods.”
“Well,” Britta said lightly, “that shouldn’t be too hard to arrange.”
“We could start with your man from tonight,” Erik said.
It was a joke, but Laura felt cold. The room was no longer cozy, as much as dark. The flickering candles made the shadows from the book piles tremble, as if they were about to topple over.
And that was it. Their connection had, of course, toppled over. In the end, they had not been able to remain friends. And that was still impossible to think about.
THE DOOR WAS unlocked, but then Britta never locked it. Her room was as Laura remembered. It was one of the newer student lodgings: a square area with a low bookshelf, a single bed, a one-door wardrobe, a desk with a chair and an armchair, all the furniture in light wood with narrow legs and straight lines. Behind the door there was a sink and a mirror that sat too far up on the wall—fitted for male students, not female. On the floor, a light blue rag mat. Scandinavian neat and tidy. Only Britta was not. The desk was laden with heaps of books and used coffee cups, their bottoms stamped black by the residual grounds. The ashtrays balancing on the piles of books brimmed with butts, the ends red with lipstick. There was a glass vase with a bunch of parched flowers—roses—the area beneath covered with spent petals. Seashells, round stones, sticks turned silver bleached by the sun, bottle caps and corks filled an ice bucket on the window sill. The wall beside the shelf was covered with postcards—Laura recognized a couple she herself had sent—and wide-ranging newspaper clippings, about the war, Lapland, the national team in gymnastics. There was a photo: herself and Britta, champagne glasses in their hands. Britta exploding out of the picture with her wide smile. Laura, slightly behind her, also blond—hair in a straight bob, also smiling, also beautiful, but her large gray eyes serious. It was a good photo, she thought. Captured them both. Matti had taken it. Come. On. Laura. Smile! You do know how to, right? On the floor were stacks of newspapers and more books. The armchair was buried under clothes, several pairs of stockings thrown over its arms. On the floor behind the armchair, there was a mound of high-heeled shoes in all colors, seemingly swept together and pushed out of the way. A stray spectator pump had ended up lodged under the wardrobe door. Necklaces hung from the arm of the bedside lamp: colored glass, pearls and silver. The bed was unmade. The room smelled stale. It needed airing. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, Britta’s room felt unused. Laura could not have lived like this. She needed clean lines to have space to think.
She wondered where the stray kitten had gone. Britta had found it after a night out, small and paltry, more a mouse than a cat. She’d picked it up, laughed at its tiny black paws clawing at her, and dropped it in the pocket of her trench coat.
Erik: “You are not going to take that home, are you?”
Laura: “It’s not a good idea.”
Britta: “But it won’t make it on its own.”
Britta had used to call them “her strays.”
The room was warm. Laura pinched at her shirt collar and lifted her top away from her chest. Britta was Britta. She’d be back any minute and laugh at them for making a fuss.
Andreas stood in the doorway, shifting his weight from one foot to another, as if he didn’t feel comfortable being in Britta’s room. Well, it was his doing they were here.
“How do you know she didn’t sleep here?” she asked him.
“She’d promised her girlfriend next door a book she needed for a class this morning, and her friend waited for her last evening and kept checking to see if she’d come home yet. She tried again this morning before going to school.”
Britta would have forgotten. Laura walked to the desk and looked among the books and coffee cups, but she found no scraps of paper, nothing that could give a clue as to Britta’s whereabouts. And yet . . . Something about Britta’s room was off, she thought. She turned to look around again but couldn’t see what it was.
“Perhaps Britta went straight to school after a night out.”
“I checked,” Andreas said. “She didn’t.”
Laura could feel her nose twitch. She would have hated having Andreas ask for her.
“I went to the library, too. I asked her friends.” His black hair fell over his forehead.
“What friends?” she asked. Now that we are gone, she meant.