She laughed, but I shushed her, afraid that her friends would awaken and commandeer the conversation and bring it back to Swedish. I was grateful for her smile, her playfulness now. I missed the first part of the trip, when we traded stories and taught each other what we felt were beautiful words in our languages. I had taught her languid, gloaming, and verdant, which remain charged with memory even now.
We were halfway across the bridge when another car pulled ahead of us and Siri stopped short.
She looked over at me with concern. “You okay, Lauren?”
I unclenched my fingers and rested them flat against the seat. I wanted to appear calm. I told myself the white fog was sealing us in.
I saw her mouth moving silently. She knew I was afraid of bridges. Maybe she was praying for me. Siri prayed a lot for a young person, in a manner less contemplative than compulsive. She said it helped her to feel closer to her mother, who had died when she was five. She’d never shared how her mother passed, only that her death had been hard on her and her siblings and it was the reason for the rift between her and her brother.
Before this trip, she’d told me some other things about Magnus: that he didn’t want her to go to college, that he was too critical, an artist himself and disdainful of her desire to study art in school. For these reasons, I had disliked Magnus before I met him. I had disliked the sounds I first associated with him: keys dropped on the dining table, the loud slam of his door, the way he talked to himself on the other side of our shared wall. When Siri had asked me to stay away from him, it had been easy to promise. Now all I could do was think of him.
“If I swim, will you swim, too?” Siri asked now, slowing behind a car, its taillights glowing ruby through the thinning fog. A group of gulls floated beside the bridge and then disappeared above us.
“You know I will,” I said. “But I might be the one Näcken pulls down.”
“At least then you wouldn’t have to go home.”
I smiled and looked over at her. The last few days had been hard. I wanted to be going back to the United States, but I wanted to be going back with her, where it could be just the two of us again.
Siri was staying in Sweden until the start of the new semester. Though she had assured me that she was planning to return for her second year at Stella Maris, I kept worrying that she wouldn’t actually come back to school. It was hard enough for me to imagine my classroom without her in the front row.
The girls in the backseat stirred and rearranged themselves, a bundle of limbs and blankets. They were Siri’s age, and they brought the teenager out in her. I never felt the difference in our ages until I spent time with them. The awkward, motherly conversations I attempted with Siri’s friends made them self-conscious. I tried to fit in, but the whole stretch of irresponsible summer, I was going around like Alice, dumbly drinking potions because they were marked “Drink Me.” And then, I was Alice in the tiny house, barely able to fit inside, my legs scrunched underneath my giant body. What a lifetime you can live—or not live—in ten years’ space.
There was the hush of the waves so close. We were coming down out of the clouds and land was again beneath us, a straight two-lane road. My guidebook had said that this island ground was a mosaic of blanched shells and fossils. I could hear the water and its rush, rush. The girls in the backseat started to stretch and talk, and their Swedish made me drowsy.
Siri announced that we were going swimming first thing. We drove through a tunnellike stretch of woods, the branches of trees knitting together over the road. It was like waking up when we saw the sky again. We parked alongside a rugged beach. The terrain reminded me of a beach on the north shore of Long Island I had often walked as a child with my mother and father, only the slope that the girls ran down was shining blue and green in the sun. Fringy ropes of what looked like blue algae swung lazily in the gentle waves, and the rocks were fuzzy with it underfoot. The beach was called Neptuni Åkrar—Neptune’s Fields.
“You said you would swim!” Siri yelled, rushing down ahead of me.
Clutching the yellow inner tube, I picked my way down the rocks. Bright blue flowers grew all along the shoreline. We were the only people as far as I could see, and the coastline stretched long and curved, changing from otherworldly blue beach to stark white in the distance. Three maroon sea huts stood at the top of the ridge and a thin string of cloud line ran parallel to the shore. I sat down upon the inner tube while the girls splashed in the sea. They had an easy, loving way among themselves. They were close in the way only childhood friends can be.
“Come in with us, Lauren!” Siri yelled.
I waved but didn’t get up to join them. Suddenly they were running toward me with big, splashing strides, hanging on to one another, their hair wet and pressing against their cheeks. They each grabbed hold of the inner tube and pulled me into the ocean. I went under smiling and got a mouthful of water.
We couldn’t stay in for long. The water was cold. When we came out, our skin was tinged blue from the algae. We wrung out our clothes to dry and sunned ourselves on the azure, blooming rocks. I loved that afternoon. There was no English, no Swedish, just sun on our bodies and sleep.
When afternoon came and the clothes were dry, we drove to the campsite. The girls in the backseat kept looking at themselves in a little mirror, their teeth shining stark white in contrast to their bluish skin. I rested my head against the passenger-side window, and my breath made a fog on the glass. I found myself thinking of Magnus’s goodbye that morning, and in the condensation, I lazily traced a letter M. Sunlight streamed through the trees overhead, turning to clicks of light when I closed my eyes. I rubbed the wetness from my fingers against my thigh.
“Lauren,” Siri said, soft and low.
I opened my eyes and wiped away the M on the glass.
“Can you help me?” She unfolded a map of the island against the steering wheel as she drove.
I smiled. Whispering. English. Things that made it just us again.
I TAUGHT ENGLISH composition in the international program at Stella Maris, a small Catholic college outside of Washington, D.C. I was a popular teacher. When class started, my show started. I led with a gentle authority I never quite exacted in real life. The students all wanted to be my favorite. No one was ever disrespectful or unprepared. The other professors complained about their problem students, about how out-of-control some of them were, but I never had behavior issues in my classroom. I loved my students. They participated, and I graded hard, so they worked hard. They didn’t skip my class. Their writing improved.
It was the first job I ever loved. In front of the class, I was always in the moment, fully theirs and full of movement, completely in my body, hands chalky, sitting atop my desk, laughing at their jokes. Students didn’t depart when I dismissed them. They stayed after to tell me about their childhood bedrooms turned into walk-in closets, the jobs waiting for them in their family businesses. They would bring me candy from their home countries and want me to try everything right then. They would tell me how empty an accomplishment could feel when those you love aren’t there to see it, to say well done. I knew what they meant by that. A check mark in the margin of their paper, a nod, a smile.