Deep Sea (20 page)

“No, we’re not,” Stephie hisses. “It’s just that our parents can’t come to Sweden until the war is over. Don’t talk so much foolishness, Nellie!”

I didn’t say we
are
orphans,” Nellie says defensively. “I just said that when we first came, it was almost like the story in that book …” She turns to Maud. “The one you lent me. What was it called again?”

“Anne of Green Gables,”
says Maud.

Aha
, Stephie thinks,
so Nellie borrows books from Maud. That’s a good thing
. Otherwise, Nellie isn’t particularly interested in reading, and she certainly never reads any German books nowadays. Her school grades are only average. She’ll never get a scholarship
in two years, when she finishes compulsory school. Stephie can only hope that the war will be over by then and Nellie will be able to continue her education anyway.

Maud whispers something to Nellie, and both girls giggle.

“Ask her!” says Maud, nudging Nellie with her elbow.

“No,” says Nellie. “You ask her.”

“No, you do it.”

“Who’s the father of Vera’s baby?” Nellie asks.

Vera’s almost five months pregnant now, and there’s no hiding her stomach any longer.

“Her fiancé, of course,” Stephie replies.

“What’s his name?”

“Rikard.”

“Do you know him?”

“No,” says Stephie, “I’ve met him, but I can’t say I know him.”

“Why aren’t they married?” asks Maud. “You’re supposed to be married before you have babies.”

“It’s a sin,” says Nellie. “What Vera did.” She pinches her lips like one of the ladies at the Pentecostal church. “A siiiin,” she repeats.

“A siiiin,” Maud echoes with a giggle.

“Auntie Alma says you’re not a Christian anymore, Stephie,” says Nellie. “Is it true?”

“Yes,” Stephie answers. “I’ve resigned from the congregation.”

“Jesus will be upset,” says Nellie. “Auntie Alma says so.”

“Jesus can’t be upset,” Maud tells her. “He’s dead.” She laughs.

Nellie looks anxious, but then she joins in with a high-pitched, exaggerated laugh.

Stephie doesn’t join in. Why is Nellie so desperately eager to please Maud?

If she hadn’t been making the very same prediction every day for weeks now, one might think Miss Holm could predict the future.

“Here it is at last!” she cries out triumphantly the next day as she extends a postcard to Stephie.

Stephie’s excitement about reading the card right away is offset by the knowledge that if she reads it in the post office, Miss Holm won’t let her leave until she hears exactly what it says. Trying to appear offhanded, she puts the card in her pocket.

“Thank you very much.”

Miss Holm looks disappointed.

Stephie goes out onto the steps. As she’s pulling out the card, she hears a commotion. A man shouts. A girl screams.

“No! No! Let me go!”

The voices are coming from the open door to the shop close by the post office. Stephie turns in that direction
and sees Maud rushing down the shop steps as if shot out of a cannon.

But she wasn’t the one shouting. It was Nellie.

At a run, Stephie crosses the graveled yard between the post office and the shop, and up the five steps. It takes a fraction of a second for her eyes to adjust from the blinding sunshine outside to the dim light of the shop.

The shopkeeper is standing in the middle of the floor, his face scarlet with anger. He is holding Nellie tightly by her black braids. Nellie is sobbing hysterically. Caramels and other candies are all over the floor. Sylvia is standing on the stairs. She gives Stephie a scornful smile.

Behind Stephie, a couple of ladies peek in through the open door.

“What’s going on?” Stephie cries. “Let her go!”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” the shopkeeper roars. “But I don’t let thieves off so easily.”

“My sister is no thief!”

The shopkeeper gestures at the floor with his free hand.

“Oh, no? Just look at what she stole while her friend lured me into the stockroom to get her something!”

The ladies have pushed past Stephie. They’re looking at each other and muttering. The shopkeeper enjoys having an audience.

“Just look! Just look what this little Jew brat has done!”

“Don’t tell Auntie Alma!” Nellie sniffles. “Please, please don’t say anything to Auntie Alma. I’ll pay for every single piece.”

“Sylvia just happened to come downstairs,” the shopkeeper says to his customers, “and she saw this little rat standing there, stealing from the candy jars. The other girl’s the daughter of one of the summer guests. She was keeping guard to see when I came back.”

Sylvia raises her well-plucked eyebrows.

“I’m sure it wasn’t the first time,” she says. “It was just a lucky coincidence that I happened to be coming down.”

“But it
was
the first time!” Nellie cries. “And I’ll never do it again, just as long as Auntie Alma doesn’t find out.”

“Not a chance,” says the shopkeeper. “Don’t you go getting any ideas. I’m most certainly going to tell Mrs. Lindberg what you get yourself into when you take in kids from foreign countries. Sylvia, you mind the shop while I’m gone.”

Still holding Nellie tightly by the braids, the shopkeeper marches out the door, down the steps, across the graveled yard, and down the street in the direction of Auntie Alma’s house.

“Let her walk on her own,” Stephie pleads. “The least you could do is to let her walk on her own.”

“So she can run off and hide?” asks the shopkeeper.
“Not on my watch. She deserves a good licking, and I intend to see that she gets one.”

Stephie follows them. What else can she do? The card is in her skirt pocket, forgotten. Her cheeks burn with shame. Her sister is a thief.

A
lthough it’s not far from the shop to Auntie Alma’s, it feels as if they walk for an eternity. Nellie stumbles forward, the shopkeeper’s big hand on her neck. Stephie pushes her bike behind them, looking straight down into the gray, dusty road so as not to have to face the curious gazes of the people they pass.

At last they arrive. Maud’s mother is sitting in the garden with a friend. No one else is in sight.

“No, Mrs. Lindberg isn’t at home,” Maud’s mother tells him. “She’s gone to the next island over to visit a relative who’s ill. She took the two little ones with her. I’ve promised to make dinner for Nellie. Is something wrong? Why are you holding her like that?”

To Stephie’s surprise, the shopkeeper doesn’t answer.
He doesn’t ask where Maud is, either. He just lets Nellie go.

“Don’t think you’re going to get off scot-free,” he mutters to her. “I’ll be calling Mrs. Lindberg tonight.”

The minute he lets go of Nellie, she rushes inside. Not down to the basement rooms where she, Auntie Alma, Uncle Sigurd, Elsa, and John are living during the summer, but through the veranda door and straight up the stairs to the rooms the summer tenants are renting. Stephie says a few words of apology to Maud’s mother and follows her sister.

She finds Nellie in the crawl space under the stairs to the attic. At first, Stephie thinks she’s crept in there to hide, like an injured animal, until she sees that Nellie is looking for something. From behind some other things, she pulls out a little suitcase.

Stephie recognizes it. It’s the one Nellie had when they arrived on the island. She has an identical one herself. It has moved with her from Vienna to the island, from the island to the apartment of the doctor’s family in Göteborg, from there to Miss Björk’s, and finally to Sandarna. Now it’s in the attic storage space in May’s family’s apartment building.

Nellie’s suitcase, though, has probably been put away for four years. She hasn’t moved since they came to Sweden.

“What do you need your suitcase for?” Stephie asks.

“You can’t really think Auntie Alma will still want me here when she finds out about this?”

“Don’t be silly. Of course she will.”

“What do you know?” asks Nellie. “And maybe I don’t want to stay here, either.”

“Where were you planning on going, then?”

Nellie shrugs. She looks determined, but Stephie sees a little quiver in her bottom lip that she recognizes from when Nellie was little and about to burst into tears.

“Nellie,” Stephie tells her, “Auntie Alma is going to be angry, but she’s not going to throw you out. I’m absolutely sure. You would be sure, too, if you thought it through. I’ve done worse things, you know, without Aunt Märta showing me the door, and you know how strict she is.”

Nellie looks incredulous. “You have?”

“Sure,” says Stephie. “I took Auntie Alma’s china dog, don’t you remember? And I went to the movies even though we aren’t allowed to.”

“You had to apologize in church,” says Nellie.

“Right.”

“Do you think I’ll have to apologize, too?”

“Maybe.”

Nellie sits down on her small suitcase, chin in hand. Her black braids reach almost all the way to the floor.

She sat that very same way four years ago in the railway station in Göteborg while they were waiting for someone to come and take charge of them.

Stephie sits down on the bottom step of the attic stairs.

“Why did you do it?” she asks.

Nellie sighs. “I can’t tell you.”

“Why not?”

Maud
, Stephie thinks.
She’s protecting Maud
.

“Did Maud put you up to it?”

Nellie starts to sniffle.

“Tell me,” says Stephie.

“She said it was my turn to treat her,” Nellie sobs. “She’s always got money she can spend on candy, and I never have any. When I told her I didn’t have any money, she said it was easy as pie to grab a couple of handfuls of sweets in the shop. She said she would get the shopkeeper to go into the storeroom, and I could take the candy and run out before he got back.”

“Then it’s just as much her fault,” Stephie tells her. “If not more.”

“What difference does that make?” Nellie asks bitterly. “Her mamma never gets mad. I’m always to blame if something breaks or gets ruined.”

“So why do you play with her? You’ve got other friends. Like Sonja.”

“She likes me,” says Nellie. “Maud, I mean.”

“Doesn’t Sonja?”

“Well, I guess so. But she always expects me to be the one to come up with things to do. And she hardly talks about anything but her grandma and her aunties and cousins and all the people she knows on other islands, and who she’s going to marry when she grows up.”

“But she’s your friend,” says Stephie. “Don’t forget
that. She’s been your friend since your first day of school. And when Maud goes back to Göteborg this fall, Sonja will still be here, where you live.”

Nellie gets up. She puts the suitcase back in the crawl space.

“Will you stay?” she asks. “Until Auntie Alma gets back?”

Stephie nods. “Of course I will.”

They manage to tell Auntie Alma the whole story before the shopkeeper calls. Auntie Alma is angry and makes Nellie ask for forgiveness. First Auntie Alma’s, then Jesus’s, on her knees. Stephie looks away.

But when Auntie Alma hears how the shopkeeper behaved, she is just as angry with him, and says Nellie certainly isn’t going to be humiliated in front of that man.

“Treating a child that way! It’s not Christian,” she says.

“What about Maud?” Stephie asks. “Auntie Alma, aren’t you going to have a word with her mother?”

Auntie Alma considers. “I’m not really sure.”

“If it had been Sonja,” Stephie says, “you would have phoned her mother right away.”

“True,” says Auntie Alma. “But this is another matter. They’re different.”

“Because they’re summer guests?”

“Her husband’s a professor,” Auntie Alma tells Stephie.

“So what?”

“Mind your manners!” Auntie Alma snaps. “Is that the kind of thing you learn at grammar school? How to be rude about people of a better class?”

“Better? Having money and fancy positions doesn’t make people better!”

“That’s quite enough,” says Auntie Alma.

At that very moment, Maud’s mother calls down from upstairs that there’s a phone call for Mrs. Lindberg. Auntie Alma goes to take it.