The American Girl (30 page)

You need to remember that in order to understand why Doris became completely cold with sweat and panic-stricken again. That damp and burnt smell, moreover it was almost unbearably strong, damp with extinguishing and stinging your nose. And Doris ran again, ran down the stairs and out onto the garden steps where she remained standing in the dawn—it was morning of course, but morning
two days
after Eddie, the American girl, had been found dead in the marsh, a skeleton in a red raincoat of the finest quality, the coat almost intact but the body almost decomposed. Doris had been sleeping for almost two days. They really must have been dynamite sleeping pills (they were) that the cousin’s mama had fed her so she would get some sleep that terrible afternoon after the corpse of Eddie de Wire was found.

Doris on the steps of the cousin’s house, stopped and looked around. At first glance everything looked so normal. The cousin’s papa’s blue Saab was parked in the yard, the old moped that was rusting away was by the corner of the barn, a few bicycles, a blue bucket, a gray spray can that was missing its sprayer, a garden rake carelessly thrown in the flowerbed at the side of the house among the everlasting flowers and sweet peas in violet and pink with delicate stems that were hesitantly forcing their way up the brown wall, trying to hang on to the nails hammered into the wall here and there. But they were sooty, the green leaves softly spotted with brown. And the stink, it did not disappear, it was everywhere. It was stronger than ever, and then Doris’s gaze lifted and she looked toward the hill where the house that was the house on the First Cape was. It was crazy.

The house was still there, strangely enough. And still. It gaped black with holes on one side. It was completely open there. As if a piece of the entire house had fallen off. And the tower was crooked and several of the windowpanes were broken.
The house of luck
stood there and gaped so desolate and destroyed in the quiet, quiet morning. The woods off to the side later. There
was a hole in it so to speak. It had burned down on one side, the ground smarting with pain and the emptiness ran like a wide furrow farther into the woods than what could be seen with the naked eye from where she was standing.

“Like a corridor of fire in the woods.” That was how Doris would describe it later, when she would express it in words to Sandra, recently returned home from Åland, whom she would meet in the woods the same day. But still, morning at the cousin’s house, and Doris stood on the steps and reflected on everything she saw without understanding anything while at the same time she tried, and this reflection was a means in this attempt, to overpower the panic growing inside her. Somewhere she also became, which was calming but at the same time an insult to everything, aware of how normal everything around her seemed.

What happened?

Why has no one told me about this?

If you listened carefully for specific sounds in the summer morning, in addition to the silence that was a result of no birds singing (but they did not do that anyway this late in the summer; and far away, by the sea and the Second Cape, which was like another world now, a world by itself, the cry of seagulls and the like could be heard), you could hear the usual noises from inside the house: the radio was giving the weather forecast for seafaring or playing a familiar piece of music at a low volume, the cousin’s mama was clattering with cups and containers during the morning dishes, but always made sure to leave a clean bowl for oatmeal and a clean coffee cup on the table for the one who happened to sleep too late. The cousin’s mama.
Mama
. Doris, so small again, heard from the cozy sounds that the cup and the bowl really were there and above all safe and all of that. She was so thankful but at the same time it made her furious, and suddenly, before she knew what was happening she had run back into the house, thrown open the door to the kitchen, almost steamed in, and screamed at the top of her lungs in the cousin’s mama’s face:

“WHAT HAPPENED? WHY HASN’T ANYONE WOKEN ME UP?”

In other words right in the face of the person she loved the most and who loved her the very most, with moreover a practical love that was expressed in action and not in these incessant puns and words. The cousin’s mama, at the sink, had looked overwrought, for a moment quite simply wounded. But then she had become herself again.

“But calm down, Doris,” the cousin’s mama said so calm and motherly. “Calm down.” Put her arm around Doris’s shoulders and looked at her with all the tenderness left in the world, and that, Doris determined, who so often saw that when she looked at the cousin’s mama, that tenderness, it existed. “You needed to rest. You were sleeping so soundly. After all of that terrible . . . you should thank your creator that you have the gift of sleep. Otherwise there have been more than enough horrors and dreadful things. As if the other thing had not been enough . . . The alarm sounded, Doris Flinkenberg. There was even talk that the cousin’s house would be evacuated.”

And then Doris’s eyes had grown to tablespoon size again because you never forget the terrible experiences of your childhood.

And suddenly, again, Doris had forgotten all her indignation, all her anger, and just peeped, perplexed like a small, small child:

“But THEN you would have woken me?”

And inside the cousin’s mama all the love that existed in her overwhelmed her in just that moment.

“My goodness,” said the cousin’s mama, so to herself that she barely got the words out. “That’s clear. Doris, small beloved child. Doris, little little child.”

And the cousin’s mama wrapped Doris in her arms again, so overwhelmed by this extraordinary person, Doris Flinkenberg.
Sometimes the cousin’s mama had that feeling with Doris: that Doris was a like a world, her own planet.

A planet in and of herself, and not even she, the cousin’s mama, had access to it.

“Have a seat here and we’ll warm the oatmeal and I’ll pour some coffee and I’ll tell you everything. And look. We’ve gotten our very own hero.”

And the cousin’s mama had gotten the morning paper and shown Doris Flinkenberg. There was a large picture of Bengt on the front page with a switch in one hand, with which he was hitting the burning ground, and a stick with a hot dog on the end in the other. “Two birds with one stone,” the caption under the photo read.

But then Doris would not say much more. Strange maybe, and also not. The fire would not become the object of more speculation from her side; it was as it was, a forest fire that had started during the strange weather pattern, or maybe quite simply a result of someone having carelessly handled fire. Thrown a burning match away in the dry moss, or a burning cigarette, by mistake. And there had been so many people moving about in the woods at just that moment. Doris’s discovery before she fell into her long sleep, the rumor of that terrible discovery at Bule Marsh, had put people into action then.

There were many who had made a pilgrimage to the marsh to see with their own eyes how the last question marks in the mystery surrounding the American girl could be deleted. What happened with her? Did she really drown? The correct answer was yes, in other words. She drowned. What a terrible tragedy of love. Based on the stage of decomposition in which the body was in, it was also clear that it had been lying in the marsh all these years. “The last question mark dispelled,” it clearly read in an article in the local paper the following day. Under the caption
“Schoolgirl’s macabre discovery brings an end to things.” And a rather fuzzy picture of reeds and the like, which were then old pieces of a corpse.

Maybe there were questions also when it came to the fire for example. But there are things you do not understand. Some things do not become better by trying to understand them. And remember that Doris was a mistreated child and somewhere inside her, that fire was still burning. The real fire, the one from the match that had been struck against the striking strip and thrown into something you had moistened with gasoline and
swoosh
, it catches fire, the house, where you are if you happen to be the unhappy victim.

Doris had alleged reasons to respect fire.

“If you stick your finger in a candle flame it will get burned. Ow. But you don’t always get off so easily. With just burns I mean. And now I don’t know if I—”

That was how Doris would say it to Sandra, that it might be time for other games now. Of course not the only reason, but still.

“Besides, I’m tired of this now. In the long run it gets boring with these fateful looks and these hot, uncomfortable shirts,” Doris would really clown about on the scorched ground out in the woods where Sandra and Doris would meet again that same day, in the afternoon.

“Life is waiting. Come on. Let’s get out the map now. The real one. Because now we’re going to travel.”

And Sandra would also be gripped by Doris’s eagerness in the face of something new. And so it became that the fire in the woods marked the end of Doris and Sandra’s game the Mystery with the American girl.

Sandra was not there when the corpse of the American girl was found. She came home the same morning Doris Flinkenberg
woke up after a day and a half of beneficial sleep after the terrible events at Bule Marsh.

Sandra was on Åland. She loathed these relatives, the uncles and “the aunt” who stood behind her when she looked out over the ocean that was so close it almost smashed against the veranda window when the waves were high. “The aunt,” who before you even had a chance to experience it yourself, talked about how nice it was, with the sea, when it came toward you. How “wild nature’s forces could be.”

“The aunt” also stood there behind her and asked a bunch of questions that Sandra did not answer, partly because she was not listening properly; she had enough going on trying to concentrate on experiencing something herself for once. Without a middleman or an instruction manual.

But when she did not answer, “the aunt” just said:

“Yes, to lose yourself in the sea and open spaces, that’s an Ålandic trait. The big dreams—” and she did not finish the sentence, not because she would have lost her train of thought but because the continuation was so obvious. That is the way it sounded anyway.

“The aunt,” in other words, there behind Sandra, at the window, otherwise nothing happened. No telephone rang, no one called to tell her that something had happened in the District, that the corpse of the American girl had been found.

Loneliness&Fear. “The aunt” had poked at Sandra’s shirt when she had arrived.

“Don’t touch it,” Sandra had said.

“What kind of thing is that?”

And when she had not stopped nagging her, Sandra finally forced out:

“A game.”

And behind her again, so close.

“What strange games you play.”

Sandra said nothing. Well, she thought. She was no islander. Definitely not.

She was no islander. She was from the District, the marsh, from where Sister Night was, Sister Day.

“I’m going to become Queen of the Marsh when I grow up,” she had said to “the aunt” at another time. “A really slimy one.”

“The aunt,” to whom all of this was abracadabra, rolled her eyes but said nothing.

Queen of the Marsh. So lovely. She thought she had come up with something herself there. A new thing. A seed. A seed for a new game to play with Doris Flinkenberg. The Return of the Marsh Queen. When she came home from Åland that is.

And it struck her again how she longed for home, for Doris Flinkenberg. Longed so terribly for Doris, the American girl, the boy in the woods, Inget Herrman (yes, even Inget Herrman), the Islander, and the house in the darker part.

But despite all interruptions, all outside interference, Sandra would be able to swear to one thing afterward. That at the moment, exactly at the exact point in time when Doris Flinkenberg was standing on Lore Cliff at Bule Marsh in the District and suddenly and unexpectedly caught sight of something red in the reeds off to the side, then Sandra herself had been standing at the window on the veranda on Åland staring at the sea that was swelling toward her, humming a certain song, the Eddie-song.

And that, this simultaneousness, was something she would never be able to explain to anyone but Doris Flinkenberg.

“I heard everything, though later. When I came home. Just now. I was on Åland.”

“Eddie then? What do we do now?”

Doris had shrugged her shoulders. Sometimes you are just wrong.

“You don’t know everything in this world. And besides, it was just a game.”

“Come on,” said Doris Flinkenberg. “I’m hungry. Dorishungry. I have a hole in my stomach.”

And laughed. And then they went from the woods to the house in the darker part of the woods and Sandra set the table with a little of this and a little of that and they ate and ate.

But then Doris had become serious again.

“Now it’s about time we do something real. That we stop playing. I want to meet her. Now we’re going to travel.

“Get out the map now. The real one.”

And then they went to Sandra’s room and spread out the enormous map of the world between them on the bed.

“Now I’m going to get to run in the Alps like in
The Sound of Music,”
said Doris Flinkenberg.

“Now I’m finally going to get to meet her. Lorelei Lindberg.

“G-O-D. How I’ve been looking forward to it.”

The boy in the pool
. But the boy was lying on the bottom of the pool, with his eyes closed. The music was playing.
Here comes the night. So cold, so roaring, so wonderful
. She went to him. That was what it had been like.

The girl had been woken by the sound and immediately got out of bed. Put on her silk kimono and stuck her feet in the high-heeled morning slippers with muffs. Not Eddie-clothes, they were no longer needed, not now.

The door to the basement stairs was open. She walked down.

Sandra Harelip
. She saw him in the pool. He lay motionless, his eyes were closed, maybe he was sleeping. She climbed down the ladder and went to him.

“Now I’m going to tell you about love,” Inget Herrman had said to the girls at the beginning of one summer a long time ago, at Eddie’s boathouse, on the Second Cape. “You don’t fall in love with someone because that person is nice or good-looking or even because of that person’s thousand good qualities. You fall in love with someone who brings something inside you to life.