“We’re really not keen on lending it out... When did you last drive?” asked Lena.
She was still holding the car keys in one hand, her arms firmly crossed over her chest.
“Last summer,” said Julia, adding a quick reminder: “But it is my car... at least, half of it is.”
A cold, damp wind swept along the street from the sea. Lena was wearing only a thin cardigan and skirt, but she didn’t ask Julia to come inside where it was warm so they could discuss things further — and even if she had, Julia would never have agreed. Richard was bound to be inside, and she had no desire to see either him or their teenage children.
Richard was some kind of big boss at Volvo. He had his own company car, of course, as did Lena, who was head of a primary school in Hisingen. They were very fortunate.
“You don’t need it,” added Julia, her voice steady. “You’ve only had it while... while I haven’t wanted to drive.”
Lena looked at the car again. “Well, yes, but Richard’s daughter is here every other weekend, and she wants—”
“I shall pay for all the gas,” Julia interrupted her.
She wasn’t afraid of her older sister, she never had been, and she had made the decision to drive to Öland.
“Yes, I know you will, it isn’t that,” said Lena. “But it doesn’t feel right, somehow. And then there’s the insurance. Richard says—”
“I’m only going to drive to Öland in it,” said Julia. “And then back to Gothenburg again.”
Lena looked up at the house; there were lights behind the curtains in almost every room.
“Gerlof wants me to go,” Julia went on. “I spoke to him yesterday.”
“But why now?” said Lena, then went on without waiting for an answer. “And where are you going to stay? I mean, you can’t stay with him at the home — there aren’t any guest rooms there, as far as I know. And down in Stenvik we’ve closed up the cottage and the boathouse for the season...”
“I’ll sort something out,” said Julia quickly, then realized that she didn’t actually know where she was going to stay. She hadn’t even thought about it. “But I can take the car, then?”
She could sense that her sister was on the point of giving in, and wanted a quick answer before Richard came out to help his wife put off lending her the car.
“Well...” said Lena. “All right, you can borrow it then. I just need to get a few things.”
She went over to the car, opened the door, and took out some papers, a pair of sunglasses, and half a bar of Marabou chocolate.
She walked back to Julia, held out her hand, and let go of the keys. Julia caught them, then Lena handed her something else.
“Take this too,” she said. “So we can get hold of you. I just got a new one through work.”
It was a cell phone, a black one. Perhaps not the smallest model, but small enough.
“I don’t know how to use these,” said Julia.
“It’s easy. There’s a code that you key in first... here.” Lena wrote it down, along with the telephone number, on a piece of paper. “When you make a call, you just key in the whole number, with the area code, and press this green button. There’s a bit of credit left on it; when that’s gone you’ll have to pay yourself.”
“Okay.” Julia took the phone. “Thanks.”
“Right... Drive carefully,” said Lena. “Love to Dad.”
Julia nodded and walked over to the car. She got in, smelled the fragrance of her sister’s perfume, started the engine, and drove off.
It was already dusk. And as she drove through Hisingen, at twenty kilometers below the speed limit, she thought about why she and Lena could never look at each other for more than a few seconds at a time. They’d been close in the past — after all, Lena was the reason why Julia had moved to Gothenburg once upon a time — but now it was just the opposite. And things had been this bad since that Friday several years earlier when Julia had been inside Lena and Richard’s house for the last time, at a small dinner party without the children, which had ended with Richard putting his wineglass down, getting up from the table, and asking:
“Do we have to sit here constantly going over this tedious nonsense about things that happened twenty years ago? I’m just wondering. Do we have to?”
He was angry and slightly drunk and his voice was rough — despite the fact that Julia had merely mentioned Jens’s disappearance in passing, simply as the reason why she was feeling the way she was.
Lena’s voice was calm as she looked at Julia, then made the comment that had made Julia refuse to accompany her sister to Öland two years later, to help Gerlof move from the cottage in Stenvik to the residential home in Marnäs:
“He’s never coming back,” Lena had said. “I mean, everybody knows that... Jens is dead, Julia. Even you must realize that?”
Standing up and screaming hysterically at her sister across the dinner table hadn’t helped at all, but Julia had done it anyway.
Julia got home, parked the car on the street, and went inside to pack. When she had packed clothes for a ten-day stay, a few toiletries, and some books (and two bottles of red wine and some pills), she ate a sandwich and drank some water instead of wine. Then it was time to go to bed.
But once in bed she lay staring up into the darkness, unable to sleep. She got up and went into the bathroom, took a prescription pill, and went back to bed.
A little boy’s shoe. A sandal.
When she closed her eyes, she could see herself as a young mother, putting on Jens’s sandals, and that memory brought with it a black weight that settled on her breast, a heavy uncertainty that made Julia shiver under the covers.
Jens’s little shoe, after more than twenty years without a single trace of him. After all that searching on Öland, all that brooding through those sleepless nights.
The sleeping pill slowly began to work.
No more darkness now, she thought, half asleep. Help us to find him.
It was a long time before morning came, and it was still dark outside when Julia awoke. She had breakfast, then she washed up, locked the flat, and got into the car. She started the engine, switched on the windshield wipers to clear the leaves, then she was finally on her way out of the street where she lived, on her way out of the city in the sunrise and the morning traffic. The last traffic light turned to green, and she turned eastward onto the freeway, away from Gothenburg and out into the country.
She drove for the first few kilometers with the window down, letting the cold morning air blow away all trace of her sister’s perfume from the car.
Jens, I’m coming, she thought. I’m really coming, and no one can stop me now.
She knew she shouldn’t talk to him, not even silently to herself. It was unbalanced, but she’d been doing it on and off ever since Jens disappeared.
After Borås, the freeway came to an end and the houses grew smaller and more sparse. The dense fir forests of Småland crowded the road. She could have turned off and headed for an unknown destination, but the tracks into the forest looked so desolate. She drove on, heading across the country toward the east coast, and trying to take pleasure in the fact that she was undertaking a longer journey by herself than she had done for many years.
She pulled in at a service station a few kilometers from the coast to fill up with gas and to eat a few mouthfuls of a stew that was chewy and sticky and not worth the money, and then she set off again.
Toward the Öland Bridge. North of Kalmar, the bridge led to the island; it had been built over twenty years earlier, completed and opened the autumn that... That day.
She wouldn’t think about it anymore, not until she arrived.