Mum kissed Cilla’s forehead. “Have a nice little midsummer’s eve, love. I’ll leave the cookies out.”
Cilla made herself smile at her mother’s patronizing remark, and waited for the house to go to sleep.
She had put the dress on right this time, as well as she could, and clutched seven kinds of flowers in her left hand — buttercup, clover, geranium, catchfly, bluebells, chickweed, and daisies. She stood at the back of the house, on the slope facing the mountain. It was just past midnight, the sky a rich blue tinged with green and gold. The air had a sharp and herbal scent. It was very quiet.
Cilla raised her arms. “I’m ready,” she whispered. In the silence that followed, she thought she could hear snatches of music. She closed her eyes and waited. When she opened them again, the vittra had arrived.
They came out from between the pine trees, walking in pairs, all dressed in red and white: the women wore red skirts and shawls and the men long red coats. Two of them were playing the fiddle, a slow and eerie melody in a minor key.
A tall man walked at the head of the train, dressed entirely in white. His hair was long and dark and very fine. There was something familiar about the shape of his face and the translucent blue of his eyes. For a moment, those eyes stared straight into Cilla’s. It was like receiving an electric shock; it reverberated down into her stomach. Then he shifted his gaze and looked beyond her to where Sara was standing wide-eyed by the corner of the house in her oversized sleeping t-shirt. He walked past Cilla without sparing her another glance.
The beautiful man from the mountain approached Sara where she stood clutching the edge of the rain barrel. He put a hand on her arm and said something to her that Cilla couldn’t hear. Whatever it was, it made Sara’s face flood with relief. She took his hand, and they walked past Cilla to the rest of the group. The fiddle players started up their slow wedding march, and the procession returned to the mountain. Sara never looked back.
Cilla told them that Sara must have taken the dress, that she herself had gone to bed not long after the others. She did tell them of Sara’s doomsday vision and her belief that she could tell the future by decoding secret messages in the newspaper. When the search was finally abandoned, the general opinion was that Sara had had a bout of psychotic depression and gone into the wild, where she had either fallen into a body of water or died of exposure somewhere she couldn’t be found. Up there, you can die of hypothermia even in summer. Cilla said nothing of the procession, or of the plastic bag in her suitcase where Märet’s dress lay cut into tiny strips.
She kept the bag for a long time.
Cloudberry Jam
I made you in a tin can. It was one of the unlabelled mystery cans the charity in Åre village handed out. Most of the time it would be sausages or split pea soup.
This is how I did it: I waited until it was my time of the month. I took the tin can from the shelf under the sink. I filled it halfway with fresh water and put half a teaspoon of salt in it. Next I put in a small, gnarled carrot from last year’s garden. I had saved it because it had two prongs, like little legs, and arm-like stumps. Then I held the can between my legs and let some blood trickle into it. Finally, some of my spit. I put some plastic wrap over the opening. The rest of the night, I sat with the can in my lap and sang to you. That’s how you were made, in October, as the first snows fell.
You grew steadily through the winter months. I sang to you and fed you small drops of milk. By Yule you were big enough that I moved you to a larger container, an old bucket. You started kicking then, I suppose because you finally had room to move around. You didn’t need any nourishment other than milk, which was good because the charity in Åre had closed. I wouldn’t go and ask for welfare money. I lived on last year’s potatoes and roots, a bird here and there, cotton-grass from the bog, and whatever I managed to steal from the shops.
The snow was slow melting that year. It wasn’t until late May that the last of the snowdrifts at the back of the house finally disappeared. The little mountain birches were unfolding their first leaves. I lifted the cloth and saw that you were ready to come out. You were curled up in the bucket, perfectly formed, the liquid around you cloudy and brown. I lifted you out and dried you off with a towel.
It was perhaps half past three in the morning. On the porch, the air was sharp and clear. I could see all the way to the Norwegian border, to the Sylarna Mountains. Sunlight trickled over the worn mountaintops. I held you up.
“Welcome home,” I said.
You opened your tiny eyes and looked out over the bog. We stood like that for a while.
Once out of the bucket, you grew quickly. The cloudberries ripened in August, covering the bog in flecks of gold. We picked them together. By then you were walking, your skin becoming thicker and darker in the sun. Although you couldn’t carry anything with your stumpy arms, you were good at snagging the berries with your mouth and dropping them in the basket. I made cloudberry compote and jam. You could never have enough of the cloudberries. I remember you sitting at the kitchen table, golden jam everywhere, smacking loudly.
As autumn slid into winter, you learned to talk. Your voice was low and a little raspy, and you couldn’t roll your Rs. We read together: old magazines, children’s books I had saved. We played in the snow. I had a kneading-trough that we rode down into the valley and I dragged back up. You burrowed into the drifts, shovelling the snow aside with your arm-stumps and wriggling tunnels through the snow. On the eve of your first Yule, you wondered about your origins.
“Where did I come from?” you asked. “Where’s my father?”
“You don’t have one,” I said. “I made you myself.”
“Everyone has a father.”
“Not everyone.”
“Why did you make me?” you said.
“I made you so that I could love you,” I said.
The snows melted, and we celebrated your first birthday. The frost left the ground. The days lengthened. You reached me to my waist and didn’t want to sit in my lap or let me hug you. We had our first argument when you started digging in the kitchen garden just outside the house. I found you in the bottom of a crater of upturned earth and seedlings, rubbing the soil into your skin. I yelled at you for ruining my plants, and why would you do this.
“But it’s because the soil is good here,” you said.
“Dig wherever you want,” I said. “But stay the hell away from the garden, or we won’t have anything to eat.”
“The soil isn’t as good anywhere else. You don’t get it.”
Without another word, you waddled off to the birch copse and dug under the trees the rest of the morning while I tried to salvage the kitchen garden. It was as if you dug away your anger, because after a while you came back with your little arms outstretched. We went inside and made lunch together and got soil and mud all over the floors.
You kept digging every day. Over by the bog, down on the slope towards the valley. It looked like we had voles or rabbits. You’d come home with things you’d unearthed: a broken saucer, part of a ski pole, little bits of bone, fool’s gold.
When the weather became warm enough, I took you to Kall Lake to go night swimming. I used to go swimming in Kall Lake as a child. That was the best thing about summer.
You squealed in delight when you saw the rocky shore and the grey lake mirror. Once in the water you became frightened. It was too big and loose you said, too loose. You sat on the shore while I swam. You didn’t like the rocks either—they were too hard. You wanted to go home and dig. We didn’t go back to Kall Lake.