You came back from the store to find me howling in the sandbox. You put off calling the police until the next day. You tried to report her missing, but were told she didn’t exist. She wasn’t in the national registry.
Of course, neither was I, which they found out. I was registered and received a personal identity number and the mandatory vaccinations.
And that was that. Mum didn’t come back.
You did what a dad is supposed to do. You made sure I went to school; you cooked dinner; we watched television together; you helped me with homework. I was never yelled at. You were never mean. When you started drinking it was quietly, in the armchair by the television. You’d get distant and fall asleep at odd times. I learned to make myself dinner.
I feel almost jetlagged. The sun is so low in the sky. The sunset just goes on and on.
Hi Dad.
I thought you might want to know what I was doing while you were getting drunk. Once we’d moved into the two-roomer in Hökarängen I was over at Maggie’s and Björn’s place most of the time. You didn’t want to see them. You were at work, or you were watching television at home, drinking. One evening I was in Maggie’s and Björn’s kitchen—we had just finished dinner—and I asked Maggie about you and Mum.
“Actually I don’t remember how it was,” said Maggie. “She didn’t arrive with any of the others – it was me, Björn, and Peter from the Jester commune, Eva and Ingeborg from Nyköping; Per-Arne was from Norrköping, he was Ingeborg’s friend from FNL… but your mother, I don’t remember how she ended up there. But she was there from the start, that she was. A very private person. She and your father were a good match that way, I suppose. They liked keeping to themselves.”
“How do you mean, private,” I said.
“She never talked about herself. I mean, she didn’t talk about personal stuff, or offer opinions. I never found out what she thought about anything, not in all the years she was there. We thought she was a bit touched, or she’d been through something difficult, so we didn’t make a big deal of it. And then there was that bit about her not being in the national registry. Maybe her identity was protected. Maybe she’d run away from an abusive husband. That’s what I think. But why she left you and your dad…” Maggie patted my cheek. She put an arm around me. “That was a shitty thing to do,” she said. “If I’d had a child like you, I wouldn’t have left you for a second.”
I sat quietly inhaling Maggie’s scent, a mix of softener, cigarettes, and warm skin.
“Do you know what your father used to say,” Maggie said. “He used to say that your mother just came out of the forest one day.”
I tried to call Maggie just now, but for some reason I have no reception. It would be good to hear her voice.
Hi Dad.
When I was little, I could sit for hours looking out the window. It could be because of a certain kind of music, or because it was dusk, or a certain slant of the light. There was a sensation in my chest, a churning. I couldn’t put words to it then. But it was a knowledge that there was something out there. That there was a hole in the world. And a longing to go there. I still have that longing, but it doesn’t overwhelm me like it used to. Until now. There’s something about the light here that makes the longing bloom.
I’m thinking about the last time I saw you alive. It was four years after I had left home. You called sometimes when you were drunk, saying everything would get better. In the end I changed my phone number.
Then it was your fiftieth birthday, and I thought I’d give it a chance. I knocked on your door at about seven in the evening. There was no reply, but the door wasn’t locked. In there was the wino den. Something under the garbage rustled in a corner.
You were in the couch, watching TV. You looked up when I came in, old milk cartons crunching under my boots.
“I was at the school house, you know?” you said. “I did clean up in here. And I went to the schoolhouse. I waited for her to come back. But she didn’t.”
You started to weep. It was a wet and forlorn sobbing. I turned around and left. It would be six years until I saw you next.
Inside the schoolhouse, I pretend that no time has passed. Closing my eyes, I can hear the others. The rhythmic thud of kneading dough. Something being chopped on a cutting board. Someone strumming a guitar and humming the melody. Footsteps on the stairs. The smell of baking bread and tea and onions frying in butter. A hand caressing my cheek in passing. I pretend that it’s dinnertime. We sing together, and then we fill our plates. I can sit in anyone’s lap. I lean against a shoulder. When I’ve fallen asleep, they carry me to the brown corduroy couch in the corner of the dining hall and put a blanket over me. The corduroy is rough against my face. The buzz of voices rising and falling.
Dad
The sun didn’t rise today. I can only see it as a glow on the horizon. I was in the kitchen when the noise came. I could hear it all the way inside. I went out onto the veranda. It was the sound of little bells. I hadn’t heard it since the day Mum left.
I tried to call Maggie. No reception. So I’m sitting here on the steps. The sound of bells still hangs in the air. And the twilight just lingering there, that won’t go towards night or day.
Dad, I think Mum is coming soon.
Miss Nyberg and I
It began with a faint, scraping noise on the balcony.
That’s how I think things began for you, anyway. For me, it started one late night in your room. It’s many years ago now, back when we were young. I was reminded of it because you mentioned that you’d planted sequoia. You did that when I rented a room in your apartment, and we snuck a plant into the flowerbed outside the house, and somehow it managed to take root in the stern Swedish soil. After twenty years, the tree had managed to dig its roots all the way down into the laundry room of an adjacent house.
It’s a Sunday in late February. We’re on the big red plush sofa that I love, but is so damned hard to get out of. You’ve made a tart apple crumble, almost no sugar, but extra crumble. We cover it in lakes of custard and talk about our aches and pains; my new hip joint, your sciatica, my novel, your exhibition. And about the sequoia on the balcony, about to slowly wake from winter sleep. And I realise I’ve never told you the story about Brown.
It was summer. You worked nights as an illustrator at a tabloid. We shared a landline phone. I woke up at dawn because I thought I heard it ringing. The phone was quiet when I opened the door to your room. But there was someone in the gloom, sitting on the wooden chest you used for a coffee table. It was a small, gnarled shape with a faint glimmer of eyes. In my half-sleeping state, it didn’t seem that odd.
When I woke up again, I wasn’t sure if I had actually been in your room that night. But the image of the creature on the coffee table stuck in my head. It turned into a short story that was never finished—I had trouble with the ending. It also felt a bit weird that a friend of mine was the main character. I could have changed her name, but it wouldn’t have been the same thing. I mean, the story was about you.
This also has to do with your penchant for strange plants. You weren’t very interested in growing boring, ordinary flowers. Possibly sweet pea, because they were so pretty. Other than that though, you preferred to order the most bizarre stuff you could find in the seed catalogue, some of it on general principle: