“Mamma doesn’t believe I can take care of myself.”
“She worries about you.”
“She never worries about you,” Viola points out.
“I can take care of myself.”
Viola takes a sip of her drink and looks out through the windshield.
“I saw you on TV,” she says.
“This morning? When I met Pontus Salman?”
“No, it was… last week,” Viola replies. “You were talking to that arrogant man with the aristocratic name-”
“Palmcrona,” Penelope says.
“Palmcrona, right.”
“You can’t believe how angry he made me! I could feel my face turning beet red, and the tears strated coming and I couldn’t stop them. I felt like jumping up and reciting Bob Dylan’s ‘Masters of War’ to his face, or like running out and slamming the studio door behind me.”
Viola’s only half listening. She watches Penelope stretch as she opens the roof window. “I didn’t realize you’ve started to shave your armpits,” she says.
“Well, these days I’ve been in the media so much that-”
“Vanity, pure vanity!” Viola says with a laugh.
“I didn’t want people to dismiss me as a dogmatist just because I have some pit hair.”
“What about your bikini line, then?”
“Well, that’s not going so well…”
Penelope pulls aside her sarong and Viola laughs out loud.
“Bjorn likes it,” Penelope says with a little smile.
“He can’t talk, not with those dreads of his.”
“I imagine you shave everywhere you have to,” Penelope says sharply. “Just to please your married men and your big-muscled idiots and-”
“I know I have bad taste in men.”
“You have good taste in most other areas.”
“I’ve never amounted to much, though.”
“If you’d just finished school, gotten good grades…”
Viola shrugs. “I actually got my equivalency.”
The boat plows gently through the water, green now, reflecting the surrounding hillsides. Seagulls follow overhead.
“So, how did it go?”
“I thought the exam was easy,” Viola says, licking salt from the edge of her glass.
“So it went well?”
Viola nods and puts her glass down.
“How well?” Penelope nudges her sister in her side.
“One hundred percent.” Viola looks down modestly.
Penelope laughs with happiness and hugs her sister hard.
“Do you realize what this means? Now you can be anything you want! You can go to whichever university you want and study anything you like! You can pick anything at all! Business, medicine, journalism!”
The sisters laugh and their cheeks flush. Penelope hugs her sister so hard that the cowboy hat falls off. She smoothes Viola’s hair and pats it into place just as she used to do when they were small. She removes the clip with the peace dove from her hair and slides it into her sister’s, smiling contentedly.
3
With roaring engines, Penelope steers toward the bay. The bow arches up; white, frothy water parts behind the stern.
“You’ve lost your mind, girl!” Viola yells as she pulls the hair clip loose, just as she used to do when she was little and her mother almost had her hair done.
Bjorn wakes up when they stop at Goose Island for an ice cream. Viola insists on a round of miniature golf, too, so it’s late in the afternoon when they set out again.
On their port side, the bay spreads out like a grand stone floor. It is breathtaking. The plan is to anchor at Kastskar, a long, uninhabited island with a narrow waist. On the southern side, there is a lush cove where they’ll anchor the boat and swim, grill, and spend the night.
Viola yawns. “I’m going below to take a nap.”
“Go ahead.” Penelope smiles.
Viola walks down the companionway as Penelope stares ahead. She reduces the speed and keeps her eye on the depth sounder as they glide in toward Kastskar. The water is shoaling quickly from forty meters to five.
Bjorn enters the cockpit and kisses Penelope’s neck.
“Would you like me to start dinner?” he asks.
“Viola needs to sleep for an hour or so.”
“You sound just like your mother right now,” he says softly. “Has she called you yet?”
Penelope nods.
“Did you have a fight?”
Tears spring to her eyes and she brushes them from her cheeks with a smile.
“Mamma told me I wasn’t welcome at her Midsummer celebration.”
Bjorn hugs her.
“Ignore her.”
“I do.”
Slowly and gently, Penelope maneuvers the boat into the innermost part of the cove. The engines rumble softly. The boat is so close to land now that she can smell the island’s damp vegetation. They anchor, let it drag, and go in toward the shore. Bjorn jumps onto the steep, rocky ground holding the line, which he ties around a tree trunk.
The ground is covered in moss. He stands and looks at Penelope. A few birds in the treetops lift off as the anchor winch clatters.
Penelope pulls on her jogging shorts and her white sneakers, jumps on land, and takes Bjorn’s hand.
“Want to check out the island?”
“Isn’t there something you want to convince me about?” she asks hesitatingly.
“The advantages of our Swedish general-access rights,” he says.
She smiles and nods as he pushes her hair off her face and lets his finger run over her high cheekbone and her thick black eyebrows.
“How can you be so beautiful?”
He kisses her lightly on the mouth and begins to lead her inland, until they reach a small meadow surrounded by tight clumps of high wild grasses. Butterflies and small bumblebees flit over the wildflowers. It’s hot in the sun and the water shimmers between the trees on the north side. Bjorn and Penelope stand still, hesitate, study each other with shy smiles, then turn serious.
“What if someone comes?” she asks.
“We’re the only ones on this island.”
“Are you sure?”
“How many islands exist in Stockholm’s archipelago? Thirty thousand? Probably more,” he says.
Penelope slips out of her bikini top, kicks off her shoes, and pulls off her shorts and bikini bottom at the same time so that she’s standing completely naked in the grass. Her initial feeling of embarrassment gives way to pure
