Real or imagined? At any rate the Dalgren household had appeared to be very lively through the wee hours. Now it was quiet as a tomb.
The world—reality as it presented itself—struck her as distant and false. She also felt an urgent need to pee. She stood up and pulled on the slippers. They were still damp. An attack of nausea and dizziness gripped her. She allowed it to pass. Brand took the narrow steps of the old staircase one at a time, holding onto a polished wooden rail.
The rooms downstairs were silent and empty. No evidence from the reunion party remained. The entire house appeared tidied up and swept clean. Wooden chairs that had been set out for guests were now stacked neatly along the walls. Where was everybody? She glanced outside. The front lane and side yards, parked thick with vehicles the evening before, were deserted.
A green antique mora clock in the big front room indicated the time was 12:17. Brand had a difficult time believing she had slept so long. The clock had to be simply decorative. Feeling like an idiot she watched the clock face to make sure the hands were indeed moving. Then it hit her. With the six hour time difference, it was six a.m. in New York, her normal waking hour when she was on the job. It still seemed impossible that it was already past noon. The mid-day light came in through the windows feeble and diminished.
She gazed out on the property. In daylight, she saw that the house stood among its outbuildings on the slope of a fairly high hill, not quite a mountain. The view was of a long sweep of snow-covered forest. In the distance was a lake, flat and white.
She dimly remembered the location of a downstairs bathroom. Her duffel had been thoughtfully placed there, parked against a wall. Next to it were her boots. She relieved herself and splashed water on her face, rubbing her skin vigorously with a rough towel. Her eyes were rimmed with red, her eyeballs, marbled with red veins. There was no shower or bathtub. Brand desperately needed to wash the stench of travel off herself. Her own pores accused her of abuse. The aquavit or slivovitz or whatever the hell the clear liquid was that the Dalgrens drank the previous night turned poisonous in her bloodstream.
A sense of shame settled in. Had she said things or done things the previous evening that were mawkish or offensive? She drank far too much. By the end of the night she was so inebriated it was as if her eyes were looking at each other. She had been guilty of patronizing her relatives, privately considering them a collection of yokels. The phrase in English was “bull in a china shop.” “A New Yorker among Swedes” would amount to the same thing.
After a single day in the country, she had already botched her Swedish visit. She addressed her haggard image in the bathroom mirror. “You have wasted your life.”
Brand made a solemn, silent promise to lay off the booze. She rooted in her duffel, fished out a baggie, and popped a couple of light yellow twenty-milligram pills into her mouth. Adderall—one of the most popular drugs in America, prescribed for both child and adult ADHD. Adderall—“attention deficit disorder for all.” Brand had tried alternatives, Modafinil and Vyvanse, among others, but there was nothing like the real thing.
She felt restless. She had come thousands of miles, only to want immediately to escape the stifling confines of the Dalgren homestead. Delving into her family’s past had been the vague goal of her visit. She recalled the previous evening, Elin Dalgren banging imperatively with her cane, the woman grasping her hand as if afraid to let go.
She wandered the empty house alone. She hesitated at the door of Elin Dalgren’s apartment. The scent of an invalid hung faintly in the air, fusty and dense. Heavy curtains blocked out the already winter-weakened exterior light. Feeling like a thief, Brand ventured in. Even though the room was gloomy, she refrained from turning on the lamps.
Where was the old woman? Where was everybody? The whole house threw off a post-apocalypse vibe. A ninety-five-year-old matriarch disappeared. The previous evening she didn’t appear to be able to move a single step on her own, much less vanish into thin air.
Unless the strain of the reunion was too much, and the guest of honor took sick.
The quarters felt close and crowded where the more modern upstairs spaces had been spare and empty. Stacks of books and papers covered most of the surfaces. A vintage breakfront with glass doors showed off Elin’s treasures: several carved, colorfully painted wooden horses of different sizes, an elegant set of silverware inside an open leather box, a pocket watch suspended in a small bell jar.
Amid the clutter on top of an old wooden desk, Brand was surprised to discover an envelope with her own name written on the outside. “Veronika,” spelled out in shaky-handed script. The flap had been left unsealed. Inside was a single, age-faded photograph.
The snapshot showed five teenagers, four of them grinning and goofing for the camera. Two boys, three girls, grouped side by side in light summer clothes. The wardrobes, the haircuts, and the yellowed age of the photograph indicated an earlier time. The 1930s, Brand guessed. She recognized the two Dalgren sisters, her grandmother and great aunt, Klara and Alice. She thought the third figure had to be Elin.
The trio of girls leaned into each other, eyes sparkling, mid-laughter. Klara wore an improvised wreath of spring flowers in her hair and a white mid-length dress, with a slightly-scooped neckline and loosely gathered at the waist. Alice had on an even more modest version of her sister’s dress. Elin stood stiff and shy, her shoulders hunched.
In the center of the tableau stood Gustav Dalgren, arms akimbo, staring into the lens with such a look of youthful exuberance that his aura dominated the group. Of the five,
