“Let’s get you to a hospital.”
I hate myself for saying it, but I would have hated myself even more if I didn’t.
“Honestly, Tone, I know you’re tough, but you’re in so much pain. What if it’s broken? Or if it heals badly?”
Tone purses her lips and shakes her head.
“It isn’t,” she hisses. “It’s just a bad sprain.”
“Are you sure?” I ask doubtfully. “It doesn’t look so good.”
“I can tell,” she says sharply. “Look, I don’t want to go to the hospital, and I don’t need to, either.”
She pokes around in the toiletry bag without meeting my eyes.
“I don’t want you to stay here for my sake,” I say. “My film isn’t more important than your health.”
Now she looks me straight in the eye.
“This isn’t your film, Alice. You aren’t the only one who’s invested a lot into this project. You aren’t the only one who cares about it.”
It stings enough to silence me.
If a sprained ankle is the worst thing to happen on this trip, then I guess maybe it won’t be so bad, after all.
THEN
Elsa trundles drowsily down the stairs and stops in the doorway to the kitchen. There’s a twinge in her chest, a sinking feeling. It’s an unfamiliar sensation, and it takes her a few seconds to put her finger on it.
Hopelessness.
On the table in front of him stands a half-empty bottle of schnapps.
Elsa has no idea where it could have come from: she refuses to have that stuff in her house, and he knows it. She hates the smell. The times he’s stumbled home giddy and reeking from the Petterssons’, she’s made him sleep on the sofa in the dining room. That must be why he didn’t even try to come up to the bedroom.
At least she hopes that’s the reason.
When he wakes up he’ll be hurting. His back has troubled him ever since an accident he had in his early thirties, but so long as Elsa massages him every evening it still works just fine.
Were it not for the thinning blond hair at the top of his head, he could be a boy lying slumped there on that table. He’s still tall and lanky, with only the small pouch on his belly to suggest he’s started to pile on the pounds. That has come on in the last few months. He eats more now, she’s noticed. He doesn’t have much else to do.
Elsa throws a quick glance behind her up at the staircase. Aina isn’t awake yet—and a good thing, too. For once she’s relieved her daughter has a tendency to sleep away her mornings. Though, it should be said, she has been getting up early of late—even on a Sunday, when she doesn’t need to be in school. She gets herself dressed up for church. Elsa suspects she’s taken a fancy to the new pastor. Which isn’t so peculiar, really: he’s a handsome man, and in Silvertjärn there’s a dearth of men for a young girl to look at.
She walks over to the table and gently puts her hand on Staffan’s shoulder.
“Staffan,” she says quietly.
He doesn’t make a sound. She gives his back a cautious rub.
“Staffan,” she says again.
Now she feels him start to stir. He raises his head slightly, then, with a low groan, lifts it all the way off the table. It takes his eyes a few seconds to focus, but she can already make out the shame in them before he blinks.
Nowadays it always seems to be there.
He looks at her. His eyes are bloodshot, and he hasn’t shaved. He looks like a drunkard, the way Einar always looked whenever she’d found him in the church and had to haul him back into the chapel to sleep it off.
She waits for the anger, as does Staffan—she can see it from the way he contracts beneath her gaze. But she doesn’t have the heart. She feels no anger. Only sadness.
“Get up and go to bed, Staffan,” she says quietly.
She strokes his head. Staffan purses his lips and gives a short nod, his eyes glassy.
As Staffan lumbers upstairs, Elsa’s eyes stay fixed on his empty chair. It needs repainting. They all need repainting. The kitchen chairs are a brilliant turquoise, which always brings a smile to visitors’ faces on entering the house. It’s something unexpected, like their green front door. Elsa likes color. If it were up to her, the whole house would be fizzing with it—blues and purples and oranges and turquoise—but that would look a sight. So she’s reined herself in to the odd splash here and there: the front door, the kitchen chairs. The flowerbeds in spring and summer, and the glossy apples in autumn.
She pulls a peeling flake of paint from the back of the chair. The gray, lifeless wood peers out from underneath.
It’s as though the spark within him has died.
Elsa closes her eyes.
Elsa has always known what needed to be done. Even in her very darkest moments, she has always known what was required of her. She had looked after her mother when she was at death’s door; spoon-fed her, held her over the chamber pot, changed her diapers. All without letting her see her shed a tear.
Elsa has always been able to give advice, has always been the kind of person others could lean on. Ask Elsa, that’s what they say down in town. Be it for help or advice, or simply a kind ear, just ask Elsa. It’s something she takes pride in.
But now she wakes up in the mornings with the feeling that she can’t breathe.
What shall we do?
They still have a little money left, but nowhere near enough to buy a house elsewhere. It’ll keep them going for a few more months if she asks to defer their bills, but after that …
There’s no work to be had. Not in Silvertjärn. But there’s nowhere else they can go. The world is closing in around them.
She opens her eyes. She doesn’t have the time for this. It’s no use thinking that way.
Elsa quickly takes the
