I don’t let myself dwell on that thought.
Emmy starts running, and I follow her.
THEN
“Elsa!” she hears Dagny calling behind her. She hesitates, almost considers pretending she hasn’t heard, but plain, simple good manners get the better of her. She turns around.
Dagny is, as usual, rather well dressed for a stroll through town, wearing a tight skirt, an ostentatious brooch on the collar of her coat, and dark lipstick that has smudged slightly at the corners of her mouth. She used to be the village beauty—and is of course still very elegant—but the years have taken their toll on her. She and her husband have no children, and Elsa suspects that it isn’t for want of trying. Sadness has made its mark, giving her a hard, lacquered appearance, like a beautiful vase in brittle porcelain.
“Good afternoon,” says Elsa when Dagny catches up with her. “How are you?”
Dagny gestures at the cold gray sky, more fitting for January than April.
“Oh, you know. The weather’s just frightful,” she says, as though it were a personal affliction, rather than one felt by the whole village. “And how are you?”
Elsa isn’t sure what to say. How is she, really? Her youngest daughter is refusing to speak to her, her husband has turned to the bottle, her firstborn is laid up with preeclampsia hundreds of miles away, and she can’t be at her side because she doesn’t dare leave her charge alone, not even for a few days.
“Fine,” she says. “Just fine.”
“Have you seen the Axelssons’ dog?” asks Dagny. It appears she’s planning to walk with Elsa all the way back to her house.
“No,” Elsa says. “Should I have?”
Dagny shakes her head.
“Ran away a few days ago, apparently,” she says. “That’s what they’re saying, at least. Personally, I think we have bears in the forest.”
“Bears?” Elsa asks.
“Yes.” Dagny nods insistently. “Klaes Ekman’s dog disappeared a few weeks ago, too. Ran away, he says. Not so cut up about it all, though, is he, as it was mainly to keep the rats at bay, but I think the bears took them. I have a cousin up in Lapland who lost a dog to bears last winter. Because they’re short on food, you see.”
“But surely that happens mainly in winter?” Elsa can’t help but ask. “Not spring?”
“Eh,” Dagny says with a dismissive wave of the hand. “With weather like this I suppose it makes no difference.”
Elsa is itching to tell Dagny why she’s wrong, but she doesn’t have it in her to explain bears’ responses to the seasons to Dagny today.
By now they are approaching Dagny’s house, and she slows down. Elsa feels compelled to do the same.
“Now, there was something I wanted to talk to you about, Elsa,” Dagny says, looking slightly discomfited. “You see, there’s been rather a din coming from Birgitta’s hut of late.”
Elsa’s heart starts to pound.
“A din?”
“Late in the evenings and at night—we can hear it all the way from our house,” says Dagny. She purses her lips, turning them into a plum-colored line across her thin face.
“Well, you know I’m not one of those who—I’m not one to run around spreading nonsense about Birgitta,” she says. “And I daresay some of the things people in the parish are saying about her are outrageous. She’s sick. It’s not her fault she’s the way she is.”
Dagny looks so pious as she says this, so sanctimonious that Elsa almost wants to give her a piece of her mind, but she forces herself to bite her tongue.
“But please, do try to make her understand that she must keep the noise down,” says Dagny. Then she lowers her voice and looks around.
“The way people are talking…” She shakes her head. “I think it would be good for her to be careful,” she says, casting a long, anxious look in the direction of Birgitta’s hut.
NOW
Emmy doesn’t stop running until we’re almost three blocks away. She takes a right behind some buildings, and I follow her. All I can hear are the hard slap of soles against the cobblestones, the ringing in my ears, the swish of Emmy’s jeans, and her hair flicking with every step.
She stops a little further down the side street, then bends double and starts hacking and whooping. The smoke has embedded itself like a film across my tongue and down my throat, but the coughs don’t want to come. My lungs feel constricted, pressed to shriveled kernels in my chest.
I hear Max’s and Robert’s footsteps behind me and stop. I bend double and allow myself to close my eyes for a second. To make the world stop. Ground myself in my body. Everything feels so far away. Numbed.
A strange tingle runs up through my rib cage. In detached curiosity I let it rise in my throat, until it comes out as a shrill giggle. I open my eyes and put my hand to my mouth to hold it inside, push it back down. Kill it.
“What happened?” Max asks.
Something about his flat, reasoned tone helps me to get my insane giggle under control, and I drop my hand again. I see Emmy cough one last time, then spit on the ground before straightening up.
What happened?” I hear someone ask. In the distance I realize it’s me.
“How could it just explode? Vans don’t just explode!”
I want somebody to do something. To take me by the shoulders, shake me, slap me. Force me to get a grip.
But none of them move. We just stand there, speechless and breathless, staring at each other.
“The lighter fluid,” Emmy says quietly.
I look up to see her staring at the wisps of smoke still coiling their way up over the rooftops.
“What?”
“The lighter fluid,” she says again. “There were containers of lighter fluid in there, for the campfire. And we had an extra can of gas for the vans. It was on the list.”
Oh, right.
“Someone must have set fire to them.
