At the top of the stairs is a small window, with four panes that let the dusky light inside. Dust particles are dancing around in the air. I’m uncomfortably aware that we don’t have our respirator masks, but push the thought from my mind. Asbestos and black mold will have to be another day’s concern.
Robert takes the last step, and gives a curt nod when he reaches the landing. I take a deep breath, hold it, step forward, and open the door on the right.
“Tone?” I say quietly as I scan the room.
It looks like a sweet girls’ room from a classic film. It’s sparingly furnished, with two beds, each less than three feet wide. Grandma must have shared the room with Aina before moving south.
The wallpaper has yellowed, and it’s impossible to tell what color it must have once been. The pattern, however, is still clear: plump little rosebuds on supple vines.
There isn’t much else in the room: a bookshelf and a desk, and a ceramic flowerpot full of dried earth on the windowsill. The window is one of the few that has simply cracked, rather than shattered completely. Through it the sun sinks over the forest in the distance. Its flame-red light makes the cracks in the glass gleam.
I take a few steps into the room and look around. Empty as it seems, it still feels like there’s a presence in there. The short, sweaty hairs on the back of my neck are standing on end, and the skin on my exposed wrists feels more sensitive than normal.
“Tone?” I say again.
She isn’t here. There’s no one here.
I gulp, then quickly kneel down next to one of the beds and look underneath. A split-second vision of a piercing gray eye staring out at me from the darkness makes my heart skip a beat, but in reality there’s nothing under either this or the other bed.
“No one here,” I say, hushed, to Robert.
He nods and steps back into the hall, but I don’t follow him. Instead I get up and walk further into the room.
The desk is calling me to it. It’s small and dainty, with carved wooden knobs on its oblong drawers, and slender white legs. I slowly open each of the drawers, afraid that they might stick.
There isn’t much inside: blank sheets of paper, an almost completely used-up pencil. Not the diary I now realize I’ve been subconsciously fantasizing about—the slender volume filled with Aina’s neatly handwritten musings.
“Alice,” Robert says quietly, a clear request.
“Coming,” I say, though I can’t quite tear myself away. I want to stay in here, soak up the house. Sleep on these mattresses, and wander these rooms.
They’re like mythical figures to me, Elsa and Staffan and Aina. I’ve grown up with them like with a fairy tale. Even in the midst of everything else, it’s almost impossible to believe I’m actually here.
I lift one of the mattresses. It breaks in my hand, spilling hard stuffing out onto my fingers.
“Alice,” Robert says again, slightly louder this time. I nod, let go of the mattress, and follow him out.
I think he’s going to tell me off, but instead he just puts his hand on the other door handle and pushes it down.
The other bedroom is larger. The windows in here have shattered inward, spewing glistening shards across the floor. The wooden planks around them are rotten and splintered. There are two narrow beds beside one another in here, too—no double bed—which strikes me as strange. I wonder if that’s just a fifties thing, or if the drinking and the joblessness drove Elsa and Staffan apart. Or if Elsa was just as cold and distant as Aina describes her in her letters. I find it hard to know what to make of Elsa. Grandma always said she was strong and driven, tenacious in a way that wasn’t always the norm for a woman of those times. The sort of person—and mother—whose love was brusque and pragmatic, but also sincere, and deeper than most people’s.
But that image doesn’t fit with the woman in Aina’s letters.
I’ve always believed Grandma’s version, seeing Aina as a confused teen, but perhaps that’s wrong of me; perhaps Grandma’s memories were just muddied by time and loss.
I’ll never know. They’re all long gone, and with them the truth.
“Tone?” Robert says.
Not a sound.
He looks at me.
“There’s no one here.”
The desk in here is bigger and clearly more expensive, made in a dark, lacquered wood with a green leather inlay. The lacquer has developed an ugly white sheen from exposure, but it clearly must have once cost a lot of money. Elsa’s pride and joy, surely. Or Staffan’s. A first step toward a life that never came.
“Seems not,” I say, opening the desk drawers.
It’s full of papers I don’t immediately recognize. I don’t know what they are, but their official appearance makes me think they’re some sort of bills, important documents that mean nothing to me. Still, I pick them up.
I should turn around now. We should go. But instead I walk to the wardrobe on the other side of the room and open the doors. They’re stiffer than the drawers, must have set in their frames, and I have to give them a good pull to get them open.
Inside, damp-stained clothes lie in disarray, in crisp fabrics that have slipped from their hangers and been soiled by time and water.
“Did you think she’d be hiding in there?” Robert asks. I can’t tell if he’s joking or not. In any case, I start opening drawer after drawer, rifling through coarse wool and thin underwear in horrible, synthetic fabrics, feeling around for something, anything—
And then I feel it.
Sheets of paper at my fingertips.
I pull them out, and for a split second I think the sound I’m hearing is the rustle of old paper on dry fabrics, but then it continues, gains in volume. Confused, I turn around
