But then she had come home one day to find Staffan waiting for her at the kitchen table. He wanted to talk to her, he said. His eyes were glassy but he didn’t smell of drink, and initially that had been a relief. For a moment Elsa had hoped it meant he had pulled himself together, grasped the seriousness of their situation.
Elsa feels almost physically sick when she recalls the hope that budded within her as she sat down opposite her husband at the kitchen table, her hands clasped in front of her, the air thick with the heady scent of the late summer heat.
When Staffan told her that it had to stop, Elsa couldn’t agree more. She was about to say that they had to do something about Aina, to get her to see sense, but he went on before she could get a word out:
“You must be reasonable—stop challenging the pastor,” he said. “Folk have started talking, Elsie. Enough, now. Enough.”
In that instant she had felt her heart split in two. He had looked at her with flat, angry eyes, as though looking not at her but at a stranger. Someone who meant nothing to him. Someone he scorned.
The next night he hadn’t come home at all.
When evensong had swept over Silvertjärn, Elsa had thought, impossible as it was, that she could hear Staffan’s voice among them.
They have started holding mass in
The front door slams downstairs, and she stops writing.
“Staffan?” she ventures to ask, but his name sounds flimsy and washed-out on her lips. Her voice falters.
Elsa hears steps and stands up. Quickly shuffling the letter together on the desk, she looks for somewhere to hide it.
She opens the wardrobe and shoves it down the side of her underwear drawer, then closes the wardrobe door just as someone calls her name.
She steps away from the wardrobe. The bedroom door bursts open.
It’s Dagny.
Her face is shiny with sweat, and her hair is in disarray. She is holding her sunhat in her hands, and her yellow shoes are covered in dust and muck. She looks like she’s been running.
“Elsa,” she says, her voice rough and scratchy from exertion. “It’s Birgitta. You must come.”
NOW
I wake up slowly, my consciousness cloudy with sleep and confusion. Then I sit up and look around. It must be late morning—ten or ten thirty, judging by the warmth of the light outside. It’s a beautiful morning that lends the church a magical aura, despite the mud and dust on the checkerboard slate floor.
Oh God. I must have fallen asleep, even though it was my watch. Yet another thing I can’t do right.
Luckily enough, none of the others seems to have woken up and caught me sleeping on the job. Small mercies.
I blink and yawn into the back of my hand. Some of my papers have fallen to the ground, so I quickly bend down and sweep them together into a small pile. It’s quite peaceful in here, with the sunlight streaming down on the others as they sleep. The only thing to taint the image is the glowering Christ above the altar.
When I take a closer look at the others I give a start. Robert’s eyes are open.
“I didn’t want to wake anyone,” he says, so quietly that I almost have to read his lips.
He sits up, slides carefully out of Emmy’s arm, and gets up.
“Is there any water left?” he asks.
I look down guiltily at the empty bottle next to the pew and shake my head.
“Sorry,” I say. “I drank the last of it.”
He nods.
“Hard to make it stretch to four people,” he says.
“We can sneak out and get some more,” I whisper. “The river isn’t far. I would have gone earlier, but it seemed stupid to go alone.”
Robert glances at sleeping Emmy, who has curled up into a little ball under the thin blanket. Her face is soft in sleep; it looks younger, strangely familiar. When I used to sleep over at her room I would usually wake up first—she wasn’t a morning person—and sometimes I would just lie there and watch her sleep. It was the sort of friendship that can only exist in those few brittle years between teenage life and fully fledged adulthood, before you’ve set your limits as to how much you let others in.
“OK,” Robert whispers. “But we’ll have to move the pew. We should try not to wake them.”
I jump off the pew and take hold of one end. We try to lift it but don’t manage to get it far—I can’t keep my end up—and it slips out of my hands and scrapes loudly against the floor.
I glance at Emmy, but she hasn’t even moved. Max is still lying where he was, snoring in thin whistles.
I pull open the heavy door. The fresh air streams into the room like a gasp, and I take in the smell of morning after the rain. The light is of the clean, white type that seems to only exist in April and May.
I stride out onto the steps. It’s completely still. Not even the blades of grass are swaying.
Robert comes out behind me, and I hear him close the door. I look around.
“Ready?” I ask. My voice sounds almost perky.
But Robert isn’t looking at me.
He’s staring past me, down at the steps, with an almost thoughtful look on his face. I turn to follow his gaze.
The rain has turned the dust on the steps into mud. It has started to dry up again in the morning sun, but the ground is still sticky and wet.
And dotted with smeared, muddy footsteps.
My mind runs through the possibilities in less than a second. The prints are clear enough to visibly be footprints, but it’s hard to tell if they were made by shoes or bare feet. They could possibly have been made by an animal with elongated paws … but no. We haven’t seen any animals since we
