“I don’t know,” I say, completely drained. All I want is to sleep. “But we probably won’t get her in there.”
There’s something horrible and disturbing about the sight of skinny little Tone suspended between the two bigger men, something that triggers a sort of primal fear in me—not for her, but for them. I want to tell them to let her go, to leave her alone. Despite having just seen her swinging, roaring, and kicking; despite her unfocused gaze and that awful, bloody mask she’s wearing.
And those hands. Those thin, dirty fingers that my eyes keep being drawn to, that I can’t stop staring at.
I’ve reached some sort of limit. I’m so tired I don’t even feel heartbroken anymore, just resigned.
“What do we do?” Robert asks me. I see my own state of mind reflected in his face. His skin is gray.
“I don’t know,” I say again. “I don’t know. We just have to wait it out somewhere, just find somewhere to…” I trail off and look around.
“My grandma’s house,” I say. “It should be on the next street. It wasn’t in such bad shape—we might be able to wait there.”
The other two don’t think about it, they just nod.
We cut across the gardens of the houses to reach the next street. I see Grandma’s green door straightaway. It’s still hanging slightly ajar, after Robert more or less dragged me out of it.
“There,” I say to Robert and Max, but Robert has already seen it.
Was it just yesterday that we were here? Less than twenty-four hours. One day and one night.
I press up against the wall to let Max and Robert pass with Tone, then close the front door behind them.
The air in here is mustier than outside, but warmer. To our left, the kitchen cupboards are still hanging open after yesterday’s plundering.
I hope there’s something left in there. Although I don’t feel like I’ll ever want to eat again, my body is crying out for food all the same. Food and sleep and darkness. The most basic things.
“What do we do with her?” Max asks. He says it quietly, as though afraid Tone will hear. I can understand. She sways slightly, then leans into him, away from her injured foot. I can barely look at it.
“Lock her upstairs,” I say. The words sound foreign. “I think there was a lock on one of the bedroom doors.”
“OK,” Max says with a nod.
I watch them take Tone upstairs. I’m scared that she’ll fight or protest, fall and hurt herself, but she goes along without any resistance.
The compact living room is the only room I haven’t been inside yet. It’s straight ahead, through the kitchen, with an eye-wateringly ugly floral sofa suite in a thick throw fabric just past the door and a small ornamental dining table to the right with a faded, embroidered tablecloth. Two of the windows have broken—one from an apple tree that has forced its gnarled branches in through the frame—and big, black spots of mold bloom from the center of the tablecloth, like a morbid imitation of its embroidery.
I sit down carefully on one of the two puffy sofas. They, too, stink of mold, but I can’t tell if it’s coming from the tablecloth, or if the stuffing has gone the same way. Perhaps both. The cushions are stiff but strangely spongy, and at first I think the fabric is going to rip under my weight, but it holds. I lean back onto the hard back and look at the wall in front of me.
In the middle of the bloated, discolored, delicately floral wallpaper hangs the photograph.
It’s the same picture, I’m sure of it.
I always thought Grandma’s copy was the only one, but here they are staring back at me through a painted gold frame: Grandma with her laughing smile, Aina with her sulky look, birthmark, and tight braids, Staffan with his slightly bulging nose and swollen jaw, and Elsa. Elsa with that straight, uncompromising gaze that seems to see straight through time to me here on this sofa.
All I wanted was to tell your story, I think.
All I wanted was to know what happened. Was that so wrong?
I hear the faint sound of a door closing upstairs. A mumbled conversation between two male voices.
Elsa stares down at me from the wall. I close my eyes to escape hers.
I don’t know when I fall asleep.
NOW
I wake up to a hand brushing against my cheek.
My neck feels stiff and immobile. I make a quiet groan as I try to sit up, but it gets louder when Max puts his arm on my back. When his hand touches my deep bruise, it feels like he might as well be stabbing me between the ribs with a kitchen knife.
“Ow ow ow, shit! Ow!”
“Sorry,” says Max, quickly moving his arm away. I shake my head and lean back slowly onto the stiff cushions. When the pain begins to pass I realize that I also have the beginnings of a splitting headache, and that my swollen airway is itching.
I glance over at the small windows that look out onto the garden. It’s still light out, but the day has started to take on the overripe, glowing hue that comes with the approaching dusk.
“Hi,” I say to Max once I’m sitting up. He gives me a half smile. Thin lips under sunken eyes.
“Hi. Fall asleep?”
“Yeah,” I say. Weird question, seeing as he’s just woken me up.
Reality has started to seep back in, thick and viscous like tar. Images returning. Emmy on the floor. Tone’s unseeing eyes. Her light hair a caked-on pile of blood and dirt.
“How are you feeling?” Max asks.
I shake my head, choosing to answer the more innocuous side of the question.
“My back really hurts,” I say.
“Let me take a look,” he replies.
He doesn’t exactly have any medical experience, but I don’t mention that. Instead I just twist away slowly and let him pull my top up over my back and the bruise. He whistles quietly when
