I fall silent.
“What are you thinking about?” Fredrik wonders.
“My dad.”
“I heard. I’m really sorry. Or is that the right thing to say?”
“Thank you.”
“You should have said something.”
“Said what?”
“You should have told me what happened. You just disappeared. Said no to everything and nobody heard from you.”
“I know.”
He looks into my eyes. I want to stay here forever. With him. He asks me how I feel now, and I hadn’t planned on saying anything, but I confess that I’ve started going to therapy. He doesn’t seem to think that’s so strange. I don’t tell him everything, of course.
We lie in silence for a moment. Then I start telling him about how I went with Johanna and left a sample at the blood bus last spring. It feels good to give blood; not enough people do. Recently I received my first summons to donate.
I keep talking. I want to get the mood we just had back again, want to make him stay for as long as possible.
I say I’ll probably faint and fall over and split open my whole arm with the needle and my blood will spray all over the room and the nurse will start slipping around on it. Fredrik laughs out loud. He takes his phone from his pocket and scoots in close to me. He holds it above us and takes a picture. I protest and say I wasn’t ready. He takes one more.
“Better?” He hands the phone to me for my approval.
“Okay, a little better.”
“Come on, we look super hot, right?”
He gets a text, reads it, and sits up.
“In one of my weaker moments I promised to drive my sister to Ikea,” he says. “Gotta go. Unfortunately. But I’ll see you.”
I sit there smiling like an idiot. That is, until I realize there can never be anything between us. When he finds out who I am, I’ll disgust him. He’ll fear me.
I fear myself.
I’m afraid of what’s inside of me.
Stella
After more than eight hours behind the wheel, I’m home again. I fall asleep in a hot bath and wake up in cold water. I climb out and dry off. Thinking about Henrik.
I still don’t know how to tell him. Tell him Alice is alive, and I’ve met her. Tell him I didn’t stay home to rest, but went to Strandgården instead. That it’s for real this time.
His T-shirt is draped over the chair in the bedroom. I pull it on and lie on our bed. I open the diary.
The summer I was pregnant, 1993, the year it reached eighty degrees at the end of April—which ended up being the warmest day of the year. Otherwise the summer was long and cold and rainy. The next year, we had a heat wave, and Alice crawled around everywhere in just her diaper.
The apartment in Jordbro. We were able to get the lease because the landlord was a friend of Daniel’s father. The scent of honeysuckle outside the kitchen window, the dirty gray-striped wallpaper in the bedroom, full of holes. In the end, I papered over it with newspapers.
Daniel, my first real love. He was a year ahead of me in high school, and he ran around with all sorts of girls in his souped-up car. I showed him I was interested, but I didn’t chase him. Somehow I still managed to catch his attention. I lost my virginity in the backseat of that car.
Daniel was wild and restless, intense about anything he was interested in. He annoyed my big sister to no end. She thought he was a bad influence; he didn’t fit into Helena’s ordered worldview. We stayed out late, street racing, partying. We had a lot of sex in the backseat of his car.
Helena was always the reliable one of the two of us. I’m a dreamer, always have been. Spontaneous and impulsive, did whatever I wanted. My sister was responsible, did what she was supposed to. She grew up too early because our dad died.
When Mom ended up alone with us, she struggled to make ends meet. At night she mended clothes for extra money, sometimes she worked double shifts at her day job as a cleaner. I was only five, and Helena had to stay home and take care of me.
My sister and I grew apart as we got older. The fact that I got pregnant at seventeen didn’t help matters.
Daniel was overjoyed when he found out he was going to be a father. He did what his parents wanted him to do, finished high school, got his diploma. Then we moved in together. He got a job in a garage. We lived on minimum wage and stubbornness. Just the two of us and Alice.
I loved being home with our baby. Looking into her eyes while I nursed her, watching her mouth search for my breast, the happy sigh when she found it. I loved her scent, loved listening to the little sounds she made, her complete trust and the tenderness she evoked inside me.
Alice’s first year. I read entries about how she learned to sit, how she started turning from stomach to back, the teeth that eventually came in. Her first birthday. When I baked her first cake, a balloon popped, and she started crying until Daniel made her laugh again.
Pernilla’s visit just before we went on our highly anticipated vacation.
I stop reading and put the diary on the nightstand. Not sure I can continue. I get up from bed and dry my hair. Pull on a pair of leggings and a sweatshirt. Pick up the diary again. Sit down on the edge of the bed. It comes back to me.
The beach, infinite, white. The sea, calm. Flowers of every color, everywhere. Oppressive heat. Trees swaying. Cabin number one.
Her red stroller, turned over in the sand.
Alice, where are you?
AUGUST 15, 1994
What did you do? Where were you?
Why weren’t you there? Why didn’t you hear anything?
Why didn’t you notice she was gone?
The same questions, over and over again.
I wasn’t away long. I wasn’t, was I? I was close by.
They think I hurt her. My own child, my baby daughter.
They think I injured her. That I killed her. I see it on them, in their faces, in the looks they give each other. I hear it in their voices.
I did something unforgivable. The worst sin a mother can commit. I didn’t take care of my child. I left her alone. I wasn’t there to protect her.
She was sleeping in her red stroller there among the trees. I went on a short walk just down the beach. Sat there for a while, just thinking. A few minutes.
They ask why I didn’t notice anything. They say it’s time for me to tell the truth. Tell it all, it will all come out in the end.
But I have told them, I have explained. Again and again and again.
She couldn’t have overturned that stroller by herself. And I would have heard if she woke up. I wasn’t away for long. I was close by. Someone must have taken her. But who takes someone else’s child? It’s impossible. People don’t steal children. She has to be here somewhere. Maybe someone is taking care of her. Because I didn’t. Her young, selfish, immature mother who went off by herself for a while.
She’ll come back. She has to. She’ll come back soon. She didn’t overturn that stroller on her own, didn’t crawl away, didn’t drown in the sea. She did not, it’s impossible.
Alice, where are you? Are you sad? Is someone else holding you now?
We’ve been searching everywhere. No trace, nothing. But she’s here, I know it. Come back to me. Listen when I call for you. Come back. You have to come back.
You are my everything. You are my flesh and blood! Without you I don’t want to live. You are in my blood.
Stella
Mom mutters to herself while rooting around in the kitchen drawer.
“Stella, where did you hide that can opener?” she says, pulling out another drawer. The way she says it you’d think she’d already scoured the whole house.
“In the second drawer,” I respond, forcing myself to be calm.
“No, it’s not here. It’s nowhere to be found.”
“It’s there.” I wonder why I invited her here. So I wouldn’t be alone? So I’d spend my time being irritated with her instead of thinking about Alice?
“That’s it, right there.” Mom picks up the mail from the kitchen counter. “Is it okay if I put this on the microwave?”
“Sure.”
“It looks like the local newspaper and . . .”
“It’s fine; put it there.”
“Shouldn’t we make enough food for Henrik and Milo?”
It’s the third time she’s asked.
“Margareta will see to it that they’re fed before they leave,” I say. “Or they’ll pick up something on their way.”
“Are you sure? We can always freeze the leftovers. You’ll have food for tomorrow,” she says.
“Mom. This will be enough.”
She throws up her hands in surrender. “Just trying to be helpful. Sorry for intruding.”
Mom has a tendency to take over. She starts baking and cooking, asks if she can help with the laundry and the vacuuming. It’s convenient for a while. But it also gets on my nerves.
“Have you heard from Helena?” I ask.
“She called this week. She and Charles and the children might come home for Christmas. I hope so.”
“Do you think she’s happy? In Oxford, with him?” That was stupid. Here we go again. Why do I keep doing that? Am I trying to start an argument? Mom wrinkles her forehead before she answers. “Yes, I think so. Don’t you?”
“She’s still there, I guess,” I say.
Not long after I had Milo, my sister met Charles while visiting London. He’s an English professor with an affinity for brown corduroy and long-winded monologues.