Chapter 8
The kids were playing in the sand. The youngest were carrying water and clay in red buckets up to the older kids, who were building engineers and in charge of planning today’s sandcastle.
Emelie looked over at Linnea, Liv and Tore, who were absorbed in a lively discussion regarding whether the sandcastle should have one tower in each corner or two together.
And maybe a drawbridge in between? Good luck building a drawbridge in sand, Emilie though to herself and spread out her towel on the sun-warm cliffs surrounding the little bay.
She laid down on the towel, which was adorned with a drawing of a jolly Santa.
One thing that was great about Astrid’s Santa hoarding was that there were plenty of towels in all sizes, from small wash cloths up to large beach towels.
They were all decorated with garlands, advent reefs and these bloody pigs. Emelie was really tired of pigs by now.
“Maybe I should become a vegetarian”, she had told Linn the other day when she was folding pig duvets.
Linn had laughed and said it was a good idea.
“Mum, can we have some ice-cream?”
She looked up at Liv who was standing next to her. Her hair was hanging in sticky saltwater locks around her head and her swimsuit was covered in sand. Emelie nodded at dug around in her wallet for a couple of 20 SEK banknotes that she handed to her daughter.
“Thanks mum! Then we are going crab fishing. I love Sardinon, I want to stay here forever”, Liv said and ran over to her sister and their friend.
Emelie smiled, wondering if she was going to say the same thing in six months when the autumn storms were roaring. Or hold on a second, then they would be back in V?xjo, and Sardinon would be nothing but a memory. But the house would still be there. The question was what to do with it?”
“Hello, mother.” Linn, of course! She was the only one of her daughters calling her that.
Emilie didn’t really like it, but since it had happened that people had mistaken her and Linn for sisters, she figured that’s why Linn liked to make it clear that they weren’t.
“Hello there love”, she said, handing her a red Christmas beach towel.
Linn unfolded it, inspecting the motif; a Santa driving a train full of Christmas gifts.
“The creativity knows no limits. Santas in trains. What might they think of next?” Linn said, trying to sound older than her 19 years.
“Just wait and see. I’m certain that there are plenty of Christmas things that we haven’t discovered yet,” Emelie said.
Linn put the beach towel on the ground and sat down on it. She pulled her summer dress over her head and straightened her bikini top. Then she shaded her face with one hand, looking at Emilie.
“Why do you have beach towels with Christmas motifs?”
“Why not? When one has everything else with Christmas motifs” Emilie responded.
“Sure, but…Did we ever have special Christmas towels?”
Emelie shook her head. No, they certainly did not.
“Since your father is a Muslim, we never celebrated traditional Christmas when you were little. But when the girls arrived we started celebrating properly with a Christmas tree and presents, but without the ham, of course,” Emelie said.
“But I got Christmas gifts before Liv and Linnea were born, I remember that clearly. That red bike with a basket, for example,” Linn said dreamily.
“Of course you got Christmas gifts, I just mean that we didn’t really celebrate in any large fashion at home. But no matter what, neither we nor grandma ever owned any Christmas towels,” Emelie said.
“No, it’s probably just hardcore Christmas freaks like Astrid who take it that far”, Linn said and laughed.
Emilie shook her head, put her headphones back into her ears and laid down again.
She didn’t turn on the radio show again, but she knew that just having the headphones in gave her some peace and quiet, and saved her from hearing the constant “mum, mum”, all the time.
Almost three weeks had passed since Midsummer, and they hadn’t really talked much about what had happened that night.
Emelie didn’t want to confess to Linn that she had gotten drunk and upset, and had and stumbled home all by herself, and Linn didn’t even seem to have noticed; she just kept babbling on about what a great dancer Andreas was and how much she had enjoyed her time with Oskar and his friends.
When Emelie heard her mentioning Andreas, she pursed her lips and forced herself to smile while reminding herself that she needed to talk to him about Linn.
Andreas had stopped by several times, it was hard to avoid as he was living approximately three yards from them, and he also didn’t seem to understand what had happened on Midsummer Eve, so it seemed that the whole ordeal had blown over.
Emelie had no plans on telling them that she was a pathetic, 40-something that had cried all the way home. Certainly not.
From afar she could hear Liv, Linnea and Tore coming back.
They were laughing and joking and, for a moment, Emilie was reminded of her own childhood when she used to go to a beach called Bjorno together with her parents.
The lake, Allgunnen, was always pretty warm, and that’s where she’d first learned how to swim.
Allgunnen, it was a rather strange name for a lake, she still thought so, and when she was a child, she had always thought that the grown-ups were referring to “Avgrunden”, the Abyss.
“I’ll go jump in the Abyss now”, she shouted and ran out into the water while her mum and dad were sitting on their towels with the picnic-basket between them, laughing.
“Mum, I am starting school here, aren’t I?”
Linn pushed herself up on her elbows, answering her little sister instead of Emelie.
“No, we are going back to V?xjo, you silly. We can’t live here”, she said, poking Linnea in the belly.
Linnea jumped and giggled, but then became serious again, stomping her foot in the ground.
“But I want to be in the same class as Tore. He says that his teacher is really nice.”
Emilie sat up and removed the headphones from her ears. This was her battle to fight, not Linn’s.
“Oh love, we have several weeks left here, you’ll have plenty of time to play with Tore. Now run and take a swim and rinse off all that ice-cream you have around your mouths, come on, all three of you, run along” she said, giving Linnea a friendly slap on the bum.
But Linnea didn’t give up and Emelie could see that she was working herself up to a tantrum of epic proportions.
Tears were streaming down her face, and she clutched her little fists until they were all white.
These blowouts weren’t that uncommon for Linnea, but Emilie hadn’t quite figured out how to handle them.
She had a couple of tricks up her sleeve, and sometimes they worked.
She grabbed Linnea’s arms, slowly stroking them and spoke to her in a calm voice.
“Linnea, calm down. Breathe. We can talk about this when we get home. We’re on the beach now, and we are going to swim and have a good time, okay? One thing at a time, remember?”
Linnea was still panting, but nodded, her sandy hair whipping around her little face.
“But mum, I want to…”
Emilie interrupted her.
“Not now, Linnea”, she said firmly.
Tore took Linnea’s hand.
“Come on, Linnea, let’s go swimming!”
The little girl wiped her tears, nodded again and smiled a little. The danger was over for now and the three kids went on down to the sea.
“Phew, that Tore is quite something,” Linn said. “He can even control Linnea, not bad. But hey, have you thought about what to do with the house?”
“Oh, don’t you start now too,” Emilie said, putting her headphones back in her ears.
She could feel the heat of the rock through the towel as she gazed out over the water that was glittering in shades of blue and green, the happy children were jumping from the pier and she felt at peace.
She hadn’t been this relaxed in several years and she really didn’t look forward to going back to V?xjo, her stressful job and a dull future as a single mum.
Not that there were many promising suitors her age here, but everything felt new.
New place, new people and a new house. Maybe a new beginning?
Three hours later, they were on their way back home. They didn’t talk much, since they were all tired after a whole day in the sun. They passed by Tore’s house, dropping him off, and Linnea told Malin and Jesper that she was going to move to Sardinon permanently.
“Oh really?” Malin said, giving Emelie a puzzled look. Emelie just shook her head and smiled at her daughter.
They chatted for a while before saying goodbye.
Back home, Emilie poured a bath for Liv and Linnea while Linn took a shower.
When the younger kids had gotten out of the bath and into their pyjamas, Linn made dinner; yoghurt and cereal in front of the telly upstairs while Emelie jumped in the shower.
When she came back out with a towel wrapped around her head and another around her body, she peeked out the living room window.
A bit further away, a small hill stretched towards the sky and there seemed to be something on top of it.
Or someone. Emelie walked closer to the window to try and figure out what it was.
At first, she thought it was some sort of landmark of the kind they put up back in the day to make the fishermen find their way home, but suddenly, it moved.
“Linn! Come on down, love,” she shouted up the stairs.
She heard Linn come bouncing down, taking the last three steps in one leap.
“Do you have to bounce like that? All the windows are shaking, and I don’t think they have triple glazed windows here. But look at this,” she said, pointing through the window.
“What is it?”
Linn looked outside, squinting.
“Is it a person?”
“I don’t know, but it kind of looks like it, don’t you think?”
Linn walked towards the front door.
“I have to check it out,” she shouted and Emelie pulled the towel closer to her body, following her daughter into the garden.
The warm evening air felt soothing on her slightly sunburnt upper arms, and she quickly peeked over towards Andreas’ cottage.
She was hoping he wouldn’t come out now when she was standing there in nothing but a towel.
“But, it is a person! I think they might be doing yoga,” Linn said, tilting her head.
They walked as far as they could in the garden and stopped right before the white wooden fence that surrounded the plot.
“It’s a woman,” Emelie said, hesitantly. “Look – she is doing ‘the tree’!”
“What did you say?”
Emelie laughed
“It’s a yoga position where you stand with your arms over your head and one foot on the opposite thigh”, she explained.
“How do you know that? You have never done any yoga,” Linn said suspiciously.
Emelie grinned and pretended to dust something off her shoulder.
“Gotta keep up to date”, she said, laughing, and they started walking back towards the house again.
“I wonder why she is standing up there?”
Linn turned her head and looked at the woman once more.
“Look mum, she has changed position – what is that one called?”
The woman was standing with one hand stretched out in front of her and the right one holding the right foot, pulling it backwards.
“Er, well, maybe it’s ‘the cross’? Or ‘the pretzel’?”
Linn looked suspiciously at her.
“Really? Ah, you’re only messing with me”, she said and playfully tugged Emelie’s towel.
“Stop that, I don’t want to flash anyone in my garden”, Emelie said, grabbing the towel harder.
“What? You don’t? But there’s no one here to see you” Linn said and pulled it again, making a part of the towel slip out of her hand.
Emelie tried to catch the towel before it fell to the ground but wasn’t entirely successful. She had almost managed to grab it when the door to the guesthouse opened.
“I thought I heard someone. Oops…”
Emilie did a maneuver with her upper body and one arm that almost gave her whiplash, but finally managed to wrap the towel around her naked body. Hopefully Andreas hadn’t had the time to see anything.
“Hello Andreas, how’s life over at the little house?”
Emelie smiled stiffly, clutching the towel as hard as she could. No more flashing in front of him today.
“Er, well, just fine. What are you up to?”
Emelie smiled again, speeding up her steps.
“We were just checking out the yoga lady out on the mountain,” she said, taking the stairs up to the porch in two long leaps.
Linn and Andreas stayed in the garden, chatting, and she could hear their voices through the front door that she had left open.
Emelie dropped down onto the closest kitchen chair and sighed deeply.
There was a bright red Christmas tablecloth on the table and she buried her face in it, shutting the world out for a moment.
She was certain her face was exactly the same colour as the tablecloth.
Suddenly a sound made her jump. It came from the cellar.
A scratching sound, a bit like when you pulled a chair without furniture pads over a linoleum floor.
But there were no linoleum floors in the cellar.
Then she heard a thud - she certainly wasn’t imagining this!
But Emelie couldn’t go down there now, wearing nothing but a towel.
She quickly pulled on her jogging pants and a t-shirt and was just about to walk over to the cellar door when she froze.
The sound was gone. No scratching, no thuds.
“Perhaps it was only a mouse,” she said to herself, and went back into the kitchen.