Chapter 58
He pulled up at the house in Snostorp. All he was supposed to do was make sure it was still standing, go through the mail, and make sure the timed sprinkler system was worth the outrageous price they’d paid for it earlier in the summer. Then: on the road again.
Hardly anyone was home on Backav?gen. When Midsummer arrived, everyone on the street had loaded their lives into SUVs and RVs and headed off on vacation.
Well, almost. The Johanssons were back. The house across the street had a trampoline in the yard, with a safety net.
When Sander stood on the lawn, he could see the neighbor girl’s head bouncing up and down, her hair following.
From a distance she looked a little like Josefin, his daughter. They played together on occasion.
He went back inside, inhaled the scent of his own home, his own life.
It was another hot day. He wanted to take off his suit jacket but decided not to.
He went into the bedroom he and Olivia shared and sat down on the bed, thinking about how lucky he was to have Olivia and the kids in his life, to have people to miss and long to see, people who missed him and wanted to see him too.
He wondered if Sten Persson had had that.
—
That summer turned out to be a very tough one, as he would recall later. A heat wave settled over the country like a threat; people couldn’t handle it. For days there wasn’t a hint of a cloud in the Halland sky. Only nights brought relief.
That was also the summer his dream came back.
Sander was eighteen and back out in Skavboke, picking his way through ruins.
It hurt to breathe, as though the very air were dangerous.
He looked around, searching for some sort of answer.
There was a hint of the unfinished here, an action waiting to be taken. Then he lowered his gaze to the ground.
He realized he was supposed to dig. He stuck his hands in the earth and clawed up soil, grass, and scrub. He dug down as deep as a grave, and soon his shoulders, back, and fingers were aching; a pang appeared dreadfully close to his heart. At last he touched something.
For a moment, Sander took in the face that had emerged. Pale violet and stiff, more a mask than a face, but then its eyelids fluttered and the face was staring back. Sander’s scream was so loud he woke himself up.
They say everything you encounter in a dream is a shard of yourself, like pieces of a shattered reflection. In that way, dreams are an enigmatic sojourn.
But if this dream was an answer, what was the question?
The tall trees swayed gently in the summer breeze, and above them, in the bright blue sky, curly little wisps of clouds drifted by like cotton candy, and as he focused on those, he thought, Yes, concentrate on those, like cotton candy, it’s simpler that way, everything will be so much simpler if you just let everything be as it is.
He held tight to that thought the way the victim of a fall grabs frantically for the railing.