Chapter 40
I fall asleep on my bed as soon as Rasmus has left. When I wake up, it’s already four o’clock. I’m immediately wide awake.
I know what I have to do.
The house is still quiet. Mom is working the evening shift and, seeing as we have no boat, is going to spend the night on Djuro. I write a note to Dad and leave it right in the middle of the kitchen table in case he comes home before I’m back.
He won’t know what to think. Never in my life have I voluntarily gone to visit Grandma Gerd. I wonder how to word it to make it sound natural.
Maybe I shouldn’t bother with a note. But I don’t want to stress him out even more. If he comes home to an empty house, he’s bound to worry.
It might make it easier if I bring something for fika.
Grandma Gerd has always been especially committed to the traditional sit-down over coffee and pastries, and even though I don’t drink coffee, having a cinnamon bun in my hand might make this all less painful.
It might make it seem like a normal visit.
So I pack a few pastries from the freezer and a thermos of coffee.
It has grown dark outside.
Bellman follows me to the door and whines. He thinks I’m taking him for a walk. I stroke his soft nose, run my fingers along his silky coat.
“Not now, Bellman,” I say. “I’ll take you out later.”
Grandma Gerd doesn’t like dogs. She doesn’t even like Bellman waiting outside the house.
With my backpack over my shoulder, I leave the house and walk toward the woods. The path is covered with wet leaves that are slippery underfoot, and the bushes seem denser than usual.
I zip my jacket up to my chin, but I’m still cold. It’s Mom’s jacket, and it’s much too big for me. I’m swimming in it. The sleeves are too long and the hem reaches my knees. But it feels comforting somehow, like Mom is here with me.
When I get to Grandma Gerd’s cottage, I see the lights on in the windows. It occurs to me that I probably should have called ahead. But then she might have told me not to come.
I have to know the truth.
I walk up to the door and notice its brown surface is shiny with condensation. I hesitate for a few seconds on the stone front step, and then I knock hard.
Three times, just as Mom always does.
Soon I hear Grandma Gerd’s voice on the other side of the closed door.
“?sa? Is that you?”
“It’s Tuva.”
Silence.
“It’s Tuva,” I repeat to make sure she’s heard me.
“Yes, yes,” she mutters from inside the house. “Calm down. I heard you the first time.”
Slowly, the door swings open.
Grandma Gerd is sitting on her walker and eyeing me suspiciously. She is wearing a gray sweater and her usual baggy jeans.
“What do you want?” she asks bluntly.
“May I come in?”
“Yes,” says Gerd and purses her lips slightly. “I suppose.” She moves to the back of the hall to give me space to step inside and shut the door.
I take off my jacket. She looks at it as I take off my boots.
“Isn’t that ?sa’s?” she says accusingly.
I immediately go on the defensive. “She said I could borrow it.”
She doesn’t react.
“Where is your mother?” she asks, looking out from under her bushy gray eyebrows.
“She’s at work. She won’t be home until tomorrow. We don’t have a boat anymore.”
“What happened to it?”
This is going too fast. I’m not ready.
Now that I’m here, finding out the truth has suddenly lost its appeal. I’m terrified of what Grandma Gerd might say, what she will say.
“I brought some fika,” I say, holding out my backpack.
She scoffs. “Well, we can’t just stand here all day. Let’s go and sit down.” She pushes her walker into the kitchen. It’s pretty cozy in here, actually, with glowing paraffin lamps and a large rustic wooden table with an assortment of cane chairs.
Well, it would be cozy if it weren’t for Grandma Gerd.
I’ve always wondered who crocheted the curtains around the windows. Neither Mom nor Grandma Gerd seems like the kind of person who would be into crafts. Maybe it was my grandfather. Mom once said he was good with his hands.
My grandfather, who isn’t really my grandfather.
My chest tightens at the thought.
I pour coffee into Grandma’s stout cups and place the pastry swirls on a plate. My hands are shaking as I put the plate on the table.
She notices. She notices everything.
“Relax, kid.” She actually sounds sympathetic. “I don’t bite.”
I can’t remember the last time the two of us were alone.
I sit opposite Grandma Gerd, who has settled into the chair at the head of the table, the one with armrests. Her fingers are gnarled and sort of crooked. Mom says she has rheumatism and that’s why everything in her house is so big—the cutlery and mugs, the buttons on the phone.
“Would you like a chocolate swirl?” I ask, offering the plate just like Mom usually does.
Grandma presses her lips together, forming a grid of wrinkles around her mouth.
“That can wait,” she says. “Say what you’ve come here to say first.”
My tongue doesn’t want to obey. It’s been only a week or so since we last sat here.
“Last time we were here. When we were talking about my grades. You said—”
“I remember what I said,” she interrupts. “Is that why you’re here?”
“Yes. Well, no.”
She isn’t going to let me get away with anything.
“What happened to the boat?” she asks again.
I tell her about the accident. Then I pluck up all my courage and say:
“What did you mean by that thing you said last time we were here? Someone like me?”
Grandma Gerd grips her mug. She takes her coffee black and sugarless. She brings it to her mouth, a little shakily, and drinks. A drop of coffee remains in one corner of her mouth.
“So ?sa finally told you?”
It’s more of a statement than a question, but I answer anyway.
“Yes.”
She nods thoughtfully. “I didn’t think she ever would.”
She gazes out the window in the direction of the water, which can’t be seen beyond the dark pane. But I know it’s there.
“Why?” she asks without taking her eyes off the window. “Why now?”
“Something happened,” I say. “When the boat sank, out in the bay.”
Grandma nods slowly. “I suspected as much.”
She looks at me searchingly, pinning me down. Her tone reminds me of Old Man Ingvar. The same wariness, the same underlying fear. I expected her to show surprise, but I get the distinct feeling that this isn’t the first time she’s heard a story like this.
“Something was chasing us,” I say. “Underwater. It capsized the boat and we almost drowned. But I . . . managed to chase it off. I made it go away.”
It’s hard to see clearly in the low glow of the old paraffin lamp on the table, but Grandma Gerd seems to have turned a shade paler. Her deep-set eyes are gray, just like Mom’s.
“So. It happened,” she says, with something like sadness in her voice.
“What happened?” I ask, and suddenly my fear is overtaken by frustration. “What happened?”
She’s holding out on me.
“You want to know where you come from? ?sa told you the truth, and now you want to know what you are.”
What I am.
Something inside me feels on the verge of breaking.
“If you know, you have to tell me,” I whisper.
Grandma Gerd takes off her glasses and polishes them with the sleeve of her cardigan, rubbing the dry wool against the lenses.
“Back in my day, everyone knew,” she says matter-of-factly.
“When I was growing up, people used to talk to your kind. Give you gifts to keep you happy. Not on the mainland, but out here we always knew how things worked. It was like tarring the docks or cleaning the nets. We did what we had to do to ensure peace and safety on the water. Balance must be maintained.”
She puts her glasses back on. Her eyes are barely visible, sunken among all those wrinkles.
“Nowadays, everyone has forgotten,” she says. “Especially the young. The newcomers think it’s fairy tales, old superstitions. But those of us who have lived here for generations, who have the archipelago in our blood, we’ve always known the truth.”
I can barely breathe.
“There used to be small folk living under Hernstam’s cabin,” says Grandma. “There were forest trolls too. But they’re gone now. The fairies hardly ever dance anymore. I can’t even remember the last time I saw them.”
Sorrow has crept into her voice. “I don’t know why, but there are much fewer of your kind now, no doubt about it. Maybe it’s down to all the chemicals in the water and air. Sometimes I think you’re all slowly being poisoned. So much has changed since I was a girl.”
“I saw fairies,” I whisper, my mouth dry. “When Axel went missing. I saw them out in the woods. They were trying to take Rasmus too.”
Grandma Gerd nods slowly.
“Well,” she says, “they do appear from time to time. You’d better believe they’re still around. But they show themselves less and less.”
“Do they really exist?” I ask, even though I’ve seen them myself.
Grandma chuckles. “Oh, yes. I don’t have the answers to everything. You kids today with all your movies and television. What is even real nowadays? But the Ancient Ones, who dwell in the forest and under the sea, they exist. They always have.”
Her eyes are like glowing coals.
“You should know better than anyone.”
Sweat breaks out on my palms.
I came here to learn the truth, but now I’m not sure I want to hear it. Still, my tongue moves to form sounds that become words. Words that refuse to be contained.
“What am I?”
“I could tell straightaway,” says Grandma. “When they brought you back after the accident and I saw those gills under your ears.” She scoffs. “I tried to tell ?sa, but she wouldn’t listen. She insisted that you were Tuva and told me never to mention it again. But I always knew.”
The scar tissue burns on my neck.
“Have you never heard of the Ancient Ones?”
I shake my head mutely and hold my breath.
Grandma Gerd’s face is in shadow. Her crooked fingers fiddle with the dining tablecloth. One of the paraffin lamps in the corner has gone out, but neither of us gets up to relight it.
“You’re a changeling. But you already knew that, didn’t you?”
Changeling.
I feel an ache inside.
“Who are the Ancient Ones?” asks a frightened voice that must be coming from me.
“Oh, there are all sorts,” Grandma says and smacks her lips. “Elves and fairies, the Nix, mara. All the beings who inhabited Earth before humans came along. But you—you are of the merfolk. The ones that live below the surface and breathe water.”
The kitchen tap is leaking, and a drop drips into the sink every now and then. It’s the only sound in the room.
Grandma Gerd looks like she is searching her memories.
“They took away my granddaughter and gave you to ?sa in her place,” she mutters.
“So does that mean they still have . . . her?”
I can’t bring myself to say the name out loud.
Tuva is my name, and I’m not about to give it up just like that. Instead, I cling to my mother’s words. I have to hold on to them or I’ll be lost.
You are the real Tuva, my Tuva . . .
But it’s hard not to collapse under Grandma’s harsh, scrutinizing gaze.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I’ve seen them only once, as a little girl. We were out in our old rowboat, my father and I. He told me about them and showed me where they used to sunbathe on the rocks. I caught only a glimpse of them.”
“What did he say about them?”
Suddenly, Grandma Gerd appears younger, her features less wrinkled and her voice more girlish.
“He said they lived under the sea but came up to the surface from time to time. Father said we ought to be careful with them, not cast nets in their dwelling places because they could get stuck.”
She has a far-off look in her eyes. “Years passed. Memories faded. The signs of their existence became fewer. The sea has gotten so dirty, utterly ravaged . . . Soon nothing will be able to live below the surface. As an adult I thought they all must have disappeared, until you showed up.”
“W-why did they give me away?” I stutter.
“It’s an old custom. It was how we used to ensure an alliance with the Ancient Ones. We gave them one of ours, and they gave us one of theirs. Blood ties were created.”
Automatically, I raise my hand to gently touch my scars. They feel tender beneath my fingers, slightly raised just under the skin.
“My father told me that they protected us from some great evil,” continues Grandma Gerd. “That we should be thankful and respectful. Show our appreciation through gifts and consideration.”
Small fragments of information come together in my mind to form a pattern of something bigger and more terrifying.
“Father used to say they were our guardians,” she mutters and gives me an inscrutable look.
“Did your father ever say what the merfolk were protecting humans from?” I whisper.
She looks unsure.
“No. We only ever spoke about it that one time. Now, what was it he said?” She scratches the crease of her arm. The knuckles on her gnarled fingers are swollen.
“Some great evil, that’s what he said. Something that needed to be kept in check.”
I see a green haze before me, the same one that guided me in the water.
That low voice echoes in my mind.
You don’t have gills anymore.
“But I couldn’t survive underwater,” I exclaim, sweeping my fair hair to one side and pointing to my exposed neck. “They’re just scars now. I can’t breathe underwater anymore. I’m human.”
Grandma Gerd reaches out as if to touch the place my gills must have once been, but I back away and let my hair down again.
“Maybe you’re neither,” she says thoughtfully. “Or both.”
I’m on the verge of tears.
I don’t want to cry, not in front of her, but I don’t think I can hold it in much longer. Then, just as I’m about to get up, I see an expression on Grandma Gerd’s face I’ve never seen before.
It almost looks like respect.
“You said you made it go away, didn’t you? That thing chasing you? You managed to save yourself and your father.”
I nod wordlessly.
Yes, I did. I made it go away, at least temporarily. I managed to hurt it, somehow, but I don’t know how or why.
Grandma Gerd reaches for a pastry and crumbles it into tiny pieces.
“You know, Tuva, all these years I’ve wondered why they gave you away.”
She lets silence linger excruciatingly before she answers her own question.
“Maybe it was so that you could watch over us. Maybe the merfolk couldn’t stay, but they knew that sooner or later the monster would return.”