Jensen Beach - Swallowed by the Cold - Stories

From the window, he stared out at the storm. The thick air, heavy with rain, clung to the water’s surface. A young girl was walking up his front path, a large white sweater hanging over her small body. It was Ingrid Källström, the girl who discovered Rolf Strand’s body in June. Fredrik and Rolf had played their weekly tennis match the day of the accident. Fredrik lost. After the match, Rolf had bicycled away from the courts. Fredrik stayed behind to talk with Manne Björnsson, a neighbor from Stockholm whose own summerhouse wasn’t far from Fredrik’s, and who often reserved the court after Rolf and Fredrik had played. By the time they’d finished their conversation the drawbridge was up and Fredrik was left to wait on the mainland side of the village before continuing his walk home. A quarter of an hour later, after he’d crossed the drawbridge, he heard the siren of an approaching ambulance. He wouldn’t know until later that evening that it had anything to do with his friend. He sometimes wondered what the siren would have sounded like to him if he had.

The girl stopped beside the tall birch, the roots of which had begun to lift and crack the stones of his front path. She looked up at the house and before he could release the curtain, he saw that she saw him looking out at her from the window. She waved, then jogged up the path and stepped onto his front porch. He had never spoken to Ingrid. She knocked. He considered not opening the door. She knocked again and said, loudly, “May I stand on your porch until it stops raining?”

He opened the door and smiled at her. “You’d better come inside,” he said.

She waited in the kitchen while he fetched a towel. Two small puddles formed at her feet.

He placed the towel on the kitchen table. “Help yourself,” he said. The wind blew hard off the water, rattling the shutters. It was cold. He understood why she stopped to wait out the storm. Two years before, a branch from the tall birch in his front yard was torn from the tree by heavy winds. The branch fell on his car, denting the roof and shattering one of the back windows.

Ingrid was holding a bag. More precisely, she was holding a paper bag inside of a plastic bag. Björn, the fisherman from around the point, packaged his fish this way. Fredrik reached out his right hand to take the bags from her. She dried her hair in the towel.

When he turned back to Ingrid, she held it close to her chest. She was staring at his stooped left side. “Thank you,” she said.

It was then he realized he was not wearing his arm. “You’re very welcome,” he said. “It’s wet out.”

“I thought I could beat the storm,” she said. As if she suddenly understood that she’d been staring at his shoulder, she shifted awkwardly from one foot to the other and looked down at the table.

The rain was falling hard onto the puddled walk. “It came quick today,” he said. “Would you like some coffee?”

She looked at him, smiled. “I’m not old enough,” she said, folding the towel loosely in half and draping it over the arm of the low club chair he kept in the space between the dining area and the living room. The chair was leather but worn and very old. It had been his father’s. He looked at the wet towel. There was a time when he’d have flinched at a wet towel on the chair but that time was long since gone.

“Of course,” he said. “No, of course.”

He put the kettle on for tea. From the cupboard beside the refrigerator, he took out a tin of shortbread cookies Rolf had brought from a trip to England six months before he died. He set the tin on the table and after struggling to remove the top said, “If you can open it, help yourself to a cookie.”

The kettle whistled. She flinched at the sound. Several times he announced that it was still raining out. Each time he did, Ingrid agreed. He hadn’t thought much about Ingrid past those first hurried and hectic days after Rolf’s accident. He’d heard about her mother, of course. The whole village talked about it through March. Still an occasional mention at the ICA or at the bar near the drawbridge. An avoidable accident, they all said. A waste. So young. Here in his kitchen was the closest he’d been to Ingrid. She looked somewhat different from his idea of her. She was so young, not more than thirteen or fourteen, he guessed, but he had no grandchildren of his own with which to compare. He knew by the shape of her face that she would one day be a beautiful woman. The warmth of the teacup in his hand reminded him of its presence. He raised the cup to his lips, blew away a thin blossom of steam, and sipped the tea.

“The fish is for my father,” Ingrid said. Her voice was soft, almost a whisper.

“He shouldn’t have let you walk out in this storm.”

“He went to town to do the shopping,” she said.

“Would you like me to drive you home?”

“The rain will stop soon,” she said. “Thank you. I should have said thank you first.” She lifted her teacup to her mouth and set it down again without drinking. When she pulled her hand away from the mug, a splash of tea dribbled over the lip and down to the table. She tried to wipe it away with her hand. “What happened to your arm?” she asked. “People tell stories but I don’t believe any of them.”

Fredrik touched his shoulder, looked away in the direction of the bathroom. “I have a disease called diabetes,” he said finally. “This disease sometimes causes vascular problems. Do you know what that word means?”

“I don’t know,” she said, still wiping at the wet spot with her fingers.

He wanted to get up and get a kitchen towel for her but didn’t want her to think he was embarrassed to talk about his arm. “It means the veins,” he said. “Blood.”

“And so they had to take your arm?”

“Our bodies betray us,” he said and regretted the seriousness of the comment.

Ingrid got up from her chair and crossed the room to get the towel she’d used earlier to dry her hair. Above the chair, pictures from his tennis career, spaced unevenly and dense, hung on the worn white wall. He’d liked the spot because the pictures were present and when he felt like it he could revisit those years, but he could just as easily ignore them too. She put a knee on the chair and pushed herself up to get a better look at the photographs. “Is this a picture of you when you were young?”

The photograph was taken in 1967 at a tennis tournament in Massachusetts. It was the first time he’d been to America. After the longest match he ever played, Fredrik won the tournament. It was his first win. His winnings paid for the summerhouse.

“It’s me,” he said.

“I didn’t know you were a tennis player,” she said. “No one ever tells children the truth.”

“It was a short career and I don’t talk much about it. That photograph was taken after the last match I won.” He got up and joined Ingrid at the chair, taking a half step to the side of the chair and leaning slightly against the arm.

Ingrid pushed, almost imperceptibly, away from him. He knew he’d made her uncomfortable. He took the picture off the wall and returned with it to the table.

“Did you like being a tennis player?” Ingrid asked. She sat down opposite him. “My father makes me take lessons every summer but I’m not very good.”

“They didn’t have TV cameras everywhere in those days and there wasn’t so much money,” he looked up from the photograph. “I’m sure you’re better than you think.”

“My brothers say I don’t try hard enough.”

“Brothers like to say such things.”

“Especially mine,” she said.

“I only played for three seasons,” he said. “I quit right after this picture was taken.”

“Why?”

“I was tired and wanted to rest. As soon as I got back to Sweden, I told my coaches I was taking a vacation. It was several weeks until the next tournament I’d planned on entering. So I went to Greece for a month. I told everyone I wanted to celebrate. But I knew I was quitting.” He stopped and looked at Ingrid and then continued when she smiled at him, encouragingly. “I took a room on the island of Paros in a little hotel full of West Germans and English,” he continued. “Everyone was scared of the communists in those days. It seems so silly to think about now. Have you ever visited Greece?”