Jensen Beach - Swallowed by the Cold - Stories

He held the pants up. “Some trouble with my zipper,” he said.

“Want me to take a look?” she asked.

“I’ll bring a different pair,” he said. He took a pair of jeans from his stack on the bed, pulled them on.

Jenny held up two socks. He sat on the corner of the bed and watched her tuck them into a ball. Outside it was snowing. It was three days into the new year.

“I say we go for it,” he said.

“What?” she said.

“Geothermal,” he said. “The heating. I think it’s a good idea.”

She folded a shirt. “That’s a change,” she said.

“I’ll move some money around.” He was trying hard to sound agreeable.

She put the shirt neatly in the suitcase, smoothed it. “If you think so,” she said. He heard caution in her voice. Her sister had come to stay for the weekend. She was downstairs, watching television and making plans with the girls about what they would get up to for the weekend. Snow was forecast every day.

Jenny was smiling. She arranged a pair of heels upright at the hem of a green skirt. “Too summery, do you think?” she asked.

“Beautiful,” he said. “I’ve always liked that skirt.”

She smiled at him and placed her makeup bag carefully on top of Jacob’s sweaters. The sweaters were bulky and though she pushed the bag down firmly it rose up above the lip of the suitcase when she removed her hand. She pushed again, this time with two hands. The bag still rose back up but she appeared to be satisfied with her efforts because she went to the closet and took out two of his ties, a black one with gray stripes and a solid red one. “I’m putting a choice of ties in here,” she said, folding the ties together at their middle and laying them in the suitcase. “Pernilla was in Copenhagen last month and said there was an excellent restaurant in one of the hotels on the harbor. I can’t remember which one. Remind me to call her when we land.” Jacob nodded his head to all of this but wasn’t listening.

She replaced the green skirt with something darker. “This is going to be good for us,” she said. She smiled at him and moved the ties from atop the sweaters and tucked them into the little zipper pocket. She closed the pocket. “I think this will be fun, Jacob.” He watched her hand reach over the suitcase and touch his shoulder. “The holidays,” she said as if she was going to say more about it.

Her back was to him and he watched her bend over to pick up from the floor a pair of socks she’d decided not to take. His wife was a beautiful woman. Her hips were round and soft. Copenhagen would be good for them. He reached out and touched her. Without standing up, she turned and smiled at him. “That was nice,” she said. “I’m looking forward to the trip, too. I miss you.”

“Me too,” he said.

In the long week between Christmas and New Year, Henrik Brandt had been taken off life support. Jenny spent the day leading up to this with Lisa at the hospital. Jacob had taken the girls out to ski on the trails in Grimsta. They’d had a big storm three days after Christmas and the snow was heavy but not too wet and the temperature was perfect for skiing. He’d enjoyed himself. The girls had gotten along with each other, and he’d had a good workout. They were almost old enough to keep up with him and he hadn’t had to stop to wait as much as the previous winter.

He looked at his wife. She was holding a nightgown he liked. “I almost forgot,” she said. He watched her fold it up into an impossibly small square and stuff it into the suitcase. “That’s it,” she said, “unless you’ve forgotten something.”

“I don’t think I have,” he said.

VIII

Jacob picked up the suitcase and followed Jenny out of their bedroom. If they wanted to make it to Arlanda in time for their flight, especially with the snow, they had five minutes to say good-bye to the girls and get on the road. They walked down the stairs. Jacob balanced the suitcase against his hip. It was heavy and he grunted a little with the weight. “Are you sure you feel all right?” Jenny said. “You were in the bathroom a long time.”

“I’m fine,” he said.

Downstairs, Jenny went straight for the hall and pulled on her boots. In the small windows above the door, Jacob could see that the snow had picked up considerably. It was coming down hard. He saw Jenny see this too. She opened the door and it became instantly cold in the entryway. He watched the snow come down in a great pulsing wall. It was nice to look at. She said something to him. He didn’t hear her but he sensed that she’d said something to him. He felt the weight of the suitcase in his hand and heard the sound of the television in the living room. She said, louder this time, “I said, What are we supposed to do now?” He set the suitcase down on the floor and looked at his wife. He listened to the girls laughing at a cartoon on the television. It was one he sometimes watched with them. He could almost picture the main character. It might have been a talking bear or some kind of large bird but as hard as he tried he could not remember.

It was a week before Easter and snowing so hard Lennart had to tuck the bouquet of tulips inside his coat. The cold weight of the stems pushed against his chest. It was April the eighth, his grandfather Bent’s ninetieth birthday. Lennart was on his way to his grandfather’s apartment. To coincide with the arrival of spring, Moderna Museet was hosting the premiere of a piece of digital artwork called The Winter War. Bent was a surviving veteran of the actual Winter War, a fact upon which the Strand family had hung much pride for more than half a century. Bent rarely spoke of the war with his grandchildren, but as he got older it seemed to Lennart that Bent’s memories of the war became fresher, more present. He would occasionally recount surprisingly detailed events from his time in Finland — the names of other soldiers, the results of a particular battle. There were more gruesome stories too. The sight of blood freezing solid the instant it fell to the snow from a neck torn open by gunfire. A leg severed by a mortar round, upright, boot still strapped to ski. When Lennart had seen the announcement for the premiere, he’d immediately invited Bent to attend. It was a birthday gift. He was the only one of his siblings who still visited their grandfather. Magnus and Ulrika lived abroad, and Matilda was always busy with her own family. Their father, Rolf, had died a year ago in June and since then Bent had become Lennart’s responsibility. He’d been home from the United States just short of a year. His time there was so long ago, only a memory untethered to his life now. Since he’d been home he and Marie had been together again. They were in love in high school and hadn’t seen each other in years. But in December, he’d run across her and her daughter, Tove, in front of the NK Christmas window displays. He’d gone, as he did every year when he was child, to see the spectacle, when he saw Marie in the crowd. She was standing in front of a home decor display, eyeing a low yellow table and a red Margrethe bowl full of silver apples. Tove stood with her face close to the fingerprinted glass of the window display. At first he didn’t think it could be her, but as he passed, she turned, smiled at him, and said his name. It was snowing.

He chose not to believe in fate, but here they were only a few months later, the three of them a family. He supposed he should have been grateful for whatever coincidence had brought them together again, and he was, but he was also bothered by the pressures of the story. It felt scripted. The expectations he and Marie had, and those that were placed upon them by family and the mutual friends they still had, were unreasonably high. The chance meeting at the department store after all those years suggested an inevitability to the relationship that struck him as unfair.