Jensen Beach - Swallowed by the Cold - Stories

A young boy walked up behind them. He touched Marie’s back with cold fingertips. Her bathing suit was nearly dry and the coldness of his touch on the small of her back, too adult, too intimate, made her flinch. He stood still, smiling at Marie. She said, “Hello there.” It was clear to Marie that he had some kind of disability. His eyes were set wide and his nose was flat against a broad face.

“Maybe she’d be brave if I jumped too?” the boy said.

Marie looked around for a parent or a guardian of some sort. What if he couldn’t swim, she thought. Two children in the water would be a challenge and there wasn’t a lifeguard that day. No one on the beach was looking at them. The boy’s smile hadn’t changed at all. He continued to look at Marie and said, as if he’d anticipated her concern, “I’m a very good swimmer. It’s not hard and I like it.”

“What do you think, Tove?” Marie said. “Should we let this boy teach us how to be brave and strong?” Brave and strong, a term she’d picked up from one of Tove’s cartoons or maybe a book. So childish and silly. She’d never thought to criticize such an expression before and was both sad and hopeful about what that meant. Tove would start school in the fall.

Tove turned and lined up at the edge of the pier. She seemed ready to jump and Marie didn’t want to do anything that might change her mind, so she took her hand and turned back to the boy. “Ready?” she asked.

The boy reached out and took Marie’s hand, which she hadn’t expected him to do. She was in between the two children. Their hands were cold and Marie could feel the ridged pruning of their fingertips. “On three,” she said, holding their hands tight to her hips.

Before they jumped, Tove pulled her hand from Marie’s hand. The boy tilted forward a half step, righted himself. “Careful,” Marie said to him. Then to Tove, she said, “Aren’t you ready?”

“This time,” Tove said. But again when Marie started to count, Tove pulled her hand away. Marie knelt on the pier. The water was dark in the shadow of the cloud. She had a pork loin marinating in the refrigerator but the rest of the meal would take time. Asparagus, potatoes, the smoked salmon rolls that Lennart liked as an appetizer. The apartment was a mess, and Lennart always took too long with the cocktails, serving a second round of drinks when he should be putting the meat on the grill. “Please, Tove,” she said. “We’re going to be late. Let’s jump this time.” Mostly it was Lennart’s sister, Matilda, about whom Marie was worried. She was younger than Lennart but Lennart was a little intimidated by her, a little scared to disappoint her, let her witness even the slightest social or personal failure. And he often took this out on Marie, getting angry if a meal was served too late or the apartment was unkempt and messy. This frustrated Marie. She disliked being late for anything when Matilda was involved. Matilda always had something to say about parenting, particularly how hard it was to keep to a strict schedule with kids, but how important. Matilda had two children and Marie had never known her to be late or unprepared for anything.

She stood and turned to the boy. “Are you ready?” She tried to sound cheerful but could sense her frustration with Tove growing in her voice. The boy didn’t say anything. He was quietly singing a song Marie remembered from when she was a girl. It was a song about jumping into cold water. She hadn’t heard it in years. She tried to recall the words but couldn’t get past the first few lines in her head before she gave up and took Tove’s hand. The cloud had passed the sun and it was warm again. Even the wind felt a little warmer. Tove pulled her hand away. “Wait,” she said.

Marie looked at the boy again. “Tove,” she said sharply, “you have to think of someone other than yourself.”

In May, just a little over a month ago, she and Tove had moved in with Lennart. He’d inherited his grandfather’s apartment. It was big enough for all of them, five bedrooms, a formal dining room that Bent, Lennart’s grandfather, had used as a library, by far the biggest place she’d ever lived. There’d been no question that Marie would move in, and mostly she was happy with the change. Lennart was good to them. He was kind, attentive with Tove, and it was good to be in the city, close to her work. The school Tove would go to was only a few blocks from the apartment and much better than the one she would have attended in the suburbs where they used to live. Safer anyway, and that was important.

A small wave, wake from a passing boat, rocked the pier gently. Marie felt her body adjust to keep its balance. She watched Tove do the same. When the pier settled, she took Tove’s hand. Tove looked up at her. Very little time had passed since they came out to the pier and met the boy. But Marie felt as though the afternoon was quickly wasting away. It was ridiculous, she knew, and she tried to fight off the feeling by playfully nudging Tove with her hip. “It’s not cold at all,” she said. “Nothing to be afraid of. Jump in.”

The boy released his hand from Marie’s. He stood at her side for a moment, likely to see if Tove was going to change her mind and then, when it was obvious that she wasn’t, took off running back down the pier to the beach. “Shouldn’t we go, too, Tove?” Marie asked.

Tove took a step and Marie felt her daughter’s weight shift, a subtle rising of the pier. But Tove didn’t jump. Marie pulled at Tove’s hand and Tove looked up, scared. “No more,” Marie snapped. “We’re going home now.”

Tove cried the entire walk back to the metro station and kept crying while they waited for their train to arrive. She dutifully followed Marie onto the train, taking a seat across from her in a cramped foursome of dirtied fabric seats, still crying. Marie got one or two sympathetic looks from other passengers. An old man tried to get Tove to laugh by making faces at her but Tove just stared at the man and kept crying. Eventually, the man gave up and got up from his seat at the Alvik station without saying anything. The ride into the city took about thirty minutes and by the time they’d reached their stop, Tove had stopped crying and was recounting for the second or third time that day something funny that happened at her preschool.

At home, Marie fixed dinner and did the dishes and made coffee and put Tove, who appeared to have forgotten the incident at the pier and was happy and giddy with exhaustion, to bed. Marie didn’t bristle once at any of Matilda’s comments at dinner or afterward. She smiled at them, in fact, agreed even, imagining that the comments were not directed at her but rather meant in confidence, in solidarity, one accomplished parent to another. Later that night when she and Lennart were in bed and Lennart moved close to her and clumsily pushed his fingers beneath the waistband of her pajama pants, she didn’t stop him even though she was tired and the coffee she had had after dinner upset her stomach and she knew he would take too long because of all the wine he’d drunk. When finally he had finished and was asleep beside her, she lay tucked warmly under the blanket until it was clear she wasn’t going to get to sleep. She got up, careful not to wake him.

A book that Lennart had read with Tove earlier was on the small antique hall table outside Tove’s bedroom door. Without thinking, Marie picked it up. The book was Comet in Moominland by Tove Jansson. Tove was named after the author. Pirjo, the Finnish woman who taught the Lamaze course Marie had taken, gave the book to Marie. An early birthday gift, she called it. It seemed like a lifetime ago. The book had always been one of Tove’s favorites.

Marie fixed herself a cup of tea and sat at the kitchen table. She was reading a novel, a Danish crime novel that was big and unfocused, and she thought about getting it from the bedroom, but she didn’t feel like reading such a book when she was having trouble sleeping. The television would wake Lennart, and anyway she hadn’t learned how to use the different controls and settings yet. So many simple parts of her life here were as yet unresolved. She opened Comet in Moominland , sipped her tea, which was too hot. She read quickly, trying to enjoy the story. The illustrations were silly but beautiful in a way, too; otherworldly was maybe the word for it. She came to the part when Moomintroll discovered that a comet was going to strike the valley and destroy it. He was scared for his family and for his home. Every time they read the book together, Tove would grip Marie’s hand at this part, terrified, until her hand released with delight at the end. She hoped Tove would always be capable of surprise, but she knew that wasn’t going to be true. It hadn’t been true for herself. She flipped to the end and read, longingly, as the Moomin family rejoiced that the comet had passed over them and left their valley safe.