Текст книги "The Storyteller"
Автор книги: Antonia Michaelis
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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 23 страниц)
And then it is. It only took seconds. The hand isn’t covering her mouth anymore; the weight on her back is gone. She doesn’t move. She crouches on the floor, on her knees, bent over, with her head on her arms. There is a noise like the breaking of dishes in a kitchen. Glass breaking.
When she lifts her head, everything is dark. The flashlight. It must have been the flashlight that broke. She hears footsteps running, running away, fleeing. Then everything is quiet.
She wasn’t sure how long she’d been cowering on the floor. A long time. She’d heard the rat again. Apart from that, she’d heard nothing. There was nobody in the hall. She was alone. No hidden murderer. Just herself … and the memory of what had happened.
She was bleeding. The blood trickled out of her, together with time. Of course, it wasn’t only blood—it wasn’t only time. There was something else she didn’t want to think about now, a part of an animal—a person—that she didn’t know. She tried to think “Abel,” but the name wouldn’t form inside her head, the letters refusing to get into any order that made sense or was even pronounceable.
She didn’t cry. Not this time. And finally, she got up, found a tissue, and wiped away the blood between her legs. There wasn’t as much as she’d thought. She put her clothes back on. She realized she was shivering. Her fingers were ice-cold, and she could barely button up her pants. When she walked over to the door of the boathouse, the pain came back. She was limping.
On the way to her bike, she tried to think the pain away. By sheer willpower. To walk normally so that no one would notice anything was wrong. There was no one around, of course, but there would be tomorrow … Magnus … Linda … people at school. When she thought about school, she felt sick. She would never, ever tell anyone about this. Not even—especially not—Magnus and Linda. And because she couldn’t tell anyone, she told herself.
“Stupid little girl,” she said to herself, spitting out the words, disgusted. “Stupid little girl; you wanted to have an adventure. There you go. You’ve had your adventure now.”
And then, as she unlocked her bike, she started humming, a ridiculous old children’s song.
Just a tiny little pain,
Three days of heavy rain,
Three days of sunlight,
And everything will be all right...
He’d lost her!
Damn, he’d lost her. He knew she’d been here, on the beach. He’d seen her with him; they hadn’t seen him of course. The shadows behind the surfers’ hut were deep and dark. But now he didn’t know where to look for her. And he would creep home, sneak past his parents’ room, secretly, like a thief in his own house—something he’d gotten used to doing the last few weeks. The dog wouldn’t give him away. The dog was sleeping deeply. He’d seen to that.
He’d lost her.
Somewhere between the beach and the place where the sailboats were docked in summer. He’d been too timid, too bent on not being discovered. The white snow made the nights too bright; it had become more and more difficult to follow her without being seen. He’d given them too much of a lead, and they’d grabbed it like a present and disappeared.
He returned to the beach, saw the rectangle of the police tape in the distance, heard it crackle in the night breeze. He realized he was shivering. He didn’t want to think of that police tape now, didn’t want to think of the dead body that had lain there, didn’t want to think of the blood slowly trickling down from the wound, dyeing the snow red. He didn’t want to wonder what Sören Marinke’s last thought had been. Of whom he’d been thinking. Maybe Sören Marinke had loved, too.
He found himself standing on the ice. He walked out, far out. It didn’t matter when he got home—either they would realize he’d been gone or they wouldn’t—and if they did, he could still tell them a story about bar-hopping with friends. He could try to look guilty and hungover. Bar-hopping with friends? He didn’t have friends.
Not even she wanted to be his friend. Not even Anna.
He took off his gloves, kneeled down, and burrowed his bare hands into the snow that covered the frozen bay. The snow was very cold. Sometimes he couldn’t fight the thought that it would feel good to lie down in it and to never have to move again. Just to lie there, in the whiteness. Forever.
ON MONDAY MORNING, THE BLUENESS OF THE LIGHT in the Leemanns’ house had changed. Something had cracked, and a dirty color had seeped through, the color of dried blood.
“It is my fault,” Anna whispered, sitting on the side of her bed. “I have destroyed the blue light.”
But there was another voice, a tiny little voice of reason, whispering to her. Your fault? asked this voice. Oh no. It wasn’t you who has destroyed anything. It was …
Please, said Anna, don’t say that name.
She took a long, hot shower and washed her hair several times. She hadn’t taken a shower the night before. If she had, Linda would have known that something had happened.
She’d been afraid she’d find Linda waiting up for her, in the living room, which would have been the end of her; Anna would have dissolved in tears in her arms. For a moment, she’d longed for that. But Linda hadn’t been there. Anna had heard her tossing in bed, next to Magnus; she knew that her mother would sleep only when she was home safe and sound. What was Linda afraid of? Was she afraid of exactly what had happened?
Anna hadn’t slept. She had lain in her bed silently, staring at the ceiling, waiting for morning to come. Now she sat at breakfast very quietly. She didn’t eat.
“Is something the matter?” Magnus asked.
She shook her head. She nodded. She shrugged.
“Did the two of you fight about something?” Linda asked.
“Yes,” Anna said, relieved at this chance to explain things. “Yes, I guess you could say we did. I need a little time to think about it.”
On the floor in the hall, beneath the mail slot in the door, she found a white envelope with her name on it. Abel’s writing. When she touched the envelope, it burned hot in her hands, like the glowing, smoldering tip of a cigarette. She tore it up into very tiny pieces and threw them into the trashcan outside.
She got onto her bike and rode to school like she did every day: there were two more weeks of classes before the reading period before finals. She still was in pain. On the bicycle seat, it came back, tearing at her insides. She rode past the turnoff to school. She couldn’t go there. She couldn’t bear the thought of seeing Abel. She didn’t want to see his ice-blue eyes. His eyes would be her undoing. She wondered what she could have read in them last night, in the boathouse. She rode to the city, got off her bike, and wandered the streets aimlessly. She’d lost her hold on reality.
It had happened once before, after she’d been in Abel and Micha’s apartment the first time, but this time was different. Now it was really gone, and it felt as if it was gone for good. What was reality good for, anyway?
At some point, she found herself on the pedestrian bridge that led over the river. In summer, this part of the river, the city harbor, was full of big ancient ships. Now it was frozen, too; only the narrow path in the middle, which they kept open for the ships, was glistening like a trickle of unidentified body fluid. She rested her arms on the railing of the bridge and looked over at the restaurant-ship.
“If I could get my thoughts in order,” she said aloud, “if only I could get my thoughts in order … Maybe I have to talk so I can think. What happened? And what does it mean?”
She looked around; there was no one who could hear her.
“I’m afraid,” she said to herself. “I’m afraid again. I have to bring the right questions and answers together. It’s a puzzle. And the first question is, who is Abel Tannatek?”
A swan waddled over the ice. Dirty and white, swans aren’t beautiful, Anna thought; they’ve never been beautiful, and I wonder who first used that adjective to describe them. It’s the same with the putrid, slimy sunsets over the sea. “If I could flick a switch and turn on a light,” she went on, “then what happened yesterday might be clearer. Then again, maybe it already is clear. Maybe the light was already turned on, on the beach, in the snow … the murderer always returns to the place of the murder. So who went to the beach last night? Who was standing there, right beside me? The wolf in the fairy tale killed his victims by creeping up from behind and cracking their necks. He never looked into their eyes. For had he seen their eyes, he might have pitied them, and he knew that. The wolf knows himself very well.”
She still felt that warm, heavy weight on her. She felt the creature’s breath on her neck and the pain, and suddenly she felt sick. She crouched down, holding onto the railing of the pedestrian bridge, but her stomach was too empty. The wolf knew himself very well; he had warned her … it had been her fault. It had been her fault. But had it?
No, said the reasonable part of her. Of course not. Don’t you remember—you have heard men say this about girls, read it in cheap newspapers, and always thought, how stupid and how wrong: she asked for it, wearing those things, drinking too much, flirting … she asked for it, she wanted it. Don’t you remember how you talked about these things with Gitta once and how you both agreed …
But I did want it, said unreasonable Anna to reasonable Anna.
Not this, said reasonable Anna. You wanted to have sex with him, that’s all. It would have been the perfect place, a dry place, no snow, no Micha around … a perfect night, too. How could you have known what would happen? You couldn’t. All you saw and felt was your love for him. You were wearing this love like a cloak, safe and warm, you thought … and he tore it apart.
But he did try to warn me, interrupted unreasonable Anna, realizing how much she sounded like a hardheaded child, trying to change the truth by the sheer force of her will.
There’s no talking away what happened, said reasonable Anna. Don’t even try it. It happened and it is horrible and you remember what Gitta said, way back when on the leather sofa.
She remembered, of course. And you’d probably catch something nasty, too. And if she was right? Anna wondered if she should have a blood test or something done, somewhere, anonymously, but she couldn’t come up with the right thing to say. For even if the test was anonymous, a nonanonymous person would draw the blood.
What happened, Miss Leemann? Was this a … “No,” she said, aloud. “No. What you want to say is the wrong word. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking rape.”
“And that’s what it was,” whispered reasonable Anna.
“Who, Miss Leemann?” the person drawing blood would ask. “Who did this to you? Do you know the guy?”
“He is … he was my …”
“He’s your boyfriend?”
“No,” she answered. “Not anymore, and maybe he’s a murderer, and it’s all over anyway. It’s over.”
She noticed that she was kneeling in the snow on the bridge. She was kneeling again.
“And I wonder,” she whispered, still caught up in conversation with a nonexistent person taking her blood in a nonexistent clinic, “I wonder … thinking about it now … he’s got a little sister, and I wonder how much he loves her really and in what way.”
When she heard her own words, the air became colder by a few degrees. “Maybe that,” she continued, “is why he doesn’t let anybody come near Micha. What if Sören Marinke suspected the same thing? And what if that was the reason he had to die?”
She thought of Micha in her pink down jacket with the artificial fur collar, of her pale blond braids, of Abel’s fingers running through her hair. She thought of Micha’s bed. There’s room on it for the two of us, Micha had said to her, or something like that. There’s room for Abel and me. Was Abel doing what he had said Rainer Lierski would do?
Was he … another hard word … hurting … horrible … was he abusing Micha?
She stood up. “I have to do something,” she said, but she said it in such a very low voice that she could barely hear the words herself. “I have to find the truth. I have to talk to somebody about all of this, somebody who exists, somebody real. Possibly the police, the ones who are trying to find Marinke’s murderer …”
Before she left the bridge, she closed her eyes for a moment and saw the picture of Micha’s schoolyard again: how Abel flew across that yard, meeting Micha in the middle, swirling her around in the clear winter air. And she felt again how he’d hugged her tight in their literature class, in the tower made of newspaper pages. No. She couldn’t talk to anyone. And least of all to the police.
She just couldn’t. Part of her—unreasonable Anna—still loved him. Maybe she would never stop loving him.
Anna hadn’t only lost her hold on reality, she’d lost her flute as well. She’d had the flute with her that night, in her backpack. Stupid enough in the cold. The flute had borne silent witness to what had happened in the boathouse. After, she’d wrapped it in Abel’s dark-blue knitted sweater and stashed it in her closet. She’d called her teacher and told her she couldn’t make it to this week’s lesson.
It had been a long time since she’d played the piano in the living room. She had stopped piano lessons a while back, deciding to concentrate on the flute instead. The final music exam only required you to play one instrument, but on that instrument you had to be pretty perfect. Now she went back to the piano. The piano seemed safer somehow, something neither Abel nor Micha had touched with their presence. She practiced her flute pieces on the piano. That was crazy, of course; she couldn’t hide the flute in her closet forever.
She no longer felt a part of the small, domestic scenes in her everyday life. She saw Magnus feed the robins. She saw Linda cut vegetables in the kitchen. She contemplated them from the outside, like painted scenes. She, Anna Leemann, was on the other side of these pictures, with no real connection to any of the things happening within.
On Tuesday morning, there was another white envelope on the floor in the hall that someone had pushed through the mail slot. White as snow, white like white noise … with her name on it. She tore it up into tiny white flakes and let it snow into the trash. She returned to school. She saw Abel walk through the schoolyard outside. He looked up—maybe he sensed her there—she looked away. She felt dizzy all of a sudden.
In her head, Gitta, who wasn’t there, whispered … words, angry words: Don’t you start thinking that rubbish again, blaming yourself, little lamb. You know what they ought to do with guys like that? I’ll tell you. I’ve got some disgusting ideas for how to punish them …
Anna tried to avoid the student lounge during break time, but Frauke, whom she’d met in the corridor, pulled her inside. She was afraid Abel would be there. And he was. He was sitting on the radiator, at the back of the room, rolling a cigarette he would have to smoke outside. He looked up when she came in, just for a second, and then turned away. He couldn’t run away—he was trapped in that corner by the amorphous mass of other students—and Anna couldn’t turn on her heels and leave either, without Frauke asking her what was the matter. It was an impossible situation.
Anna managed to hold herself together. She managed to drink a cup of horrible coffee from the broken coffee machine with Frauke and to talk about nothing for five whole minutes, or rather, to let Frauke talk and pretend she was listening. She’d turned her back on Abel but felt his presence.
At lunchtime, he was standing at his usual place near the bike racks. Anna saw him from the window—black hat down over his ears, hands in pockets, earplugs in his ears. He’d shut out the world. At one point he talked to two guys—maybe he sold them something; she didn’t see.
He wasn’t Abel anymore. He’d turned back into Tannatek, the Polish peddler, whose presence at school was a riddle to everybody and whom most people were a little afraid of.
She wondered if that was it. If things had turned back to an earlier point, if everything was now as it had been before, and if she could just act as if she’d never known him.
No. Things weren’t how they’d been before. Rainer Lierski was dead. Sören Marinke was dead. And a small girl with pale blond braids and a pink down jacket was wandering over the ice, in a fairy tale, helpless in wind and weather. The weather forecast said there would be a snowstorm.
“Little lamb,” Gitta said, turning up at Anna’s door in the afternoon, very real now, not just a voice in her head. “Little lamb, what’s wrong?”
“I’m poring over my books,” Anna replied, standing in the doorway, refusing to let Gitta in. “Why should anything be wrong?”
“Oh, come on,” Gitta said. “Something’s happened. Between you and Abel. You’re not talking anymore. Do you think we’re all blind? We’re worried about you.”
“Who is ‘we’?” Anna asked.
Gitta brushed the question aside with her hand and searched for her cigarettes. “If you won’t let me in, then I’m going to smoke,” she said. “And the smoke will get into the house through the door.”
Anna shrugged.
“But you won’t get rid of me so easily. So things didn’t work out, did they? With Abel? The whole thing has run up against a brick wall.”
“So what?”
Gitta blew a smoke ring into the cold air. “What do you know about him?”
Anna narrowed her eyes. “What do you mean, what do I know about him?”
“I mean it just as I said it. What do you know about Abel Tannatek?”
“Maybe,” Anna said, “the question is what do you know about Abel Tannatek? Is there something you want to tell me? Is that the reason you came?”
Gitta smoked in silence for a moment. “No,” she said finally. And then, “Sometimes I find myself thinking about that police tape on the beach. It pops into my head that …”
“Oh, does it,” Anna said, suddenly defensive, “and do you know what sometimes pops into my head? Hennes von Biederitz. And Bertil Hagemann. One of them bragging about what a good shot he is, the other trying not to talk about the fact that he’s probably a good shot, too. Hunting. Bertil was out there on the beach both days before Marinke’s death. He said so himself. As to where Hennes was … I guess you’d know better than I would. Or maybe you wouldn’t?”
Gitta stared at her, perplexed. “What do these two have to do with anything?”
“That,” Anna said, “is exactly what I’m wondering.” And she closed the door.
• • •
On Wednesday, there was a third white envelope in the hall. When she touched it, it wasn’t glowing like the first one. She would tear it up like the two other envelopes. She would … she saw her fingers opening the envelope, knowing these were the fingers of unreasonable Anna. The paper was filled with tiny haunted letters. There was her name.
Anna. Anna, are you reading this? I’m not going to stop writing to you.
I have nothing, only words. I am a storyteller.
I want to explain something to you. But I can’t. Later, maybe later.
The words that I will have to find for that explanation will be sharp and they will hurt, much worse than the thorns of roses. There is a reason for what happened. I can’t be forgiven so I am not asking you for forgiveness. We lost each other, and we will never find each other again. Rose girl, the sea is cold and …
She put the letter back into the envelope and tore it up, into even smaller pieces than the other envelopes. The icy wind took the scraps from her fingers and carried them away with it, high up into the sky like snowflakes falling up instead of down. There were tears burning in her eyes. We will never find each other again. No, she thought, we won’t. Ever.
The situation at school grew even more impossible. Anna forced herself to go to her literature intensive class. Abel seemed to have forced himself, too. He was even on time and was already sitting at his desk when she came in. Who’d had the bright idea to shape the desks into a U? They sat opposite each other but didn’t look at each other; they looked everywhere else. There were three yards between them, three yards of glass splinters, fleeing footsteps, pain, blood, a hand covering someone’s mouth, the weight of a body, the breathing of an animal. There were two dead bodies between them.
Once, she looked at him. He’d taken off his sweater. He was sitting there in his T-shirt, and she saw the two circular scars on his upper arm. But now there weren’t just two. There were three. The third one was bigger, or actually longer—a broad line. She looked away, looked again. The line was not a line. It was a row of single, circular wounds so close to each other that they melted into one. She tried to count them, but Abel turned his head, and she lowered her eyes.
The pain, she thought. The pain is the same as mine, just in a different place.
After the unbearable double lesson, she waited until everybody had left. Abel was the first to go. Knaake still sat at his desk. Then he looked at Anna, stood up, closed the door, and sat down again. He didn’t say anything. He took a thermos full of tea from his bag and poured tea into a cup. He was in no hurry.
“I have to talk to someone,” Anna said. He nodded.
“Let’s just assume something happened,” Anna began. “Something … bad, between Abel and me. Something that has to do with … trust …” She put her hands to her cheeks and felt a feverish heat there. She hated herself for the fact that she blushed. “Something I can’t talk about … let’s assume it was my fault, in a roundabout way.”
“Let’s not assume that,” he said softly. Did he know what she was talking about? No, he couldn’t.
“Okay, let’s assume it was not my fault … I mean, I did trust him,” Anna said in a low voice, without looking at Knaake. “But I don’t know what to think anymore. You know … about the two murders … Lierski … he was Abel’s little sister’s father. Abel hated him. He was afraid that he would … that he would do something to Micha. I think he was kind of known as … for being a pedophile. Maybe it wasn’t true, but Abel was sure. They’ve arrested someone for Lierski’s murder, someone who owned the right kind of weapon and who knew him, but I don’t know if it really was him after all … and then Sören Marinke, at the beach … you heard it on the radio. He was the social worker who’d turned up at Abel and Micha’s apartment … Abel isn’t eighteen yet—you know that—so in theory, he shouldn’t have custody of Micha. She should go live with relatives or a foster family, but Abel refuses to let that happen … their mother, Michelle … whom you don’t know …”
She looked up. He was shaking his head. “No, Anna. I don’t know her.”
Yeah, right, Anna thought. And where did Michelle get those old Leonard Cohen cassettes … How many people in town listened to stuff like that? She knew of only three: Michelle, Linda … and Knaake.
“Michelle disappeared,” Anna said, “a few weeks ago. She just up and left. But she can’t be far. She’s drawn money from the household account. From an ATM in Eldena.”
Knaake was staring into his cup, as if he could find Michelle Tannatek in there, if he only looked hard enough. Like he knew exactly what the woman whom he was searching for looked like.
“There is this fairy tale,” Anna whispered. “A fairy tale Abel is telling his little sister. Sometimes there are people in it who really exist. Sometimes I recognize them too late. I recognized Sören Marinke too late. He also died in the fairy tale. The bad guys all die. But who decides that they’re bad? I’m … I’m afraid … afraid that someone else will be found dead beneath the snow. Someone else who’s been shot in the neck.”
“But you haven’t gone to the police.”
“No. I …” She didn’t say, I love him. It would have sounded so trite.
Knaake got up and went over to the window, cup in hand. “There are many possibilities,” he said. “An infinite number of possibilities. I’m no detective. But maybe there are more possibilities than you’re seeing.”
She lifted her head. “Yes?”
“Possibility number one is the simplest,” Knaake said. “Abel Tannatek shot both men, the first because he hated him and the second because … tell me, why would he have shot the second one? Does it make sense to kill a social worker? A social worker is just a government agent … if you shoot one, another will take his place.” He laughed grimly. “It’s like a computer game.”
“And the second possibility?”
“Possibility number two: Somebody else shot them. And here we have two possibilities again. Somebody did it to help Abel. Or … somebody did it to make people think that Abel did it. But that all sounds a bit too much like an old black-and-white Mafia movie.”
“But are there other possibilities?”
“Sure. Dozens. For example, why do we think that it was the same murderer? Because of the shot in the neck? A nasty way to kill someone, by the way. The Nazis were known for this practice. Executions.”
Anna caught her breath. “You think … you think it might have been two different people?”
“It’s possible, isn’t it? The second murderer copied the handwriting of the first.”
“You are a detective.” Anna smiled. She stood up and went over to the window to stand next to him. Knaake smiled, too.
“A bad one. I hold this literature intensive class, but I read my share of crime thrillers too, you know. So let’s assume … assume Abel did kill Rainer Lierski. If things are as you said they are, he had a reason.”
“And somebody else killed Marinke? To make it look like Abel did?”
“Maybe. Or else … maybe the truth lies elsewhere. Maybe there’s someone out there acting absolutely irrationally. Someone who actually thinks she can solve a problem by killing a social worker. Who wants to protect Abel and Micha but doesn’t understand anything. A person who’s messed up her life completely and thinks she can only help from the shadows, a person who also hates Lierski for something he did … a person who drowned her intellect and her charm in alcohol a long time ago …”
Anna pressed her nose against the cold windowpane. Down there, in the yard, a dark figure was standing near the bike rack, hands dug deep in his pockets as always.
“Somebody acting absolutely irrationally,” Anna repeated in a whisper. She looked at Knaake. “Who?”
“Michelle,” he said.
The thought was new and strange, and Knaake shook his head right after he’d spoken the name. “Of course, these are only wild speculations.” He went back to his desk and screwed the lid back onto his thermos. “Like I said before, I don’t know Abel’s mother. But if you want … I could try to find out some things. It would be like a game … a change from gathering dust between high literature and stupid detective stories.” He shook his head again, as if to shake the dust out of his nearly gray beard.
“A dangerous game,” Anna said.
“I’d prefer to play it myself, however … instead of your playing it.” And then Knaake put a hand on her arm, all of a sudden. “Anna, you’re not the only one I’m worried about. There’s someone in the schoolyard, someone suffering in a horrible way. I’m sorry … how stupid … I don’t know what happened between the two of you. I don’t know if it can be forgiven. The hardest thing always is to forgive yourself.”
Knaake tucked his leather briefcase under his arm and opened the door. “Take care,” he said. “I’m not sure we’ll be having school tomorrow. They said there’ll be a big storm tonight. Get home safely.”
“I can’t go home yet,” Anna murmured. “I may ride out to the bay before the storm comes. I need to think.”
“Don’t stay out too long,” Knaake said as she left.
A big storm? Actually, a thaw had set in. Outside, drops were quietly falling from the trees and the sun shone warm and bright.
The hardest thing always is to forgive yourself …
He doesn’t mean me. He means Abel. But Abel already told me that that’s not possible, he said so in that letter, and maybe in every letter he wrote.
Abel wasn’t standing by the bike racks anymore. It was as if he, too, had melted away. Anna got onto her bike, still feeling the pain between her legs, a hurt that might never leave her, but she didn’t ride home. The wind was refreshing and warm; it blew her out of town, down the bike path along Wolgaster Street, past the Seaside District, past the turn leading to Wieck and the harbor, past the woods of the Elisenhain, past the new housing development—around the bay to Ludwigsburg. In summer, the beach near the village was crowded, but not as crowded as Eldena. There was no entrance fee and no fence. The beach out here was much narrower, wilder, and longer—a beach full of mysterious corners and secret hiding places in the tall beach grass. Anna left her bike near the long building housing the old café. There was snow on its thatched roof now.
She walked between the wind-bent pines down to the beach. Out on the ice, white swans and black bald coots were huddled in weird lumps. You could walk across the bay to Wieck—the café lay exactly opposite. Today, there was no one on the ice.
She wandered along the beach, the wind at her back. She stepped over ice floes the sea had stacked, one on top of another, into strange works of art. She realized she’d stuffed her hands into the pockets of her coat and pulled her hat down low on her face. As if she was him, she thought. All she lacked now were the earplugs of the old Walkman, full of white noise. But no, she didn’t need those—the wind produced its own white noise, and she was at the very center of it.
The coastline turned to the right, away from the bay, leading out toward the open sea, and she followed it until the sand became too narrow. When she could walk no farther, she forced herself to climb up the short slope through the trees. There was a path up there, a path that led back through the pine forest. But she didn’t want to go back, not yet. She found a bench between the trees, a cold, snow-covered bench. She sat and looked out over the ice.
She had come to think, but her head felt empty.
When she closed her eyes, summer crept out of the trees around her. She could feel it enveloping her, feel the sunlight on her skin. The snow long gone, a thin line of beach lay beneath her, golden yellow. The pines waved fresh green needles, the beach grass swayed in the summer wind. And there someone was building a sandcastle, a castle with towers decorated with shells and sea grass, with flags made of colored paper, with pinecones for inhabitants—the builder was a small girl with blond braids, dark and wet from swimming, a girl in a pink bikini bottom and a large knitted dark-blue sweater with the sleeves rolled up on top. Anna heard her laugh—there must be other people down there she couldn’t see from here—she heard a woman’s voice … Michelle, she thought, Michelle is here; she’s come back; everything’s all right; this is next summer; and everything has turned out all right in a secret way. There must have been some other explanation for everything. Neither Abel nor Michelle had had anything to do with the murders; otherwise they wouldn’t be here now, would they? And Abel had always loved Micha just the way you’re supposed to love a little sister, or the way a father loves his daughter, no less. And me, I’m down there at the beach, too, she thought, together with them. Didn’t I just hear my own voice? She opened her eyes and the vision was gone.
