It was a Wednesday, the night Erik died.
Back in 1989, Wednesday evening meant Jazzercise at the Sowell Bay Community Center, and Tova rarely missed a class. Under her sweatpants, she wore an emerald-green leotard, which hugged her trim thirty-nine-year-old waist. Will loved that leotard; he always said it matched her eyes.
This particular Wednesday, she came home and began to shed her exercise clothes, ready to draw a bath, as usual, but Will intercepted her. The last of the day’s sun filtered through the bedroom window, bathing their lovemaking in a giddy glow. Just think, Will had said, grinning at her as they laid on the bare sheets, the quilt scrunched at the foot of the bed. Soon, we’ll have the house to ourselves all the time.
Erik would’ve started at the University of Washington that fall. Where was he that afternoon? Tova still doesn’t know. The police asked her repeatedly, but all she could tell them was he was probably out with friends. He was always out with friends, naturally; he was eighteen. Tova had stopped keeping tabs on the intricacies of his social schedule a couple of years ago. He was a good kid. A great kid.
The green leotard didn’t make it to the hamper that Wednesday. Instead, it lay slung over the arm of the Charleston chair in the corner of Will and Tova’s living room, right where Will had flung it after he peeled it off of his wife. When the Sowell Bay Police came to the Sullivan house
early the following day, after Will and Tova had reported that Erik had never come home from his late-night shift at the ferry ticket booth, the green leotard was still there, a blight on the otherwise tidy room. An unofficial part of the record.
Tova remembers staring at it as the detectives talked. She still didn’t think it could be true. Erik was at a friend’s house. Sleeping on someone’s sofa. He’d forgotten to call. Good kids did that from time to time, did they not? Great kids, even.
At some point, someone moved the leotard to the hamper. Tova must have laundered it, because who else ever did laundry? Certainly not Will. But she doesn’t remember. It slipped into some sort of void, as so many things did, once Erik’s disappearance was confirmed and he was declared dead.
The Charleston chair is still there, although Tova had it reupholstered a few years afterward. She chose a paisley fabric in shades of blue and green, meant to be cheerful. But somehow the chair always seemed complicit, in spite of its new clothing.
It will be the first to go when she moves.
TOVA NEVER INTENDED to spend her adulthood in the house she grew up in. But then, so much about her life never turned out how she intended. She’d only been eight when Papa built the three-level house.
The middle floor was for living. The lower floor, dug into the hillside, was the cellar, for storing apples and turnips and cans of lutefisk. The top level was an attic, for her mother’s trunks.
The trunks were full of things Tova’s parents couldn’t bear to leave behind in Sweden: relics that didn’t quite fit their new American life. Embroidered linens; some forgotten matriarch’s inherited wedding china; wooden boxes and figurines, carefully painted with reds, blues, and yellows. On rainy afternoons, Tova and Lars would climb the ladder to
the attic and play under its bare rafters. Picnics on lace- trimmed tablecloths with Dala Horses as guests, tea service from chipped bone cups.
Then one summer, a few years later, Papa decided it was time to replace the ladder with a staircase. He enlisted two of his best shop-hands to help. They worked from dawn to nightfall. Papa’s health was starting to fail, even then. Tova remembers how he rested on a chair in the hallway while the younger men drove nails through the cedar planks.
Once the staircase was built, the shop-hands packed slag wool into the rafters and sanded the floorboards. Meanwhile, Papa worked on the attic’s amenities, building a dollhouse into one corner and a stout table into another. He built two wooden chairs, and he carved flowering vines into their legs and etched a string of stars onto their backrests.
When it was done, Mama came through with her broom. Papa beat the cobwebs from a woven rug that’d been rolled up in a corner and laid it in the center of the finished room. All of them, Tova and Lars and Mama and Papa and the two shop-hands, stood on the rug, admiring. Sunlight struggled to come through the filthy dormer window. Mama attacked it with a vinegar-soaked cloth until it gleamed.
“Now,” Papa said, patting the window frame, “you children have a proper place for play.”
But they weren’t children anymore. Lars was a teenager, and Tova just two years behind. They used the converted attic some, but soon, their interest in playrooms waned. Tova considered it some kind of mercy that Papa hadn’t been around to see them abandon the room he’d worked so hard on.
Really, it ought to have been a grandchild’s playroom.
But, of course, she and Will never had grandchildren.
Erik was young when Will and Tova moved back into the house to take care of Mama. Tova wanted to donate Erik’s baby toys, but Mama insisted: save them for your own grandchildren one day. So Tova stashed them in the attic.
They remained there after Erik died. They remain there now.
The only thing that’s changed is the dormer window. Will had it replaced. It was a few years after Erik died, and Will had an incident. The sort of thing grief can do to a person. Tova doesn’t like to think about the incident. That wasn’t Will’s norm. But then, nothing is normal when you lose a child.
Tova, being practical, said the new window was an upshot of the incident. It was larger, brighter.
Now, as she crosses the attic room it feels as though she might walk right through the glass and into the treetops on the other side. It really is a beautiful room. It has the best view of the water.
Once, she and Will met with a real estate agent, just to see.
“Incredible,” the agent had gushed. “This whole house is incredible. You’d never know all this was back here!”
This was true. Tucked into the hillside at the end of a steep, rocky driveway choked with blackberry bushes, one could drive right by and never know the house was there.
The agent ran her fingertips over the railing on the staircase and cooed at the attic’s soaring beams, high and polished like a cathedral. From one shelf in the attic, she picked up a toy car with one wheel missing. Erik’s car. “We’ll need to get rid of all this stuff, of course, before we list,” the agent said.
They decided not to sell.
The toy car is still there. Tova picks it up and slips it into her robe pocket.
This time, it’ll be different.
IT’S VERY LATE when Tova makes her way to bed. Cat sleeps in a little pile on the bedspread, his flank moving gently up and down. She pulls the covers back carefully so as not to wake him. She smiles to herself. Never would she have
imagined sharing her bed with an animal, but she’s glad he’s here.
She drifts into a strange world. A dream, it must be, but she’s not entirely sure, for it feels so mundane. In the dream she’s lying right here on her firm bed cradled in her own arms, then the arms start to grow, weaving around her like a baby’s swaddle. The arms have suckers, a million tiny suckers, each one pulling at her skin, and the tentacles grow longer until they’ve created a cocoon and everything is dark and silent. A powerful feeling washes over her, and after a moment Tova recognizes the feeling as relief. The cocoon is warm and soft, and she is alone, blissfully alone. Finally, she succumbs to sleep.
