Free Some Kind of Peace by Camilla Grebe, Åsa Träff

buoy in a storm.
    “Damn. I’m sorry, Siri. I’m really…”
    He falls silent, searching for words, shakes his head, and looks like he’s trying to collect himself. Or maybe he’s just trying to regain his balance.
    “I’m sorry. I don’t know what got into me. I’m just drunk… Damn it. Can you accept my apology? I truly mean it. Damn. Stupid alcohol…”
    Sven looks like he’s about to embark on a long conversation about his relationship to all manner of drugs, something I’m really not in the mood for.
    “It’s okay, Sven.”
    I place a hand on his arm to underscore that I mean what I say.
    “We can talk more about this on Monday, or we can just forget about it. It’s okay.” I squeeze his arm a little and he looks grateful. As he turns around and walks unsteadily through the kitchen door, I see her.
    Birgitta is standing in the hall, watching me. Her thick lips are pinched together, her face is tense, her arms crossed over her heavy breasts. She gives me a knowing look, filled with a mixture of contempt and sympathy.
    I am ashamed .
    How much did she see? What does she think of me?
    She comes closer and stands in the doorway. She looks at me again but says nothing.
    “Well, so…” I say sheepishly, feeling my face burning.
    I am ashamed because her husband was groping me?
    Birgitta just looks at me. She says nothing but slowly raises her index finger toward me as if to reprimand a disobedient child, or point me out—a guilty person. Then she turns and goes out into the garden without a word.

Stefan loved diving. It had been his passion for more than a decade. When he wasn’t out diving, he was planning his next diving trip with his equally obsessed friends. Great Barrier Reef, the Red Sea, South China Sea, the Gulf of Mexico. Stefan had been all over the world, but there were always new countries to visit, new seas to discover.
    The first few years, I never went diving with him. He knew how afraid I was of the dark and he fully accepted that I wanted to avoid any situation that might lead me beyond the reach of light. Then he slowly started to broach the subject. “Maybe you can do a test dive, at thirty feet it’s still light.”
    I started to seriously consider learning how to dive. This was right at the time I started working as a cognitive behavioral therapist, and the very heart of CBT is to expose yourself to your fears. It is the only way to move past them. So I decided to fulfill his wish.
    I will never forget my first dive. It was on one of our long winter vacations. Stefan took special care to make sure he introduced me to his great passion under the most favorable circumstances. We went to the Maldives. As I stood on the warm white coral sand with the tank on my back, all my doubts vanished. The Indian Ocean gently received me as, unaccustomed to the heavy equipment, I carefully slid into the water.
    The first things I registered were a feeling of weightlessness and the rays of the sun breaking through the surface, forming a moving pattern on the solid sand bottom. Everything was silent, except for a persistent clicking and the hissing and bubbling that my own breathing caused in the regulator. Stefan took my hand and together we swam out to the reef. He was attentive, helping me equalize the pressure as we started swimming deeper. Six feet became twelve, which became twenty-five. We floated along the wall of the reef. Surrounded by millions of fish in all the colors of the rainbow, I felt a stillness I had never experiencedbefore, and I remember thinking that now, only now, do I understand Stefan.
    I received my diving certification and started to accompany Stefan more and more often on his trips, both in Sweden and abroad. We dived in warm, salt, tropical seas, in the turbid waters of the Baltic, in old abandoned mines, in shipwrecks, and in forests of brownish-green kelp billowing along with the waves. As my diving improved, my fear of dark water gradually disappeared.
    Then