Free The Cold Song by Linn Ullmann Page A

almost the same age, you two.”
    Alma looked at her feet, ran a hand over her bangs.
    “No, we’re not,” she said, “I’ll be thirteen soon, actually.”
    “Yes, well anyway,” his mother said. “Simen has his friends to hang out with and doesn’t need a babysitter. But thanks for offering. Talk to you soon.”
    Alma looked at Simen’s mother.
    “Yeah, but will you, though?” she asked.
    Simen’s mother was already closing the door on her, now she opened it again.
    “Will I what, Alma?”
    “Talk to me soon!” Alma said. “Will you? Or was that just something you said?”
    Simen’s mother gave a little laugh. It was the first time Alma had ever seen her laugh. She had a nice smile. They looked at each other.
    “A bit of both maybe,” Simen’s mother said. “I’m pretty certain I’ll talk to you soon, I mean we are neighbors during the summer and bound to be bumping into each other. But yes, it was also something I just said. Okay?”
    The summer before, though, Alma had been paid two hundred kroner to mind Simen for four hours. For the first hour Simen had been at home with Alma, at Mailund. He had thought it great fun to run up and down the big stairway that went from the basement to the attic (and counting the stairs—twenty-seven) where Jon worked. Then they had played dress up in Alma’s room and Alma had brushed his long blond hair and then he had started screaming and protesting like a little girl. After a while Jenny emerged from her room upstairs and told Alma and Simen it was time they went out or found something else to do, she’d had enough of them running up and down the stairs and screaming inside the house, they were getting on her nerves.
    Siri was about to leave for work, which meant that Jon would soon have to stop writing in order to take his turn with the children. That was the arrangement the summer before Milla. They split the day between them. Before Siri left she made up a picnic basket for Alma and Simen. Sandwiches, apple cake, and red lemonade. Liv wasn’t allowed to go with them. She was too young.
    “Don’t go near the lake,” Siri told Alma.
    “No, no,” Alma said. “We know.”
    “And take good care of Simen,” Siri said. “Don’t let him wander off, out of your sight.” Then she stroked Simen’s head and said, “Hi, Simen, how are you today?”
    “Fine,” Simen mumbled.
    Alma rolled her eyes. Her mother always had to interfere.
    “
I’m
the babysitter, you know,” she whispered. “Why are you always interfering?”
    So Alma and Simen went off to the woods and ate their picnic by the lake. It was possible to swim there, as long as you watched out for the water lilies, and Alma told Simen about the time when Syver had drowned somewhere around here years ago, and then she tipped her red lemonade into the water. She didn’t like red lemonade. How many times had she told her mother that she didn’t like red lemonade? She only liked the regular kind. Not the red stuff. Red lemonade tasted like puke. But, and Alma said none of this to Simen, her mother didn’t listen. Siri never listened to anything Alma said. Siri probably wished she’d never had Alma. Alma looked out across the lake. Simen sat close beside her and she told him about Syver, and as she went on the story changed into a kind of fairy tale. She liked it that Simen listened to her, that he pressed close against her and listened.
    IT WAS IMPERCEPTIBLE and almost painless. The way she divided herself in two, sometimes in four. She was about three or four years old the first time it happened, and she remembered feeling dizzy—as though she had inhaled an invisible gas. After Syver disappeared, she ran through the woods to the lake looking for him, and it was as if one Siri remained standing by that still, water-lilied surface (and never left), while the other went home to get help.
    The year before he drowned she said that he wasn’t the only one, just one of many.
    “I have lots of