Free The American Girl by Monika Fagerholm Page A

and Lorelei Lindberg “discussed.” When they had “discussed” they started arguing. The Islander and Lorelei Lindberg loved to fight but had a silent agreement that this fact should not be revealed. If you did not fight for real then you could not make up for real afterward. And the best thing about fighting was making up. And then no one was allowed to bother them.
    It was just when the fighting had reached its culmination that the nauseous feeling that could not be stopped welled up inside the little girl. And then hallucinations brought on by the drunkenness and the hangover, followed in a state between sleep and consciousness, a pounding headache and stomach pumping at a hospital where black-clothed nun-nurses with troubled expressions kept watch over the little harelipped girl.
    But still, this was in any case indisputable. One morning, not the next one but maybe the one after, the storm had abated and there was sun and it was clear again and it was probably pretty late although Lorelei Lindberg was still lying in bed, asleep. The Islander shook Sandra, waking her where she was lying on the sofa in the big room that was almost a suite (“It’s ALMOST a suite” was, among other things, the sort of thing her parents had the habit of arguing about). The Islander indicated she should be quiet and get dressed quickly and come with him. And out with the girl again and before she knew it she and theIslander were back on the wretched promenade again, this time in a real taxi.
    “This is going to be our home,” the Islander said and pointed over the field at the same house whose magic power had not been banished.
    “Here?” Sandra asked weak at the knees and for a moment she thought, despite her young age, she understood all of those people who drink themselves into a stupor to avoid coming face-to-face with reality. And she tried to put all the hesitation and all the resistance she could muster in this little “here?” But it was obviously not much. Her head continued to pound in the sunshine, her angel had been buried for good, her angel, other people’s angels, everyone’s angels, and now a completely neutral sun was shining from the clear and soaring sky again, a sky that was extremely indifferent toward them.
    “Not here,” the Islander said impatiently. “In our home country of course. Come, let’s go and ring the bell. I need to take some pictures.”
    They had waded through the snow, first the Islander, then his daughter. Sandra had straggled behind anyway, perhaps deliberately. Everything was crazy, all of it, and it was spiraling in her head and her stomach was knotting up too. She saw how the Islander ran up the long stairs and rang the bell. And what was it? Some kind of alpine march suddenly started playing loudly in the idyllic nature. In other words, it was the doorbell.
    Thrilled, the Islander yelled from the landing where he was standing, “What a gizmo!” down to his daughter, who was not the least bit enthusiastic. He waited and waited, the song died out, no one opened.
    The Islander had to manage with the camera by himself as best he could, so it turned out that he captured only the outside of the house on his roll of film.
    And soon he was busy with the camera:
click, click, click
, and
click
.
    The girl closed her eyes because of the dizziness, and suddenly, she saw an alpine villa next to a muddy marsh in front ofher. A house with a decomposing façade and a long staircase. And a woman who fell down the staircase, rolling violently down all the gray, concrete steps. Then coming to rest on the ground like a dead person.
    Driven to the hospital, stitches in the neck with a stitch called butterfly.
    And inside the house, in the basement, a swimming pool without water. And there was someone who was running in it, back and forth between the two short sides. Running and running, arms making swimming strokes in the empty air in front of her.
    Imaginary swimming. That she was the child, she