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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 A
A
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, A
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 …
A
A
At lunchtime, he was standing at his usual place near the bike racks. A
He wasn’t Abel anymore. He’d turned back into Ta
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 A
“I’m poring over my books,” A
“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’?” A
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.”
A
“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?”
A
“I mean it just as I said it. What do you know about Abel Ta
“Maybe,” A
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,” A
Gitta stared at her, perplexed. “What do these two have to do with anything?”
“That,” A
• • •
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 A
A
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.