The End, page 8
A popping sound by the kitchen counter makes me jump. When I look over, Judette has opened a bottle of champagne.
“I’ve had this lying around for a while now,” she says, and puts four glasses out on the table.
It glugs and fizzes as she pours each of us champagne. Emma declines, filling her glass with nonalcoholic cider, instead. I glance at her, then quickly look away when she meets my eyes, feeling vaguely guilty.
“I don’t know how I feel about condoning . . .” Stina says as Judette tops up my glass.
“You don’t think Simon’s had alcohol before?” Emma smirks and looks at me. “You were still hungover when I got here.”
Stina smiles back at her. Judette is standing behind Stina’s chair. She puts a hand on her shoulder and raises her glass.
“I’d like to make a toast. I’m so happy you’re here, Emma.”
“I’m happy to be here. And Micke says hi, of course.”
Stina pats Judette’s hand and looks up at her. Then she turns to me and Emma. And I know how badly she wants this picture to be true. For us to be a family again.
The champagne flutes clink together.
“Let’s eat!” Stina says after we’ve all had a sip.
We lift our cutlery. Blow on the food we’ve speared on our forks. The potatoes au gratin burn the roof of my mouth. I chew a slice of cucumber, and it helps a little. Judette says the food is lovely. Stina wonders if it needs more salt.
“But adding salt afterward is better,” she says, just like I knew she would. “If the food’s too salty to begin with, there’s nothing you can do about it.”
“That’s so true,” Emma says. “I’ve never thought about it like that before.”
We exchange a look. When I was little, Emma was so good at impersonating Stina that I’d collapse on the floor laughing.
Stina, who would have been a grandmother. Who cried with joy in the kitchen when Emma called us and told us she was pregnant. Who went out the very next day to buy baby clothes and toys. I couldn’t help myself, they’re adorable; look at these tiny shoes.
“I was thinking we could have moose one of these days,” Stina says. “One of my parishioners hunts, and he’d happily swap for some fish rations. Wouldn’t it be nice with a proper Sunday steak?”
I drain my glass, then pour myself some more. Stina looks at me but doesn’t say anything. They start talking about Judette’s job as a waste collector. Emma tells us about Micke’s parents, who help out with home care in Överkalix. Both of them used to be unemployed.
“They’re more energetic than they’ve been in years. I think it makes it easier for Micke to leave.”
I think about Micke. Soon he’ll have to stand on a train platform and say goodbye to his parents for the final time. What do you say in a situation like that? I barely know him. I’m not sure you can get to know him. He’s like Teflon, with his even tan and blue shirts, his superficial talk about his job and sports. I’ve never understood what my sister sees in him. But now I can feel a lump growing in my throat. I take a gulp of champagne. Stina shoots me a glance before turning back to Emma.
“When will he be back?”
“Next week, as long as the trains from Luleå keep running.”
“They wouldn’t cancel them without warning.”
Emma plays with the base of her glass.
“No,” she says. “No, I guess not.”
“And you know you’re both very welcome here,” says Stina.
“I know. We’ll see what he says when he comes back.”
“Yes, only if Micke wants to, of course,” Stina says quickly. “It would just be so nice to have the two of you here.”
Mom, stop. This is how you run people off. Can’t you tell?
“How are you otherwise?” Judette asks.
“I haven’t thrown up all day,” Emma says with a jazz hands ta-da.
“I was the same when I was expecting you,” Stina says. “I thought morning sickness sounded like a dream. I was sick constantly.”
Emma laughs.
“I definitely don’t feel like I’m glowing, that’s for sure.”
“Did you feel sick when you were pregnant with me?” I ask Judette.
She grins. “Not even once.”
“I found it pretty aggravating.” The champagne has made Stina’s cheeks rosy.
“You made us all sick when you came out instead,” Emma informs me.
We laugh. And everything almost feels normal.
“I think Tiny’s kicking now,” Emma says. “Or maybe it’s just gas.”
Stina places her hand on Emma’s stomach, and her eyes immediately well up with tears. “Yes. It’s kicking,” she confirms, and smiles.
“God, I can’t wait to meet him,” Emma says. “Or her. But I think it’s going to be a boy.”
I swallow the potatoes in my mouth. Judette shoots me a warning look. Don’t argue with her.
“Micke wanted us to find out,” Emma continues. “He’s always so practical, you know. He wants to know what color the baby’s things should be. But I think it should be a surprise. And it’s not like I want everything to be pink or pale blue, anyway.”
“No, of course not,” Stina says, hastily wiping her cheeks dry.
“Micke’s so old-fashioned about things like that,” Emma continues. “We still don’t know what kind of child it will be, regardless of gender. I mean, if you know in advance, you might just end up with a lot of outdated expectations.”
I can’t listen to this. I stand up and start clearing the table. Let the tap run as I rinse the plates. They clatter loudly as I fill up the dishwasher and turn on the coffee maker. My pulse rushes in my ears, pounds dully in the wound by my eyebrow.
When I’m finished and rejoin them at the table, Stina’s talking about the church. Her voice has steadied and grown more reassuring. Calmer. And I wonder if her voice reflects how she feels about it. In that case, I understand why she loves to work.
“It’s really not that different from the conversations I’ve had with people who’ve received a fatal diagnosis or lost a loved one,” she says. “It’s the same questions and feelings. What’s the point of it all? Who do I want to be in the time that I have left? What happens afterward?”
She looks at the bubbles rising in her glass.
“But there’s one important difference. And that’s the fact that no one is alone in this. We’re all affected. I think there’s a comfort in that, too, even though it’s difficult for most people to admit.”
I have a vision of Lucinda’s downy hair under her hat. I wonder what it’s like to have been “the cancer girl” for so long and suddenly just be a person again. Everyone has the same death sentence now.
Is she afraid of dying, or is she used to the idea of it? Can you ever get used to it?
“Hunger is easier to endure if you don’t have to see people stuffing themselves,” Stina goes on. “At least this is . . . fair.”
She starts talking about the final night. Stina is holding a service from midnight to when Foxworth smashes into us at four in the morning on September 16. She has to find the right words—the words people want to hear—while the minutes pass.
“So, no pressure, huh?” Emma says.
And I wonder how my sister’s brain works. How does she go from talking about the baby like it’s actually being born to talking about our imminent death?
I reach for my phone on the windowsill, looking at a new photo Tilda’s posted today, a close-up of her face. She’s smiling wearily at the camera.
HI, LOVELIES. TAKING A BREAK FROM EVERYTHING FOR A WHILE, SO DON’T WORRY IF YOU DON’T HEAR FROM ME. GOT A LOT TO THINK ABOUT. SEE YOU SOON.
“Simon,” Judette says. “Put that away, will you?”
“Okay.”
But I look at the picture for a few more seconds. Hope flutters stubbornly inside me. Tilda wasn’t at the party last night. Neither was Johannes. Amanda barely spoke to me. I don’t know what’s going on. But maybe it doesn’t matter.
There is a possibility that I’m one of those things Tilda has to think about. Maybe she’s realized that she misses me.
NAME: LUCINDA
TELLUS #0392811002
ENTRY 0010
Another thing, if I’m going to be honest: in my first post, I wrote that I felt relief, or something like relief, over Foxworth. I meant it then, but right now, I hate the person who wrote that post. I want to take it back, but it’s already in the system. Has already been beamed into space. I hope you don’t judge me too harshly.
The most difficult thing about being sick hasn’t been the fear of death. It’s been knowing how much I would miss out on. The Earth would keep spinning, the seasons would come and go.
Without me.
I wouldn’t know what Miranda was like when she grew up. I wouldn’t be there when she and Dad did things together; I wouldn’t fall in love or hear new music or find out how my favorite TV shows end. And a small part of me—a small and revolting part of me—thought, Now I won't miss out on anything. I'll see how it ends.
So, yes. I felt a relief of sorts.
I might as well make another confession while I’m at it: I don’t know what to do with myself. When I was sick, everything revolved around survival. Now I suddenly have to choose how to spend my last few weeks, and I have no idea. People keep talking about seizing the day. What a sick fucking requirement that is. Nothing gives me more anxiety. When I got cancer, I didn’t miss adventures, or traveling, or things like that. I missed staying in bed all day, binge-watching movies. I even missed being bored. You have to feel pretty good to be bored.
And you have to assume you’re going to be bored in the future, too.
Predictably, that whole seize the day thing blew up this summer. There’s a Bucket List app that people connect to their social media. You can’t travel particularly far anymore, or treat yourself to expensive things, or take a class—things people would have put on the list before. But my social media is filling up with messages like: Elin Bergmark has completed two items on her Bucket List today: Write a poem about someone she likes and read it aloud to him/her! Tell someone she’s in love with him/her! People are dancing naked in the rain. Saying yes to everything for a whole day. Smashing electric guitars like rock stars. Asking people to punch them, just to find out how it feels.
There’s a page called the FuckIt List, too. It isn’t connected to social media, so fortunately, I don’t have to find out when my relatives or old teachers attend their first swingers party.
3 WEEKS, 6 DAYS LEFT
NAME: LUCINDA
TELLUS #0392811002
POST 0011
Ihad a fight with Dad. I’m so angry I’m shaking. And it all started with flower bulbs.
This morning, our neighbor, Gill, came by in a gardening hat and muddy clothes, asking if we wanted some bulbs from her garden. She talked about the flowers she was planting, how beautiful they’d look come next spring.
Gill used to babysit Miranda and me when Mom died and Dad started working again. She was kind, but so unpredictable I could never relax around her. One moment, she’d be spoiling us with candy and taking us for rides, the next she’d be weeping into her coffee at some roadside café, loudly asking herself what would become of us without our mother. Now Gill is one of the comet deniers. Whenever Foxworth comes up, she chuckles indulgently and says, “Well, well. We’ll see what happens when the sun rises on September sixteenth and nothing’s happened.”
Dad accepted the bulbs, listened patiently to Gill’s instructions about light and shade and north and south. When she’d left, he said that he envied her.
He said that it must be nice to shut your eyes sometimes. He talked about the comet deniers as though they were harmless ostriches that should be left alone to stick their heads in the sand. But I’m so sick of them. They’re idiots who are taking up way too much space in the media because “both sides need to be heard.” But there aren’t two sides to this. We’re going to die. The deniers pollute social media with their high-handedness and contempt, raging over how messy the world’s become since we fell for the “hoax.” Today, I saw that some of them wanted to stop TellUs, because the transmissions could attract hostile aliens.
And now the deniers caused a fight between me and my dad. He said that there wasn’t anything wrong with wanting to retain a bit of hope. But the deniers aren’t hopeful. They’re a pain in the ass. They’re arrogant, and they can’t be ignored. And they’re not harmless. They’re people who lie to themselves, who think everything is going to be fine, who won’t help out during the current crisis.
That was when I brought up what things had been like at the beginning of the summer. So many people needed help. In this town alone, there were homeless men and women who couldn’t get back to their families, and we had so much more than most. If Dad had done something those few days, while currency still mattered, we could have made a difference.
“Back then, we weren’t even sure we’d get hit,” Dad said.
“What were we going to do without money if the comet just harmlessly passed us by?” I exploded. I never said that we should give away everything, and he knows it. And I realized that I’d been angry at him all summer without having admitted it to myself.
We’ve avoided real arguments since I got sick. Today, it was as if everything came out at once. All my frustrations over a thousand things, both big and small. And I even used the most forbidden tactic: “What do you think Mom would say if she knew how selfish you’re being?”
It was so manipulative of me. I don’t actually know what Mom would have said. I was so little when she died.
Dad stormed out of the house, and the sound of the front door slamming shut behind him was the most satisfying thing I’d ever heard.
That feeling lasted for about five seconds. Then I noticed that my hands were trembling and I heard Miranda crying in her room. I still feel bad about it. For her, not Dad.
SIMON
This morning, Tilda sent me a koala emoji. I’m trying not to get my hopes up; maybe the koala doesn’t mean anything in particular to her anymore. But I couldn’t help asking Johannes if she’d said anything to Amanda about me. He replied that he had no idea. From the briefness of his message, I could tell he’s getting sick of me, of this. And I get it. I’m so fucking sick of myself.
I put my elbows on the handle of the shopping cart and push, rolling away across the speckled tiles of the supermarket floor. I gaze over Swedish apples and carrots, bundles of celery and onions, plums and bags of spinach. The absence of prices on the signs still strikes me as weird.
Our planet is doing better than it has in a long time. We’re no longer shipping food and other resources back and forth across the globe. Factories that gulped down energy and spewed out waste, like hundreds of thousands of Lucinda’s pooping giants, have shut down. We’ve stopped flying and rarely drive, and we waste only a fraction of the electricity we used to.
If we’d lived like this before, we might even have saved the environment.
All it took was a comet.
Tilda said I spent too much time stressing out over things I couldn’t change. I used to start every morning reaching for my phone and reading the news. And every morning, I hated myself for it. It was like drowning. It all seemed connected. One piece of bad news led to another—the apocalypse in slow motion.
Judette comes up to me and throws a jar of pickles and lingonberry jam in the cart. My eyes go to one of the lids, marked with an expiration date that will never come.
“They’re almost out of tomatoes,” I say.
“We only need potatoes. Stina is making steak this weekend.”
“You mean a real Sunday dinner?”
Judette raises an eyebrow. “So? What’s wrong with that?”
“There’s nothing wrong with it, but she made it sound like . . . I don’t know. We’ve never had that before, have we?”
Judette sighs. Suddenly, I can tell just how tired she is. Last night, I overheard her crying in the bathroom.
“You could cut Stina some slack, you know,” she says. “She’s really trying.”
“I know.”
I lean over the handle again and roll away. Why don’t I cut Stina some slack? Why do her efforts make me so uncomfortable? The answer might be obvious. They say we’re always bothered by people who remind us of the things we don’t like about ourselves.
I wait until Judette catches up with me, carrying a bag of potatoes in her arms like a baby. We walk past the meat section, which looks unchanged. I wonder who spends their final weeks volunteering at a slaughterhouse. The dairy section is well stocked, too, even though the cartons look different, and there’s less of a selection than there used to be.
We grab flour and oil off the shelves. There are hardly any brands I recognize left. The government-issue packages simply state what’s inside. Dark green text, white background. No photos of billowing rapeseed fields, no drawings of ears of wheat stretching toward the sky.
“What’s wrong with Emma?” I say, and jump onto the cart again. “I thought it would pass.”
Judette grabs the handle. “I’m in charge of this now.”
“But seriously. She’s acting like the baby’s really coming.”
“So what?” Judette says, and takes hold of the shopping cart.
“She’s sick.”
“Or she’s healthier than any of us.”
“But she’s lying to herself! And how can Micke stand it? It would have been his kid, too.”
We stop by the canned goods. Judette turns toward me, appearing to consider something.
“Maybe he can’t,” she says.
“Can’t what?”
“Stand it. It seems like he might be staying in Överkalix.”
My shock must be written all over my face, because Judette’s features soften.
“How do you know?” I ask her.
“We talked to him this morning. Emma doesn’t know.”
