CHAPTER THREE
When I said that nothing that terrible haunted me, I meant it. I was still haunted but by less terrible things.
There was the time I saw twin boys appear behind me when I was walking home from St?va’s. They never said anything, they just stood there with their pale faces and stared at me. It made me uneasy, to put it mildly, and they followed me down the road. It was only near my house that they ceased to exist, literally shimmering away like the air above hot pavement.
Another time I was serving detention after English Language class. I can’t remember what for but I was a particularly rambunctious student and had a hard time sitting still. To my teacher we were alone however I was very much aware of an older boy in the corner of the room. At first he tried to get my attention by calling my name over and over again. The teacher never noticed so I had to assume he was a spirit of some kind. It helped that his eyes were bright purple with no pupils to mar the blank slate. Very unnatural.
When I continued to ignore him, he worked his way up to spitballs, flinging them in my hair. It was curious because the spitballs were real and stayed in my hair until I found some of them later that night. Finally, the boy gave up and left the room, a trail of shiny blood following him out the door. I watched my teacher carefully to see if he saw anything at all. He only shivered as the boy passed him by and didn’t even bat an eye when the door opened and the bloody nuisance stepped out.
Little incidents like this happened all the time and I went on ignoring them. I didn’t know what they wanted but when I was in public, it was wrong to ask them. Small town mentality existed back then and I did not want to be branded as the minister’s crazy daughter.
At any rate, I had the theatre to keep me company. I joined the tiny drama club with the aim of putting on A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream by the year end. With my perseverance I won the role of Helena and wouldn’t you know it but St?va got the part of Demetrius. We were sixteen now and he had grown into quite the handsome young man, something I had never noticed until I was in the play with him. Surely I had noticed the way some of the girls my age would drool over him, but to me he was always the boy next door, the goat boy, my closest and dearest friend.
That all changed when we decided to go for a walk after school to discuss the play. We stayed clear of the woods as we usually did and strolled along the edge of the lake until our path turned upward into rolling hills of rye that waved in the breeze.
It was October and very cold but the sun was strong and heated my skin that wasn’t wrapped in shawls and wool. The sky was as wide as a dome with that surreal blue that contrasted with yellow fields, just like the country’s flag.
“Pippa,” St?va said, his voice low and his brow knotted. I stopped and looked at him, not used to seeing him look so grave.
He reached out for my hand and grasped it tightly. My mouth opened and a tiny “oh” came out, though I wasn’t really sure what was going on. Were we rehearsing?
“We have to be young lovers,” St?va continued. I nodded. His eyes were filled with fear and something else I had never seen before. I had never seen lust on a man. It was so very different from the big doe-eyes the girls would give him.
“Yes. For the play,” I told him.
His eyes narrowed slightly but were tempered by a lazy smile. “Yes, for the play.”
“Are you nervous?” I asked. I suddenly was. My eyes dropped from his strange expression and focused on his long fingers curling around my own.
“Very,” he whispered. I still didn’t look up. The dynamic between us, between best friends who shared everything and were as comfortable around each other as worn socks, had changed. I didn’t like to feel nervous because of St?va and I didn’t want him to be nervous because of me.
“We can act. We are actors,” I said quietly. I took my eyes away from our hands and looked at the yellow grass at my feet.
“We don’t have to,” he said and he took his other hand under my chin and tipped it up so I was forced to meet his eyes. Before I could process what was happening, his lips were on mine. It wasn’t easy – it was both our first kiss. Our teeth knocked against each other and his nose pressed uncomfortably against my cheek.
I wish I could say that the kisses improved after that. They didn’t. But I had figured that was the way things were. I had no frame of reference, after all. Oh, I didn’t mind when St?va kissed me or touched me but I didn’t feel the way he felt. I didn’t have the girly deer eyes and I didn’t have that lustful look that was always on his face.
Nor did I feel anything the first time we made love. I say made love because I truly did love St?va with all my heart, but it was a different kind of love. It was more brotherly than anything else. Though sex had been ingrained my head as morally wrong by my father, I broke the rules and decided to bed St?va in his hayloft one balmy summer night. I hoped by doing so, the way I felt about him would change, that I would awaken some sexual being in my 17-year old soul.
All it ended up doing was awakening my fertility.
I ended up pregnant.
I figured it out after missing my monthly red visit and being sick for days on end. I didn’t tell my parents, knowing how they’d feel about it. I didn’t tell St?va either. I knew there would be no point.
Children were something that I eventually wanted. But there were so many more things I wanted before then. I wanted to live. I wanted to spread my wings and get out of this small, dead place. I wanted to move to Stockholm and experience the city life. I wanted to take my acting and apply to somewhere that counted; not a tiny school but a theatre with paying patrons and lavish seating. I wanted that life first. Then I would work on what was expected of me. It’s not that I didn’t want to fall in love and start a family. I just wanted the choice of when.
If I told St?va I was pregnant, he would make me go through with it and I loved him enough to do so. He already talked about us getting married. If I wanted that life, being a farmer’s wife in a small town, maybe doing the occasional play in between pregnancies, then I would have been thrilled. Any girl would be so lucky to have St?va as a husband and the father of their children. But I wasn’t any girl. Far, far from it.
I got rid of the seed inside me by paying a visit to the local witch. This sounds fantastic, I know, but there is no way to describe her. Some said she was just the local whore, others said she made potions and powders when she practiced witchcraft, others said she was a holistic, natural doctor. All I knew was that she lived alone in a cottage in the high woods, where tall trees climbed upward into rocky outcrops and that no one said her name in public. They just called her “h?xa” or The Witch.
There was a single dirt path that led the way, the age-old grooves in the dirt from hundreds of years of horse and donkey-drawn carts. I was frightened to death of going to see her but the prospect of having a child and being tied to the town was even more frightening.
The woman’s name was actually Maria and even though she was intimidating with her wild white hair and rough mannerisms, she was rather nice. She made me up a tonic to put into tea, a combination of local sage, leaves and other herbs. She warned me against the pain and the bleeding but didn’t pass any judgment on me for asking for it. It was like she understood where I was coming from and an expression of pride passed through her tired eyes when I told her my plans for the future. I was glad my secret was safe with her and hers – that she probably was a whore, judging by the man who came knocking on her door while I was there – was safe with me.
The next month was a blur. I passed the seed in the lake on a clear evening. The sun had just gone down enough past midnight that no one would see me if they were looking. I didn’t like the idea of being in the water still, but as soon as the bleeding became nonstop, I felt it was the cleanest choice. I was afraid of what the smell of all that blood would attract from deep inside the woods. I suffered through the pain I deserved.
After that, it was time to go back to school. I had other plans. The abortion ravaged me with guilt daily and the longer I stayed where I was, living with my parents, going to school, going steady with St?va, the more I felt guilty for what I had done. If I was going to go through such a selfish event, I had better follow through with my reasoning. Otherwise what was the point?
And so I dropped out of school just as we came into the last year and decided to head to Stockholm to pursue my dream. Maybe then the guilt would stop clawing at me.
My decision came as a shock to everyone I knew. St?va wouldn’t come with me and didn’t understand how I could leave him. Neither did any of my classmates or teachers – to them, we were the perfect couple. My parents were livid. They told me that if I left I would not have a home to come back to when I returned. In other words, they disowned me. I expected as much from my father and didn’t really care what he thought but my mother’s actions surprised me. I suppose she was so hurt that I would leave them that I didn’t deserve to be her daughter. I am still not sure if that’s true or not. On good days I think my mother was wrong to shun me like that. On bad days, I couldn’t really blame her. At least it prepared me for a pattern that would endure for the rest of my life. Looking back, I wonder where my “karma” began to fester. Was it when I had the abortion? Or was it when I selfishly abandoned my only love and family?
I left the place of my childhood with nothing on my back but a small sack full of belongings. I can still tell you what was in there: Two dresses, one fancier than the other. A tube of red lipstick for “acting” purposes. A clip for my hair. My nightgown, corset, stockings and two pairs of bloomers. A copy of Dante’s Inferno in English to help my language skills (I nicked it from the school library). A tiny notebook and pencil. A handful of licorice.
I didn’t have any money and was planning to hitch rides to the big city, but St?va surprised me and borrowed his father’s car to drive me to nearest train station. It was about an hour away and together we had our last ride together. He didn’t say much to me but I could see how I was breaking his poor heart. It absolutely tore me up inside and I when he hugged me goodbye – slipping a wad of kronas in my pocket for the train and a few nights in a hotel – I broke down in tears. As emotional as I was on the inside, my steely reserve finally collapsed and in his arms.
“I don’t understand you,” he whispered into my ear as I choked back the tears that wouldn’t stop coming. “But I hope you find what you’re looking for.”
And with that ringing in my ears, I got on the train and left my old life behind for good.