The Nightmare (2 page)

Penelope Fernandez comes from La Libertad, one of the largest provinces in El Salvador. She was born in a jail cell, her mother attended by fifteen female prisoners doing their best as midwives. There was a civil war going on, and Claudia Fernandez, a doctor and activist, had landed in the regime’s infamous prison for encouraging the indigenous population to form unions.

Penelope opens her eyes as she reaches the platform. Her claustrophobic feeling has passed. She thinks about Björn waiting for her at the motorboat club on Långholmen. She loves skinny-dipping from his boat, diving straight into the water, seeing nothing but sea and sky.

She steps onto the subway, which rumbles on, gently swaying, until it breaks out into the open as it reaches the station at Gamla Stan and sunlight streams in through the windows.

Like her mother, Penelope is an activist and her passionate opposition to war and violence led her to get her master’s in political science at Uppsala University with a specialty in peace and conflict resolution. She’s worked for the French aid organization Action Contre la Faim in Darfur, southern Sudan, with Jane Oduya, and her article for
Dagens Nyheter
, on the women of the refugee camp and their struggles to regain normalcy after every attack, brought broad recognition. Two years ago, she followed Frida Blom as the spokesperson for the Swedish Peace and Reconciliation Society.

Leaving the subway at the Hornstull station, Penelope feels uneasy again, extremely uneasy, without knowing why. She runs down the hill to Söder Mälarstrand, then walks quickly over the bridge to Långholmen and follows the road to the small harbor. The dust she kicks up from the gravel creates a haze in the still air.

Björn’s boat is in the shade directly underneath Väster Bridge. The movement of the water dapples the gray girders with a network of light.

Penelope spots Björn on the afterdeck. He’s got on his cowboy hat, and he stands stock-still, shoulders bent, with his arms wrapped closely about him. Sticking two fingers in her mouth, she lets loose a whistle, startling him, and he turns toward her with a face naked with fear. And it’s still there in his eyes when she climbs down the stairs to the dock. “What’s wrong?” she asks.

“Nothing,” he answers, as he straightens his hat and tries to smile.

As they hug, she notices his hands are ice-cold and the back of his shirt is damp.

“You’re covered in sweat.”

Björn avoids her eyes. “It’s been stressful getting ready to go.”

“Bring my bag?”

He nods and gestures toward the cabin. The boat rocks gently under her feet and the air smells of lacquered wood and sun-warmed plastic.

“Hello? Anybody home?” she asks, tapping his head.

His clear blue eyes are childlike and his straw-colored hair sticks out in tight dreadlocks from under the hat. “I’m here,” he says. But he looks away.

“What are you thinking about? Where’s your mind gone to?”

“Just that we’re finally heading off together,” he answers as he wraps his arms around her waist. “And that we’ll be having sex out in nature.”

He buries his lips in her hair.

“So that’s what you’re dreaming of,” she whispers.

“Yes.”

She laughs at his honesty.

“Most people … women, I mean, think that sex outdoors is a bit overrated,” she says. “Lying on the ground among ants and stones and—”

“No. No. It’s just like swimming naked,” he insists.

“You’ll have to convince me,” she teases.

“I’ll do that, all right.”

“How?” She’s laughing as the phone rings in her cloth bag.

Björn stiffens when he hears the signal. Penelope glances at the display.

“It’s Viola,” she says reassuringly before answering. “
Hola
, Sis.”

A car horn blares over the line as her sister yells in its direction. “
Fucking idiot
.”

“Viola, what’s going on?”

“It’s over. I’ve dumped Sergei.”

“Not again!” Penelope says.

“Yes, again,” says Viola, noticeably depressed.

“Sorry,” Penelope says. “I can tell you’re upset.”

“Well, I’ll be all right I guess. But … Mamma said you were going out on the boat and I thought … maybe I could come, too, if you don’t mind…”

A moment of silence.

“Sure, you can come, too,” Penelope says, although she hears her own lack of enthusiasm. “Björn and I need some time to ourselves, but…”

2

the pursuer

Penelope stands at the helm. An airy blue sarong is wrapped around her hips and there’s a peace sign on the right breast of her white bikini top. Spring sunlight pours through the windshield as she carefully rounds Kungshamn lighthouse and maneuvers the large motorboat into the narrow sound.

Her younger sister, Viola, gets up from the pink recliner on the afterdeck. For the past hour, she’s been lying back in Björn’s cowboy hat and enormous sunglasses, languidly smoking a joint.

Five times she tries to pick up a matchbox from the floor with her toes. Penelope can’t help smiling. Viola walks into the cockpit and offers to take the wheel for a while. “Otherwise, I’ll go downstairs and make myself a margarita,” she says, as she continues down the stairs.

Björn is lying on the foredeck, a paperback copy of Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
put to use as his pillow. Penelope notices that the railing near his feet is rusting. The boat was a present from his father for his twentieth birthday, but Björn hasn’t had the money to keep it up. It was the only gift his father ever gave him, except one time when his father paid for a trip. When Björn’s father turned fifty, he invited Björn and Penelope to one of his finest properties, a five-star hotel called Kamaya Resort on the east coast of Kenya. Penelope endured the resort for two days before she took off to join Action Contre la Faim at the refugee camp in Kubbum, Darfur.

Penelope reduces speed from eight to five knots as they reach the bridge at Skuru Sound. They’ve just glided into the shadows when Penelope notices the black rubber boat. Pressed against the concrete foundation, it’s the same kind the military uses for their coastal rangers: an RIB with a fiberglass hull and extremely powerful engines. Penelope has almost passed beneath the bridge when she notices a man hunched in the darkness, his back turned. She doesn’t know why her pulse starts to race at the sight of him; something about his neck and the black clothes he wears bothers her. She feels he’s watching her even though he sits turned away.

Back into sunshine, she starts to shiver; goose bumps cover her arms. She guns the boat to fifteen knots. The two inboard engines drone powerfully, and the wake streams white behind them as the boat takes off over the smooth surface of the water.

Penelope’s phone rings. It’s her mother. For a moment Penelope fantasizes that she’s calling to tell Penelope how wonderful she’d been on TV earlier, but she snaps back to reality.

“Hi, Mamma.”

“
Ay
,
ay
.”

“What’s wrong?”

“My back. I’ll have to go to the chiropractor,” Claudia says, loudly filling a glass with tap water. “I just wanted to learn if you’ve talked to your sister.”

“She’s on the boat with us,” Penelope replies, listening to her mother gulp the water down.

“She’s with you … how nice. I thought it would be good for her to get out.”

“I’m sure it is,” Penelope says quietly.

“What do you have to eat?”

“Pickled herring and potatoes, eggs—”

“Viola doesn’t like herring. What else do you have?”

“I’ve made a few meatballs,” Penelope says patiently.

“Enough for everyone?”

Penelope falls silent as she looks out over the water. “I can always skip them myself,” she says, collecting herself.

“Only if there aren’t enough,” her mother says. “That’s all I’m trying to say.”

“I understand.”

“Am I supposed to be feeling sorry for you now?” her mother demands with irritation.

“It’s just that … Viola is not a child—”

“I remember all the years I made you meatballs for Christmas and Midsummer and—”

“Maybe I shouldn’t have eaten them.”

“All right then,” her mother says sharply. “If that’s the way you want it.”

“I’m just trying to say—”

“You don’t have to come for Midsummer,” Claudia snaps.

“Oh, Mamma, why do you have to—”

Her mother has hung up. Penelope shakes with frustration.

The stairs from the galley creak and a moment later Viola appears, a margarita in hand. “Was that Mamma?”

“Yes, it was.”

“Worried I wouldn’t get enough to eat?” Viola can’t hide a smile.

“Believe me, we have food on board,” Penelope says.

“Mamma doesn’t believe I can take care of myself.”

“She worries about you.”

“She never worries about you,” Viola points out.

“I can take care of myself.”

Viola takes a sip of her drink and looks out through the windshield.

“I saw you on TV,” she says.

“This morning? When I met Pontus Salman?”

“No, it was … last week,” Viola replies. “You were talking to that arrogant man with the aristocratic name—”

“Palmcrona,” Penelope says.

“Palmcrona, right.”

“You can’t believe how angry he made me! I could feel my face turning beet red, and the tears strated coming and I couldn’t stop them. I felt like jumping up and reciting Bob Dylan’s ‘Masters of War’ to his face, or like running out and slamming the studio door behind me.”

Viola’s only half listening. She watches Penelope stretch as she opens the roof window. “I didn’t realize you’ve started to shave your armpits,” she says.

“Well, these days I’ve been in the media so much that—”

“Vanity, pure vanity!” Viola says with a laugh.

“I didn’t want people to dismiss me as a dogmatist just because I have some pit hair.”

“What about your bikini line, then?”

“Well, that’s not going so well…”

Penelope pulls aside her sarong and Viola laughs out loud.

“Björn likes it,” Penelope says with a little smile.

“He can’t talk, not with those dreads of his.”

“I imagine you shave everywhere you have to,” Penelope says sharply. “Just to please your married men and your big-muscled idiots and—”

“I know I have bad taste in men.”

“You have good taste in most other areas.”

“I’ve never amounted to much, though.”

“If you’d just finished school, gotten good grades…”

Viola shrugs. “I actually got my equivalency.”

The boat plows gently through the water, green now, reflecting the surrounding hillsides. Seagulls follow overhead.

“So, how did it go?”

“I thought the exam was easy,” Viola says, licking salt from the edge of her glass.

“So it went well?”

Viola nods and puts her glass down.

“How well?” Penelope nudges her sister in her side.

“One hundred percent.” Viola looks down modestly.

Penelope laughs with happiness and hugs her sister hard.

“Do you realize what this means? Now you can be anything you want! You can go to whichever university you want and study anything you like! You can pick anything at all! Business, medicine, journalism!”

The sisters laugh and their cheeks flush. Penelope hugs her sister so hard that the cowboy hat falls off. She smoothes Viola’s hair and pats it into place just as she used to do when they were small. She removes the clip with the peace dove from her hair and slides it into her sister’s, smiling contentedly.

3

a boat adrift in jungfrufjärden bay

With roaring engines, Penelope steers toward the bay. The bow arches up; white, frothy water parts behind the stern.

“You’ve lost your mind, girl!” Viola yells as she pulls the hair clip loose, just as she used to do when she was little and her mother
almost
had her hair done.

Björn wakes up when they stop at Goose Island for an ice cream. Viola insists on a round of miniature golf, too, so it’s late in the afternoon when they set out again.

On their port side, the bay spreads out like a grand stone floor. It is breathtaking. The plan is to anchor at Kastskär, a long, uninhabited island with a narrow waist. On the southern side, there is a lush cove where they’ll anchor the boat and swim, grill, and spend the night.

Viola yawns. “I’m going below to take a nap.”

“Go ahead.” Penelope smiles.

Viola walks down the companionway as Penelope stares ahead. She reduces the speed and keeps her eye on the depth sounder as they glide in toward Kastskär. The water is shoaling quickly from forty meters to five.

Björn enters the cockpit and kisses Penelope’s neck.

“Would you like me to start dinner?” he asks.

“Viola needs to sleep for an hour or so.”

“You sound just like your mother right now,” he says softly. “Has she called you yet?”

Penelope nods.

“Did you have a fight?”

Tears spring to her eyes and she brushes them from her cheeks with a smile.

“Mamma told me I wasn’t welcome at her Midsummer celebration.”

Björn hugs her.

“Ignore her.”

“I do.”

Slowly and gently, Penelope maneuvers the boat into the innermost part of the cove. The engines rumble softly. The boat is so close to land now that she can smell the island’s damp vegetation. They anchor, let it drag, and go in toward the shore. Björn jumps onto the steep, rocky ground holding the line, which he ties around a tree trunk.

The ground is covered in moss. He stands and looks at Penelope. A few birds in the treetops lift off as the anchor winch clatters.

Penelope pulls on her jogging shorts and her white sneakers, jumps on land, and takes Björn’s hand.

“Want to check out the island?”

“Isn’t there something you want to convince me about?” she asks hesitatingly.

“The advantages of our Swedish general-access rights,” he says.

She smiles and nods as he pushes her hair off her face and lets his finger run over her high cheekbone and her thick black eyebrows.

“How can you be so beautiful?”