Adventures with Waffles (11 page)

“Yes,” I said, smiling.

“But it’s going to be quite lonely for you when Lena leaves, my sweet.”

It was like the piece of bread dried up in my mouth.

“Who’s leaving?” I asked, breathless.

Mom stared at me. She looked shocked.

“Hasn’t Lena told you that she’s moving? They’ve been packing for several weeks!”

I tried to swallow the bread, but it just sat there. Mom took my hand and squeezed it hard.

“My darling Trille! Didn’t you know?”

I shook my head. Mom squeezed my hand even harder, and while I sat in silence, she told me that Lena’s mom had half a year left to do at art school, which she hadn’t finished before Lena was born. Now she’d gotten back into the school, so they were going to move to town. They were going to live next to Isak. Maybe Lena would have a real dad soon.

I sat there, the bread and liver paste in my mouth, unable to swallow it or spit it out. So that was why I hadn’t been let in! Lena was going to move! She was going to go right ahead and move without even saying anything! I could see that Mom was really sorry for me. And I could understand why!

This was not right! I got up so fast that the kitchen chair fell over. I ran out in Magnus’s shoes and hit at the hedge as I went through that horrible hole. It was so dark that I tripped on Lena’s steps, sending my liver paste and bread down the wrong way. Spluttering and angry, I threw open the door, like Lena usually does, and stomped inside.

There were cardboard boxes everywhere. Lena’s mother appeared from behind one of them, surprised. We stood there looking at each other. Suddenly I didn’t know what to say. The cardboard boxes were so strange. Lena’s house didn’t look like itself anymore.

Lena sat in the kitchen, not eating her dinner. I went right over to her. I thought I’d yell, like she normally does. I was going to shout—so loud it would echo around the half-empty kitchen—that you can’t just move without telling people! I’d opened my mouth to do it—but then it didn’t come out. Lena didn’t look like herself anymore either.

“Are you going to move?” I whispered eventually.

Lena turned around and looked out the kitchen window. We could see each other’s reflections there. We looked at each other in the dark window, and then Lena got up and sneaked her way past me. She disappeared into her room. And closed the door quietly.

Lena’s mom dropped everything she was holding.

“Didn’t you know, Trille?” she asked, looking even more shocked than Mom had. There was a piece of tape stuck in her hair. She climbed over the cardboard boxes and threw her arms around me.

“I’m so sorry! We’ll come and visit lots, I promise. It’s not far from town.”

For the rest of the week, Lena and I each sat in our houses and waited.

“Aren’t you going out to play with Lena before she goes?” Mom kept asking. And I felt that I was the only one in the whole world who understood Lena. Of course we couldn’t play now.

On New Year’s Eve, we held a farewell party at our house, with loads of food and fireworks. Isak was there too. I couldn’t bring myself to speak to him or Lena. Besides, Lena didn’t speak to anyone. She sat there looking angry all evening—her mouth set in a straight line. It only turned into a circle when Grandpa stuck one finger in each of her cheeks and pressed so that he could pop in a chocolate.

When the moving van came, I stood at the ropeway window, watching the moving men, Lena’s mom, and Isak carrying the cardboard boxes out of the white house. Lena came last of all. I’d been wondering whether they would have to carry her too, but she walked by herself and sat down in the back of Isak’s car. I felt that I had to go outside, but first I went to my room and took down the picture of Jesus.

Lena didn’t look at me. There was a thick car window between us. I knocked, and was a little surprised when she opened it. To be fair, it was only a small gap, but it was just big enough for me to push Jesus through. And just big enough for me to say good-bye. But it was apparently too small for Lena to say it.

“Good-bye,” I whispered one more time while Lena gripped my picture and turned away.

Then they drove off.

That evening I was so sad that I didn’t know what to do. It was completely impossible to get to sleep. Dad must have understood, because he came up to my room long after he had said good night. He brought his guitar.

I didn’t say anything. Neither did Dad, who sat on the edge of the bed. But after a while, he cleared his throat and began to play. He played the Trille tune, just like when I was tiny. It’s my very own song, and it was Dad who wrote it. When he finished, he said that he’d written a brand-new song for me, called “Sad Son, Sad Dad.”

“Do you want to hear it, Trille?”

I gave a tiny nod.

And as the wintry wind swirled around the house and everyone else slept, my dad played “Sad Son, Sad Dad.” I almost couldn’t see him because it was so dark. I just listened.

And suddenly I realized what dads are for.

When he’d finished, I cried and cried. Because Lena didn’t have a dad, because Auntie Granny was dead, and because my best friend had moved away without saying good-bye.

“I never want to get out of bed again!”

That was all right, said Dad. He said he would bring food up to me even if I stayed there right up until my confirmation. Then I cried even more, because it was going to be a terrible life.

“Will I ever be happy again?” I asked.

“Of course you’ll be happy again, Trille, my boy,” said Dad, lifting me up onto his lap as if I were a little child. I fell asleep there that evening, and hoped that I would never, ever wake up again.

I
did get up the next day.

“What’s the point of staying in bed?” I said to Grandpa, who heartily agreed.

“No, it’s not worth staying in bed, lad.”

But I wasn’t happy, even if I might have looked like it after a couple of days. I went around trying to smile when someone was kind to me, because they all were, but inside I was just sad. Sometimes I stopped what I was doing and wondered how everything could change so quickly. Only a short time ago, Mathildewick Cove had been full of Auntie Granny’s waffles and Lena’s noise, and then suddenly almost everything I cared about had completely vanished. I had nobody to go to school with, nobody except Krølla to play with, and nobody to sit at the ropeway window with. Instead I had a big, painful lump inside me, which would never disappear. I felt the lump was there mostly because Lena had left. That had changed everything. Trees weren’t for climbing anymore, and my feet wouldn’t run. She must have had something to do with food too, because suddenly nothing tasted like anything. It made no difference if I ate bread with liver paste or ice cream. I almost wondered if I should stop eating. When I told Grandpa, he suggested that I should start eating boiled cabbage and cod-liver oil.

“Seize the day, lad!”

Grandpa was now the best thing in my life. He understood everything without going on at me. Plus he was missing someone too. Everyone was sad. We missed Auntie Granny, and we missed Lena, and we missed Lena’s mom. But it was Grandpa and me who were saddest. The whole day was full of sadness, from when we got up to when we went to bed.

When an entire week had passed and I’d experienced the first Friday without Lena, Grandpa and I were sitting at his small kitchen table, listening to the wind. I had been to school and walked there and back alone. When I came home, I was drenched with sleet and tears. Grandpa was the only one in, and he’d just made hot coffee. He gave me ten lumps of sugar and half a cup of coffee. There’s no stopping Grandpa. Ten lumps of sugar!

I told him about my day. The boys in my class thought it was more boring at school now that Lena had left. The class had been quiet and strange, and not nearly as perfect as Kai-Tommy thought it would be without girls. I didn’t say anything else for a while and picked at the sugar cubes. Thinking that Lena was never going to be in my class again was so sad that my stomach tied itself in knots.

“Grandpa, I miss her dreadfully,” I said in the end, starting to cry again.

Grandpa looked at me seriously and said that missing people is the best sad feeling there is.

“You see, Trille lad, if you’re sad because you miss someone, then that means you care about that person. And caring about someone is the best thing there is. We carry the people we miss inside us.” He put his hand to his chest with a thump.

“Oh . . .” I said, pulling my sleeve across my eyes. “But, Grandpa, you can’t play with people who are in there.” I sighed, thumping my hand on my own chest.

Grandpa nodded heavily. He understood.

We didn’t say any more, Grandpa and I. The wind whirled around the buildings, making enough noise. I didn’t want to go out sledding by myself.

When I went back upstairs, Mom had made my favorite meal for dinner. It was the third time that week. Maybe I should’ve told her that I couldn’t taste anything, but I decided not to. By the time I went to bed, it felt as if I had strained my smiling muscles. They were completely exhausted.

“Dear God, please give me back my sense of taste,” I prayed.

The sad lump in my stomach meant that I couldn’t sleep. I lay there listening to the horrible weather instead. Suddenly there was a bang on the windowpane.

“Help!” I mumbled, sitting up in bed, afraid.

There was another bang. I wished I still had Jesus above my bed! I was just about to run through to Mom and Dad’s room when someone half whispered and half shouted, “Come on, open the window, you dozy dormouse.”

I sprang up and practically flew across to the window.

There was Lena, standing outside. In the middle of the night.

“Smoking haddocks! I thought I’d have to smash the window before you heard me,” she said irritably when I opened it.

I didn’t say anything. Lena was standing outside my window with her backpack on her back and her knitted hat on her head, and it felt like I hadn’t seen her for a hundred years. She didn’t say anything for a while either. She just looked at me in my pajamas.

“It’s cold,” she said at last.

Shortly afterward we were sitting in the kitchen drinking hot water. It was the quietest thing we could think of. Lena hadn’t taken off her hat. She’d run away hours ago and was so cold that her teeth were chattering.

“I’ll move into the hay barn,” she said.

“Into the hay barn? Our hay barn?”

Lena nodded. And then a sob came out of her. I could see that she was struggling to look normal. For a long time she sat like that with a very strange look on her face, but eventually the tears came anyway. She was crying. Lena Lid, who never cries!

“Lena,” I said, brushing tears from her cheek. I didn’t know what else I should do; she might strike out or something if I tried to hug her.

“Have you got a sleeping bag or haven’t you?” she asked, a little severely.

“I have.”

When I went back to bed, I was the only one who knew that my best friend had moved back to Mathildewick Cove. She was lying out in the barn, wrapped up in a blanket, a sleeping bag, and the hay. And even if it was creepy to sleep in a dark barn all alone, she probably slept like a log, because the picture of Jesus was lying next to her in the hay. I’d never been part of anything so secret before. And I’d never been so happy.