The Lounge

He came down at twenty to two, which was twenty minutes early, because for once in his life he was going to be there first.

The lobby of Palo Verde Hall was full of other people’s parents. There was a banner over the desk that said WELCOME, FAMILIES! in maroon on gold, and under it the whole of Family Weekend was going in and out of the glass doors in visors and lanyards, carrying things: a father with a microwave, a grandmother with a cake tin held in front of her in both hands like a casket. The day porter, the sophomore with her hair up in a pencil, sat behind the desk with the visitors’ book open in front of her and the expression of a woman at a frontier.

Kimura was outside the glass doors.

She was standing in the shade of the arcade with her back to the wall, small and upright, in a dark linen jacket in ninety-two degrees, with her black hair cut short and her hands folded in front of her, the way a woman stands at a bus stop for a bus she does not intend to catch. He had not seen her since he came to Tempe. He had seen a blind across the road move an inch, most days, and heard her out of Rhys’s telephone, saying things that made Rhys look at the ceiling.

He went out through the doors into the heat.

“Sergeant.”

“Sir.” She did not look round. She was looking at the road. “You’re early.”

“Yes.”

“She’s not here yet.”

“I know.” He stood beside her in the shade. “I’ve never been there first. Not once. Not in my whole life.”

Kimura looked at the road a moment longer: at the far side of it, where the cars were parked nose to tail under the line of trees in front of the dentist’s, in the shade, with their windows up. Then she looked at him, briefly, the way she had looked at the windows of a beer hall in Berlin, and back at the road.

“No, sir,” she said.

---

She came in at two o’clock exactly.

She came along the arcade from the left, from the direction of the trees, at the pace of the Marshal’s folder, with a tall fair woman from the Swedish detail a few steps behind her and a canvas bag over her shoulder, in a plain dress of dark blue linen and flat shoes and the reading glasses on their chain, and no hat. She looked like a woman who had come to see where her son lived. Three hundred people were doing that in the lobby. None of them looked at her twice.

He looked at her more than twice.

She was thinner. She had been thinner on the screen on Sunday, and he had told himself it was the screen. It was not the screen. Her face had gone a little way back toward its bones, the way a face does after an illness or a long flight or both, and under what was left of the tan she always had from the Ingrid in the summers there was something that was not a colour so much as the absence of one.

“Fredde.”

“I was early,” he said.

She looked at him over the reading glasses. Then she took them off, and let them hang on the chain, which was what she did when she was going to listen.

“You were,” said his mother. She kissed him on both cheeks. “I am very proud of you. I will tell your father.” She looked past him at Kimura, by the wall. “Sergeant Kimura.”

“Ma’am.”

“You were on the Kreuzberg.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“He told me about folder six.” His mother considered her. “Thank you for making it the thickest.”

Kimura’s face did nothing at all.

“It was the thickest on its merits, ma’am,” she said; and the tall Swede behind his mother inclined her head very slightly to Kimura, as one officer to another, and Kimura very slightly inclined hers.

---

The sophomore on the day desk turned the visitors’ book round.

“Hi! Welcome to Palo Verde! If you could just sign in? Name, who you’re visiting, relationship?”

His mother picked up the pen on its little chain and wrote, in her small upright hand, Christina, and nothing after it, and moved the pen to the next column.

Under VISITING she wrote Room 312. Under RELATIONSHIP she wrote, quite slowly, as though it were a word in a language she was learning and wanted to get right, Mother.

“Great!” said the sophomore, and gave her a sticker that said PROUD SUN DEVIL FAMILY, and his mother looked at it, and put it on, on the left, exactly where she would have worn the sapphire.

---

The lounge was behind the lobby, a long low room with two sofas that had given up and a foosball table with one goalkeeper missing and a vending machine that sold coffee. It was full of families. Rhys was at a table by the window with the Charter open in front of him, reading it, actually reading it, with a pencil. Sam was at the next table with a calculator. Neither of them looked up.

His mother sat down on the less defeated of the two sofas, and took out of the canvas bag a white china cup without a saucer.

He had known the cup all his life. She had brought it from Stockholm the year he was five, and had never in his hearing allowed anybody else to wash it; and she held it out to him now, on a sofa in Tempe, and said, “Coffee, please. Black. I am allowed two. This is the second.”

He filled it from the vending machine. It came out of the spout in a thin brown rope and smelled of a garage. She tasted it.

“That is the worst coffee I have ever had,” said his mother, with great satisfaction, and drank some more.

“Where are you folks from?” said a large man on the other sofa, in a golf shirt, with a lanyard that said DAD and a son beside him who wished to die.

“Sweden,” said his mother, in English.

“Oh, Sweden. We did a cruise. Copenhagen. Beautiful.”

“Thank you,” said his mother. “That is very nearly the same.”

The man beamed at her. At the table by the window, Rhys turned a page of the Charter that he had not finished reading, which on Rhys was the equivalent of a shout.

---

She had a folder in the canvas bag, with two photographs in it, and she gave him the first.

It was a small room with a sloping ceiling and a bed and a desk and a window, and on the windowsill, very small, a carton of milk.

“Uppsala,” said his mother, in Swedish. “Nineteen ninety-four. The first week. The officer was through that wall.” She pointed. “The milk is not mine.”

He laughed. She gave him the second.

It was a small room with a sloping ceiling and a bed and a desk and a window, and through the window, filling it, a hill, and on the hill, pink, enormous, a castle.

“That one is yours,” said his mother. “If you want it. It is held. It looks at the bell.”

He looked at the two photographs, one in each hand, forty years apart. They were very nearly the same room.

“Mamma.”

“I am asking you,” she said. “Properly, this time. Not the Marshal’s letter. Me. I flew eleven hours to say it in a room, because you cannot argue with a room on the telephone. Sweden is a country, Fredde. You will have it. You should know it before you have it, and not after. That is the case. It is a good case. I would make it for anybody.”

“I chose here.”

“I know you did. I have come to see it.”

“Then you’ve seen it.”

“I have seen the lounge,” said his mother. “And a man who has been to Copenhagen.” She closed the folder. “I would like to see where you live.”

---

The lift had a sign on it.

It was a new sign. The lift had been mended in August, and had worked for seven weeks, and had then stopped between the second floor and the third with a girl inside it for forty minutes, and the new sign said OUT OF SERVICE, and under it someone had written AGAIN, and under that, in a different pen, THE STAIRS ARE 79, STOP LYING.

“We can wait,” said Frederick. “Somebody’s coming on Monday.”

“It is two floors.”

“It’s forty-five steps.”

His mother looked at the stairs going up from the back of the lobby, in their half-flights, concrete, with the steel rail painted maroon.

“I have walked up stairs before,” she said.

He heard it. He did not think she had meant him to, and then he looked at her face and saw that she had, and that she was going to do it anyway, and that there was no door in it.

They went up.

---

She did the first half-flight well. She did it with her hand on the maroon rail and her back straight, and at the first landing she stopped in front of the noticeboard, where there was a laminated sheet about scorpions, and read it.

She read all of it, with her reading glasses on: how to tell a bark scorpion from the other kind, and to shake your shoes in the morning, and that they glowed under ultraviolet light, and whom to call. She read it with every appearance of a woman who had always wanted to know about scorpions, and he stood beside her and watched her breathe.

“They glow,” said his mother.

“Yes.”

“How extraordinary.” She took the glasses off. “I will tell your father.” And went on up.

She did the second half-flight more slowly. At the second floor she did not stop, because there was nothing to read; and she started up the next, and at the turn of it, on the landing between the second floor and the third, under the narrow window that looked out between two of the concrete fins at the car park, there was a step that was a little wider than the others, the right height to sit on.

She sat on it.

She did not say anything first. She sat down on the step under the window in the dark blue dress with her hand still on the rail, quite slowly and carefully, the way you put down something that is full to the brim; and she put the other hand flat on her chest, high up, on the bone, with two fingers spread, as though she were keeping a place in a book; and she breathed.

He stood on the step below her and watched her breathe.

He had been listening to it for seven weeks, on the telephone, for the breath in the wrong place, and he had thought, because he had been listening so hard, that he knew what it was. He had not known. On the telephone it was a sound. On the stairs it was his mother. It was her shoulders going up and coming down, and the cords in her neck, and her lips, which had gone a colour he did not have a name for, pale, with something under the pale, and her eyes, which were fixed quite steadily on the wall opposite, on a fire notice, as though the fire notice were the horizon and she were on the deck of a ship in weather, keeping her eyes on it so as not to be sick.

“Mamma.”

She lifted one finger off the rail. Wait.

He waited. Somebody went past on the stairs above them, going up, a father with a rug over his shoulder, who said “Afternoon!” and did not stop.

It took about two minutes. He did not count. He knew it was about two minutes because the shadow of one of the concrete fins outside the window had moved across the car park and touched the bonnet of a red car, and had not been touching it before.

“I am not going to fall down,” said his mother, at last, in Swedish, to the fire notice. “I am sitting down. It is the opposite.”

“You fell down in August.”

“In August I did not sit down soon enough.” She took her hand off her chest. “I have learned. I sit down now. It is very boring. The cardiologist is delighted with me.” She looked at him, for the first time since she had sat. “Do not look like that, Fredde. You look like your father in the hospital. I could not bear it then and I cannot bear it on a staircase.”

“How long has it been like this?”

“Like what?”

“Like this.”

His mother looked at the fire notice again.

“A little while,” she said.

---

There were footsteps on the stairs above them, coming down, slowly, in socks.

It was Tyler, in the dark blue sweatshirt with the hood up and the headphones round his neck, going down to the vending machine; and he came round the turn of the flight and saw Frederick on the landing, and stopped, and saw the lady sitting on the step, and stopped more.

He looked at her for a moment with his head on one side.

Then he put his hand into the front pocket of the sweatshirt, as he had on these stairs in August, and took out a bottle of something blue and held it out.

“You want a Glacier?” said Tyler.

His mother looked at the bottle.

“It’s electrolytes,” said Tyler. “It’s like ninety-two. People pass out at like ninety-two. My mom made me bring twenty-four.” He held it out a little further. “It’s cold. I just got it out.”

His mother took it.

She took it in both hands, and turned it round, and read the label on the back, all of it, the small type as well, with the reading glasses, exactly as Theo had read it on the eighteenth of August; and then she unscrewed the top and drank about a third of it, sitting on the step, and screwed the top back on, and looked up at him.

“It is mostly salt,” she said, in English. “Thank you. It is very kind.”

“No problem.” Tyler looked at Frederick. “This your mom?”

“Yes.”

“Cool.” He looked back at her. “Hi. I’m Tyler. I’m the roommate.”

“Christina,” said his mother.

“Nice to meet you, Christina.” Tyler nodded at her, with tremendous seriousness, the way he nodded at a screen when a thing on it had been explained to his satisfaction. “He’s a good roommate. He doesn’t touch my stuff.”

“I am glad,” said his mother.

“Yeah.” Tyler put the headphones back on, and then took one side off again. “Keep it. I’ve got like nineteen.”

He went on down the stairs in his socks.

His mother sat on the step with the blue bottle in her lap and looked after him for some time.

“He is very nice,” she said, in Swedish.

“He doesn’t know who you are.”

“No,” said his mother. “He thinks I am a nice Swedish lady who is not used to the heat.” She looked at the bottle. “I have not been that for fifty-nine years. It was the best thing that has happened to me since August.” She held out her hand. “Help me up. I would like to see the room.”

---

She stood in the door of three hundred and twelve with her hand on the frame and looked: at the two beds and the two desks, and the carpet of no colour, and the two screens above Tyler’s desk, where it was snowing on a dark forest, and the blind down behind them.

Her eyes stopped on the shelf over his desk.

The jumper was on it, folded, maroon, with the gold at the cuffs.

“Have you worn it?” said his mother.

“Once. In August. In bed.”

His mother considered this. “That was not October.”

“It’s ninety-two.”

“It is October.” She went in and took it down off the shelf and sat on his bed with it on her knee, and put her hand on it, flat, the way she had put her hand on her chest on the stairs, and looked at the snow on the screens, and at the blind. “Where is your hill?”

“Behind his blind. He never opens it.”

Then she looked at the pillow, and he saw her see the dent in it, at the very edge, where a head had been put night after night as far over as it would go; and she looked at him.

“Show me,” she said.

He showed her where you put your head, and how, past Tyler’s bed and the two screens, there was a gap at the edge of the blind about an inch wide. And the Queen of Sweden lay down on her son’s bed in a residence hall in Tempe, in her flat shoes and the sticker that said PROUD SUN DEVIL FAMILY, with the bottle of Glacier in her hand, and put her head at the very end of the pillow, and looked.

She looked for a long time.

“There it is,” she said.

He sat on the edge of the bed by her feet. He understood, after a minute, that she was not going to get up for a while, and that she had known on the stairs that she would need to lie down somewhere, and had chosen where.

“You see why they are in a hurry,” said his mother, to the inch of window.

“Because of you.”

“Because of me.” She did not look away from the gap. “The Marshal is not a cruel man. He is a frightened one. He has a Crown Prince in Arizona and a Queen on a staircase, and he has done the arithmetic. It is not a plot. It is a man who can count.”

He looked at the floor.

“If you need me to go,” he said, “then I…”

“Don’t.”

It was very quiet.

“Not today,” said his mother. “Not on the day you have seen me on a staircase. If you go to Uppsala you will go because of Uppsala, and because you have thought about it in a cold room for a week, like a king. You will not go because your mother sat down. I have asked. You may answer me in a letter. Not today.”

“Mamma.”

“Not today, Fredde.”

She lay with her head at the end of the pillow and looked at his hill through an inch of somebody else’s window, and after a while, very slightly, so slightly that he would not have seen it if he had not been watching her for two hours with his whole body, her shoulders came down, and stayed down, and her breathing was her own.

---

The stairs going down were easier. She held his arm on one side and the maroon rail on the other, and at the landing under the window she did not stop, and did not look at the step.

Kimura was at the glass doors. The tall Swede was outside with a car that had come round to the kerb with its engine running; and his mother stopped inside the doors, among the microwaves and the lamps, and put the blue bottle into his hand.

“Give that back to Tyler,” she said. “Tell him a nice Swedish lady says thank you.” She kissed him on both cheeks. “And wear the jumper.”

“It’s ninety-two.”

“It will not always be ninety-two.” She looked at him. “Nothing is always.”

She went out. Kimura held the door, and his mother said something to her in it, too low for him to hear, and Kimura said “Yes, ma’am,” and his mother went across the pavement to the car and got in, and did not look back, because she never did; and the car went.

Kimura let the door close. She stood beside him for a moment, looking across the road at the line of trees in front of the dentist’s, at a space in the shade under them where a car had been parked.

“Sir,” she said.

“Yes.”

“She was outside for twenty-five minutes.” She did not look at him. “In the car. Over there, under the trees. She told her driver she was early.”

He looked at the space under the trees.

“She’s always early,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” said Kimura. “She’s always early. She came in at two exactly.” She was quiet for a moment. “I’ve never once seen her on time.”

He did not say anything.

Kimura looked at the road a little longer. Then she went out through the doors into the heat, and across the road, between the cars, not hurrying, to the door beside the dentist’s, and in, and a minute later, on the second floor, a blind that had been half down went down another inch.

---

He went back up the stairs.

He went up past the scorpions, and round the turn, and stopped on the landing between the second floor and the third, under the narrow window. The shadow of the concrete fin had gone right across the bonnet of the red car now and down the other side.

He sat down on the step.

It was the right height. It was exactly the right height. He sat on it with his elbows on his knees, with Tyler’s bottle in his hands, a third gone, the top screwed on tight, and looked at the fire notice on the opposite wall, where she had looked, as though it were the horizon; and sat there.