The Number 7 Read online

  Dad closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. Finally, after years of mystery, years of my guessing about my grandparents, he’d revealed to me the truth. The story of how he’d originally learned to plow through, to just keep moving forward. Somewhere along the way, he’d lost the ability to know when to look back. He did that with his parents and he did that with Mom.

  “That’s why you never met them. It’s eerie that we’re now combing through this stuff looking for them.” Dad sat up to get back to work. He opened a lid to a box and started digging through it. “It feels good, though. I need this.”

  I watched him methodically pull out small items and place them in neat little piles.

  Suddenly, I didn’t just feel like I was looking for my grandparents—I was chasing them.

  XII.

  Gerhard never forgot the exact moment he rewrote his fate. Later, after it was all over, he’d often wonder if things would have been different had he simply turned down the old man’s offer. He said it all began with a girl.

  Agnes Landquist needed her bicycle repaired, and no one knew bicycle mechanics better than Gerhard. He fiddled with any bike he could get his hands on. He’d disassemble and then reassemble the spokes, the forks, and the chain. He saw each part in his mind, and he watched how the pieces fit together.

  One day outside his school, Gerhard and Agnes sat in silence as he worked diligently greasing her bicycle gears. Agnes studied him with awe. Occasionally, he’d ask her to hand him his wrench or his pliers, and she’d slowly lean over and delicately place the tool in his hand. Their fingers touched once or twice, and Gerhard’s stomach ached with adolescent love. He wanted to kiss her, but he didn’t dare. She wanted him to kiss her, too, but isn’t that the way of first love?

  Before long, an old man with silver hair came searching for his delayed daughter. The man stood back, quietly watching Gerhard’s hands. Gerhard knew him immediately. Kjell Landquist, Agnes’s father and Trelleborg’s station manager.

  When Gerhard had finished, the man leaned in and asked, “Can you fix anything else, son?”

  “Sir?” Gerhard shielded his eyes from the sun, staring up from where he crouched next to the bicycle.

  “We’re down a man at the station, and I could use someone whom I don’t need to explain something to twice. Come see me this afternoon.”

  Gerhard stood up slowly, closed the lid of the grease can, wiped his hand on an old rag, and wheeled the bicycle to the girl waiting next to her father.

  “Thanks, Gerhard,” she whispered as her father started walking away.

  The man turned and chuckled. “Come see me this afternoon and I’ll give you some bigger toys to play with.”

  Later that day, Kjell hired Gerhard as a train mechanic. It was Gerhard’s sixteenth birthday. Gerhard had been working for Kjell exactly one month when he arrived at the station one day to find his father waiting for him. The tremendous man sat awkwardly on the small platform bench, smoking his bent pipe. Leif Magnusson was a ferryboat captain. He was used to the rock and sway of a choppy sea. The railroad, with its grounded station and defined tracks, was a world away from his own.

  Gerhard took a seat next to his father and waited for him to speak. Leif was a man of few words, and Gerhard had learned to listen.

  “Lasse has decided to join me on the ferry,” he began. Gerhard nodded; he’d always suspected his brother would follow in their father’s footsteps.

  “It’s good for him to start work like me.”

  “Ja, javisst. Of course.” Leif paused and puffed repeatedly on his pipe. “Lyckliga Lasse och Gamla Gerhard,” he chuckled remembering the nicknames. Gerhard frowned at his epithet, wishing he’d been the one they called lucky. He wanted to be the one with the fighting spirit.

  “It’s been hard for him . . . watching you come here every day. He wants so badly to be like you,” Leif coughed and crossed his arms.

  Gerhard stared at his own feet, doubting his father’s observation. Had he come all the way to the station just to talk about Lasse?

  “My boys are no longer boys,” the old man reached into his pocket and nonchalantly pulled out a small leather pouch.

  “I’ll give him something, too, don’t worry. But I wanted to give this to you alone.” Leif slowly produced a gold chain as long as Gerhard’s forearm. At the chain’s end hung a worn, but polished, pocket watch. “Your grandfather’s.”

  It’s magnificent, Gerhard thought as he reached out and accepted the gift, letting his palm feel its weight. He popped open the case and inspected its round face. A small, loopy, antiquated inscription read, Till min son. “To my son.” Gerhard held it to his ear. Nothing.

  “Here,” Leif took the chain and showed him how to lift the winding crown and spin it clockwise.

  Gerhard inspected the watch with scrutiny. He shut his eyes, held the device to his ear, and visualized its gears. He imagined what its insides would look like once he stripped away its exterior. What were its inner workings? How did it run? He imagined tiny wheels, tight springs, and flattened screws. He envisioned how all the pieces fit together, how one wheel turned another, which turned another. All parts performing their proper functions. Everything in synchronicity.

  “You have to wind it every day. But if you do, it will never fail you,” Leif advised, stroking his beard and taking a long puff on his black pipe.

  Gerhard snapped the watch shut, securing the memory of the moment within the gold case forever. That’s when Gerhard began measuring his life in minutes.

  XIII.

  Dad and I took armfuls of albums and boxes of photographs downstairs to the kitchen. He continued searching through the photos for people while I fixed us some coffee and split pea soup.

  “My father used to make us pea soup on the first Thursday of every month. It’s how his mother, Åsa, made it,” Dad smiled as he thought back on the memory. I prodded him further trying to dig up older recollections.

  “Dad, there’s so much you seem to know that you’ve never told us. What else did Grandpa say about Sweden?”

  “Oh, not much. He didn’t really talk about his family. Mom told me not to ask him, so I didn’t.”

  “And you never asked her why he didn’t want to talk about it?” What would you think about him if you knew the truth? I silently asked. I could tell you, Dad. I could tell you everything I know, but would you want to know?

  “I guess I didn’t think about it. You never really asked about Grandma and Grandpa before coming here. I was like that, I suppose.”

  Ugh. He could be so frustrating when he was right.

  We sat down to our warm, savory dinner. Greta said she wasn’t hungry and stayed in her room. The wind whooshed against the windows at the back of the house, and we could hear a draft infiltrate the house somewhere along the frame of the kitchen door. I shook with a December chill.

  Dad laid a meager spread of photos on the table as he sipped his soup. I watched him study the pictures carefully. Occasionally, he’d pick one up and then set it back down again. A couple times he smiled wistfully. I wanted so badly to ask him, to urge him to tell me what he was thinking, but I let him take his time. No good would come of me interrupting and rushing him. At last, he looked up at me. He seemed startled to see me, as if he’d forgotten I was sitting there.

  “Here she is. This is my mom,” he pointed to a photo of a woman sitting at a typewriter.

  I picked up the worn photograph and studied it intently. The picture was taken from the side; she was sitting and staring at her typing. Her ankles were crossed beneath her seat. She wore a button-down blouse and a kerchief tied tightly around her neck. Her hair was curled and pinned back. She looked lovely. In the background of the picture, an old Bavarian cuckoo clock hung on the wall.

  “She liked writing poetry,” Dad continued. “She had elegant handwriting, but she was an amazing typist. She was beautiful, wasn’t she?

  “And this one,” Dad picked up a square, scalloped-edged photograph a
nd handed it to me. He swiveled his chair so we could stare at the picture side by side. “This is your grandpa.”

  The man in the photo had a furrowed brow and a long, clean-shaven face. He wore his light hair swept to the side. He had thick-rimmed glasses and a striped sweater. He was watching something intently off-camera, but he wasn’t smiling.

  Gerhard Gustav Magnusson. My grandfather, the murderer. At last, we meet.

  I recalled all the questions I didn’t have answers to, the anecdotes Grandmother relayed to me during my time in her house, and the mystery that surrounded this young man with the sad eyes.

  “Good-looking guy, wasn’t he?” Dad held the picture next to his own face. “Any resemblance?”

  I looked fondly at the features of my grandfather and compared them to my dad’s. Their chins were exactly the same square shape. Their noses were long, not short and upturned like mine. Their foreheads were also similar, wider than most. Dad’s hair was graying and receding but lay in the same position as Grandpa’s. The only distinct difference was in the eyes. Noticeably, Dad’s eyes were full of life. In Dad’s eyes there was light, whereas Grandpa’s eyes looked lackluster. I discovered a lump in my throat that hadn’t been there when we first sat down.

  “He was very handsome,” I said matter-of-factly, clearing my throat. “Just like you, Dad.”

  “I was thinking about going to Weaver’s later,” Dad said, wiping up the last of his pea soup with a hunk of sourdough and taking a bite. “I thought you might . . . want to tag along?”

  I couldn’t tell if Dad was insinuating anything about Weaver’s tall, handsome shelf-stocker, but I didn’t care. The thought of a chance encounter with my attractive schoolmate enthralled me. Even if I’d already seen him in class that day.

  “Would love to.”

  Looking down at my meal, I realized I was carefully picking my slice of sourdough to little pieces, crumbling them into my empty bowl. Dad eyed me suspiciously while I laughed nervously and quickly got up from the table to clean up.

  Dad and I walked to Weaver’s even though the winter cold was biting. It wasn’t far from the house, and Dad and I were getting used to walking downtown. There was something magical about the woods at night. I stole Greta’s turquoise pashmina for the evening. Wrapping it tightly around my neck, I inhaled her perfume. She even smells good, I thought with slight jealousy. I thought briefly about asking Dad about her. Had he also noticed how she incessantly tugged at her long sleeves these days? Was he worried, too? But I couldn’t bring myself to ask. In some stupid way, I felt as if talking to Dad about her would betray her trust. No, I couldn’t ask him. I’d have to question her about it myself. So while Dad carried our folded canvas bags under his arm, we walked in silence. The two of us chose to conserve our energy; the thought of talking only made me colder. I shone the flashlight ahead of us.

  Our journey took us off-pavement, and I couldn’t help but notice the crunch of the frozen earth under our feet. I wondered if Sweden felt this cold all the time.

  I thought more about Grandma and her decision to contact me. Why me? I wasn’t special. I was a skeptical teenager, sometimes cynical, and constantly second-guessing myself. I did well in school and helped Dad around the house—though definitely not as much as I should. All in all, I considered myself pretty short of extraordinary.

  Did Grandma want me to expose my grandfather for who he really was? Could I do that? What would that do to Dad?

  Supernatural oddities like this usually fell upon weird people in movies: psychics, ghost hunters, outcasts. It was strange how Grandma never fully addressed me. If she had singled me out, decided I was the one she wanted to relate the story to, why didn’t she ever speak directly to me? Maybe she couldn’t. Maybe those were the rules of the ghostworld, or afterworld, or wherever she was calling me from. Suppose I had to prompt her? After all, I had my own questions regarding Grandpa.

  I didn’t immediately go to the garden section of Weaver’s. That would have been too desperate. If Greta had taught me anything regarding the opposite sex, it was to act completely indifferent. It drives them crazy, she had explained as if we were talking about a pack of feral dogs.

  It happened when I was standing over the yams again. I was placing one of the big, lumpy vegetables in my basket when he came up beside me, pretending to restack the pile of produce. He pushed himself so close to me our arms touched. I didn’t jump. I just continued to inspect the produce as if he hadn’t startled me. Even though, at that moment, something inside me dissolved.

  “We’ve got to stop meeting like this, Mums.” He smiled, piling the yams into a pyramid.

  “Do we?” I whispered.

  He looked so pleased, and I wanted so badly for him to kiss me.

  “You need a Christmas cactus? We’ve got the best cacti this side of Chester County.”

  I turned to face him. “Seriously, what is it with you and your plants?”

  “I dunno,” he shrugged. “I’ve got a green thumb. Everything I touch comes to life. See?” He reached out and grabbed my hand. Spinning around with our hands enclosed, I stared into his faultless eyes. This was a test. A battle of wits. How was I going to react? How did he want me to act?

  I held on tightly and replied, “Your hand is freezing.”

  A momentary glimmer of disappointment swept through his eyes. Whatever the test, I’d failed it. I didn’t know what I was supposed to say. But before another second could pass, his familiar smile returned.

  “You wanna hang out this Friday?”

  Wait, what?

  “Sure,” I dropped his hand.

  Did that really just happen?

  “I get off at six.”

  Our eyes locked. Neither of us looked away, and I’m pretty sure we were standing closer than what was typical of friendly classmates.

  “I was going to make cookies . . . ” I heard my voice trailing off, but I couldn’t remember what else I was going to say.

  “Could you use a hand? I mean, even if it is ‘freezing’?”

  Finally, Gabe broke the eye contact to inspect the hand I’d just held. He turned it over, playfully offended.

  “Are you as good in the kitchen as you are in the garden?” I teased.

  “Lousy, actually.”

  How could you be lousy at anything?

  “Five October Hill Road. Do you know it?”

  “I’ll be there Friday at seven,” he held up both his hands and wiggled his fingers. “With . . . gloves—not bells—on.”

  Then he winked and walked away. He was still on the clock, even though it seemed like he’d just spent an hour with me. I took a deep breath, smiled gleefully to myself, and ventured off to go find Dad.

  Friday night, Dad had initially insisted on answering the door until Greta came to my defense. This was the first time I’d ever had a boy over to the house, and Dad was unsure how to handle his younger daughter dating. So much for Greta paving the way for me, I mused. Apparently there was a whole new set of worries Dad succumbed to when he realized I wasn’t the boyish, ten-year-old daughter he thought I’d be forever. The transformation had even come upon me suddenly. I was learning as I went, like a paint-by-numbers for dating. I wanted to be cool like Greta, but more importantly I wanted to be cool like me.

  “Isn’t that sweater a little tight on you?” Dad had asked when I told him I was having a guy come over.

  “Dad, it’s not the sweater that’s tight!” Greta laughed from where she lay reading a tabloid magazine on the couch in front of the fireplace. “She has boobs and a waist, you know.”

  Dad eyed me anxiously. I held up my arms and shrugged. Greta had helped me pick out something to wear. It was her sweater.

  “Maybe you could wear that soccer jersey I bought you? That’s fun,” Dad said encouragingly, but I caught him gulping with trepidation. “Boys like soccer . . . ”

  “That grungy thing from London?” Greta sat up and glared from her spot on the couch. Was she really insulting some
thing British? “Dad, she looks fine! Louisa, you’re perfect.” Her head fell back on the couch and I saw the magazine lift back into the air.

  Dad stomped off into the kitchen while I stood in the hallway confused. When he returned, he held a piece of blue cloth bunched in his hands.

  “You’re making cookies, right?” He stuffed the bundle into my hand. “Wear this.”

  I held up an oversized apron he usually wore when he grilled in the summer. I looked at Greta for some kind of defense, but I was on my own.

  Dad was tinkering with Grandpa’s toy train when there was a knock at the door. He must have found it upstairs. I’d left it on the hallway table, but did I leave it there intentionally, for him to find? Didn’t I secretly want him to talk to me about it? If only he provided me the right opportunity to tell him the truth about Grandpa. If only I were brave enough to just come out and ask, “Dad, do you know who your dad really was? Let me tell you.”

  Dad had spent the afternoon flipping every switch in the cellar, had followed wires through the walls, and had changed whatever batteries needed changing, trying to bring the train back to life. But it wouldn’t run. It stayed dead. He’d at last resorted to taking the entire train apart and spreading its pieces out on the living room floor. I wanted to tell him I thought it was useless—that the train had already delivered its message—but Dad seemed intent on bringing it back to life. Why? How could it help?

  When the knock sounded, I noticed he gripped the screwdriver a little too tightly. Was he more focused on my visitor or the train? Walking through the living room to the front door, I saw his eye arch to make sure I was keeping my end of the deal. The bulky blue apron hung around my neck and was tied at the waist. Dad chuckled, satisfied, as I passed him. I mockingly stopped in front of him to curtsy.

  “Okay, okay,” Dad shooed me on to the door.

  It was dark outside and the large fir wreath Dad had hung on the front door blocked the window. Out on the front step stood Gabe, his arms wrapped around a very large, and very red, poinsettia plant. But someone else stood there, too: Rosemary. Both faces greeted me eagerly.