Page 127 of Deep End

“Holiday grocery crowd, Scar.”

Christmas is quiet and lazy, good food and movies and naps, just the three of us, just the way I like it. Barb is, miraculously, not on call. Pip snores softly and farts loudly. I’m full and happy and maybe a little reckless, because I snap a picture of the holiday spread and send it to Lukas with the captionFika?

The reply is, as usual, instantaneous.That’s a meal.

SCARLETT:How do you even know that?

LUKAS:No coffee in sight.

I add a Pac-12 mug to the side.Better?

LUKAS:Still a meal. With an empty mug next to it.

SCARLETT:Are you the fika police?

LUKAS:Unlike you, I speak Swedish.

SCARLETT:I’m tired of this gatekeeping.

Two minutes later, my email pings with a message. Someone gifted me a yearly premium subscription to Duolingo. Lukas must not know my middle name, because he went withScarlett Troll Vandermeer.

Most likely, he’s perfectly aware that it’s Ann.

SCARLETT:The passive aggression!!!

LUKAS:Nothing passive about it.

I want to ask him how he’s doing. If he’s freezing his ass off. How many hours—minutes, milliseconds—of sunlight he gets. But my bravery runneth dry, and thenot knowingis back with a vengeance, so I download the damn app and begin my Swedish journey.

In the following days, though, Lukas starts sending me pictures.

Jan, cross-country skiing, smiling broadly at the camera.

His niece and nephews, baking with a striking blond woman.

A tree branch crystallized in ice.

The most beautiful lake I’ve ever seen, surrounded by snow-covered trees that remind me of the ink on Lukas’s arm.

I reply with snippets of my own time at home—the Arch in downtown St. Louis; the diving well where I used to train; Pip rolling over, tongue out; the mischievous grin on the face of Cynthia, our elderly neighbor who came over for tea and slipped an inch of whiskey into our mugs.

With anyone else, I’d feel self-conscious about the small banality of my life, afraid of letting slip how uninteresting I am. But my sexual relationship with Lukas is so fundamentally based on brutal honesty about our wants and needs, it bleeds into every aspect of our interactions. Second-guessing my worth hardly ever occurs to me.

If he didn’t enjoy sex with me, he’d amend the list.

If he didn’t like my pictures, he’d leave me on read.

So it continues. A cat’s tail peeking through two inches of snow, like a shark’s fin. Barb’s office at the hospital, her lab coat draped over a chair. Ice-skating. A cronut.

Sometimes, we say nothing. Sometimes, we ask questions. (Is that a wolf? Was he just outside your door? We went to Gävleborg and tracked it. Oskar’s a pro.) Sometimes, I laugh at us. Shouldn’t we be exchanging nudes and flowery masturbation recounts? He should tele-dom me. Order me to suck his cyberdick. And yet, the only parts of our bodies that travel across the Atlantic are mydimple, from the day Pip wouldn’t stop licking my cheek, and the long-fingered grip on the rod he uses for ice fishing.

I write new drafts of my med school essays, and shadow Makayla, my favorite of Barb’s colleagues. “You should do an internship here next year,” she suggests. “Maybe in the spring quarter? Would look amazing on applications.”

The inevitable happens at Costco, two days before New Year’s Eve. Barb and I are debating whether it’d be amoral to pass up on a stellar deal that would provide Biscoff to the next four generations of Vandermeers (or, more likely, to the two of us, for the next week) when someone calls our names.

It takes me a minute to place Josh’s mom’s face, and another to realize that he’s standing next to her. Barb and Juliet have, unfortunately, always liked each other, and when they start chatting, Josh moves closer to me.

“Hey, Vandy.”

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