Sometimes she’s an older sister who tells me things not even the adults seem to know. My older siblings all moved out and away before I even started school, and Britt has always been as close as a sister. “You’re the prettiest thing I ever saw,” I say, straightening her crown and halo, and that makes her smile, even though sorrow peeks through the ragged edges of her joy.

I see her change, then, radiant like the pictures in Grandma’s illustrated Bible, where the golden rays emanate from Jesus’s head. Once it’s done, she bows her head and I place it on her curly brown hair, a coronation. She sits so still, looking at my fingers braiding: purple wood cranesbill, white bishop’s lace and oxeye daisies, red campion, yellow buttercups, blue forget-me-nots and fragile harebells. But I don’t want to sleep, and I don’t want to marry any man either, so instead I braid them into a crown for Britt. I would dream about the man I’ll marry if I slept on them. I’ve picked seven kinds of flowers to put under my pillow, picked them special, keeping silent all the while, climbing over seven fences to do it right. In the silence between us, the notes seem to resonate within her, tugging at her, rippling through her, plucked on strings of guts and breath, pain and memory. Britt taps her fingers to the melody, so I know she hears it too. We wear woolen sweaters over summer dresses, bare legs swinging, and from far away I can hear music, or maybe it’s just the river’s distant voice: B minor, a song like whispers and sun on water. We’ve helped decorate the village maypole with birch-leaves and flowers, such as there are up here so far north in June. Most nights, I might not have believed her, even though she goes farther into the woods than anyone else I know, but tonight is Midsummer’s Eve, when the skein between tale and truth is thin enough to pass through. You can even speak to the hare, then: if you know how, if he trusts you enough to let you. She says you can speak to them when the sun and moon have gone down. Shapes and shadows move in the gloom beneath the forest’s dark-fringed spruce and pine, and Britt says it’s the trolls that live there, restless in the long summer dusk, hiding themselves under rocks and roots and glossy lingonberry leaves. The hare reminds me of Britt: dark eyes watching to see if you’ve come to kill it long legs always ready to run. He sits upright on his haunches by the forest’s edge, ever watchful, bending now and then to nibble grass and clover, grey-brown fur all sleek and trim, long ears turning.

We’re sitting on the wooden fence near my family’s potato patch, looking down the slope at the red-painted barn and stable, watching the hare. Something’s happened to her there, but I don’t understand what it is, and she can’t find the words to tell me. It’s Midsummer’s Eve and even this close to midnight there’s no darkness, only a long, translucent dusk that will eventually slip into dawn.īritt and I are fifteen, and she has just come back from That Place, the one the adults won’t talk about even when they think I’m not listening.

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