A Purple Winter

Chapter 2-1

Chapter 2

Saturday morning, Helga Lund, Nick’s mother, was at our front door. I could see her striking face through the door’s glass pane. I was still in my gym shorts, half asleep, standing barefoot in the hall, holding a glass of chocolate milk.

But my mother wouldn’t answer the door. “Hurry, get it,” she said, shutting her old flannel robe tighter, before shuffling back to her bedroom in the back of the apartment. I heard her lock click and knew she’d stay in there all day. On Saturdays, my mother would usually go over to the presbytery and help with things there. Whatever those things were. But today, she had a migraine.

I set my glass down on the hall table and then cracked the door open a sliver, embarrassed to meet Helga in my U2 T-shirt and gym shorts. She was a classy woman with an almost royal presence that flustered me. Nick was so much like her. “Good morning,” I said, hoping to change her impression of me once and for all. She always looked at me like I was from another planet.

“Boo!” Lene, Nick’s nine-year-old sister, jumped out from behind her mother, smiling a toothless smile. “You’re babysitting me!” She bounced her pale blond eyebrows and her curls shimmered like pearls in the sun. She was wearing a yellow summer dress and we were in November. Wasn’t she ever cold? She was the strangest little girl I’d ever met, and frankly, she scared me a bit. “I brought my Barbies and two Kens.” She entered the house, pushing by me.

“I—I—uh—”

“I’ll give you ten dollars.” Helga was already fishing into her red leather purse. Her platinum blond hair was tied back in a long pony tail and her gray overcoat was open over a cream-colored blouse that was neatly tucked into a fitted navy-blue skirt. And she was in heels. We’d gotten our first snow this morning. “Here you are.” She handed me a crisp ten-dollar bill. “Boone has had a little mishap again and Johan and I are taking him to the clinic.”

Boone Lund was the most accident-prone kid I’d ever known. His hospital file was probably thicker than the phone book. “Wha—at happened?”

Helga let out a sharp little breath and crinkled her nose. “He roasted banana peels and rolled the mixture into Archie comic book pages.” She had a wonderful accent I adored. “Then he smoked them. You know, like cigarettes.” She turned on her heels. “Thank you, Derek. I’ll be back in an hour.”

I didn’t have any plans, anyway.

When I turned around, I found Lene sitting on the worn green rug in our living room, emptying the contents of her pink backpack, blond Barbie dolls spilling out around her. “This one is Hecube,” she said, without looking at me. Lene’s voice was clear and high as a silver bell. “And this one is Andromaque.”

I didn’t know how she could possibly invent such names.

“They’re the Trojan women. You know—from the Iliad.”

Right.

She showed me a bigger doll. It was missing an eye. “And this one here…she’s special. She’s a prophet. She sees the future.”

This kid was obviously a bloody genius. “What’s, uh, what’s th—the doll’s name?” I walked into the living room and sat on the old creaky arm chair. That chair still smelled of my dad’s Aqua Velva after shave. Sometimes I missed him. I hadn’t seen him in over two months. Maybe he’d be home for Christmas. And if so, what would we talk about?

Lene’s eyes were bright—full of cleverness. “Her name is Cassandra.”

I shivered, a strong feeling of déjà vu coming over me. Cassandra. I’d never known a girl named Cassandra, and yet, this all seemed so familiar.

“She knows what’s gonna happen,” Lene said, her eyes returning to the doll in her hands. “But the tragedy is that no one believes her.”