The Lost Village

I was up there. I called her and asked her to come get me. It was a Friday night. I guess she was at some party.”
I swallow again. My throat is dry as sand.
“She said—” I begin, but then my throat constricts. I force it out, regardless:
“She said she didn’t have the energy anymore,” I say. “That I ‘couldn’t go on like that.’ And then she hung up.”
The last part is virtually a sigh. The tension is still there in my chest, but it feels nice to have gotten the words out, like the lightness you feel in your arms after dropping a dead weight.
Max shakes his head. I shrug.
“So what’s she doing here?” he asks, quietly, without accusing me.
I shake my head.
“We had no other choice,” I say. “We needed someone with Emmy’s skills, someone with production experience. Emmy’s good at editing and directing, and she has contacts. They’re what we need.”
“No, I mean … why did she show up?”
I open my mouth but then close it again.
“I don’t know,” I eventually say. “I assumed she’d turn me down. I’m still surprised she didn’t.”
Max spins a blade of grass between his fingers.
“You could have asked me, you know,” he says, looking at me with wide, shiny eyes. I’m surprised by how thick and dark his eyelashes are. When we first met he used to wear glasses. I guess he must be wearing contacts now. At times I find myself missing those glasses, thick-rimmed and ugly as they were, in the same strange way I find myself missing the traces of acne across his forehead. It’s a sense of loss that isn’t anything to do with him: it’s about me, about that time in my life. About who I was back then—peppy and fresh out of college—and who I am now.
“I know,” I say. “But I didn’t want you to find someone. I can’t come running to you for more money as soon as anything goes wrong. I wanted someone with real skills, someone I knew was good, and whatever my personal feelings about Emmy are, this project is more important. This film is everything to me.”
Grandma’s story, my retelling; Silvertjärn is both my past and my future. I’ve lived with it since I was a child, and it’s going to be my breakthrough. No more receptionist jobs, no more temping. No more sofa-surfing with friends, no more humiliating conversations asking my parents for money to pay my phone bill, even though I’m almost twenty-nine, even though all my old classmates are being offered promotions and raises, getting married and having kids.
The Lost Village is my ticket out of all of that.
Max nods slowly.
“I guess I just don’t get how you can trust her after that,” he says.
“I don’t need to trust her,” I say. “I just need to know that she’ll do her job. And she will. She’s a pro.”
I swallow down the sudden sourness in my mouth. The languid light is shimmering in the brushwood.
I just wish I could believe what I’m saying myself.

 NOW
Night falls soft as a sigh over the village. When Max and I get back to camp sunset has already started to lick its fiery tongues across the sky, and by the time I’ve transferred the photos from the cameras to the laptop the sun is already half-buried under the horizon.
I’m going through the pictures on the laptop while Max gets some food ready. Robert seems determined to help him out; I can hear them mumbling about boiling points and lead levels in food tins. With their red and blond heads hunched over the alcohol stove, they look like two bashful boys sharing their toys in the sandbox.
I smile to myself, then turn my eyes back to my laptop. I’m not expecting to get through all the shots now—I’m saving the bulk of that work for postproduction. I expect I’ll have to work much closer with Emmy then. Before we got here that prospect hadn’t seemed so unworkable, but now, less than twenty-four hours in, I’ve started to wonder if we could outsource some of the more technical stuff. Having her here is triggering things I hadn’t anticipated.
Unfortunately, Emmy is a great director. A little too sure of herself, perhaps, a little too convinced of her own genius, but her belief in her own methods is often well-founded and she’s extremely well-read. The first time I really noticed her was during our second seminar in Dramaturgy I at Stockholm University of the Arts. I’d seen the petite girl with the green eyes, tousled hair, and rocker clothes before, but I hadn’t given her a second thought until I made a comment in class that I felt was both thoughtful and well-reasoned, only to watch in shock as it was cut to shreds by that very same girl. She had a dab of tobacco under her lip and looked as though she’d just rolled out of bed, but she went through what I’d said point by point, making mincemeat of my arguments against the conventional three-act structure.
Later that evening she had suddenly popped up again at the student bar, a beer in her hand and a mildly apologetic smile on her lips. She introduced herself as Emmy Abrahamsson and apologized for what had happened in the seminar. Said that she could “get a little enthusiastic at times.”
I’m still not sure if I regret accepting that beer.
I’ve never been the same since that night on the bridge. I learned something about people that night. And something about myself.
Seven years have passed since then, almost a quarter of my life. And all this time she’s been like a half-healed wound, a scab I can never quite seem to stop myself from scratching.
It was naïve of me to think I’d be able to put that to one side here.
I shake my head, try to focus on the images in front of me. They’re good. The shots from the school are strong. Not all of them are completely in focus—Tone still