Then she did something she had never done before. She gave his cheek a gentle stroke. And that teased out a little smile.
When she was in the car driving home again, she thought to herself that she never wanted to be old. She couldn’t face the deterioration, the helplessness. She didn’t want her hair to go gray and her jowls to sag. She thought about her father; he was like a child now. His life was over too, even though he was only seventy-five. He was in another world, but he was in good physical health and might live for years yet with serious dementia. She had seen an Alzheimer brain on TV once, and it was as full of holes as Swiss cheese.
That evening she sat on the sofa with Simon and looked through a photo album. She had to point out and explain who was who all the time.
“That’s Granny and Grandpa,” she said, “on their wedding day. Isn’t Granny lovely?”
Simon agreed. There wasn’t a picture like that of his mother and father because they never got married.
“Look, that’s me,” she pointed and laughed. “I was just a baby there, and I was pretty fat. And there I’m ten; we’re at the beach. I remember that swimsuit because I had it for a long time.”
“And that’s me and Daddy,” Simon said as he looked up at her. “And I’ve got a sister.”
“A half-sister,” Bonnie corrected him. “It’s not quite the same.”
She helped him brush his teeth, tucked him into bed, and switched off the light. She felt utterly exhausted and went back into the living room and sank down in an armchair. She tried to find something to watch on television. Where was her life going? What was going to happen? Sometimes, like now, she felt that something was close, something she couldn’t articulate.
24
Every winter, on the night before Christmas Eve, Eddie went to bed first. When the door closed behind him, Mass swung into action. She filled an old red stocking with candy and hung it above the door to her son’s bedroom. He would lie awake in bed and listen to the hammering. Early the next morning, he would empty the contents of the red stocking out onto the table and munch his way through it in no time. And now it was already January. Mass had tidied Christmas away and all the pine needles had been swept up.
Eddie had been working on the crossword for some time, chewing a pencil that was about to disintegrate. Intrigue. Plot. When he had finished, he sat and pondered. And after he had pondered for a while, he sat down at the computer. Mass took over the newspaper but kept an eye on her son staring at the screen. After a while, he turned and looked at her.
“When was Dad born?” he asked.
“Oh, darling, I’ve told you so many times before.”
“Well, tell me again,” Eddie insisted. “I need to get it absolutely right.”
“November sixth, 1945,” she said with a frown.
Something about her son’s behavior made her uneasy. There was a determination about him that she had seen on a couple of previous occasions; it meant he was up to something.
“Do you have his personal ID number as well?”
“No.”
“And where was he born?” Eddie asked.
“In Bergen.”
“And when did he leave us?”
Mass sighed in exasperation. “Eddie, darling, why do you want to know all this?” she asked anxiously.
“When did he move?” Eddie persisted.
“In 1987. On May twenty-seventh.”
He looked at her in surprise. “Crikey, you even remember the date?”
“Women remember things like that,” she said wearily. “Men don’t always pay attention to the details.”
“And when did he die?”
“In ’92. But don’t ask me the date because I don’t know. And I don’t know where he’s buried, and I don’t know if he had any children with his new wife. And I don’t want to know. He was a coward.”
“Why do you always say he was a coward?” Eddie asked.
Mass thought for a while before she reluctantly replied: “Well, when you were little, you weren’t very easy to deal with.”
Eddie looked at his mother with piercing eyes. “Why? What do you mean?”
“You didn’t want to do anything. You didn’t want to go to daycare; you didn’t want to be with other children. You clung to us all the time because you suffered from what’s called separation anxiety. So even though we managed to get you a place at daycare, we couldn’t use it. I’m just being honest now. And Anders was at the end of his tether. He didn’t think you’d ever amount to much. He called you a sniveling brat, and fathers shouldn’t say things like that about their own children. It’s just not right.”
“But if you weren’t in touch, how did you find out that he’d died?”
“His wife wrote me a letter.”
“His wife?” Eddie exclaimed. “Wrote you a letter?”
“Yes.”
“But she didn’t say where he was buried?”
“No, and I didn’t particularly want to know either, because I had no intention of visiting his grave.”
“But if you got a letter” — Eddie was excited now — “then you know her name, don’t you? And then I can find out.”
“I don’t remember much of the letter,” she admitted.
“Nothing?”
“Good Lord, Eddie, you do go on. You’re starting to annoy me now.”
“But you do remember her name, don’t you?” he nagged. “You can remember the date he moved to Copenhagen. So that means you’ve got a good memory, just like me.”
She closed her eyes and a considerable amount of time lapsed before she opened them again. “Well, since you’re obviously not going to give up, her name was Inga.”
“Inga what?”
“Inga Margrethe.”
“What else?”
“I can’t remember.”
“But it must have been written on the back of the envelope,” he said. “Have you still got the letter?”
“Of course not,” she snapped. “Why would I keep it?”
Eddie thought about what his mother had told him, that he was a difficult child. Even though it had never been said so directly, it was something he already knew. He turned back to the computer screen and opened a new document. He sat for a while and thought before he started to write.
To the Tracker Tore production team,
My name is Eddie Malthe, and I am writing to you because I need help to find my father’s grave in Copenhagen. He left my mother and me on May 27, 1987, and then remarried and moved to Denmark. My father’s name is Anders Kristoffer Malthe, and he was born in Bergen on November 6, 1945. His new wife is named Inga, but I don’t have a surname, I’m afraid. They settled in Copenhagen. I know that he died in 1992 but I don’t have the exact date. I watch your program every week, and I know that you have found people all over the world. It would mean a lot to me, because then I could go to Copenhagen and lay flowers on his grave. All I have is an old photograph that hangs over my bed. I hope that you will be able to help me find him.
Yours faithfully,
He mailed the letter the same day. He had printed it on good paper because he thought that it might be more personal that way. No doubt they got heaps of letters. He didn’t want his to drown in them all. He had written his address and telephone number at the bottom, and, to be on the safe side, had stuck on two stamps. The long wait started. He would sit by the kitchen window and watch for the red mail van, and as soon as he saw it, he would rush out into the snow. Ansgar often came out at the same time with the cat at his heels. Presumably he stood by the window waiting as well, but Eddie just grabbed what was in the mailbox and disappeared back into the house as fast as he could. Sometimes he had Shiba with him. Her legs were getting worse and worse, but every time he mentioned it to his mother, she got upset. Some days she laid out a newspaper by the front door, so the dog could shit there. But Shiba also had good days, and then Mass held on to the hope that she would get better. She couldn’t bear to accept the inevitable. And all the time, Eddie waited for a letter from Tracker Tore. His body ached with anticipation and he was constantly in and out of his room to look at the photograph. His father really was a handsome man, he thought, with broad shoulders and thick blond hair. He had forged a steely determination to find his father’s grave. He would look day and night for months if he had to.