But he felt worst about Sara. His disappointment was even greater considering that he’d allowed himself to hope that finally she was showing signs of improvement. Of course he should have known better, evaluated the situation professionally instead of letting himself be influenced by optimism. But he wasn’t the first psychiatrist in history to misjudge a relative’s circumstances. Although he no longer loved Sara in a romantic sense, he was still very fond of her and that fondness would never go away, any more than he could stop loving his parents. Although their relationship had taken a different turn than they’d planned on their wedding day, they still stood in its shadow; in any case, the way things were at the moment they were still a long way from feeling able to look for happiness once more in the arms of other people. If Benni’s fate were never explained, they might remain this way all their lives. His disappearance bound them with slender but strong threads, the web of their shared tragedy.
When the plane landed, he made it his first task to call his ex-wife. It was much colder in Ísafjörður than in Reykjavík and Freyr’s coat flapped in the wind, allowing the cold to bite through his thin shirt. With his free hand he managed to button his coat loosely as he increased his speed across the tarmac. He was about to hang up when Sara finally answered. She wasted no time on a greeting, and instead asked curtly: ‘What do you want?’
‘I just wanted to say goodbye to you properly. It was all a bit weird when I left and I found it difficult to discuss things properly with your friend there.’
‘You don’t have to patronize her like that to me. You made it perfectly clear what you think of people like her. However, you might want to think about abandoning your prejudices and listening to what she has to say. It’s not just mumbo-jumbo.’
‘Maybe not.’ Freyr was striding purposefully through the airport. He lowered his voice slightly as he made his way through a group of travellers that had gathered at the luggage belt. ‘But if I try to open my mind to this, would you at least be willing to look at it with a slightly more critical eye? Maybe we could meet halfway? How about that?’ He was more than ready to play along and pretend to consider a Ouija board and other such nonsense if it would bring Sara a bit more down to earth.
‘I’ve tried it, Freyr. It doesn’t work. I’m still having the same dreams and I’m still haunted by the same feelings.’ She took a deep breath before continuing: ‘I can smell Benni sometimes. I see him at the shops, outside the apartment, everywhere I go. I’m not hallucinating, Freyr. He’s still here. You’ve got to realize that.’ Again she drew a breath. ‘There’s something bad in the air, something that’s getting worse. If you choose to pretend it’s nothing, then so be it. I wish I could say something or do something to get you to take this seriously, but I know I can’t. But I felt obligated to you, which is why I took the chance of having Elísa talk to you and open your eyes to what you don’t want to see. It didn’t work, obviously.’
‘Sara, I’m not sure you ought to have much more to do with this woman.’ He said this as carefully as possible, for fear of her hanging up on him. ‘If you dream about Benni, think you can see him and so on, it’s perfectly natural and it doesn’t have to have any psychic meaning. You must believe me, these things are more common than you think. Your mind is still tied to him, and because he’s always uppermost in your thoughts he’ll keep appearing like this for a long time to come, though it might eventually be less often. Do you think I haven’t experienced these things myself?’ He didn’t want to tell her about the incident at the hospital, when Benni had seemed so real to him that he’d felt as if he could touch him.
‘I can’t talk to you about this, Freyr.’ There was defeat in Sara’s voice. ‘And I know you lied to me. About what, I don’t know, but you once lied to me about something that makes a huge difference in all of this.’
‘What?’ Freyr’s heart skipped a beat. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘I wasn’t going to mention it to you, but it’s been plaguing me and it’s best if I just say it. It’s up to you what you do about it; you can tell me the truth, continue to lie or just say nothing. You decide.’
Freyr was silent for a moment. ‘If you think I have information that could solve Benni’s case, you’re very wrong.’ He was angry; at her and at himself. He’d reached his car, which he’d left in the car park outside the terminal. He allowed the wind to cool him down. ‘Where is this coming from?’
‘When I wake from the dream that haunts me every night, I know it for certain. You can’t say or do anything to change it, so you can spare yourself the trouble.’
‘What is this dream about, Sara? Maybe the feeling it gives you can be explained by its contents.’
‘It’s about Benni. What else? I’m chasing him; I never catch him, of course, but I’m always really close and get closer every time. Everything is green, even the air. It’s difficult to explain but I wake up in a sweat, knowing that you were the cause of all of this. Because you lied.’
Freyr said nothing. The dream seemed startlingly similar to the last one he’d read about in Védís’s dream diary. He was afraid to admit how much Sara’s words affected him, especially the part about lying. There, he knew he was guilty.
‘She wouldn’t stop. I hope you don’t mind, but I thought you would want to know about it even though you were on leave.’ The nurse’s anxiety was plain to see as she stood there with her arms crossed, deep wrinkles creasing her youthful brow. Freyr smiled reassuringly, realizing that his preoccupied state might have been taken by the woman as annoyance at having been called to the nursing home. Nothing was further from the truth; he’d been happy to receive the call, because it meant he could push his own troubles aside for a while.
‘No problem, you were absolutely right to call.’ He concentrated on sounding perfectly normaclass="underline" ‘You said Úrsúla had repeatedly asked to see me, but did she say why?’
The woman shook her head. ‘No, you know how she is. Not exactly a chatterbox. It actually started on the morning shift but I didn’t come in until the afternoon, so I don’t know for sure whether she was any more lucid then. I doubt it. I thought I’d better get hold of you before we left for the night, in case she needed to be admitted to hospital and monitored. You never know how well sleeping pills will work if a patient’s having an episode.’
‘I’d better see what’s up.’ Freyr put his hand on the doorknob to the woman’s room. ‘Has she been out today?’
‘No. She wouldn’t hear of it. She actually stiffens in fear if you so much as mention even going into the corridor. She’s terrified of something but refuses to say what it is. In the meantime there’s very little we can do to help her overcome her fear.’ The woman stretched her back. ‘I feel like she’s deteriorated. The little progress we’d started to see seems to have gone into reverse, unfortunately.’
This didn’t particularly surprise Freyr; in fact he’d been worried this might happen. For a long time all the signs had suggested that she could regress. ‘I’ll look in on you before I go.’ He opened the door and the heavy air in the apartment was nearly palpable. ‘Oof. Can’t we open a window?’