She screws up her eyes to see the road properly. Tall fences flash past her on either side. They are meant to keep wildlife off the road. They’re not meant to protect wildlife but to protect people. People are the most frightened animals on the planet, she thinks.
She glances again at Dante in the child seat.
She was already a pastor in the parish of Hässelby when she found out she was pregnant. The father was the editor of the newspaper Church Times. She found herself standing and staring at the results of the pregnancy test, realizing that she was thirty-six years old. She decided to keep the baby but not the father. Her son was the best thing that had ever happened to her.
The sleeping boy’s head has fallen to his chest and his security blanket has slipped to the floor. Before falling asleep, he was so tired that he cried at the slightest frustration. He cried because he didn’t like the way the car smelled like Mamma’s perfume; he cried because Super Mario had been eaten up.
Pia Abrahamsson realized she had to pee urgently. She’d had too much coffee at the meeting. It’s at least twenty kilometers to Sundsvall and more than four hundred to Stockholm. There has to be an open gas station soon.
She tells herself that she shouldn’t stop the car in the middle of the forest. She shouldn’t and yet she finds she is stopping anyway.
Pia Abrahamsson, who often preaches that there is a reason for everything that happens, is about to be the victim of chance.
She turns onto a logging road and stops at the boom that prevents traffic from entering. Behind the boom, a gravel road stretches through the forest to a storehouse for lumber. She thinks she’ll walk just beyond the view of the road and she’ll leave the car door open in case Dante wakes up. Which he does.
“Mamma, don’t go.”
“Sweetie,” Pia says. “Mamma has to pee. I’ll leave the door open so I can see you the whole time.”
He looks at her with sleepy eyes.
“Don’t leave me alone,” he whispers.
She smiles and pats his sweaty cheek. She knows that she’s overprotective, but she can’t help it.
“Just an itty-bitty minute,” she says.
Dante grabs for her hand, but she pulls away. She ducks under the boom and walks along the gravel road. She turns and winks at Dante.
What if someone sees her with her bare backside and films her with a cell phone? Pia envisions the clip circulating on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter: “The Pissing Pastor.”
She shudders at the thought, then steps off the road and into the trees. Heavy forestry machinery, harvesters, and bulldozers have torn up the earth.
As soon as she’s sure that no one can see her from the main road, she lifts her skirt, moves her underwear to one side, and squats. She’s tired, and she steadies herself with one hand in the soft moss that grows at the base of the trees.
Relief fills her as she shuts her eyes. When she looks up again, she sees something incomprehensible. An animal has come out of the forest on two legs. It’s walking on the logging road, bent over and stumbling. A tiny figure covered in dirt, blood, and clay.
Pia holds her breath. It isn’t an animal after all. It’s almost as if a part of the forest has freed itself and come alive. As if it’s a little girl made from twigs.
She gets up and follows it. She tries to say something but can’t find her voice. A branch breaks beneath her foot. Rain has started to fall.
She moves as if she’s in a nightmare. She can’t make her legs run.
She sees between the trees that the creature has reached the car. There are dirty cloth bands hanging from the strange girl’s hands.
Pia stumbles up the gravel road and watches the girl sweep her purse off the driver’s seat onto the ground. She gets in and shuts the door.
“Dante!” Pia struggles to say.
The car starts up and drives over her cell phone. It scrapes the guardrail as it turns around and onto the road. Then it straightens out and roars away.
Pia is crying as she reaches the boom. Her whole body is shaking. How could this have happened? The twig girl appeared from nowhere, and now the car and her son are gone.
She bends down under the boom then walks onto the long, empty road. She is not screaming. She can’t scream. The only sound she hears is her own breathing.
23
The rain is beginning to beat against his windshield. Mads Jensen, a Danish long-haul trucker, sees a woman standing in the middle of the road barely two hundred yards in front of him. He swears and blows the horn. The woman seems to come alive at the sound of the horn, but instead of moving, she stays in the middle of the road. The trucker honks the horn again and the woman takes a step toward him, lifting her chin to look right at him.
Mads has already put on the brakes and feels the weight of the semitrailer press against the old Fliegel cab. He has to brake harder while gearing down. The transmission is bad and there’s knocking in the steering axle. A shudder goes through the trailer before he manages to bring the vehicle to a full stop.
The woman is just standing there, barely three yards from the headlights. Now Jensen can see that she’s wearing the dress of a Lutheran pastor beneath her jean jacket. The little white rectangle at her collar shines against the black backdrop of her shirt. The woman’s face is devoid of color. When their eyes meet through the windshield, tears begin to stream down her face.
Mads turns on his warning lights and leaves the cab. Heat and the smell of diesel stream from the motor. As he walks around the cab, he sees that the woman is now leaning on a headlight and is having trouble breathing.
“What is all this?” asks Mads.
She turns to look at him. Her eyes are wide open.
“Do you need help?”
She nods and he leads her to the side of the cab. The rain is getting heavier and the skies are darkening.
“Has someone done something bad to you?”
At first she hesitates, but then she climbs into the passenger seat. He closes the door behind her, hurries around the cab, and gets into the driver’s seat.
“I can’t keep blocking the road,” he says. “Do you mind if I get going again?”
She doesn’t answer, so he starts the motor and the tractor-trailer moves forward. He turns on the windshield wipers.
“Are you hurt?” he asks.
She shakes her head and holds her hand in front of her mouth.
“My son,” she whispers. “My son…”
“What did you say? What happened?”
“She took my child…”
“Would you like me to call the police?” he asks. “Let me call the police.”
“Oh God!” the woman moans.
24
The wipers sweep the rain away as fast as they can. The road ahead appears to be boiling under the downpour.
Pia is shivering and she can’t calm down. She realizes she can’t speak coherently, but she’s able to listen as the truck driver talks with the emergency center. He’s being advised to continue along Highway 86 and then take Highway 330 to Timrå, where an ambulance can take Pia to Sundsvall Hospital.
“What are you talking about?” asks Pia, suddenly finding her voice. “I don’t need an ambulance! You have to stop the car! That’s all that matters!”
The truck driver gives her a look and Pia realizes that she has to pull herself together and make herself clear. Even though she feels as if she’s falling through space, she must sound rational.
“My son has been kidnapped,” she says.
“She is saying that her son has been kidnapped,” reports the truck driver.
“The police must stop the car. It’s a Toyota… a red Toyota Auris. I can’t remember the license plate number.”
The truck driver asks the operator to hold on for a minute.
“It should be ahead of us on the road. You have to stop it. My son is only four years old. He was still in his car seat when I had to…”