“Valium. Ten-milligram pills.”
Lars Christian repeated this.
“I’ll get in touch with him as soon as I get into work tomorrow morning.”
During the night, the dream came back for the first time in weeks. As always, she dreamed that she had gone to Chicago for the Newberry seminar on American literary history and was in a hotel room when there was a knock on the door. With only small modifications, the dream dealt in real events as they had unfolded that morning in Chicago. It was more like a retelling of the past, without the nightmare’s delirious lack of any logic or predictability, where rooms can change into other places. She had been sitting in an armchair with its back to the window. One curtain had been pulled back and the crisp light of dawn fell on a hotel writing pad in her lap. She had made a few last notes on the presentation she was to give later that morning on John Updike’s literary legacy.
In the dream, as in reality, she assumed that a cleaner was waiting outside the door and it made her look for anything embarrassing left lying around. She had checked in late and had hardly had time to do more than take a few steps across the carpet. That morning, she had already tidied the bed a little, and she didn’t need more towels.
As she walked the short distance to the door to tell whoever was outside that she was fine and busy with something important, she managed—in the dream, at least—to have a vision of her life with Greg and Julie, a distillation complete with an extremely concentrated run-through of moments of shame and happiness but also rich in detail, down to things like Greg’s tone of voice when he told her he wanted to take her surname (a land of ashes is better than Noland at all) and Julie’s trembling lower lip when she had fallen from the monkey bars in Olin Park and, as they found out later, broken her arm.
There was another knock on the door, but by then she knew what to expect and didn’t want to take the last few steps across the floor. It was at this point that the most marked discrepancies occurred: in the dream, the voice of the overweight policewoman who had done the knocking did not come from outside the door; she was suddenly sitting at the end of Jane’s bed in full uniform, and at her side stood a younger male colleague and the hotel manager who had escorted them. The policewoman cupped her hands to form a bowl that hid something from view. Her eyes attracted Jane, who slowly came closer, even though she realized that the hidden thing was something she didn’t want to see.
“Jane Ashland? We must talk to you,” the hotel person said in an oddly tuneful voice, like a clarinet’s.
The policewoman reached out her arms toward Jane, solemnly parting her hands as if to offer up a sacrifice or scatter petals. Reluctantly, Jane leaned forward and saw, in the woman’s palms, a small dead animal, its fur torn and bloody.
A sound out of hell woke her. She knew she must take something. Golden light filtered in through the gap beneath the blind. The color made her think of organs stored in formaldehyde. She turned to lie on her front, raised the blind a little, and saw the Poles busying themselves with an angle grinder just below her window. In a cloud of concrete dust, Andrej or Andrzej watched as Eva cut a flagstone in half.
In between the heart-wrenching howls, the house was quiet. Jane walked downstairs barefoot, still in her nightgown, holding her wallet in her hand. She crossed the terrace and then the lawn where the frost was shrinking back into the shadows under the thuja trees. The sun’s rays bounced off the roof of the caravan and burned her corneas. She could have counted the blades of grass.
Eva looked up and saw Jane just as she was about to start cutting a new concrete slab. Jane covered her ears with the wallet and her free hand as she stepped inside the dust cloud, which smelled strongly of gunpowder. How easy it was to lose one’s sense of reality when there was nothing else left to lose. When the grinding disc had stopped spinning, she made her face convey “you know how one can feel sometimes” and asked if she could buy one of their bottles of vodka.
The young man grinned, as if in sympathy.
“No problem,” Eva mumbled.
Their reaction didn’t surprise her. She had mentally granted them both a capacity for observation, a grasp of reality that the Askeland-Nilsens lacked. She had a vision of their lives, impoverished and bleak, among storm-lashed gray tower blocks in a former Soviet state—existences in which pretense had no place.
She mixed the vodka with some of the black currant cordial she had found in the kitchen. The first glass went down quickly, the second she sipped as slowly as she could and remembered how Charles Bukowski had put it: “When you drank, the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn’t have you by the throat.” Though Bukowski had omitted to mention that after the third shot of alcohol, a sensation of suffocating could come back and, later still, of keeping barely a pace or two ahead of someone pursuing you down a dark alleyway.
At one point, she found herself in Camilla’s room, sitting on the girl’s bed with a large, yellow stuffed animal from IKEA squashed against her chest. Then, she threw up in the bathroom on the second floor and had to use the end of her toothbrush to push lumps of vomit down the sink’s drain holes. She showered for a long time and settled down in a cheerful mood to wait for the Askeland-Nilsens to come home. As the afternoon wore on, she had persuaded herself that her quarrel with Eva was simply typical of what happened in an extended family. People occasionally would have different points of view. A bagatelle, then, rather like the matter of the damaged soap dish in the shower cubicle. She had knocked it down and hidden it deep inside the trash can.
By seven in the evening, no one had turned up. The Polish couple retreated into their trailer, leaving behind a numbing silence. She poured the last of the black currant cordial into a mug with a measure of spirits and drank it all leaning over the kitchen counter from where she could see the road through a low, narrow window.
Lars Christian’s Volvo drove up at around eight o’clock. He parked near the wire fence outside the site as the last feet to the garage were still not flagged. Camilla climbed out slowly. She was wearing the white tracksuit and her hair was up. Jane thought her face had the same pained expression as after the training the other night, and ran out into the hall. As soon as she had stepped inside, Jane pulled Camilla close and pressed her lips against the girl’s hair. Lars Christian’s presence in the same space registered as a distracted gaze, minor movements, jackets being hung up. Camilla giggled a little and said something in Norwegian before slipping out of Jane’s embrace and disappearing into the bathroom.
Lars Christian suddenly stopped in front of her. He stood quite still. She focused on a point above his eyebrows.
“How has your day been?” she asked. What she actually wanted to know was if he had gotten her medication. At the deep inlets in his hairline, his skin was tight and smooth. She wanted to put her finger up where his hair had once grown and follow the curve until it reached the first small, childishly downy hairs.
“I… well, I don’t know. All right?” Lars Christian tried to catch her eye.
“This arrived today,” he said. He was holding a square cardboard box in his hand. “Your book!”
“That was quick.”
“Express delivery apparently takes no more than two to four days.”
“All the way from the US?”
“Yes.”
She felt uncomfortable at the sight of the Amazon box, like a victim of blackmail confronting a box crammed with evidence of sins of the past.