His shaking becomes more pronounced. “But I want to. You should sleep in here. In here. It should be me who …”
He buries his head in the comforter over his knees. He’s still shaking.
“No, Niklas. You’re definitely not sleeping in there. I will. No. No. I’ll put the air mattress outside the door to the room.”
Now we can hear Frederik through the wall, weeping loudly. Someone ought to be there with him. Someone ought to comfort him.
“Niklas, you have to sleep in here, like you always do. Then I’ll lie down on the sofa in the living room … No, I’ll sleep outside his door … No.”
In the end, Niklas says it’s okay if I sleep on the air mattress on his floor. I have to work tomorrow, and I know I won’t get a wink of sleep if I have to lie down alone somewhere in the house.
Although the air mattress is on Niklas’s shelf, all the comforters and linen are in our bedroom closet. But I don’t want to go in there, so I fetch a blanket from down in the living room.
As I make up the mattress on the floor beside Niklas’s bed, I can’t help but wonder who I’m doing all this for. It’s obvious that Frederik doesn’t care about me now — despite being completely dependent on his parents and me around the clock, to protect him from himself. But his callousness since the seizure is due to the disease. What about back when he was himself?
And then I let myself be tormented again by a memory that’s been plaguing me the last five weeks. In Majorca, just before Frederik fell, he was standing atop the stone wall, swinging his arms, he was shouting, and then he started to cry at the mere thought of Niklas — his paternal love so great that his weak brain could no longer hold it in.
But toward me, it wasn’t love that burst forth.
The black mountainsides, the brush we’d driven past, the scent of lemon. “You piece of shit, Mia! You big fat piece of shit!”
He began thrashing about with his arms even more wildly. And then he fell.
“Frederik! Frederik!”
“Dad!”
A piece of shit. Just like his love for Niklas, was that something he’d felt for a long time — but had had enough brainpower to hide till then?
The slope where he fell. The tree that saved his life.
• • •
At last. A month and a half after Frederik’s seizure, the doctors finally gauge that it’s time to operate, and then it goes quickly. They schedule the surgery for two days later.
The evening before the operation, I go to the kitchen. Niklas has been out with friends all day, as usual, and I pour myself a generous tumbler of whiskey.
I haven’t raised the glass yet when I hear his voice behind me. “Please don’t.”
I turn around. Niklas is standing in front of the broom closet.
“Where’d you come from?”
He stares at me, a disagreeable tightness around his eyes, and I don’t know where to look.
“It’s just one glass. It’s not—”
He doesn’t budge. “Then I’m moving over to Mathias’s.”
I don’t know where to go. I can’t stand to be in the kitchen anymore, or in the front hall either. I rush into the living room, where Frederik is stretched out on the sofa, watching TV, and I throw myself into his arms, just as if he were well. Lie there and press myself to him. He doesn’t take his gaze from the screen. There’s auto racing on Eurosport.
We’re quiet for a little while, and then I say, “I’m so unhappy.”
He doesn’t answer.
“Frederik! Can’t you say anything? Can’t you ask me why I’m unhappy?”
He looks at me with a big grin. “Yes, I will. I’ll ask you. Why are you unhappy, dear?”
“It’s because I’m so scared of your operation tomorrow.” The words come out in a rush. “It’s because you mustn’t die or get any sicker.”
“Well, is that all. It’ll be fine. Don’t you worry about it.”
He turns back to the cars whizzing around and around. And I just lie there with him. I could probably squeeze more of a response out of him, say that I’m also unhappy about my conversation with Niklas, but instead I get up and go over to the other end of the room and call Helena through the engine noise from the TV.
She only has to hear the sound of my voice before she’s offering to spend the night at our place. And she can hear how relieved I become once I say yes.
Standing in the kitchen, I swallow three scoops of chocolate ice cream so quickly that they burn against my palate, and then I go upstairs and knock on Niklas’s door. He opens it halfway and stands there blocking the opening.
“Helena’s coming over,” I say.
He makes a sort of humming noise in response.
“Is there anything I can do for you?” I ask.
“No thanks.”
“What are you doing?”
“Just sitting and watching some videos.”
I don’t have anything to base it on, but I get the feeling he hasn’t heard me. I find myself repeating my words. “Helena’s coming over, to sleep. I’m really glad she’s going to.”
“Okay,” he says.
“I’m really glad that you’re so … manly,” I find myself saying. And then I repeat myself. “Do let me know if there’s anything you’d like to talk about, anything I can do for you.”
But apparently there isn’t. I’m stranded on the Swedish beach where I met Frederik twenty years ago. Everybody else has gone home, they’ve gone on with their lives and I’m still here, half buried in the sand, the waves washing over me, cold as a corpse.
I return to the kitchen and put some water on for tea, for Helena. Maybe I really died then on the beach, I don’t know. I go to set out a couple of tumblers and the fifth of Scotch too — maybe she could use a little whiskey.
But the bottle’s gone. I look in all the cupboards. It and the cognac bottle have both disappeared.
6
Frederik doesn’t have cancer. He won’t die from his disease.
But the meningioma sits directly in his brain’s median plane, which makes it much more difficult to remove. As a result, I spend so much time in the short week after the operation at the National Hospital’s neurointensive clinic that I practically live there, and after that three weeks in the neurology department of Hillerød Hospital, where Frederik totters around, taking small steps like a dying dog.
And then he comes home to our house. He slowly fights his way back to being able to remember and speak and walk. Each week he improves, but after four months, he seems just as alien as he was in the month before the surgery. Perhaps his progress will stop here, perhaps he’ll continue to get better for a few more months. Nobody can say. But he’ll never completely be himself again.
When fury overcomes him, it distorts his face exactly like Niklas’s when Niklas was three: the same knitted eyebrows, the same hollow in his cheeks; the same quiver in the skin and arch to the lower lip. And now Frederik’s fits of rage are rubbing off on Niklas. The pettiest things set them off. They yell at each other and slam doors throughout the house, two spitting images divided by thirty-two years and an unforeseeably complex brain operation, while I run around after them trying to calm Niklas down. The only one who mustn’t get angry is me. If I succumb, everything will fall apart.
• • •
My first meeting with the support group for spouses of people with brain injuries was supposed to take place at the house of someone called Kirsten. But her husband was rehospitalized this morning, so at the last minute the meeting was moved.
At Gerda’s apartment, the scent of sugar and vanilla hangs in the air; she’s baked cookies. We squeeze in around her dining room table. Six women, five of them looking at least twenty years older than me, and a single lean, grey-haired man.