The two polite young men walk into the living room, where Frederik is sitting at the dinner table, reading from a stack of advertising circulars.
“Frederik Halling?” one of them asks. “It is 10:15 a.m. You are hereby under arrest, charged with embezzlement and falsification of documents. It would be best if you remained seated while we go through the house.”
Frederik says nothing and, equally silent, I sit down in the chair next to him and hold his hand.
After listening to the front door open and shut a couple of times, I can hear the policemen rummaging around in Frederik’s office. I get up and go in there. His computer lies in a moving box with a pile of DVDs and two external hard drives. The officers put files and folders and all kinds of papers into boxes, while they allow me to stand there and watch.
An hour later, they turn their attention to Frederik again.
“Now then, sir. We would like to ask you to accompany us to the station.”
Frederik gets up, and I put some crackers and apples in my bag. I put on my coat and am ready to go when the first officer says, “Sorry, ma’am, you can’t come with. Only Mr. Halling.”
“But Officer, they think I helped embezzle the funds. They’ve accused me too.”
“We don’t know anything about that.”
The second policeman takes over. “We suggest you wait here at home. Later today, we’ll call and tell you whether he’s going directly to jail.”
“Directly to jail?”
“Yes ma’am. With a charge like this, one doesn’t go home to sleep.”
Something breaks inside of me. I see Frederik in a fight with other inmates; I see him attacking policemen in an uncontrollable burst of anger and being beaten with batons.
“But he’s sick! His brain is sick! I have to come. You don’t know how to talk to him.”
“Sorry, ma’am.”
“But you don’t understand! He gets fits of anger, he’ll start hitting you!”
“We’re sorry.”
“You can’t just do this, the man isn’t well! You’ll end up having to charge him for assaulting an officer!”
“Ma’am, it can’t get any more serious than it already is.”
I make an effort to breathe calmly, but the air comes in long noisy gulps as I plead with them and follow them out to the cruiser. They won’t budge. Meanwhile Frederik sits peacefully in the car, looking blankly at the seat in front of him and eating the package of crackers I gave him.
As soon as they’ve driven off, I run into the house and call Laust, who doesn’t answer. I leave a message on his machine about him being a psychopath who’s killing his best friend.
I call Helena, but she doesn’t pick up either.
I call Thorkild and Vibeke. They’ve had time to digest the news, since I already called them this morning at half past six. Vibeke answers and hands the phone to Thorkild.
“You need a lawyer,” he says.
Of course we do. I call Gerda from the support group and ask if anyone in the group knows a lawyer who’s familiar with brain injuries.
“You should call Bernard,” she tells me.
“He knows one?”
“He’s a lawyer himself, and in that field he’s the best there is.”
Bernard’s the only member of the group that I didn’t feel completely at ease with, but of course I call.
“Your husband has the right to have counsel present during questioning,” he says. “The police should have informed you. If you want, I can be at the station in twenty minutes.”
“I’d be tremendously grateful if you could do that. He might start hitting people, and he’s—”
“Okay. I’ll call you later.”
I collapse on our bed, but it smells wrong — of Frederik’s new smell. I try to rest, but I cannot. So I lie down on the air mattress instead, pull the comforter over my head, and hope I can drift off.
• • •
Niklas comes home from school early; he skipped his last classes. I tell him I understand, and give him a quick, watered-down version of what happened.
“Are you very upset?” he asks.
“Yes.” It feels oddly still here in the entry. “Yes, I am.”
“But not as upset as … that other time?”
“No! Not at all. You don’t have to worry about that, I’ll never do that again.”
He clears his throat. “Is there anything I can do?”
“No, it’s not really you who’s got to … you don’t really have to …”
It’s hard to believe how considerate Niklas can be, especially since he’s been on my case so much these past few weeks. Angry about the most trivial things. Now we converse as if he never yelled at me last night, as if he never screamed at me three days ago when his bike lock wouldn’t open, or before that, when Frederik put a Danish essay Niklas hadn’t turned in yet at the bottom of our pile of already-read newspapers.
On the debate forum at braindamage.com, I’ve read that if Frederik does get better, he’ll go back and forth between being affectionate and normal, and being irrationally testy and emotional—“like a teenager,” they say. There will be good moments, but they will disappear instantly without warning.
Niklas says, “I could show you my new pictures.”
He knows that I love to look at his photos with him. And lately I haven’t been allowed to.
I hug him and fetch a chair from Frederik’s office so we can sit next to each other in his room.
Whenever Niklas does come home, he sits at his computer and edits pictures and videos. Mathias composes the most unbelievable electronic music, and their latest plan is to project Niklas’s photos on a screen above the stage while Mathias’s music plays as a warm-up for a concert at the gymnasium.
There’s no bra in the laundry pile — I checked while he was in school — nor was there anything else white that might look like a bra in the dark. Niklas quickly exits a bunch of programs as I sit down, and I think I see the name Sara listed as sender in a bunch of chat messages, but they fly by too fast to be sure. I do know who Sara is: she’s in Mathias’s homeroom, pale with long dark hair and freckles, and she used a lot of bookish phrases during the few moments we spoke at Niklas’s sixteenth birthday. He’s changed the subject the couple of times I’ve mentioned her name since then.
Niklas brings up Mathias’s latest composition and clicks PLAY. A wave breaks against the coast. It breaks again. And then again. And with each crash, it sounds more and more like a person falling down a flight of stairs. Heavily; she must have broken a bone. The falls — the wave-crashes — come more quickly, a great dance rhythm. A melody wriggles in on a piano, and then the wind on the beach in Sweden.
“Our theme is water,” Niklas says, showing me a sequence of enigmatic black-and-white patterns. “What do you think this is?”
“No idea.”
“You see something round, don’t you?”
“It looks like the entrails of a dead animal,” I say, thinking it could be a brain, though I don’t want to say that out loud.
“It’s a glass of water with ice cubes, with the light playing on it. It was standing on the kitchen counter one day, and I took a whole series.”
He goes through the pictures explaining them, almost as if I were a little kid and he were reading to me. As if he were my dad. His hands dart quickly across the keyboard; there’s hair growing on them, a thin patch from the base of the pinky to the wrist. Lots of men would fantasize about what Niklas and Sara might be doing with each other. Would dwell needlessly on them in their fascination. That’s the way men are: they want youth, they think they can screw themselves younger, or marry themselves younger. Yet no matter how much they humiliate themselves, they’re just poor wretches, halfway to death. Just like me …