I raise my head and glance at him. Thock, thock, thock. Isn’t he going to tell me to stop? No, he’s playing some game on his cell phone. He has the earphones in and doesn’t hear a thing.
I poke his leg.
“What?” He pauses his game.
“Don’t you think it’s getting cold?”
It’s dark outside. He’s in shorts and a T-shirt, while I wear a cream-colored top with lace trim and a pair of army shorts.
“Yeah.”
“Should I ask if they have a couple blankets we can borrow?”
He mutters something to express indifference and starts his game again.
“I think I’ll ask for some blankets. Or perhaps a couple sweaters from the lost and found,” I say. He can’t hear me. “Or some pants. If we can fit them.”
Thock, thock, thock: the sound drives me up the wall. I set down the racket.
“Pants or sweaters,” I say. “Maybe both.”
The funeral reception, our weeping friends, the neighbors who come to the burial — just like when the woman across the street got breast cancer. Would her husband find a new wife and move on? That’s what we all wondered then.
No, he’s grown strange. Keeps to himself, acts aggressive. A tragedy. He isn’t recovering.
Me. Niklas. I see myself six months from now, making him elderberry cordial and baking him rolls. It’s evening, and we’re still living in Farum. We’re going to try to get our lives together, I’ll say. You know I’ll always be there for you and support you any way I can. We’ll sit on the sofa and talk, cry, sip the hot cordial.
But that’s not the way it’ll be. Niklas doesn’t want to sit on the sofa with me. Other images: I shop alone, let myself into a cold dark house, go up the stairs knowing that Frederik will never go up the stairs with me; I lie on the bedspread of our bed, entertaining a desperate desire to see his ghost.
A bell rings. I look up at the red number: it’s ours. My throat is dry.
I want to poke Niklas, but he’s already packing up his earphones; he wasn’t so lost in his own world after all.
My legs are numb when I stand. From the counter, a nurse brings us to a small room with bare pastel-green walls. A dark young man in a smock is waiting for us. Under his eyes the skin is almost black. I’m freezing, I should have asked for a sweater after all. And something about the fluorescent lights in here hurts my eyes.
We sit down on plastic seats. Dr. González, it says on the man’s name tag, and he addresses us in English.
“Frederik has been scanned. I am very sorry to say …”
Blood drains from my head. I feel faint and grab my son’s hand. “Oh no. A skull fracture?”
“Yes. He has a brain tumor. I am very sorry.”
“The fracture, will it paralyze him? Will he be able to talk? Will he die?”
“The fracture?” The doctor looks at me curiously.
“Yes, he fell … The fracture.”
“There is no fracture.”
“You just said …”
“He has a brain tumor. It has been exerting pressure, and it triggered an epileptic seizure. Fortunately, there was no serious blow to the head.”
“You said there was a fracture!” I find myself shouting. “You said, ‘Yes.’ I heard you!”
I know my behavior is totally inappropriate. I’m going to stop. I hold my tongue and lean back in the flimsy chair with such force that it almost falls over.
“Sorry,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
Niklas takes over, with a tone that is the complete opposite of mine. “He’s got a tumor?”
“Yes.” The doctor adopts a mournful air and nods his head a little too much. “Unfortunately, I cannot say much more. We are transferring him to the neurological ward. The experts there will examine him tomorrow morning.”
I grasp my seat with both hands. “Is it cancer?”
“We cannot say. The neurologists will examine him tomorrow morning.”
“But then it isn’t cancer?”
“Unfortunately, we cannot say that yet.”
“But it’s probable that it isn’t cancer?”
“The neurologists will be able to say a great deal more tomorrow.”
The peculiar light in here is getting to me: cloudy as pus, sharp as the scalpel that cuts an inflamed area away.
“What is it if it isn’t cancer? Would it also—”
“It is much too soon to say anything. But the neurologists tomorrow will—”
“Can you do something about this light? It hurts my eyes.”
“In the neurological department I am sure they will do everything they can.”
Niklas and I hold hands as we walk slowly back to the waiting room. We are quiet. He doesn’t play any more games on his cell, and I no longer fumble with my racket.
Just quiet.
I have no idea what time it is when a nurse comes out to us. “You’re free to go home now. Nothing else is going to happen tonight. And then you’ll be more rested tomorrow when you go to the neurological department.”
From the taxi windows we look out on the streets: rose-pink houses with green shutters, palm trees and narrow lanes, small idyllic plazas with ice-cream stands and oversize parasols. Everything is dark and abandoned. And meanwhile I know I need to be the rock that Niklas can lean upon. I can hardly make my voice heard in the taxi. “He’s going to make it, Niklas. Dad is so strong.”
We drive down an avenue of tall palms, toward the hotel strip along the beach. A little while later Niklas tells me the same thing. And I repeat it back to him.
“He’s going to make it. Dad is so strong.”
• • •
I met Frederik twenty years ago, and soon I knew he’d be the love of my life.
I was twenty-two and a student at Blaagaard Teachers’ Training College, majoring in math and PE. In my second year, I started my student teaching at Trørød Elementary in Søllerød, where Frederik was a teacher. There were more than sixty teachers at the school, and in the beginning there was no reason for me to speak to him. But I knew who he was because people talked about him.
During a meeting with my supervisor in a corner of the teachers’ library, she mentioned that Frederik had no doubt set his sights on becoming a headmaster, just like his father, who led the conservative, well-respected North Coast Private Grammar School. Frederik was only twenty-eight and had already been elected chair of our school’s Danish committee. He’d also organized a joint project with three other schools to develop a continuing-ed course for Danish teachers in creative writing for children.
At the time, it didn’t occur to me that my supervisor might’ve easily been annoyed by such an untried teacher trying to outshine her. Instead, she spoke with gentleness and pride, and only later did I learn that that was typical of the way people around Frederik reacted to him.
Then they packed us off to school camp, five classes and twelve teachers for a week together in a small group of log cabins, deep in a Swedish forest.
Our departure was delayed, of course, and the buses had to stop several times en route because of carsick kids. After I’d been on the bus five hours, the stench of puke was stinging my nostrils and I was exhausted from the constant shouting, hooting, laughter, and tears — and by a massive drop in blood sugar from the banana bread we’d shared two hours earlier.
We finally reached the cabins. It was still early afternoon, but the clouds and rain were so heavy and low that, hours before sunset, they lent the day an air of twilight. We got the kids in their rubber boots and rain gear, and the teachers who’d been there before led them down to the ocean. I went last to make sure no one was left behind on the path through the pine forest.