I’m on the overpass that crosses the freeway, almost home now, and I recall another time sitting here in the car on my way from work, talking to Bernard on the phone about my day. He told me about his own day, on his way home to Lærke in his car, and just as I reached Station Road, we started talking about a trip he’d taken once as a student. Three law students traveling together, staying in a cottage in some community garden outside East Berlin. They were into the local raves, which were huge back then in the years after the Wall fell.
“I was pretty wild when I was young,” he said.
“Wild?” Perhaps I sounded startled. “But you were already with Lærke back then, weren’t you?”
“Well yeah. Not wild in that way.”
• • •
I throw my school bag onto the small table in the entry and call out, “I’m home!” like I usually do.
Frederik doesn’t answer. I turn on the electric kettle and go upstairs.
The bed’s empty. I walk quickly, almost at a run, to the workshop. He isn’t there either.
“Frederik! Frederik!”
Has he left a note behind, a letter? I run back to the bedroom, down to the living room, back to the kitchen, out into the yard. No letter, no Frederik.
On our patio I stand completely still, listening to sounds from the neighboring yards, feeling the pulse in my temples. Will today be the day I’ve been fearing, ever since he began lying in bed and moaning for hours at a time? Since he first said that he’d destroyed everything and just wanted to die?
The yard’s as still as I am. The silver-white undersides of the leaves on the tall poplars next door don’t so much as stir.
And just the way you always hear cops state the exact time when they arrest someone, I hear the basic facts being recited in my ear: There is no wind, it is cooler than normal for the season, there is moisture in the air. I am standing on the patio of our silent yard. Frederik is dead.
No one can know how it must’ve felt for him, for the first time in ages, to reproach himself for something. For the first time since a tumor changed everything. How does guilt feel the very first time? Or empathy for another person? How does it feel to realize in a blinding flash that you’ve ruined the lives of everyone around you?
I call Niklas, who is at Mathias’s with some friends, but he hasn’t seen or heard from his father. I manage to sound calm on the phone, though I can hear the thudding of my heart. Niklas sounds calm too, and I don’t think it’s an act. He has no sense of the danger; he hasn’t been home during the afternoons when Frederik’s at his most inconsolable.
Then it’s my in-laws’ turn.
“Is it possible he might do something to himself?” Vibeke asks.
I hesitate too long, and Thorkild has to take the receiver. “We’re coming over there now,” he says.
“I’d rather you wait. If I don’t find him in the next half hour, I’ll call you again.”
Back to the yard. I shout his name and get no answer.
And just then — at the same time that I’m searching and calling and feeling desperate — just then, it’s not simply despair I feel. What was it that Ulla said at my first support group meeting? It would have been better if Kirsten’s husband had died this time. The group smiled afterward; we all felt a bond.
I run down the wooded path toward the lakeshore. No sign of him on the small pier that extends from the woods out into the water.
Thorkild calls again. I tell him they should wait another hour before they come, but he says they’re already in the car and on their way.
I call the police. They haven’t heard anything.
Vibeke calls again from the car, and while I have my weeping mother-in-law on the phone, I hear the beep of another incoming call. I hang up and suddenly Laust is on the line. “Will you come and get your husband!”
“He’s at your place?”
“He just shoved his way in, and I can’t get him to leave.”
Relief. And then not, after all. What was it Ulla said? And everyone smiled. I’m relieved. I am relieved.
I picture Frederik standing erect and sobbing in Laust and Anja’s classy Copenhagen home, his thin body amid their vintage furniture of Swedish birch, with its lovely patinated stain. The moose in the forest.
“May I speak to him?” I ask.
He comes on the line, but he isn’t crying. “There’s nothing to say,” he says in a pinched voice before falling silent. He sounds like a lonesome hero in an old western.
“But you’re not going to leave?”
“No.”
“You have to. It’s Laust’s apartment.”
“It’s him who needs to talk to me. There are two of us. He’s being so unconstructive.”
“How did you get all the way over there?”
The receiver’s torn from his hand and Laust is back. “I’m calling the police if he isn’t out of here in two minutes.”
I try to convince Laust to wait and I run back to the house and car. Once I’m on the freeway I call Niklas and then Thorkild and Vibeke, who are headed toward me on the same road.
Frederik and I have been to lots of parties and dinners in Laust and Anja’s apartment, which lies a few hundred yards from Saxtorph. I know where everything is, in their rooms and kitchen cabinets. I know which photos of their kids hang by the door in the living room and which ones hang in their bedroom. I know the reflection of the window onto the long white dinner table, and the bookcases with Anja’s blue-grey folders of teaching materials for her gymnasium English classes. And I know, from one of the few Saxtorph teachers who side with us, that Laust and Anja have to move. The board’s personally responsible for the school’s finances — something that nobody gave much thought to because the finances were always rock-solid, but now four of the board members have to sell their homes.
All my life, whenever I’ve encountered men who are grieving, I’ve observed a certain restlessness in my body. Unhappy women weep and talk and spew their sorrow over everything. Grieving men, on the other hand, shuffle dumbly about and seal up all the chinks in their houses until they’re ready to gas themselves or ignite some catastrophe for whoever happens to be nearby. They commit suicide and murder and monstrosity, while we only make sobbing attempts that aren’t really meant to succeed. The grief of men is a vast, silent world that’s never revealed itself to me.
And yet I may be starting to understand a little anyway. These last few days in bed, as I’ve finally begun to glimpse my new future, my eyes have been completely dry.
• • •
Laust opens the great carved oak door of his and Anja’s apartment. He looks just as I expected, his pale round head bleak and brooding. And Frederik, standing in the hall behind him, looks the same way. Not a peep. There’s nothing to suggest that they’ve been talking to each other at all.
I don’t know what to say to Laust, who until a few months ago was one of my best friends. Now I don’t even want to talk to Frederik in front of him. Lacking a better alternative, I decide to be like the men: I hold my tongue and look annoyed. The three of us proceed silently into the large corner living room, with its stucco ceiling and the view over Saint Thomas Square. Then we just stand there.
FOR SALE signs block part of the windows. Several of the old paintings are gone; perhaps Laust and Anja had to sell them. The ceramic bowl I picked out for Anja’s fortieth, as a gift from us and some friends we had in common, is also gone from the dinner table, though probably not to be sold.
Why is Laust home in the middle of the day? Is he on sick leave?
At last Frederik speaks up. “You change your accounting methods the way I’ve told you; you sell the gym, and the other premises that we rent out after school hours, to an independent firm, and the school can lease them back during the school day.”