I knock again. Harder. Should I go down and get someone?
The door opens. His face isn’t swollen in the least, not by sleep or heat or grief. It’s untouched, as young people’s faces are.
I ask, “Are you sick?”
“No.”
“I thought there might have been something you ate.”
“I’m not sick.”
He looks at me and wakes up a bit.
“What’s wrong? Other than, of course … Dad.”
A few years ago, after a harrowing day like this, it would have been only natural for him to crawl into my bed, or for me to get into his. There wouldn’t have been the least thing odd about it: falling asleep as I embraced my son. A few years ago.
3
“Mia. We talked to him.”
Immediately I’m awake, and I recognize the voice of Thorkild, my father-in-law, on the telephone.
“Talked to him?”
“Yes, on the phone here in Denmark. He seems lively enough. And cheerful! We called the hospital, but now they’re going to run some tests.”
Half an hour later, Niklas and I are sitting in a taxi on the way to the hospital. Yesterday I called my in-laws from the emergency room. Now I try the hospital one more time, in vain, before calling Thorkild again — just to hear him repeat the last thing he said. “Frederik seems to be in good spirits. He doesn’t have any pain or paralysis or speech difficulties, and he feels well. I think we’ve been lucky — this time around.”
The neurology department is in a cubic metal-clad addition to the old hospital. It is more modern and better maintained than many Danish hospital wards, and the contrast with the emergency room in which we spent yesterday is striking.
On the other hand, not everyone here can speak English. We present first Frederik’s passport and then our own, and at last a smiling nurse’s aide leads us into Frederik’s room without us understanding what she’s saying.
There’s an empty place where Frederik’s bed must have stood, and once again, there’s nothing for us to do but sit and wait. We try not to stare too much at the patient next to us, but it is hard. He’s a thin man in his early thirties with a white bandage wrapped around the upper part of his head. A square rack of steel pipes presses against the bandage from several directions, probably to immobilize his head, yet it looks as if big metal bolts are screwed directly into his skull on every side. He can blink, but his face registers no expression. He stares up at the ceiling while his cheeks hang loose. Doors open and shut, nurses talk in the corridor, two nursing students come in and drag out some large apparatus — he reacts to nothing.
In the distance, a man is shouting unintelligibly in Spanish, his angry voice resounding down the halls.
Niklas and I walk out of the room. And from the farthest end of the corridor we see an orderly approach with Frederik, sitting up in a bed.
“Frederik!”
We run toward him, and he smiles broadly when he discovers us.
“Whew! It’s good you came! Such a fright,” he booms. “Good thing that’s over now.”
The orderly begins shouting again, just as angry as before. It’s clear he wants Frederik to lie down while he wheels the bed along, but Frederik doesn’t care.
I don’t know if I’m allowed to stop the bed in order to kiss him, or to lean over and embrace him.
“It’s all over?”
“Yes, they’re going to give me some medicine and discharge me today.”
We follow the bed at a half run. “That’s fantastic!”
Niklas and I hug each other while we timidly watch Frederik, who’s grinning broadly.
“But what about the tumor?” Niklas asks. “Doesn’t it have to be removed?”
“Not for the time being.”
“Great. But … how are you doing?”
“I’m doing super! They say they can discharge me in a little while, and that’s good. For if we’re going to make it to the dripstone caves, it’s going to have to be today.”
“Do you really think …”
It seems crazy, but Frederik wants to keep to our itinerary. And after the orderly has parked the bed and left, we tentatively let Frederik’s optimism rub off on us. I call Thorkild and Vibeke and turn my cell on speakerphone so we can all talk together.
“We have awakened from a nightmare,” Thorkild says.
“You’re right,” I say. “That’s exactly what we’ve done.”
I hand the telephone to Niklas and lie with my chest against Frederik’s, I close my eyes so I can shut out the sight of the man with the bolts coming out of his head.
“I got so scared, Frederik,” I whisper. “I got so terribly, terribly scared.”
“So did I,” he says.
But he doesn’t lower his voice, even though I’m lying right next to him. He speaks in the same cheerful, almost shouting voice as when he came riding toward us in the hallway, the same voice as when he stood on the stone wall yesterday.
I know. I know right now that this man is not my real Frederik. But he can become him again, I think. Of course he can.
I nestle against him, pressing my face into his long white hospital gown. I don’t want to have diarrhea and nausea again, I don’t want to wake weeping in the hotel room tonight, I don’t want to be afraid.
He is half shouting. “We’ll have to rent a new car straightaway if we’re going to make it to the dripstone caves today.”
“Yes, Frederik,” I say. “We’ll have to.”
• • •
Last year we decided to hold a big birthday party for Frederik, even though he wasn’t entering a new decade or anything. There were so many other years when we hadn’t had time to celebrate, so now it was time.
We invited thirty-eight friends, and almost every one of them could make it, so there was no way we could seat all of them at a table. And we agreed that that would be okay. It would make the party more festive if some folks had to sit on folding chairs spread about the rooms and others had to eat standing, or sitting on a sofa armrest or the stairs or wherever they could find a place.
Several of our friends had known us only at Saxtorph, and I could see that our home took them by surprise. During the long years when Frederik essentially left Niklas and me to our own devices, I became obsessed with buying and selling furniture as a hobby — especially Danish design classics from the ’50s and ’60s. On numerous weekends, I took my trailer to check out bargains I found in a weekly classified-ad paper, and from scratch I slowly traded my way up to quite an exclusive collection. But while our house and furnishings were beautiful, I also knew that I squeezed too many pieces into a place that was too small.
From the moment the first guests arrived, the mood was exceptional. Niklas had compiled a mix of lounge music he thought we might like, and it worked like a charm. My best friend, Helena, and I had made a bunch of salads that we had put a lot of effort into, and then we had a butcher deliver some grilled free-range chickens and meatballs.
Early in the course of the dinner, Laust Saxtorph, the diminutive chairman of the school board, stood up on a chair to make a speech, and the guests crowded in the doorways to listen.
“Frederik, you have a secret,” he began, pausing for effect. “Somehow or other, you get the rest of us to suggest doing what you want us to do.”
Half of our guests worked at Saxtorph, and they laughed out loud.
“And as headmaster, you use this talent every single day — for both raising children and raising teachers … and the chairman of your board!”
The guests laughed again.
Before Laust became chairman, his father had held the post, as had his grandfather and great-grandfather, the school’s founder, the renowned educator Gustav Saxtorph. Besides chairing the school board, they’d also been headmasters, and in the old days the headmasters had lived at the school. So that Laust, just like his father and grandfather, had his childhood home in rooms that are now used for after-school activities.