“Hello,” he said, but she didn’t answer.
He tried to edge his way around her wheelchair in the narrow hallway.
“Do you think you could back up just a little, so I can get past?”
She backed up.
“Now then, Lærke. This bag has only frozen goods, so I thought you might be able to put it away in the freezer.”
No answer.
“Do you think you could do that?”
“Yes.”
“Great.”
She remained where she was, parked in front of him. Her long golden hair fell across her shoulders. Bernard brushed it every morning, a ritual he genuinely enjoyed. And it seemed to him as if her skin had gotten smoother and younger after the accident, perhaps because she no longer tensed the skin in her forehead or around her eyes.
“Then you should go out to the kitchen now, over in front of the freezer,” he said.
So that’s what she did.
“Here’s the bag. Look. Try to set the new things farther back in the freezer, so that the open packages are easy to get at. Okay? Can you do that?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
Bernard put away the groceries in the four other bags and then came back to Lærke and the frozen goods. She still had a long way to go, but it was good for her to do it by herself.
He stood behind her and said, “Try to set the open packages on top. Then they’ll be easier to get at.”
“Oh, right.”
“You understand why, don’t you?”
She didn’t answer.
“Look, sweetheart, this package has been opened. If you set it in front of the unopened package, then we won’t end up having both of them open at the same time. Does that make sense?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
He remained standing there.
After a little while, he said, “Look, this package isn’t open, while this other one is. Now if you set the new one in back … It’d be great if you did the same thing with all of them.”
“Did what?”
“If you set the new packages in back.”
“Yes.”
She did it with the one she had in her hand, but then she forgot to do it with the next one.
“Well, maybe you should just do it the way you want to,” he said. “You’re the one putting the frozen things away, so you should decide where they go.”
She didn’t answer, and he started to perseverate.
“So you should decide where they go, right? When you put them away?”
She looked up at him and said, “First the back ones should go first, because then the first ones … First the new ones should go in back, because then the old ones can first …”
Lærke could usually express herself more clearly, but when she got into a bad rut, she had a hard time getting out again.
She started to scold herself, while at the same time trying to say it correctly. “Not in back — front! By the door! The front ones shouldn’t first … the door.”
He gave her shoulders a little squeeze and said, “Yes, that’s where they should go.”
She didn’t answer.
On Saturdays, Winnie would drive the boys to and from soccer. Ordinarily they were back by noon, and now it was twenty minutes past. Bernard felt a mild unease, which he knew he ought to resist. Otherwise, where would it ever end? But Winnie wasn’t so young anymore; her eyes, the cars, what happens in traffic …
“Did your mother call?”
“I don’t know.”
“But did she call just before I got here?”
“She called.”
“Well, what did she say?”
“I don’t know.”
He went to the phone to see if there was anything on caller ID. Next to the phone was a scratch pad, where they’d tried to get Lærke to write down all the messages.
Winnie had called. He called her back and heard from her that practice had been delayed a little, and there was no need to worry.
He began setting the table, with Lærke at his heels, rolling back and forth between kitchen and living room so that she blocked the doorway every time he went back to get something new. Since she was following him anyway, he gave her something to take out to the table.
And then he sat down and waited. And Lærke rolled over to his side.
Tired, he stared into the air, and tired, she stared into the air. But at some point he had sat still long enough, and he turned his face to her. She didn’t turn hers.
He said, “What I wouldn’t give to know what’s going on in your head.”
She made no reply.
“Lærke, what are you thinking right now?”
She still didn’t answer.
He grabbed her hand so that she turned to face him. He looked her in the eye and asked again, “What are you thinking, sweetheart?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re not thinking of anything?”
“No.”
“Your mind’s a complete blank?”
She continued looking wordlessly in front of her.
But he couldn’t let the riddle rest. “Do you see images, or is there something that’s making you sad, or happy? Something we could do differently? Are you excited about physical therapy on Monday? Are you remembering something we’ve done together?”
“Yes, it’s completely blank,” she said. “Completely.”
• • •
As any family member of someone with brain damage knows, the hard part isn’t the initial shock. The hard part comes when the adrenaline recedes and you have to set out down the endless grey corridor of disheartening days, days that look like they’ll last the rest of your life.
The daily grind in which companionship is lacking. Where you find yourself more alone than you thought humanly possible; where you grieve so much, you just want to stay in bed for months. And where you force yourself to get up anyway for your kids’ sake — and because your spouse isn’t actually dead.
Yet there are joys, too. During the first year after the accident, Lærke became better at remembering, speaking, moving — and she began to get her feelings back. Just seeing the boys could once more make her happy.
And then one day when Bernard was sitting at home, working in what used to be his home office but was now furnished as a bedroom for his in-laws, she came in to him beaming with pleasure.
“I was daydreaming! I lay on the bed, and then I imagined being on vacation with the three of you. Imagined it! There were palms there, and a beach. I just imagined it and it showed up, completely on its own!”
Could anything be more momentous than the return of your inner life? Bernard and Lærke celebrated. And the boys did too. They understood what a big day it was for their mother to imagine things once more.
I press my bare chest against Bernard’s as he tells me this, and it’s as if my body thinks it’s me he’s crying for. Rationally, I know that’s not true, but my arms squeeze him tighter, and I feel the urge to say, But I’m here, really. I’m not dead, don’t cry. I’m right here.
And I try to be a little bit Lærke, and it’s almost as if he’s my old Frederik. And I wish I could just wrap my arms around Niklas like this — with my clothes on, of course — just hold him and weep with him for the real husband and father who now is dead.
For a second, it’s Frederik who lies in my arms. We’re at Trørød Elementary. We’re young again and I’m a student teacher, he the committee chair for teachers of Danish. We’re starting our lives all over again. Bernard met me when I was an au pair in Paris, and he followed me here to Denmark. I am his young healthy wife.