There are a thousand things I want to ask him about, a thousand things I want to tell him. He looks at me a bit shyly and sits down on my in-laws’ old couch. I want to say that he doesn’t always have to act so brave about his father’s illness, that he can tell me what he’s thinking, that I won’t be nosy — I know he doesn’t like that — but will listen. And I want to say that I’m always there for him.
And as these things are running through my mind, I find myself, oddly enough, measuring the gap between our knees and the gap between our bodies — his on the couch, mine in the armchair. Why am I doing this? I’m much too conscious of the distance. Of our bodies. Is this consciousness the water that’s choking him? Am I being too much, too intense?
I cross one leg over the other, fold my hands and separate them, glance at Niklas, glance down. How can I set him at ease? Maybe I should start by saying something like I just want to tell you, I feel like you’ve done a remarkable job of dealing with your father’s illness. From there we can proceed to what’s been hardest for him, and maybe he’ll even want to share a drop of his sorrow with me.
But he beats me to the punch, and before I say anything, he asks, “Why can’t Dad have rabbits?”
“What?”
“Why can’t Dad have rabbits?”
“Did he ask you to talk to me about that?”
“No.”
“Hmm.” I’ll let it slide for now. “Niklas, we can’t just have a bunch of small animals running around everywhere. To begin with, there’s still all this clutter from moving, and then on top of that I have to take care of you and a sick husband. There’s just a lot to deal with — an incredible amount.”
“But Dad’s not really sick anymore, is he?”
“When he comes up with ideas like raising rabbits, you can bet he’s not quite right in the head.”
“I think they’re a good idea.”
“You think it’s a good idea for us to turn our new apartment into a rabbit farm?”
“Yeah.”
“And what’s so good about this idea?”
“Well, he’s at home all day long anyway. He really wants to help you earn some money, and he can’t get a job. It’s perfect — he has time, and we need the money.”
“How much has your father been talking to you about this?”
“Not much.”
He looks away, and I try to figure out if he went over to eat at Abdul’s, or if perhaps Frederik called him from Abdul’s phone.
“You probably don’t understand,” he says, “but it’s humiliating for a man when his wife earns all the money.”
“I probably don’t understand? Ha! But you do?”
“Yeah.”
I stare at him and can’t help but laugh. “Want a piece of cake?” I ask.
“Yes, please.”
So I walk into the kitchen to cut two pieces of cake and make myself a cup of coffee. Niklas isn’t allowed to drink coffee at night.
“And some black-currant juice,” he says from the living room.
“You obviously think Dad’s gotten better,” I say as I cut the cake. “Dad’s become a teenager, and you don’t realize that living with a teenager can be a little trying.”
I hear Niklas’s voice behind me. “If I were a boss somewhere, I’d definitely give him a job, now that he’s so well.”
I don’t answer. To avoid admitting how thoroughly changed Frederik is, Niklas and his grandparents have become acrobats of self-delusion. All day long, Thorkild and Vibeke try to come up with little episodes from Frederik’s boyhood to prove he isn’t sick, since their anecdotes all show that he’s always been the way he is now. Thorkild will call, totally hopped up, to tell me how once in a canoe on summer vacation in Norway in 1979, Frederik insisted on telling a certain joke over and over again, though everyone told him to stop. The next day it’ll be something else, and I can’t even tell if the stories are real or if they’re just making them up.
But no one — not any of Frederik’s new friends, not Niklas, not Thorkild or Vibeke — is with him enough to know the truth. I’m the only one. And there’s no question that he still has problems taking initiative. Again and again, I have to remind him about things that need taking care of in the apartment when he’s there alone. And when they don’t get done, it’s not just because he lacks initiative; there’s also evidence of self-centeredness and deficient long-term planning, since he certainly can make the effort to go out with his new friends.
And then there’s his impaired inhibitory mechanism. If he’s used the last piece of toilet paper, either he forgets to replace the roll, or instead of just taking one roll down from the cabinet, he takes three and stacks two of them on the floor beside the toilet, even though I’ve told him I don’t like him doing that. When he opens a bag of muesli or something else in the kitchen, he makes the hole much too large, and when he’s supposed to buy groceries, using the list I write out for him in the morning, he buys too many packages or packages that are too large of whatever it is I’ve asked him to get, even when I explicitly write a reminder not to on the list.
At least Niklas has been brought up well enough that he comes into the kitchen without being asked, and carries his juice and cake back to the coffee table.
Last week I saw him sitting with some friends down on Williams Square. I was driving past, and Niklas had an arm around Emilie as if they’d just been kissing. Something in their body language told me that they were the alpha pair in the group. And why not? They’re both attractive, well dressed, intelligent, they’ve got everything. They must be the couple the other couples all want to be — sick father and all. So has Niklas shifted his whole life, his whole world over to his friends now? Is he actually happy now? If only I could discover a little bit more about how it’s going with Emilie; that must be what takes up the most space in his life these days.
Niklas says, “You also say we can tell Dad is sick because he’s over at the neighbors’ so much. But in the old days he was always working, right? He didn’t have any time to talk to the neighbors. Being at the neighbors’ now doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with him being sick. In fact I think it’s a good thing; there just wasn’t anybody who did that on Station Road. Now we’ve moved, and he’s adjusted to the fact that people live differently here, that they’re more involved with each other’s lives. You’re the one the neurologists would call rigid. And the same thing goes for the rabbit business.”
“Well, I guess I can see that,” I say, wishing that for just five minutes, Niklas could be on my side.
But he won’t let up. “If you gave Dad his car keys back and let him go online again, it’d also be a lot easier for him and Khayyat when they get old LPs and stuff from people’s homes and sell them down by The Square.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I really like Khayyat. He sets out the things he gets by the parking lot in back of the mall, and Dad helps him sell—”
“Your father is not going to sit in some parking lot and hawk junk! All our friends pass by there! He’s a headmaster! Not one of those people who—”
“He just wants to help. To earn some money.”
“But he earns squat! In any case I haven’t seen any money.”
“Right now there’s only enough for candy and cigarettes. But later—”
“He’s started smoking?”
“Not that I know of.” Niklas answers too quickly, clipping the words off.
“Have you started smoking too?”
“No.”
“But Dad has.”