Maybe it’s already too late. Or is he actually ignorant about Bernard and me — am I just imagining things? I call and text Niklas several times, but he doesn’t answer.
And then new messages arrive from Bernard. Should I reply? Does it make any difference whether it’s his real self that I’ve fallen in love with? His hormonal changes could be a gift. In fact, I may be the luckiest woman in the world, to find a man who’s brain-damaged in precisely the remarkable way that Bernard is.
I can’t deal with any of it.
I read his texts for what seems like hours. I don’t send him any myself.
Frederik calls around seven to say that dinner will be on the table soon.
When I return, Niklas’s music has stopped. I check my appearance in the hall mirror. Nothing to see. And Frederik seems calm and happy, so Niklas can’t have told him anything.
I sit down quietly at the dinner table. A little later, Niklas comes in; he doesn’t say anything either. I try for a bit of eye contact, just some form of recognition, but it’s a lost cause.
Frederik’s spread a cloth and done a nice job of setting the table; he’s been making an effort every day to win back my love and respect.
“Now let’s enjoy ourselves!” he says with a bright smile. I watch Niklas, who looks just as angry as this afternoon, though more tight-lipped than ever.
Neither Niklas nor I answer.
One beer stands next to Frederik’s plate and another next to mine. Seeing his I say, without really thinking, “That’s not very good for you. And we can’t afford it either.”
He gets up and takes both beers back to the fridge. Halfway there, he stops and holds one out toward me. “Do you want it?”
“No thanks.”
He knows that if he claims he’s no longer sick, it can be interpreted as not acknowledging his illness. And the inability to acknowledge his illness is such a key symptom of his injury that an even longer time would pass before I let him go online without sitting beside him, or go shopping without checking all the receipts.
We’re having homemade moussaka and salad. Frederik’s really made the dinner into something nice — as much as he can, considering there isn’t much money and he basically never cooked before a few months ago, when I gave him responsibility for all the household work.
When Niklas and I don’t say anything, he looks at us with disappointment. “What’s the matter?”
Niklas doesn’t answer.
“I thought we could enjoy ourselves tonight,” Frederik says. He looks over at me. “Did you have a good run with Andrea?”
I finally have to tell him. “Niklas and I were fighting about his music.”
“Oh, so that’s why.”
How did Niklas find out about Bernard and me?
The other day, he barged into the bathroom while I had my tennis clothes in the sink to make them wet before hanging them up to dry. They were supposed to look as if I’d been playing tennis all afternoon. But did he really know that was what I was doing?
Or did one of his friends see Bernard and me swimming in the sound the other day? What went wrong?
Niklas gets up without saying a word and walks out to the kitchen. I hear him open the fridge, and he returns with two beers.
“I don’t think you should …” I start to say. “It’s not a good idea for either of you.”
And then for the first time tonight, he looks me in the eye. It’s not a pleasant experience. He comes closer, sets one beer in front of his father, and opens the other for himself.
Frederik hesitates, and I can see that he’s thinking about showing his solidarity with me by telling Niklas to listen to his mother. Perhaps he wonders why Niklas can twist me around his little finger today.
“Is this okay with you?” he asks me.
I sigh resignedly, and Niklas takes a big gulp of beer.
“You should listen to your mother,” Frederik says in a subdued voice.
Other than that, not a sound.
Frederik doesn’t open his beer.
He says, “Well, I for one have no idea what’s going on around here.” All too quickly he corrects himself. “Or yes — of course I do. Obviously, you’ve been fighting about Niklas’s music — that’s clear.”
Silence.
“Yes, it’s difficult,” Frederik says. “We all have to live here, don’t we?”
In the end, I make an effort to pull myself together.
“What have you been up to today?” I ask Frederik in my most controlled voice.
He lights up. “Well, I was trying to find more evidence in my old bank statements.”
“Find anything interesting?”
“Yes, in fact I was looking forward to telling you. Just one new thing: in the years before my tumor was discovered, I signed up twice for fitness classes without ever going to them. And once for fencing, which I never went to either. Before that, I never signed up for exercise. It was my impaired inhibitory mechanism that let me sign up, of course — and my inability to focus that kept me from following through.”
Niklas looks up at the ceiling, as if to say he thinks we’re hopeless.
I find myself sounding a little grumpy, though I don’t mean to. “There are tons of people who sign up for all kinds of things that they never end up doing.”
“But that’s where Bernard is fantastic. We’re gathering lots and lots of these sorts of facts.”
What goes through Niklas’s mind when he hears his dad use the word fantastic about the man he knows to be my lover?
This past year, a wall of manhood has risen up around Niklas, and I can’t see through to his real self. My boy’s still there within the wall, I know he is — the boy who’d come running to me from the yard if he found a small animal or an oddly bent branch, the boy I could once embrace and lift into the air when he was unhappy. But now his real face hides behind a broad jaw and a coarse complexion, his real body under strange muscles.
“Yes,” Niklas says. “He can do a little of everything, that Bernard.”
I scowl into his bottomless, grey-blue man’s eyes. I do what I can to signal to my son that he should stop now.
“Yes, he can,” Frederik agrees, relieved that Niklas is finally saying something.
But Niklas doesn’t stop there. “He’s a real go-getter, eh? Throws himself into all sorts of things.”
“You shut your mouth!” I blurt.
Frederik raises his water glass and regards his son mildly. “What do you mean?”
“Well, that’s just my impression.”
“From what I was saying?”
“Yeah …” Niklas shrugs his shoulders, letting the word slowly dissolve to nothing.
Silence once more. Till suddenly Frederik looks horror-struck and gets to his feet so abruptly he knocks his chair over. He runs toward the front door. In this moment he must be healthy. Healthy enough to understand what the rest of us are thinking and feeling.
“Frederik! Frederik!” I shout. Followed by: “God damn it, Niklas! God damn it!”
Then I take off after Frederik. But he’s gone.
I run through corridors, down stairways, back through other corridors. Around the grounds. Now he’s going to die, I think. I shout, I look for him. Now he’s finally going to do what he’s talked about for so long.
He knows the area much better than I do, and he’s disappeared without a trace. I run back to the apartment, and as soon as I’m in the door I yell, “Niklas, what were you thinking?”
“What was I thinking? What were you thinking? You think it’s fun to hear that your mom’s on her back screwing some white-haired man behind the hedge at the tennis club?”
I half fall onto the couch. My voice grows weak. “Did someone say that?”
“Of course they said it! Everyone’s been gossiping about it! But you’re totally off in your own world!”