“Yes, but … yes, I probably haven’t—”
“Now I don’t have my mother anymore either!” Niklas’s voice sounds as if it’s coming through the wall of another room.
“You do have your mother. I haven’t changed.”
“You have, you’ve turned into someone else too! God damn it, behind the hedge at the tennis club! That’s not my mother. It isn’t! That’s not who she is.”
“Niklas, I promise you I’ll always be—”
“You’re gone! Dad’ll be in prison soon! And our house is gone too!”
It’s impossible to get through to him. “It’s not certain that Dad’ll go to jail.”
“I’m not that stupid. Of course he’s not going to win this case. I’m not an idiot! Everything’s gone!”
I get up from the couch and go over to him to give him a hug, though I know he hates them.
He pushes me away, but I approach him again, and again he pushes me away. Normally I respect the fact that he doesn’t like me embracing him, but not today. When I try a third time, he doesn’t push me away. We stand there quietly in the living room. I wrap both my arms around him, I press myself against him and lean my head in against his shoulder.
“I’m here, Niklas,” I say. “I’m right here. That’s one thing you can always count on. I will always be your mother.”
The evening sun no longer reaches our apartment, but it glints off the windows of the next apartment block. Some of the neighbors are eating Saturday dinner on their patios, the clink of glasses and the sound of happy voices blending in with the background thrum of the freeway.
Somewhere out there is his father.
I raise my face from Niklas’s shoulder. I have an urge to tousle his hair, but I don’t.
“Do you want to come with me to look for Dad?” I ask. “I think you’d be a lot better at finding him than I would.”
“Can’t we let him come back by himself?” Then he thinks about it for a moment, and he says, “Yeah. I’d like to come with.”
• • •
We head down toward the freeway first. Up onto the high embankment that’s supposed to shield Farum Midtpunkt from the noise. I lead the way along a narrow path trampled down between high stalks of wild grass, among ripe seedpods and flowers. Now and then we have to duck to pass under a pine branch. There’s so much undergrowth here; so many places Frederik could hide. I’m thinking about what Niklas has been through. The humiliation in front of his friends. How can I ever make it up to him?
We draw near to the long slender footbridge that crosses the freeway. It seems the most logical place to jump, but there’s no sign of Frederik. Maybe he’s not out here at all. Maybe he’s over at one of his friends’.
I hear Niklas’s voice behind me. “Why didn’t you come down here that night?”
“What?”
“Why didn’t you come down here, instead of staying home so that it was me who found you?”
I turn to him and look at his face, the warm yellow evening sun striking it from the side. I know right away what he’s talking about, but it’s too much for me to process all at once, and I can’t help repeating myself. “What?”
“That time in the kitchen with the tequila and pills.”
“But Niklas, there weren’t any pills! I didn’t take any!”
Silence.
“I didn’t want to die. As long as you’re still alive, I never want to die.”
Silence.
“No matter what happens.”
Silence.
“Who told you there were pills?”
“I don’t know, people just said that. That’s the rumor, anyway.”
The first time I see his small, wrinkled, blue-red face as he’s placed upon my belly; he has his friends over, in the yard at Station Road, all of them hopping with delight in the inflated kiddie pool; he runs in from the street, crying from a fall on his bike.
“I could never think of doing that,” I say, grasping him by the shoulders as I look into his eyes. My skinny boy who’s now taller than me. “Never. I could never ever think of doing that, Niklas.”
And then I watch as it unfolds before me. For the first time since he was thirteen, he presses himself against me. He sobs the way he could when he was a small boy. He’s shaking, and I am too. He hugs me, he hugs the woman who is his mom. For the first time in all too long. My Niklas. My son.
YOU DISAPPEAR
When Thorkild and Vibeke come by to pick up Frederik and everything he owns — a stuffed suitcase, four garbage bags of clothing, and three moving boxes, two of them with LPs — they’re polite. They say they understand that it’s not working anymore, and they make an effort to remain cordial.
But they don’t want any help carrying the things down to the car. And when I notice that Frederik forgot the power cord for his laptop behind the desk and run down with it, Vibeke says thank you with theatrical surprise — as if for the entire course of our marriage, right up to this very moment, I’ve been thinking only of myself.
As soon as Frederik moves into his parents’ basement, he’s allowed to be online all he wants, and every day he sends me an e-mail. Lots of them describe his dogged efforts to land a job.
The tests all show that his concentration, empathy, and organizational ability are now above average, and when he declares that he’s well, I no longer contradict him. He’s been cold-calling scores of primary schools to hear if they could use a substitute, but of course no one wants him.
He runs the risk of never joining the workforce again, but then rescue arrives in the form of Khayyat, from the neighboring staircase here in Midtpunkt. Khayyat gets his cousin to hire Frederik on a trial basis in his small corner shop in Lyngby. Frederik throws himself into it, trying to prove how dependable he is, how he doesn’t have the least trace of ludomania or brain damage anymore. Once he has a year at the shop on his résumé, he wants to apply for jobs in the school system again. Unless of course his case ends badly.
In some of his e-mails he’s effusively affectionate, in others he’s angry that I want a divorce, and in still others he just tries to understand what happened to us and the marriage we once thought would last the rest of our lives.
Dear Mia,
It’s really you who disappeared this past year. Not me. You.
The Mia I married was warm and loving. She engaged other people; she wanted to be a teacher so she could help at-risk children. She was so full of empathy and thoughtfulness for her friends, her family, and her students.
But since my operation, you’ve come to regard all of us as if we’re no more than neurochemistry — mere brains in which everything is rigidly determined beforehand.
Yet brains are flexible! What we experience, what we think and feel, what we read — all these things leave their traces on the brain, traces that can be as hard to alter as if we were born with them.
That’s what happened to you. My brain’s recovered, so that I am once more myself. But after all you’ve been through, how will you ever become your old self again?
Here in Lyngby, the leaves are falling down. I walk along the lanes and grieve for the warmhearted wife I watched disappear.
Much love,
Frederik
• • •
Bernard’s car is so tidy; ours never looked like this. By itself it doesn’t really matter, but every hour that he and I spend together, I notice these little differences that tell me we’re doing absolutely the right thing.
Bernard is also much more daring when it comes to new music. We go to concerts by weird unknown bands, while for a long time Frederik’s been content to play the same old LPs over and over again. It’s the way Bernard breathes, without blowing loudly through his nose, the way he can actually tell the difference between my blouses. And in bed, the attentiveness and love of adventure that shine through every minute we’re together are in full blossom. There’s no question I’ve met the man I’ve dreamt of for as long as I can remember.