More Bitter Than Death (29 page)

We take a seat on the government-issue chairs in the waiting room and I look around at the other people here. A very pregnant woman is eating an apple and reading a magazine. She has her shoes off and her feet up on the chair across from her. Her feet are swollen and I’m surprised she can even walk on them. A young couple is sitting with a child on their laps reading books. The child points to something in the book and then laughs in delight. The parents look at each other and they laugh too; their intimacy is palpable.

A tall woman in green hospital scrubs comes over to us. Her dark hair is combed back and held up with a tortoiseshell hair clip. She has a thin leather choker around her neck with a black charm that looks African. I wonder if she’s a radiologist or an ultrasound technician or a nurse or a midwife. Are all obstetrics nurses earthy and alternative? Do they prefer to be called midwives and teach breathing techniques and natural childbirth coping mechanisms, or do some of them support hospital births and pain medication?

The woman introduces herself as Helena and explains that she is going to perform today’s exam. We follow her down the corridor into a small, stuffy exam room. It’s so cramped there’s hardly room for three people. The room is warm, too warm. My struggle to breathe gets worse and I feel the panic taking over.

I lie down on a table covered with crinkly paper and pull my jeans down a little. Markus sits in a chair by my head.

On the wall in front of us is a screen.

Helena explains in great detail, like a teacher, what the purpose of the ultrasound exam is, that they’re looking at the fetus’s organs, and after that they’ll measure the head to determine its age and growth.

“Is this your first child?” Helena asks, smiling as she smears clear goo on my abdomen, unaware of the weight of her question.

“It’s my first child, so I’m a novice,” Markus says, coming to my rescue. “Why are you putting goop on Siri’s stomach?”

He continues to engage the midwife in small talk while I close my eyes and focus on my breathing. I try to concentrate on being present, ignore the anxiety. I hear Helena’s voice, hear her describing what she sees on the screen, which is turned toward her and away from us so we can’t interpret or misinterpret the pictures. I hear her words, her calm voice. I hear, but I can’t put what she’s saying together into anything comprehensible.

“And then maybe you’d like to take a peek?” Helena carefully touches my shoulder and I open my eyes. The screen in front of us is on now and showing a black-and-white image. Suddenly the white part turns into a body. Uneven shadows turn into a torso, arms, and legs. A little head appears on the screen. I can’t hear what Helena is saying anymore. I’m just looking at the baby who’s moving, impatient, nervous.

“I’m measuring the head and the femur to determine the approximate age. It looks like you’re in week eighteen.”

Helena smiles, and looks at me to check if that’s what I had thought. I realize I haven’t said a word since I introduced myself to her.

“Week eighteen?” I’m surprised. Almost half the pregnancy is over without my hardly even being aware of it. I haven’t told anyone besides Markus and Aina, not my parents, not my sisters. I was so sure that this pregnancy too would end in pain and loss that I tried to pretend it didn’t exist.

“Week eighteen,” Helena repeats, looking down at her keyboard and entering the numbers. Then she looks up again. “That means you’ll be parents around the twenty-eighth of April next year.”

I look at the screen again, see the silhouette of the baby, look at Markus. My heart is still pounding, hard and fast, but the fear has abated and is now replaced by something else.

Hope?

Markus is sitting in the armchair, which he’s pulled over to the TV, controller in his hand. There’s some kind of virtual battle on the screen. I have a hard time understanding the appeal of this game. Some days I want to call it immature, but I realize that I have many traits that Markus accepts and puts up with and that he too needs space for his interests.

Several empty moving boxes are leaning against the wall in the living room and I realize that he has brought some of his things from his apartment, that he is beginning to make himself at home. I unlace my knee-high boots and toss the rain-soaked jacket and shawl over a chair in the little entry hall.

“Let me just finish this round,” Markus says, and keeps shooting away at his virtual enemy on the other side of the screen with great concentration.

“Sure,” I say, picking up the cardboard boxes filled with food and heading into the kitchen. I start unpacking them and putting things away into the fridge or the freezer. I’m struck by how commonplace and natural everything feels and by the fact that I like this feeling. I hear Markus curse from the living room. The game is over and obviously he lost.

“Do you want some help?” he asks. Markus comes into the kitchen, walks over, and gives me a light peck on the cheek. The lost battle seems forgotten. He caresses my shoulder.

Something has changed between us. Markus has grown calmer, less obstinate, maybe because he feels more secure. And when he’s calmer, I don’t feel as claustrophobic. It’s so simple, and yet so hard. I shake my head and put away the last of the groceries. Markus sits down at the kitchen table and puts his head in his hands. He looks worried.

“How much do you know about kids? About child psychology, I mean?” he asks. He has turned his face toward me and I see that he hasn’t shaved and that his eyes are bloodshot. I know that he’s been working more than usual lately. He’s tangentially involved in the Susanne Olsson murder investigation, but mostly he’s working on two rapes that took place in Hellasgården. I know
they were unusually brutal and there is some suspicion of a serial rapist, and I know the investigation is weighing on him.

“Kids? Are you worried about my ability to raise a child? Do you think I’m going to be a lousy mother?”

“This isn’t about you at all, honey,” he replies. His smile is weary, and even though I know he’s kidding, I feel guilty. “You know that little girl, Tilda? She’s living full-time with her dad now. She used to spend every other weekend with him and the rest of her time with Susanne. Anyway, the father says Tilda almost never speaks. At all. She just draws. She hasn’t mentioned her mother since the murder, hasn’t asked, hasn’t wondered. It’s as if she just shut down, and he has no idea how to get her to open up again.”

“Is she in therapy? Is she seeing a psychologist?”

I think about that little girl who hid under the dining table for several hours as her mother lay dead beside her on the kitchen floor, and about what Markus told me before about the police’s questioning session with her.

“Yeah, she’s meeting with some psychologist from Pediatric Psychiatric Services. But I don’t know what they’re doing with her. I’m sure you would know better.”

“I have no idea, actually. I’ve never worked with traumatized children. They might be helping her to express herself, draw, paint . . . uh, I don’t know.”

When it comes to treating children who have witnessed acts of violence, my expertise is extremely limited. Suddenly I remember a lecture from my undergrad days by a blond woman with big silver hoop earrings and a beautiful pashmina shawl who talked about working with refugee children at a camp north of Stockholm, how they had the children draw pictures of soldiers and then rip them up.

“Whatever became of the robbery homicide theory, anyway?” I ask.

“They still think it might be a robbery homicide. That would be so . . . simple, actually. It seems so awfully unnecessary.”

“And Henrik, where does he fit in, as the robber, or what?” I ask, watching Markus make a face and roll his eyes.

“I don’t believe that robbery homicide business, okay? It just seems wrong. So much anger. They questioned that guy who was handing out flyers, the one who found her. And he did actually steal her wallet, so that makes him a suspect. But, my God, a sixteen-year-old who had absolutely no relationship with the woman? No, I don’t buy it. And Henrik is still missing. The profiler we brought in thinks he’s mostly a danger to himself, is afraid he’ll commit
suicide if he realizes what he did. As if that would help. His ex, Kattis, calls several times a day. She’s scared to death that he’s going to come after her and she’s still completely convinced that he killed Susanne Olsson as well. That’s what she says anyway.”

Markus looks dejected and exhausted, but I see rage in him as well, an emotion Markus almost never shows.

“And what about this stuff with Malin?” I ask.

He shakes his head and says, “That would be a weird coincidence, wouldn’t it? For her to be placed in the same support group as Henrik’s ex-girlfriend? I mean, if it is a coincidence. But I think it is, because the murderer was almost certainly a man and, besides, Malin has an alibi. She was running some half marathon in Skåne the day Susanne was murdered.”

“So it’s just a coincidence?”

“What do I know? I mean, Gustavsberg isn’t that big. And they aren’t too far apart in age; it really isn’t totally unbelievable for it to just be coincidental.”

Markus shrugs and massages his temples. “This whole investigation is just such a mess,” he continues. “The press is slaughtering us for not arresting Henrik right away. Everyone has an opinion about what happened and they all want to share it publicly. And everyone is pretty much assuming we’re worthless.”

We stand there side by side in that little kitchen, with Markus tired and angry, and me worried. I think about Henrik’s confused, violent behavior. The idea that he’s out there somewhere—hiding, biding his time—frightens me, even though I realize that Markus is right. Henrik probably is mostly a danger to himself.

Then Markus’s cell rings. I feel a rush of resentment. We were supposed to spend the evening together. The call probably means that Markus will have to go somewhere, maybe question a witness, maybe a potential suspect. He answers curtly, says
hmm
and nods before hanging up. He seems irritated, upset by the information he’s received. He moves into the living room, turns on his laptop, which is on the little desk by the window, and types something. Seconds later a new web page opens in his browser and I see the black headlines on the
Aftonbladet
home page: “Will She Catch Her Momma’s Killer? The Police’s New Witness in the Olsson Murder: Tilda, Age 5.”

Patrik’s tears stream down his red, splotchy cheeks like rivers, forming wet stains on his worn skinny jeans. All the hopes, all the confidence he felt the last time we met, gone like the autumn leaves around my cottage. The way he bends his long body down over the yellow cracks in the linoleum floor, defeated and broken. By life, by love.

As powerless as usual, I slide the Kleenex box across the table and start trying to sort things out.

“She left,” he says. “I think she’s sleeping with someone else. That no-good useless bitch.” His voice is as limp as his body.

“Okay, from the beginning now. What happened?” I ask.

He sighs and then flops back in my armchair like someone with a fever, as if he didn’t have the strength to sit up straight, every muscle exhausted to the breaking point.

“The day before yesterday, totally unbelievable! When I got home she, she . . . was packing, just like that. And then she just walked out, left me and the kids. Just like that. Goddamn it—”

His bony body shakes.

“What did she say?”

“I. Hate. Her,”
he screams, and I know why. It hurts when someone you love disappears. I really feel for him. I wish I could take that skinny man, that bearded boy, into my arms and just cradle him.

But that’s not appropriate, of course.

He’s the client, I’m the therapist.

Our roles are clearly delineated: he sits in one armchair, I in the other.

He cries and I pass him the Kleenex.

He pays and I listen.

“Okay, okay, okay,” he says. “This is what she said: I helped her, isn’t that great? She’s strong again, blah blah blah. A bunch of bullshit, if you ask me. Now she realizes that she doesn’t love me. And now she’s strong enough to leave me. Thanks to my support. Thanks, thanks a lot!”