More Bitter Than Death (30 page)

He wipes his face with the Kleenex, cleaning snot from his lip and chin, wads the wet tissue up into a ball that he tosses at the wastepaper basket. He misses and it lands with a dull squish on my clinically clean floor.

Neither of us responds.

“Besides, it’s totally illogical. I’m the one who should leave her. I’m the one who had to earn all the money, take care of the kids while she was having . . . anxiety, lying on the couch, eating. Like a stupid, fat cow. On drugs. If anyone was going to leave, it should’ve been me, not her. It’s not . . . fair.”

“And how did it make you feel when she said she wanted to split up?”

“If you ever ask anything as stupid as that again, I’m going to get up and walk out of here. Do you understand me?” Patrik snarls between his teeth. But it’s an empty threat. He sighs and looks up at the ceiling.

“Okay, okay. It feels like I’m dying. It feels like I’m dying and she stole my life. I mean, we have a life together, two children. How could she? It’s wrong. It’s . . . it goes against nature. A mother shouldn’t just leave her children.”

Aina and Sven are arguing outside my office. Aina’s voice is shrill, Sven’s muffled, insistent, not backing down.

“Like your mother did? I mean, she abandoned you too in a way,” I say.

“Stop going on about my mother!” Patrik howls. “This isn’t about her. This is about Mia, damn it.”

“Of course this is about you and Mia, but some of the pain you’re feeling definitely has to do with the experiences you carry with you.”

Patrik isn’t listening. He’s far away, mumbles something inaudible at the glossy floor.

“What did you say?” I ask.

“Love.” He whispers something.

“Love?” I repeat.

“Love messes you up.”

And I can only nod in response.

Patrik is drawing lines with his wet shoe on the floor, spreading dirty brown water. Like a child, I think. He looks like a child. A sad, abandoned child.

“And now?” I ask.

He looks at me blankly with red-rimmed eyes and a furrowed brow, as if I were speaking a foreign language.

“Now?” he repeats.

“What happens now? Have you guys talked about that?” I ask.

He shakes his head, staring out the black window, pursing his lips.

All I hear is the squeaking sound as he drags the sole of his shoe over the linoleum.

The town houses are built in the middle of what looks like a field, right at the edge of a spruce forest, which extends all the way down to the sea in the west and to the little downtown area in the east. The yellow wood façades and blue doors have taken on a dishwater-gray hue in the November twilight. Satellite dishes of various sizes sprout off the buildings like mushrooms. A warm, golden light glows from the windows, reflecting in the marshy ground, reaching toward the darkness beyond the neat little yards, toward the woods where no one lives.

Kent Hallgren is tired, so bone tired.

More tired than anyone deserves to be, he thinks, pouring a good helping of whiskey into a Duralex glass, no ice. He would have liked ice but wasn’t up to the trek to the freezer, which was on the far side of the kitchen, to get it. His legs feel as though they’re made of stone, his back aches, and his head is exploding. When he brings the glass to his mouth, he smells the acrid odor of his own sweat.

This last period of time, he thinks, he wishes he could just mark it off the calendar, erase it from the hard drive, as it were.

Susanne’s death has worn him out. He has been sleeping poorly and hasn’t been able to concentrate at work. He thinks again that he doesn’t deserve this, that he actually deserves a better life—without debts, without a crazy ex-wife who gets murdered, without being saddled with a child.

It’s not that he doesn’t feel sympathy for Susanne, because he does. They were together for three years, after all, and Lord knows she didn’t deserve to die, even though she’d been a first-class tramp for the last several years. She had her good side, Susanne did. She was a good mother to Tilda, the kind who served healthy food, always made sure Tilda was well dressed, and kept her hair braided. The kind who established a good rapport with the daycare workers and the pediatrician’s office.

And now it’s all up to him.

Obviously it’s not fun. Obviously it’s unfair. He’s not prepared to take
care of a child full-time, doesn’t know what to do, doesn’t know how to braid, doesn’t know what little girls like to play with.

There’s a pile of pizza boxes and wadded-up wrappers from the shawarma place in the corner next to the cat’s water dish. Tilda has colored on some of the pizza boxes. A face with round eyes and long, sharp teeth smiles at him from the greasy brownish-beige box.

He thinks absentmindedly that the face doesn’t look pleasant, that it’s an evil face. Why did she draw that? Is that a picture of the . . . murderer? Should he bring the pizza box to the police? How much did she see, actually? Did she see . . . ? No, he can’t think about that. He has to keep it together now. He decides not to take the box to the police; there isn’t much to the phantom drawing.

Tilda is sitting at the kitchen table stringing wooden beads onto some fishing line. He didn’t have any other thread, because Tilda doesn’t usually spend that much time at his place. She doesn’t normally stay for so long anyway, not so long that she needs a bunch of toys. An episode of
Bolibompa
on TV and a sketchpad are usually plenty. But now he went and bought her beads from the toy store downtown. They thought that would be perfect for a five-year-old girl, and it seems that they were right, because she’s been sitting there playing with them for almost an hour.

He sips his whiskey, which is lukewarm and smoky and makes him shudder when he swallows. He thinks about what the police said, how they don’t know who the murderer was yet, that Henrik couldn’t be tied to the murder, that he actually has an alibi. But the police must suspect him, right? You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to see that something’s wrong with him. All those muscles . . . You don’t get muscles like that from lifting scrap metal. Henrik must be taking something. How could Susanne fall for him? And then supposedly shooting is a hobby of his? A person wouldn’t enjoy a hobby like that if they didn’t have aggressive tendencies to begin with. And besides, not that it was any of his business, but there was a rumor that Henrik gambled away everything he earned on the horses.

And now here he was, saddled with a five-year-old. This wasn’t in his plan. Obviously he had to cancel his trip to Phuket with the guys.

He takes a big gulp of the warm liquid and the alcohol fumes sting his eyes.

Everyone was very understanding when he canceled. They all thought that what happened to Susanne was ghastly. And he’d actually become something
of a celebrity in his circle, a person who was being afforded extra respect and attention, someone people sought out contact with. That actually felt really nice.

Then suddenly she’s standing there in front of him, slipping her small, skinny arms around his jeans-clad leg and looking at him with those big, blue eyes—the eyes that were also Susanne’s eyes. And he feels something soft spreading through him, a feeling he doesn’t know the name of, and also doesn’t know what to do with.

“Little lady, Papa’s little lady,” he says, and bends down to kiss her on the cheek.

“Ugh, Papa, you smell like Teacher,” Tilda says.

“Like Teacher?” he asks, confused.

“Yeah, like Teacher when she puts that gooey blue stuff on her hands.”

“Gooey blue stuff?”

Then he remembers. There’s a big pump bottle of alcohol gel in the daycare bathroom that the staff use when they wash their hands. Apparently that helps prevent the flu. Does he smell like that, like hand cleaner? He puts down his whiskey glass and picks her up onto his lap.

“Time for bed, missy,” he says.

She nods seriously and he is struck yet again by how obedient she is, wonders if that’s going to last, or if that’s a phase she’s going through, wonders if she’s traumatized, and if she is, how she would express that.

*   *   *

He lifts her up into the bed and buries his nose in her brown hair, inhaling the scent of food and soap.

He says, “Good night, Papa’s princess.”

“You have to brush my teeth, Papa. It’s important to brush your teeth,” Tilda says, staring up at him with those blue eyes wide, giving him that serious look again, and he sighs.

“Whoops, Papa forgot. I’ll go get your toothbrush, okay?”

She nods.

He goes to the bathroom, searching through the clutter on top of the washing machine for the little toothbrush that looks like a giraffe. He finally finds it under a tin of snuff but can’t find her toothpaste, the one that tastes like candy. He puts a little glob of Colgate on the brush instead
and walks back out to her makeshift bedroom. He thinks he should tidy it up for her, paint the walls a happier color, yellow maybe? Get some smaller, kid-sized furniture—Ikea has things that are cheap and good, he’s seen that on the Internet—and get rid of all the hockey sticks and video games.

Cautiously he brushes her small, perfect teeth while she obediently holds her mouth open.

“There. Now you can go to sleep,” he says.

She looks at him with a shocked expression. “But Papa, you forgot my nightgown.”

“Ah, yes, ha ha, that was silly of me.”

He puts her nightgown on for her, the one with Dora the Explorer on it, gives her another kiss on the cheek, and sneaks out of the room.

*   *   *

One more whiskey, he thinks. If anyone has earned that, it’s me.

He positions himself in front of the window and looks out at the dark, waterlogged field, at the woods on the other side, at the silhouettes of the pine and spruce trees that are still visible against the dark sky. He sighs deeply, picturing the white, flour-like sand on the beaches in Phuket, the bars in Patong, the women’s soft, brown skin and narrow hips under those way-too-short skirts.

He really needed to get away, finally get the rest he deserves, the rest he needs.

He leans his forehead against the windowpane, listening to the wind outside. He watches the glossy autumn leaves fluttering past in the darkness outside.

“Paaaapa.”

At first he doesn’t respond to her, isn’t actually even up to opening his eyelids, just rests his full weight against the cold pane.

“Paaaapa!”

*   *   *

She’s standing in the middle of the floor in her room with her face turned toward the window. The thin curtain flutters a little in the draft.

“Little lady, you have to go to sleep.” He picks her up, but she wriggles out of his grasp and screams loudly.

“Papa, there was a lion outside my window!”

“But, honey . . .” He reaches to pick her up, but she’s faster, darts out into the living room. He follows her.

“Honey, there is no lion.”

“Yes, there is. I saw it.”

“Yes, yes. But there’s no lion here, in Gustavsberg. In Sweden. It’s too cold here. They die.”

She’s been afraid ever since she saw that nature show on TV about the lion. How can they show that kind of thing during prime time? He just doesn’t understand it, animals ripping each other to pieces: how is that appropriate for children?

Tilda sits down on the leather couch. Wraps both arms around her legs, buries her nose between her knees.

“I saw a lion in the window. I saw it I saw it I saw it,” she insists.

“Oh. Well, should we go see if the lion is gone? Should we go look together?” he asks.

She glances up at him, their eyes meet, and she nods.

*   *   *

They stand in front of the black windowpane. He’s carrying her on one hip and he’s struck by how light she is—a child, so important, but no heavier than this.

A puff of cold, damp air hits them from the broken window, which can’t really be closed fully, and he remembers he has to fix that as soon as it’s warm and light enough.

“You see? No lion,” he reassures her.

She peers suspiciously out the window, leaning forward so that her breath condenses on the pane of glass.

“Right?” he asks.