More Bitter Than Death (8 page)

“Okay,” she says hesitantly, faltering as if she isn’t sure whether she should say this or not. “It’s been a really tough week. Henrik, my ex, got ahold of my new phone number and has been calling me all the time.”

She slumps down in her chair and her thick, brown hair falls out of its twist, down over her face, covering her eyes.

Aina taps her pen lightly against her notepad and asks, “Kattis, do you want to take a couple of minutes and tell us a little more about you and Henrik? Would that be okay?”

Kattis shrugs without looking up and I feel a strange solidarity with the woman next to me. We must be the same age. She’s small and neat, like me, but her skin is pale. Under the cold sheen of the fluorescent lights, I can make out some of her veins under the paper-thin skin on her throat. Her jeans hang way down on her hips, as if she has recently lost a lot of weight.

“Henrik and I met two years ago,” Kattis says. “At his friend’s house. It was passionate from the beginning.”

She smiles, raises her head, and looks around, and I’m struck by how beautiful she looks when she’s happy. I haven’t seen her so happy before.

“Passionate?” Aina says to prompt her.

“Yeah, it was crazy. We sort of instantly fell madly in love, and the sex was amazing. Maybe that seems like a silly thing to say given our context here, but for me . . . well, I’d never experienced anything like that. So we moved in together after just a couple of weeks, or, well, I moved in with him.”

She smiles again, wider this time. The rest of us sit in silence, hands clasped in our laps, waiting for her to continue. Aina nods silently.

Outside the window the autumn sky has grown dark, and a bluish light seeps into the room. The only sounds are the distant hum of traffic and the
sound of Sirkka’s wheezing. Years of smoking must have taken a toll on her lungs.

“Anyway,” Kattis says, suddenly seeming embarrassed and glancing down at the floor. She stops.

“There’s no hurry,” Aina says. “We’ve got plenty of time.”

Kattis laughs, but this time it’s a tired, joyless laugh.

“It’s so hard to say how it started. It’s like that story about the frog. You know, if you put it in a pot of hot water it jumps right out, but if you put it in cold water and then slowly raise the temperature . . . I guess what I mean is, it was really subtle in the beginning. He would kind of control what I did, who I saw. Then he didn’t want me to see other guys, not even at work. He would flip out, accusing me of cheating on him, call me a ‘stupid whore.’ He said no one would ever want me, that I was ugly, fat, stupid, worthless. So when he hit me the first time, I guess it wasn’t particularly . . . surprising. It just made sense. And by then I had taken so much verbal abuse from him, I thought I deserved it, you know? I thought I had brought it on myself, that I needed to learn to . . . change. Improve.”

Kattis pauses and sits quietly, staring straight ahead, occasionally at Aina, although she doesn’t seem to really see her. She sighs and continues.

“We were together for a year. And during that year . . . I don’t know. It’s like that year totally changed me, made me into a different person. Sometimes I can barely remember who I was back then, before Henrik. But I miss that girl. I want her back. I want to be the old Kattis again.”

She shakes her head and glances down at the floor. She looks ashamed, ashamed and profoundly sad.

“But you’ve left him now?” Hillevi touches Kattis’s knee and I can see how the contact makes Kattis jump, as if it burns.

“Yeah, but the worst part is . . .” Kattis is still looking at the floor, avoiding eye contact as if she were afraid that we are judging her. “Well . . . the worst part is that I didn’t want to leave him. I mean, damn it . . .” She hides her face in her hands. “I wasn’t the one who left him. He dumped me, and it hurt so bad. He stopped loving me and it was like I just disappeared, like I couldn’t exist without him. I never imagined it could have hurt so much. I mean . . . rationally I get that he’s a pig and that I should be happy it’s finally over, but right then . . . I felt like I was dying. Do you know what I mean?”

She looks up, tentatively, her gaze resting almost imperceptibly on each
of us in turn, as if she’s assessing our facial expressions for signs of skepticism or disgust. Suddenly she looks a little calmer. Maybe she didn’t see what she feared she would.

“That’s the worst part, the part I can’t forgive myself for,” Kattis continues. “That I didn’t actually want it to end even though he was so awful.”

“How are things going now? Are you still in love with him?” Sofie asks boldly, without thinking. We’re all wondering the same thing but don’t dare ask.

“No,” Kattis says, smiling slightly, looking tired. “No, now I’m so incredibly grateful that it’s over. And the most ironic part is that now he’s started to follow me around again. He calls when he’s been drinking and wants to see me, harasses me. And when I say no he gets mad, says he’s going to kill me and stuff like that. And . . . sometimes I believe him. I actually think he’s going to do it someday.”

“You shouldn’t think like that, you really shouldn’t think like that,” Hillevi says, her hand still resting on Kattis’s knee.

“He has a new girlfriend now, did I mention that? I think they’re living together and . . . I don’t know. Whenever they have a fight, he calls me, talks about how what we had was so good, so special. He says we had something irreplaceable, something unique . . . And whenever I ask him to leave me alone, well . . . he totally flips out, starts calling me a stupid whore, says I’m going to die. I’m beginning to think that he’s an actual psychopath, that he can’t feel anything for anyone besides himself and is only looking out for himself. And then there’s his new girlfriend. On the one hand, I hope things go well for them. I hope he ends up with her, so he’ll let me go. On the other hand, what if he hurts her too? I mean, if he does, am I complicit? Am I?”

Hillevi gives Kattis’s skinny leg a squeeze but doesn’t say anything.

*   *   *

Aina went on ahead to get us a table. I’m alone in the conference room cleaning up after the meeting. Used mugs and dirty glasses have to be loaded into the dishwasher, the whiteboard erased, the table wiped down. Jeff Buckley’s tortured voice is coming from a little CD player. Aina complains that the music I listen to is way too depressing, but I like it. Maybe it suits my mood, perhaps too well.

As I clean up, I pour myself a glass of wine from the bag-in-a-box left over
from when Sven had a few of his former university colleagues over for sandwiches and drinks last week. The wine is cheap and acidic, but it still feels nice when the familiar warmth spreads from my stomach to all the nerve endings in my body.

Whatever does the trick, I think to myself.

Whatever takes the edge off.

Suddenly I hear a strange sound over the music. Anxiety spreads through me like an electric shock, undoing the mellowness from the wine. My fear is immediate, and the little hairs on the back of my neck stand up as I suddenly grasp the situation. I’m not alone. Someone is in our offices.

I turn off the music, interrupting Jeff Buckley’s elegy “Grace.” I hear the sound again, muffled, as if someone didn’t want it to be heard. I start looking around the office, trying to figure out where the sound is coming from and at the same time noting which exit is closest.

Escape.

My instinct is to flee.

It’s so dark outside, the big windows are black, reflecting the room. I try to talk myself down, convince myself that there isn’t any danger, when suddenly I understand what it is I’m hearing. Someone is crying.

*   *   *

The bathroom in the hall is locked. I knock on the door and the muffled sniffling stops. The door opens and a red-eyed woman appears.

It’s Kattis.

Her eye makeup is smeared down her cheeks like rivers. Her eyes are swollen, her hair is disheveled, and her cheeks are red, maybe from pain and sadness, but also maybe from shame at having been interrupted in the middle of this private moment.

Kattis rubs her face with the palms of her hands, smudging her makeup into a dirty gray field. She looks at me, cautiously, tentatively.

“Sorry,” Kattis says. “I didn’t know . . . Is the office closing now? I mean, do you have to leave?”

She wipes her shiny nose and sniffles back the snot. I see how she’s struggling to pull herself together, to regain control. I do something that I usually avoid. I reach out and touch her arm, trying to calm her.

“Don’t worry,” I say. “I’m just tidying up a little.”

Kattis seems to appreciate the gesture. She smiles hesitantly. “I’m sorry. I mean, really sorry. I scared you, didn’t I?”

For the first time she looks directly at me, and I realize how I must appear to her: tense, maybe afraid, holding a half-empty glass of wine. I look down at the glass and then our eyes meet and we both start giggling.

“No, you didn’t. Well maybe just a little.” I smile and feel my body slowly relax. “But, seriously Kattis, how are you actually doing?”

She shakes her head and reaches back into the small bathroom for some toilet paper. I touch her arm again.

“You can’t stay in the bathroom,” I say. “Come on, let’s go sit down.”

I lead us toward the therapy room where we’d been sitting across from each other just a half an hour earlier. We sit down and Kattis studies my wineglass.

“Uh,” she says hesitantly. “I’m sure this is probably totally unethical or whatever, but can I also have a glass of wine, please? I just feel so . . . wiped out.”

Kattis sniffles and blots her face with some wadded-up toilet paper. She’s totally right, it definitely doesn’t seem like a good idea for me to offer wine to a patient, but at the same time I can imagine exactly how she’s feeling right now. I go to the kitchen and come back with another glass of red wine. On the way I turn on the music again.

“Here you go, just this once. From here on out, it’s going to be coffee or mineral water.”

She smiles quickly, grateful. She takes a few greedy swigs and then leans back and closes her eyes.

“Shit . . . I’m so sorry. I’m sorry. It’s just so hard to talk about this stuff. I had no idea that it would be this hard. You know . . .”

She cocks her head to the side and looks me in the eye, seeking validation, understanding. I’ve seen this look before and I just nod sympathetically.

“I’ve just never . . . I’ve just never said this out loud to myself before. And now, it’s like all of a sudden it just came over me. Like I just realized what a pathetic loser I am. I mean, how could I let this happen to me? I’m really a pretty normal person, you know? I’ve been in relationships before and they were . . . ordinary, normal.”

Kattis looks plaintive, as if she needs my sympathy, my approval, as if she needs to make me understand that she’s ordinary, normal, not just a victim. As if the fact that her ex-boyfriend beat her makes her ashamed, as if she were the guilty party.

She quickly looks away and takes a big gulp of wine.

“It’s not your fault, you know.” I say the words assuredly, because I know it’s the truth.

Kattis glances down at her wineglass and rotates it, looking skeptical.

“I should have done something,” she says. “I should have left him, but he’s not all bad, you know? The world isn’t black and white. No person is just good or just bad. And Henrik, he really loved me too. And I . . . I just really wanted it to work out.”

My cell phone rings suddenly and I see that it’s Aina. I raise a finger to Kattis to ask her to hold the thought, and I pick up. Aina is mad that I haven’t shown up and asks pointedly whether she needs to come back and help me do the dishes. I promise to hurry and then hang up. Kattis, who heard the conversation, quickly downs the rest of her wine and sits up straight.

“I’m keeping you,” she says. “I didn’t mean to. I’m going to go, but thank you for listening. And thanks for the wine.”

She comes over and gives me a hug, repeating herself again.

“Thank you. Thank you for listening.”

Aina is sitting at a dark-brown wooden table sipping a beer. She’s flipping through the culture section of the paper and I can tell she’s irritated. It’s hot and a little stuffy at the bar and the buzz of people’s conversations envelops me. The place smells like food and something else I can’t put my finger on. Most of the tables are taken and the customers look as if they’re seeking refuge from the cold and darkness outside, like castaways on a deserted island. I walk over to Aina and squeeze through the crowd to take a seat at the table. There is a large, full glass of wine at my place. Aina glances up. She looks like she’s trying to decide if she should be mad at me or forgive my lateness.

“Check this out.” She gestures to the open page of the newspaper, where there’s a review of a new book by a therapist criticizing the increased focus in recent years on cognitive behavioral therapy and evidence-based methods in psychiatry. “I’m so tired of always being portrayed as some kind of robot therapist without the capacity for empathy or independent thought,” Aina continues. “Do they really think it’s possible to provide any kind of useful treatment without acknowledging the client’s history or previous experiences? Do they imagine that we just memorize some manual or something? It’s so weird. When I started practicing CBT, I always thought we were the good guys, that we were the ones who really listened to the patients and took their symptoms seriously, worked on what they really thought their problems were. But when I read stuff like this, I realize that these people think we’re the villains, the shallow ones, just in it for the short term and only interested in getting the biggest results in the shortest possible time, as if we don’t care about the people behind the results, as if we don’t see the suffering.”