The Boy in the Suitcase (11 page)

“Atju.”

The boy’s voice was faint, but he spoke the word slowly and clearly, as if to make sure she didn’t misunderstand.

“No,” she said quickly. “They were all out of those. You’ll have to make do with this one instead.”

Then she marched around the front end of the car as quickly as she could and got into the driver’s seat. The indignant voice followed her as she backed and turned, sounding loud and clear through the open windows.

“You don’t even have a proper car seat for him,” shrilled the woman. “I simply don’t understand how someone like you can call herself a mother. I simply don’t… .”

S
IGITA WOULD HAVE
liked to stay at the police station, but Gužas evicted her politely but firmly. He had her phone number, he would call. He repeated his exhortation to go home.

“But perhaps you shouldn’t be alone. The boy’s father?”

“He works in Germany. He’s not coming.”

“Well, a relative, then. Or a friend.”

She just nodded, as if she were still someone who possessed such things. She did not want to admit to him just how alone she was. It felt shameful, like some embarrassing disease.

Her headache was so strong now that it hovered like a black ring at the edge of her field of vision; her nausea swelled once more. She ought to eat something, or at least drink a little, like the old man had told her to:
It’s important to drink enough when it is this hot.
She bought a small square carton of orange juice at tourist price from a man selling candy and postcards and amber jewelry at a bright green cart. The juice was lukewarm and didn’t taste particularly nice, and the citric acid burned her sore throat.

They’ll find him, she whispered to herself. They will find him, and he will be all right.

There was no conviction in the words. Normally, she didn’t see herself as a person with a very lively imagination. She was much better at recalling facts and figures than at picturing places she had never been, or people she had never seen. She didn’t read a lot of novels, and saw only the films that were shown on TV.

But right now she could imagine Mikas. Mikas in a car, hidden under a rug. Mikas wriggling and crying while strangers held him down. Mikas calling for his mother, and getting no answer.

What had they done to him? And why had they taken him?

Her legs shook. She sat down on the wide stone steps leading to the river. A couple of years ago, the city had put up benches here, but they quickly became a magnet for addicts and homeless people, and now the seats had been removed, so that only the galvanized steel supports bristled from the concrete like stubble. Below, the Neris moved sluggishly in its concrete bed, brown and shrunken and tame compared to its winter wildness.

HER FIRST SUMMER
with Darius, the river had been their secret place. If you followed the bank far enough away from the bridge, the paved pathway gave way to a muddy trail through the jungle of reeds. Insects buzzed and whirred, gnats and tiny black flies, but there were no people, no prying eyes or wagging tongues, and that was a rarity in Tauragė. They could even bathe. Together.

She didn’t know anyone else like him. The other boys were idiots—giggling and drawing crude pictures of penises on school books. Milda’s older brother had once pinched Sigita’s left nipple and tried to kiss her; he was basically just as mean as Milda, only in a slightly different way.

Darius was completely different. He seemed utterly relaxed and at ease with himself, and so much more mature than any of the others. He told her he had been named after the hero pilot Steponas Darius, just like Tauragė. That was rather fitting, she thought. She could easily imagine Darius doing great things one day.

When he wanted to take off her blouse, she stiffened, at first. He stopped what he was doing, and slid both hands down to her waist.

“You are so tiny,” he said. “My hands go almost all the way around you.”

A deep shudder went through her that had nothing to do with cold. His hands moved up inside her blouse and brushed her breasts very lightly, very gently. She raised her face to the sun. Don’t do that, said Granny Julija’s voice in her head, you will go blind. But she let the sunlight blind her for a few more moments before she closed her eyes. Her hands spasmed into fists, clutching two handfuls of shirt from his back, and his tongue touched hers, then her lips, then the inside of her mouth. He had given up on the blouse and concentrated his efforts on her skirt and knickers. She stumbled and was thrown off balance, and he did nothing to hold her, but let himself fall with her instead, so that they hit mud and sunwarmed river water with a wet thud. His weight came down on top of her so hard that she was too winded to move or speak, which he took for acceptance.

“God, you’re fine,” he whispered, spreading her thighs with eager hands.

She could have stopped him. But she wanted it too. Her body wanted it. Even her head wanted it, in a way. She wanted to know what it was like—this sinning business. And it was good that she didn’t really have to
do
anything except lie there and let him at her. She was prepared for pain; there had been whispers and sniggers in the girls’ lavatories at school, that the first time was difficult, and that it hurt.

But it didn’t. It was almost too easy, too right, to lie with him like this, pushed down into the soft warm mud by the weight of him, to feel him move between her legs and then inside her, like a welcome guest that might have stayed for so much longer than the brief moment it actually took.

He hunched over her, and then slid out. Lay there completely spent for a while, as the buzzing of the insects slowly returned, and the sound of the train on the railway bridge in the distance, and the rustle of the reeds in the wind. For an instant, a dazzling blue dragonfly hovered over his shoulder before zooming away.

Was that it? thought Sigita. Was that really all?

He rolled off her. He hadn’t taken off any of his clothes; only his fly was open. She, on the other hand, was suddenly conscious of how inelegant she looked, with her knickers round one ankle and her skirt rucked up so that her entire pelvis was exposed. Somehow, he had also managed to push up both her blouse and her bra to get at her breasts, something she had barely noticed because so much else was going on. She hastily tugged her skirt into place and wanted to pull down her blouse also.

But this was when he did something that none of the other boys would have done. The thing that was just Darius. He pushed her gently back into the mud. He kissed her, a deep wet kiss that went on till she could hardly breathe. And then he touched her, outside and in, so that she gasped in surprise.

“Darius… .”

“Shhh,” he said. “Wait.”

He used only his hands and his mouth. And he kept at it till the light and the sounds went away. Till she shuddered from head to foot. Till something wild and unfamiliar throbbed inside her, over and over, and she knew for certain that she was no longer any kind of virgin, and never would be again.

She felt no guilt at that moment, nor did she think of shame, or sin, or consequences. That came later.

A
UGUST TWILIGHT HAD
begun to gather over the bay when Nina turned off the former fishing village’s main street and continued up the sparsely paved road that led through the neardeserted holiday cottage park. Tisvildeleje these days was populated mainly by commuters and tourists, and now that the school holidays had ended, most of the visitors had left. There were still a few cars with German license plates outside the biggest and most luxurious of the houses, and a couple of children whacked away at a tetherball, the pole wobbling ominously with each swing. Except for that, the lawns lay deserted and scorched from the unremitting sun of this late, hot summer. Last year had been rainy and dull, but this year the sky had seemed permanently blue since May, and by now leaves, shrubbery, and grass had long since lost any vestige of lushness and formed a dry landscape of burnt yellows and dusty greens. Nina checked her watch. Exactly 8:20.

She parked in the lane by the mailbox, behind a blue VW Golf with a streamer in the rear window.
M-Tech
, it said.
Solutions That Work
. Was it Karin’s? It didn’t seem like the kind of car she would choose, but Nina could see no other, more likely vehicle. She peered up the long winding drive. The cottage looked to be quite old; it was painted a deep dark red, with white frames and tiny romantic window panes from before the age of double glazing. It was set some distance from its neighbors—the last one before the woods, just as Karin had said.

Nina jammed her keys and her mobile phone into the pockets of her jeans and got out. The boy was watching her covertly, beneath half-closed eyelids. She opened the rear door and touched his wrist gently. He felt warm now, but not fevered, she noted with professional routine. There was no doubt that he was fully conscious, even though he was lying very still, the now somewhat greasy blanket wound around his legs.

He is trying to disappear, thought Nina. Like the baby hare she had once come across as a child, in the back garden, where it had been desperately trying to hide. When she had picked it up, it hadn’t struggled or resisted. It just crouched in her hands, featherlight and downy. In her six-year-old ignorance, she had thought it liked her. But when she put it on her bed, it had already had the same distant look as the boy in the back seat, and later that night, she found it limp and dead in the shoe box she had provided for it.

Was the boy giving up in the same way?

Nina shivered, and not entirely because the day had finally begun to cool. She couldn’t leave the boy in the car, she decided. He was awake, and even though he didn’t know her from Adam, coming with her had to be better than the alternative—being left locked in a car in the gathering darkness, not knowing where or why.

He hadn’t moved a muscle, but as she reached for him now, he suddenly scooted back with such abruptness that the blanket slipped off him and dropped onto the floor of the car.

Nina hesitated.

She didn’t want the child to be afraid of her. She didn’t like that he looked at her as if she might be a monster little different from the man in the railway station, but she had no idea how to win his trust.

“What on earth have they done to you?” she whispered, sinking down onto her haunches and trying to catch his eyes. “Where do you come from, sweetie?”

The boy made no answer, only curled himself into a tighter ball at the opposite end of the seat, as far away from her as he could get. She could see a dark stain on the seat where the blanket had slipped, and the boy smelled unpleasantly of body sweat and old urine. Nina felt a surge of tenderness, just as she did when Anton or Ida had a temperature or threw up, back home in the Østerbro flat. She would bring them crushed ice, berry juice, and damp cloths; the urge to be good to them and make them well again was so overpowering it filled her entire being. So simple to be a good mother then, she thought. It was everything else that got to be so complicated.

She pointed to the house, then put her hands togther like a statue of a praying saint and rested her cheek against them in a parody of sleep.

“First, we’ll get you something to eat,” she said, trying to smile. “And then we’ll find a bed for you to sleep in. And after that, we’ll see.”

The boy made no sound, but she had to have done something right after all, because he uncurled and slid an inch or two in her direction.

“Good boy,” she said. She remembered an article she had read a few years back about children’s ability to survive in even the most brutal of environments. They were like little heat-seeking missiles, it had said, aiming themselves at the nearest source of warmth. If a child lost its mother, it would reach for its father. If the father disappeared, the child would head for the next grown-up in the line, and then the next, seeking any adult who would provide survival, and perhaps even love.

She showed him the clothes she had bought, and when she began to dress him, he helped. He obediently held out his arms so that she could put them into the sleeves of the new T-shirt, and ducked his head so that it was easier for her to pull it on. A clean pair of underpants followed. That would have to do for now, but even that much suddenly made him seem much more like a normal three-year-old. He came into her arms easily, as she lifted him from the car. Again she was struck by the difference between his weight and Anton’s.

Now that he was awake, he didn’t allow her to hold him against her shoulder. He sat warily straight on her left hip as she walked up the gravel path to the veranda.

“Hey, little one,” murmured Nina, softening her voice into a maternal cooing. “No need to be afraid anymore.”

His warm breath came quickly and carried a sour smell of fear and vomit.

On the veranda, someone had arranged a row of large pots containing herbs and pansies; their well-watered plumpness looked odd against the aridness of the rest of the garden. By the half-open door, a pair of bright yellow galoshes sat next to a small pet carrier. Nina remembered that Karin had spoken of a cat, at that drunken Christmas party. Mr. Kitty, she had called him. She had acquired this male presence when she’d decided once and for all that she was tired of looking for Mr. Right and the two point one children she was statistically entitled to.

At the moment, Nina could detect no sign of either kitty or Karin.

She raised her free hand to knock on the door, but it moved as she touched it, swinging open at her first knock. Unhindered, Nina stepped right into the little darkened hallway. There was a clean detergent-borne scent of citrus and vinegar, and Karin’s shoes and boots were lined up neatly by the half-open kitchen door.

It was very quiet.

“Karin?”

Nina’s foot came down on something soft, which gave way under her heel with a slight crunch. Startled, she backed up and steadied herself against the wall.

“Karin?” she called again, but this time with little expectation of an answer. She inched forward, running her hand over the door frame until she felt the sharp plastic contours of a switch. The light came on with a faint click, revealing a half-eaten sandwich on the floor. It was still partially wrapped, and had been acquired from the deli of the local Kvickly, she could see.