You Disappear: A Novel (12 page)

“Of course.”

When Niklas wakes me, this time I open my eyes. I can see from the light that I must have slept several hours. He’s standing again by the side of the bed. He asks, “Do you think I should stay home tonight?”

“That might be a really good idea. We don’t know what’s happening. Or what could—”

“It’s just that Mathias and I were going to meet at his house about our show. It’s actually really important.”

I can recall bits and pieces of something I must have dreamt; Frederik riding a dinosaur.

“But of course,” I say. “That’s what you should do then.”

The inside of my mouth feels sticky. I need something to drink, and as soon as I can I need to text the parents of my fourth graders to say our parent meeting tonight is canceled. I should really call our friends too before they hear about Frederik on TV. And we don’t have any food in the house.

I don’t have the energy to call anyone, but I’m just going to have to slip out to the mini-mart to buy something for supper.

I get up out of bed and check to see that Frederik’s still asleep. As I walk from our yard out to the street, wrapped in more clothing than I perhaps need, I discover Niklas’s friend Sara. She’s standing a few yards from me, almost hidden beside the neighbor’s hedge, busy peering at something on her cell phone.

I’m exhausted, but I pull myself together for a smile.

“Hi,” I say. “Do you want to come in? He’s home.”

She looks almost alarmed. “I was actually … I’ll just wait out here.”

“Well, he’s heading over to Mathias’s.”

“Yeah, I’m going over there too.”

“So you make photo and sound shows too?” I ask.

“Nah, we’re just going to hang out.”

Niklas calls out from his window, behind me. “Stay right there! I’m coming down!”

I call back up to the window. “Niklas, you’re welcome to invite Sara up to your room!”

Immediately she loses all interest in her phone. “
Sara?
You thought I was
Sara
?”

“What? No, not at all! I don’t even know who Sara is!”

“Has Sara been here?”

“No! Nobody’s been here.”

I wince under the weight of her probing gaze, as if
I
were the teenage girl and she the grown-up. “There hasn’t been
anyone
called Sara,” I say a little too quickly, feeling as though I’m still waking up. I add, “You can go inside if you like. Until he’s ready.”

“We actually agreed … I think instead, I should …”

The front door opens and Frederik comes out. He looks fresh and cheerful again. Fresh and cheerful, as he pretty much always is, regardless of whatever he may have left in ruins around him. He looks like a man who’s just gotten a big raise.

“This is Niklas’s friend,” I say.

Frederik smiles happily. “
Damn
you look good. To think that you’re Niklas’s friend. I’ve got to hand it to him!”

“We’re on the social committee together.”

He reaches out to touch her arm. “I’d really like to get inside your pussy!”

I slap his hand away. “
Frederik!
”

He snaps at me. “But it’s something she should be proud and happy to hear—that men want to get inside her pussy.”

“Stop it! Just stop it!”

Niklas comes storming out of the house and immediately sees his friend’s face. “What’s going on here?”

“I think you two should leave,” I say. “Go now, and I’ll get him inside.”

Niklas and the girl who isn’t Sara hurry off. Frederik and I yell at each other. Then I run into the house, and he follows me in so he can keep arguing with me.

Once we’re inside, and the neighbors can no longer see us, I throw him facedown to the living room floor, where I straddle his lower back and pin his arms.

“You big piece of shit!” he shouts again and again. “Big piece of shit!”

He thrashes around so much that he bangs his shinbones against the doorframe and knocks over a lamp, and I can see blood soaking through one of his trouser legs.

“Shut up, God damn it!” I shout, struggling to hold him down on the floor.

He succeeds in twisting a hand free, which allows him to pinch me hard on the thigh. I grab the little stainless-steel bowl standing on the coffee table and hammer it down on his back so that he roars in pain.

Who the hell is he, this strange man who’s broken into my house? Who’s invaded my husband’s body, his head?

Once I strike him I can’t stop. I bang the bowl down on his back again and again while he writhes and yells that it hurts, that I’m a piece of shit.

I stop to catch my breath.
I cannot live with a man like this
, I think, waiting for him to settle down.
There’s no way anyone can expect me to. There’s just no way
.

Beneath me, his body grows tired and limp. I’ve still got him pinioned down when he begins to speak, in a sad voice that I haven’t heard since he became sick.

“The words just rushed out,” he says. “I knew I shouldn’t say something like that to her. I can’t understand why I did.”

I let go immediately. For he sounds like the real Frederik. The “voice” is gone. I want to help my poor husband, I want to lift him up. Who is he now? Has he been set free?

We stand in the middle of the floor. The room grows bright, and it feels as if all the anger was flushed from my body after I hit him. I’m appalled that I could have done that.
A sick man. A poor sick man
.

I can’t stand to look him in the eye. Instead I glance around, trying to find the best place to sit him down.

“Well, it’s certainly good that you know it’s wrong,” I say.

“I do know. It’s utterly, utterly wrong!”

His eyes are desperate, and opened wide. As if he’s just this moment discovering who he’s become, and everything he’s done these past months.

“It’s utterly, utterly wrong! Utterly, utterly, utterly!” Suddenly he’s shouting. “It’s awful! Why do I say such things?” And he’s crying at the same time, so that tears or snot gets caught in his windpipe and he starts coughing as he shouts. “Why do I do it?”

In seconds his cheeks are sopping wet. He’s no longer a human being; more like some animal that bellows. A long-limbed, bony animal. He’s a moose, standing alone in the forest and bellowing its grief.

“Too awful! Too awful! I don’t know why I say those things!”

“No, you don’t know why.”

“I don’t want … I don’t … I … too awful!”

And then something new happens: the tears grow less animal. Without thinking I reach out my hand to stroke his cheek, and he doesn’t push it away. It’s the first time he’s let me touch his face while he’s crying.

Immediately I start weeping too. It’s such a change—that I may touch him when he’s sad. I press myself against him, and he lets me do that too.

“Frederik, I know that you think everything’s awful.”

“It
is
awful!”

“But you’re making progress.”

“No, no, no!”

“You are. You’re beginning to get better.”

“No, it’s just too too awful!”

“Yes, you shouldn’t say things like that to Niklas’s friends, but now you know that. Now you know when you’re doing something wrong.”

“No I don’t!”

“Yes you do. And I’m also allowed to hold you and touch you. That makes me very happy.”

“You
are
allowed to! I’m so wretched!”

“Yes, you’re wretched. But it’s good that you know you’re sick. That’s a very good thing. And it’s good you get unhappy when you’ve done something wrong. That’s very good too.”

“No, no, no!”

Fifteen minutes later, his sobbing suddenly ceases. We sit down on the sofa, and from other times I know just what he needs. I go out into the
kitchen and spread jam on four pieces of bread, which he then bolts one after the other.

To think that I struck him, just a short while ago. I don’t understand.
I’m
an awful person. I’ve just struck my sick husband. Battered him. With a small stainless-steel bowl. And I don’t have any brain damage to blame.

The telephone rings. Then the cell rings, and then I hear a text come in, and then the phones ring again. I don’t answer them. I know what they’ve all heard. The news. Something on TV about the charges. I turn off the phones.

Later, another kind of peace falls over him.

“So maybe I’m sicker than we thought?” he says.

“Yes, maybe you are.”

“But I was really looking forward to going back and working at the school. Do you think I’ll have to wait a couple more weeks?”

“Yeah, I think that’d be a good idea. You should wait a little while.”

We rest our heads against each other, and I drape an arm over his shoulder. That’s how we sat in the old days. That’s how we sat during our three good years together.

At a quarter to seven the next morning, I run from the sculpture park behind the senior housing units and down the path through the woods. The path is still full of potholes from the winter, and for a long stretch it skirts the lakefront, just a few yards from the water.

As I run, I think about Niklas. How he no longer dares to bring friends home. And I think about Frederik, who wants to have sex with one of his son’s friends. Has he always been like that? Are all men that way? Maybe the only difference between Frederik and other men is that the others keep quiet about it because their inhibitory mechanisms are still intact.

As my feet find their way around the potholes and slush on the path, I think about Frederik during the years he was unfaithful. I think about Hanne’s boyfriend, who drove her to jump from a high-rise. About my father
just wanting to ball hippie chicks
. About the married men who made passes at me in the weeks after I’d thrown Frederik out, and my tennis coach, all those years ago when I was in gymnasium. They’re everywhere. I think about all the drunk married teachers running around, potbellied and red-cheeked, during faculty Christmas parties. How can a woman ever have a trusting relationship with a man?

Through the low-hanging branches I can see the mist over the lake, which is itself the color of thickened mist. That’s what it is after all, I think, and I stop by the pier. I walk quickly out over the water and suck the air deep into my lungs.

I had thoughts like this before Frederik became sick. And I’ve spoken
with Helena about it often. Her attitude is
Yes, all men are like that. But in a few years it’ll all be over; we should enjoy it while we can
.

That’s where we disagree.

Still in my running clothes, and with sweat pouring down my face, I pop into the mini-mart at the train station. I only have a few minutes before I need to be home and shower, but we’ve run out of milk, since I never went shopping yesterday after all.

There are already people here. I grab two quarts of milk and stick my credit card in the terminal.

The girl behind the counter says, “Didn’t go through. Try again.”

I remove the card from the slot and slide it back in.

The display says it’s not working. The girl doesn’t say anything.

“You know what, I have another card,” I say. “Let me try that one.”

I fish Frederik’s card out of the inner pocket of my damp sweatpants, stick it in, and enter his PIN.

“It says on my screen to confiscate it,” she says.

“Confiscate it? Why?”

“I don’t know. You stole it, maybe.”

She stares at me with big blue eyes that might have been beautiful if the rest of her pale face wasn’t so listless. You’d think it must be all she can do just to sit upright.

“Of course I haven’t stolen it!” I say. “It’s my husband’s card.”

“Give me it,” she says.

“What if I don’t want to?”

“I don’t know. Hasn’t happened before.”

She wants me to think she’s an idiot. That’s what she wants. She wants me to think she doesn’t give a damn about me or the store or her own future. Doesn’t give a damn about anything but TV, fries, ketchup, and a boyfriend who’s as dumb as she is.

“I need it, really,” the girl says. “You’ve got to give me it.”

Two men are now standing in line behind me. One of them lives on our street, and I know he’s a sales manager for a discount shoe chain. I suppose he’s seen the item about Saxtorph on last night’s news. In front of the milk fridge we nodded at each other, but now he pretends to examine something in his basket.

The girl’s face is as wrinkle-free as a blow-up sex doll’s. I find myself talking with much too much volume and emphasis. “I have
no
idea what this is all about.”