You Disappear: A Novel (19 page)

“What a magnificent yard you have!”

“Thank you, we like it a great deal too.”

“And it’s so well maintained! Are you the one who takes care of it?”

“My mother does.”

“I’ve got to say, it must be great having a mother like that.”

“Yes, we like it a great deal.”

I sit down. “Your mother’s coming out with some juice for us in a little bit.”

“Well now, juice. That’s something I really like.”

Everything is so inviting, so tempting, so marvelous, yet I feel like the healthy person whose hand approaches a dangerous pile of cards in the Iowa Gambling Task. I can’t say why, but there’s something about her replies that gives me a strong urge to retreat. Instead, I make an effort to find my cheeriest and most relaxed tone of voice. “We were just standing and admiring the picture of the four of you in your entryway.”

“That’s from the Cévennes.” A long curly lock of blond hair has fallen across her forehead, but she leaves it there. “We love those mountains, they’re in France. Bernard’s family has a house in a village there, Aumessas. It’s our favorite place.”

“I’ve never been down there.”

“It’s lovely.” She smiles and says, “You’ve been tennising?”

“Yes.”

“Just like Bernard.”

“Yes.”

“I also tennised. Or … it’s not called that, is it?”

“You also
played
tennis.”

“Ah yes. Ha-ha!” She has a sweet, girlish laugh. “I
plaid
tennis.”

“But you can’t anymore?”

“No, and it’s really too bad.”

“Yes.”

I keep discovering new aspects of the garden. An azalea bed in a far corner blossoms in several colors, and when I look back toward the house I catch sight of three camellias. I certainly haven’t seen many of those in Denmark. I once tried to get one to grow in my yard.

“Have you been to the day-care center today?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“And you like going there?”

“Yes, I like it a great deal.”

“So what did you do today?”

She sits silently for a long while before she answers. “Imagine, do you know what? I can’t remember.” She laughs. “ ‘Do you know what,’ that’s a good pression, isn’t it? I love good pressions. Our language is so rich! It’s rich in good pressions, in … ex- … ex-pressions.”

“Yes, it is. I really like good expressions too.”

“ ‘Do you know …’; ‘do you know …’—what was it now?”

“ ‘Do you know what?’ ”

“Oh yes. Ha-ha! I said, ‘Do you know …—what …?’ And you said, ‘Do you know what?’ ”

“Yes, that’s funny.”

“Ha-ha! Language is so rich.”

Winnie comes toward us from the house, bearing a tray with a pitcher of juice and four glasses. When she’s still some distance away, she calls out, “You’ll have to pardon me! I was delayed.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I say. “We’re sitting here enjoying your lovely yard. I could stay all day.”

“Thank you, we like it a great deal. Actually, I was in the middle of playing mah-jongg online with my sister in Sydney. She was sitting there waiting for my next move, so I just wanted to—”

“That’s fine, you should go back in then and finish playing.”

“Thanks, I’d actually like that. Just give a shout if there’s anything I can do.”

She leaves again, and Lærke says, “You and Bernard are going to talk about your son Nelkas, right?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Thanks.”

“Tumor.”

“Yes.”

Through the bushes at the bottom of the yard, I glimpse a couple running past in sweat suits. There must be a path back there. So Bernard and Lærke used to be able to go running in the woods right from their yard.

Bernard’s suddenly standing behind us. He’s in a suit, and when he bends over to kiss his wife, his white-grey hair catches the sun.

After embracing her and exchanging endearments, he glances over at me. “You’ll have to excuse me. I try to always be punctual, but sometimes when I’m in court …”

“Of course.”

He looks at Lærke again and touches her shoulder. “Why isn’t Winnie here? Is she in her room?”

“She’s mah-jongging.”

Bernard explains, “My in-laws have their own room here, with a computer and everything. So they can overnight when we have a special need for them.”

As I nod, smiling, I try to imagine Vibeke and Thorkild keeping a room in our house. It sounds horrific, but I suppose not everyone feels that way about their mother-in-law.

“We’ve been sitting here enjoying ourselves,” I say. “Lærke told me about the Cévennes.”

“Ah, Aumessas. Every year we set a few days aside so we can be there on our anniversary.”

“Such a romantic couple!”

“Yes. In recent years, Lærke’s parents have come along too. It’s more practical that way.” He must see something in my face, for he immediately adds, “But in the evening on that day, we go out and dine without Winnie and Knud!” His voice rises on
without Winnie and Knud
; those few hours, on that one evening, must be a high point of their year.

This time I think I manage to disguise my pity.

“We like it a great deal,” Lærke says, and Bernard gives her shoulder one last squeeze before leading me to their living room to talk about Niklas.

It wasn’t dark when I passed through here before, but now it strikes me as almost gloomy. Of course, that’s only because we’ve been sitting in the backyard soaking up the sun.

Bernard waits for me to sit down on the sofa, and then he sits at the other end.

“Some people find it difficult to be with her in the beginning,” he says. “Naturally, that’s only until you get to know her and see past the surface. For she’s still got a great sense of humor and is just as loving as in the old days.”

He grows lost in thought staring at my empty glass, while I think that he’ll never get his old Lærke back. No matter how much he dreams and lies to himself, there’s no rehab that can bring her back after eight years.

With a start, he catches himself. “Sorry about that! Would you like something more to drink?”

“Please. I seem to be just pouring it down my throat.”

“Come out to the kitchen with me and we’ll see what we can find.”

On the way through the door to the kitchen I go a little too quickly and catch his heel, falling into him. We laugh and find some elderflower cordial in a cupboard.

The ice cubes clink as he tips them into the glass, and I see before me how he sits wedged in the car, screaming with pain and horror as the love of his life lies unconscious at his side, blood soaking into her fair hair, the color disappearing from her cheeks. The scent of blood and burnt rubber rises around me and presses against my palate.

I have a strong urge to ask,
Was she unconscious? Did you think she was dead? Were you trapped there beside her?

I know I shouldn’t, but my inhibitory mechanism must be impaired, and of all the things I want to ask, one piece slips out. “Were you injured too, that time in the car?”

“Yes.” He stares deeper down into the elderflower juice than need be. “Is it okay if we don’t talk about it?”

“Of course! Of course, that’s totally okay!”

We walk silently back to the living room.

I start telling him about Niklas. “Often, I try to get him to tell me how he thinks things are going. But with a teenage boy, actions say more about how he’s doing than words, don’t they? And then when his father has him stealing from the school … It’s also incredibly difficult when you have to set limits …”

I know I’m talking about everything at once.

“Yesterday Frederik set some fiberboard sheets on the floor in his office and then drilled through them,” I say. “He knew he would make holes in the floor, but he didn’t care! I swallowed my anger, because it was so trivial, in comparison to the embezzling. And it’s all due to his sickness. But then what about when Niklas leaves a plate on the coffee table after eating something? Isn’t that even more trivial? And I only yell at Niklas! So of course he gets grumpy.”

Bernard talks about his boys. No answers to what I’m asking him, if I could even say what that was, just personal experiences.

It’s a weird sensation: a glimpse of how it could be to raise kids as a couple. I hear myself speaking more calmly now, and my thoughts become clearer; only now do I realize how jumbled they really were.

After listening to me talk some more about Niklas, he leans forward. “I don’t know why, but I was just wondering: has Frederik met some of Niklas’s friends, or perhaps a girl your son is interested in? Maybe he behaved inappropriately toward her?”

“No way! How could you—”

I don’t finish; he sees something through the window and hurries soundlessly to the back door, where he stands concealed in the edge of the doorway, as if he’s caught sight of a deer that’s come up from the woods to graze in the yard.

Instinctively I know we mustn’t spook the timid creature. Cautiously, silently, I sidle toward the window.

But I don’t see anything but Lærke, who’s lurching across the lawn on her crutches.

“Winnie should see this too!” whispers Bernard, his eyes boyishly wide with excitement.

He heads toward the hallway, and only when he’s by the hall door does he turn around and whisper, “She hasn’t walked that steadily on the grass since the accident! Look at her! What willpower! She’s getting back her will!”

Then he’s gone.

She does look lovely out there. She struggles, and her hat’s flown off, while behind her lurks brush, thicket, woods, bog. Yet I don’t see anything other than her slow lurch across the lawn. I don’t see what he’s seeing.

EMBEZZLEMENT
. Every week brings new revelations in the case against headmaster Frederik Halling, who was charged with embezzling from Saxtorph Private School one month ago.

Halling’s wife, Mia Halling, has not been charged in the far-reaching embezzlement case, although the tabloid
Ekstra Bladet
reported yesterday that she was in jail and had confessed to transferring 4 million crowns to a private bank account in Spain. That report turns out to be false.

There has been widespread speculation in the media about Mia Halling’s role after it was revealed that her signature appears on several key documents in the case.

The lawyer for Saxtorph Private School, Tom Jørgensen, has stated that his client finds it indefensible that neither of the Hallings has been detained while the investigation is still ongoing. Several independent legal observers have said that it is indeed highly unusual for a defendant to avoid pretrial detention in such a large embezzlement case. But they also emphasize that there may be mitigating circumstances that are not public knowledge, including details of a serious operation that Frederik Halling underwent recently.

In addition, Frederik Halling’s lawyer, Bernard Berman, succeeded in convincing the court that Mia Halling’s signature on key documents was, beyond a reasonable shadow of a doubt, falsified by the defendant himself.

Laust Saxtorph, chairman of the board for the bankruptcy-threatened school, said in a press release that while the school cannot at present prove that Mia Halling signed the documents herself, he awaits the results of further investigation.
(MT)

My cousin’s husband, the younger sister of the hardware store owner, the neighbor’s ex—everyone, everyone. Every single one of them has their own unpredictable reaction. I get to the point of being antisocial, then I open myself up to them anyway, only to regret it when they find some new way to catch me out.

The former treasurer of our homeowners’ association is suddenly standing next to me in front of the fish shop in The Square. She smiles, and I think that of all people she at least will say something kind. She’s been fond of Frederik, who helped her out at one point with the accounts.

She’s wearing a short red jacket, with a belt strap dangling from either side and a gaily colored scarf around her neck. “That was terrible what happened to Frederik—and on top of his illness!” she exclaims.

“Yes, it’s been rather awful.”

“It’s so obvious it wasn’t him. I can’t understand how they don’t see that.”

The fishmonger points to me, but I wave another customer forward.

The treasurer grasps me by the arm. “But surely they’ll find whoever really did it soon, won’t they?”

“Whoever really did it?”

“Yes, the person who embezzled from the school. Since it wasn’t Frederik.”

“But it
was
him, you know. It’s just that he was ill, and not himself.”

“Who?”

“Frederik, yes. But he was ill.
Very
ill.”

She lets go of my arm and glances around quickly, as if she’s suddenly not sure she wants to be seen with me. “But it
couldn’t
be Frederik. I told all my friends that I
knew
it wasn’t Frederik.”

“No, it wasn’t Frederik—not the
real
Frederik. When it happened, his tumor had already changed who he was.”

“What! So it
was
him? But I mean—has he confessed to it?”

“Yes, he—”

“What! That can’t really—”

“It’s complicated. He’s had a brain tumor that’s been growing for many years, and each year it’s made him less and less himself, and as a result it’s not—”

“But he was still running the school, wasn’t he?”

“Yes, he was able to do that well enough.”

“But he was too sick to keep from stealing from the till?”

For the thousandth time, I try to summarize in a few seconds all the books and articles I’ve been poring over for months. But she hurries off, and it’s clear that I’ve yanked the rug out from under her. She’ll be talking about it for the rest of the day to her husband and all her friends.

• • •

Before our case, I never realized that sometimes a verdict isn’t decided by a judge or jury. Frederik’s will be determined instead by a small group of state-approved psychiatrists, and it can’t be appealed.

We’ll still go to court all right, months from now, but the proceedings will be essentially pro forma. For the judge knows that he doesn’t have a clue about neuropsychology, and he’ll let everything hang on the psychiatric report. If the report says that Frederik embezzled the funds of his own free will, the judge will sentence him to a minimum of three years in jail. If however the report says it was the illness that drove him to it, Frederik will have to undergo treatment instead. Since the treatment is actually the operation he’s already had, he’ll be able to leave the courtroom a free man who doesn’t have to feel guilty about having destroyed an entire school.